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- Convenors:
-
Kelly Fagan Robinson
(University of Cambridge)
Timothy Carroll (UCL)
- Formats:
- Panels
- Stream:
- Bodies
- Location:
- Magdalen Old Law Library
- Start time:
- 20 September, 2018 at
Time zone: Europe/London
- Session slots:
- 2
Short Abstract:
The maintenance of health and wellbeing demands a continual engagement with the material of the body and its environment. What does this mean practically and analytically?
Long Abstract:
The body is a physical thing in the world. It allows certain happenings and hinders others. Health is, consequentially, produced through engagement with affordances of the body. Affordances - taken here as the possibilities based on the qualities of surface and form of material stuff - shape the person and (and in) their environment as sinews, skin, bone, blood, eyeballs, fingers and more.
This panel explores the fleshy parts of life and the wellbeing of people within their material ecology, grappling with the body as a thing: a contained aggregate with a purpose. We take "material ecology" to denote the set of all relata (person and thing, object and substance, tangible and intangible) with which the subject relates in a given space/time. As bodied subjects, people must maintain the health and wellbeing of the body in order to stay alive. This simple fact of life demands both continuous engagement with the quotidian mysteries of life and the periodic - and at times cataclysmic - encounter with medical and/or ritual intervention.
As such, the panel invites papers that unpack the qualities and affordances of human and non-human matter, mapping out the engagement between the body and its ecology. We are particularly interested in anthropological papers that actively engage across the sciences (be it medical, physical, material, engineering, etc.) through questions investigating affordances, within the themes of, for example:
-anatomy
-the built environment
-material infrastructure (of bodies and spaces)
-performance
-disability
-sport
Accepted papers:
Session 1Timothy Carroll (UCL)
Paper short abstract:
This paper looks at the relationship between oil and skin within the ritual practice of Orthodox Christianity in order to explore the material constitution for ritual health practices.
Paper long abstract:
This paper explores the material qualities of oil as used in Orthodox Christianity, specifically as seen in the ritual anointing using Holy Myrrh and the hot oil taken from votive lamps. Oil is a material with specific properties and affordances, such that its surface comes into a specific relation with the skin of the devotee. The skin, too, is a material with specific properties and affordances, and the paper looks at the fusion of flesh and oil as a point of material engagement that opens up new ways to think through how the material properties of things and persons facilitate wellbeing. Drawing on the historical legacy of oil as it was understood in Greco-Roman antiquity, and the metaphors and ritual practices developed through the early Christian period, this paper situates contemporary Orthodox use of oil within the idioms and spiritual experience of health and athleticism. The paper argues that the material constitution of oil, and its capacity as a visual, tactile, and olfactory sensation upon - and dissipating into - the skin makes it a particularly potent medium for the transduction of blessings, health, and general wellbeing into the Orthodox body.
Aaron Parkhurst (University College London)
Paper short abstract:
Through a biosocial analysis of ski-jumping, and the politics of building the women's event in the Olympics, this paper argues that bodily and material ecology offers insight into how gender relations are made and contested.
Paper long abstract:
Sport is, in many profound ways, a microcosm of how society views the world. Sport is largely overlooked in the social sciences, yet is one of the most important social institutions and behaviours in which humans participate. Following the panel's call for 'material ecology' as an analytic to explore the affordances of the body in different social and physical landscapes, this paper analysis gender relations through a material ecology of sport. Specifically, this paper examines the institution of ski - jumping. It analysis a crucial moment in every performance of the sport: the point of impact between a person's body and the ground as one lands. This moment had been used for many years to deny women the right to compete in the event at the highest international levels. After many years of campaigning by athletes, the full women's event was added in the Sochi 2014 Olympics. The paper takes seriously the biology of the human body and pivots it against social structures and biases within society. Through a biosocial analysis of ski-jumping, and the politics of building the women's event in the Olympics, I argue that this moment of impact presents a bodily ecology that offers insight into how gender relations are made and contested.
Theodora Sutton (University of Oxford)
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines intersections between technology, body, and health in a digital detoxing community. It discusses how metaphors shape imagined affordances of the digital, as well as material ecologies of body, personhood, and wellbeing.
Paper long abstract:
In 2008, the founder of digital detoxing was critically ill. Attributing his injuries to digital "burnout" in his job at a technology company, he organized the first digital detox event in the San Francisco Bay Area as an intervention for himself and others who use devices in an "unhealthy" way.
This paper focuses on the ways that human bodies and digital technology are conceived of in the now several-thousand-strong digital detoxing community. It examines the ways in which metaphors shape "imagined affordances" (Nagy & Neff, 2015), material ecologies, and notions of self, and how these, in turn, place digital technology as detrimental to wellbeing.
Digital detoxers conceive digital technology as a disruption to the natural order of things: toxic and manipulative. They fashion themselves as healthy subjects against technology, by piecing together a bricolage of pseudo-medical digital ills. They describe how before they found digital detoxing, "the internet was coursing through my body," and still fear "what it's doing to our brains."
How does this community explicate the interface of body and device? How do metaphors shape their understanding of technology and health? What embodied and discursive strategies do they employ to maintain a sense of wellbeing while under continual digital threat? And how do they ultimately judge whether wellbeing has been attained? These questions hope to enable a rich panel discussion of the topic of material ecology and wellbeing, at the intersection of human and non-human matter.
Jed Stevenson (Durham University)
Paper short abstract:
The end of the flood of the Omo River as a result of a large dam has rendered local people's lives newly precarious. Understanding the implications of this change for mental health and well-being requires us to think anew about the relationships among bodies, minds, environments and food systems.
Paper long abstract:
Anthropologists have documented a wide range of ways of living, working, and ageing that are compatible with health and well-being. The people anthropologists have studied also provide lessons about the limits of human adaptability - human vulnerability in the face of radical changes in material and social ecology. In this paper I consider the impacts of one such radical change: the end of the annual flood of the Omo River, as a result of the building of the Gibe III dam. For centuries, the flood of the Omo provided water and sediments that made it possible to grow food in an otherwise semi-arid environment. With the end of the flood, the lives of the people who call the valley home were rendered newly precarious. Drawing on ethnographic work among the Bodi (Mela) of the lower Omo in the years immediately before the end of the flood, and on a structured survey of psychological distress, I consider the implications of the end of the flood for mental health and well-being. Understanding these implications requires us to think anew about the relationships among bodies, minds, environments and food systems. The study calls into question assumptions built into conventional measures of mental health, and reminds us of the biocultural costs of modernity.
Jonathan Alderman (University of St Andrews)
Paper short abstract:
In the rural Andes, personhood is defined by intersubjective relationships with nonhuman beings. This paper will examine the role of the house as a nonhuman being itself and as a conduit between its inhabitants and local place deities.
Paper long abstract:
In the rural Andes, personhood is defined by intersubjective reciprocal relationships with nonhuman beings. This paper will examine the role of the house as a nonhuman being in itself and as a conduit between its inhabitants and local place deities. In the rural Andes, houses are traditionally made from adobe (mud and straw). The house materially connects its inhabitants with the deities that reside on mountainsides, since it is made of the same substance as the mountains themselves. Following Andeanist anthropologists Catherine Allen (2014: 74), who refers to the adobe house as a sentient being, Benjamin Orlove (1998), who describes mud as constitutive of the identity of rural Andeans, and Marisol de la Cadena's (2015) of personhood in the rural Andes as mutually constituted in relationships with Earth Beings, I examine an Andean understanding of wellbeing as the maintenance of practices that reproduce consubstantiality. The paper is based on fieldwork with the Kallawayas, Bolivian shamanic-healers, for whom the physical and emotional wellbeing of their patients depends on their reciprocal relations with the nonhuman beings around them. Relations between people and local deities are maintained through offerings on community and house shrines. A lack of attention to sacrificial obligations can lead to illness and misfortune, seriously affecting wellbeing. Part of this paper will discuss the effects on these relations of consubstantiality when the material of Kallawaya houses changes from adobe to red-brick, no longer connecting people with the wider environment, but placing a barrier.