Paper short abstract:

My lecture will focus on the "True" or "Holy Lengths" of Mary and Jesus. Based on the materiality of these body lengths made from paper, I develop a new perspective on these objects often categorised as "superstitious" and inquire into a specific religious and emotional practice.

Paper long abstract:

My lecture is about an almost forgotten type of museum object: the "True Length". "True" or "Holy Lengths", especially of the supposed proportions of saints, and in particular of the foot or body of Jesus and Mary, have been known since the Middle Ages. Their heyday was the Baroque, though they remained widespread in the 19th and early 20th centuries. These strips of paper were kept in the home, worn on the body or wound around it. Their purpose was to protect their owners from dangers, enemies and diseases and to help them during pregnancy and childbirth. The Catholic Church disowned "True Lengths" early on. The objects were collected and exhibited in museums of folklore as evidence of "superstition".

In ethnology studies, the distinction between belief and superstition has long been critiqued. Sacred and popular religious practices are no longer examined separately. In my lecture I undertake a "re-measuring" of these objects from the perspective of material culture studies and emotional studies, examining the interplay between the materials, subject and relationship to the transcendental. The materiality of "Holy Lengths" and the types of uses they were put to shed light on an individual religious practice that seeks to involve the body and to emotionalise and to mobilise feelings. But feelings and expressions of feelings are still subject to particular social conventions and values. So the "Holy Lengths" can also be used to ask further questions about a specifically Catholic "emotional education", thus contributing to research into religious and emotional practices.

Paper short abstract:

Those marked as different often become the object of stories about their differences. Using affect and embodiment from folkloristics and disability studies we will hopefully get a fuller understanding of how individuals with different bodies were perceived and responded to.

Paper long abstract:

People who are considered physically and/or mentally different often become the object of gossip, and the stories about their differences affect both the individuals in question as well as the society, no matter whether they are the teller, the listener or the talked about.

In this paper I am working with stories about individuals from the 17th to 19th centuries, and according to the source material, they all had physical, cognitive or mental differences which lead to the creation and spread of legends and gossip and thus created a complex context of factual and fictionalized elements. In the intersection of various elements, we can see how stories and bodies mutually affect each other. The material in question - both historical documents as well as legends, gossip and newspapers - was collected, recorded and printed in the 19th and 20th century. Dealing with archived material also means contrasting versions of affect and its intensity in different times and communities.

I approach the individuals and their stories form their bodies working towards social and cultural understanding of difference and normality, using affect and embodiment from the perspectives of folkloristics and disability studies. With this approach we will hopefully get a fuller understanding of how individuals with different bodies were perceived and responded to. If we are lucky we might even be able to imagine the personal experience and embodiment of those who were different at different times.

Paper short abstract:

In the presentation I will discuss the sensory experiences and emotions that are often connected to books and e-books, and ask how does the change from a physical artefact to a digital object affect reading experiences and understanding of books as emotional artefacts.

Paper long abstract:

Printed books used to be the obvious format for reading literature, until e-books became easily accessible. The development of tablets and smartphones were expected to change reading habits in a similar way that happened for instance in music industry, when CD's lost the competition to streaming services. The change of books, however, has been slow. At the moment digital books are developing and sales are increasing, but they still are marginal compared to printed books.

One of the reasons for this, that has been raised up in e-book research, is quite interesting from an ethnological perspective. Readers tend to emphasise their attachment to elements such as feel, smell, sound or atmosphere, when they give reasons for choosing a printed book instead of an e-book. At the same time, they often find it difficult to find words to this attachment. Books smell "somehow" nice or they "just" create a good atmosphere to reading. I argue, that research fields of books and reading can benefit from focusing on the emotional side and materiality of reading, and that this will help to understand readers' perspectives to digitalisation of books. I will discuss the sensory experiences and emotions that are often connected to printed books and ask, how does the change from a physical artefact to a digital object affect the experiences and reading related practices.

Paper short abstract:

The reports related to ethnic shows in East-Central Europe are full of expression. I focus on staging otherness. By using a concept of 'aura' (Benjamin 1935) I discuss how emotions which aroused by the presence of exotic people on stage, help to broaden understanding of the phenomenon of live shows.

Paper long abstract:

Ethnic shows in East-Central Europe (1870-1930) formed a phenomenon of encounter with Others typical to the era of pre-image. They were studied thoroughly in the West, though not in the East. However, some sources about these shows have been preserved. Interactions between the 'exotic' actors and the audience are the most pressing subject to be investigated.

In order to explore it from the perspective of affect and emotion I use a concept of 'aura' (Benjamin 1935), defined as 'a strange tissue of space and time: this unique apparition of a distance, no matter how close it may be'. In this sense the aura is associated with stage presence, and uniqueness of the actors 'their presence in the here and the now which paradoxically emphasize feeling of distance'. This approach allows to recognize moments and sensations evoked by performances. Benjamin's insight here is that each human sensory perspective is not completely biological. It is also historical. The ways people perceive change with social changes.

In such studies the way of using senses plays central part in the final interpretation of the phenomenon. Working on existing sources researchers can figure out the 'spots' that evoked reaction or touched emotional plane of the audience. What should be underlined is what attendants were seeking in these shows, and the ways of collapsing the distance between the actors and the audience. Using such approach to live shows enables understanding how physical closeness and sensual contact can produce effect within Benjamin's aura to create a distance.

Paper short abstract:

The paper explores stand-up comedy as an economy of attention and affect that depends on intersubjective capture (i.e. relatability) between participants of interaction. What are the methodological implications of this viewpoint in terms of the social formations and publics that stand-up thrives on?

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores the performance form of stand-up comedy as an economy of attention and affect that depends on intersubjective capture (i.e. relatability) between participants of interaction. Stand-up is first elaborated on as an exceptionally harsh attention economy that thrives on capturing, holding, and purposefully managing the attention of (co-present) audience.

For stand-up gigs to succeed, as most stand-up comics emphasize, something has to "connect" or resonate across performer and audience. I suggest this something is equally affective as it is cognitive, for after all, stand-ups aim to resonate by evoking emotional response and by encouraging a modality of engagement that is primarily affective. By drawing from recent work on situated affectivity, I inquire into the kinds of affective resonances these performances trade on, framing stand-up broadly as an "affective arrangement" that patterns, channels, and modulates affects in recurrent and repeatable ways (Slaby et al. 2017; Slaby forthcoming).

In particular, I elaborate on the methodological implications of these perspectives in terms of the social formations and publics associated with stand-up comedy. As particularly affect-intensive sites of social interaction that thrive on a temporary feel of communality, how to approach stand-up performances in an analytical and critical register?

REFERENCES

Slaby, Jan; Mühlhoff, Rainer & Wüschner, Philipp 2017. Affective Arrangements. Emotion Review 2017, pp. 1-10.

Slaby, Jan (forthcoming). Affective Arrangement. In Jan Slaby & Christian von Scheve (eds.), Affective Societies: Key Concepts. New York: Routledge.

Paper short abstract:

This paper treats the analysis of affects and emotions on archival recordings. How can a researcher reach the performer's emotional state by listening? As a folklorist, I approach the topic from socio-cultural and neurological aspects with examples of my research material: Karelian lament poetry.

Paper long abstract:

Karelian laments—traditional ritual wailing poetry—are expressions of personal and collective grief and sorrow. In general, laments convey emotions verbally, musically, and by multimodal affect displays, as several researches have shown. I am interested in the interaction of a lament and a lamenter from the aspect of emotions: how the performer's emotions and changes in the emotional state influence the performance, and, in contrast, how the lament and performing it influence the performer's affective experiences and emotional state. To add some challenge, my research material comprises of archived audio recordings from fieldwork interviews made during few decades in the mid-20th century. However, with this challenge comes many intriguing questions.

The embodiments of emotions are various and they can appear as direct, involuntary reactions or consciously produced, "mimic" displays. These different modes of affect displays—natural and artificial—are in the focus of this paper. Additionally, I discuss the changes in the emotional state and the expression, as well as the matters that causes these changes. How can a researcher hear the nuances and changes of performer's emotional state by listening the tapes? Is the difference of display of heartfelt and artificial emotions audible? Can the interpretations be reliable?

I contemplate the methods and possibilities to answer these questions combining perspectives of cultural, social and neurological studies. All these different fields are essential for emotion research; the bodily experience and mental and physical reactions have basis on biology and psychology, but the interpretations of these reactions are socio-cultural.

Paper short abstract:

Game of Thrones reaction videos display emotions of media consumers that effectively make them producers of their own. Reaction videos tend to display extreme physical feedback and emotions. The cultivation of these in fan culture poses questions to the study of body, affects, senses and emotions.

Paper long abstract:

For about five years, the genre of 'Game of Thrones reaction videos' has enjoyed vast popularity on online video platforms such as Youtube. The series is known for its brutality and unexpected twists in the storyline. Especially the sudden deaths of popular protagonists have been described as a rule-changing postmodern strategy of narration (Wittingslow 2015).

Reaction videos show consumers´ immediate emotions while watching disturbing scenes for the first time. They are produced by friends and family members who are aware of the forthcoming story twist. The immediate nature of the reaction video allows for the display and reception of "authentic" emotions. These reactions are broadcasted in the borderland of Youtube´s position between the "real" and virtual, offline and online life.

In the paper, Game of Thrones reaction videos are analyzed from a BASE-perspective. The questions are as following: What do reaction videos tell us about the spatial situation of emotional experience (Swan 2017) during media consumption? What motives lie behind the obsession with vulnerability on public display? Is it the "authenticity" of anger and pain that allows for the self-identification with imagined communities? What kind of an attention economy (Goldhaber 1997) does the reaction video stand for?

Apart from the private character of domestic reaction videos, the filming of fan reactions during public screenings has become popular. Especially the 'Burlington Bar reaction videos' will be studied in the paper as events of cultivating the collective production of user-generated content in the form of body, affects, senses and emotions.

Paper short abstract:

The presentation considers epistemological and methodological gains of combining contemporary ethnography and archival data containing children's narratives of fear. This creates a possibility to analyse how intertextuality and contexts produces emotions and regulate expressions of fear.

Paper long abstract:

Talk of fear is paramount in contemporary Sweden, as well as across the world. Fear is usually described as an intrinsic human response to certain stimuli and the emotional basis for flight. It is also however, a cultural construct. To feel fear is an ambiguous state of mind, not only by nature but also in the meaning of the emotion. This ambiguity, however, is partially overcome through the contextualization of fears in "emotional regimes" (Gonzales 2012), which regulate their expression and create social expectations that determine the range of meaningful emotions for any given situation. These situations vary over time, in place and with context. If children in the contemporary express fearful narratives about the future of the world, children in the past directed their fears to other ideologies or objects.

A fruitful methodological strategy in this study has been to combine children's narratives of fear from the contemporary and stories of fear from the folklore archives. Thereto, in order to understand the interconnection between individual emotional life and the narratives of fear, a broad analysis of other textual narratives and visual culture of fear has been vital. It thereby becomes possible to say something about the intertextuality and the contexts from which fear narratives derives its power and authority.

The analysis of emotions situated in different cultural and historical context can provide us with relevant cues, not only about fear manuscripts or emotional regimes but also about the eventual emotional instability that comes together with social and cultural change.

Paper short abstract:

This paper shall explore the emotional responses to physical surroundings that help to construct claims about the presence of 'ghosts' or 'spirits'. The context of this research is a folk belief in supernatural world presenting itself in every-day situations in connection to mass-media.

Paper long abstract:

This paper marks the beginning of a new project. It shall explore the emotional responses to physical surroundings that help to construct claims about the presence of 'ghosts' or 'spirits'. The context of this research is a folk belief in supernatural world presenting itself in every-day situations (usually at home). Such instances gained popularity through numerous Swedish TV-series, for example "Det okända" (the unknown). Emotions and feelings presented in such pop-cultural productions tend to serve as a way to construct a valid claim for having a disturbing ghost and an acceptable explanations of negative feelings in a certain material structure (e.g. home).

In other words, emotions attached to materiality, communicated through bodily experiences, help to establish something immaterial. This paper's focus is on the preliminary probe into the field of construction and function of ghost narratives in modern Sweden with connection to the mass media.

Paper short abstract:

This paper inspects the possibilities of finding and analyzing the presence of displays of affect in Kalevala-meter incantation performances, via a new theoretical framework, that draws from folkloristic and linguistic anthropologic theories.

Paper long abstract:

Incantations in Kalevala-meter, an oral tradition actively practiced in the Finno-Baltic area up to the 20th century, have received scholarly attention since the birth of the field of Folklore Studies as an independent discipline. However, new views and results can still be gained by using new theoretical and methodological frameworks.

In my paper, I will discuss the performances of Kalevalaic incantations seen through a new methodology that combines linguistic anthropological theories of semiotic registers (Agha 2007), stance taking (Du Bois 2007), and voice (Keane 1999).

The framework that I am using, enables inspection of ways the performer constructed linguistically formed social personae, and employed them in their performance. These social personae manifest on the level of utterances, para-linguistic devices and bodily expressions, thus forming a part of a semiotic register.

I will pay special attention to the challenges of inspecting emotions present in performance, when contextual information is limited, and the research material has been archived in textual form. The questions I am especially interested in my paper, concern the possibilities of studying displays of affects in the archived incantation material. I discuss indexical cues for affects on textual level, and how they can be abstracted and analyzed. The discussion illuminates performer's ways of addressing different agents, and argues that displays of affect index various stances taken.