Andrew Irving
Concordia University, Canada
Absence and Imagination
A central problem facing anthropologists during fieldwork, especially when considering the centrality of sense, memory and imagination to people’s lives, is how to access the imaginary given there is no independent access to consciousness or experience. This paper attempts to bring the imaginary to life and make a ‘map’ of different cities, including New York, Montreal, London and Kampala, through their emotions and memories in the pursuit of a better understanding of how experiences of illness, displacement and death are inscribed into the urban imagination. By blurring the lines between ethnography, art and performance, it uses the influence of performance artists to create ethnographic-mnemonic contexts that are ‘already underway’ but would not exist without the intervention of the anthropologist or people’s willingness to inhabit different roles. Establishing these kinds of staged encounters with the city potentially opens up different kinds of dialogue between people, their bodies and their surroundings; as events happen and dramas unfold, habitual roles are recast and the field is ‘made-strange’, thereby creating the possibility for different types of intentionality, interaction and self-understanding through performance, self-representation and the textualisation of being. By accompanying people on their performative journeys around the city a secondary memory materialises whereby we gain a ‘sense’ of how life is mediated by interior dialogue, reverie and memory.
*See excerpt below from ‘Ethnography, Art and Death’
