Looking for the Margin

Author(s)

Jasamin Kashanipour

Abstract

Based on ethnographic fieldwork with contemporary male and female life drawing models in one European and non-European artistic field, the chapter presents an ethnography of gradualness as a slow bodily mimesis and as a methodological approach to attentive thinking for studies in which multi-sitedness and decentralised structures are involved in their core. I refer to a particular part of my ethnographic research, in which life models describe the role of transference in their profession, specifically the transmission of emotion in the process of creating artworks. This part explores the invisibility of emotions and the visibility of embodied emotions—a theorem emerging from my study which traces life models’ perception of body and embodiment, role identity and agency, and their socio-political engagements within the artistic and the social field.

Often the existence of emotions is marginalized due to their complex, intangible, and/or frightening natures. There is a striking correlation between how fast we perceive emotions and how slowly we see, read, translate, transform, or identify with emotions. Given the complexity of emotions, I propose to move beyond addressing emotions as invisible feelings and to take embodied emotions as visible narratives into discursive consideration in a worldly and/or multimodal ethnographic practice. An ethnography of gradualness is significant for making the un-seeable visible as the narrative of the un-seeable in a globalized world is often located in the margin or goes beyond the fieldworker’s gaze. It is the gradual gaze (Kashanipour 2021a) that looks for the margin and narrates how emotions become embodied emotions, how the un-seeable becomes visible.

Organisation(s)

Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology

Pages

213-229

Publication date

2024

Peer reviewed

Yes

Austrian Fields of Science 2012

504008 Ethnography, 504009 Ethnology

Keywords

Portal url

https://ucris.univie.ac.at/portal/en/publications/looking-for-the-margin(91cf6de0-76b1-4a23-ad29-882f02a591c8).html