Affective spaces, melancholic objects: ruination and the production of anthropological knowledge*

Abstract

This article critically engages with recent theoretical writings on affect and non‐human agency by way of studying the emotive energies discharged by properties and objects appropriated during war from members of the so‐called ‘enemy’ community. The ethnographic material comes from long‐term fieldwork in Northern Cyprus, focusing on how it feels to live with the objects and within the ruins left behind by the other, now displaced, community. I study Turkish‐Cypriots’ relations to houses, land, and objects that they appropriated from the Greek‐Cypriots during the war of 1974 and the subsequent partition of Cyprus. My ethnographic material leads me to reflect critically on the object‐centred philosophy of Actor Network Theory and on the affective turn in the human sciences after the work of Gilles Deleuze. With the metaphor of ‘ruination’, I study what goes amiss in scholarly declarations of theoretical turns or shifts. Instead, proposing an anthropologically engaged theory of affect through an ethnographic reflection on spatial and material melancholia, I argue that ethnography, in its most productive moments, is trans‐paradigmatic. Retaining what has been ruined as still needful of consideration, I suggest an approach which merges theories of affect and subjectivity as well as of language and materiality. Résumé L'article examine sous un angle critique les écrits théoriques récents sur l'affect et l'agency non humaine pour étudier les énergies émotives libérées par les biens et objets confisqués lors d'un conflit armé aux membres de la communauté dite «ennemie». Le matériel ethnographique provient d'un travail de terrain de longue durée dans le Nord de Chypre, qui portait sur le ressenti de ceux qui vivent avec ces objets, dans les ruines laissées par l'autre communauté désormais déplacée. L'auteure étudie les relations des Chypriotes turcs avec les maisons, les terres et les objets qu'ils se sont appropriés sur les Chypriotes grecs lors de la guerre de 1974 et de la partition de Chypre. Le matériel ethnographique la conduit à une réflexion critique sur la philosophie centrée sur les objets de la théorie de l'acteur‐réseau et sur le tournant affectif des sciences humaines à la suite des travaux de Gilles Deleuze. Par la métaphore de la «ruine», l'auteur sonde ce qui ne va pas dans les proclamations académiques de tournants théoriques et de changements paradigmatiques. En lieu et place, elle propose une théorie de l'affect engagée dans l'anthropologie, par une réflexion ethnographique sur la mélancolie spatiale et matérielle, et affirme que l'ethnographie, dans ses moments les plus productifs, est trans‐paradigmatique. En gardant ce qui est «ruiné» comme digne encore de considération, l'auteure suggère une approche qui concilie les théories de l'affect et de la subjectivité et du langage et de la matérialité.

Border Poetics: Becoming Cypriot in the Dead Zone

“…for instance, 3 which both invite a preferred formal reading strategy, whereas the border Dead Zone acts as a compromised, or abject, milieu de mémoire, a site where personal and political memory meet: it is a palimpsest of inter-communal conflict, and most of all a memory of a handful of hot weeks that began on 15 July 1974. 4 The Dead Zone is an official manifestation of the inter-communal conflicts of 1963 and 1974, but this place does not celebrate the past in ruins as a lieu de mémoire conventionally does (Woodward, 2001;Navaro-Yashin, 2009). Neither is it straightforwardly an organic pre-modern milieu de mémoire, as defined by Nora (1996).…”

Sensitive Objects: Affect and Material Culture

“…See e.g. Chadha 2006;Navaro-Yashin 2009Townsend-Gault 2011;Beckstead et al 2011;Gibson 2013, Hafner 2013Jansen 2013;Pink et al 2014;Springwood 2014;Bille et al 2015. See also the special issue of the Journal of Material Culture from 2010, which was devoted to emotive materiality and the affective presence of human remains (see Krmpotich et al 2010).…”

“…This resonates perfectly with the art of haiku writers, who attend to a moving configuration of perceptions -a glimpse of colour, let's say, plus a special tincture or texture combined with a peculiar sound pressing through a moment -that can resonate in the reader sensibility so that … 'the mind is struck as with a hammer, bringing the senses up short and releasing a flood of associations'. (Gibson 2013: 246) Affects and objects With some significant exceptions, such as Navaro-Yashin (2009, Gibson (2013), Jansen (2013Jansen ( , 2015, and Bille et al 2015), few ethnographers have worked on affects in relation to material culture. 8 As ethnologists and anthropologists we are interested in practices and lived experiences that are always historically embedded.…”

“…It is the practices of the people using the objects or who are inspired by environments that we observe, and it is the people we ask who tell us how they understand their practices 'as goal-oriented, meaningful and affectively loaded' (Jansen 2013: 35). Kramig and Flemmen (Chapter 8) align with the anthropologist Yael Navaro- Yashin (2009, who has done a lot of systematic fieldwork on affects. In her work on Turkish Cypriots inhabiting expropriated Greek dwellings, Navaro-Yashin challenges the way in which affect has been theorised, using metaphors that invoke abstraction, imaginaries of immateriality and conceptualisations of invisibility (ibid.…”

Material culture of multilingualism and affectivity

“…But those who do interest them-selves in links between emotions and materialities investigate fascinating matters such as affective objects (see e.g., Schreirer & Picard, 2000), relational artefacts and evocative objects (Turkle, 2007(Turkle, , 2011. Using Hartmann's approach and his hierarchy of effectivity (see e.g., Zaborowsky, 2011) researchers strive to understand emotive energies discharged by properties and objects, based on an approach which combines language and materiality with theories of affect and subjectivity (Navaro-Yashin, 2009) or how the affective capacity of some objects is sustained over time (Börjesson, n.d.).…”