Paper short abstract:

Material objects of home can affect our emotional states. However, these affects are often unverbalized and connected with sensory experiences. Are narratives such as interviews and writings therefore usable research materials for the scrutiny of affective materiality?

Paper long abstract:

Various material culture studies show how material objects of everyday life can be tools for creating feelings of safety, comfort, and homeliness. Some items are important in supporting identity, life stories and feelings of belonging. In the current abundance of things and western consumerism, material objects can cause uncertainty and create feelings of imbalanced, unsustainable, and unethical living. Material items can affect our feelings and emotions in different ways, but their impact is often difficult to verbalize. They are not always understood as affective actors, but rather as practical tools or subjects of actions and given meanings. Also, affect happens in interaction between things and people, and it is connected with bodily presence and sensory experiences. These aspects raise questions of possible research materials. Can affect of material objects be scrutinized via verbalized narratives, interviews or writings? In this presentation, I will introduce materials and preliminary analysis of my current research, which is focused on affective objects of home. I will introduce two different types of materials. First is a set of interviews which I made in 2021 in Zoom due to covid restrictions. The second consists of written narratives collected by an archive. I will discuss how I have tried to find and scrutinize the emotional and sensory yet unverbalized affects of different material items of home.

Paper short abstract:

I introduce the ethno-psychoanalytical (interpretation group) approach and its epistemological benefits by exemplifying it via my research on knitting and illustrate the path from (the description of) emotional experiences to dense argumentations via ethno-psychoanalytical group interpretation work.

Paper long abstract:

Turning a (temporarily) blind eye to the terminological debate regarding the study of affects, emotions, feelings etc. (see also Skoggard/Waterston 2015), I take this panel as an opportunity to introduce a epistemological-methodological tool that we have implemented at our Department of Cultural Anthropology and European Ethnology in Graz, Austria, in 2013. I am speaking of an ethno-psychoanalytical interpretation group headed by a professional group analyst.

This approach is theoretically based on the theorem of transference and countertransference, here transferred from the (psycho)therapeutical to a group setting. Working with the unconscious, this approach enables reflections of emotions and irritations which emerge during fieldwork and are subsequently articulated in the research diary. Freely associating research diary entries, the group helps uncover hidden (symbolical) meanings and thus render visible latent field and cultural logics. Ultimately, this methodological approach not only accounts for the long-demanded reflection of the researcher’s positionality and subjectivity (Becker et al 2013; see also the Writing Culture debate); it also helps refine and amplify epistemological means, as urged by Bourdieu (1999) in his warning of reflexivity turning into an end in itself.

In my talk I will introduce the ethno-psychoanalytical (interpretation group) approach and its epistemological benefits by exemplifying it via my own research on knitting. Reproducing diary entries as well as group interpretation minutes, I will illustrate the path from subjective descriptions of sensory and emotional experiences in research diary entries to serendipitous realisations via ethno-psychoanalytical interpretation work which ultimately lay the ground for strong arguments.

Paper short abstract:

This paper addresses how emotions are shared and navigated by museum professionals in repatriation discourse. It aims, in particular, to demonstrate how affect can be studied in the borderland between professional and public/private at a time when political pressure on repatriation is increasing.

Paper long abstract:

Cultural heritage is a politically and emotionally charged topic of present public debate. As political pressure on museums to repatriate heritage items rise over the world, museum professionals are facing increased difficulties in navigating the emotions at stake between their own professional communities and the diasporic, politically active, stakeholders they seek to collaborate with.

Building on observation data and in-depth interviews with museum professionals and external stakeholders engaged in the project Ongoing Africa at the Swedish Museum of Ethnography, this paper addresses the uncertain affective positionalities of museum professionals in repatriation discourse. Viewing affect as culturally negotiated and meaningful, the paper suggests that affect can be studied in the borderland between different “affective communities” (Ahmed 2008). The "flat emotions" of museum professionalism (Smith 2021) have become increasingly difficult to navigate and express, highlighting the distinctions between public and professional grieving over historical atrocities. Exploring the tensions generated between affective communities, the paper further seeks to define how affect can or cannot be shared between professionals and the public.

Paper short abstract:

The paper deals with silence in ethnographic research. Silence is not the absence of something, but it is an action, a powerful form of communication. It can derive from a conflict of memories and emotional trauma. How to research silence? How to detect it? What message it conveys to us?

Paper long abstract:

After more than sixty years, the "Istrian exodus", the massive migrations of (mostly) Italians from Yugoslavia after WWII, continues to stir emotions and provoke disputes in international politics. My research of it in Istria, which after "exodus" radically changed the population structure, has been pervaded by an omnipresent silence and strong emotions. In the dominant research silence is treated as a consequence of socio-political power relations, the relationship between dominant and marginalized social groups and memories. Indeed, silence ensues when memory cannot rely on collective memory because it is unacknowledged (Halbwachs 2001). However, silence can be seen as the consequence of emotional trauma, the impossibility of narration. By keeping silent people protect themselves and avoid everything that reminds them of the emotional trauma. If memory does not process traumas from the past, there is a danger of a "conspiracy of silence" and the collective identity can rely on collective silence. The research identified other kind of communication tactics by which people tried to retain control over emotionally burdensome memories. But emotions like fear, sadness, humiliation etc. are communicated and transmitted through signs of embodied memories (Kidron 2009). The main methodological problem is how to detect them? How to research silence, even when silence is filled with words? What impact on the traumatic silence and its future can have an ethnological research which contextualize, acknowledge and articulate the untold? These and other questions will be dealt with in the Istrian case of the memories on the post WW II "exodus".

Paper short abstract:

By focusing on the online interaction, we ask how different emotions become entangled with the various phases of research process and what kind of discursive and socio-material knowing on affects does this generate in the context of academic work.

Paper long abstract:

In our project "Academic affects", we have used various methods to capture the different emotions that affect our academic work. During the COVID-19 pandemic years, we organized online meetings (Lorenzetti et al. 2016), "Affect cafés", in Zoom for researchers to share their experiences and emotions on their work. Alongside other methods, we have also performed digital ethnography (Caliandro 2018) and followed Twitter conversations concerning academic life. In our presentation, we focus on these two methods of generating understanding of affective practices. We ask how different emotions become entangled during the research process: in the interaction between researchers and participants, in the expressions aiming to mediate the emotions and in the interpretations we make in our analysis.

Both our examples differ from the traditional ethnographic fieldwork. Sitting in front of a laptop, looking and listening to participants or reading their emotions via Internet is, however, a corporeal experience that leaves different kinds of impressions on us. Looking at these affective circulations and their doings (Ahmed 2014), we focus on the ways emotions and affective practices can be both mediated, identified and scientifically written. By following Sara Ahmed (2014, 208), we understand emotions as involving “bodily processes of affecting and being affected (…) emotions are a matter of how we come into contact with objects and others.” We focus particularly on the ways narrations and online/offline bodies become entangled in the analysis and our writing, and what kind of discursive and socio-material knowing on affects does this generate.

Paper short abstract:

In the paper, the author explains the emergence of ordinary affects during the breakup of Yugoslavia. He shows that the ordinary affects were unfolding amid social anomie created by the collapse of the Yugoslav state and the processes of ethnicization on the subnational level.

Paper long abstract:

In the paper, based on the analysis of ethnographic material, the author explains

the emergence of ordinary affects during the breakup of Yugoslavia.

He shows that the ordinary affects were unfolding amid social anomie created

by the collapse of the Yugoslav state and the processes of ethnicization on the

subnational level. One of the striking features of the processes of ethnicization

was targeted violence against civilians or democratization of violence on

a subnational level. To help understand the emergence of affective afflictions,

the author supplements theories of cultural trauma and ethnicization with the

concepts of situation and crisis embedded in the ordinary. Furthermore, he argues

that this small theoretical supplement can help understand the persistence

and unusually high presence of war rhetoric in some post-Yugoslav states.

Paper short abstract:

I reflect on Collective Exploration Workshops (CEWs) and Emotional Editing as two ethnographic inventions which emerged as methodological strategies to cope with the predicament of ethnography in the intimate space.

Paper long abstract:

How to study intimacy without destroying it? This question hunted me from the start of a long research project on intimacy-making in three world cities (Madrid, Montevideo, and Mexico). Results are contained in the monography Metropolitan Intimacies (2022) and the film The Order I Live In (2018).

Recognizing singularity and minimizing intrusion were our guidelines. In a first stage, we organized collaborative workshops at a cultural lab in Madrid, on a voluntary basis. Groups among 5 and 20 participants talked and interacted for two or three hours around a suggested activity like bringing personal photos, preparing a meal, sketching a map of home appliances, compiling a music repertoire, dancing, storytelling, drawing. We called that “Collective Exploration Workshops” (CEWs). The task at hand confers a common goal, prompting a lively exchange of experiences and confidences. We laughed and cryed together in some of these sessions.

The experience was so moving that in a second step we visited some of these people in their homes. The material was edited in the form of an indoor urban symphony which weaves voices in a choral line. We called it Emotional Editing: the emotional tone provides the thread between the sequences, and the montage reflexively integrates the author’s voices in the form of music soundtrack -composed by myself- and visual athmospheres -filmed by Jorge Moreno. Emotional editing follows emotional, sensorial, and poetic principles: the poetics of the participant’s stories are replicated at a textual level, in the very making of visual, affective, and sensory discourse.

Paper short abstract:

Drawing from ethnographic research in Spain on sport and cultural performance genres, and the anthropology of sport and expressive culture, this paper will identify methodological challenges and propose responses through sensory anthropology, theories of affect, and insights on desire.

Paper long abstract:

For a cultural anthropologist specializing in sporting cultures including their traditional and folk variants, the expressive and affective dimensions of cultural performances and sport fandom have always been a challenge. For example, the interpretive richness of my latest ethnography on a traditional sport, the Catalan human towers castells (forthcoming in 2023 by Indiana University Press), was both invigorating and debilitating. Researching and writing the book was reduced to a single challenge that overwhelmed all others, and which cost me several discarded drafts: to somehow put in writing the visual, experiential, and emotional force of performance. When people perform castells, they submerge into a sensory world of pain, heat, pressure, and smells. When they watch it, they feel arrested by its compelling drama. The limits of language before performance was constantly frustrating, and the words of the American dancer Isadora Duncan often came to mind: “If I could tell you what it meant, there would be no point in dancing it.” Similarly, in my previous work on Basque soccer madness in the north of Spain, recognizing, recording, and presenting the affective dimensions of fandom was an ultimate priority. Drawing from my previous research in Spain on sport and other cultural performance genres, as well as the broader anthropology of sport and expressive culture, I will reflect on methodological challenges and some responses through sensory anthropology, theories on collective affect and effervescence, and psychoanalytical insights on desire.

Paper short abstract:

New technologies open possibilities to research affects and bodily remembrance. I explore how a virtual cycling platform, where the race circuit can be relived, can be used as a tool when studying the experiences of the first women cyclists who participated in the Olympic games.

Paper long abstract:

Athletes have a strong connection with affects and experience a wide variety of possibilities for bodily remembrance for instance regarding their training regime and races, being exposed to the elements, risking injury, and celebrating success.

I study the experiences of the first women cyclists who participated in the Olympic Games in 1984. In my research I explore the possibilities that a virtual cycling platform can offer for oral history. Currently it is possible to generate a race circuit with its landform onto a virtual cycling platform that controls a resistance device, where a bike can be attached. This makes it possible for the research interviewee to sit on their bike and virtually ride around the race circuit experiencing the uphills and downhills, possibly even paired with the visual images of the surroundings.

What happens when a former elite cyclist gets to relive the Olympic race circuit almost four decades after the race? How does this play together with the affects involved in their memories? And how does this need to be addressed methodologically?