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.