Feeling Fieldwork: Affectivity, Co-creativity, and Multimodality in Ethnographic Music Production

I was very happy to have the chance to think about how music production has informed my ethnographic work in a blog post I wrote for the Committee for the Anthropology of Science, Technology & Computing Platypus Blog. Below is the abstract and link for both the article and song I wrote and co-produced with a research participant in Norway last year:

While anthropological research methods have often focused on cataloging ethnographic moments through field notes and interviews, most ethnographers will agree that the written word can’t quite capture what it feels like to be in the field. As a musician, filmmaker, and producer in my work alongside anthropology, I decided to explore how skills associated with my songwriting and sound engineering might further explicate the effervescent quality of what fieldwork feels like on an embodied register.

https://blog.castac.org/2023/11/feeling-fieldwork-affectivity-co-creativity-and-multimodality-in-ethnographic-music-production/

Anthropology News photo essay: Ten Tears After Terror

I was honored to have had the chance to reflect on the July 22nd attacks in Norway through a tour at Utøya with Norwegian folk high schools students. The link to the photo essay I wrote from the day of our tour is here.

Society for the Anthropology of Religion Biennial Conference Abstract

I’m thrilled to be presenting at SAR 2023 at the University of Victoria in Victoria, CA this May. The following is the abstract for my paper:

This paper explores the role Lutheran ritual plays in value formation in Norwegian folk high school education. Folk high schools offer students one year programs that are designed to instill Scandinavian values in young adult students before they attend higher education or enter the workforce. Drawing upon fifteen months of ethnographic work at a folk high school in south-eastern Norway, I assess how Lutheran masses held on campus were designed to bring forth one of the folk high school’s five core values, opplevelse (experience), by inviting all students and staff, irrespective of their personal relationships with Christian faith, to participate. Despite the majority of students self-identifying as “not Christian”, most of them voluntarily attended, and actively participated in, these services. This paper argues that despite prevailing stereotypes of Norwegians being predominately secular, the “hidden sacrality” of Norwegian political and social life was made visible by Lutheran rituals at the state-sponsored Christian folk high school where I conducted my ethnographic research. I argue that Christian practice, and belief, in Norway are on a continuum, and that these rituals reveal entanglements between the secular and the sacred that invites further exploration of the role Christianity plays in value formations that emerge in both Norwegian statecraft and in Norwegian social life. I suggest that this experience of lived religious practice in Norway problematizes the distinctions that have been made between secularism and Christianity in Scandinavia, and reflects tensions that emerge in a range of social and political contexts in “secular” societies more broadly.

Atelier: Creative Arts and Social Sciences Network Grant and Abstract

I was recently awarded a grant from the Atelier: Creative Arts and Social Sciences Network at the University of Edinburgh to assist with my doctoral research. The abstract for my project is detailed below.

This project will utilize creative and collaborative anthropological methodology to explore how Norwegian values relating to secularity, egalitarianism, and environmentalism emerge in alternative education in southern Norway. Norwegian Folkehøgskoler (‘folk high schools’), funded in part by the Norwegian government, are boarding schools where young adult students voluntarily spend a year enrolled in ungraded coursework relating to creative arts, sports, or travel. These schools, designed in the 1840s by theologian N.F.S. Grundtvig, offer an alternative pedagogical model for ‘life-long learning’ that was created in order to transmit cultural and social values to working-class Scandinavians (Stråth 2018). While folk high schools were originally founded on Lutheran values, Norwegian folk high schools today are categorized as either ‘Christian’ or ‘secular’, a classification that demonstrates how Norwegians view the distinction between Christian and secular identities in a broader social context. Currently, many folk high schools are implementing new tools for environmentally-conscious practices as young Norwegians are becoming increasingly concerned with adopting behaviours that mitigate the effects of the climate crisis. For this project, I will work with secular folk high school students to co-create a multi-modal ethnographic piece that will incorporate sound, film, and mixed media projects that will culminate in an exhibit at the end of the school year open to the public. By assessing how social and material forms emerge through co-creation at folk high schools, I will investigate how Norwegian values are received, negotiated, and reconstructed by students as they imagine their futures during a time of social, political, and ecological change. 

Princeton University's "Imagining Radical Futures" Conference Abstract

The Nordic model has implemented some of the highest standards of living on the planet. While the Norwegian state has mitigated physical pain and suffering through its social welfare programs, it has failed to circumvent psychological or social pain for its citizens as indicated by high indexes of anxiety, depression, and loneliness in Norwegians. Christian youth communities, particularly in the southern and western regions of the country, however, provide an alternative to the impersonality of the Norwegian state by creating localities where relationships formed around shared goals flourish. Drawing from the field research I conducted at a Christian summer youth camp in southern Norway in 2017, I suggest that high standards of living in Norway have fomented competition, self-reliance, and isolation for many of the young Norwegians I studied, but the localized Christian communities they participate in offer them spaces for mutuality, vulnerability, and relationship. In imagining futures concerning “the good life,” I argue that these localities, and others like them, will provide avenues for generating purpose, meaning, and community in increasingly disintegrated social worlds. I also suggest that anthropology can benefit from aspects of theological discourse, particularly those concerning ethnographic-engagement with religious communities, as anthropologists interact with ontologies that call for different ways of qualifying an “anthropology of the good.”

"On Knowing Humanity" Journal Article Abstract

The Threat of Ambiguity: Risk and Faith in Relational Ethnography and Interdisciplinary Dialogue

Below is the abstract for an article I wrote for the On Knowing Humanity Journal during my masters of Theological and Cultural Anthropology from Eastern University. My ethnographic work associated with the article was supported by a grant from the John Templeton Foundation.

Mary Douglas has identified the discomfort people feel in circumstances of ambiguity. For social groups, both informal and institutionalized, the wish for what Douglas calls “hard lines and clear concepts” (1966: 200) can create in-groups that are self-referential and oppressive. While boundaries are integral to any community, I suggest that social groups must interact with one another with a sense of ontological permeability that is rooted in dialogical relationship in order to both transcend and affirm their boundaries appropriately. The same is true between ethnographers and those they study. In this paper, I will draw on a conversation I had with several young Norwegian Christians I interviewed during field research conducted at the Grimstad Bible School in Southern Norway to illustrate how reflexive ethnography and transcultural dialogue can be conducted with a sense of both risk and faith. I will also argue that both ethnographic work and interdisciplinary discourse can benefit from creating permeable boundaries, and that in order to do so, academics from all disciplines will need to let go of the myth of objective reporting and embrace the possibility of finding a sense of what John Milbank would call moving from “unity to difference” and back.