thanks.

Today, it is the last day to write stuff in my journal (and I have to admit, after having seen what L. has been working on, I feel that my small journal is kind of anemic). So I thought I would publish a couple of post throughout the rest of the week. To start off, let me say, that this course was by far the most eyeopener that I have attended so far (I know, I know, I have always tended to be a bit of a flawner). Seriously, I discovered a different panel of authors that I had never even heard about. And I realize that doing ethnography could be a lot less austere than I originally thought it should be. So, thank you.

dialectical video

From everything I could put my hands on in these last couple of months, I have not found an example that could better illustrate what a dialectical image is.

songs

This is something I always wanted to do. Sharing a song and a few words at the same time. Please let yourself be taken by the music before you read further.

I love that song. It’s one of these great piece where words and melody intertwine to form something special that goes beyond rationalization. One of these inexplicable moment that suddenly happen. Serenity becomes suddenly reachable. Peacefulness as well. Ok. Stop the song. Or let it finish, before we switch to a new kind of mood.

This one produces a complete different atmosphere. Are we lingering into what Stewart calls atmospheric attunements? Maybe. But that’s not the space where I would like to access, the theoretical area that what I would like to reach. Are you still hearing the noisy sound of the guitars. Does it not sound like whales? I have always been impressed with the musicality of the noises. Not the notes per se, but the cacophony and the commotion that are at times produced (performed) by a variety of instruments (including the voices). The stressful tone induces a different mood than the previous piece. Both of them are however really powerful.

These are my ghosts, my phantoms, my deads. One day, as Ochoa did with the dead, I will use music as a methodology, or at least as a vector that will allow me to sediment and augment what I am writing; the description of the people and their culture I am attempting to portray ethnographically. Ochoa’s work is so insightful and deeply compelling in the ways in which he attempted to portray the sea of the deads (was it his words??).  I mean, within his narrative, you could almost feel the texture of the dead. I however believe that arts provide instinctively a mood, a density, that catalyzes the our senses to touch the texture. Any kind of arts should augment ethnography, even the most rigid and severe ones.

It’s when I write stuff like that that I realize I need to deepen my understanding of sound theories in anthropology.

my neighbor

when i rented my place in august, the lady was like: yeah, it’s like trendy around here, and your upstairs neighbors is very quiet. She is an old lady, and her husband passed away two years ago.

so i signed right away. i don’t care about the trendy thing. i don’t go out. No, i always have something new to read.

but, one month later, the lady moved. And my quieter appt. has transformed itself into caisse de son for the new neighbor. He is like 20ish, and like to party. That’s all I can say.

I mean, I remember how it is. Partys are following each other, you meet new people, have a couple of beers, drugs. I get that. I have been there. But I realize now how not tolerant I have become.

so, a few days before i would go join my family for Christmas, people started to open beers upstairs. I know because I could hear them. In these old house, the noise travels very easily.

so, as i was saying, the party was starting. i was like talking to myself, trying to be reasonable: `come on, you’ve been there. It`s Christmas after all.` My new neighbor has been quite noisy in the last months, but i did want to cause trouble.

At 3:30 in the morning, I could not help myself. I was so mad. I told myself I would not say anything right now, but next time that he will be as loud, I would call the landlord.

Then, I realize that my tolerance for my neighbor’s noise is really close to sedimentation. Each time he disturbs me, there is another layer that augments the previous one. If i had thought about it, it would have been interesting to note whatever thing I was doing each time he disturbs me. His presence, the ways he wals with his heel, and the loud music he puts on at 11:30 pm would have been a random and uncontrolable thread from which I could observe what I was doing, thinking, eating, watching, listening. In other words, this young man, without knowing it, would have become the rhythm to which I would have taken fake ethnographic notes of what student life is…

So, my question is, because there must be one: would that be appropriate to be led, in an ethnographic work, by random association of things and events that are out of control from the anthropologist?

catching up

I realize now that there is three books that I have not talked at all in this journal.

Insectopedia: I genuinely told all my friend about that book. No one bought it. I guess they were not interested by insects. Or maybe they just do not trust my judgement.

Society of the dead: I loved it. But still unsure whether, or how, I can use that book in the future.

Moore: I do not know why, I can’t even figure out why this should be interesting. I guess I did not understand what was the point.

When I look back right now at the beginning of this course, I realize how lost I was. Moore might have been right to use sedimentation as a way to analyze a given place. There is no other way around. Small layers are added on each other, one after the other. Together, it produces something: a meaning, a flash. Maybe that’s what it is all about: augmenting.

Top 5 and Top ten were all over the news recently. Correspondingly, I will give you here my personal top three of the more interesting and intriguing concepts I have been acquainted to in the last months.

3. becoming with. Haraway’s becoming with has been pretty powerful to explain how subjects come to interact and evolve with each other. Even though I find her book a bit human-centered for a multispecies, I realize that her work has paved the way for novel ways of approaching convoluted relations between things and human.

2. augmentation and sedimentation. I just like metaphors. And these two represents some kind of reality that is interestingly depicted in Ochoa and Moore.

1. assemblage. this one is really intriguing. I believe that assemblage is one of these concepts that the meaning is easy to grasp while bearing at the same time complex philosophical ideas. during my phd, i would like to get a better understanding of what are the philosophical foundations of assemblage.