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Type: Lab
This series of workshops, held across spring semester 2021, focused on Ethnography Workshop fellows and conveners’ work as it intersected with the topic of death.
Death and Rebirth
February 5, 2021
Shreya Maini (PhD Student, Religious Studies) and Jieun Cho (PhD Candidate, Cultural Anthropology)
Drawing on Akhil Gupta’s article “Reliving Childhood? The Temporality of Childhood and Narratives of Reincarnation,” (Ethnos 67 (1)) that uses childhood as a critical lens to examine the category of child in developmental models, the session proposed to think about reincarnation beyond the secular-religious divide. How do certain figures become central to (re)imagination of collective futures, in ways that bring together the spiritual and the political? How are senses of time—cyclical, linear, or otherwise—remade in/through such figures to what ends and effects? Given that living through the pandemic has curtailed opportunities for generative interactions in social fields, how can one think of reincarnation or rebirth in light of the current challenge to care for each other?
Death and Affect
February 19, 2021
Anne Allison (Professor, Cultural Anthropology) and Jake Silver (PhD Candidate, Cultural Anthropology)
Allison and Silver shared works-in-progress for feedback, discussion, and reflection on how we can do anthropology when the object of description/inquiry is not so clear as we may assume. Allison presented portions of a chapter from her book on new mortuary practices in an era of downsizing sociality in Japan. Silver shared an excerpt from his dissertation, “The Sky, Upended: An Ethnography of Palestine, the Planetary, and Their Politics.”
Death and Biopolitics
March 5, 2021
Sophia Goodfriend (PhD Candidate, Cultural Anthropology) and Yanping Ni (MA Student, Asian/Pacific Studies Institute)
Goodfriend shared a paper, “A Street View of Occupation: Getting Around Hebron on Google Maps,” which was based on her research in the summer of 2018. Starting with her own frustration in navigating the streets of Hebron—the largest city in the West Bank—on Google Maps, she considers the tensions of producing cartographic data. While the street views of Hebron show seamlessly stitched images, these rub against borders, checkpoints, or walls that people encounter on the ground as pedestrians, residents, and commuters. She follows Wesam—a Palestinian who walks the city to create user-generated images with a 360-degree camera attached to the selfie-stick—to discuss how the panoramic view becomes a site of contestation in this specific place. Ni shared the first chapter of her thesis, “Disposable Bodies, Privatized Care” for the workshop. Her work looks at the political economy of care in post-socialist China by foregrounding mine workers who developed black lung disease and the caretakers who look after them. She discusses in this chapter how local mines operate besides official terms of contract, and how family values become mobilized in organizing domestic care when healthcare is dispossessed.
Death of Senses
April 2, 2021
Cody Black (PhD Candidate, Music) and Cade Bourne (PhD Candidate, Music)
Both Black and Bourne shared their writings along the lines of gigging economy, affective labor, and aural relationality. Black, who has done his fieldwork with artist-laborers in K-Pop industry in South Korea, discussed in his writing how one media start-up works with the interviewees to catch a human emotion that often moves people to tears and to transform it into a communicable affect on social media platforms like YouTube. Borne, whose research looks at precarious labor of DJs in Japan, examined the potential and limits of the concept immaterial labor in exploring DJing and its product: vibes.