Being a Devil with a Brain Injury

I am a devil. I have a TBI. I will not quit.
I have been researching the body in space and the making of place during Barcelona’s ‘correfocs’ for the last five years. ‘Correfocs’ are street performances where a group of people, called devils, dance to the sound of drummers whilst doing a very loud performance with different types of fire artifacts. This is intrinsically part of Catalan popular culture and recently, its volume has been questioned. Furthermore, I recently got diagnosed with a TBI and aural sensitivity, nosiception is now adjusted differently, lowering my pain threshold. Becoming a devil with aural sensitivity means pain has redefined my relationship with correfocs, the spaces we, as devils, transit and with my environment. This paper is a reflexive auto-ethnographic account where I analyse my corporeal perceptions of and during correfocs as a devil and the effect and affect it has on my making of place before and after the diagnosis. I also evaluate, through my recent need for adaptations or accommodations with sound, the current movement to question ‘correfocs’ volume (loudness).
Keywords: aural diversity, nosiception, barcelona, corporeal, place making

Nicole Gombay (Geography, Université de Montréal, Canada)

Traumatic Brain Injuries, Sensory Alterations, and Transformations in the Flow of Life

After a Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI), people’s senses can make themselves felt in new and unusual ways. These sensory alterations can have powerful impacts on people’s abilities to engage with other people and things, which can affect both their capacities to participate in the world around them and their understandings of themselves in that world. The consequences of these changes may cause some to fall out of their hitherto taken for granted flow of life. If flow entails movement, it also entails inertia, dissolution, admixtures, turbulence, blockages and passages, diffusion and concentration, surface calm and motion below. Based on research focussing on the sensory transformations experienced by people with TBIs, this talk will explore some of the impacts experienced by them when their flow of life shifts course.
Keywords: flow, brain, time, tempo, stillness

Kennedy Opande ∆ (Postdoctoral fellow, York University, Canada)

Exploring Neurology Patients’ Descriptions of Somatic Conditions: Situated, Cultural and Local

Our paper explores cross-cultural variations of describing neurological conditions. In particular, we look at the culture-specific norms, values, and language across the different contexts that shape how patients express neurological conditions—tremors, paralysis, seizures, sensorial sensitivities, and pain—to their neurologists. We draw on ethnographic research from five neurology clinics in Toronto, Canada and Kisumu and Nairobi, Kenya to highlight cultural and linguistic variations in how patients talk about somatic experiences associated with brain injuries and how medical providers respond in kind. Attuned to these clinical encounters and discursive exchanges between patients and doctors, we note socio-cultural variations reflecting a range of local beliefs about bodies, minds, and biomedicine between Canada and Kenya. Specific cultural idioms and metaphors of the neurological conditions are explored, and the context of their presentation. We also explore the local historical, economic and social forces shaping these cultural idioms of illness and disability, in the context of anthropological discussions of culture-specific knowledges and situated spaces of action and consider how such differences might be understood in terms of the uneven development of global neurology.
Keywords: Cultural idioms, situated spaces, sensorial, Kenya, neurology