Anthropology and Humanism最新文献

In this “hundreds” honoring Kathleen Stewart, I recount a memory rooted in an experience of misrecognition. The memory functions as a prompt for exploring the affective impact of being in the wrong place.

This piece honors the work of Katie Stewart through the form of the “hundred.” Invoking Stewart's figure of attunement in the context of park cruising, I write about the relation of stories to forms of life from which one may be estranged in time. Against anthropology's magic—in which story emerges as something like a perfectible form—a fragment is offered, some context for words exchanged in a park, opening perhaps to another mode of narration.

When the pandemic hit in March 2020, I found myself stuck at home, like millions of other people. Confronted with constant news reports about rapidly rising infection and mortality rates, I reverted to creative methods to investigate and come to terms with the challenges of lockdown. Exploring the surreal state of immobility, vulnerability, and emotional turmoil, Nine Acts emerged as an experiment in picture-informed linguistic association. Post-pandemic, the works offer space for ethnographically rich, evocative dwelling.

I painted the visuals in 2020–21 and added their poetic companions in 2022. Momento Mori (Figure 1), based on a pre-pandemic sketch (Figure 10), investigates how the endless stories about dying patients triggered personal memories of my mother's pre-pandemic death. While earlier academic publications (Svašek 2008, 2010, 2012, 2018) already commented on her illness and absence, the painting-poetry mode of articulation opened a new avenue for “tracing the density of human being” (Rapport 2022, 1118).

Sisters (Figure 2) materialized while chatting with my sibling through Skype, and Jumper (Figure 3) describes the moment I realized that “painting from a distance” could be developed as a research method. The following four Acts (Figure 4-7) explore the use of the approach during online fieldwork with migrant women in (Northern) Ireland. In 2010, I had researched how communication technologies (fail to) create emotional connections within transnational families (Svašek 2010, 2018). In lockdown, I returned to this highly topical theme (Svašek, 2022; forthcoming). Hope, Side by Side, Basket, and Homeland investigate how COVID-19 affected female migrants' long-distance interactions and locally lived lives and comment on ethnographic making through painting. On Teams and Conference² analyze Teams and Zoom as conferencing tools and show the potential of painting-poems to transform virtual meetings into humorous experiences (Figure 8, 9).

While pre-2020 graphic anthropology already demonstrated the value of concentrated bodily attention through sketching (Alfonso 2004; Causey 2017; Dix and Kaur 2019; Elliot and Culhane 2017; Hurdley 2019; Ramos 2004, 2018; Tausig 2010; Haapio-Kirk and Cearns n.d.), painting-from-a-distance helped to explore pandemic predicaments. Combined with poetic writing, an effective tool in the hands of skilled ethnographers (Maynard and Cahnmann-Taylor 2010), the painting-poems capture “the patchwork and minutia of sensuous life in the project of making worlds with others” (Rubaii's 2023, 3). Performed in 2022 for fellow anthropologists, they pulled the public together in a moment

This story is part of a special section in honor of Kathleen Stewart, who is ever mindful of how we language what we world. My story is written as an exercise in poetic force, generating the life of beast-signs and backtalk, which were fundamental concepts in Stewart's early writing. In this “hundreds,” Miss Grace tells a disaster story meant to encourage a scanning for signs of “the beast” in the trauma of a deadly Caribbean hurricane that destroyed her beachside village leaving only anguish and hordes of tourist investors in its wake. Miss Grace worlds beast-time encounters with some'ting crazy, as vibratory conjurations and transductions, as in some quality of an accidental discovery of feelings. I turn to the power of crazy, fluid connections through which Grace's sea-stormy encounters became a make-believe space that composed itself as a dense entanglement of sensation, attention, and matter. I re-imagine the evidence of Grace's beast-time affective economy as a dynamized force, co-constituting enactments of trauma and curiosity, attempts to find room to maneuver in a new tourist real, on a beach, in Belize.