Recent scholarship on caste in India has opened inquiries on the sensorial dimensions of the perception of untouchability and their effects on the production of a caste-based sociality. The inquiries however limit their understanding of perception as mediated via the senses and interpret sociality as produced post-facto. Building on the process philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead, this essay instead understands perception as immediated and non-sensuous. I argue that in a caste- based society like India, sociality is felt ex-facto as a potential in the perception of untouchability, but the perception itself never emerges in actual experience. Furthermore, it is the very non-emergence of the perception of untouchability which allows untouchability to reproduce itself and mutate all experience towards a sociality of caste. This essay does not theorize Dalit experience, it rather investigates the practice of untouchability by those of us constituting the caste-world – the upper castes and others complicit in the perpetuation of the practice. The essay outlines how untouchability is activated as potential and felt in perception, how it reproduces itself in every experience, and the productive paradox of its non-emergence which it seeks to work out to multiply its power and endurance.

Keywords: caste, untouchability, non-sensuous, immediation, non-emergence
 

Isabelle Boiteau (Social and Cultural Anthropology, Autonomous University of Barcelona, Spain)

Performances of Secrecy: The Visual and Auditory Scaffolding of Social Structures and Hierarchies.

The proposed paper addresses the ways in which control of sensory perception accompanies and reinforces structural boundaries created in performances put on by secret societies in southern New Ireland, Papua New Guinea. Male secret societies, such as the tubuan, put on masked dance performances. Though these performances are put on by members of the secret society and build on secret practices, the performances are largely oriented towards non-initiates. These performances play important roles in building and maintaining social structures within the community. They do so along structural lines by emphasizing who may (and is obligated) to behave in which ways. The control of sensory perception is an important element of this work. Much effort is placed into controlling who may see or not, as well as over who may see what and in which ways. Similar control is enacted over who may hear, may not hear, is obligated to hear, and hears in which ways. The control and structuring of the senses is critical in shaping the lived experience of performances for different groups of people and is an essential part of how the practices contribute to the building and maintenance of social structures and hierarchies in communities.
Keywords: masks, secrecy, performance, perception, power.

Susanna Trnka (Anthropology, University of Auckland, New Zealand)

Sensory Politics: The Phenomenology of “Crises”

Recent scholarship has emphasized the ways that declarations of crises are attached to state securitization regimes. In this presentation, I take a different tack, approaching crises in light of their phenomenological dimensions. I suggest that if we are to understand contemporary democratic processes, it is imperative to consider the phenomenology of “crisis” as embodied and sensorially experienced by various segments of society. Engaging in an analysis of the sensorial dimensions of citizenship during states of emergency, I outline how we might analytically approach “collective critical events” in terms of their capacities to propel both action and a widespread sense of disablement, both of which are essential for understanding not only personal biographies but the biography of the nation-state. Drawing from two collective critical events that radically reshaped daily life in communities in which I was conducting anthropological fieldwork -- the 2000 Fiji Coup and New Zealand’s national lockdowns in response to Covid-19 -- I examine how focusing on the senses during moments of crisis might help elucidate understandings of democracy.

Keywords: citizenship, collective critical events, crises, politics, states of emergency