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- Convenors:
-
Tobias Boos
(Free University Bolzano-Bozen)
Dorothy Louise Zinn (Free University of Bozen-Bolzano)
Daniela Salvucci (Free University of Bolzano-Bozen)
Eleonora Mastropietro (Università degli Studi di Milano Statale)
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- Format:
- Panel
Short Abstract:
This panel calls for “unwriting” and “rewriting” territories as an opportunity to discuss alternative methodologies that promote participative, multimedia, multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary understandings, narrations and critical writings of inhabited territories.
Long Abstract:
How to “write” territories avoiding both objectifying reality and reproducing current stereotypes connected to both idealized self-representation as well as to external misrepresentation of “the other”? Who is entitled to produce a narrative on places and their inhabitants? How could we, as researchers, propose an understanding of specific locations and their sociocultural dynamics, starting from the inhabitants’ perceptions, but also contributing with our own independent and creative point of view?
This panel calls for “unwriting” and “rewriting” territories as an opportunity to discuss alternative methodologies that promote participative, multimedia, multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary understandings, narrations, and critical writings of inhabited territories. It fosters a dialogue among ethnology, folklore, anthropology, geography, art, visual, and performative disciplines about the possibility of unwriting and rewriting in a different way the places that we all dwell in.
We take inspiration from those methodologies that attempt to produce unconventional and multimedia “writings” of inhabited territories, such as the deep mapping-method. This is a relatively “anarchic” practice based on collaboration between insiders and outsiders, beyond any hierarchy between experts and non, putting together inhabitants, scholars, and free-lance artists to rewrite places by unwriting preconstructed narratives as well as pejorative and stereotyped representations. We especially focus on those places that are often portrayed as “marginal,” “ugly,” or uninteresting, but also on those usually and uncritically described as “untouched,” or “idyllic,” or even “exotic.” We are eager to discuss with colleagues and practitioners interested in participative, multimedia, and multidisciplinary alternative methodologies to unwrite and critically rewrite territories.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Paper Short Abstract:
Historically viewed as marginal by the Nation-states the borderland is a unique inhabited territory. Through multidisciplinary narrations, creative processes and critical writings the project Mugalur aims to identify networks and foster real cross-border practices, especially in the proximity of border territories in the Basque Country.
Paper Abstract:
Through different activities gathering local residents and elected officials alike, the project Mugalur aims to develop regular spaces for exchange and mutual knowledge and, in the long term, to establish a "forum", a laboratory of ideas to promote new dynamics of cooperation between both sides of the border. The historical seven Basque provinces divided by the border, appear now gathered in a European project. During 2023-24, seven workshops were organized on both sides of the border, inviting local residents to draw a sensitive cartography and to share their views and experiences on the multiple sides of the border in their everyday life. Funded by the NAEN Euroregion and coordinated by the Development Council of the Basque Country, a unique association created in July 1994, representing all the driving forces of the northern Basque Country, the project involves academics and local development agencies.
Mugalur entangles research and creation through the implementation of participatory methodologies. Through multidisciplinary narrations and critical writings it aims to get to know each other better and identify real cross-border practices, especially in the proximity of border territories. Historically viewed as marginal by the Nation-states, the borderland is a unique inhabited territory where experiences, economic and family exchanges and feelings of belonging have been built. Reflecting on the sharing and creating together processes that occurred during the workshop will eventually reveal the potential of informal networks and ties between dwellers across the border, leading in the long run to think of and enact (or not) a shared territory.
Paper Short Abstract:
Based on research with members of the indigenous Emberá-Wounaan community in Panama, this paper explores the (im)possibilities of doing research differently, aimed at doing justice to the diversity of Emberá-Wounaan perspectives and their attempts to navigate, benefit from and simultaneously make future-proof territories that are changing due to transit migration.
Paper Abstract:
Since a decade, an increasing number of highly diverse migrants on their way to North America has passed through indigenous territories at the Colombia-Panama border. Although the impact of this migration on these border communities has slowly become a point of attention for the Panamanian government, academics, the media, and civil society organizations, the role or fate of these communities are often framed in two simplistic ways: either through a criminalization of indigenous actors and their migration-related business, or a concern over migration-induced endangerment of the ‘indigenous way of life’ in an area still considered ‘remote’. Based on embryonic research with city- and comarca-based members of the Emberá-Wounaan community, this paper explores the (im)possibilities of doing research differently, aimed at doing justice to the diversity of Emberá-Wounaan perspectives and their attempts to navigate, benefit from and simultaneously make future-proof their changing territories. It considers in-depth, collaborative mapping methods to accommodate different aspects of their territory (water, sovereignty, marginalization) as well as ambiguous socioeconomic and political relationships. It also considers the role of local, foreign and indigenous researchers in cultivating knowledge about these perspectives and relationships. The paper is an attempt to disentangle layers of participation and representation, and to address historically produced injustices.
Paper Short Abstract:
This paper proposes to unpack French conceptions of territory, in particular the ways in which territoire has come to signify not only a geographic area but a set of social relations embedded in the locale, by focusing on the role played by territorial diagnostics in urban regeneration. What would writing against territorial diagnostics entail? Drawing from fieldwork undertaken in the 18th arrondissement of Paris – one of the centralities of contemporary urban regeneration in France – this paper turns to abjected spaces and abjected subject positions to formulate a partial critique.
Paper Abstract:
In its efforts to re-engineer abjected urban spaces, French urban experts deploy a range of techniques and technologies geared toward sociocultural and infrastructural change particularly through the repurposing of dormant construction sites or disused industrial facilities. One crucial component of the creation and circulation of knowledge about these spaces and their surrounds is territorial diagnostics. The term signals a medical conception of territory as body politic, one on and within which experts intervene remedially through transplants and sutures, to render space legible and formalize its informality. How can one continue to write about a given space, specifically when it is rendered an object of state and market intervention, without participating in territorial diagnostics? If to write against territorial diagnostics may mean to write with the abjected urban – that which refuses or is prohibited from being enfolded into legitimate desirable urbanity – it remains that such abjected urban retains a right to opacity and that to write remains an activity of rendering legible. That is, in writing about and with interlocutors whose sensibility is to remain within darkness, the ethical gesture of critique replicates the institutional desire to render oblique sociality legible for remediation. Underlying these questions is a general tension about how anthropologists of modern power may become implicated in the very processes that they seek to critique, by way of shared methods with the experts against which they write.
Paper Short Abstract:
We propose the method of the “deep map” as an artistic-academic approach that initiates a dialogue among the local population about their relationship with the place they inhabit. The method intends to minimise hierarchical structures and promises to blur the boundaries between science and art.
Paper Abstract:
The contribution presents methodological thoughts and first results of our research carried out in the municipalities of Jovençan (2019), in the Alpine Valley Valle d’Aosta, Oppido Lucano (2022), a village of Basilicata, and Porto Tolle (2024), a municipality in the Delta del Po area, all in Italy. The researchers propose the method of the “deep map” as an artistic-academic approach that initiates a dialogue among the local population about their relationship with the place where they live and, in the process, about their future social, cultural, and economic development. The deep map method promises to blur the boundaries between science and art as well as between experts and the local population and intends to avoid hierarchical structures inside the research team.
In our contribution we present the results of our three deep mapping initiatives in which our research team, composed of scientists and artists, took residence in the municipalities for a week. Our experiences indicate that the meticulous preparation of taking residence and the shortness—about one week—of the stay triggered spontaneity and situational engagements between people and the landscape. During the stay, a process of place-specific reflection emerged among the population and the members of the research team, which can provide the local communities with a space for dialogue for the formulation of their communal future.
Paper Short Abstract:
The aim of this communication is to present the uses of dialectogram methodology, from a comparative perspective. Using the example of two punk spaces, these detailed cartographical depictions enable researchers to grasp the imaginaries at play, as expressed by the communities themselves.
Paper Abstract:
A dialectogram is a highly detailed cartographical depiction of a space inscribed with the social life of that place, as developed by Mitch Miller (2016). This creative rendering of social space has been adapted as a participatory methodology in punk places in Belfast, Northern Ireland (by Donaghey with the Warzone Collective at their social centre, 2018) and in Val d’Ajol, France (by Tuaillon Demésy and Donaghey with the ‘Narcissiens’ of Chez Narcisse bar, 2021/2022).
This communication will compare the deployment of the dialectogram as ethnographic methodology in these contexts, in order to highlight its usefulness as a “do-it-together”, non-exploitative, co-creative approach towards developing research insights tied to space and place.
First, the aim will be to grasp the issues involved in this methodological approach. The punk and anarchist associations of Chez Narcisse and the Warzone Centre underpin this emphasis on non-exploitative methodological approaches. The meaningful inclusion of the research community at (almost) all stages of the research process, from planning and drawing to exhibiting the outputs, also echoes indigenist methodological considerations.
Secondly, the focus will be on the imaginaries thus exposed – insights that are distinct from discourse. Moving from physical space to social space, dialectograms capture in a visual form the history, symbols and stories associated with these spaces. Crucially, this graphic representation reflects the importance of these spaces as a symbol (or container of a multitude of clashing symbols) and offers a window into the social imaginary of each place/space, as expressed collaboratively by the communities themselves.
Paper Short Abstract:
How can we ethnographically explore the promissory dimension of urban territories and help destabilize promises that compel people to endure, rather than dissolve, powerful clusters of promises (Berlant 2011)? With audio-/visual material of go-alongs I propose to problematize promises of social participation and cultural recognition in Paris.
Paper Abstract:
The urban territory is co-constituted by a multiplicity of promises that function like vectors within the urban fabric: promises made in the city may compel people to stay, promises of urbanity may have been the reason people left non-urban areas, and promises of a specific city may have influenced the decision to live in a particular place. Therefore, I conceive of the city as a promissory assemblage (Färber 2019), acknowledging the reliably unreliable nature of promises.
How can we ethnographically explore the promissory dimension of urban territories? And how can this help destabilize those promises that compel people to endure, rather than dissolve, powerful—and not always empowering—clusters of promises (Berlant 2011)?
In this paper I would like to discuss material from my longterm research in Paris that is based on audio-/visual material from go-alongs that I conduct with diverse people between the Institut du monde arabe (IMA) and the Institut des cultures d’islam (ICI) in Paris. Using mobilizing ethnographic methods such as itinéraires, we explore together the spatial experience of urban promises of social participation and cultural recognition. From the discussion in this panel, I hope to gain inspiration for analyzing various materials and creating a multimodal presentation that enables a critical examination of promises as vectors in urban life.
Paper Short Abstract:
Real investigative or anthropological creativity resides probably not so much in the combination of ‘emic’ and ‘etic’ points of view but rather arises from fostering the constant, imperfect encounter occurring ‘in-between’ ‘both’, without any clarity about where end or begin the inhabitant’s perceptions or one’s ‘own’ points of views or strategies.
Paper Abstract:
The contribution starts with a decolonially inspired reflection on the necessity of unwriting two of the central concepts of this panel’s proposal. I tackle the idea of methodology from the standpoint of ‘contrarian’ anthropologists like Rabinow and Ingold, with a wink to Feyerabend’s classic, whereas the hegemonic idea of territory will be approached and partly refuted from the perspective of the Aymara families and groups with whom I have worked since many decades. Real investigative or anthropological creativity resides probably not so much in the combination of ‘emic’ and ‘etic’ points of view but rather arises from fostering the constant, imperfect encounter occurring ‘in-between’ ‘both’ parts, without any clarity where end or begin the inhabitant’s perceptions or one’s ‘own’ points of views or experiences. To make this point anthropologically I recur to my decade-long experience with Aymara families in Bolivia and specifically with an indigenous association that provides juridical and cultural advice to communities in their struggle with mining companies and the so-called plurinational state. I discuss the paradox of, on the one hand, having been told many times that “we don’t need the academy” (or scientific research) and on the other hand having been allowed in extremely generous ways to partake in these people’s everyday ways of being-in-the world and of corresponding. Rather than planning interdisciplinary methodologies, politically (territorially!) interesting things started to happen once we let loose the control of the investigative process, observing the emergence of creative dynamics of participative activism.