Gapnotes

Notes from the gap

Karl Andersson

Karl Andersson is attending the MA Visual and Media Anthropology programme at Freie Universität Berlin. He has a background in journalism and is currently researching Japanese subcultures. 日本語で話せます！

Week 48: 25 November – 1 December 2019

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Lots of readings related to my research proposal. Finished Boellstorff’s et al handbook, which I like so much. And I was struck by how good MacDougall is. I’ve got enough input now and started writing the literature review. So I will continue writing intensively for the next few days.

Tuesday and Wednesday I was in Stockholm for work, which included an amazing dinner at Teatergrillen. I also had lunch with former and probably future Berliner A and saw two exhibitions at Moderna Museet and ArkDes: Mud Muses – a rant about technology and Flying Panels – How Concrete Panels Changed the World. The former was so so, with the exceptions of two videos by Akbar Padamsee and the Otolith Group that I watched in full and really enjoyed.

I had to skip a planned “film evening” on Okinawa at Arsenal today in order to create my presentation on Superflat for next week’s class in Artistic practices. I also continued transcribing an interview.

I didn’t watch any anime this week. But! I was contacted by a new informant and am pursuing an intimate email interview with him. At one point he referred to Wataru.

Readings

Images, race and representation

Unit 6: Zora – the ‘First’ in her field

  • Charnov, Elaine S. 1998. “The Performative Visual Anthropology Films of Zora Neale Hurston.” Film Criticism 23 (1): 38–47.

Master thesis

Topic

  • Kinsella, Sharon. 2000. Adult Manga: Culture and Power in Contemporary Japanese Society. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press.
    • “Introduction.” Pp. 1–19
    • Chapter 4. “Amateur Manga Subculture and the otaku panic.” Pp. 102–38.
    • Chapter 5. “The Movement Against Manga.” Pp. 139–61.
  • Otomo, Rio. 2015. “Politics of Utopia: Fantasy, Pornography, and Boys Love.” In Boys Love Manga and Beyond: History, Culture, and Community in Japan, edited by Mark McLelland, Kazumi Nagaike, Katsuhiko Suganuma, and James Welker, 141–52. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.

Method

  • Boellstorff, Tom, Bonnie Nardi, Celia Pearce, and T.L. Taylor. 2012. Ethnography and Virtual Worlds: A Handbook of Method. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
    • Chapter 11: “Writing up, presenting, and publishing ethnographic research.” Pp. 182–95.
    • Chapter 12: “Conclusion: Arrivals and new departures.” Pp. 196–200.
  • MacDougall, David. 2006. The Corporeal Image: Film, Ethnography, and the Senses. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
    • “Introduction.” Pp. 1–8.
  • Madill, Anna. 2018. “Rotten Girl on Rotten Girl: Boys’ Love ‘Research.’” In Researching Sex and Sexualities: Methodological Reflections, edited by Charlotte Morris, Paul Boyce, Andrea Cornwall, Hannah Frith, and Yingying Huang, 263–78. London: Zed Books.

Other

Exhibition

  • Moderna Museet:
    • Mud Muses – a rant about technology
      • Otolith Group: Anathema (2011, 37 min)
      • Akbar Padamsee: Syzygy (1970, 16 min)
    • Atsuko Tanaka
    • Carl Fredrik Reuterswärd
  • ArkDes: Flying Panels – How Concrete Panels Changed the World

Film

  • The Matrix (1999, 136 min)

Video

Week 47: 18-24 November 2019

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Lots of readings this week, mostly for my thesis, but also for my upcoming presentation on Superflat, which is also relevant for my thesis. It’s somehow all connected. Only the bell hooks text was part of the programme’s official readings.

I’m only taking two courses this semester: Artistic practice in transcultural contexts and Images, race and representation. Both are great so far – both interesting and relevant. I’m skipping the other two courses:

  • Borders, Mobilities, Applications: Constructive Interventions in Migration
  • Visualizing Ecologies: More-than-human ethnography and experimental visual approaches in the Anthropocene

I’m mostly skipping them out of necessity. I don’t see a point in attending a course if you don’t do the readings, and I want to focus on the readings in my own area as much as possible now. Reading takes so much time for me, so I’m trying to be realistic. I also have a more or less fulltime job. And none of these courses is graded, unlike last semester, when I took all courses and not until they were finished chose which two to do a project and be graded in.

The other reason I’m skipping them is that I am not that interested. The “non-human” is trendy now, but as S pointed out, many cultures have always seen humans as a part of nature, not above it as has been the West’s view. So it’s in a way a typically Western thing to suddenly want to focus so much on the “non-human” and also name it the “non-human” or “more-than-human”, thereby assuming that everything is centered around the human. Having said that, I’m studying anthropology – the knowledge of humans – because I’m interested in humans, and my final project is about extremely human constructs. So the “ecologies” will have to wait while I’m enjoying the anthropocene.

A third reason, or a variation on the first, rather, is that I’ve started to realise how little time there is left to prepare for my fieldwork and filming in Japan, which must probably happen already in February 2020. So I’ve started to engage with the material again. I’m transcribing interviews and editing short clips. I wrote my main informant Y to ask him if he wants to participate in a movie in February, but no reply so far.

Some more anime this week:

I watched the first episode of Puzzle & Dragons Cross (2016) after having read about the manga in Illust Note 51, a whole issue about Korokoro Comics which I bought in Tokyo. Both the manga and the anime are spinoffs of a successful game. Watching the anime I realise that the boy hero that inspired shota in the 1980s is still around in pretty much the same way (which is not very surprising as he represents the norm). He still has a rival, and I noticed striking similarities between the “hovering blobs” around him and the “old woman” and “magical girl” of both Wataru (1988) and Granzort (1989), and why not Ranma ½ (1989) or even Yuu☆Yuu☆Hakusho (1992; manga 1990), in the way they talk and in their roles as sidekicks. Have old women and young girls turned blobs? The way the blobs are drawn, not to mention the whole setup as such, reminds a lot of Yo-kai Watch (2014), which was an extremely popular 3DS game when I lived in Japan in 2013, which in turn of course was trying to emulate Pokemon (1997), which I have never watched.

As I continued watching Wataru and Granzort tonight, I was also reminded of how the whole concept – boy on adventure with a group of newly found friends – is like a prequel to Hunter x Hunter (1999; manga 1998). Especially Wataru reminds so much of Gon. Suddenly the brilliant manga, created by Yuu☆Yuu☆Hakusho creator Togashi Yoshihiro, doesn’t feel as original as I first thought. It’s a difference in depth and quality rather than in terms of the outer characteristics, because Hunter x Hunter remains a brilliant anime and one of my absolute favourites.

On Wednesday I went with S to see the Japanese documentary Shusenjo, but it was so full that we were not even let in.

On Friday we went to the Prenzlauer Berg planetarium where we were guided live to the stars and galaxies in the universe while leaning back in comfy chairs and gazing up in the artificial sky. It was the first time for me in a planetarium, and it was amazing! Such an immersive experience, far from both Einstein lecture and Mercury transit (although that one was pretty cool). I finally got S’s obsession with space. I want to go back!

And yesterday we watched Lars von Trier’s Idioterne at home. Third time for me, and it just gets better. Even though it’s easy to mock the Dogma 95 manifesto, it is still inspiring to see such a great film being made with so little of the fancy stuff.

Oh, and I’ve spent a couple of days filling up Zotero with over a hundred items, properly sorted and tagged, and with annotated pdf’s attached to them. I love the programme and started paying for extra cloud space (2 GB), so that I can have all the pdf’s there (too).

Readings

Artistic practice in transcultural contexts

Presentation on Superflat (unit 4)

  • Darling, Michael. 2001. “Plumbing the Depths of Superflatness.” Art Journal 60 (3): 76–89. https://doi.org/10.1080/00043249.2001.10792079.
  • Borggreen, Gunhild. 2018. “Art and Consumption in Post-Bubble Japan: From Postmodern Irony to Shared Engagement.” In Consuming Life in Post-Bubble Japan: A Transdisciplinary Perspective, edited by Katarzyna J. Cwiertka and Ewa Machotka, 175–94. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv56fgjm.13.

Images, race and representation

Unit 5: An‘other’ perspective

  • hooks, bell. 1992. “Eating the Other: Desire and Resistance.” In Black Looks: Race and Representation, 21–39. Boston: South End Press.

Master thesis

Topic

  • McLelland, Mark. 2012. “Australia’s ‘Child-Abuse Material’ Legislation, Internet Regulation and the Juridification of the Imagination.” International Journal of Cultural Studies 15 (5): 467–83. https://doi.org/10.1177/1367877911421082.
  • Zanghellini, Aleardo. 2009. “Underage Sex and Romance in Japanese Homoerotic Manga and Anime.” Social & Legal Studies 18 (2): 159–77. https://doi.org/10.1177/0964663909103623.

Method

  • Anderson, Leon. 2006. “Analytic Autoethnography.” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 35 (4): 373–95. https://doi.org/10.1177/0891241605280449.
  • Boellstorff, Tom, Bonnie Nardi, Celia Pearce, and T.L. Taylor. 2012. Ethnography and Virtual Worlds: A Handbook of Method. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
    • Chapter 10: “Data Analysis.” Pp. 159–81.
  • Stoller, Paul. 1997. Sensuous Scholarship. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
    • Chapter 2: “The Griot’s Tongue.” Pp. 24–43.

Other

Zeiss-Großplanetarium

  • Starry Night (60 min)

Anime

Film

  • Idioterne (Lars von Trier, 1998, 117 min)

Video and livestreams

The commodification of the Other

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I saw this campaign by British shoe company Clarks in the window display of Galeria Kaufhof at Alexanderplatz, Berlin, in November 2018. It features black models and the slogan “Comfort in your soul”.

I snapped some photos because I thought it was a good example of how black people are often used in advertising to represent values like authenticity, closeness to nature and soul, simplicity and comfort – all the things that the presumably white potential customer might feel that they lack in their busy life.

I was reminded of this campaign when I read bell hooks for our upcoming class in Images, Race and Representation (my emphasis):

The acknowledged Other must assume recognizable forms. Hence, it is not African American culture formed in resistance to contemporary situations that surfaces, but nostalgic evocation of a “glorious” past. And even though the focus is often on the ways that this past was “superior” to the present, this cultural narrative relies on stereotypes of the “primitive,” even as it eschews the term, to evoke a world where black people were in harmony with nature and with one another. This narrative is linked to white western conceptions of the dark Other, not to a radical questioning of those representations.

In the next paragraph she could have been talking about this very campaign, but of course the examples are endless:

Should youth of any other color not know how to move closer to the Other, or how to get in touch with the “primitive,” consumer culture promises to show the way. It is within the commercial realm of advertising that the drama of Otherness finds expression. Encounters with Otherness are clearly marked as more exciting, more intense, and more threatening. The lure is the combination of pleasure and danger. In the cultural marketplace the Other is coded as having the capacity to be more alive, as holding the secret that will allow those who venture and dare to break with the cultural anhedonia (defined in Sam Keen’s The Passionate Life as “the insensitivity to pleasure, the incapacity for experiencing happiness”) and experience sensual and spiritual renewal.

More on othering later (cause I have a lot to say about it).

hooks, bell. 1992. “Eating the Other: Desire and Resistance.” In Black Looks: Race and Representation: 370. Cambridge: South End Press.

Week 46: 11-17 November 2019

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So I finally finished Watanabe’s shota essay. Yesterday I met my former Japanese tutor S, who helped me with some of the passages that I hadn’t understood properly. It feels great to be able to add this important work to the study diary – and to Zotero, which I have now chosen as my reference manager of choice. I’ve only added five items to it yet though – it takes time if you want to do it right.

Yesterday I also had a Skype talk with my master thesis supervisor. Since I haven’t started my thesis proposal yet, I felt ill-prepared, but it turned out to be very helpful and I felt very inspired afterwards. Maybe this meeting felt so good because we missed out on a proper meeting during in-house due to logistical circumstances. Deadline in one month (20 December 2019).

Archenhold Sternwarte Berlin
At the Archenhold Sternwarte to watch the transit of Mercury.

On Monday, S took me to the Archenhold Observatory where we watched Mercury pass in front of the sun – the transit of Mercury! A small black dot in front of the big yellow sun – amazing! A small group of dedicated amateur astronomers had gathered to enjoy this event, which will happen next time only in 2032.

Jobwise we launched a new service this week, so I was quite busy with that and therefore ill-prepared (again!) for the two courses I’m taking.

Tonight I proofread a PhD research proposal.

Readings

Artistic Practice in Transcultural Contexts

Unit 2: Converging Zones between Art and Anthropology

  • Unit introduction.
  • Schneider, A. & C. Wright (Eds.). 2010. “Between Art and Anthropology.” In Between Art and Anthropology: Contemporary Ethnographic Practice, pp. 1–21. Berg Publishers.
  • Schneider, A. 2008. “Three modes of experimentation with art and ethnography.” In Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 14, 171–94. Royal Anthropological Institute. (Only read 171–77 = the introduction and the first example of three, because not so relevant.)

Images, Race and Representation

Unit 4: Phenomenology of Blackness

  • Fanon, Frantz. 1952. “The Fact of Blackness.” In Black Skin, White Masks, 257–65. Very touching.

Master thesis

  • Watanabe, Yumiko. 1998. “Otaku no Sekushuariti 1: Shota no Kenkyuu.” In T. Okada (ed.): Kokusai Otaku Daigaku 1998-nen: Saizensen kara no Kenkyuu Houkoku: 31–55. Tokyo: Koubunsha.
  • Barabantseva, Elena, and Andy Lawrence. 2015. “Encountering Vulnerabilities through ‘Filmmaking for Fieldwork.’” Millennium 43 (3): 911–30.
  • Bataille, Georges, and Annette Michelson. 1986. “Nietzsche’s Madness.” October 36: 42–45.

Shota story

  • 河本ひろし (Kawamoto Hiroshi). 2004. “ボクとヒロくん” (Boku to Hiro-kun). In 美少年の美学7: The 悪戯っ子, (Bishounen no Bigaku 7: The itazurakko). 松文館 (Shoubunkan).

Other

Anime

Film

Week 45: 4-10 November 2019

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I’m excited about the two courses that have started. The readings are really interesting and it’s a pity that I’ve only done them halfheartedly.

Instead I’ve spent a lot of time making my way through Watanabe’s shota essay. The first part was about shota’s history and definition. The second part dealt with the mentality of female shota fans and was based on an interview with an editor of a commercial shota magazine. It didn’t go into depth. The third and last part though is super interesting, as it deals with male shota fans, and the interviewed creators do not “come from loli”, as many male shota fans apparently do. Watanabe is surprised by what they say, but me, I nod my head as it all fits into my findings so far. I have a meagre three pages to go, but that means at least half a day so I couldn’t finish it this week.

The anime race has continued, it was a real nineties week (and late eighties):

Wataru (1988) and Granzort (1989) remind a lot of each other, since they were made by the same studio (Sunrise) and director (Iuchi Shuji). Wataru has rollerskates and Daiichi a skateboard. Wataru was seminal, but Granzort has the best music – I think I watched so many Granzort episodes simply because of that.

I will drop all the rest, except for Evangelion (1995), which is famous but which I hadn’t watched before, and Super Bikkuriman (1992), made to promote a candy bar but surprisingly charming.

Immersing myself in these animes to the extent that I dream about them is a way for me to try to understand shota on another level. I am convinced that there is knowledge that doesn’t come from texts, but which finds its way into you in more mysterious ways, and you need to open up for that possibility in order for it to happen. I feel … embodied!

On Thursday I went with S to a queer block of Interfilm, Berlin’s short film festival. Varying quality, but we both thought João Cândido Zacharias’s The Last Romantics stood out from all the rest by just being brilliant.

On Friday I had dinner with A and partied with my classmates at Filmkunstbar Fitzcarraldo and the punk bar across the street that was evicted 162 days ago according to the digital counter above the bar.

Saturday was 9 November 2019, so I biked with S to Brandenburger Tor for the Mauerfall 30 celebrations – we arrived just in time for the fireworks.

I booked flights for Christmas.

Readings

Artistic Practice in Transcultural Contexts

Unit 1: Situating Contemporary Art in Anthropology

  • Foster, H. 1995. “The artist as ethnographer?” In The traffic in culture: refiguring art and anthropology, ed. G. Marcus and F. Myers, 302–09. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Upcoming presentation

  • Ivy, Marilyn. 2010. “The Art of Cute Little Things: Nara Yoshitomo’s Parapolitics.” Mechademia: Second Arc 5 (Fanthropologies): 3–29.

Images, Race and Representation

Unit 3: The White ‘other’

  • Dyer, Richard. 1997. “The matter of whiteness.” In White: Essays on Race and Culture. London: Routledge. (Read p. 1–6.)

Other

Anime

Articles

Book chapter

  • Eddo-Lodge, Reni. 2017. Why I’m Not Talking to White People About Race.
    • 3: “What is White Privilege?”, pp. 60–77.

Film

  • All Rites Reversed:
    • British born Chinese
    • Black snow

35th International Short Film Festival Berlin 2019

  • SP 05: Queer Fever:
    • Lolo (Leandro Goddinho / Paulo Menezes // Germany, Brazil // 2019 // 13:40 min)
    • Eli – Ein Portrait (Lumen Nguyen // Germany // 2018 // 06:40 min)
    • Os últimos românticos (The Last Romantics. João Cândido Zacharias // Brazil // 2019 // 12:00 min)
    • Lila shel ahava (Night of Love. Omri Loukas // Germany, Israel // 2019 // 24:50 min)
    • Les lèvres gercées (Kelsi Phung / Fabien Corre // France // 2018 // 04:20 min)
    • Zapatos de tacón cubano (Cuban Heal Shoes. Julio Mas Alcaraz // Spain // 2019 // 17:00 min)
    • Revolvo (Francy Fabritz // Germany // 2019 // 08:00 min)

Podcast

Sveriges Radio Europapodden: 140: “Många uppskattar inte sin frihet”

Week 44: 28 October – 3 November 2019

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Classes have begun and we have registered on a third online teaching platform in one year, as well as a third video conference system. I don’t feel inspired about the courses and I am very critical to the fact that the Qualitative Methods course has been discontinued, just because the lecturer quit. Qualitative Methods was described to us as the backbone of the programme, so what does it say about the programme that they decided to ditch it?

However, I am extremely excited about my own research. I’m immersing myself in relevant anime to literally watch the history of shota, as it is described in Watanabe’s essay, which I continue to decode, one page at a time:

As we saw last week, the “turning point” for shota was Mashin Eiyuuden Wataru (Sunrise, 1988).

Wataru’s “heirs” were Sunrise produced robot animes aimed at children: Madou King Granzort (Sunrise, 1989), Zettai Muteki Raijin-Oh (Sunrise, 1991), Chou Dendou Robo Tetsujin 28-gou FX (1992), and Super Bikkuriman (Toei Animation, 1992).

In 1994, three important works added male shota fans to the previous female core: Akazukin Chacha (Gallop, 1994), Yuusha Keisatsu J-Decker (Sunrise, 1994), and Yamato Takeru (Nippon Animation, 1994). The shota characters in these works were more feminine.

Shota’s momentum can be seen in hits like Neon Genesis Evangelion (Gainax, Tatsunoko Production, 1995).

On Tuesday I and S went to the Einstein lecture at FU, where Catherine Heymans talked about dark matter and dark energy.

And tonight we went to a concert where S’s friend D played the violin.

I read another chapter in Eddo-Lodge’s book:

We don’t live in a meritocracy, and to pretend that simple hard work will elevate all to success is an exercise in wilful ignorance.

– Reni Eddo-Lodge, p. 56 (“The System”)

I googled why there are so many reaction gifs with black people in them, and found out that the phenomenon has been dubbed “digital blackface”:

There’s the “hilarious” Auto-Tuned neighbour meme, which plays into the stereotype of black people as natural-born, always-on performers and/or “welfare queens” (the fact that many of these clips – Charles Ramsey in Cleveland, Ohio, or Antoine “Hide yo’ kids, hide yo’ wife” Dodson – originated as local news interviews with witnesses to horrifying incidents, seems to get lost somewhere in the process of meme-ification).

– Ellen E Jones in The Guardian

I had quite a dramatic work week.

And on Friday I had a couple of beers at Südblock with some of my classmates: L & C, K & M. J and his boyfriend O dropped by very quickly.

Anime

Articles

Book chapter

  • Eddo-Lodge, Reni. 2017. Why I’m Not Talking to White People About Race.
    • 2: “The System”, pp. 44–59.

Lecture

  • 19th Einstein Lecture, Prof. Dr. Catherine Heymans: Seeing the Invisible – The Dark Side of the Universe.

Concert

  • 20 Jahre concentus alius (Emmauskirche)

Video