{"id":3238,"date":"2024-09-04T11:01:52","date_gmt":"2024-09-04T10:01:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.manchester.ac.uk\/hcri\/?p=3238"},"modified":"2024-09-04T11:34:48","modified_gmt":"2024-09-04T10:34:48","slug":"feeling-notes-by-dr-omer-aijazi","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.manchester.ac.uk\/hcri\/2024\/09\/04\/feeling-notes-by-dr-omer-aijazi\/","title":{"rendered":"Feeling Notes, by Dr Omer Aijazi"},"content":{"rendered":"

The article is by Dr Omer Aijazi, Lecturer in Disasters and Climate Crisis at HCRI and author of\u00a0<\/em>Atmospheric Violence: Disaster and Repair in Kashmir<\/a>. Here, he rethinks field notes as \u201cfeeling notes\u201d and considers the possibilities that this shift in thinking might create in writing ethnographically, drawing upon his experience researching\u00a0Atmospheric Violence\u00a0to demonstrate these ideas.<\/em><\/p>\n

\n

People here make me laugh or want to cry. They depress me; they confuse me; they infuriate me. I can\u2019t figure them out; I am left perplexed. How is it possible that they have such power over me?\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

\u2014A note from my journal<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/a>Atmospheric Violence\u00a0<\/em>is a mediation on life in the mountainscapes crisscrossing Kashmir and Northern Pakistan, near the contested India\/Pakistan border. The book is organized as a series of interconnected\u00a0scenes<\/em>. Each\u00a0scene\u00a0<\/em>acts as a framing device through which the feeling world is rendered palpable, encouraging us to hold extraordinary violence and ordinary concerns in the same breath. The first\u00a0scene<\/em>\u00a0is dedicated to Niaz.<\/p>\n

I am currently in Islamabad, Pakistan\u2019s capital city. It is monsoon season. The weather is hot and unbearably humid. Everything is damp, sweaty, sticky. This time of the year, non-essential surgeries are postponed in hospitals. The murky weather slows down the healing of open wounds. As promised to him, I want to send Niaz a copy of my book, but I don\u2019t have a postal address. Niaz cannot read English, but he still wants the book. After a few attempts, I managed to reach him on the phone. While he began with the customary \u201cAllah ka shukr hai<\/em>\u201d (All is well, thanks to Allah), his voice is somber, his words measured. His breathing is heavy, labored, erratic.<\/p>\n

Niaz is paraplegic and requires round-the-clock care, a duty entrusted to his brother. According to some, his brother is possessed by a jinn giving him enormous capacity to be a dedicated caregiver. Due to the remote location of his village, Niaz rarely has access to a doctor. A nurse visits him when needed, to inspect any wounds and change his dressing. Open sores from prolonged stay on the charpoy are at a constant risk of life-threatening infection.<\/p>\n

Niaz is engaged in a most beautiful wait for his body to recover, pending divine authorization. On a prior occasion, he described how his cuts, bruises, and wounds have a life of their own. They can grow tender, swell, become inflamed. When this happens, the pain is intense akin to shards of glass cutting into one\u2019s skin. There is unbearable burning. And bleeding. And itching. Niaz abruptly ended the phone call: \u201cOmer\u00a0bhai<\/em>\u00a0(brother), I am not doing so well. I feel very poorly. I am in pain.\u201d<\/p>\n

It has not been possible to get a hold of Niaz since. I will try again in a few days. The internet and phone lines are a mess in Pakistan these days. The government has embarked on a massive surveillance campaign to catch political dissidents, intentionally disrupting communication, making it even harder to link with those in the country\u2019s border zones.<\/p>\n

I feel a sense of urgency to see Niaz. I will travel to the mountains if I can\u2019t reach him in the next few days. A colleague cautioned that I do not and should not have unfettered access to Niaz. Visiting him unannounced while he is not at his best will be a trespass.<\/p>\n

What does it mean to attend to the intensity of others?<\/em>\u00a0For me, it means posing obstacles to the violent yet normalized expectation of consuming people\u2019s lives without any ethical wounding or disorientation. And to imagine a more immediate, compelling, even tense relationship with our interlocutors that is not contingent on extraction but grounded in an attachment of deeply felt care. What if we imagine ethnography as a mode of receiving deeply? \u201cLiving each other\u2019s lives and dying each other\u2019s deaths\u201d as Marshall Sahlins writes.[i]<\/p>\n

Our Hearts Are Doomed to Fail<\/strong><\/p>\n

Knowledge, much like relationality, cannot be worked out in advance. But control theorists will disagree. In grad school, we are trained to \u201cmap the literature,\u201d \u201cfind gaps in the literature\u201d, and then \u201cfill in\u201d those exact gaps that we \u201cdiscovered\u201d earlier. But what about more spirited wayfinding that relies on gut, intuition, heart?<\/p>\n

In\u00a0Atmospheric Violence<\/em>, I make a case for thinking from the heart. Instead of field notes, I opted for feeling notes. Feminist STS scholar Anne Pollock contends that the heart is an object doomed to fail.[ii] Heart failure, she explains, is not a result of any intrinsic injury but a result of the extra burdens placed on it by the body. Pollock asks: \u201cWhat if the heart and its failure can become ways of thinking about objects in the world? What does a model of an object that is\u00a0intrinsically burdened\u00a0<\/em>and\u00a0thus doomed\u00a0<\/em>do . . . [for ethnography]?\u201d[iii]<\/p>\n

The Heart Has a Mind of Its Own<\/strong><\/p>\n

Atmospheric Violence<\/em>\u00a0is an exercise in being attentive to heartbeats, that is, opening oneself to others despite the risk of wounding. Attention to heartbeats is exhausting. It requires an unlikely relation to knowledge marked by steady percolation\u2014 a slow ontology of being differently productive as we wait for knowledge to mark us. So that the future is not foreclosed even before it is forthcoming.<\/p>\n

Heartwork demands being content with uncertainty. In her work on abolition futures, Liat Ben-Moshe encourages us to let go of our \u201cattachment to certain ways of knowing\u201d that rely on certainty, expertise, and demands for clear alternatives.[iv] She advocates for a stance of not-knowing or dis-epistemology. This may be contrary to how we are trained to think: diagnostically, laser-focused on end goals, intent on finding, grasping, having.<\/p>\n

But Where Should the Disobedient Go?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I wrote\u00a0Atmospheric Violence<\/em>\u00a0for the spirited and enthralled. Control theorists are not my kin. The awry, the astray, the transgressive are invited. The book embraces the epistemologically messy; those who wear their hearts on their sleeves.<\/p>\n

\n

This post was originally published University of Pennsylvania Press blog here<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

\n

[i] Marshall Sahlins. What Kinship Is\u2014and Is Not.\u00a0<\/em>Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013, 28.<\/p>\n

[ii] Anne Pollock. \u201cHeart Feminism.\u201d\u00a0Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience\u00a0<\/em>1, no. 1 (2015).<\/p>\n

[iii] Pollock, 11.<\/p>\n

[iv] Liat Ben-Moshe. \u201cDis-orientation, Dis-epistemology and Abolition.\u201d\u00a0Feminist Philosophy Quarterly<\/em>\u00a04, no. 2 (2018), 4.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The article is by Dr Omer Aijazi, Lecturer in Disasters and Climate Crisis at HCRI and author of\u00a0Atmospheric Violence: Disaster and Repair in Kashmir. Here, he rethinks field notes as \u201cfeeling notes\u201d and considers the possibilities that this shift in thinking might create in writing ethnographically, drawing upon his experience researching\u00a0Atmospheric Violence\u00a0to demonstrate these ideas. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6208,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3238","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-staff-blogs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.manchester.ac.uk\/hcri\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3238","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.manchester.ac.uk\/hcri\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.manchester.ac.uk\/hcri\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.manchester.ac.uk\/hcri\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6208"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.manchester.ac.uk\/hcri\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3238"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.manchester.ac.uk\/hcri\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3238\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3249,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.manchester.ac.uk\/hcri\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3238\/revisions\/3249"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.manchester.ac.uk\/hcri\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3238"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.manchester.ac.uk\/hcri\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3238"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.manchester.ac.uk\/hcri\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3238"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}