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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, -Sofia Gonzalez-Ayala
Paper short abstract:
I will reflect on my attempt to use an ethnographic approach, on the one hand, to create distance with and analyze and, on the other, to apply my analysis onto my job as (a female) public servant, bureaucrat, researcher and museologist in the Museum of Memory of Colombia's project.
Paper long abstract:
In this presentation I will refer to the challenges posed and possibilities offered by using an ethnographic approach, on the one hand, to create distance with and analyze, and on the other, to apply my analysis onto my job as public servant, bureaucrat and museologist in the creation of the Museum of Memory of Colombia.
For 4 years I have been hired by the National Centre for Historical Memory to work as curator, researcher and public servant (first as a "contractor" and later on as "specialized professional") in the project that attempts to create a Museum of Memory designed to provide satisfaction measures and non-repetition guarantees to victims of the armed conflicti in Colombia--a conflict that has not ended in spite two peace accords between the State and paramilitary (2005) and guerrilla (2016) groups.
I will reflect on my attempt to apply my anthropological and research training to my work as public servant and curator. I have used sound recording, note taking and article publishing to document, create distance with and analyze my everyday labour. How much is it possible to actually create that distance? What does it mean to be "at home" as a female ethnographer, museologist or (simply a) bureaucrat? What does it tell us about the transitional justice context in which my (home) country lives in, while still suffering from dire violence both from legal and illegal armed groups? And what about the role of museums and museology, and memory, in the same context?
Christine Hämmerling (University of Zurich)
Paper short abstract:
I reflect upon the different functions of home and bedroom for pregnancy vlogging on YouTube – before and during the pandemic. I present a categorization of interiors, reflect on the vlogger’s home as an assemblage of private and public, and look at negotiation of authenticity, intimacy, and trust.
Paper long abstract:
Pregnancy-vlogs are often situated in the pregnant vloggers home and bedroom. This setting not only challenges traditional conceptions of private and public spaces, but it also helps us reflect on interdependences between media, space, narrative, and the pregnant female body.
Speaking about feelings, decision making, and the female body during pregnancy surrounds these bedrooms with a set of narratives that evoke intimacy and trust. These are important currencies for professional vloggers. Thus, filming a vlog at home can be read as a reaction to challenges regarding the authenticity of the vlogging community. The home becomes a promise: What is set here, must me intimate, trustworthy, and real.
Thus, in pregnancy-vlogs, home and bedroom can be analyzed as cultural spaces under negotiation: By blogging from and about the private home - before and during the pandemic -, traditional concepts of family, being a wife and mother, of health and work ethics are promoted. Living a modest, natural (as the basis for a natural birth) and normal life is described as desirable, as it is represented in the style, dealing with, cleaning and decorating one’s cozy, family-friendly home.
Pregnancy-“updates” show the home in a modified quality: It highlights social norms such as tidiness, efficiency, and a capacity to deal with one’s surroundings: Like the mess in the house, messy feelings – how ever intense they are – are finally gathered, organized and overcome in an uplifting story, pain is mentioned but also laughed away, and insecurities are shared, but already dealt with.
Lydia Maria Arantes (University of Graz)
Paper short abstract:
I will take exemplary scenes described in my Corona diary and unravel them in an ethno-psychoanalytically inspired way, leading to a scenic understanding of experiencing the pandemic. In doing so, I propose a way of using the pandemic confinement in order to realise an anthropology beyond the home.
Paper long abstract:
Ever since the pandemic has taken over our lives, I have been writing a Corona diary. Especially during lockdown number 1 in the spring of 2020, I (at times excessively) gathered fieldnotes describing our upside-down everyday life as a married couple with two, kindergarten and primary school aged, daughters that suddenly scrambles to make arrangements for full time home-office in a small flat.
In my talk, I would like to take a few exemplary scenes described in my diary and unravel them in an ethno-psychoanalytically inspired way, leading us to a scenic understanding (as developed by Alfred Lorenzer) of the situations described. An ethno-psychoanalytical interpretation approach such as scenic understanding draws on atmospherically present complexes of meaning distributed in scenic associative imageries. Together with unravelling emotions articulated within the research diary it renders visible latent field and cultural logics of living (through) the pandemic.
The pandemic experience has thrown (many of) us back onto ourselves, our subjectivity, our corporeality, our familial relationships, our domestic space, and into constantly negotiating intimacies of different scales. I would like to take this call as an opportunity to introduce this ethno-psychoanalytical approach and show how it might be able help us use this “confinement” productively, allowing us to go from an anthropology of / at / from the home to an anthropology beyond the home.
Georg Wolfmayr (Department of European Ethnology, University of Vienna) Susanna Azevedo (University of Vienna) Ana Rogojanu (Vienna University of Economics and Business) Raphaela Kohout (University of Vienna)
Paper short abstract:
We examine how pandemic measures affect explicit and implicit homely orders, e.g. whether and how people re-arrange their homes. In addition to online interviews and video tours, participants are asked to document their everyday-lives through different media during the second lockdown in Vienna.
Paper long abstract:
The covid-19 pandemic has drawn our attention to our homes. The high rise of real estate prices since the first lockdown in spring 2020, and the increased profits of furniture stores support this claim. In general lockdowns, quarantines and other measures have led to an increase in time spent at home. As a consequence, people had to arrange and transform their homes e.g. into offices, schools, fitness studios while renegotiating living constallations i.e. living alone or in cohabitation.
The pandemic situation has, moreover, affected different households in very different ways, which not only makes inequality visible, but also exacerbates it. While groups of lower income are tendentially restricted to fewer square meters which may cause functional overlappings of spaces, wealthier groups with more living space available may adapt the requirements for different functions more easily. Against this backdrop, we examine how people dwell and arrange their homes during the restrictions to deal with these requirements. While doing so we pursue the question of how pandemic measures affect explicit and implicit homely orders i.e. spatialities, both in single apartments as well as in shared living spaces, and how arrangements about e.g. privacy and noise challenge home-structures and perceptions of cohabitation.
The ethnographic data will be collected during the second lockdown in Vienna in November 2020. In addition to online interviews and online-video tours (go-along video interviews), participants are asked to document their everyday-lives through different media.