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- Convenors:
-
Dorothy Noyes
(The Ohio State University)
Kyrre Kverndokk (University of Bergen)
Anne Eriksen (University of Oslo)
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- Chairs:
-
Anne Eriksen
(University of Oslo)
Kyrre Kverndokk (University of Bergen)
- Discussant:
-
Barbro Blehr
(Stockholm University)
- Formats:
- Panel
- Stream:
- Performativity
- Sessions:
- Thursday 24 June, -
Time zone: Europe/Helsinki
Short Abstract:
This panel explores the aesthetics of exemplarity: the networked process of performance, emulation, and revision through which rules of social conduct are made and remade. What formal and communicative devices mark performances that seek to revitalize established rules or to propose new ones?
Long Abstract:
The rule must be abstracted from the deed,... against which others may test their own talent, letting it serve them as a model not for copying but for emulation.
--Immanuel Kant
Rules invite a range of responses in action. They can be grudgingly acknowledged, bent, evaded, ostentatiously observed, flagrantly transgressed, or painstakingly revised. In the interplay between these last three possibilities lies exemplarity: the networked process of performance, emulation, and revision through which rules of social conduct are made and remade.
A concrete action becomes exemplary when it is understood as pointing toward a model or rule, but the example will also always do much more. The intrinsic abundance of the performed example may strengthen a rule, but also threaten to overthrow or upend it.
This panel addresses the aesthetics of exemplarity as the space of performance that falls between observance and transgression. Rules are most stable when they are least visible. Thus, when a performance calls attention to the rules, and by extension to itself, it is an indicator of conflict and/or change in the air.
We seek papers exploring the communicative and formal means through which particular performances of conduct set themselves up as examples, inviting reflection on the rules as well as emulation by other actors. The aesthetics of carnivalesque or inversive transgression have been much studied. What aesthetic and affective devices do actors call upon not to ridicule an established order, but to propose its revitalization or replacement?
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Thursday 24 June, 2021, -Paper short abstract:
Times of crisis inspire to imagine a different tomorrow with a different set of rules: utopian festivals and survivalist preparedness drills provide experimental spaces allowing actors to perform alternative futures and thereby questioning existing rules and exploring new exemplary ways of life.
Paper long abstract:
While always remaining unknown and uncertain, visions of the future guide our actions in the present. Paradoxically, envisioning apocalyptic and utopian futures can bring about a sense of purpose and certainty in times of crisis. We analyse utopian festivals and survivalist preparedness drills as experimental spaces, as “future laboratories”, allowing actors to envision and perform utopian and apocalyptic futures. In doing so, we argue, future laboratories facilitate the transgressing of existing rules, establishing new rules and testing exemplary ways of life. Utopian festivals explore what the world could already be like if only we established new rules and created “new certainties”. As self-proclaimed “pioneers of a good life” these festivals act as models of a better world (e.g. living in self-supporting communities without money) within the present. By contrast, preparedness drills explore surviving in a catastrophic future without functioning infrastructures and institutions. The drills equip participants with the necessary skills in order to prevail in the envisioned struggle for survival. Both laboratories provide actors with a “taste” of what the future could be like and, more importantly, what they could or should be like. Thus, future laboratories allow actors to enact exemplary versions of themselves while evoking a sense of being ahead of one’s time. Drawing on comparative ethnographic research in Germany, we analyse future laboratories merging approaches from the anthropology of the good and the anthropology of future
Paper short abstract:
Eilert Sundt's work on the morality of the rural population (1857) initiated folk life studies in Norway. The book is full of example stories, serving both as research material and as a tool to constitute its object of knowledge. The paper examines Sundt's rhetorical and performative use of examples
Paper long abstract:
Some examples is the title of the opening chapter of Eilert Sundt's large work on the "decency" of the rural population from 1857. Sundt, reckoned as the founding father of both ethnology and sociology in Norway, presents short narratives of encounters with persons from the lower rural population who had children born out of wedlock. He also asks whether such examples can contain true and reliable information? As an answer, Sundt presents strong arguments for the use of quantitative analyses, but he also starts each of the following chapters with more examples.
My paper will investigate Sundt's use of examples as more than introductory anecdotes. They serve to produce pathos, to convey morality, and to persuade the readers of his interpretations of what he has seen and heard. As such, they are elements of a rhetoric of truth, seeking to convince the reader about the low morality of the rural population. Furthermore, the examples have important performative aspects, allowing Sundt to present himself as the competent researcher and the virtuous observer of the low life of peasants and paupers. Most fundamentally, they serve to create an image of "the people", the Other, the group that is being subjected to the then new science of folk life studies. The examples become sites where the individuals that Sundt met, discursively can be made to perform according to the emerging ideas about this group, and consequently contribute to its coming into being.