{"title":"Touch in digitalized worlds: An introduction","authors":"Tuva Beyer Broch, Saiba Varma","doi":"10.1111/anoc.12239","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/anoc.12239","url":null,"abstract":"<p>The English word digital (from the Latin, digitus) etymologically connects both fingers and technologies. In this special issue, we honor this dual meaning of the digital by foregrounding how living in a digital era both challenges and actualizes our senses, particularly our sense of touch. Ethnographically, the articles gathered offer intimate accounts of tactile experiences that intertwine with the digital in both direct and indirect ways. Despite ongoing—and often legitimate—anxieties about the disappearance of touch from our increasingly digitized world, our special issue shows that human engagements with digital technologies are more complex. We theorize touch through a phenomenological and relational lens and as a sensory experience that is deeply shaped and reconfigured by local, sociotechnical and political-economic concerns. This special issue illuminates how attention to hands, fingers, or touch can help us understand the relationship between bodies, ethical life, social relations, selves, and subjectivities through a new lens.</p>","PeriodicalId":42514,"journal":{"name":"ANTHROPOLOGY OF CONSCIOUSNESS","volume":"35 2","pages":"136-149"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2024-08-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/anoc.12239","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142244981","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Hands labouring for safety: Mediated intimacy in influencer communities on Instagram","authors":"Marie Heřmanová","doi":"10.1111/anoc.12238","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/anoc.12238","url":null,"abstract":"<p>The article explores how digital images of hands are used as a symbolic representation of intimacy and intimate emotions in influencer communication on Instagram. Based on digital ethnography with female influencers in the Czech Republic, the analysis focuses on three categories of communicative practices, where hands function as a visual representation of intimacy—creating community, a sense of vulnerability, and the notion of rawness and openness. The analysis points to the gendered nature of influencer communication. It explores how intimacy is established specifically by women influencers who need to navigate vulnerability with the need to protect themselves against gender-based online violence in the form of hate comments and sexualized hate speech.</p>","PeriodicalId":42514,"journal":{"name":"ANTHROPOLOGY OF CONSCIOUSNESS","volume":"35 2","pages":"186-200"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2024-08-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/anoc.12238","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142244980","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"“All that is dark, potential, and quiet”: Riding the hinge in the witch's dance","authors":"Jacquelyn Marie Shannon","doi":"10.1111/anoc.12235","DOIUrl":"10.1111/anoc.12235","url":null,"abstract":"<p>In this paper, I analyze the witch's dance through the lens of Jahra “Rager” Wasasala's <i>bloo/d/runk</i> (2016) and Liz Lerman's <i>Wicked Bodies</i> (2020) whose invocation of the witch through the moving body, I argue, goes beyond merely metaphorical or esthetic applications, but enacts a certain dramaturgical function as a hinging threshold, a dynamic site of negotiation between material and immaterial forces. In my analysis, I sketch the contours of a hinge-analytic called “riding the hinge,” seeking suspension in the hinges of performance in order to account for how invisible forces assume presence on stage through the figure of the witch as she dances. “Riding the hinge,” I argue, is a practice performed by choreographers who engage the transformational presencing power of the body of the witch in performance, as well as a critical methodology for analyzing such works.</p>","PeriodicalId":42514,"journal":{"name":"ANTHROPOLOGY OF CONSCIOUSNESS","volume":"36 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2024-08-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141922514","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The datafied hand in our health","authors":"Kalindi Vora","doi":"10.1111/anoc.12237","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/anoc.12237","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This article looks at a smart ring as a window into how contemporary datafication in fitness and medical wearables is informed by the longer history of notions of fitness and the datafication of health within the practice of medicine. After introducing some of the concerns arising from the history of eugenics, specifically out of disability studies critiques, and the more recent organizing of health through data-driven algorithmic medicine, as well as discussing the difference between non-optional wearables and their use as part of transhumanism, I briefly consider how wearables could be a site of intervention, to seize rather than relinquish power over our datafied bodies.</p>","PeriodicalId":42514,"journal":{"name":"ANTHROPOLOGY OF CONSCIOUSNESS","volume":"35 2","pages":"150-158"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2024-08-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142244605","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Holding slow time while scrolling fast: Young minds, handmade materialities, and imagination in the digital era","authors":"Tuva Beyer Broch","doi":"10.1111/anoc.12234","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/anoc.12234","url":null,"abstract":"<p>The digital era in which we live has led to countless online social movements, all driven by emotions. This paper builds on fieldwork that stretched over 2 years, starting March 2020 as Norway went into lockdown due to COVID-19. Emotions as experienced online seem to differ from those that are materially embodied or physically present among the studies' 25 young adults. Through two young women, this paper explores reflections on slow writing, holding a letter in their hands, in juxtaposition to fast scrolling on their phones, receiving and sending messages and pictures. In the meetings between their hands and paper, their hands, and their phone screens, they sense time and experience emotions through touch and imaginaries. Amelia and Embla connect mind, body, and senses, as they share their understanding of touching what others have made by hand, imagining the thought behind the embodied materiality.</p>","PeriodicalId":42514,"journal":{"name":"ANTHROPOLOGY OF CONSCIOUSNESS","volume":"35 2","pages":"171-185"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2024-08-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/anoc.12234","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142244468","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The nature of nonduality: The epistemic implications of meditative and psychedelic experiences","authors":"Julien Tempone-Wiltshire, Floren Matthews","doi":"10.1111/anoc.12233","DOIUrl":"10.1111/anoc.12233","url":null,"abstract":"<p>In Jylkkä's (<i>Philosophy and Psychedelics: Frameworks for Exceptional Experience</i>, Bloomsbury Academic, New York, 2022) Mary on Acid: Experiences of unity and the epistemic gap, the author contends that psychedelic experience, by inducing unitary—nondual—experiences of subject–object dissolution, brings to light the epistemic gap between unitary knowledge, constituted by experience, and relational knowledge, distinct from experience. Jylkkä draws a connection between the nondual experience as occasioned through psychedelic usage, and Buddhist contemplative practices. While Jylkkä's attempt to establish a dialogue between analytic philosophy, Buddhism and the science of psychedelics is laudable, we contend that more rigorous attention is required to characterizing nondual experience, the forms of experience occasioned by psychedelic use, and whether they truly constitute parallel to states cultivated through Buddhist practice traditions. While such parallelism may speak to a deeper unification, such a claim requires substantiation to avoid the perennialist eliding of the varied and rich engagement with nonduality across completive traditions. This article highlights the internal tensions that exist surrounding the nature of the nondual as elucidated across Indo-Tibetan traditions, dangers of decontextualizing states induced through culturally embedded contemplative practices including the underrecognized epistemic function of ceremonial ethnomedicine usage in generating Indigenous metaphysics; and the under acknowledged potential of psychedelic substances for attenuating introspective bias in first-person phenomenological inquiry.</p>","PeriodicalId":42514,"journal":{"name":"ANTHROPOLOGY OF CONSCIOUSNESS","volume":"36 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2024-07-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141673766","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Touching food: On finding the tech-tile†","authors":"Krishnendu Ray","doi":"10.1111/anoc.12230","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/anoc.12230","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This article wrestles with the question of the relationship between the digits of our hands and the digital in a dispersed but connected world. What can be held and what fails our grasp in such a universe? How the everyday and habitual skills of cooking and cleaning come into consciousness or vanish into habit, in a constant choreography of remembering and forgetting, with the digital as aid or hindrance. In the process of thinking through posture, gesture, and infrastructure, it reflects on the enduring contemporary challenge of doing ethnographic work at multiple transnational locations, by an ethnographer with a passport that does not travel well, made worse by the restrictions of a pandemic. In the process, it shows how the same hands that can heal, can also hurt.</p>","PeriodicalId":42514,"journal":{"name":"ANTHROPOLOGY OF CONSCIOUSNESS","volume":"35 2","pages":"213-225"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2024-06-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142244806","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Hands in memory and in imagination","authors":"Douglas Hollan","doi":"10.1111/anoc.12231","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/anoc.12231","url":null,"abstract":"<p>We use our hands for many tasks and sensory orientations, including eating, communicating, and bathing. We hold, and manipulate a variety of objects, artifacts, and people, feeling for warmth, coldness, texture, hardness, and softness. We approach people or objects with greetings, embraces, and caresses, and to shove, hit, or defend ourselves against other people and potentially dangerous things. Yet just because our hands play such a central role in so many aspects our lives, they may also play an inordinate role in our memories and imagination. This paper highlights the place of hands in memory and imagination and how these memories and imaginings, in turn, affect not only how we use our hands and for what purposes, but with whom we use them and under what circumstances.</p>","PeriodicalId":42514,"journal":{"name":"ANTHROPOLOGY OF CONSCIOUSNESS","volume":"35 2","pages":"226-233"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2024-06-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/anoc.12231","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142245122","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Attentive hands: The coexistence of digital and analog attentions in children's sports","authors":"Trygve B. Broch","doi":"10.1111/anoc.12232","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/anoc.12232","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Through an extended ethnography of a sports team of boys growing from 7 to 11 years old, I explore Norwegian parents' anxieties about the digital world encroaching on their children's lives. I compare parents' monitoring of their children's (non)digital leisure activities with how kids interact (non)digitally. On the surface, as parents observe how their children's bodies move from screens to sports, they see their kids' attentive hands shifting focus from electronic gaming and screen swiping to a more welcomed ballplaying and high-fiving with nonelectronic teammates. However, close inspection reveals that my interlocutors never completely enter or leave the digital, but dwell within both worlds simultaneously. The result shows the meaning of children sports as changed by the digital, how the digital appears in the foreground or the background of our interactions, and how an emphasis on attentive hands can help unearth how the digital passes through us to constitute our lifeworlds.</p>","PeriodicalId":42514,"journal":{"name":"ANTHROPOLOGY OF CONSCIOUSNESS","volume":"35 2","pages":"159-170"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2024-06-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/anoc.12232","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142245038","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Correction to Experiencing Harpa: Revelatory architecture and the spatial encounter","authors":"","doi":"10.1111/anoc.12227","DOIUrl":"10.1111/anoc.12227","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Thilmany, Drew Nathan. “Experiencing Harpa: Revelatory Architecture and the Spatial Encounter.” <i>Anthropology of Consciousness</i>, vol. 34, no. 2, 2023, pp. 330–60, https://doi.org/10.1111/anoc.12207.</p><p>The last name of the interlocutor Jakob Strømann-Andersen was misspelled as Strohman-Andersen.</p><p>We apologize for this error.</p>","PeriodicalId":42514,"journal":{"name":"ANTHROPOLOGY OF CONSCIOUSNESS","volume":"36 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2024-05-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/anoc.12227","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141106475","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}