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- Convenors:
-
Devin Flaherty
(UT San Antonio)
Christopher Stephan (University of California, Los Angeles)
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- Format:
- Panel
- Sessions:
- Friday 9 April, -
Time zone: America/Chicago
Short Abstract:
This panel examines attention across social scales to explore its role in constituting social inequalities. It aims to explore the primal role of attention in shaping social life and ethnographic practice, and thus its potential for realizing an otherwise — within anthropology and the broader world.
Long Abstract:
Contemporary anthropology is in the midst of openly grappling with the ways in which traditional forms of anthropological engagement embody and reproduce colonial modes of sociality. One of the central loci of this problematic is the basic model of 'appropriate' subjects and objects of research. Less acknowledged, however is the patterns and forms of attention that underlie those relationships. This panel brings attention to the foreground, examining it as a) a psychological process foundational to ethnographic research and knowledge production, b) an important object of ethnographic inquiry in its own right. While attention has received limited focus within psychological anthropology, we know that attention is both patterned and malleable, culturally-constructed and psychologically basic, and also fundamentally finite; attention is thus also 'unequal' in the objects it considers, inherently limited in its capacities and scope. This panel seeks to build upon previous work to examine the work of attention across social scales in a variety of communities, and to explore the role of patterns and forms of attention in constituting social inequalities. Within this project, the modes of attention through which data collection and analysis took place will themselves be interrogated. By emplacing our own forms and patterns of attention in the ethnographic context within the social sphere that we are studying, this panel aims to begin a conversation about the primal role of attention in shaping social life, and thus its enormous potential for bringing about an otherwise — both within anthropology and in the broader world.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Friday 9 April, 2021, -Paper short abstract:
In this paper I explore a specific regimen of attention that focuses on “the self as it acts in the world”. Drawing on ethnographic research in the Ecuadorian Amazon, I explore how Runa indigenous people pay attention to the world surrounding them rather than to their own inner psychological states.
Paper long abstract:
Paying attention to one’s own inner life is usually understood to be a universal human activity. While this capacity is certainly available to all humans, its manifestation is culturally specific and attention to one’s own inner life might be encouraged or not depending on the context. As a handful of philosophers, anthropologists and historians have noticed (Campbell 1987; Rosaldo 1984; Taylor 1989), the idea of the self as marked by constant reflexivity — a self that constantly pays attention to its own inner life — seems to be a peculiar product of modernity and thus dependent on specific understandings of emotions and sociality. In this paper I contrast regimens of introspection — where attention to one’s own inner life is deemed central to experience — with another type of attention, one that can be best described as focusing on the self “as it acts in the world”. Drawing on psychologist’s theories on “flow” , phenomenological work on action and my own ethnographic research in the Ecuadorian Amazon, I explore how Runa indigenous people pay attention to the world which surrounds them rather than to their own inner psychological states. Local conceptions of work, as well as ecological engagements with their natural environment, encourage Runa people to constantly focus their attention on activity, avoiding mind wandering and fantasising, which are taken as serious signs of illness or malaise. I will argue that such attentional regime has stark effects on the ways in which Runa people experience what is valuable in life.
Paper short abstract:
Drawing on long-term fieldwork in Croatia among practitioners of a spiritual development practice known as hagiotherapy, this paper shows how an analytical focus on attention can weave together individuals’ praxis and wider social-cultural patterns.
Paper long abstract:
Whether we look at the myriad of newspaper articles, blog posts and books that announce a ‘crisis of attention’ brought about by new technologies or at the increasing interest in mindfulness-based interventions for well-being and productivity, it becomes clear that attention is a salient topic in the public sphere. However, despite psychological anthropology being in a privileged position to study attention in all its socially-embedded complexity, only a handful of scholars (e.g. Jo Cook and Nick Seaver) have turned the anthropological gaze towards this topic. This paper joins these scholars by presenting an ethnographically grounded attempt to consider attention as a feature of human cognition with great relevance for the understanding of culture and society. Drawing on long-term fieldwork in Croatia among practitioners of a spiritual development practice known as hagiotherapy, the paper explores how the concept of attention can drive anthropological analysis. Hagiotherapy practitioners subscribe to a model of the person in which its ‘spiritual dimension’ can be worked upon to achieve healing and personal growth. By analysing some of their practices as techniques that train and redirect attention, this paper shows how an analytical focus on attention can weave together individuals’ praxis and wider social, cultural and political patterns. Attention is approached form a standpoint informed by research and theories of cognitive science and psychology while, at the same time, critiques of these theories are raised where the ethnography warrants it.
Paper short abstract:
This paper reflects on what it means to ‘attend to’ realities of people living with mental troubles in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, an urban landscape where such experiences are attended to differently in different spaces and by different people.
Paper long abstract:
My PhD research is centred around the evolving storylines of different people with experience of mental troubles in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, who I met through the psychiatry ward of a university hospital. Their stories about life and illness took various shapes, in relation with different social situations and healing spaces, conflicting strands of knowledge and shifting lines of interpretation. In this paper I want to reflect upon what it means to ‘attend to’ such realities as researcher. I often felt that my ways of attending differed from those of other people (family, doctors, healers…), and also from person to person. With some people, I felt that our attentions slowly started to correspond (Ingold 2017), leading to forms of mutual understanding about the world, to ways of ‘attending together’ to “that which is not easily knowable” (Good 2012). Other people taught me that attention may also (unwillingly) become intrusive, posing questions about the idea that attention is a form of care (Ingold 2017). These and other research experiences make me reflect on what attention (as well as shifting your attention) ‘does’, for those who participate in anthropological research and for researchers, and why and how it makes parts of experience and certain reflections (in)visible. I also want to explore how the concept of attention can help us more broadly to understand people’s movements, with “affliction” (Das 2015), through a landscape where such affliction is attended to differently in different spaces and by different people.
Paper short abstract:
This paper details drafted co-attention and how togetherness articulates with interlocutors. My RA and I often reversed the direction of our habitual thoughts and brought to the foreground a sense-explication of the world that worked to produce something meaningful and unexpected to us both.
Paper long abstract:
By incorporating the role of attention into this paper I move beyond classic psychological anthropology discussions regarding the habituated and taken for granted ways of thinking and being (Csordas 1993; Throop 2005, 2008, 2010), and interrogate how anthropologists can similarly produce insightful accounts about ethical ethnographic transparency via patterns of attention. That is, we can dissect the who, what, when, how, and why of particular individuals and narratives, which are regarded as central to our studies, in order to better understand the influential intersubjective dynamics operating in fieldwork conducted with a research assistant.
Through a reflection on attention, this paper offers a discussion about the ways in which my researcher assistant's personhood functions in the development and enrichment of knowledge—he allows for a certain type of epistemological possession, which I alone would likely not encounter.
This paper details how my research incorporates what drafted our co-attention, and how our togetherness articulated with our interlocutors. In working together, Abinet and I often reversed the direction of our habitual thoughts (Zaner 1975) and brought to the foreground a sense-explication of the world (Husserl 1960) that worked together to produce something meaningful and unexpected to us both. We generated altruistic concessions to that which might be otherwise, offering a methodologically unique way in which the phenomenological enterprises can be undertaken with a research assistant. It is precisely through this type of phenomenological project that Abinet and I were able to bring assumptions about mental unwellness among returned Ethiopian domestic workers under closer examination.
Paper short abstract:
Using ethnographic data related to clam harvesting and Tai Chi, I explore how the different ways in which practitioners direct their attention influences (i) what they come to know about the world and (ii) how others assess what they know.
Paper long abstract:
What we pay attention to influences what we experience and come to know about the world. Culture plays a huge role in directing how we employ our senses, as well as how we focus our attention when using those senses. Added to this, cultural (including scientific) biases exist in relation to which senses and what types of attention are considered worthy of merit, and which ones can be ignored, which then impacts assessments of whether and to what degree the knowledges that result from these experiences are good/useful or bad/unuseful. This presentation draws on a variety of ethnographic experiences/fieldsites to explore how these two issues intersect. It explores how attention is deployed differently by different knowledge-makers, and how knowledges are assessed as superior or inferior by others due to the ways in which their attention was focused. The two key ethnographic cases explored are related to clam harvesting and the practice of tai chi. In relation to the former, I describe why scientists employing their attention differently than Nuu-chah-nulth and Kwakwaka’wakw clam harvesters came to feel their knowledge was superior. In relation to the latter, I explore how tai chi practitioners pay attention to and cultivate sensations that scientists and many Westerners treat as non-existant or suspicious and, because of this, treat the claims of tai chi practitioners as unbelievable and therefore inferior to their own.