Phillip Vannini

Non-representational ethnography: new ways of animating lifeworlds

Over the last decade and a half, socio-cultural geographies have witnessed a genuine explosion of interest in the ethnographic tradition. Such interest is due in part to the increasing acceptance of non-representational ideas across the field and the way these ideas have constructively informed the long-standing debate on the analytics, esthetics, and politics of ethnographic representation. Non-representational theoretical ideas have influenced the way ethnographers tackle important methodological and conceptual undercurrents in their work, such as vitality, performativity, corporeality, sensuality, and mobility. This article aims to capture a few of the characteristics of this constantly evolving non-representational ethnographic style. Non-representational ethnography seeks to cultivate an affinity for the analysis of events, practices, assemblages, structures of feeling, and the backgrounds of everyday life against which relations unfold in their myriad potentials. Non-representational ethnography emphasizes the fleeting, viscous, lively, embodied, material, more-than-human, precognitive, non-discursive dimensions of spatially and temporally complex lifeworlds.

Social Semiotics and Fieldwork: Method and Analytics

Drawing from recent analytical developments in semiotics and postmodern ethnography, this article exposes and assesses the combination of social semiotics and fieldwork as a form of qualitative inquiry. Approaches to semiotics and fieldwork are not new—structural ethnographers in cultural anthropology and structural interactionists in sociology and communication studies have previously laid the foundations for the integration of formal methods of analysis and inductive approaches to data collection—yet, as this article argues, structuralism’s limitations have hampered the growth of semiotics within qualitative inquiry. By presenting social semiotics as a viable alternative to structural semiotics, by describing in clear pedagogical fashion how social semiotics can be used as a research strategy, and by exposing its potential for applicability, this article attempts to bring sociosemiotic ethnography to the forefront of contemporary qualitative inquiry.

The Aroma of Recollection: Olfaction, Nostalgia, and the Shaping of the Sensuous Self

ABSTRACT This study examines olfactory perception and nostalgic memories focusing on sense acts and the sensuous self as a dialectic of ritual sensations and sense-making rituals. Our data are drawn from a convenience sample of twenty-three participants who reflected on their olfactory experiences through the use of research journals. Our analysis illustrates how olfactory perceptions and memories are necessarily produced by active “idealizing activity” that is emergent in sensuous rituals that help maintain self continuity over time. Our focus on olfaction—at the expense of a more multisensory approach focusing on, say, taste and olfaction—contributes to a very small body of sociological (but also a larger body of anthropological) literature on this important but much neglected medium of perception.

Constellations of ferry (im)mobility: islandness as the performance and politics of insulation and isolation

Drawing from three years of fieldwork — including over 250 journeys and about 400 interviews — conducted in ferry-dependent coastal and insular communities of British Columbia, this paper extends the concept of constellation of mobility and provides empirical evidence to argue for its relevance. Coined by Cresswell, the concept of constellations of mobility refers to historically and geographically specific formations of movement inclusive of relational experiences, practices, and politics. By focusing on two of the constitutive parts indicated by Cresswell (experience and route) and a third one originally developed here (remove) ethnographic data description and analysis show how ferry (im)mobility in ferry-dependent communities contributes to spatializing dynamics of insulation and isolation. Positive affective aspects of these spatializations, such as uniqueness and distinction, place-attachment, sense of place, place-identity, safety, connection, and remoteness, as well as negative aspects, such as marginalization, divisiveness, disconnection, fear, and confinement are outlined.

Making Sense of the Weather: Dwelling and Weathering on Canada’s Rain Coast

Drawing on ethnographic data collected throughout British Columbia’s coastal regions, in this article, the authors examine people’s experiences of ordinary weather. Data show how people experience weather multisensorially and how the weather plays a central role in the way individuals and collectives define sense of place. Experiences of weather, the authors argue, are a reflexive and active form of dwelling. A focus on skillful embodied practices and dwelling highlights how weathering is a process through which people make and remake places and shape their sense of self. The authors conceptualize the practice of weathering as a form of somatic work and explain how through somatic work places and weather emerge within a performative ecology of movements.

Sound Acts: Elocution, Somatic Work, and the Performance of Sonic Alignment

Drawing on reflection, nonparticipant and participant observation, and introspection this article examines the performative dimensions of sound, arguing that sounds of both the nonsemioticized and semioticized variety function as acts, not unlike speech acts. Through a layered text, the article offers analytical reflections and evocative writing focused on the exploration of acoustic environments such as movie theatres, airplanes, street music performances, residential neighborhoods, and more. An important material property of sound acts, elocution, is identified, conceptualized, and examined. Elocutionary sound acts are also examined as social dramas, insofar as they constitute a crisis-ensuing breach of what the authors refer to as the somatic order. The maintenance of, or alignment on, the rules prevalent within a defined somatic order is also examined and discussed. As a whole, the sensuous performative dynamics that sound acts and somatic alignment entail can be referred to as instances of somatic work.

Doing islandness: a non-representational approach to an island’s sense of place:

This paper presents both an empirical characterization and a theoretical treatment of an island as practice. Through video and ethnographic description we describe and interpret how one kind of islandness is done. Thus we understand islandness corporeally, affectually, practically, intimately, as a visceral experience. Basing our conceptual treatment on the non-representational idea of dwelling, we approach place as a kind of practice. We view the key performances through which an island becomes such as practices of incorporation. Inhabitants, we believe, incorporate a place not by way of mental design or blueprints, or by way of signifying comparisons and juxtapositions, but rather by sheer practical, creative, skillful engagement with its affordances. Thus we understand the practices of an islander as someone who assembles together an island by way of making use of whatever is at hand, solving going concerns as they present themselves.

Making Sense of Domestic Warmth: Affect, Involvement, and Thermoception in Off-grid Homes

Drawing from ethnographic research conducted in Alberta, as well as across multiple sites in Canada, this article describes and discusses the practices and experiences of heating off the grid with renewable resources (i.e. passive solar and wood). Heating with renewable resources is herein examined in order to apprehend the cultural significance of dynamics of corporeal involvement in the process of creating indoor warmth. A distinction between energy for which corporeal involvement is relatively high (hot energy) and relatively low (cool energy) is then made. Off-grid indoor warmth is therefore understood as a hot energy requiring intense involvement. The authors argue that thermoception is a type of affect with catalytic properties.

Performing Taste at Wine Festivals: A Somatic Layered Account of Material Culture

Sensuous scholarship refers to research about the human senses, through the senses, and for the senses. Sensuous scholarship asks us to recognize the meaningfulness of our somatic experience of the world, to understand the skilful activities through which we actively make and remake the world through our senses, and to develop evocative strategies of representation— to write sensuously. In this article, the authors reflect on one particular genre of sensuous scholarship, which they refer to as the somatic layered account. The authors draw upon participant observation data collected at wine festivals at seven sites scattered across western British Columbia and Southern California. The authors examine how people express taste sensations and preferences to others, as well as what role wine’s material properties play in these social dramas. In formulating and developing the concepts of somatic accounts, taste vocabularies, and somatic joint acts, the authors contribute to a growing understanding of the social aspects of the senses and of sensations, as well as how people perceive the material world—and the sense of taste in particular—in active and reflexive ways.

Mind the Gap: The Tempo Rubato of Dwelling in Lineups

Abstract Despite their prominence in everyday life lineups are of peripheral concern to mobility scholars. Aiming to contribute to our existing knowledge on lineups and the transitory places of everyday life writ large, this paper attempts investigates lineups at small island ferry terminals. Drawing upon fieldwork including travel to, on and from ferry boats, for a total of about 250 journeys over three years, and about 400 qualitative interviews, this mobile ethnography focuses on practices of ferry mobility in coastal British Columbia. Lineups are portrayed as complex orchestrations of rest and movement weaved through relational performances of mobility and relative immobility. As neither a place in the sedentarist nor nomadic sense, lineups defeat facile, dichotomous conceptualizations of spatialities and temporalities. Neither still nor flowing, neither public nor private, lineups are animated by idiosyncratic practices of dwelling whereby multiple and unique forms of livelihood are performed. Ferry lineups are ephemeral moorings: places where communities form and dissolve in temporary zones, as if suspended from the regular rhythms of the rest of the day and the week. On small islands lineups exist as stolen time‐spaces – an original concept that draws inspiration from the musical idea of tempo rubato and from Michel de Certeau’s (1984) treatment of tactics.