Corre[o]graphy
One of the earliest posts published here at my website, the one of Mapped Encounters, concerns a great interest of mine, namely, as hinted by its heading, practices of mappings and the critical, in my case also the much anthropological and ethnographic laden, engagement of their—the practices and the mappings that is—come abouts, relevancies and ramifications. I declare in that post, linked here, my fondness of untangling matters of the contextually entangled so to probe the spatiotemporal, situated and relational dimensions of occurrences and becomings, scales and orderings, particularities and generalities, matters and movements, histories and compositions, presences and absences. Therein, I denote that my interest doing so is to at once diffract and put into perspective the significances of given categorical and classificatory sets of cataloguing, thinking simultaneously with the components they entail and those which they reject, the boundaries they advance and the structures they enact, the knowledges they stem from and the practices they reinforce, the bodies they concern and the forms they flesh out, the differences they create and the matters such differentiations imply (see Barad 2007 and Haraway 1997 for notes on the concept of diffraction such as related to matters of feminist standpoint theory and human–beyond human worldlings).
This post continues such thoughts, and with my now five more months of fieldwork conducted, it specifies a sort of conceptual epiphany that I got during one of my walks through some orchards here in Ostuni earlier this week; one correlating my being here and my processual working with this research project, such as my continuous ambition to tease out a context-laden analytical concept from my experiences for framing the matters transpiring through them. Rough in its becoming as this conceptual framing of my research still is, the fact that it occurs fundamentally grounded in my fieldworking experiences and intricately entwined with the anthropological queries that I through this fieldwork explores, it simultaneously composes and mobilizes an intriguing analytical and methodological toolbox for me to 1) correlate the multiple and multiscaled dynamics that I by means of this research partake of and 2) narrate such findings correspondingly to the settings in which the research takes place and the contexts with which it is concerned (including that of academia).
Corre[o]graphy! The thought hit like a bolt from the blue. But also not, for I was during the occurrence of this thought surrounded by olive orchards, and having spent almost six months conducting fieldwork about olive cultivation and the becoming of olive oil production here in Apulia—myself everyday being immersed in environments of olive plants, many secular and millennial in kind with peculiarly dancingly body sculptured formed trunks, and sensuously imbued in practices of olive cultivation and olive oil extraction, and on a daily basis thinking critically and carefully about each and every encounter that I have (had) along the process—well, perhaps the bolt rather came from my embodied and emplaced experience than out of the blue. Nonetheless, it struck like a bolt and it felt so obvious when it did, for, playing on the writings of correspondence such as framed in the work of Ingold (2021) and that of cartography by Dolphijn and van der Tuin (2012), analytically gathering the practice of choreography as a specified body-motion-physical-sequential-part-to-the-whole art generally, and with the arts of noticing by Tsing (2015) particularly, connecting the various bodies related to my research per se and the bodies of knowledge influencing their becoming in time and space, and thinking with ontogenies of sorts such as denoted by Haraway (2016), Barad (2007), and Strathern (1995), it methodologically, analytically and ethnographically captures the multiscaled assemblages (Deleuze and Guattari 1987; Palsson and Swanson 2016; Tsing 2015), the response-abilities (Haraway 2008), and the human–beyond human matters that I through my much photographic laden research aim to make sense of through my undertaking of sensuous scholarship (Pink 2015; Stoller 1989; van Ede 2009). The conceptual framing with the [o] within brackets hints, beyond the inspirational foundations outlined above, and some which I have not outlined here but indeed pinned to my vivid mind-map-wall, a framing with open ends that occurs relatively approached by photographic means and moving arts and centered on the becoming of things. In sum, I seek through this conceptual framing to curiously and critically explore the corresponding bodies and ontogenesis of sorts mattering in the becoming of olive oil through spatiotemporal engagements; to account for the mappings it correlates as well as those of my own endeavors; to attend to the corporeal flows of others by means of that of my own embodied figure; to think with the situated presences of the matters of concern and to correspondingly do so through a diffractive and ethnographic anthropological lens.
All of the below visuals are from this week, and gathered here, they collectively enhance a particular corre[o]graphy that my research concerns, namely one of rooted growth.
Moved through growth in time and space as trunks become, re(as)sembling sculptural danced bodies of sorts, I have with encounters like these become curious about the corre[o]graphy of their forms: what caused them to grow this way and what may through a corre[o]graphic engagement of their occurrence transpire?
Well, briefly regarded, a qualified guess on my behalf, stemming from hours and hours of practicing sensuous arts of noticing, attuning my body and rhythm following the movements of hundreds and hundreds of olive plants throughout the region of Puglia, going close up, touching and allowing myself to wondrously be touched by them, I gathered that the underground parts, once rooted underneath the soils, which much like the bush growth of olive plants occurs branched, through time grows upward, creating marvelous trunks with their sort of apart-grown-together configurative flow. Several ideas have occurred to me with regards to what forces, or lack thereof, that may or may not have correlated these bushes growing treed, such as a result of human cultivation and olive oil production; I have imagined how non-pruned suckers, such as those visible in the humanly abandoned orchard of the photo just up to the right, in their gathered configuration through centuries of growth become the remarkable bodies of trunks so common in this landscape; I have wondered about effects of micro and macro climates and how weathering and wearing marked correspondences of sorts onto these lastings of that which occurred through their lifetime standing rooted in these grounds; I have figured that events similarly to the concurrent presence of Xylella fastidiosa through histories of territorial becomings have shaped the landscape to current states; I have become aware of how spatiotemporal concerns of olive cultivation, such as practices of domestication and plantation strategies, through legacies of practitioners shaped the rooted matters of olive oiled ontogenies to become the way they have; I am curious to corre[o]graphically explore how olived things in this place continuously matters.
Rubbled Moves,
Rooted Modes
ROOTS & ROUTES
On my move exploring stories of the becoming (or not) of olive oil here in Apulia, I fieldwork my way through olive growths once in being and the beings now growing in its place. Many orchards stand lush also void of human cultivation, others uprooted to pave way for new cultivations; some occur brimful with diverse food crops, such as with pepperoncini, others newly olive planted, such as with the bacterium resistance olive variety of FS-17.
References
Barad, Karen. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press.
Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. London: Continuum.
Dolphijn, Rick and van der Tuin, Iris. 2012. New Materialism: Interviews & Cartographies. Ann Arbor: Open Humanities Press.
Haraway, Donna J. 2016. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press.
——, Donna J. 2008. When species meet . Minneapolis, MN : University of Minnesota Press.
——, Donna J. 1997. Modest_Witness@Second_Millenium. FemaleMan©_Meets_OncoMouse™: Feminism and Technoscience. New York: Routledge.
Ingold, Tim. 2021. Correspondences. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Palsson, Gíli and Swanson, Heather A. 2016. Down to Earth: Geosocialities and Geopolitics. Environmental Humanities 8 (2): 149-171.
Pink, Sarah. 2015. Doing Sensory Ethnography. 2nd ed. London: Sage Publication Ltd.
Stoller, Paul. 1989. The Taste of Ethnographic Things. The Senses in Anthropology. Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press.
Strathern, Marilyn. 1995. The Relation: Issues in Complexity and Scale. Cambridge: Prickly Pear Press.
Tsing, Anna L. 2015. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
van Ede, Yolanda. 2009. Sensuous Anthropology: Sense and Sensibility and the Rehabilitation of skill. Anthropological Notebooks 15 (2): 61-75.
