Carrying as a method: Taking the body as an archive
Abstract:
This article discusses the concept of "carrying" as an important factor affecting research practice. As researchers, we actually carry sound, beauty, trauma and distress. Researchers are vectors in a dual sense. First of all, our life trajectory embodies and influences us. Our research is a current world, which is intertwined with all aspects of our lives. Second, we become carriers by activating the relationship between research and materials. Researchers carry concrete history, confusion, dreams, and materials in specific social structures. Carrying a physical resonance that involves space, technology, and body.
Author profile:
Nirmal Puwar
Goldsmiths, University of London
Literature source:
Body Society. 2021. 27(1): 3-26
This article author: Nimal Puwar
Introduction: Things we carry
In "What they carry" (1990), Tim O’Brien created a storytelling technique as a North American Vietnam veteran. Through a series of interrelated character descriptions, he draws attention to what soldiers carry with them. This includes material objects, physical illnesses, and mixed emotions, all of which will be throughout the study. And academic and artistic works focus on what people carry. This includes physical objects, body marks and traces, and contradictory feelings; hope, fear, dreams and nightmares (Berger and Mohr, 2010 [1975])
Researchers also carry concrete history, obsessions, dreams and materials in specific social structures. Carrying can be understood as a metaphor that provides miniature theories, as sound theorist Martin Daughtry said, in uterus we can rethink and perceive the world (2017:48). This article specifically discusses the processes required to conduct research across generations, across time and space, including the use of the body as an archive. This article mainly discusses the relationship between generations and the archives it brings, the archive resources brought by life experiences to research practice, and the impact of physical memory on research.
Profiles between generations can be carried by searching in paper archives, or other types of archives can be found in the form of records, music, cooking, objects, scenery, architecture, feeling and body. Research often constitutes a subconscious exploration of intergenerational connections. Connections are built in the way we seek to communicate. The text, images and recordings in the archive are fragments of memory that can affect the bodies of scholars exploring in the archive. Searches of archives are intertwined emotionally and politically. This section reflects how intergenerational inheritance occurs through the relationships we look for and build in the archives, which involve paper, objects, bodies, sounds, feelings, and all relationships.
There is a relationship between the body and the archives. We bring our own bodies in and out of the archives as researchers with our relationship with the bodies we are looking for. The body of the researcher itself is an archive of history and labor. The emotional response to the archive is part of the scholarship, just like the analysis of the emotional records of the documents that end up in the archive. Emotion is accompanied by the composition of archives and also by our searches between archive materials. In The Scenery of Good Women (1986), Steedman mentions that when she heard the hard work of her mother in her family’s family’s mother in childhood, she found herself crying in the archives, who left home at a very young age to work and live in a distant city. Among the sporadic archival fragments, their labor and living conditions are closer to Steedman.
Life and research
Social and political events will affect our research direction, and so will the research focus of funding institutions. The biographical characteristics of researchers' lives can also be the center of time and rhythm, from when we start a research topic to how quickly it proceeds.
Yasmin Gunaratnam (2013) began her study of hospice care after her mother died of cancer, and her father had just passed away. She was forced to deal with and understand hospice care, pursued her PhD in the field, and carried out several related projects. Biography can also affect the time difference between research and publication of a certain topic. About 20 years after Gunaratnam started the project, she published Death and Immigration (2013). It’s hard for her to finish the book faster because the essence of a dying story is to…spend time to live with the story (2013:20).
Body Memory
As Emil Durkheim admitted, body memory is a vibrant ritual (see Narvaez, 2006). Pierre Bourdieu (Pierre Bourdieu, 1990) calls doxa a deep structure of embodied personality. These are learned not just through thinking, but through physical knowledge. We gain a practical feeling through our physical efforts. Therefore, the body has memory through its behavior. The body has an archive that is contained in a habit. If we regard habits as the embodiment of history (1990:190), it is a physical archive of habits that are deposited in past trajectories, which we often unconsciously activate through knowledge. When the body moves, knowledge is generated.
Michel De Certeau et al. (1998) mentioned that Burdieu did not pay attention to women who did enough in daily life. In "Practice of Daily Life" (Volume II), they focus on cooking practice, which can be used as a daily gesture that can be filled with body memory, rhythm and movement:
"Whether it is using tools (cutting onions with a knife) or bare hands (kneading dough), this technical movement requires the mobilization of the entire body, which is achieved through the movement of hands and arms. Sometimes the entire body must swing rhythmically with the rhythm of continuous efforts required by the task at hand." (1998: 202)
Food and Music
If we regard the body as an archive, it is the accumulation and solidification of physiological, social and ecological trajectories. Songs and music have the potential to slow cognitive impairment , especially dementia. The same is true for food, and the taste and smell of family food is a source of comfort and communication in later life (Lee, 2000), activated in the life history of disease management (Ferzacca, 2004). In the field of dementia research, it is often noted that the onset of dementia is similar to persistent bereavement. As nerve damage develops, people will deform and begin to disappear. Over time, people with dementia may not recognize who their partner, children, and close people are. However, dementia is not a zero-sum game. This phenomenon of neurodiversity exists on an uneven plane.
Even in the late stages of Alzheimer's disease , musical memory is often maintained. Although episodic memory deteriorates, procedural memory remains. Music is stored in program memory, associated with repetition and muscle memory, providing us with opportunities to communicate with those suffering from dementia (Aldridge, 2000, 2005). Listening to music can promote involuntary autobiographical memory. Thus, as a practice, music provides a range of affirmation and relationship connections. A awakening of awakening proved to be a response to prominent autobiographical songs.
Summary of carrying as a method
This article uses the concept of carrying to understand:
1. Carrying is reflected in intergenerational communication, in archives of articles, culture, voice and physical contact.
2. Carrying occurs over the entire life process with the change of time dimensions.
3. Carrying is a network across space, for example, transnational and diaspora.
4. Carrying a methodological encounter woven into a methodological encounter, usually as a link between life and research.
compilation | Huai Shu
review | Shed Xue
final review | Krystal
©Sociology Theory Journal
"Looking" Give me a little yellow flower
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