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- Convenors:
-
Francisco Martínez
(Tampere University)
Eeva Berglund (Aalto University)
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- Discussant:
-
Adolfo Estalella
(Universidad Complutense de Madrid)
- Formats:
- Panel
- Stream:
- Knowledge Production
- Sessions:
- Tuesday 22 June, -
Time zone: Europe/Helsinki
Short Abstract:
The confining brought by the pandemic turned homes into both objects and places of research, and it drew attention to the widespread problems with housing. The current crisis is an experiment in living ethnography, which entails rethinking our interlocutors, as well as our outputs and commitments.
Long Abstract:
We propose questioning what a home is and what it does methodologically and epistemologically through a series of home-based, multimodal ethnographies. We recall reflections on the 'anthropology at home' from thirty years ago, which were focused on renewing the discipline of anthropology and repatriating discourses of the self. But we discern important shifts in all those terms as well as in the role of our interlocutors, which demand our attention.
The current crisis is also inspiring reflections on what counts as anthropology or research, and about what it might mean to do ethnography these days. We also suggest approaching home from the point of view of diverse processes and politics of locating, so opening up even further the object and modes of inquiry in anthropology and cognate fields (ethnology, geography, sociology, STS, etc.) We also suggest rethinking anthropology's aspirations as a discipline, as well as its ethos and ethics.
We will gather reflections on how the pandemic reconfigurations have impelled us to reconsider what a home is and does. Our call is explicitly generic so people can interpret these matters from their background and research interests. In this panel, we especially welcome experimental, collaborative, multimodal ethnographies that reflect on home-making during the pandemic from a methodological point of view. We feel impelled to invent new forms of collaboration and narration in the field, as well as to reconsider which ethnographic devices will allow us to research from home and to extend our epistemic imaginaries from the domestic space.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Tuesday 22 June, 2021, -Paper short abstract:
The pandemic had caused a reversal of the work-home separation so familiar to most urbanites. Using Lefebvre’s rhythmanalysis to theorise this reversal and the “new normal”, I explore the significance of rhythmanalysis in advancing anthropology “of”, and not just “in”, the city.
Paper long abstract:
Home was where the work was and still is when we think of farming and related types of work in rural life, with little separation between work and home. In recent years and particularly in urban society, the delineation between work and home had given rise to “take your son/daughter to work” week to introduce them to the world of “real work”. The pandemic caused a reversal and work had come home with parents working alongside their children once again, including that of academics teaching from home. This has led not only to a collective reflection on what is essential work but also on whether there is still the need to separate work from home given the fact that most (albeit not all) of what we do face-to-face can be done online over a strong and stable internet connection.
This paper presents some theoretical reflections on the work-home dichotomy (should there be one?) in an urban setting through the lens of Lefebvre’s rhythmanalysis, noting how the everyday life at isorhythmia (equilibrium) that we take for granted could be knocked out-of-sync causing arrythmia. What circumstances could return it to the former isorhythmia, or a new eurhythmia (“new normal”) and what might prevent its return? Most significantly, if rhythmanalysis is able to theorise the “everyday”, could it also become a critical concept in theorising anthropology “of” the city and not just anthropology “in” the city, thereby advancing urban anthropology as a whole?
Paper short abstract:
In doing digital ethnography with a Hindu-inspired community, I experienced the complexity of having to deal with a great amount of information converging into one space. My field was a multi-scalar collage of the online events of this community seen from the small room where I happen to also live
Paper long abstract:
Due to the COVID-19 crisis, I was impelled - like nearly everyone - to conquer the digital sphere. Consequently, what was intended to be a participant observation among a Hindu-inspired community in the city of Madrid became a mix of online interviews with the city's devotees; online activities hosted from different places: a theatre colloquium in Madrid, a World Convocation on Los Angeles and several online meditations in India; together with numerous posts on different webpages and social-media platforms. Observing all these events from my room, it felt like my digital fieldwork gave rise to a confusing global-local articulation that was taking place in the small space of my desk.
This change in my research design unchained an entire set of consequences with the corresponding reflections. For instance, it struck me that my fieldwork was full of (meaningful) silences, of intermittency and daily-life interruptions. I found myself scheduling my moments of 'observation', tinkering with the asynchronicity allowed by some digital platforms. I experienced the relativity of movement, visiting different places through my laptop's screen while sitting statically on my chair. In this particular arena I found that, together with my position, questions of bonding and field boundaries were compromised. My room became a vessel were my research left its mark.
Paper short abstract:
We often forgot that home is both noun and verb. This aural-visual essay experiments with a “living ethnography” to concentrate on the tension between home as verb and noun. In prying home from its built structure as house, we encounter its anti-structure in nomadism and its meaning as journey.
Paper long abstract:
This experiment of “living ethnography” questions what home is, as place and action. We often forgot that home is both noun and verb. This aural-visual essay concentrates on the tension between home as verb and home as noun, shifting the mountainous doubled humped m and its hum into rhythmic glyphs of embarkment: the beginnings of a trail, the ridges of the road ahead. Home only becomes dwelling through activities of living rather than mere settling. Asad explains (video section 1) home as a temporary nesting. Home as perch. A hovering point. Although, more anchored, Malkah (video section 2) aspires to a roaming home. “Home is a journey,” she explains. For the exiled Walter Benjamin, (video section 3) home was the briefcase containing his Passages work, the notebooks more commonly known as the Arcades Project. As a noun, home is related to origin, nationality, identity, family, the familiar. Home can be the comfort of the known, of what is visible. But home is also the invisible, the hidden, or an atmosphere – “the smell of the nest” (Bohm). Home is our bodies (as nests), what we carry within as we move on. To wrestle with its meaning, this essay pries home from its built structure as house to encounter its anti-structure, as an assemblage of floating parts, moveable and transient: nomadic. This means we must do away with not only notions of homeland, but also of home as fixed places.
Paper short abstract:
Locked up at home, it is the field that enters my life, not me deciding where or when to visit the field. I cannot shut down my home, the field imposes on me, on my everyday life. For me, is the ideal timing to reassess my position as researcher at home and to re-think my relationship to the field.
Paper long abstract:
Locked up at home, it is the field that enters my life, and not me deciding where is the field site or when to visit the research field. I cannot shut down my home, the field imposes on me, it has become part of my everyday life.
I became infatuated with Covid-19 not because it’s a trendy response of the moment in the arts and social sciences, but as an inescapable way of being in the world. Covid-19, the lockdown, the ensuing home quarantine, provoked my interest in a fieldwork setting outside my primary scholarly interest (the Middle East) as it profoundly affected all aspects of my everyday musicking activities at home in Athens, Greece. I could not shut my door to Covid-19 and the effects it brought to my music-making ventures. It was the field, suddenly and unexpectedly entering my everyday life, my house, nuancing every aspect of my music world. Under such circumstance, I was unable to draw a line between personal life and fieldwork, between home and the field. Ethnomusicology at home, is inextricably bounded to my identity as researcher, performer, concerned citizen and a parent of a child involved in music activities.
The current pandemic confront ethnomusicologists with new and challenging social realities; it is an opportunity to reconsider what a home is and observe how contexts and fieldwork settings change rapidly. For me, is the ideal timing to reassess my position as researcher at home and to re-think my relationship to the field.