Sensing the Everyday

Sensing the Everyday is a multi-sited ethnographic inquiry based on fieldwork experiences and sharp everyday observations in the era of crisis. Blending sophisticated theoretical analyses with original ethnographic data, C. Nadia Seremetakis journeys from Greece to Vienna, Edinburgh, Albania, Ireland, and beyond. Social crisis is seen through its transnational multiplication of borders, thresholds and margins, divisions, and localities as linguistic, bodily, sensory, and performative sites of the quotidian in process. The book proposes everyday life not as a sanctuary or as a recessed zone distanced from the structural violence of the state and the market, but as a condition of im/possibility, unable to be lived as such, yet still an encapsulating habitus. There the impossibility of the quotidian is concretized as fragmentary and fragmenting material forces. Seremetakis weaves together topics as diverse as borders and bodies, history and death, the earth and the senses, language and affect, violence and public culture, the sociality of dreaming, and the spatialization of the traumatic, in a journey through antiphonic witnessing and memory. Her montage explores various ways of juxtaposing reality with the irreal and the imaginal to expose the fictioning of social reality. The book locates her approach to ethnography and the ‘native ethnographer’ in wider anthropological and philosophical debates, and proposes a dialogical interfacing of theory and practice, the translation of academic knowledge to public knowledg

Sensing the Everyday

Sensing the Everyday is a multi-sited ethnographic inquiry based on fieldwork experiences and sharp everyday observations in the era of crisis. Blending sophisticated theoretical analyses with original ethnographic data, C. Nadia Seremetakis journeys from Greece to Vienna, Edinburgh, Albania, Ireland, and beyond. Social crisis is seen through its transnational multiplication of borders, thresholds and margins, divisions, and localities as linguistic, bodily, sensory, and performative sites of the quotidian in process. The book proposes everyday life not as a sanctuary or as a recessed zone distanced from the structural violence of the state and the market, but as a condition of im/possibility, unable to be lived as such, yet still an encapsulating habitus. There the impossibility of the quotidian is concretized as fragmentary and fragmenting material forces. Seremetakis weaves together topics as diverse as borders and bodies, history and death, the earth and the senses, language and affect, violence and public culture, the sociality of dreaming, and the spatialization of the traumatic, in a journey through antiphonic witnessing and memory. Her montage explores various ways of juxtaposing reality with the irreal and the imaginal to expose the fictioning of social reality. The book locates her approach to ethnography and the ‘native ethnographer’ in wider anthropological and philosophical debates, and proposes a dialogical interfacing of theory and practice, the translation of academic knowledge to public knowledg

An introduction to cultural anthropology/ by C. Nadia Seremetakis.

This book engages young scholars, teachers and students in a critical dialogue with past and present directions in cultural-historical studies. More particularly, it prepares prospective anthropologists, as well as readers interested in human cultures for understanding basic theoretical and methodological ethnographic principles and pursuing further what has been known as cultural anthropological perspectives. The book discusses key, field-based studies in the discipline and places them in dialogue with related studies in social history, linguistics, philosophy, literature, and photography, am.Introduction; Part I: Exploring Cultures; Chapter One; Part II: Writing the Other; Chapter Two; Chapter Three; Chapter Four; Chapter Five; Part III: Reading the Other or On Visual Communication; Chapter Six; Chapter Seven; Chapter Eight; Chapter Nine; Part IV: Institution versus Meaning; Chapter Ten; Part V: Economy and Exchange; Chapter Eleven; Part VI: Signs, Communication, and Performance; Chapter Twelve; Chapter Thirteen; Chapter Fourteen; Part VII: Cognitive Systems; Chapter Fifteen; Chapter Sixteen; Part VIII: Symbolic Systems; Chapter Seventeen; Chapter EighteenPart IX: Ritual PassageChapter Nineteen; Chapter Twenty; Intersection; Part X: Gender and the Cultural Construction of Difference; Chapter Twenty One; Chapter Twenty Two; Chapter Twenty Three; Part XI: Emotions and the Senses; Chapter Twenty Four; Chapter Twenty Five; Author Index1 online resource

The Memory of the Senses. Marks of the Transitory

The article is a part of a book edited by Nadia Seremetakis, Perception and Memory as Material Culture in Modernity. The author considers connections between senses, culture, memory and identity. Referring to the example of a particular sensory experience from her Greek homeland, she shows what happens when perception and memory are globalized through transnational regulations and standards, as well as the homogenization of material culture