Paper short abstract:

Through cases studies of narratives about heritage and local history, the question of « the truth », which is regularly invoked by the amateur historians to legitimize their writings, will be examined here : which social conditions enable them to tell the "truth" and how do they tell it ?

Paper long abstract:

Hundreds of heritage associations have been created in the North of France for the last 30 years. Members of those local societies often write books or papers about the memory of places or monuments they intend to preserve. Interviews conducted among those amateur historians and heritage activists show that despite the social distance that could separate them, they all have a common point : the quest for truth. « To make the true history known », as one respondent said, is sometimes associated with a specific perception of details that nobody would have noticed before them. It could also be opposed either to fake history - made by other amateurs - or to academic history- written by scholars who don't care about local data. But what is « the truth » for these amateur historians and what types of narrative does it lead to? I'll try here to put some light on these questions through case studies from a collective fieldwork conducted in Picardy ( a region which is now part of the bigger region Hauts de France). We will first look at the way the autors tell their life stories and justify their work. Then two types of writings will be analysed : village monographs and historical fiction - this last writing being often told to be more « real ». What is at stake in those narratives ? In which social and political context are they embedded and which kind of recognition are their authors looking for ?

Paper short abstract:

How does one learn to listen past words? How is the ethnographer to address questions that are not directed to the anthropologist subject but to the diasporic returnee? Where in the research shall we place the answers of questions meant for the participant of here, not the observer from there?

Paper long abstract:

"Meda w'ase."

"What is your name?"

"Lucy Adjoa."

"That's not a name."

"Lucy Adjoa Armah."

"No."

"It's the name in my passport."

*Pause*

"...Ask your mother what your name is!"

***

I include this exchange to remind myself, and you, of three things:

1.What is on paper, particularly the text, is not necessarily the correct, appropriate or only truth.

2.One needs to understand themselves on different terms in the field. Fieldwork tells you who you need to be, you do not get to insist on who you are.

3.Any question can be a blink or a wink.

Twitch

What is your name?

What is your name?

What is your name?

What is your name?

What is your name?

What is your name?

What is your name?

What is your name?

What is your name?

What is your name?

What is your name?

What is your name?

What is your name?

What is your name?

Wink

What is your tribe?

What language do you speak?

Explain your accent?

Where are you from?

No. Where are you really from?

Tell me about your family.

What do you know of your history?

How do you see me?

How do you see you?

How are we different?

How are we the same?

Do you see yourself in me?

How am I to engage with you?

What are you doing here?

Paper short abstract:

The paper focuses on the daily life personal micro-stories of residents living in Kaunas micro-districts that were built in the soviet period. The main issue of the article - to examine relation between visual and textual narratives, also to analyze the processes of storytelling and textualizating

Paper long abstract:

The paper focuses on the daily life personal micro-stories of residents living in Kaunas micro-districts that were built in the soviet period. Kaunas is the second largest city in Lithuania located in the geographical center of the country, during the interwar period it had temporarily become the capital of the country. After the Second World War, the city suffered from demographic changes caused by internal migration and a rapid industrialization process.

The main issue of the article - to examine relation between visual and textual narratives in soviet and postsoviet period, also to analyze the processes of storytelling and textualizating the experience. In analyzing micro-districts residents narratives, classical and modern ethnographic research methods were used: comparative and retrospective methods, content analysis of textual and oral narratives. While analyzing oral and visual narratives, the aim was to identify and distinguish the dominant thematic areas, leitmotifs or "worlds" (Young 1987). This paper is based on a fieldwork research conducted by the author at Kaunas in 2018.

Memory is the ability that allows us to shape self perception (identity) both on a personal and collective level (Assmann 2008: 109). In this paper oral and visual naratives are used as an access to reveal the identities created by memories. Analyzing memory narratives from the Soviet era, both major macro-narratives and micro-stories prevail. Individual micro-stories always have a relationship with other narratives - narratives of other people, major narratives - meta-narratives (Šutinienė 2013), as well with narratives of the local places and the community history.

Paper short abstract:

The author interrogates her secret blog written during a year of cancer treatment. Friends and family were the readers. In the "making of" the blog, the author shifted from narrator to object of her auto-ethnography. The curation of her self-representation became factors of healing and resilience.

Paper long abstract:

In November 2017, after receiving a cancer diagnosis, the author began a secret Facebook group in which she documented her journey through cancer treatment, through text and photographs, and occasional video. The members of the group were individually, and in two cases collectively, invited to participate in and witness this blog. Over the course of a year, the author reported on, performed, and narrated representations of herself that were active agents of her healing journey.

Drawing on notions of curating the self through dress and adornment (Pravina Shukla), personal reflexivity and hermeneutics of self (Foucault), and the dynamics between author and readership in enacting, reinforcing, and creating a sense of community, the author interrogates her "making of" the blog, reflecting on the shifts between narrator and object of her own narration. Questions of authenticity versus, or in conjunction with, performance came into play. Beyond a distraction, the blog created an opportunity to witness the ways in which information and communication technologies create new spheres of reality, creativity, and interaction. Self-curation choices also revealed what might or might not be the author's choice to share with her audience, and how she narrated her own self-presented narrator.

Paper short abstract:

Signature, displacement, closure and reverberation will be explored as "effects of meaning" present in an ethnographic documentary on daily life in three global cities. Through them, the singular poetics of the micronarratives by urban dwellers become a unified, orchestrated choral urban symphony.

Paper long abstract:

The order I live in is a documentary on micronarratives of the Self in Madrid, México City and Montevideo. It will be screened in the AV01 panel (monday 15 at 16:30h.)

What we have documented in this movie is a research in progress on the making of domestic space and the metropolization of intimacy. At the same time, our ambition has been to experiment with the well-known genre of the urban symphony. Ours is then is a twofold exploration: on the one hand, that of the concrete, intimate spaces of the participants; on the other, that of a credible storyline on modern living in big cities.

The devices of our mise en scene (workshops, interview framing, rapport, montage, music and others filmic procedures) are responsible of a number of narrative twists superimposed onto the characters' original, emotional and lively storytelling. Four "effects of meaning" seem identifiable here: (1) signature, (2) displacement, (3) closure and (4) reverberation.

Signature is linked to the intrinsic indexicality of discourse. It marks with authorship both the original stories and the mediated one. Displacement (semantic and phisical) accounts at the same time for the materiality of stuff as well as for iterability of meaning. Closure discloses search for form: a will of style. There is a mistery in why beauty of traits or poetic justice seem to bear moral consequences. Finally, reverberation denotes the basically narrative character of the anthropologist's account. It cannot scape to be other thing that a tale of tales.

Paper short abstract:

The paper reflects on the creative process and problems of authorship, as folksong is transformed by a composer, following other criteria than those of a traditional performance situation/practice.

Paper long abstract:

Based on the romantic paradigm, a "folksong" has dual meaning: anonymously inherited musical piece sung by all or at least by majority of a "folk", and the same piece, but transformed by a composer. This duality has resulted in accepted practice to label the composer's creative product as "arrangement". This may seem right, if the accepted claim for the composition's originality focuses just on the melody and text. In fact, a musical event, also the performance of a folksong, can be characterized meaningfully by a set of formal, stylistic, performative, contextual and other aspects, which clearly distinguish the traditional situation and which are going to be transformed by the composer. Thus, even if the text and melody remain the same, the different style, instrumentation, musical form, and, above all, the context of the performance let qualify this situation as not equal with the traditional, and the musical result in the new situation as creative intention of the composer. As an obvious difference from "usual" compositions an identifiable thematic source can be indicated in this case.

Paper short abstract:

This paper focus on the steps done to transform narratives obtained from amateur and professional salsa dancers in a scientific narrative around salsa dancing. The "reading" of dancing bodies on salsa dance floors also is part of the ethnographic work required in a research on salsa dancing.

Paper long abstract:

This paper focus on the steps done to transform narratives obtained from amateur and professional salsa dancers in a scientific narrative around salsa dancing. The "reading" of dancing bodies on salsa dance floors also is part of the ethnographic work required in a research on a global practice such salsa, that will be reviewed here.

I return to my ethnographic work and use the idea of the body as a file proposed by André Lepecki, from the performance studies. Lepecki departs from Michel Foucault's archive concept in The Archeology of Knowledge. The body as a "transformative archive" in relation to his "idea of dance as a system of incorporation of excorporations and incorporation of excorporation" (Lepecki 2013: 72). While choreography (literally "dance writing") is bodily communication, dance understood as a system, according to Lepecki, has much in common with the description of the personal intercommunication model that several North American researchers of the late twentieth century known as the Escuela de Palo Alto have proposed: a retroactive circular system where feed-back is a central element (see Winkin 1994). The models proposed by Lepecki and theorists of communication are useful to establish the analogy between dancing and speaking.

On the background there are the relations dance-ethnicity and language-ethnicity, which allow us to establish an analogy between dancing and speaking, and which have a common factor that is the body.

Paper short abstract:

We reserve this final slot for sharing ideas, making questions and opening a fruitful discussion. By providing an open space to let the discussion flow, the previous individual exercises of epistemic striptease will ideally end up in a collaborative intellectual choreography.

Paper long abstract:

We reserve this final slot for sharing ideas, making questions to panel participants and opening a fruitful discussion based on the presentations. The making-of stories told, written and performed by contributors will constitute the starting point from which we can analyse diverse aspects of the long journey from the micro-politics of field encounters to the macro-narratives of ethnography. This classical fascination for the "tricks of the trade" dates back to the times of Malinowski and his famous phrase "the ethnographer´s magic". In this occasion, the secrets revealed will help provide new insights on the ethnographic process to make our discipline move forward. Some bullet-questions to trigger discussion are the following:

In which way does the format chosen (video, performance, exhibition, written text, etc.) affect the content and the poetics of the discourse? How does the ethnographer manage to gather empirical pieces so to make a coherent story? How does the personality of the researcher influence the process of making up the narrative? In which ways the positionality in the field brings specific perspectives when telling the story? What impact have the emotions experienced in the field on the poetics of narrating?

However, instead of following a pre-formatted structure, this section´s aim consists on providing an open and free space to let the discussion flow. In this way, the previous individual exercises of epistemic striptease will ideally end up in a collaborative intellectual choreography.