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Oral Presentation Session - Cosponsored Status Awarded
Sponsored by: Society for Cultural Anthropology
Cosponsored by: American Ethnological Society
Primary Theme: Materiality
Touch, as experience, sense, and activity, is both a point of contact with the world and a worlding in itself, central to our capacities to affect and be affected. As an analytic and ethnographic focus, touch draws our attention to the fundamental and sometimes contradictory socio-material qualities of the world; touching is a kind of boundary work that distinguishes things and selves within a given ontology but only though their contact, producing difference out of the very instant in which things rub off of each other. The veritable frontline for both harming and flourishing, touch is essential to companionship, cultivation, sexuality, as well as manifold forms of violence, contagion, and a variety of other multivalent fleshy exchanges.
Acts of touching and being touched pull us into sensuous connection with people, other animals, objects, and ambient surroundings, while also giving form and flesh to wider economic and social processes. Forces like care, toxicity, forensic authority, and historical and material conditions get onto and under the skin. Here touch is inherently political: who and what touches, how, and with what consequences, is historical, hierarchical, inevitably unequal, at times contested, always racialized and gendered. Touch is deeply cultural: its place in human affairs varies profoundly across time and place. At the same time, touch is also universal; contact, or being in touch, is central to the mattering of everything that exists.
Despite being so central, or perhaps precisely because of its ubiquity, touch has often evaded extended conceptual and empirical attention in anthropology, or been downgraded or dismissed outright. Against this tendency, and building on prior conversations in phenomenology and the anthropology of the senses, in two paired panels we offer touch as a provocation, inviting experiments that take up touch as an analytic focusing us on the politics of resonant fleshy and material moments and the histories of our ramifying socio-material encounters.
Part I: “Tangible Difference, Worlding Techniques,” explores the practices through which touch both produces worlds of difference and mediates encounters with difference: enduring sensations emerging from experimental ethnographic practices, relations of disability, differences between self and other produced as forms of life are made known through touch. Panelists trace the ways such differences then make a difference, having material, social, and psychic consequences for those who touch and are touched, while transforming the way difference is made a subject, object, or mode of knowledge. As such, this conversation offers a kind of extension of Merleau-Ponty’s observation about the reversibility of touch—that to touch is always in some sense to be touched. Examining tangible relationality in Uganda, biometric socialization in India, and experimental representational practice and profound sensory difference in North America, all of the papers on this panel are concerned with signature anthropological concerns—kinship, sociality, and otherness—while engaging interdisciplinary conversations in disability studies, aesthetic theory, and STS.
Zoe Wool
Assistant Professor
Rice University
Tyler Zoanni
New York University
Tyler Zoanni
New York University
Anna Eisenstein
University of Virginia
Terra Edwards
Assistant Professor of Anthropology
Saint Louis University
Danilyn Rutherford
President
Wenner-Gren Foundation
Vijayanka Nair
Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Deborah Thomas
R. Jean Brownlee Professor of Anthropology
University of Pennsylvania
Stefan Helmreich
Professor
Massachusetts Institute of Technology