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- Convenor:
-
Aaron Su
(Princeton University)
Send message to Convenor
- Format:
- Panel
- Sessions:
- Friday 9 April, -
Time zone: America/Chicago
Short Abstract:
Anthropology's focus on the "human experience" has been challenged, as the "human" produces inequalities in fields from multispecies ethnography to Black studies. This panel examines "experience," as psychological anthropologists among others can no longer consider sense perception neutral ground.
Long Abstract:
Contemplating modernity, Lévi-Strauss (1955: 121) mourns that we have been alienated from "the true conditions of our human experience"; thus, the anthropologist's task is to perform this demystifying work. The familiar maxim, echoing his sentiment, that anthropology is "the study of human experience" has faced scrutiny, but it is figure of the "human" that has been systematically challenged. From multispecies ethnography (Kirksey and Helmreich 2010) and studies of biotechnology (Rabinow 2004) to engagements with Black studies and its critiques of liberal humanism (Thomas 2019, Jobson 2020), anthropologists have established that human-centric approaches reproduce inequalities and political challenges.
But what about "experience," and who gets to claim it? In recent decades, medical and psychological anthropologists have argued that we must rescue "experience" from its subordination to "knowledge" (Good 1993). This is especially salient for psychological anthropologists, who have deeply engaged with sensation, perception, and emotion as coordinates for compassion and understanding.
Building off the importance of experience, this panel invites ethnographic investigations of moments when individual or collective "experience" is contested, foreclosed, unreliable, or disavowed, or when it is modified by such factors as distortion, repression, haunting, trauma, silence, and absence. As Geertz (1973: 405) observes, "human experience is not mere sentience"; it is rife with "ambiguities, puzzles, and paradoxes." What political possibilities are uncovered by refusing to treat "experience" as neutral ground? What inequalities are reproduced by assuming experience as the province of all?
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Friday 9 April, 2021, -Tamara Turner (Max Planck Institute for Human Development)
Paper short abstract:
In an Algerian ritual, various trance states are musically cultivated in order to grapple with human suffering. Trance processes bring the past to bear on the present so that through an individual’s “experience,” other subjectivities and temporalities are cultivated in the trancing body.
Paper long abstract:
In Algerian diwan, a ritual that emerged out of the trans-Saharan slave trade, various trance states are musically cultivated in order to grapple with human suffering. In order to do this, trance processes bring the past to bear on the present so that through an individual’s “experience,” other subjectivities and temporalities are cultivated in the trancing body: ancestral suffering, intergenerational memory, stories and legends of the community, hagiographies of saints, and one’s own interpersonal suffering in the present. “Experience” is a nuanced concept here, given the varieties of agency loss that define trance and in which many degrees of conscious awareness fluctuate. This exploration of trance temporality productively complicates how we think about time and experience, about what it can mean to inhabit—in bodily ways—“infinitely many times.” This co-presence of “then” and “now” is crucial to the goal of trance in the management of pain and suffering: a kind of temporal-intersubjective integration. Drawing on eighteen months of fieldwork in Algeria, recent anthropological scholarship on the nature of “experience” as it attends to suffering (Desjarlais 1992, Davies 2011, Throop 2010, Pinto 2014), hauntological theory (Derrida 1994, Good 2012, Hollan 2019) music and trance studies (Jankowsky 2010, Becker 2004, Rouget 1985), and cross-disciplinary engagements with affect theory (Ahmed 2004, Cassaniti 2015, Massumi 1995, Mazzarella 2009, etc), this paper proposes that the utility of ritualized trance is due to the collapsing of time and multiplicities of “experience.”
Joshua Franklin (University of Pennsylvania)
Paper short abstract:
Ordinariness is a common theme in narratives of transgender childhood. I examine what constitutes the ordinary from the different perspectives of transgender children and their parents. This child-centered approach complicates analyses of gender normativity.
Paper long abstract:
Normalcy is a common theme in narratives of transgender childhood. Yet while parents and health professionals often emphasize normalcy, invoking the categories of “ordinary parenting” and “ordinary childhood,” I ask how transgender youth experience and articulate ordinariness themselves. I draw on fieldwork conducted with youth receiving care at a gender-affirming clinic within a large children’s hospital. I found that transgender children and adolescents, like many adults in their lives, narrate their experiences in “ordinary” terms, but that in the context of a young person’s own narrative, ordinariness takes on different meanings. For my interlocutors, ordinariness is an experiential category which indexes a wide array of social contexts and relationships, which may exceed biopolitical frameworks of gender recognition. By rethinking what constitutes the ordinary from the different vantage points of transgender children and their parents, this paper complicates analyses of gender normativity by reorienting to a child-centered point of view. I argue that attending to both the intense valuation of ordinariness and its multiple, divergent meanings helps elucidate the ongoing racialization of transgender childhood and allows us to envision a less deterministic conceptualization of gender identity development.
Beata Szulęcka (Polish Academy of Sciences)
Paper short abstract:
This paper proposes to critically examine a call to re-establish an ability to experience one’s body present in the new body-based trauma therapies. It questions the transcultural validity of experience and looks at the global dissemination of knowledge regarding “the healthy ways” of experiencing.
Paper long abstract:
In contemporary Western approaches to recovery from trauma, such as SomaticExperiencing, a central claim is that healing happens through reconnecting with the so called felt sense. Sensations and feelings signalized by the body are seen as an authentic and true expression of the self. Trauma is said to cut people of these deep-seated capability to recognize their own states. (Levine, van der Kolk). Healing happens through reestablishing of an access to a whole range of emotions: being able to feel your body, “connecting with yourself” etc. It seems that we live in a culture, where such phrases sound so acceptable, that it becomes difficult to raise any doubt about this call to experiencing.
The aim of my paper will thus be a critical analysis of the theory and practice of Somatic Experiencing (SE), an American therapy designed to help in trauma-resolution, as taught in Poland and in India. I want to pose questions about the very meaning of the notion of the embodied experience. My hypothesis is thus that the claim of accessing the bodily experience as a condition of healing is itself culturally specific. It delineates concepts of the body, affect and healing which might differ across cultures. I will thus track the possible limitations of transcultural application of the “universal” language of experience. The research will thus constitute an ethnography of “trauma-work” and will be based on interviews with SE practitioners in Poland and in India as well as participant observation during trainings of SE in Poland.
Clarice Rios (State University of Rio de Janeiro) ARHETA ANDRADE (Instituto Benjamin Constant (IBC)BR) Olivia von der Weid (Universidade Federal Fluminense)
Paper short abstract:
This paper describes and reflects upon the work of the accessibility subcommittee of the Brazilian Anthropological Association in creating solutions for the cultural and artistic exhibitions that were part of the Association’s first virtual meeting.
Paper long abstract:
In the face of Covid-19 pandemic, the Brazilian Anthropological Association had to move their biannual meeting to a virtual environment. This is a major event for Brazilian anthropology It gathers thousands of people to attend a wide variety of paper sessions, roundtable discussions, workshops, and cultural and artistic activities, such as photo exhibits and ethnographic film screenings. As part of the accessibility subcommittee, the authors of this paper faced the challenge of helping curators adapt the format of the meeting’s exhibits to this new reality. The subcommittee general’s approach to this task was to come up with creative strategies to promote aesthetic accessibility for people with disabilities, while enriching the overall experience for the public in general. With that in mind, we took the multiple corporeal experiences of people with disabilities not simply as impairments, but as invitations to develop to new forms of engagement with the exhibits’ materials. We propose a presentation for this panel in the form of a video that will be recorded and edited in advance, in an attempt to extend the aforementioned approach to the conference paper format itself, and re-create the experience of multiple sensorial engagements that we tried to evoke in the exhibitions.