Ghosts in the head and ghost towns in the field: ethnography and the experience of presence and absence

Author(s): Jonathan Skinner 

Abstract

This paper is about an anthropologist coming to terms with the field and fieldwork. In 1995 I left - was evacuated from - my fieldsite as a volcanic eruption started just as my period of fieldwork drew to a close. These eruptions dramatically and instantaneously altered life on the island of Montserrat, a British colony in the Caribbean. Whilst Montserrat the land, and Montserratians the people, migrated and moved on in their lives, Montserrat and Montserratians were preserved in my mind and in my anthropological writings as from 'back home' I held onto the ethnographic present and held dialogues with informants and my self in my head.



Revisiting Montserrat several years into the volcano crisis, I once drove through the villages and roads leading to the former capital of the island where I had worked from. All the people had been evacuated due to the volcano, and yet all of the landscape had been preserved or was being hinted at in the pyroclastic mudflows and ash falls from the volcano. In my journey to the ghost town Plymouth, I recalled the presences from my fieldwork. My route to this modern day Pompeii threw up a stark contrast between absence and presence with deeply unsettling consequences: rather than lay my ghosts to rest, my return to my fieldsite became an opportunity for my ghosts to further bed themselves in. As such, this paper uses my hauntings to work through the problematics of anthropological experience and ethnographic closure as well as the real and unreal, the written and the unwritten

Sex, slaughter, sleaze and salvation: 'Phoren' tourists in the slums of Calcutta, India

Author(s): Atreyee Sen 

Abstract

The main 'S' words explored in the anthropology of tourism, sun, sex, sea, sights and sand, perhaps need to incorporate further slaugher, sleaze and salvation. My paper for this panel will explore the violence and voyeurism in viewing poverty in marginalised urban spaces. It will uncover fluidities within small-scale local travel industries and how the latter cater to changing lifestyles, religious angst and sexual preferences of international travellers. I did my ethnography in the slums of Calcutta, where travel entrepreneurs organised a range of discreet tours for 'foreigners' (primarily from Australia and the US). These popular expeditions into slum areas offered 'sightings', such as half-naked women bathing at wells, ritualistic animal sacrifice, the aged dying of starvation etc. While reinforcing stereotypes of the primitive other (as against the exotic other), these secret tours allowed travellers to indulge in a range of emotions, from real life voyeurism to 'showing gratitude to God for being civilised'. By emphasising the ambivalences and contradictions in viewing and representing the other, this paper argues further that the immoral and critical gaze of the foreign tourist can affect the nature of morality and commercialism among the urban poor.

Walking Auschwitz, walking without arriving

Author(s): Nigel Rapport 

Abstract

The paper is an interweaving of three strands: an account by Imre Kertesz of his experiences in Nazi concentration camps in the Second World War which he published as the novel, Fateless; an account of a walking tour in Suffolk which W. G. Sebald published as the travelogue, The Rings of Saturn; and an account of my own of visiting the Auschwitz memorial site which has been constructed on the edge of the Polish city. Linking the three strands is the issue of the phenomenology of walking: the consciousness which is capacitated by this activity and the accompanying power to interpret one's life and surroundings in particular ways. Kertesz would walk the Nazi lager without stopping for death; Sebald would walk the Suffolk landscape without admitting the passage of time; Rapport would walk Auschwitz without falling victim to the systemic constructions of others.

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An urban tour: sensory sociality as ethnographic method

Author(s): Sarah Pink 

Abstract

This paper discusses how the sensory sociality of walking, photographing, and audio and video recording, alongside and in collaboration with research participants, can be productive of place-as-ethnographic knowledge. Drawing from recent academic writing on sociality, walking, sensory experience, and the production of place I will suggest how collaborative ethnographic methods that themselves are productive of what might analytically be called 'place' can be central to the generation of academic understandings of how people construct their relationships to their environments, both through practice and imagination. In doing so I reflect on a research event that was, based on my request to visit and meet relevant people in a town, but initiated and organised by the people participating in my research.

Robinson in Space

Author(s): Patrick Keiller 

Abstract

Patrick Keiller is a film-maker rather than an anthropologist and this session has him showing and discussing of his internationally acclaimed and multiple award winning "Robinson in Space", which is a C21st recreation of Daniel Defoe's Tour through the Whole Island of Great Britain (1724 -26). The critique of contemporary urban and rural experience outlined in Robinson in Space and its counterpart London has developed into a navigable DVD which assembles 67 early topographical actuality films as a virtual landscape of circa 1900 and a planned research project The Future of Landscape and the Moving Image which addresses the production of landscape and images of landscape in terms of mobility, belonging/displacement and current and anticipated future economic change.