Phemonenology

Through a focus on the everyday object, this one-day symposium explores both the experience of visual culture in everyday life and the phenomenon of the everyday in visual culture. Drawing on theories of the everyday from such fields as anthropology, phenomenology and sociology, papers will examine the seemingly banal things that formed the culture of daily life, asking: what constitutes an everyday object? How were everyday objects experienced, represented or collected? And how does their study enhance our understanding of the cultural history of early modernity?

Papers by established and emerging scholars will explore the theme of the everyday object in a variety of media, including sculpture, painting, dress, furniture and the graphic arts. Presentations will investigate ephemeral objects, quotidian spaces and habitual activities—from the social rituals of marriage, food consumption and waste disposal, to overlooked ‘things’ like taxidermy, miniature furniture and clothing accessories.

This research presents the development and critical assessment of an Archaeoacoustics Toolbox for Geographic Information Systems (GIS) technology written in the Python programming language, and applies this methodology to cross cultural case studies exploring the importance of soundsheds in an anthropological-archaeological context. As counterpoint to a common critique of experiential theoretical approaches the Soundshed Analysis and Soundshed Analysis-Variable Cover tools provide a replicable means of modeling baseline estimates of the experience of sound. Testing against modern acoustical studies establishing scientific accuracy, and explanations of the sound physics calculations performed by the tools are provided. The tools are then applied to case studies situated in Ancestral Puebloan sites within Chaco Canyon; the Classic Period Maya Kingdom of Copan; and nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Ireland to explore a variety of modeling techniques and culturally-derived inputs. In addition to demonstrating the use of the Archaeoacoustics Toolbox, each of the case studies represents an individual contribution to understanding the importance of what was heard in the past. By incorporating a consideration of landscape acoustics, archaeologists can more fully understand the embodied experience explored through phenomenological, perceptive, and performance-based approaches. A GIS approach to landscape scale archaeoacoustics provides a contextualizing framework by which researchers can
approach auditory hypotheses, explore embodied experience, and listen to what the past is telling us.

Evidence for some ephemeral, Roman, ritual practices, particularly using organic materials, is lost to us. This paper will introduce a case study which has not been previously considered as a platform to explore the material relationships between invertebrates and their use in magical or medicinal practices. Through a combination of discussing the biology and zoogeography of the stag beetle Lucanus cervus, in combination with a phenomenological approach to the topic that considers the beetles as real, living creatures and situates them within a living and changing environment throughout, this paper raises questions about, and adds colour to, our understanding of the potential uses of stag beetles as pendants for such purposes in the Roman world. Experimental investigations using other beetle species were undertaken as part of this investigation to show that there are significant logistical issues which may have been encountered during the preparation of an insect for the purpose of personal adornment. The novel approach adopted in this paper is multidisciplinary, drawing on strands of biology, archaeoentomology, materiality, and sensory archaeologies, in addition to the experimental reconstructions.

In multidisciplinary research of space and closeness: physicists, linguistics, and psychologists alike have searched for a means of applying topological characteristics in a phenomenological viewing of reality. I argue the underlying topological desire can only subsist in a literary medium but also a means to appreciate it in such a medium.  With Natsume Soseki’s modal concept “F+f”, I’m transgressing the lines of academics while subsisting in the literary world.

This paper is a theoretical investigation into the question of affinity and belonging in everyday life contexts. I argue that Sociology has tended to focus attention on the conceptual binaries of ‘individual/community’ or ‘individual/social structure’ when discussing experiences of inclusion, solidarity or belonging in social life. This has meant that such experiences are generally conceived in terms of ‘a part of’ or ‘apart from’. Such a focus has meant that incidents of belonging or affinity which lie between these extremes and which may be intense, intimate and meaningful, but at the same time fluid, ephemeral or tenuous tend to escape sociological analysis.

Largely inspired by sociological phenomenology, but multi-disciplinary in nature, this paper will try to address this issue by positing ‘resonance’ as a useful concept by which sociologists and social scientists more generally, can engage with the more fluid forms of belonging and affinity achieved in everyday life contexts.

Keywords: resonance; everyday life; intimacy; anonymity; collective effervescence; communitas; Durkheim; affect; Schutz; Ingold.