Immortal Mortality
To make the analogy of a book, one chapter is about to come to an end and others are about to take form. I am here referring to the big chunk of fieldwork underpinning my research in the first instance; those constituting my doctoral thesis in the latter. While still much in the process of working my way through the experiences that I have had this year, I have quite a good sense of the matters and encounters that represent the core of my research. In other words, of what will come to materialize as the emphasis thereof. I have so — a good sense that is — as I throughout my fieldwork habitually have engaged my material analytically. It has namely been an intrinsic part of my research process to on a regular basis try to understand that which I have experienced at once from a contextual and broader perspective, from an insider and outsider point of knowing and doing, from a particular and general stance of becoming. One could without hesitation denote that I take serious the process of doing and thinking ethnographic work both while participating in and writing about the lived realities of interest. For, though we ethnographers momentarily detangle ourself from our research interest, such as when making etic analyses, our work yet occur much wrapped up in the narratives we care to portray. Hence the importance to consider such dynamics through and through.
That noted, this post introduces one of the chapters about to come into being; namely, that of Immortal Mortality. In this channel, as opposed to that of my forthcoming thesis, it does so more photographically than textually, however nonetheless ethnographically. What follows are a selection of roughly 60 photos taken throughout the year which separately and collectively hints corresponding histories, industries, and imaginaries of the olive plant. Key to the chapter — let alone to this post — is to think with how a supposedly immortal plant paved way for the mortality of an industry. A subsequent objective is to consider relational realities of living and dying (as opposed to consider dichotomous understandings of life and death).
