Worlding beyond worlds

Endings are marked by the urge to look back, take stock, and assess. At Visual Anthropology Review, endings are also, very literally, beginnings: members of our editorial office rotate off while others begin. We write the introduction to this issue amid this moment of change. We do so against a complex, at times impossible, social and political landscape where ideological divisions grow more divisive and where open, meaningful dialogue seems unattainable. There is an urgency with which we and many of our authors write. Words, indeed, images, and the descriptions they generate can elucidate and make visible the complexity of our contemporary moment. They proffer refuge; spaces from which to imagine and enact new forms of resistance. At the same time, the contributions to this issue also hint at something else: the possibility that many of the concepts so key to our scholarship and teaching might be insufficient. In preparing this introduction, we have had repeated conversations about the current state of things and how geographical distance from the places where we are from complicates our ability to see and understand our present in the same way. In many of these exchanges, we have discussed how, as recently as 3 years ago, when Lee Douglas first joined this editorial office, there was a shared belief that against the backdrop of the pandemic and the inequalities that it revealed—in the wake of global calls for racial and gender-based justice—other ways of doing scholarship were coming into being. Working for a publication that has long celebrated image-driven knowledge production, there was also a feeling that non-textual forms might find new, more public spaces within our discipline of words. In practice, however, we have found that ushering in new forms of doing anthropology—new forms of working with the visual—is often complicated by the very structures in which our research and teaching are entangled. In looking back, we have reflected upon the insufficiency of liberal gestures toward resistance and the possibility that we have failed to create other worlds out of the polycrises that have come to characterize our collective present. How might we move from a romanticization of alternative spaces and frameworks to the creation of practices that might be able to respond to, or even break through, the fortifications of neo-fascism? How can we get beyond the invocation of an “otherwise,” the wish that someone somewhere holds the antidote to the vicissitudes of late capitalist, imperial decline? In response to this constellation, we turn to worlding—a concept central to many of the contributions to this issue. Worlding contends that the world is not an objective a priori, but that it is accomplished through the repetition of material and intersubjective practices. In Kathleen Stewart's formulation, worlding is a “refrain.” It is "[a] scoring over a world's repetitions. A scratching on the surface of rhythms, sensory habits, gathering materialities, intervals, and durations. A gangly accrual of slow or sudden accretions. A rutting by scoring over” (2010, 349). Worlding makes new grooves that may or may not deepen into patterns by way of repetition, “if you allow them to take on some weight, or if you can gather the resources with other people to make them” (Berlant, 2021, 97). Worlding happens when atmosphere crystallizes, when “something [is pulled] over a threshold into something that becomes recognizable” (Stewart, 2024). Worlding is work that we, as anthropologists and image-makers, perform. Our work is not merely descriptive. It redescribes what previously has gone unspoken and gives expression to the incipient; it amounts to theories and objects that subtly alter the world through their addition to it. Imagining and enacting other worlds is also a practice to which many of our interlocutors and collaborators are committed. We observe and learn from how they create other worlds. Often, we co-create these other realities—the possibility of an otherwise—through the relationships and forms of relation integral to the ethnographic endeavor. In a time of acute emergency, world-making—imagining and inhabiting other possible worlds—can remedy and repair. As Kathleen Stewart suggests, worlding is “a tunneling or an unsettling that animates not because it is a given but because it elicits a virtual mapping” (2024). Our survival might indeed rely on plotting and carving out heterotopias where it is safe to forget the relations of domination that structure our lives (Foucault, 1986). However, we argue, if we think that this is a sufficient form of resistance or that it is enough to offer up redescription, then worlding risks becoming retreat. While it is tempting to imbue the concept of worlding with a romantic, liberatory potential—as if any act of redescription could equally instantiate new ontological conditions—worlding, at least in Stewart's version, implies a “politics of incipience” (2024). In this editorial introduction, we seek to consider how conceptual and methodological frameworks of visual anthropology equip us to articulate emergent ways of life and systems of value, to pull them over the threshold, to which Stewart refers, into something recognizable. These frameworks can contribute to these politics of incipience not only by specifying the ethical dimensions of the worlds which may emerge through our ethnographic labor, but also by creating space to reflect on what worlding and reworlding might do beyond mere description. We argue that, together, the articles in this issue expand and enrich the concept of worlding. They demonstrate how the word itself threatens to flatten out questions of power. Not everyone has the authority to create worlds, not all worlds are equal, and not every attempt at world-making is felicitous. Not every world can last or has the power to actually challenge the disciplinary regimes and geopolitical grids that condition our lives and life chances. By extension, the worlds we instantiate can be punctured by pre-existing structures of power, or worn down by the friction of rubbing up against the old world's infractures. We do not mean to fetishize permanence or measure success by how long something lasts but simply to point out that some worlds are backed by force and well-positioned to eclipse other worlds. It also might be the case that what we world might not be what we think it will or should be. Our intention is not to dismiss worlding and world-making; we do not rule out the otherwise. Instead, we consider what an incipient visual anthropology might contribute to thinking more complexly about how we imagine, describe, and bring into being the other worlds so desperately needed at this crucial time. In this sense, we agree with Stewart who suggests that “It is not critique's rough handling of what is wrong with the world we need now, but an attunement to the weird generativities and meanwhiles lodged, launched, and deforming in the broken realism of ongoing histories of dehumanization and foreclosure” (2024). The authors in this issue are both invested in and skeptical of the worlds that are being worlded in their ethnographic work. As such, they often attend to the unexpected “generativities and meanwhiles” (Stewart, 2024) that can serve as a point of departure for rethinking visual anthropology's contribution and investment in a world otherwise. In “Real Cameras, Irreal Things: Image-making and Ethnographic Insight,” Konstantin Georgiev reflects on how para-ethnographic photographic practices—that is, imaging-making around and apart from ethnographic research—shapes not only the questions that we, as anthropologists, bring to the field but also the methods we use to answer them. He begins the article recounting the story of an elderly woman with deteriorating eyesight who uses a video camera to record scenes from her everyday life. Later, she uses the zoom function to see things more clearly, with the camera functioning as a prosthetic to extend her vision. Georgiev compares this to his own para-ethnographic work, in which he collages and layers images to articulate but also to observe connections and affective dimensions that might otherwise go unnoticed. According to Georgiev, these images speak to what linguists refer to as the “irreal mood.” Thi linguistic modality gives form and expression to the atmospheric and invisible, to “things that exist but whose reality has not been directly witnessed by the speaker.” In this instance, photographic experimentation, montage, and overlapping surfaces are generative gestures, acts of worlding through which Georgiev attunes himself to local, historically grounded ways of seeing. Here, image-making—but also, making with images—are practices through which the author himself learns to see other incipient worlds. In “Ethnographic Film as World-making: Connecting Visual Anthropology with Science and Technology Studies,” Sanderian Verstappen and Sarah R. Davies put into conversation concepts from STS and social and cultural anthropology, two adjacent but often unlinked disciplines, to explore filmmaking's potential as an ethnographic method. Invested in exploring filmmaking and multimodality's ontological potential, the authors argue that ethnographic filmmaking is not just a means for documenting the mundane aspects of scientific work and the epistemological dimensions of the scientific laboratory, but also a generative practice for studying the intricacies of knowledge production. The authors chart examples from student films produced in their co-taught course “Visual Ethnographies of Science” and describe their embrace of a pedagogical strategy that instantiates the collaborative nature of science and filmmaking. In doing so, they highlight how observational cinema, like technoscientific research, possesses world-making dimensions through its ability to enact the phenomena it seeks to depict. Here, filmmaking—and its collaborative iterations—are a kind of world-making that not only “generates a reality,” but also performs into being the knowledge producing practices that it documents. Through their focus on filmmaking as “a transformative encounter,” the authors contribute to what Gabriel Dattatreyan and Isaac Marrero-Guillamón (2019) describe as the “politics of invention” in multimodal anthropology not by examining “any particular technological novelty” but by “[reconceptualizing] an established form.” In doing so, the authors urge us “to consider the ontological politics of this form of scholarship,” that is “to critically examine what worlds are being worlded by our methods.” Here, the invitation is not only to invent, but rather to consider what feminist scholar Donna Haraway (2016) describes as “thinking practices,” which shape how and what knowledge is being produced, as well as the perspectives of those producing it. By acknowledging the entanglements between subjectivity and objectivity, Verstappen and Davies open new avenues through which to consider how multimodal methods invent, but also how that invention is itself a mode of imagining and constructing other worlds. As such, this article focuses less on the form of multimodal scholarship and more on what is brought into being through visual methodologies. In a very different key, the photographs in Harmandeep Kaur Gill's article “Nothing is ever lost or forgotten: Searching for the Traces of Mo Dickyi Sangmo” demonstrate the world-making capacity of visual ethnography. Mo Dickyi, a Tibetan refugee living in northwest India, seems contrarian and socially isolated. Her relatives and neighbors perceive her as irritable; her demonstrated longing for life in Tibet seem to be at odds with Buddhist principles that emphasize the impermanence of reality. Through a series of portraits and still lifes from the homewhere Mo Dickyi was confined in old age, Gill gives tangible expression to the losses that she experienced. In giving material form to absence, the photographs work against any description of her life as socially or spiritually impoverished. To the contrary, her home contains an entire universe behind a soot covered curtain. A portrait of Mo Dickyi sitting at her kitchen window shows the eponymous figure as comfortably immersed in her environment. The stripes of her skirt blend with the richly colored fabric beside her. The top that she is wearing fades into the dark corner behind her. Another photograph shows Mo Dickyi in silhouette lighting a butter lamp offering. The warm glow of the lamp and the blue rings emanating from the gas stove look almost like a supernova in abstraction, a cosmic phenomenon playing out in the palms of her hands. Together, these photographs ask readers to ponder absence and, more importantly, to imagine how gaps might also be a starting point for articulating connection. Here, photography is a call for a kind of worlding rooted in affective relation. In this issue's dialogue, “Placemaking in the Nuclear Sensorium,” interdisciplinary scholar Shannon Cram and feminist filmmaker Irene Lusztig converse about their experiences tracing everyday life in Hanford, a nuclear company town in Washington State where weapons-grade plutonium was produced and tested during more than four decades. Centered on Lusztig's placed-based documentary Richland, the exchange between Cram and Lusztig reflects upon “the distinct cultural production of atomic narratives in place” and the extent to which filmmaking and sensorial approaches to narratives can “facilitate listening across political and ideological difference.” In many ways, this is a dialogue about dialogue and its possibilities; a detained conversation between filmmaker and researcher whose work asks “what it means to inhabit ongoing complexities and contradictions” of “nuclear heritage.” The conversation reveals Cram and Lusztig's deep commitment to tracing the impact of atomic weapons, their production, and their lingering chemical presence across time and scales by inhabiting complexity rather than flattening it. As Cram notes in her introductory text, “We discuss the distinct cultural production of atomic narratives in place, attending to the social and structural conditions that recognize (and fail to recognize) nuclear impact. We talk about how Richland engages with the bomb beyond the frame, inviting forms of sensory attention that activate the invisible.” Here, attention to landscape and sound animates what cannot be seen, what Cram describes as a “sensory absence” regarding the history of nuclear contamination. This attention to sensory absence, indeed, forms of collective forgetting, are intricately entangled with “listening-centered documentary practices” that seek to “facilitate listening across political and ideological difference.” This, too, is an exploration of worlding in which the sensorial potential of image-making offers the impossible: the ability to listen across political and ideological differences that shape how individuals and communities see and inhabit the world. The Critiques that appear in this issue also address forms of worlding by reflecting on texts and films that challenge dominant narratives, be they nationalistic, cultural, or ecological, and envision new possibilities for coexistence and belonging. In his review of Natasha Raheja's A Gregarious Species, Muhammed A. Kavesh considers how the locust swarms that breach the India-Pakistan border defy national imaginaries and materialize the shared vulnerabilities of more-than-human life in the Anthropocene. In this sense, Kavesh identifies how Raheja's visual narrative constructs a where and and of and In this instance, challenge through their ability to shared on a the concept of through the photography of as in and by and that this work the of the as a how of and feminist image-making as a space for and While not address worlding and world-making she how photographic a space for alternative of beyond national to of State of the of and of an as a for in how the author approaches public as a and space where becomes a how description of the an with and its resistance to narratives of offers a and, indeed, to state Here, public and its histories are of a where national and cultural are authors R. and with the documentary by and as they to with their in the experiences with as that geographical and and argue that the the of cultural and to bring into the of worlds of and belonging. Here, a for making and social worlds where distance can be as cultural amid In the in this that and the transformative potential of visual anthropology in rethinking our shared worlds. In a this issue's the A of a to the possibilities that emerge when and public engages with photography and the form as through which to the of public and ethnographic images and work to explore the material surfaces of a where things are of a of and its on concept of an of the see also uses photography to move between of and distance to understand the indeed, the world of This issue with a by and on first at the the articles consider how visual and has the field across for those working in the and introductory how with anthropology, collaborative and cultural have an of anthropologists with practices in and The begins with of her work as a and her in a multimodal that the of visual because they ethnographic filmmaking beyond the of well to allow to and their own her attention to other the of new of subjectivity in and that the figure of the as the to world this figure into being when they for a that they imagine as and A of worlding when these same these as a of these rather than the of state describes how have a to the state the to of and into material resources and of chemical to as a the they cultural with the of for and a in in that the work as is to what describes as the of to other visual and that and for new forms of It is a way of worlding. research on the working in the form of a her to in with her that which could have working in the of her to cultural to a landscape that is there to the from the of the Here, and are of into being other worlds. The with a contribution from who considers the and of This is where she describes her in with a from the The of the is that will serve as He her to in that he is to and her what to with images that are the he have In a sense, is a about and its and in because of her to visual form to the that cannot world for Her becomes a across a of of the world cannot the fortifications of the In documenting her and the of and the of the gives visual form to a different affective The with that have failed and over to make or even toward for even as those more have in The worlds a a politics of and a to and a that is to not at suggests that a concept of worlding the of power. it makes the need to making worlds and heterotopias repeated Here, the of this discussed at the of this editorial introduction, something to to or understand what is being spaces of and within the of life. This is, possible and if we are to when it seems both and unattainable. can be when it up other avenues that call our attention to the of generativities and meanwhiles” and their capacity to world beyond indeed, beyond worlds in our contemporary state of and (Stewart, 2024)

Sociology · Geographies of human-animal interactions · History · Spatial and Cultural Studies

• Afterword

  Kathleen Stewart•The affect theory reader•2010

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• The Parallax Effect

  Open Access•Faye Ginsburg•Visual Anthropology Review•1995

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• Of Other Spaces

  Michel Foucault, Jay Miskowiec•diacritics•1986

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• The Land of Open Graves

  Jason De León•Land of Open Graves•2019

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• Introduction

  Open Access•E G Dattatreyan, Isaac Marrero-Guillamón et al.•American Anthropologist•2019

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• Institutionalizing the unruly

  Faye Ginsburg•Ethnos•1998

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• Surface assemblages. Towards an archaeology in and of the present

  Open Access•R Harrison•Archaeological Dialogues•2011

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