Defensor Universitario

Moments of Incommensurability.

1.1 Ethnographic Moments: Points of First Contact

I was told before entering “the field” that I would “come back” to write up my PhD with a radically different set of notes to the one I was expecting to gather. This a “rite of passage”, an experience of losing and finding myself in the immersive experience of ethnography. I also once heard, again in the halls of the academy, that anthropologists spend most of their time trying to understand the first two days of fieldwork⁴⁷. This dazzling immersion, where all sense of normativity, assumed values and ways of doing and being are suddenly and dramatically re-orientated, gives rise to a “need to understand” (Strathern 1996:6). Reading Strathern’s “need to understand”, we can start to understand how “writing begins in the field” (ibid).

The ethnographic moment is a relation in the same way as a linguistic sign can be thought of as a relation (joining signifier and signified).

We could say that the ethnographic moment works as an example of a relation which joins, the understood (what is analysed 'at the moment of observation) 'to the need to understand (what is observed at the moment, of analysis) (ibid)

I can look at my thesis in its structure and focus and ask, what is it that informs this

“ethnographic moment”? What, in my immersion into the field, out there, gave rise to a dazzling disjuncture of meaning that results in a moment? A moment that will be pulled apart, set out as a point at which values, meanings and ways of being are so different to the ones we are familiar with that it creates a disjuncture, a need to understand that is productive of “good anthropology”.

Answering this question I can locate three points at which a disjuncture where a “need to understand” arose that dominate this thesis. Firstly, there is my immersion into the

47 This has been attributed to Clifford Geertz, but I cannot find a reference so I’ll attribute the sound bite to Paul Twin (2013 per coms).

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PhD programme itself as I regained the language and customs of academic practice after a few years away. I joined the Adaptable Suburbs Project (ASP), which based out of UCL’s Architecture department, the Bartlett, used a particular form of methodological⁴⁸ analysis and approach which took some learning. However, whilst there was a jolt, in its very newness this jolt was simply a moment. It became ethnographic when I started to realise I needed to ask more pertinent questions of the project’s aims in order to help answer them.

I will return to this later, but first I will introduce the second moment. This moment arose when I walked into the back of a pub in suburban London, in the first two days of my fieldwork, where a small group of people, who call themselves “The Seething Villagers” or “Seethingers”, had dedicated their weekend to crafting sculptures of oversized lamps, fish and giants from wicker, crepe paper and other materials (Figure 5).

I was welcomed but confused amidst an array of local phrases, jokes and stories that form a large part of this PhDs content⁴⁹⁵⁰. However, before elaborating on either of these moments I wish to draw attention to the third ethnographic moment.

Figure 5: Crafting Seething

48 See chapter 2 and Appendix.

49 Particularly chapter 3.

50 I had the sense this would be the case on that day.

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In this moment the ASP, of which I was a part, came to meet, through a map, the Villagers, my “local-enthusiast” informants. This moment serves as both an entry point to the thesis and as a key ethnographic moment from which the following chapters emerge. This moment reflected my ethnographic focus back on the ASP in order to ascertain why “the moment” occurred as it did. Further, I aimed to understand “the moment” from within a constellation of both the ASP and the local informants simultaneously. I wanted to know how each side of this equation worked, why a map existed and why was it incommensurable with the very data it set out to gain?

This chapter is an anthropological study of the moments through which commensurate totalities are established. That is, just as Strathern argues that we have an “ethnographic moment” where we are dazzled by disjunctures of meaning and ways of being that give rise to the anthropological discipline itself, I argue that it is these moments which form the very basis and the need for anthropology. Through paying attention not to radically different worlds but rather to the politics of the moments between social projects, we are able to locate the mechanisms through which harm and loss endure. I argue it is the moments of difference that matter in that this is where the terms of existence are set out. This occurs not just at dramatic anthropological moments of ontological clash, but in everyday moments of living, all the time. The material registers through which we live are constantly shifting, moving, being performed and are up for grabs. How precisely a sound “whole” of meaning is established in a world of poly possibility is a question I am interested in.

Using Foucault’s notion of “ethical substance” - defined as that which constitutes the prime material of ethical conduct, or that in oneself which produces the imperative to act in a certain way - this chapter looks at a moment when two social projects with different ethical commitments meet.

For Foucault, ethical substance is whatever stuff – cognitive, emotional, physical, or what-not – it is; that is, the object at once of conscious consideration and of those labours required to realize a systematic ethical end, which is to say the being of a subject of a certain qualitative kind (Foubion 2012:72)

It is this commitment to the ethical substance of a social project which forecloses the socially inconceivable - it defines socially legitimate action and that which is not legitimate in the self and the other. It is at a moment of disjuncture, a meeting of

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incommensurate ethical commitments that the gap between social projects is maintained, yet they remain in relation.

This chapter describes how two social projects briefly overlapped through an online digital mapping interface. Both projects, I argue, are interested in the crafting and understanding of the material landscape in order to produce and extend the productiveness of that landscape in relation to their own moral projects. Whilst both projects are interested in the same material landscapes, but with different, yet overlapping, values, it is the map, and my position as ethnographer, which provides an opportunity to see how the establishment of legitimacy occurs through interaction and non-interaction, visibility and non-visibility. That is, both projects are ongoing, unfolding and aim to establish coherency and universality within their articulation of the socio-material landscape. The map, and the discussion of what is, or is not on it, affords the opportunity to reflect on the mechanisms of both social projects, and moments of meeting between them.