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- Convenor:
-
Deniz Coral
(University of Minnesota)
Send message to Convenor
- Discussant:
-
Manuel Ramos
(ISCTE - University Institute of Lisbon)
- Format:
- Panel
- Sessions:
- Thursday 8 April, -
Time zone: America/Chicago
Short Abstract:
This panel welcomes proposals on anthropological sense-making, research, and writing in light of drawings made by researchers, research interlocutors, or both. How can drawings allow us to engage with an embodied and affective ethnography based on “being-in-common” (Nancy 2000)?
Long Abstract:
Anthropological endeavors have long used drawings as critical windows for exploring diverse worldviews, feelings, emotions, imaginations, and subjectivities regarding how researchers and research interlocutors place themselves in the world (Causey 2017; Guillemin 2004; Hendrickson 2010; Ingold 2011; Martin 1994; Pandolfo 1997; Taussig 2011). In light of these endeavors, this panel invites scholars to ponder anthropological sense-making, research, and writing. It welcomes proposals that challenge the conventional understanding of participant observation and think through embodied and affective ethnography that emerge from the intersections and divergences between conceptualizations of drawings as “anthropological data,” a “research method,” and a way of ‘seeing, experiencing, and interpreting the world.”
The panel aims to invoke provocative discussions based on but not limited to these questions: how do drawings illuminate the interrelationship between researchers and research interlocutors within the intersubjective milieu of the ethnographic research, which is already embedded in multi-layered and perpetually changing power dynamics? To what extent do drawings make space for recounting the incoherent, discontinuous, ephemeral, and the imponderable in ethnographic writings and conceptualizations? How can drawings shape our ethnographic research and writing by undermining or fostering familiar ways of narration and forms of authorship? Can drawings help us bridge the gap between psychoanalysis and anthropology regarding intimacy, transference, desire, and unconscious? Last but not least, how can drawings enable us to unsettle the creation of knowledge that reproduces domination and hierarchy and allow us to reconsider anthropological research and writing based on “being-in-common” (Nancy 2000)?
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Thursday 8 April, 2021, -Paper short abstract:
This paper is based on one-year drawing the daily life of a public tertiary hospital campus. It explores the intimacy drawing affords one with the field, new and uncommon power relations that emerge when drawing in a hierarchical space such as a hospital and notions of getting lost in fieldwork.
Paper long abstract:
I spend the past year, the fieldwork-year of my PhD journey, drawing my way through a public tertiary hopsital in Myanmar - the same hospital I spent since 2015 drawing in the role of project architect for the renovations of the hospital buildings and developing the campus’ masterplan. As a trained architect drawing is second nature to me. The experience of drawing as an anthropologist to that of an architect is different and similar at the same time – as an architect I draw with speculation about a future that might or might not come. As an anthropologist I draw what is, what I see. In both instances I draw to understand, the process of drawing affording an intimacy with one's field site beyond words.
This paper will tell a story of the drawings I made in the field - the intimacy they created with “my hospital”. How they allowed me to see, to engage and to collaborate, becoming a mode of analysis as well as a tool for writing. While spending my days with my sketchbook, common power relations were reversed and challenged, and I got lost in drawing while finding anchorage in my drawings.
Paper short abstract:
Seeing a collection of drawings created by a composite cohort of South Asian migrants in Europe, this paper reflects critically on the methodologies and ethics of engaging with research participants’ artwork, foreseeing the chance to move from ethnographic analysis to collective exhibitions.
Paper long abstract:
Can drawing be alternative, ancillary or complementary to conventional ethnographic modes? What if our interlocutors’ graphic artifacts are braided within the verbal predominance of anthropological fieldwork? This paper reflects on the pictorial outcomes of an extensive multisite research that I’ve undertaken with South Asian diaspora families settled across European countries since 2017. Set within an ERC-funded project, which investigated the experiences of home-making for people upon conditions of mobility (esp. forced or economic migrants and their descendants), my methods rested primarily on participant observation in domestic settings and collection of life stories. Yet, focusing on the drawings produced by participants, whether during focus groups, following in-depth interviews, or on a spontaneous basis after elicitation, I argue for recognizing the significance of the sketches, portraits and even plans of people’s houses collected. Asking my interlocutors to make a visual handicraft of their home was a challenge from which some withdrew, others responded with application: in their own time, with their own means. Besides the aesthetic value of such artworks, I emphasize the cognitive and emotional import of transferring into graphic sign the meanings of home for those who may be torn between lands, identities and affects. What’s in a home: objects or relations, places or habits, memories or projections? The selection of drawings I will display reveals this research method as a potential practice of freedom for participants, and their handmade pictures as a valuable gift bestowed within the ethnographic collaboration, which can afford novel interpretations and prospects for dissemination.
Paper short abstract:
DESI EROS is an arts-based phenomenological research study that evokes the meanings of erotic power among South Asian women through surrealist folk art paintings. The art and research findings were created by a transpersonal process of psychic decolonization. They can be viewed at www.desieros.com.
Paper long abstract:
DESI EROS (www.desieros.com) is an arts-based phenomenological research project which asked: “What is the lived experience of reclaiming erotic power among South Asian women, in light of our cultural contexts and ancestral histories?” I collected six diasporic Desi women’s descriptions of reclaiming erotic power, and engaged in a phenomenological data interpretation process of their narratives to unearth core thematic meanings of reclaiming erotic power. Then, I expressed these thematic meanings in the form of surrealist folk art, with South Asian cultural symbols embedded in each painting. I experienced a literal decolonization of my South Asian American psyche while creating this artwork: the symbolic images in each painting emerged by a transpersonal process of being intuitively led by Divine Imagination, which awakened deeper understandings of indigenous, pre-colonial South Asian cultures that I did not know before. After finishing each painting, I conducted research about the cultural symbols of each image, and wrote essays that explicate these cultural symbols and the meaning of “erotic power” in indigenous South Asian cultures. The final artwork and research findings are available on www.desieros.com. They aim to liberate and decolonize the meanings of reclaiming erotic power for Desi women–both personally, as described by each writer’s subjective experience, and collectively, as expressed by our indigenous cultural symbols as Desi people.
Paper short abstract:
The paper shows how drawings can serve as a good catalyst to express positive and negative personal emotions in the field when it comes to everyday life events such as marital disputes, births, deaths, religious celebrations, marriages and gender-based violence.
Paper long abstract:
Emotions are associated with irrationality in scientific research, so it is not surprising that researchers tend to underestimate emotions in their field experiences. During fieldwork on the influences of popular television content on Moroccan women's everyday lives, the use of drawings and doodles proved to be a good catalyst for expressing personal emotions and maintaining rationality sanity when dealing with everyday life events such as marital disputes, births, deaths, religious celebrations, marriages, and gender-based violence. Ellis (2007) writes that the close and emotional study of others requires " the researcher turns the same scrutiny on herself as on others." Drawing proved to be an excellent tool for dealing with ethical issues and positive or negative emotions that arose through my experiences. The main argument I will pursue in my paper is that it is beneficial for a researcher to engage emotionally and personally with the research questions and the people being studied, especially when looking at oneself, not only for ethical and moral reasons, but also to tap into additional productive and untapped sources of knowledge that can complement more traditional methods of anthropological research. Ellis and Bochner (1996) call this "evocative autoethnography" and "emotional sociology" (1997) to suggest that personal emotions and the connotations they can trigger may appear as relevant observations. In this paper I aim to show how art, particularly drawings, can be used as a fieldwork diary to act as a personal catalyst for experiencing the field and as an untapped source of analysis.
Paper short abstract:
This paper addresses the topic of visualisation practices, such as video recording, note-taking and sketching during field work. Drawing on a case study from evolutionary biology, the interaction between expert knowledge, skill, observation, and the mediating tools and devices shall be studied.
Paper long abstract:
Visualisation practices accompany almost any data collection process in the field. They mostly are employed for documentation and help to translate research objects into “immutable mobiles” (Latour 1990).
As has been observed during ethnographic fieldwork with evolutionary biologists, these practices contribute further aspects to the research and impact the knowledge production. Drawing as a tool during fieldwork, helps to guide the attention, to tunnel and frame the vision and to filter out only the relevant aspects. During this, the methods and devices that accompany this process, play a decisive role. Looking through binoculars and documenting observations in a protocol triggers different ways of sense-making than producing video recordings or drawings in field notebooks. The choice of methods causes different interactions between research object, researcher and visualisation practice. They require different skills and (visual) training. Visualisation practices, thus, are not only pragmatic tools, they also work as epistemological devices and establish different modes of practice.
These aspects also receive attention in the field of design research. Taking visualisation practices as a commonality between scientific knowledge production and design shall allow to draw a fresh perspective on scientific knowledge production through the lens of a design-informed social anthropology. Relating to the concepts of skilled vision (Grasseni 2007), thought style and thought collective (Fleck 1979) and situated knowledge (Haraway 1988) this paper puts the visual material and its related practices into the centre and allows to question the entanglement of expert and peer knowledge, visualisation practice, and (visual) skill with scientific knowledge production.