Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the process of future orientated imaginations of Scotland and their role in making accounts of oneself and others within the SNP. It will focus on political accounts of identity and belonging in relation to the current volatile political climate in the UK.

Paper long abstract:

Political identity and account making in Scotland has become a hot topic since 2014, reinvigorated by rapidly changing political landscapes within the UK. Scotland currently exists in a liminal political space in which the country is re-imagining itself as a pro-European state outside of the union. The SNP is having to re-imagine it's positionality in relation to Scotland, the UK and the EU. These re-negotiations of positionality are being created -in part- through imaginations of Scotland's future amongst SNP members, who subsequently transmit these imaginations to the general public, advocating for actions and political alliances based on these future imaginations of Scotland.

In this paper I discuss this process of re-imagination and re-positioning by SNP members, focusing on accounts of oneself and others within the party. I focus on the ways their daily imagination of the present and future of Scotland impacts their political identity, their positionality in the UK and Europe and their account making of themselves as Scottish in contrast to others. Drawing from traditional ethnographic work as well as CDA and participant art (inspired by Christina Torren's work) I discuss how the imaginations of Scotland in the future uncover the ways in which conflicting narratives of belonging allow SNP members to construct a collective imagining of Scotland's nationalism as 'civic'. I explore how they account for these diverging narratives through imaginations of what Scotland is, and what Scotland 'will be' once it is free from the English 'other' and their divergent narratives and imaginations of the UK.

Paper short abstract:

This paper investigates the ways in which account-making is a critical practice in the creation and distribution of sacred Tibetan Buddhist texts. Sacred texts are often personified and understood as "speaking" objects, imaginative labour is essential in bringing these agentive objects to voice.

Paper long abstract:

Sacred texts have long been understood as embodiments of Buddha speech (gsung) in Tibetan Buddhism. This vocality is part of a wider personification of sacred Tibetan texts, which are routinely wrapped in robes, invited and carried from place to place, and prayed to directly (Diemberger). The personification of texts and their capacity to speak relies upon the diligent work of their human makers and keepers. In order to ensure the creation of a successful speaking text, makers must produce mobile, imaginative narrative accounts of the personified texts and their power.

Based on 16 months' recent fieldwork with a Nyingma Tibetan Buddhist community in Berkeley, California I will explore how these narrative accounts are creatively adapted. The printing of sacred texts is a central feature of this California community's work, and they distribute the finished products by the hundreds of thousands to the Tibetan monastic population in India. In so doing they have lifted Tibetan texts from their familiar sites of production and patronage and stretched them to fit new spaces. Their creation has moved from the hands of monastics and artisans, to those of American volunteers, often spiritual beginners. In the course of their work, the texts must be made "speak" at once to donors, sponsors, practitioners, to lay and monastic audiences across multiple countries. I suggest that for American practitioners to bring Tibetan Buddhist books to life and to voice in this new locale has required creative and imaginative labour, revealing new facets to the vocality of sacred texts.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the imaginative, empathic and ethical work that goes into making a Somali love song - a multi-vocal account-making process in which a poet, musician and singer each have a part to play in conveying the "taste" of another's love(-suffering) experience.

Paper long abstract:

According to fans of Somali love songs, the best songs are those that come from "deep, deep within the soul" to make you "feel what she feels" - songs in which you can "taste" the experience of love(-suffering) about which a given singer sings. The process by which love experiences become love songs, however, is a decidedly multi-vocal one that usually involves input from, at a minimum, a poet (and his muse), a musician and a vocalist. This is an account-making process that requires not only artistic knowledge and skill, but also an acute ability to "taste" (dhadhanso) and then represent the deeply intimate experiences of another. Drawing on conversations with Somali poets, musicians and singers, and broader ethnographer research on the labour of love songs in contemporary Hargeysa, this paper explores the imaginative, empathic and ethical work that go into the making of a love song that is able to successfully convey - in words, sound and voice - the "taste" or truth (ruun) of the original love experience. I conclude with a reflection on what this account-making process may contribute to anthropological ideas of empathy, as well as the doing and writing of ethnography.

Paper short abstract:

How do we account for intersubjectivities in ethnographies? Comparing writings of philosophical thought experiments about shared intentions with anthropological vignettes, I will explore the salient properties of two writing genres that both seek to capture the essence of collective intentionality.

Paper long abstract:

What it means to engage in a shared action is one of the core questions of both philosophy of action and anthropological fieldwork. Both disciplines, philosophy and anthropology, seek to provide conceptual tools and empirical insights for the phenomenon of collective intentionality and the shapes it takes in human everyday life. The creative process of ethnographic account making seeks to account for knowledge gain through shared practice, thus trying to close the epistemological gap between selves and others: In writing a vignette we attempt to capture a shared instance of clarity within the continuous flux of time. The transition from the understood to the written, however, is an underexposed aspect of ethnographies. What makes anthropologists distinguish between real intersubjectivities and mere projections from the self to the other? How can the ethnographer properly describe the experience of collective intentionality in her transcripts, field diaries and vignettes? How does one turn something shared, yet non-predicative into predication?

Turning to philosophy of action, I will expound philosophical writings of thought experiments about shared intentions (which are contrived to serve an argument) and compare their key features with those of anthropological vignettes - which are based on (bodily) experience of the author and, allegedly, non-fictional. I will explore (a) salient properties of two writing genres that both seek to capture occurrences of collective intentionality and (b) how possible gaps between vignettes, their makers, their readers, and their objects can be closed.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores how the fear of isolation and rejection acts as a socio-cultural catalyst for the rise of teenage anorexia. Additionally, this paper also divulges how graphic medicine enables sufferers to make sense of their disintegrated socio-cultural world.

Paper long abstract:

Anorexia nervosa has gained critical attention as the deadliest psychiatric disorder in western society. Teenage anorexia in girls which is a subset of anorexia is a corollary of their fear of social condemnation which might happen if they fail to conform with putative cultural expectations of femininity. Accordingly, fear of isolation/rejection can be considered as strong socio-cultural catalysts for the rise of anorexia in teenagers. Although there are numerous studies which underscore the indisputable correlation between anorexia and fear of social acceptance, not many significant attempts have been made thus far to fathom anorexia using a socio-psychological theory. Interestingly, there are graphic medical memoirs that deploy the medium to explore the hitherto unmapped trajectories of subjective eating disorder experiences in the light of social seclusion fear. Considering anorexia as an ineffable condition of psychosomatic trauma, we need non-verbal media where the "unspeakable may be better communicated emotionally and viscerally" (Hirsch, 2004). Accordingly, comics which in itself is a disruptive medium aids them to process their emotions, recreate their identity and restore their fragmented selves. In this context, by drawing theoretical postulates from Elizabeth Noelle-Neumann, this article examines the rise of anorexia in young girls using the spiral of silence theory, specifically by close reading Katie Green's graphic memoir, Lighter Than My Shadow (2013). Additionally, this paper also divulges how structural features of the medium of comics help in articulating traumatic experiences and how graphic medicine offers imaginative and innovative ways of expressing affective truths.

Paper short abstract:

This paper looks at how residents of the London neighborhood of Kilburn negotiate incoherence and emergence within their own biographies, by asserting various frames of coherence. Using this as a lens, it interrogates broader trends within anthropology which have tended to valorise incoherence.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores the connections between the ideas of accountancy and biographic accounts. The former, understood as the process by which a rate of equivalency is established between distinct things, is often seen as the central technology of liberal society - not only as a financial technology but as a technology of the self. However, it has widely been argued that the complexity of social relations, and indeed of personal biographies, persistently evades and exceeds such techniques of accounting. As a result, academics have often come to privilege accounts which emphasise emergence, complexity or even incoherence, favouring these both in terms of empirical attention and theoretical valorisation.

Such messy accounts were certainly widespread in the London neighbourhood of Kilburn. However, in many cases their narrators would nonetheless insist that these accounts ought to be recognised as coherent, and would sometimes go to considerable lengths to secure this recognition. In this paper, I focus on two such instances: a case of a 'roadman' in his thirties, involved in Kilburn's subversive and often violent street culture, grappling with doubts over his choices; and a case of a late-middle-aged benefits claimant who seems to want to put a vast swathe of his life story down on his benefits application form. I suggest that both these accounts resist liberal forms of commensurability, yet simultaneously seek to insist on their coherence through alternative narrative structures. I conclude by suggesting that alongside complexity, anthropologists must also attend to attempts to narrativize and mobilize the world through the assertion of forms of simplification.

Paper short abstract:

British equestrians are liable to describe their horses in child-like terms, yet also to critique that same practice. I demonstrate frictions between three language ideologies, and argue that contemporary horse owners must manage changing epistemological responsibilities of care.

Paper long abstract:

British equestrians are liable to describe their horses in child-like terms, yet also to critique that same practice. This paper investigates the play, deviance, and risk associated with infantilisation and considers how and why language speakers might employ various not-real frames of description. I provide ethnographic evidence for three forms of language ideology employed by British equestrians, each of which utilises - and critiques - infantilisation. A traditionally equestrian, rural genre of speech favours an approach I call 'straight talking' (replete with rough teasing humour); the private use of 'motherese' and the online posting of poetry and memes I call 'loving language'; and an explicitly reflexive, overtly moralised genre of considered speech I call 'care with words'. In each case, variably, child-like-ness enables the horse to be known as a reflexive and communicative subject who makes not-quite-real choices that it is not-quite accountable for. I explain the tensions and conflicts that occur at the frictions between the three linguistic ideologies; particularly the traditional equestrian rejection of what appears as an invading, over-philosophised claim for rhetorical-moral expertise. I aim to contextualise these linguistic dynamics within the changing class demographics of British equestrianism, as well as in relation to commentaries on 'post-truth' metacognition. I argue that British horse owners negotiate changing metalinguistic expectations and epistemological responsibilities. Battles surrounding matters of appropriate care are increasingly fought on epistemological grounds; to care well is to know well, and to speak well too.

Paper short abstract:

This paper compares accounts of ethnic unity/enmity in Li and Han ethnic communities in the southwestern island of Hainan, Southern China. It explains how politics of memorizing/forgetting past sustain the ethnic boundaries in present.

Paper long abstract:

The paper examines the ways of knowing/forgetting the past demarcating the ethnic boundaries in the domain of family, which sanction the inter-ethnic intimate relationships. In imperial China, the over centuries interaction between Li highland ‘anarchists’ and Han plain ‘civilian’ did not brought about the cultural similarity, also it produced the rigor ethnic segregation after frequent military conflict. Till present, the knowledge of the ancestors or ancestor worship, maintained an ethnic marker of which efficacy lies on Li’s inability of telling the past. My investigation on the memories of the past in two communities, informed that the Han’s imagined unity was less about inherited the literati tradition than surviving from the threat of the others. Han’s knowledge of their community history intertwined with popular memory of ‘Li plunders’ forged an illusory unity among the Han families, which commonly sanctioned the inter-ethnic intimate relationship. The Han identity could not merely construct through the narratives that project pride of being the descendants of ‘Grand scholars, bureaucrats’, also the stories of surviving which implies the fear of the others. Contrast to Han’s fictional presentation of their past, Li communities present counter narratives through more materialistic way: single lineage village, deeds of ancestral territories and modern war hero remind their past of dominance on the island. Nonetheless, these accounts were still invalid way of informing the history, thus, they rather in favor of contrasting Han’s ‘historical fantasy’.