The Power of Shared Embodiment: Renegotiating Non/belonging and In/exclusion in an Ephemeral Community of Care
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The Power of Shared Embodiment: Renegotiating Non/belonging and In/exclusion in an Ephemeral Community of Care Anita von Poser1,2
· Edda Willamowski2
© The Author(s) 2020
Abstract In this article, we explore the power of shared embodiment for the constitution of an affective community. More specifically, we examine how people afflicted by long-term, arduous experiences of war, migration, and discrimination sensually articulate and, at least temporarily, renegotiate feelings of non/belonging, care, and in/exclusion. Methodologically, we draw on emplaced ethnography and systematic phenomenological go-alongs with a group of elderly migrants, born and raised in different parts of Vietnam, who had arrived in Germany within different legal–political frameworks and who, during the time of our psychological–anthropological research, frequented the same psychotherapeutic clinic. We apply the notion of “affective communities” (Zink in Affective Societies: Key Concepts. Routledge, New York, 2019) to grasp how the group experienced a sensual place of mutual belonging outside the clinic when moving through different public spaces in Berlin as part of their therapy. Particular attention is paid to the participants’ embodied and emplaced memories that were reactivated during these excursions. Shared sensations and spatiality, we argue, made them feel they belonged to an ephemeral community of care that was otherwise hardly imaginable due to their distinct individual biographies, contrasting political attitudes, and ties to different
Anita von Poser and Edda Willamowski are co-first authors of the article. & Anita von Poser [email protected] Edda Willamowski [email protected] 1
Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology and Collaborative Research Center 1171 Affective Societies: Dynamics of Social Coexistence in Mobile Worlds, Freie Universita¨t Berlin, Landoltweg 11, 14195 Berlin, Germany
2
Collaborative Research Center 1171 Affective Societies: Dynamics of Social Coexistence in Mobile Worlds, Freie Universita¨t Berlin, Habelschwerdter Allee 45, 14195 Berlin, Germany
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Cult Med Psychiatry
social collectives. In analyzing this affective community, we highlight how significant spatio-sensorial modes of temporal solidification can be in eliciting embodied knowledge that positively contributes to therapeutic processes. Keywords Affective community · Embodiment · Belonging · Care · Emplaced ethnography
Introduction On a grey, cloudy, and windy day in late March 2017, we organized a boat cruise (a so-called “historical sightseeing cruise”) on the Spree river for the participants of a bi-weekly group therapy for Vietnamese migrants that usually took place within a psychotherapeutic outpatient clinic in Berlin.1 For many years, the participants, all of them elderly Vietnamese-born women and men, had been suffering from unvoiced feelings of non-belonging and social exclusion. These feelings were directly linked to their often arduous migratory experiences, which could not only be similar but also quite
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