Convenor
Benjamin Hegarty
The Australian National University
Co-covenor
Shiori Shakuto-Neoh
The Australian National University
Chairs & Discussants
Benjamin Hegarty
Shiori Shakuto-Neoh
The Australian National University
From new reproductive technologies to selfies on Facebook, an enmeshment of the social and material increasingly alters our bodily relationships with the world. This transformation of patterns of relationality between humans and non-humans has prompted rich ethnographic encounters and representations. Our starting point is to trace technologies that alter relations to the body, and material objects which become the body and vice versa. Anthropologists have discussed how objects affect social relations and how bodies or bodily senses have consequences for the social world. However, the entanglement of the body and the material as a way of being in the world has not been extensively discussed. Such joint bodily practice with non-humans suggests the creative capacities of socio-material entanglement. We focus especially on creative capacities of bodies — taken in relation to the non-human world — as sensing and feeling with objects in navigating social relations. We welcome papers that take into account and combine theoretical developments in the areas of human-material relationships, bodies and material culture. While theoretical perspectives may be drawn from anthropology or any other cognate discipline, preference will be given to papers based on rich ethnographic data.
Contributors to this panel are encouraged to expand on the following questions:-
- Consider the entanglement of human and non-human in practice to further our understanding of classic anthropological themes, such as kinship, religion and economy.
- Discuss how certain objects are charged with the sensorial to make real the social.
- Describe ways to explore how the role of the emotions might be understood through the sensory and material realms.
- Explain methods for ethnographic practice which advance understandings of creative capacity for sensing and/or feeling bodies with objects.
IUAES2015 panel session #5, #6 #7 [Room 313]
16 July 2015, 11.00 – 12.30 hrs., 13.30 – 15.00 hrs., 15.15 – 16.45 hrs.
Programme
Body Modification and Politics
P7-02-A1
Imagining Transgender in 1970s Indonesia
Benjamin HEGARTY
P7-02-A2
Transgressive Creativity: self- expression and oppression among ‘Hard-core’ tattooed women in Israel
Michal STEIN
P7-02-A3
‘Being a little bit pregnant’: In-Vitro Fertilisation as Technology of Hope
Bernhard HADOLT
P7-02-A4
Mirror and Image: bodily practice of a classical ballet in Thailand
Keiji IDETA
P7-02-A5
“Ethnicization of smells” and “olfactization of ethnicity ”: A reflection on domestic material culture in the case of Ursari Romanian Roma
Andreea RACLES
Becoming with Things
P7-02-B1
Walking in Utopia: Materiality of Life among the Japanese Retirement Migrants in Malaysia
Shiori SHAKUTO-NEOH
P7-02-B2
Jamu becomings on the island of Java, Indonesia
Julie LAPLANTE
P7-02-B3
The Social and Imaginary porosity of Cloth in the embodied artwork of Mary Sibande
Patricia C. HENDERSON
P7-02-B4
Speaking through Things: Gods and their priests in Hindu south India
Soumhya VENKATESAN
Politics of Play
P7-02-C1
Belief and the Body: Symbolic Violence and the Construction of ‘Ki’ in the Practice of Aikido
Kevin TAN
P7-02-C2
Children’s’ Play and games in the Tribals of West Bengal: An Ethnographic Study
Souvik KUMAR
P7-02-C3
Pencak Silat and/as media: Reconstructing Indonesian martial arts in cross-cultural, transmedial networks
Patrick KEILBART