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- Convenors:
-
Francisco Martínez
(Tampere University)
Martin Demant Frederiksen (University of Copenhagen)
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- Stream:
- Disciplinary and methodological discussions:
- Location:
- Aula 31
- Sessions:
- Wednesday 17 April, -, -
Time zone: Europe/Madrid
Short Abstract:
How does peripherality challenge methodology and theory-making? This panel explores the ways in which the unarticulated & the edgy can be considered a form of thinking about problems, questions & evidence, reflecting also on what it means to be on the periphery — ontologically and epistemologically.
Long Abstract:
We start from the premise that clarity and fixity as ideals of modernity do prevent us from approaching that which cannot be easily captured and framed into scientific boundaries. We reach certain ethnographic limits.
We propose not just to move along the boundary between the known and the unknown, but to also remain on it, to stay on the surface and with the in-between. A boundary that is fleeting, unfixed, vague, more related to a state in which we enter than to a geographical space.
We welcome papers that rethink how the unarticulated and the edgy can be incorporated into ethnographic research as a generative condition. And in doing so, we argue that peripherality is not only to be seen as a space in the making or as a marginal condition, but rather as a mode of attention and a form of making theory and practice. We thus propose to be attentive to knowledge that is not just conceptual also but attitudinal, one that unfolds or hovers between the actual and the potential (Crapanzano 2004).
Hence, we set out to engage with a series of empirical and theoretical issues such as:
- What is the centre and the periphery of what we do? And what is its surface and core?
- How to represent the infra-knowledge — what lies beneath the threshold of verbal reasoning, or do not respond to the criteria for widely recognised forms of knowledge?
- How can we apprehend modes of knowing that open up to an invisible realm (Mittermaier 2017)?
- Does learning entails unlearning?
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Wednesday 17 April, 2019, -Paper short abstract:
Various kinds of ignorance and not-knowing are expressed when referring to eating patterns. The ambivalence of "not-knowing-but" can be seen as a way of dealing with hierarchy of knowledge systems and with supremacy of expert knowledge while claiming for cultural legitimation of peripheral foodways.
Paper long abstract:
The usual phrase caught up when talking about food practices and food systems is "I don't know it for sure, but…". Various kinds of ignorance and not-knowing are expressed when referring to eating patterns and everyday choices. Identifying them is one of anthropologist's analytical challenges, but figuring out why and how this ambivalence is so widely used is even more intriguing.
In modernity particular knowledge systems are valued as reasonable, credible, legitimate. These are discourses of scientific argumentation, risk-benefit analysis, systematic reviews, expert recommendations which are not only substance for evidence-based policies and public health management, but also seep down to everyday practices and become hegemonic. They define what counts as knowledge and what counts as periphery: not-knowing, ignorance, old wives' tales. Expert knowledge is considered to be the layout for any kind of knowing about food and rational, healthy, responsible, and ethical consumption.
At the same time expert knowledge systems are the arena of the most profound uncertainty and insecurity. Then, what is considered to be peripheral: tradition, non-reflexive habits, social embeddedness, cultural repetition and intuition - appear as stable, trusted, and comforting alternative. The ambivalence of "not-knowing-but" can be seen as a way of dealing with hierarchy of knowledge systems while claiming for legitimation of everyday food patterns. The paper is then focused on strategies of disarming the modern expert discourse by undermining softly the supremacy of rational knowledge itself: questioning what is/can/should be known and what can/must be hidden.
Paper short abstract:
Linking my legitimate peripheral participation in different modes of ceramic production with Lambros Malafouris's theory of material engagement, I will attempt to integrate non-discursive, situated and embodied knowledge, mētis (itself a peripheral knowledge), into ethnographical cognition.
Paper long abstract:
Apprenticeship and other forms of situated learning require what Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger have called "legitimate peripheral participation". Ethnography conceived as research through practice is also based on legitimate peripheral participation in situated processes. Situated learning is usually involved in passing on manual and bodily skills, or acquiring embodied knowledge. In the research through practice the role that the body's non-discursive knowledge plays in comprehension and interpretation takes on immense significance. However, given the intellectual legacy of the Aristotelian distinction and hierarchization between practical and theoretical knowledge and the Cartesian dualism in the Western cognitive tradition, the non-discursive knowledge of the body has a peripheral status in legitimate knowledge production. I will ground my paper in the practice of working on a potter's wheel and of casting porcelain ware, both in the studio and in the factory conditions. Linking my legitimate peripheral participation in different modes of ceramic production with Lambros Malafouris's theory of material engagement, I will attempt to integrate non-discursive knowledge of the body into ethnographical cognition. Following Marcel Detienne and Jean-Pierre Vernant, the non-discursive situated knowledge of the body which resists abstraction is described with the Greek term mētis.
Paper short abstract:
How do skilful practitioners comport themselves towards the unknown? This paper discusses not-knowing within wine production, and calls into question notions about what knowledge is, as well as assumptions about an omnipresent and unqualified desire-for-knowledge.
Paper long abstract:
Ethnographers are in the business of procuring knowledge about the knowledge of others, and debates abound on the contents and nature of this object of study. Only recently, however, has non-knowing been raised as a topic. If ethnographers have long endeavoured to valorize marginalized knowledge, the fundamental question now concerns the extent to which they have also projected their own unqualified desire-to-know onto those whom they study (Mair, Kelly, and High 2012).
Based on long-term fieldwork with Italian producers of "natural" wine, this paper reverses the question of knowledge, in order to focus on domains of non-knowing in cellar and vineyard. It shows how producers comport themselves to what they do not know, and how such things belong within the course of their practice. While these producers do not tend to construe ignorance as a virtue in itself, their work is such as to expose it to the influence of things unknown. Their production cannot be confined within the domain of the knowable, nor can knowledge be extended to encompass all things relevant to production, without diverging from what is construed as a good manner of working.
On a theoretical level, this argument would have us question models of knowledge that assume it to be about prediction and control, forefronting instead ways of knowledge in forms always vulnerable in its exposure to the unknown. Methodologically, the paper raises the question of how we as ethnographers can write about non-knowing without purporting to know more than those about whom we write.
Paper short abstract:
This talk discusses how un-knowing constitutes a critical practice for the coppersmiths of Santa Clara del Cobre, where failure, rupture, and alterity shape artisanal skill, performance and agency.
Paper long abstract:
Recent studies of craft and skilled practice argue that artisan agency is honed within ecological and socio-political constellations between persons, places, materials and things (Ingold, Marchand). However, in the family forge of Santa Clara del Cobre, where I have apprenticed for many years, failure and disruption— un-knowing— are key to learning, not only the vernacular copper-smithing methods and aesthetics, but more importantly, how to become both a skilled artisan and community member. It is via walking these very edges and fault-lines—in the gaps of bodily practice and intention, that craft skill, knowledge and agency can become, if not acquired, more fully understood.
This paper explores the peripheries I have experienced, negotiated and analyzed as an artist-anthropologist and artisan-apprentice studying with Maestro Jesus Perez Ornelas (1926-2014) and his sons since 1997. How is the concept of tacit knowledge, so often associated with craft, theoretically and pragmatically inadequate, reductive, over-simplifying and problematic? How can failure and (un)knowing be employed methodologically as a critical component of thinking-in-doing and understanding-in-making? How can working together in the forge temporarily transform and transcend gender, class, ontological and epistemic hierarchies?
Drawing from my doctoral study (2012-2017), "The Agency of the Artisan and their Craft— Between Praxis and Theory— Santa Clara del Cobre, Michoacán: Towards an Anthropology of Making," this talk will demonstrate how it is in the liminal betwixt and between of peripheries and centers where artisan's agency is developed and performed.
Paper short abstract:
What happens if an anthropologist invites ten artists to engage with an ordinary object and revise it into a political question? What kind of reactions and dynamics does this gesture open along? And how does anthropology relate to its own failures, limits and changing notions of fieldwork?
Paper long abstract:
What happens if an anthropologist invites ten artists to engage with an ordinary object and revise it into a political question? What kind of reactions and dynamics does this gesture open along? And how does anthropology relate to its own failures, limits and fieldwork accidents?
This paper sets out to demonstrate the way these three questions are interrelated by describing the making of the exhibition 'Objects of Attention' (Estonian Museum of Applied Art and Design, 2019), in which 31 people with different background took part. The ethnography describes how an anthropologist makes use of things as devices of social research, acts himself as a curator, and establishes experimental collaborations (Estalella and Sánchez Criado 2018). A key challenge of this project was to be aware of different standards, disciplinary interests and temporal regimes between the diverse practitioners involved. Another key challenge was to create its own audience across disciplinary boundaries and at the intersection of different fields of study.
By reconsidering the failures and shortcomings of the ethnographer in both, the paper engages with methodological self-assessment and disciplinary notions of fieldsite and epistemic validity. Also, it reflects on what to do when the ethnographer loses trust in the informants or they misbehave, cheat, go missing, or fail to keep the engagement: can we still consider them as informants? And does it stop fieldwork?
Paper short abstract:
Through an analysis of accounts of the politicization of visionary knowledge among indigenous Williche people in southern Chile, I will suggest that ethnographic research on relational modes of knowing the invisible realm reconfigures problems of access and participation.
Paper long abstract:
The southern Chilean coastal region where I worked with indigenous Mapuche-Williche farmers was described to me by a main informant as an irreducible "enigma." Peripheral even to the more prominent Mapuche to the north, the Williche have endured greater cultural loss, and once-common modes of knowing through dream and vision have become "invisibilized" in everyday rural life. This was an enigmatic invisibility: however hidden the invisible realm and its meta-human powers often seemed, in rare moments most people had stories to share about premonitory dreams or risky encounters with strange apparitions. Yet in recent years the powers of the invisible realm have become visible in earthly affairs with growing divisive force. As ritual practitioners known as maestras de ceremonias have begun to "revisibilize" sources of ancestral knowledge through direct visionary connection with nearly forgotten place-based divinities, charismatic machi shamans have gained newfound political and ritual prominence. Notwithstanding ensuing disputes over relative authenticity, the cosmological configurations of the two kinds of ritualists differ to such an extent that their simultaneous presence in a ritual space provokes an existentially disturbing dissonance of energies. As an ethnographer I was peripherally positioned in relation to such visionary irruptions of invisible agency in the visible realm, but will suggest that due to the inherent relationality of visionary knowledge, inseparable in Amerindian ontological terms from experience and being, I could not avoid the ethical implications of participation as I became drawn into my informants' accounts of their relations with beings of the invisible realm.
Paper short abstract:
The paper presents research into the fate of researchers employed at chemical plants before 1989. We focus on a double semi-peripherality: a geographical one (Czech Republic) and a disciplinary one (post-1989 transformation of industrial R&D) resulting in a unique perspective on transformation.
Paper long abstract:
The paper presents the preliminary results of our research into the fate of chemical R&D departments and institutes affiliated with chemical plants in the Czech Republic. The research comprises an analysis of archival materials and a thematic analysis of interviews conducted with researchers formerly employed at the factories to conduct applied research, solve ad hoc technical issues, and work on patents and innovations. Due to limited resources this also led to the production of unorthodox knowledge, needed for DIY solutions. We believe this analysis may offer a new perspective on the economic and political transformation after 1989. As such, our paper focuses on a double semi-peripherality. Firstly, its geographical focus is on a country in Europe´s semi-periphery affected by attempts to push it into the centre through the implementation of measures designed by actors such as the IMF and WB. Secondly, we focus on a subject paid little attention in science and technology studies. Unlike extensively researched academic research and its transformation (Balazs, Faulkner, and Schimank 1995; Schimank 1995; Vohlídalová 2017), applied research has been paid little attention (Muller 1995). Our aim is to show how our understanding of the processes of transformation may be challenged by the perspective offered by those deeply affected by the changes but rarely listened to despite representing part of the intellectual elite. This perspective promises to challenge the dichotomous interpretation of the transformation as a triumph of economic necessity and efficacy or as a social catastrophe for those at its losing end.
Paper short abstract:
Drawing on the case of Europeans travelling to northern India to participate in ten days silent Buddhist retreats, this paper examine the ways in which people spatialize and temporalize this silent experience in its sensorial, affective, embodied, cognitive and social dimension.
Paper long abstract:
Speech - as a fundamental aspect of a human condition - is the main tool that rhythm social relations (Breton & Le Breton; 2009). It's also the main channel with which ethnographers collect their data. But what is happening beyond the horizon of speech, when words disappear (or are forbidden) and only silence remain?
Drawing on the case of Europeans travelling to northern India to participate in ten days silent Buddhist retreats, this paper examine the ways in which people spatialize and temporalize this silent experience in its sensorial, affective, embodied, cognitive and social dimension. Through a phenomenological approach, I will try to show that in the special settings of these retreat Centers - silence is not considered as a mere synonym of absence but as a multiplication of other forms of presences, as an agent of sens-making and a way of perceiving, constructing and negotiating one's inner and outer inter-subjectivities lifeworld. In addition, the proposed paper will also explore methodological and epistemological concerns on the different way to conduct an ethnography of silence.