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Yet this points to a paradox of institutionalized nostalgia: the stronger the loss, the more it is overcompensated with commemorations, the starker the distance from the past, and the more it is prone to idealizations.

Svetlana Boym - The future of Nostalgia

#nostalgia

George Marcus proposed multi-sited ethnography as a way to examine global processes and the increasing interconnectedness of all people through the process of globalization. According to Marcus, multi-sited ethnography solves the need for a method to analytically explore transnational processes, groups of people in motion, and ideas that extend over multiple locations. Since multi-sited ethnography is concerned with movement of ideas, people, and commodities, it is heavily related to a world-systems theory.

Notes on The Emergence of multi-sited ethnography - Marcus (1995)

The move towards multi-sited ethnography might give rise to three sets of methodological anxieties: a concern about testing the limits of ethnography, a concern about attenuating the power of fieldwork, and a concern about the loss of the subaltern. [...]

Any ethnography of a cultural formation in the world system is also an ethnography of the system, [...]

Marcus argues that multi-sited ethnography allows for a macro-level understanding of a topic, since it allows for a researcher to trace populations, ideas, and material objects through time and space.

For ethnography then there is no global in the local-global contrast now so frequently invoked. The global is an emergent dimension of arguing about the connection among sites in a multi-sited ethnography.

Multi-sited ethnographies inevitably are the product of knowledge bases of varying intensities and qualities. To do ethnographic research, for example, on the social grounds that produce a particular discourse of policy requires different practices and opportunities than does fieldwork among the situated communities such policy affect. To bring these sites into the same frame of study and to posit their relationships on the basis of firsthand ethnographic research in both is the important contribution of this kind of ethnography, regardless of the variability of the quality and accessibility of that research at different sites. [...]

In multi-sited ethnography, comparisons emerge from putting questions to an emergent object of study whose contours, sites, and relationships are not known beforehand, but are themselves a contribution of making an account that has different, complexly connected real-world sites of investigation. The object of study is ultimately mobile and multiply situated so any ethnography of such an object will have a comparative dimension that is integral to it, in the form of juxtapositions of phenomena that conventionally have appeared to be (or conceptually have been kept) 'world-apart'.

Marcus identifies different modes of constructing multi-sited ethnography:

1. Follow the people

Moving migration studies (Malinowski’s Argonauts), Roger Rouse’s Work on Mexican migrants..

Elhum Shakerifar’s A syrian Love Story

2. Follow the thing (Wallerstein’s commodity chain)

Commodities, for example, can be traced through macro level processes; a commodity may be produced in one place, shipped to another, used by one social group, discarded, and used again by another social group. Following the commodity and conducting multi-sited ethnography allows for various geographic locations and social networks to be examined.

Macau 2015,

Leicester, 2016

3. Follow the Metaphor

When the thing traced is within the realm of discourse and modes of thought, then the circulation of signs, symbols, and metaphors guide the design. (see Haraway) and Martin’s Flexible Bodies.

4. Follow the Plot, Story, Allegory

Social Memory- Boyarin’s recent collection on the remapping of memory concerns social struggles over alternative visions about the definition of collective reality. Processes of remembering and forgetting produce precisely those kinds of narratives, plots, and allegories that threaten to reconfigure in often disturbing ways versions (myths, in fact) that serve state and institutional orders. In this way, such narratives and plots are a rich source of connections, associations, and suggested relationships for shaping multi-sited objects of research.

5. Follow the Life or Biography

6. Follow the conflict

See also Stephanie Black’s film on Sugar Cane plantations in the US.

#methods #multi-locale

Until recently, whatever the force of social change, a case could be made that social life was largely inertial, that traditions provided a relatively finite set of possible lives, and that fantasy and imagination were residual practices, confined to special persons or domains, restricted to special moments or places. In general, imagination and fantasy were antidotes to the finitude of social experience. In the past two decades, as the deterritorialization of persons, images, and ideas has taken on new force, this weight has imperceptibly shifted. More persons throughout the world see their lives through the prisms of the possible lives offered by mass media in all their forms. That is fantasy is now a social practice, it enters, in a host of ways, into the fabrication of social lives for many people in many societies. [...] These complex, partly imagined lives must now form the bedrock of ethnography, at least of the sort of ethnography that wishes to retain a special voice in a transnational, deterritorialized world. For the new power of the imagination in the fabrication of social lives is inescapably tied up with images, ideas, and opportunities that come from elsewhere, often moved around by the vehicles of mass media

Appadurai, 1991 “Global Ethnoscapes: Notes and Queries for a Transnational Anthropology, p.54

#theory #arjun appadurai #place #imagination #media

The terms of the negotiation between imagined lives and deterritorialized worlds are complex, and they surely cannot be captured by the localizing strategies of traditional ethnography alone. What a new style of ethnography can do is to capture the impact of deterritorialization on the imaginative resources of lived, local experiences. Put another way, the task of ethnography now becomes the unraveling of a conundrum: what is the nature of locality as a lived experience in a globalized, deterritorialized world?

Appadurai, 1991 “Global Ethnoscapes: Notes and Queries for a Transnational Anthropology, p.52

#arjun appadurai #diaspora #theory #place

As groups migrate, regroup in new locations, reconstruct their histories, and reconfigure their ethnic projects, the ethno in ethnography takes on a slippery, nonlocalized quality, to which the descriptive practices of anthropology will have to respond. The landscapes of group identity - the ethnoscapes - around the world are no longer thightly territorialized, spatially bounded, historically unselfconscious, or culturally homongeneous. We have fewer cultures in the world and more internal cultural debates.

Appadurai, 1991 “Global Ethnoscapes: Notes and Queries for a Transnational Anthropology, p.48

The 5 Scapes:

Ethnoscapes — the ever shifting “landscape of persons who constitute the shifting world in which we live: tourists, immigrants, refugees, exiles, guestworkers, and other moving groups and persons” (Appadurai, 1990, p. 329).

Mediascapes – “refer both to the distribution of electronic capabilities to produce and disseminate information (newspapers, magazines, television stations and film production studios) which are now available to a growing number of private and public interests throughout the world, and to the images of the world created by these media” (p. 330). “Tend to be imagecentered, narrative-based accounts of strips of reality (Appadurai, 1990, p. 331)”.

Technoscapes – “the global configuration, also ever fluid, of technology, and of the fact that technology, both high and low, both mechanical and informational, now moves at high speeds across various kinds of previously impervious boundaries” driven by “increasingly complex relationships between money flows, political possibilities, and the availability of both un- and highly skilled labor (Appadurai, 1990, p. 329-330)”.

Finanscapes – the flow of capital: “currency markets, national stock exchanges, and commodity speculations move mega-monies through national turnstiles at blinding speed” (Appadurai, 1990, p. 330).

Ideoscapes – “Also concatenations of images, but they are often directly political and frequently have to do with the ideologies of states and the counter-ideologies of movements explicitly oriented to capturing state power or a piece of it” (Appadurai, 1990, p. 331).

more: http://www.auamii.com/jiir/Vol-01/issue-01/X9.Power.pdf

#thesis #theory #ethnoscape #arjun appadurai #diaspora

Notes on The Temporality of the Landscape - Ingold (2011)

Time and Landscape are the essential points of topical contact between archaeology and anthropology.

Avoid the dualistic opposition between naturalistic view (landscape as a neutral external backdrop to human activities) and culturalistic view (every landscape is a particular cognitive or symbolic ordering of space)

--> Adopt a ‘dwelling perspective’: ie the landscape is constituted as an enduring record of - and testimony to - the lives and works of past generations who have dwelt within it, and in so doing, have left there something of themselves.

[Note: is this perspective still relevant when approaching other landscapes than let say the British countryside..]

Landscape

not ‘land’, not ‘nature’, not ‘space’. It is the world as it is known to those who dwell therein, who inhabit its places and journey along the paths connecting them. It is not environment, which is a more functional view (organism / environment relationship- affordances)

The landscape puts the emphasis on ‘form’, in just the same way that the concept of the body emphasizes the form rather than the function of a living creature. [note:form / function: landscape / environment, body / organism (soma) ]

Like organism and environment, body and landscape are complementary terms: each implies the other, alternatively figure and ground. The forms of the landscapes are not, however, prepared in advance for creatures to occupy, nor are the bodily forms of those creatures independently specified in their genetic makeup.

Ingold sees Embodiment as a movement of incorporation rather than inscription, not a transcribing of form onto material but a movement wherein forms themselves are generated (? Ingold 1990 - An anthropologist looks an biology)

Taking the organism as our focus of reference, this movement is what is commonly known as the life-cycle. Thus organisms may be said to incorporate, in their bodily forms, the life-cycle processes that give rise to them.

Ingold proposes to regard the environement as an embodiment.

Temporality

not chronology (regular system of dated intervals) , not history (as any series of events which may be dated in time according to their occurrence in one or another chronological interval)

Taskscape

Ingold uses temporality to introduces his ‘taskscape’. ‘Task’ defined as any practical operation, carried out by a skilled agent in an environment, as part of his or her normal business of life. In other words, tasks are the constitutive acts of dwelling. No more than features of the landscapes, however, are tasks suspended in a vacuum. Every task takes its meaning from its position within an ensemble of tasks, performed in series or in parallel, and usually by many people working together. Technical and social should not be separated, as ‘ human technical practices are embedded in the current of sociality. It is to the entire ensemble of tasks, in their mutual interlocking, that I refer by the concept of taskscape. Just as the landscape is an array of related features, so -by analogy- the taskscape is an array of related activities.

Value is measured in units of money, land in units of space, and labour in units of time. astro time and social time. Taskscape is essentially social.

Taskscape is embedded in temporality. “the notion that we can stand aside and observe the passage of time is founded upon an illusion of disembodiment. This passage is indeed, none other than our own journey through the taskscape in the business of dwelling.

Taskscape is social because people, in the performance of their tasks, also attend to one another.

In the resonance of movement and feeling stemming from people’s mutually attentive engagement, in shared contexts of practical activity, lies the very foundation of sociality.

Music mirrors the temporal form of the taskscape. 1. Cycles and repetitions in music as in social life, these are essentially rhythmic rather than metronomic 2. In music as in social life, there is not just one rhythmic cycle, but a complex interweaving of very many concurrent cycles. Whilst it reflects the temporal form of social life, music in fact represents a very considerable simplification, since it involved only one sensory register (the auditory), and its rhythms are fewer and more tightly controlled. The temporality of the taskscape, while it is intrinsic rather than externally imposed (metronomic), lies not in any particular rhythm, but in the network of interrelationships, between the multiple rhythms of which the taskscape is itself constituted. 3. The forms of the taskscape, like those of music, come into being through movement. Music exists only when it is being performed. Similarly, the taskscape exists only so long as people are actually engaged in the activities of dwelling, despite the attempts of anthropologists to translate it into something rather equivalent to a score. - a kind of ideal design for dwelling - that generally goes by the name of ‘culture’, and that people are supposed to bring with them into their encounter with the world.

What is the relation between Taskscape and Landscape?

If music best reflects the forms of taskscape, it might be thought that painting is the most natural medium for representing the forms of the landscape.

And by looking at differences between music and painting, we could deduct differences between taskscape and landscape.

Music is performed, paintings don’t have to. But actually, this appears more as a systematic bias in Western thought, that privileges form over process. Thus the actual world of the painting is subordinated to the final product; the former is hidden from view so that the latter alone becomes an object of contemplation. In many societies, (eg the Yolngu in Northern Australia), the order of priority is reversed, the emphasis is on painting as a performance. Far from being the preparation of objects for future contemplation, it is an act of contemplation in itself. (see also Thankas painting in Tibetan buddist tradition, or yantras in Hinduism)

“musical sound, of course, is subject to the property of rapid fading: speeding outwards from its point of emission, and dissipating as it goes, it is present only momentarily to our senses. But where, as in painting, gestures leave their traces in solid substance, the resulting forms may last much longer, albeit never indefinitely.”

“One cannot treat landscape as an object if it is to be understood. It is a living process; it makes men; it is made by them” (Inglis, 1977:489). Just as with music, the forms of the landscape are generated in movement, but this movement is through a solid medium.

“A landscape is the most solid appearance in which a history can declare itself” (Inglis, Ibid)

Thanks to their solidity, features of the landscape remain available for inspection long after the movement that gave rise to them has ceased.

The Harversters, (1565) by Pieter Bruegel the Elder

Animated version by Arlo Mountford. \

The landscape is the congealed form of the taskscape. The landscape seems to be what we see around us, whereas the taskscape is what we hear. To be seen, an object need do nothing itself, for the optic array that specifies its form to a viewer consists of light reflected off its outer surfaces. To be heard, on the other hand, an object must actively emit sounds or, through its movement, cause sound to be emitted by other objects with which it comes into contact. Thus outside my window I see a landscape of houses, trees, gardens, a street and pavement. I do not hear any of these things, but I cam hear people talking on the pavement, a car passing by, birds singing in the trees, a dog barking somewhere in the distance, and the sound of hammering as a neighbor repairs his harden shed. In short, what I hear is activity, even when its source cannot be seen. And since the forms of the taskscape, suspended as they are in movement, are present only as activity, the limits of the taskscape are also the limits of the auditory world. (Whilst I deal hear only with visual and aural perception, we should not underestimate the significance of touch, which is important to all of us, but above all to blind people, for whom it opens up the possibility of access to the landscape - if only through proximate bodily contact)

Tori Foster, Downtown

#ingod #temporality #taskscape

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