Anonymous introductions: identity and belonging in Corsica

Candea, Matei

doi:10.1111/j.1467-9655.2009.01600.x

Cited by 17 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 26 publications

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“…However, anthropological perspectives on merographic connections, and particularly those put forward by Strathern, illuminate the cultural logic at work that permits such domain crossings evident in knowing. Connections caught up in knowing in Dodworth, as in Bacup (Edwards, 2000) and Corsica (Candea, 2010), are not simply connections between people. They are, rather, connections that insist on binding people, places, memories, and pasts together in terms of 'what matters'.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

‘Knowing’, Absence, and Presence: The Spatial and Temporal Depth of Relations

Degnen

2013

Environ Plan D

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Through the lens of 'knowing', which is simultaneously an expression in colloquial English and a set of cognate practices, this paper considers the ways in which relations come to have ontological depth which is both spatial and tempwral. The signiflcance of knowing people and places in everyday life exceeds a simple 'familiarity with' or 'knowledge of. Instead, knowing speaks to what it is that is said to matter in the webs of relations which connect (and sometimes disconnect) people and place, connections that accumulate in uneven and unequal ways. The paper thus builds on recent literature in human geography on absence, presence, and postindustrial ruins and weds it with anthropological theory on connectedness, relatedness, and ruination to examine knowing. This cross-fertilisation of disciplinary perspectives permits me to pay critical attention to seemingly incommensurate and yet overlapping webs of relations (relations with people aUve and dead, relations with places present and absent, relations with memory, relations with change and the past). Following Navaro-Yashin's recent work in Northern Cyprus, I argue that knowing in regard to absence sheds light on the theoretical bind of object-centred versus subject-centred approaches. IntroductionThis paper examines the depth of feeling forged between people through place and time. I focus on the processes by which people, places, and objects become "mutually possessive" (Candea, 2010, page 127) or, in other words, the ways in which they become interconnected, as well as the temporal and spatial dynamics of these processes. The ethnographic locale where I conducted the research motivating this piece, however, is one where erasure and absence inform social relations as much as presence and continuity do. What, then, are the consequences of mutual possession in such an ethnographic context where people, places, and objects occupy seemingly incommensurate" domains of the living and the dead, the present arid the erased, the visible and the eradicated? These domain crossings are premised on cultural logics that, as I will argue here, can contribute to larger debates over subjectivity and affect. 1 shall be arguing that 'knowing' people and places, and 'being known', are relational aspects whereby people can be connected to (as well as disconnected from) each other through place (Ingold, 2011) and through social memory. Dodworth, the village where this fieldwork was based, is a setting of intense localism. Social interaction and public discourse here are characterised by the regular exchange of stories about shared historical experiences and of the micro-details of individual villagers' biographies as well as those of their wider family networks. Knowing thus reveals a set of practices of how people position themselves in multiple ways within overlapping webs of relations: relations with people, relations with places, relations with memory, relations with change and relations with the past.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

‘Knowing’, Absence, and Presence: The Spatial and Temporal Depth of Relations

Degnen

2013

Environ Plan D

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“…And the children see each other through the photos of other children presented to them in scientific publications or on Facebook. This way of meeting has parallels to what Matei Candea (2010) describes as ‘anonymous introductions’. During his fieldwork in Corsica, he observed that his interlocutors in first‐person encounters avoided the exchange of personal names to enable a social relationship.…”

Section: Relatedness and Anonymitymentioning

confidence: 71%

De novo kin: sharing data, shielding persons, and forging relatedness in precision medicine

Navne

Svendsen

2022

Royal Anthropological Inst

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Comparing, sharing, and shielding children's biological and biographical data in genetic databases and on Facebook are central moves when geneticists and families search for diagnoses for children with rare diseases. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Denmark, we show that the work of linking children carrying the same genetic mutations forges new sibling-like forms of relatedness between them. With the concept of 'datasociality', we add new layers to 'biosociality' by capturing the ways in which biological information is increasingly mediated by digital and algorithmic processes in the genomic era. In the process of both sharing data and securing anonymity, unrelated children become related through qualities of otherness.This article investigates issues of anonymity and relatedness which are brought to the fore in the use of international genetic databases when diagnosing children with rare diseases. The ethnographic material is drawn from Denmark, but speaks to much broader empirical discussions of the management of transnational health data and to anthropological theories of kinship. The starting point of this article is the ethnographic puzzle that for doctors to diagnose a child with a rare genetic disease, they need to compare one child's data with the data of multiple other children, while respecting each child's right to remain anonymous. In the process, the sharing of data in genetic databases and on Facebook comes to form recognition and affinity between the children.Sitting in on genetic counselling sessions of children with rare genetic diseases in a Danish clinic in 2018, we learned that to connect and track family disease histories and inheritance through generations, a genetic test and a family tree were not enough to facilitate a diagnosis. For the children featured in this article, disease does not run in the family. Instead they carry de novo disease-causing genetic mutations, which appear for the first time in the history of their families and are not inherited from

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“…For us the red glow of the sunset should be as much part of nature as are the molecules and electric waves by which men of science would explain the phenomenon’ (: 28–9). This idea, that the emotional impact of the sunset, whatever it happens to be (sadness, wonder at its beauty, awe and so forth), should be seen a property of the phenomenon, along with its physics, chemistry, etc., is taken up by other writers (Latour ; Viveiros de Castro ; Candea ) who, inspired also by Tarde ( [1893]), have called for the replacement of the problematic of ‘being’ with examination of ways of ‘having’. To see fear (and fear instigation) as a property opens up the possibility of examining their differential locations and sharp effects among constellations of relations.…”

Section: Fear As a Propertymentioning

confidence: 99%

Fear as a property and an entitlement

Humphrey¹

2013

Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale

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Dominant approaches to fear in the social sciences and humanities tend to consider fear as a negative and disempowering emotion. Such analyses conceptualise fear as an indistinct mass phenomenon, a characteristic of an abstraction, such as 'risk society' or 'culture of fear' or 'dictatorial power'. By contrast, this paper examines the structure of the experience and management of fear by individual subjects, and relates this to questions of morality and self-reflection. Using the cases of omens and horror movies, it is shown how fear is evoked and 'managed' within assemblages, which might include other people, frightening objects, ghosts, animals, diseases, technologies, or monsters. One is conscious of one's own fear and hence fear itself can become another 'thing', a property, which somehow must be dealt with. The theoretical proposition here is that fear need not be conceptualised as all-embracing. An emotion such as fear is 'mine' / 'ours' and contained within an identity; and yet, being a relation, it puts into question the connection between this passing element of what we think of as 'self' with the world outside. Such an approach opens the possibility of examining the management of fear, its coming and going over time, the evaluations that are made of it (as noble, despicable, justified, irrational, etc.), and the entitlements it provides in society. In particular, it raises the question of attitudes towards other humans as objects of fear, and the circumstances in which they are repudiated or, to the contrary, embraced. I n t r o d u c t i o nFear may grip us directly in a myriad of very different circumstances: a creaking footstep in the house at night, being flung about in a plane during a thunderstorm, dreading a nuclear attack on our city or closing our eyes in terror during a horror movie. It is now widely accepted in socio-cultural anthropology that despite such diversity of situations, fear is always a relation, if only a relation we have with an imagined future disaster (Furedi 2007a(Furedi , 2007b. This paper suggests that fear is evoked and 'managed' within relational assemblages, which might include other people, frightening objects, ghosts, animals, diseases, omens, technologies or monstersand fear itself. One is conscious of one's own fear and hence fear itself can become like another external 'thing', 1 which somehow must be dealt with along with the object or situation that is perceived to make one afraid. 2 What are the implications of this? In anthropology and the humanities in general, emotions, like fear, love or ragemore so than affects, like 1 This can be seen most clearly in techniques to control emotions. In modern Thai Buddhism, for example, behaving 'emotionally' is understood to detract from merit. A central meditation technique practised by nuns consists of developing mindfulness of each posture and each emotion as it comes up (these are often the 'defilements' of boredom, guilt, fear, anger…), the aim being consciously to purify the mind from these attachments and realise thei...

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Anonymous introductions: identity and belonging in Corsica

Cited by 17 publications

References 26 publications

‘Knowing’, Absence, and Presence: The Spatial and Temporal Depth of Relations

‘Knowing’, Absence, and Presence: The Spatial and Temporal Depth of Relations

De novo kin: sharing data, shielding persons, and forging relatedness in precision medicine

Fear as a property and an entitlement

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