It is an honor to write an afterword to this provocative and engaging collection of short essays and films by a wide range of creative anthropologists and mediamakers hailing mainly from northern Europe, who have been sharing their work at workshops throughout the Nordic Region that they have been organizing since 2022. In 2023, they officially created the Sensory Media Anthropology (SMA) Network whose innovative approach is featured in this thematic section of the Allegra Lab. I had the pleasure and privilege (as a US American outsider) to attend and speak at the 2023 Oslo workshop, which gave me a sense of the lively, generous, deeply informed, and very creative work emerging from this initiative. I can’t imagine a more fitting place for this work to be published than the Allegra Lab site which, since it’s inauguration over a decade ago by “a small group of renegade anthropologists”, has been enlivening “the ‘dead space’ between standard academic publication and fast-moving public debate”. Allegra’s soul-nourishing motto is “Anthropology for radical optimism”. Sign me up!!
It’s heartening to see the vitality of the SMA work in 2024 and helpful to place it in perspective. This special issue took shape more than two decades after the 2002 publication of Media Worlds: Anthropology on New Terrain, the landmark volume that I edited with anthropologists Lila Abu- Lughod and Brian Larkin. Media Worlds was our effort to establish media anthropology as an important emerging subfield within the discipline. It’s hard to remember that in the early 21st century when that book came out, we and the other authors in the collection had to defend the very idea of anthropologists studying media. The work ranged from activist Indigenous media practices to the politics of gender in the consumption of Egyptian soap operas to the infrastructures that shaped how Bollywood films made their way into the lives of Hausa men in northern Nigeria, to name three out of twenty chapters. We argued that media anthropology is significant in its own right and that ethnographic attention to media practices across the globe are expanding social theory as well as media studies, an extremely Eurocentric field at that time. Now, a quarter of our way through the current century, it seems impossible to imagine ethnographic work carried out anywhere on the planet that does not take into account the presence or (on occasion) absence of media; here, I use that word, media, based on its popular understanding as a means of communication reliant on distinctive technological regimes such as radio, television, film, television, newspapers, magazines, the internet, and other rapidly expanding digital forms.
The authors offer open-ended and exploratory sensibilities, building on an invigorating and inventive combination of media and sensory anthropology. They focus on the sensuous, affective, and embodied knowledge produced by encounters with a wide range of mediations.
This thematic collection for the Allegra Lab invites us to take a step further onto even newer terrain than that of Media Worlds, by bringing the growing field of sensory ethnography together with the now established and burgeoning work in media anthropology. Taking a generative approach to their effort to cross-fertilize ideas from both sensory and media anthropology, the editors of this thematic section of the Allegra Lab have organized the writing around 8 themes – not the usual suspects we might recognize from academic writing that carry with them longstanding conceptual frameworks. Instead, these themes which emerged at an earlier SMA network workshop held in Turku, Finland, are unexpectedly fresh: skin, weather, electricity, steps, moved, gut feeling, walls, and clocks. The authors offer open-ended and exploratory sensibilities, building on an invigorating and inventive combination of media and sensory anthropology. They focus on the sensuous, affective, and embodied knowledge produced by encounters with a wide range of mediations.
As the editors explain in the introduction, their strategy has been to catalyze authors to be poetic, playful, political as well as theoretical, in an effort to produce the kind of work that “usually falls through the cracks of academic publishing”. The remarkable essays in this collection are compellingly reflexive and wide-ranging in two ways. First, many offer ethnographic sensibilities built on local knowledge: filmic contemplation of wintry weather in Finland, documentary activism in Brazil’s Baile Funk clubs, unexpected trance while witnessing Javanese Jathilan rituals, the constraints and creativity expressed on Cairo’s art-covered walls, the barriers of Norway’s high-walled prisons, and Chile’s Atacama Desert redolent with memories of violence. Second, others stretch anthropological ideas of place and fieldwork, into the body and the material world, from the human gut’s connection to the brain, to skin, electrical signals, radio fields, and the alternative sonic worlds produced by tinnitus, on the one hand, and Christmas music on the other. In going through the beautifully written essays and short films in this collection, I appreciate how the popular understanding of media tied to particular technologies of mass communication is strategically displaced from the idea of media deployed here. Perhaps it is best replaced by the much broader term that speaks to the SMA approach – medium – defined by the Oxford English dictionary as:
the intervening substance through which impressions are conveyed to the senses or as a force that acts on objects at a distance.
Whatever the name that best fits this work might be, this thematic section makes a convincing case for the value and future of the approach that the sensory media network has given us. The authors demonstrate in their lively writing and moving image work a welcome intervention into and expansion of contemporary anthropology in ways that encompass both the intimacy of sensory experience and the ubiquity of mediation.
Reference
Ginsburg, Faye, Lila Abu-Lughod, and Brian Larkin, eds. 2002. Media Worlds: Anthropology on New Terrain. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Featured image by Susan Wilkinson on Unsplash
