Sensing the Everyday

Front matter

SENSING THE EVERYDAY

Sensing the Everyday is a multi-sited ethnographic inquiry based on fieldwork experiences and sharp everyday observations in the era of crisis. Blending sophisticated theoretical analyses with original ethnographic data, C. Nadia Seremetakis journeys from Greece to Vienna, Edinburgh, Albania, Ireland, and beyond. Social crisis is seen through its transnational multiplication of borders, thresholds and margins, divisions, and localities as linguistic, bodily, sensory, and performative sites of the quotidian in process. The book proposes everyday life not as a sanctuary or as a recessed zone distanced from the structural violence of the state and the market, but as a condition of im/possibility, unable to be lived as such, yet still an encapsulating habitus. There the impossibility of the quotidian is concretized as fragmentary and fragmenting material forces. Seremetakis weaves together topics as diverse as borders and bodies, history and death, the earth and the senses, language and affect, violence and public culture, the sociality of dreaming, and the spatialization of the traumatic, in a journey through antiphonic witnessing and memory. Her montage explores various ways of juxtaposing reality with the irreal and the imaginal to expose the fictioning of social reality. The book locates her approach to ethnography and the ‘native ethnographer’ in wider anthropological and philosophical debates, and proposes a dialogical interfacing of theory and practice, the translation of academic knowledge to public knowledge.

C. Nadia Seremetakis is Professor of Cultural Anthropology at the University of the Peloponnese, Greece. She has authored several acclaimed books and articles in English and Greek, including poetry, and has been actively engaged in public anthropology in both Europe and the USA, where she lived and taught for more than two decades.

PART II Death drives in the city Awakening 31

Third stream memory 33

The aperceptual present 34

Theatrokratia and citizenship 36

The cartographic order 38

Silent détournement: from cities of the dead to death in the city 39 viii Contents

Space profaned 41 Gendering the sacred 43 The pre-secular modern 45 Grave selfies 46

The second life 48

4 Modern cities of silence: Disasters, nature and the petrified bodies of history

The city of statues 52

Excavating private memory 55

Bodies in ruins 56

The city without walls 61

The object(s) of memory: managing the uninheritable 64 Re-membering the present 66

Ruins and ashes: re-witnessing the natural 70

Losing place 73

5 Wounded borders: The arrival of the ‘Barbarians’

Europe besieged by the border 81 New space of flows 83

Medicine, information and body consumption: Gioconda 90 Fascination beneath the surface 92

The transnationalized body 95

Uncertain bodies 100

Older dramas 102

Postscript: Eros and thanatos re-covered 103

PART III Senses revisited

Touch /tactility — a backstage 111 Touching taste and memory — the play 118 Aftertastes 130

The sob 134 From the borders of the inside 136 Tactile sounds 137

PART IV Sensing the invisible 9 Divination, media and the networked body of modemity

Telepresencing theodicy 143

Evil eye and somatic witnessing 148

Shadow modernity 150

Divination and the involuntary body 152

The spell 155

Cup: a cosmological interior 156

The moral economy of reading and witnessing 159 Gendering the invisible 162

The social nervous system via involuntary gestures 162 Remediations 163

Intangible culture 171 In and out 171 Debts and payments 172

PART V Borders of translatability 11 On ‘native’ ethnography in modernity Ethnographic translation 184 Import anthropology 185 12 Ethnopoetic dialogues: Performing local history 13 Performing intercultural translation

Multiculturalism and legislation 202

Contents ix

192 198 x Contents