https://anthroprospective.com Anthroprospective – Research as Everyday Literature Thu, 01 Oct 2026 00:22:16 +0000 https://anthroprospective.com en https://anthroprospective.com/Page-coming-soon Thu, 16 Jun 2022 23:15:03 +0000 Anthroprospective – Research as Everyday Literature https://anthroprospective.com/Page-coming-soon Page Coming Soon!&nbsp; Stay tuned... Read Next&nbsp;︎︎︎ https://anthroprospective.com/Resources Tue, 10 Feb 2026 06:17:43 +0000 Anthroprospective – Research as Everyday Literature https://anthroprospective.com/Resources Resources &nbsp;Courses Royal Anthropological Institute - Introduction to Forensic and Expert Social Anthropology Royal Anthropological Institute - Introduction to Anthropology Royal Anthropological Institute - Anthropology and Art: an Introduction Royal Anthropological Institute - Social Anthropology: Understanding Our Place in the World Royal Anthropological Institute -&nbsp;Anthropology and Environmental Justice: Law, Policy and Activism World101x: Anthropology of Current World Issues (free course)&nbsp; Conferences Australian Anthropological Society annual conference (10-12 June) &nbsp;Biennial Royal Anthropological Institute FILM Festival Conference Events Wenner Gren Events Royal Anthropological Institute Events Networks Australian Network of Student Anthropologists (ANSA) Australian Anthropological Society (AAS) American Anthropological Association (AAA) Wenner Gren Foundation Grants and Scholarships Wenner Gren Index of Grants and Fellowships Read next -&gt; https://anthroprospective.com/Portraits-2026 Thu, 01 Oct 2026 00:22:16 +0000 Anthroprospective – Research as Everyday Literature https://anthroprospective.com/Portraits-2026 Portraits [2026] &nbsp; Words: Ryan BlackwellImages: Ryan Blackwell Image caption: A disposable vape lies inside a loop of dark beads, both dusted in river sediment. “what happens when photography is used not simply to document material culture but to participate in it. By changing the ontology of these objects—shifting them from product to waste, from waste to portrait—the images question how beauty is constructed, how value is assigned and how material culture shapes our understanding of ourselves.” Ryan Blackwell <img width="2064" height="2752" width_o="2064" height_o="2752" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/f9c8c2d3c1e4f4eec13f59e1f343e03cf9528959346a851f4cdf2279ca95b667/276.-THAMES-FEB-202611593.jpg" data-mid="252777625" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/f9c8c2d3c1e4f4eec13f59e1f343e03cf9528959346a851f4cdf2279ca95b667/276.-THAMES-FEB-202611593.jpg" /> 01. Along the banks of the River Thames, disposable vapes, fragments of packeting, beauty products and intimate items settle amongst the pebbles and silt, becoming absorbed into the landscape. Shaped by water’s meandering flow yet saturated with material traces of human activity the river operates simultaneously as landscape and archive. But the Thames tells two histories at once. Alongside Roman pottery and clay tobacco pipes lies another, unfinished archaeology: a fragmented tapestry of contemporary London woven from the things we no longer notice. The project asks a simple question: is value simply a product of time? Or have we created a material culture so disposable that some objects will never become treasure, no matter how long they survive? I am not an archaeologist or an anthropologist, but the methods of this project borrow from both. Portraits [2026] developed through collecting, cataloguing, and photographing objects recovered from the river. Photography is more than a means of recording; it is also a method of enquiry. My visual practice and academic research unfolding together, informing each other. Archaeologists reconstruct societies through relationships between people and artefacts. This project asks the reverse question: what do today’s artefacts reveal about people, and are we happy with how the future will understand our present?&nbsp;I was repeatedly drawn to objects that speak clearly about contemporary – single use plastics, medical waste, and objects that come into close contact with the body. Individually they appear insignificant, but together they describe a culture informed by intimacy, convenience and disposability. In many ways, we are our material remains. &nbsp; <img width="5472" height="3648" width_o="5472" height_o="3648" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/bb71fb54105d0ffa03fbc473ab08e830fd6890df2f494be4e14b454345765072/_Q0A4085.jpg" data-mid="252777621" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/bb71fb54105d0ffa03fbc473ab08e830fd6890df2f494be4e14b454345765072/_Q0A4085.jpg" /> 02. A Felipo Berio olive oil lid pressed into the mud among pebbles, catching the low afternoon light. 03. Low tide shows brick rubble, tyres, a Lime bike and a tangled scooter, all left by the water. <img width="4511" height="3007" width_o="4511" height_o="3007" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/460d136a946bafbe6a409ec7de64c9288949fad9c851ed5dbdc878761f79e5a9/_Q0A4104.jpg" data-mid="252777623" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/460d136a946bafbe6a409ec7de64c9288949fad9c851ed5dbdc878761f79e5a9/_Q0A4104.jpg" /> The project began unexpectedly. On a location recce in Greenwich, I noticed a discarded Yves Saint Laurent lipstick half buried in the river bank. Catching the evening light at low tide, it glistened somewhere between treasure and nature. It seemed impossible to separate the manufactured object from the landscape that surrounded it. As a commercial photographer, I construct images of desire around products exactly like this one. And I must have photographed objects destined to share the same fate. Encountering the lipstick in this altered state disrupted that visual language. I was no longer interested in the object as a product, but in its changing ontology. Nothing about the lipstick itself had altered. What had changed was its position within systems of desirability. On a department store counter it signified luxury. Half buried in the Thames it became waste. Through the photograph it became something else again: an artefact. I took its portrait. 04. A YSL lipstick tube, its silver casing pitted with grit. Something once carried close is now packed with silt. <img width="3197" height="4263" width_o="3197" height_o="4263" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/9a9df276d6a291620613a331039ee92848b4500ec92677399e2c353615496130/BLACKWELL_02.jpg" data-mid="252777629" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/9a9df276d6a291620613a331039ee92848b4500ec92677399e2c353615496130/BLACKWELL_02.jpg" /> <img width="3197" height="4263" width_o="3197" height_o="4263" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/eeaa3c5fbae18eb20319c2f04e3b4b8b2cadb42e9fbc9f2fdfc5fb689b298553/276.-THAMES-FEB-20269795.jpg" data-mid="252777624" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/eeaa3c5fbae18eb20319c2f04e3b4b8b2cadb42e9fbc9f2fdfc5fb689b298553/276.-THAMES-FEB-20269795.jpg" /> 05. Discarded vapes each coated in mud. The photographs deliberately borrow the visual language I have developed through commercial image-making. Careful lighting, controlled compositions and a tenderness usually reserved for desirable objects are redirected towards things that have been abandoned. Photographed in a visual language reserved for luxury products, I invite the viewer to spend longer with things we would ordinarily ignore. Questioning whether the objects themselves have changed, or simply the way we understand them. This recalls Mary Douglas's (1966) observation that dirt is merely 'matter out of place’ arguing that objects become impure not because of what they are, but because of where they are found. A luxury lipstick on a department store counter signifies desire; but half buried in the Thames it becomes refuse. And so photography interrupts this certainty. The image neither restores the object's original function nor ignores its degradation. Instead, it exposes how meaning is continually negotiated through context. If mudlarking transforms yesterday's waste into today's heritage, photography asks whether that transformation can begin before time has done its work. Photography does not simply record my found objects; it participates in changing them by shifting them into another visual economy — another life and another history. This became increasingly important as I continued collecting. Every object in Portraits [2026] had been shaped by human touch, first through its manufacture and then through its use. Somewhere along the way value was lost. I call these images Portraits because the objects stand in for the people who touched, carried, desired and discarded them. Their lack of human subjects only intensifies human presence. I found myself imagining the routines they once belonged to: the lipstick applied before work, the disposable vape bought on a night out, the strip of crime scene tape marking an emergency since forgotten. These narratives remain speculative, but they reveal an object’s ability to carry traces of relationships. Looking closely at them became another way of looking at ourselves. <img width="3201" height="4267" width_o="3201" height_o="4267" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/01087bf753ad508cac3ab6383e1a646d8a1f9ca1754aaaaac6ceb33c3e6aa7ab/276.-THAMES-FEB-202612036.jpg" data-mid="252777627" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/01087bf753ad508cac3ab6383e1a646d8a1f9ca1754aaaaac6ceb33c3e6aa7ab/276.-THAMES-FEB-202612036.jpg" /> 06.&nbsp; A Gordon’s gin flask, its label still legible under a skin of algae and silt. 07. A glass jar holding a zip, mesh fabric, wire and plastic film, all suspended in murky water. <img width="2480" height="3307" width_o="2480" height_o="3307" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/7f7d4351539d3587333860e696a7f54680f8fd47ae6ef0844d559d0327846798/276.-THAMES-FEB-202612474.jpg" data-mid="252777628" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/7f7d4351539d3587333860e696a7f54680f8fd47ae6ef0844d559d0327846798/276.-THAMES-FEB-202612474.jpg" /> Anthropologists have argued that only artefacts remain from ancient societies, making relationships between people and things essential to understanding the past. Looking at contemporary objects suggests the inverse. What kind of archaeological record are we creating now? The objects collected in Portraits [2026] survive because they were designed to. They are made permanently and used impermanently. Every disposable vape, Actimel carton and fragment of glass embody this contradiction. The surgical glove recovered from the Thames was manufactured for a brief emergency, may outlive my entire bloodline. The plastic itself will surely survive longer than the paper these photographs are printed on. If these objects become the primary evidence of our civilisation, are we comfortable with the story they will tell? Reading anthropological discussions of material culture changed how I understood the river itself. I had always expected to find waste in the Thames. That expectation felt natural until I realised it was cultural. The river is not inherently polluted; it has been cultivated into this condition through generations of human behaviour. Seeing the first beauty product glistening amongst the silt made it difficult to separate nature from manufacture. Rather than existing as opposites, they had become entangled. As Tim Ingold (2011) suggests, culture is not separate from nature but its continuation. The Thames is therefore neither purely natural nor purely artificial. It is a landscape continually produced through our habits of consumption, where the tide carries evidence of everyday life alongside water and sediment. In the same way, aesthetics are not separate from anthropology. Ingold argues that aesthetic awareness is not a refined luxury but fundamental to how we relate to the world. Photography became my way of cultivating that awareness. The images are not intended to aestheticise waste, but to use beauty as a means of sustaining attention. Looking is itself is a form of research enquiry and the photograph provides a frame to construct narratives around these objects we would ordinarily dismiss, allowing questions of beauty, significance and responsibility to emerge through sustained attention rather than judgement. <img width="3535" height="4713" width_o="3535" height_o="4713" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/c60a4c8225bef58b5a99c156e2523d65532c0707a08e0d53e94bc1082c0ec3d5/276.-THAMES-FEB-202611596.jpg" data-mid="252777626" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/c60a4c8225bef58b5a99c156e2523d65532c0707a08e0d53e94bc1082c0ec3d5/276.-THAMES-FEB-202611596.jpg" /> 08. Glazed ceramic shards and a terracotta fragment, worn smooth at the edges. 09. A shard of yellow plastic in dark sand, the one bright thing among the stones and reeds. <img width="4280" height="2853" width_o="4280" height_o="2853" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/7b74d55d4ce11ebef0d6d79d95f5c7ae0ff32d030c9870314d997b61cc2447ca/_Q0A4101.jpg" data-mid="252777622" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/7b74d55d4ce11ebef0d6d79d95f5c7ae0ff32d030c9870314d997b61cc2447ca/_Q0A4101.jpg" /> <img width="2480" height="3307" width_o="2480" height_o="3307" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/14c15bb1e64f898b478e0d47addcececd3242f0d50ef5dfcf04d83e4a71a9b64/BLACKWELL_04.jpg" data-mid="252777630" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/14c15bb1e64f898b478e0d47addcececd3242f0d50ef5dfcf04d83e4a71a9b64/BLACKWELL_04.jpg" /> 10. A blue rubber glove coated in mud, its fingers spread as if mid-gesture. Mudlarkers have assembled extraordinary archives that illuminate London's past, yet today's discarded objects remain culturally invisible from their work. A Roman jug and an Actimel carton were both manufactured, used and discarded within the ordinary routines of everyday life. The difference lies less in their function than in the historical distance that separates them from us. We romanticise what time has softened. Contemporary waste resists nostalgia because it reflects our own habits too clearly. We are confronted not by ancient history but by ourselves. Portraits [2026] proposes a shift in perception. It neither condemns nor redeems the objects it photographs, because I remain implicated in the systems that produced them. Instead, the series asks what happens when photography is used not simply to document material culture but to participate in it. By changing the ontology of these objects—shifting them from product to waste, from waste to portrait—the images question how beauty is constructed, how value is assigned and how material culture shapes our understanding of ourselves. If archaeology studies the past through what survives, then perhaps photography can help us excavate the present before it too becomes history. The objects in these photographs are not exceptional. They are ordinary. That is precisely why they deserve our attention. <img width="3510" height="3510" width_o="3510" height_o="3510" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/87a687b3ef94861a9964486e0dcd0c9c9fe6a466a403d31981568ace2554a5e8/headshot.jpg" data-mid="253068612" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/87a687b3ef94861a9964486e0dcd0c9c9fe6a466a403d31981568ace2554a5e8/headshot.jpg" /> Writer Bio Originally from Liverpool and now based in London, Ryan Blackwell is a photographer working across fashion, beauty and art projects. His practice is shaped by a sensitivity to colour and form, exploring ideas of beauty, value and attention. His work combines a graphic, classical sensibility with a contemporary edge, bringing intimacy and character to both people and objects. Read Next&nbsp;︎︎︎ https://anthroprospective.com/In-Conversation-with-Craig-Ryan Mon, 06 Jul 2026 09:06:57 +0000 Anthroprospective – Research as Everyday Literature https://anthroprospective.com/In-Conversation-with-Craig-Ryan In Conversation with Craig Ryan Of The StandardX, Fitzroy Melbourne Interviewer: Courtney Boag Image: Craig at The Loft, The StandardX 7 July, 2026 “ To turn strangers into something more, you need warmth, rhythm, trust and a little bit of surprise. When those things come together, people leave feeling like they were part of something rather than just present in the room” Craig Ryan <img width="3456" height="4608" width_o="3456" height_o="4608" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/34064a5b57bc0a1cbfe777638ed8ff4a3ce1e3e48b112efcdc1e7712e2a71928/Craig-The-StandardX.jpg" data-mid="250124849" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/34064a5b57bc0a1cbfe777638ed8ff4a3ce1e3e48b112efcdc1e7712e2a71928/Craig-The-StandardX.jpg" /> Every so often a space does something extraordinary: people arrive as strangers, guarded and self-contained, and leave feeling more connected and inspired. At Anthrōprospective we spend a great deal of time thinking about how that happens, and why. It is one of the questions beneath our journal, our monthly Nostos salons, and a new conversation card game we have been building to move people past small talk and into exchanges that leave a positive mark. Grounded in social science, the game uses ideas from anthropology and sociology to give people quiet permission to speak openly, and to notice the deeper currents running beneath their everyday stories. That question brought us to Fitzroy in June to test our first prototype in the wild, running sessions at Industry Beans on Rose Street with a small group drawn from design, academia, entrepreneurship and industry. And when it came to where we would base ourselves, and who we would want beside us as a collaborator, one choice felt like a natural alliance: The StandardX, who we are delighted to have partnered with for this chapter. The hotel does not treat hospitality as a transaction. It treats its rooms, its bar and its programming as a cultural proposition, a place that hangs art, hosts conversation and draws the neighbourhood in. Our card game and their hotel are, in the end, doing the same work by different means: where the game uses social theory to open people up across a table, The StandardX uses design and atmosphere to open them up across a room. Two crafts, one conviction, that the spaces and objects we make quietly decide whether we meet each other at all. Which is why we wanted to sit down with Craig Ryan, the hotel's General Manager, to talk about the daily work of keeping a place like this culturally alive. What follows is a conversation about origins and intentions, about Melbourne and the art of the third place, about the quiet architecture of belonging, and about what it takes, night after night, to turn a building full of strangers into something more. Every space like this begins with an idea and a leap. Take me back to the start — what was the original vision for The StandardX? The original vision for The StandardX was to create something that felt unmistakably connected to its neighbourhood, not a hotel that could be picked up and placed anywhere else. Fitzroy has such a strong identity. Creative, independent, a little rebellious and very social. The hotel needed to feel like it belonged to that energy. The StandardX was designed as the younger, more spontaneous expression of The Standard brand. It is not about formality or traditional luxury. It is about personality, cultural relevance, good design, great music, food, and the kind of moments that feel unplanned but stay with you. From the beginning, the idea was to create a hotel that could be both a place to stay and a place to discover. You might come in for a room, but then find yourself in Bistro X, up at On Top, in The Loft, or crossing paths with someone during a music night, a wine dinner, a local collaboration or a neighbourhood event. That was always the ambition to create a hotel that feels alive and activated in its surrounds. <img width="2792" height="3722" width_o="2792" height_o="3722" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/7f97af4ce85a253d419e5427a1f2d639a8a1e992157cf155b3d85de247c7d214/P1010573.jpg" data-mid="250124954" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/7f97af4ce85a253d419e5427a1f2d639a8a1e992157cf155b3d85de247c7d214/P1010573.jpg" /> <img width="3456" height="4608" width_o="3456" height_o="4608" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/518e9ec5627d9d0ed178556f8862c2f5c6102b41ed6bcd5e090a1bb83cb8fe14/P1010545.jpg" data-mid="250124948" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/518e9ec5627d9d0ed178556f8862c2f5c6102b41ed6bcd5e090a1bb83cb8fe14/P1010545.jpg" /> The hotel is unmistakably of Fitzroy here on Rose St, you have the creative community right on your doorstep. How does the neighbourhood shape what happens inside these walls, and how do you want The StandardX to give something back to that culture? Fitzroy shapes almost everything we do. The streets around us are full of independent stores, galleries, bars, restaurants, makers, musicians and creative people who have built the personality of the neighbourhood over many years. We do not want to compete with that; we want to be part of it. The hotel takes cues from the local environment. You feel it in the design, the attitude, the way people move through the spaces, and the kind of programming we lean into. The StandardX is not trying to create a polished bubble separate from Fitzroy. It is more about creating a doorway into the neighbourhood. ‘ For us, giving back means using the hotel as a platform. That might be through local partnerships and inviting neighbourhood creatives into showcase their works, supporting local producers and winemakers, or creating reasons for people who live nearby to actually use the hotel. Bistro X, The Loft and On Top aim to be places the local community can connect. The best version of The StandardX is when guests leave with a stronger sense of Fitzroy and the local creative scene than when they arrived.So much of the connective tissue at The StandardX comes down to the design itself — the lights, the layout, where the bar sits, where people's paths cross. How deliberately do you design for encounter and conversation, and what are the details most guests feel but never consciously notice?&nbsp; It is very deliberate, but ideally it should not feel deliberate. The best hotel design creates behaviour without forcing it. At The StandardX, the spaces are designed so that people naturally cross paths. You arrive, you move through the lobby, you see the bar, you notice Bistro X, you hear music, you catch the atmosphere of the room. It creates a sense that something is happening, even before you know exactly what it is. The lighting is a big part of that. It softens the space and makes people want to stay longer. The furniture placement matters too. Not everything is set up in a formal, straight-line way. There are corners, communal moments, tables that invite conversation, and areas where you can either be seen or disappear a little. The bar is important because it acts almost like a social anchor. It gives the room energy and gives people permission to pause. The movement between Bistro X, The Loft and On Top also creates this layered experience where the hotel reveals itself gradually. I think the details guests feel but do not always consciously notice are things like warmth, sound, lighting, sightlines and pace. They may not say, “the design made me speak to someone,” but they might say, “I just liked being there.” That is often the design doing its job. <img width="3330" height="4440" width_o="3330" height_o="4440" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/6853d0030ec236684415969b284bb80616d2cd3f49f837aa29054a5303ae7221/P1010562.jpg" data-mid="250124951" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/6853d0030ec236684415969b284bb80616d2cd3f49f837aa29054a5303ae7221/P1010562.jpg" /> <img width="3456" height="4608" width_o="3456" height_o="4608" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/165b71a0d39acebac537a88976fa1c2750b47e9ec8f0104dbdb65e035dd1b054/Craig-The-StandardX..jpg" data-mid="250124848" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/165b71a0d39acebac537a88976fa1c2750b47e9ec8f0104dbdb65e035dd1b054/Craig-The-StandardX..jpg" /> The StandardX hosts a number of cultural and music events throughout the year, what is your vision for this cultural programming? The vision is for cultural programming to feel authentic to the hotel and authentic to Fitzroy. We are not interested in events that feel like they have simply been dropped into the building. The programming needs to have a reason to be here. Music, food, wine, fashion, art, conversation and neighbourhood culture are all natural territories for The StandardX. We want the hotel to be a place where different parts of the creative community can come together, sometimes in a very public way, and sometimes in a more intimate way. For example, our wine dinners at Bistro X are not just about food and wine. They are about storytelling, connection and creating a table where people can experience something local and personal. Music programming can bring a different energy again, especially when it reflects the sound and attitude of the neighbourhood. Collaborations with local artists, brands or cultural voices allow the hotel to become more than accommodation and part of the cultural calendar. Ultimately, the programming should make people curious. It should give locals a reason to come in, guests a reason to stay longer, and the hotel a stronger role in the neighbourhood. We hear a lot about "third places" where community life happens and this idea of "social infrastructure" whereby the physical places we build can quietly determine whether connection forms at all. Do you see The StandardX as that kind of infrastructure for people, and what does it take to create that sense of belonging? Yes, absolutely. I think hotels can be powerful third places when they are designed and operated with that intention. Traditionally, a hotel was mainly for travellers. But today, the best hotels are also for locals, collaborators, regulars, creatives, neighbours and people who simply want somewhere interesting to be. The StandardX has the ability to be that kind of social infrastructure because it has different entry points. You can come for coffee, dinner, a drink, an event, a meeting, a staycation, a rooftop moment or a conversation. Not everyone has to engage with the hotel in the same way. Creating belonging is about consistency and openness. People need to feel welcome without feeling over-managed. The team plays a huge role in that. It is the tone at the door, the way someone is greeted, the music, the lighting, the confidence of the service and the feeling that the hotel has a point of view. Belonging also comes from recognising the neighbourhood around us. If locals feel that the hotel understands Fitzroy and is contributing to it rather than taking from it, then the hotel becomes part of the community fabric. <img width="3456" height="4608" width_o="3456" height_o="4608" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/e049790bf9fc532fc85ec07e968dae6bcd859c2ddf263c94bbaa3d9f33b0f231/P1010563.jpg" data-mid="250124952" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/e049790bf9fc532fc85ec07e968dae6bcd859c2ddf263c94bbaa3d9f33b0f231/P1010563.jpg" /> We were so grateful to spend time here in June while we were testing an exciting conversation card game that will use social science theory to help people have deeper conversations. I'd love to know what you think it takes to turn a room full of strangers into something more? I think it starts with creating the right conditions. People need to feel comfortable enough to let their guard down, but stimulated enough to be curious. That is where the room, the hosting and the structure of the experience all matter. A room full of strangers becomes something more when there is a shared reason for being there. It might be a game, a dinner, a performance, a question, a glass of wine, or even just the energy of the space. The key is to create a gentle invitation rather than forcing interaction. What I love about your conversation card game is that it gives people permission to go beyond small talk. Hotels are full of passing interactions, but the opportunity is to create moments where people actually connect. The StandardX is a great environment for that because it already has a social energy. It is not too formal, and it is not trying too hard. That makes people more open. To turn strangers into something more, you need warmth, rhythm, trust and a little bit of surprise. When those things come together, people leave feeling like they were part of something rather than just present in the room.What excites you about collaborations like ours — the idea of a hotel becoming a stage for ideas and community, not just a backdrop? What excites me is that it pushes the hotel into a more meaningful role. A hotel should not just be the backdrop. It can be a host, a connector and sometimes even a catalyst for ideas. Collaborations like yours bring new thinking into the building. They allow us to explore different ways people can engage with the space, and they also help us understand what modern hospitality can be. It is not only about service in the traditional sense. It is about creating environments where people feel something, learn something, meet someone or see the neighbourhood differently. The StandardX brand has always had a strong cultural lens, so these collaborations feel very natural for us. Whether it is a conversation-based experience, a wine dinner, a music event, a local partnership or a creative activation, the goal is the same: to make the hotel feel alive and relevant. The best collaborations also create value in both directions. The hotel provides the stage and the atmosphere, while the collaborator brings a new audience, idea or perspective. That is when the space becomes more than a venue. <img width="3456" height="4608" width_o="3456" height_o="4608" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/0ad4b6b35bbe087b7856860dcaefb56d094ef0129585f7c8397f66f7dafe4935/P1010570.jpg" data-mid="250124953" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/0ad4b6b35bbe087b7856860dcaefb56d094ef0129585f7c8397f66f7dafe4935/P1010570.jpg" /> <img width="3456" height="4608" width_o="3456" height_o="4608" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/30fee97dfa9df420e4b8e09e986e35fca68c5130ab410db318e80a80ff258635/P1010568-copy.jpg" data-mid="250125008" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/30fee97dfa9df420e4b8e09e986e35fca68c5130ab410db318e80a80ff258635/P1010568-copy.jpg" /> &nbsp; When someone walks out of The StandardX, what do you hope stays with them? I hope they leave with a feeling. Of course, we want them to remember the design, the food, the room, the rooftop, the music and the service. But more than that, I hope they remember the energy of the place and most of all a feeling of their new second home. I want people to feel that The StandardX gave them access to Fitzroy, a conversation, a moment, or a different side of Melbourne. Maybe they discovered a local wine, met someone unexpected, heard a great track, had a memorable dinner at Bistro X, or simply felt like they were somewhere with personality. The best compliment is when someone says, “I want to come back,” not just because the hotel was comfortable, but because it made them feel connected to the neighbourhood and to the people around them. For me, that is what The StandardX should do. It should stay with people as a little reminder that travel, hospitality and culture are at their best when they feel human. <img width="3456" height="4608" width_o="3456" height_o="4608" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/35dd46edeb66c1283b3581379b68ff72347e97e39f20b1dab0ab1a6f1a9aad42/P1010549-copy.jpg" data-mid="250125007" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/35dd46edeb66c1283b3581379b68ff72347e97e39f20b1dab0ab1a6f1a9aad42/P1010549-copy.jpg" /> Interested to learn more about The StandardX or book a room - visit them here. Check out some of the cultural happenings and events at The Standard here in Melbourne and around the world. Book a table at BistroX for an incredible wine and dine experience. &nbsp; Connect with The StandardX on socials Read Next&nbsp;︎︎︎ https://anthroprospective.com/Digital-Intimacy-and-the-Spectatorship-of-Sensing Fri, 03 Jul 2026 00:37:23 +0000 Anthroprospective – Research as Everyday Literature https://anthroprospective.com/Digital-Intimacy-and-the-Spectatorship-of-Sensing Digital Intimacy and the Spectatorship of Sensing Why We Still Don't Understand Each Other Words: Adam Sudewo Image caption: Distant feelings. Always there, never attainable. 9 July “ The spectatorship of sensing allows one to feel closeness without genuine engagement. It presents a form of intimacy that does not require presence, conversation, or shared experiences...This kind of closeness blurs the line between knowing and imagining.” Adam Sudewo <img width="3024" height="4032" width_o="3024" height_o="4032" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/b9e345516790b9586faf3b4c9f2e6ca92a453649c1a88625351c0c31883ab8f2/pexels-goldcircuits-4440584.jpg" data-mid="250236805" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/b9e345516790b9586faf3b4c9f2e6ca92a453649c1a88625351c0c31883ab8f2/pexels-goldcircuits-4440584.jpg" /> 01. “Am I in love? – yes, since I am waiting. The other one never waits. Sometimes I want to play the part of the one who doesn't wait; I try to busy myself elsewhere, to arrive late; but I always lose at this game. Whatever I do, I find myself there, with nothing to do, punctual, even ahead of time. The lover's fatal identity is precisely this: I am the one who waits.” —Roland Barthes, &nbsp;A Lover’s Discourse Roland Barthes once wrote that a person in love is “someone who waits” (Barthes 1978: 39–40). They struggle to occupy themselves in other spaces, so they remain trapped there, in the waiting room: doing nothing amid uncertainty and absence. In the digital space, waiting no longer carries a specific emotional weight, but rather becomes an atmosphere that is constantly studied and interpreted, something that is slowly becoming a new affective infrastructure. It flickers in the disappearing typing indicator before a message arrives, in the ritual of checking who’s viewed a story, in revisited old conversations late at night, or in the strange intimacy of recognising someone through an uploaded song, both within and beyond the “muck of language” (Barthes 1978: 99). In this sense, waiting becomes a way to understand one another through acts of sensing: unfolding in patterns of appearance and disappearance, pauses, repetitions, silences, and emotional traces creeping along social platforms (“the platform”). It centers on how users sense the presence of others through fragments circulating on the platform, without ever gaining full access to their experiences. Throughout this interface, every distinct experience begins to settle into the same emotional rhythm. It teaches users to understand intimacy, sorrow, and even political violence through uniform structures of visibility and affect. If Barthes spoke of this in relation to a body falling in love, then social media expands this condition into a broader collective experience. What makes waiting so central to Barthes’s observations on love is not merely that one desires a specific presence, but because one lives in the uncertainty shaped by absence. One does not know whether one is loved, thought of by others, or even loved in the same way one loves others. Connection becomes a scattered signal within the waiting room. An empty space that cannot be filled by any certain knowledge. In that space, time feels as though it is slowing down; various possibilities seem to split into other possibilities, and every sign that appears takes on a weight of meaning far greater than itself. This also occurs in the digital waiting room, where individuals are forced to grapple with the uncertainty of scattered signs. Waiting, in this context, means surrendering oneself to every possibility carried by the signs and the frozen passage of time. As Geert Lovink said in a personal interview I conducted: The 24/7 distraction is in full swing. There’s no clue how to stop swiping. None of them leads to anything. There are always more videos to watch… and messages to read and respond to. You try to keep up but fail (Lovink 2025). Thus, the platform has become a bustling space that leaves little room for pause. Consequently, waiting under the shadow of uncertainty has become a permanent feature of the affective atmosphere of digital life. When certainty is absent, humans begin to rely on the scattered signs around them. The person whose presence is longed for may never fully materialise within this uncertainty. What remains are only memories, images, gestures, or fragments of that person. What emerges is an imaginary universe of connection, suspended as an unanswered question. A universe that can only be approached through the work of reading and reinterpreting the elements that shape it. Without any possibility of making it fully one's own. Social media, which was initially appreciated for its ability to bridge distances and connect people from the farthest corners of the world, on the other hand, ceaselessly produces and distributes signs on a massive scale. Signs that can now be counted, measured, sorted, and compared. A person’s presence no longer appears merely as an impression left in memory, but as a sequence of numbers, indicators, and notifications that constantly update themselves. In such a space, attention becomes visible, while intimacy is increasingly rendered through observable forms of visibility. Activity indicators, view counts, online status, the sequence of a story, or other features contribute to generating new traces that constantly invite interpretation: inviting an endless proliferation of interpretations about what intimacy means today. Thus, the platform does not entirely eliminate the uncertainty that accompanies human connection. Rather, it multiplies the material used to interpret that uncertainty. Every new feature introduces a new sign; every new sign opens up new possibilities for interpretation. As a result, digital life is increasingly less defined by direct communication and increasingly more defined by the activities of reading, interpreting, and connecting scattered fragments. Social media platforms not only multiply the material through which uncertainty is interpreted, it also quietly redefines what it means to understand another person. To understand, in the platform’s logic, means to read measurable, visible, quantifiable signs. Such a definition is anything but neutral. At this point, the platform sidelines other forms of understanding that leave no trace, produce no data, and cannot be registered by algorithms. Just like waiting, the reading of signs in digital space has also become a permanent condition that is difficult to stop. This relates to the workings of the platform regime, which constantly requires the user’s undivided attention so that it can continue to circulate within its own loop. Through this attention, the platform succeeds in keeping users in a never-ending affective state. Users remain caught in a continuous orbit around signs, drawn back by exhausted emotional currents. “Sadness and neighbouring mental states are responses to the relentless assault on users’ attention spans” (Lovink 2025). Real conversations are reduced to a leaking dam of attention, manifesting as subconscious memories of doom scrolling, stalking, lurking, and other ceaseless digital activities. This leaves humans stranded on a threshold of intimacy, a thin line between connection and disconnection. The abundance of signs produced by platforms ultimately reshapes the boundaries of human connection in its most fundamental form. At this point, platform-mediated intimacy gradually shifts into what I call the “spectatorship of sensing”, a state in which users feel increasingly close to the lives of others through constant exposure to traces of their existence, yet this closeness is not always accompanied by deeper understanding. What is available is not the experience itself, but rather the representations circulating around it. Consequently, social relationships are increasingly built upon impressions, assumptions, and partial interpretations of lives that, at their core, remain fundamentally inaccessible. The spectatorship of sensing allows one to feel closeness without genuine engagement. It presents a form of intimacy that does not require presence, conversation, or shared experiences. One can follow the rhythm of another's life, track shifts in their mood, and even feel a sense of loss when they disappear from the screen, without ever truly becoming part of their life. This kind of closeness blurs the line between knowing and imagining. Furthermore, what distinguishes spectatorship of sensing from empathy is that the sense of closeness it generates always leaves a distinct void. This points to a platform mechanism that flattens the diverse ways feelings circulate between people. The platform standardises signs that can be read by almost everyone. The stories we see, the messages we read, or the songs we upload shape our feelings toward someone who leaves a digital footprint. And because digital traces never truly disappear, spectatorship of sensing also never truly ends. It continues to haunt and knock on every door of the digital space whenever we, whether consciously or not, enter it. We can sense something about a person even if they have never appeared in our lived reality, simply because the platform continuously presents the remnants of their existence to us through these signs. By this point, the digital space transforms how we communicate through observation and interpretation to make sense of absence itself. For example, we can discern whether someone is heartbroken, burned out, in love, lonely, or experiencing other emotions without having to interact with them face-to-face. Through observing someone’s online activities, we can construct a universe of understanding regarding ex-lovers, crushes, mutuals, creators, and online friends within the shifting affective landscape in our own minds. The digital space turns each of us into spectators of others’ emotional lives through the residues of memory and lingering signs, which are embedded in absence. However, on a platform, absence often does not manifest in the same way for everyone. Some losses are granted space, while others remain unseen, constrained by algorithms and virality. Such differences in visibility are certainly not a coincidence that can be practically addressed by digital strategies. Platforms shape not only what we know, but also what we are capable of feeling. What appears in a feed, what is reposted, or even what vanishes quickly, is the result of the power structures and interests driving the platform. In this sense, the platform is an infrastructure of perception that defines the boundaries of what can be collectively felt. In “Decolonial AestheSis: Colonial Wounds/Decolonial Healings,” Walter Mignolo (2013) writes: “Modern aesthetics have played a key role in configuring a canon, a normativity that enabled the disdain and rejection of other forms of aesthetic practices, or, more precisely, other forms of aestheSis, of sensing and perceiving”. What is striking about this text is that Mignolo does not merely address the issue of aesthetic taste. He expands the scope to consider how certain systems can determine how we perceive what is deemed legitimate, and what must be excluded. For this reason, Mignolo (2013) tends to speak of “world-sensing” rather than “world-vision”, since vision, which has long been prioritised by the history of Western epistemology, actually has often displaced affect and other sensory ways of knowing and sensing. Today’s digital platforms operate in the same way. They indirectly configure regimes of normativity by determining what content appears, what is repeated, and what is deemed worthy of attention. They disseminate this content to users, who unconsciously consume it repeatedly. The difference between platforms and established aesthetic systems, perhaps, lies solely in how platforms do not present themselves as legitimate canons. They more closely resemble a dynamic infrastructure that appears neutral and open to all. Yet, precisely because of this, the hierarchies of sensing produced by platforms are difficult to recognise and challenge outright. As Lovink puts it, platforms operate “like the air we breathe” (Lovink 2025). They have become inseparable from how we live, embodied within space and time without us ever realising their presence. The most powerful and determinative infrastructure is the one whose presence is the least visible. Thus, if the way we perceive the world is already largely shaped before we even recognise it, the question that arises is: what will happen if intimacy, sorrow, and political violence begin to be experienced through the same infrastructure? Furthermore, the platform, due to its ability to shape infrastructure that appears neutral, is gradually becoming a sort of collective sensorium of our world today. Evoking Marshall McLuhan’s (1964) concept of the technological sensorium, the platform operates shared sensory system through which it can determine and curate what kinds of experiences are permitted to appear and be felt by its users. Within this shifting, flickering collective sensorium, genocide, war, heartbreak content,&nbsp; creative work’s meme, ads for the latest hotels and coffee shops, all collide simultaneously in a single swipe of the screen. Rather than producing identical experiences, platforms standardise the ways users encounter and engage with them. The central issue of digital life does not lie in the loss of the ability to feel, but in the increasingly narrow range of ways available to feel. Platforms expand the range of experiences we can witness, but at the same time standardise the forms of engagement we can have with those experiences. Everything on the platform must submit to a regime of platform features that shapes users' embodied experience as they scroll, view, share, or simply pass by content in an identical manner. Consequently, the constant flow of crisis-related content in the digital space is difficult to process politically because the platform’s infrastructure does not provide a way to experience it differently. Indeed, varied experiences are presented in this space, yet the regime of perception operating within it remains uniform. Crises presented as spectacles will continue to be absorbed and folded back into the platform's endless stream, without disruption, without any distinct weight compared to other content. At this point, the limits of spectatorship of sensing become unmistakably clear. We can sense everything, yet find it increasingly difficult to sense anything differently, drawn into the sensorium of the capitalist platform. We currently live in an era where connectivity seems to be facilitated solely by platforms. They allow us to know more about others even when separated by millions of miles, within the promise of a universal humanism. Yet, at the same time, in other parts of the world, war, genocide, land dispossession, loneliness, and alienation seem to be never-ending. This raises new questions that may continue to weigh on each of our minds: why does this abundance of sensing not automatically create a world of mutual understanding? We, perhaps, too often experience, know, and are exposed to others’ experiences through platform infrastructure. By presenting so many things at once, which can only be experienced in the same way, we struggle to distinguish what is urgent, requires action, or calls for collective solidarity, and what can simply be overlooked. Information pours endlessly from our fingertips each day. It leaves us drowning in structural exhaustion without clear navigation or a way out. Every door in the digital space is an emergency exit. Thus, the spectatorship of sensing does not stop at romantic and interpersonal issues. It is a political condition in which the same logic also shapes how we experience war, genocide, disasters, and even political crises. The digital subject becomes a permanent witness to the lives of others, observing from a distance. Our failure to understand others does not stem from a lack of information, but rather from the fact that our relationship with the world is increasingly mediated by our position as spectators of others’ experiences. By the time this essay is finished, Barthes may still be waiting in his grave, saying: “I am the one who waits” (Barthes 1978: 39–40). He waits amidst a scarcity of signs, when uncertainty arises from the absence of information. We are still waiting too, but under different conditions. We wait amidst an abundance of signs. We know what someone posts, what they like, what they listen to, what is happening in Palestine, Congo, Sudan, or within our own social circles. History records that humans live amidst so many traces of others’ lives. Yet this abundance does not automatically make the world easier to understand. On the contrary, the more we are able to sense, the harder it becomes to determine how each experience should be situated. Understanding remains a fragile thing, always lagging a few steps behind what we manage to see and feel in the waiting room. References Barthes, R. (1978). A Lover's Discourse: Fragments. Hill and Wang. McLuhan, M. (1964). Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. McGraw-Hill. Lovink, G. (2025, April 5). Sad by design – Interview with Geert Lovink by Adam Sudewo. Network Cultures. https://networkcultures.org/geert/2025/04/05/sad-by-design-interview-with-geert-lovink-by-adam-sudewo/ Mignolo, W. (2013). Decolonial aestheSis: Colonial wounds/decolonial healings. Social Text Periscope. https://socialtextjournal.org/periscope_article/decolonial-aesthesis-colonial-woundsdecolonial-healings/ <img width="1170" height="1445" width_o="1170" height_o="1445" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/c4ec007a081c729cb69ae2d8718b62bb14963f06e242f7e9222ee822e9e33b51/IMG_4997.jpg" data-mid="250034721" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/c4ec007a081c729cb69ae2d8718b62bb14963f06e242f7e9222ee822e9e33b51/IMG_4997.jpg" /> Writer Bio Adam Sudewo is a writer and independent researcher from Cirebon, Indonesia. With a background in political science and experience in art collectives, his work sits at the intersection of writing, cultural research, and digital narratives. His interests revolve around decolonial practices, collective memory, peripheral cultures, care work, and the politics of everyday life. Instagram: @adamasu__ Read Next&nbsp;︎︎︎ https://anthroprospective.com/Ghazipur-Garbage-Hill Fri, 03 Jul 2026 00:59:20 +0000 Anthroprospective – Research as Everyday Literature https://anthroprospective.com/Ghazipur-Garbage-Hill Ghazipur Garbage Hill Waste, labour, and urban life at Delhi’s edge Words:&nbsp;Abhishek SinghImages:&nbsp;Abhishek Singh Image caption:&nbsp; For many workers at Ghazipur, the landfill is not only a site of hazard but a source of livelihood—an environment where earning, endurance, and routine are inseparable. “ Ghazipur invites questions about labour, value, and proximity. Who is expected to live and work closest to the remains of collective consumption? Which forms of labour become indispensable while remaining largely unseen? What does it mean when environmental crisis is not an exceptional event, but an ordinary condition of everyday life?” Abhishek Singh <img width="4928" height="3264" width_o="4928" height_o="3264" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/7a743313db184941d41cf831f52c607465c5901902e4153c4265d4923c4cf101/Abhishek_Images_03.jpg" data-mid="250034832" border="0" data-scale="100" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/7a743313db184941d41cf831f52c607465c5901902e4153c4265d4923c4cf101/Abhishek_Images_03.jpg" /> 01. On the eastern edge of Delhi, the Ghazipur landfill rises above roads, homes, and markets like an artificial hill built from the city’s excess. Long before one reaches its base, it announces itself through smell, smoke, and dust. What appears at first as a dumping ground soon reveals itself as something more complex: a place where waste becomes landscape, where labour continues in hazardous conditions, and where the afterlife of the city’s consumption remains permanently visible. Landfills are often imagined as the end point of urban life: the place where unwanted things are taken away and forgotten. But at Ghazipur, nothing really disappears. Waste arrives continuously in trucks from across Delhi and accumulates in unstable layers: food scraps, plastic packaging, broken household objects, construction debris, industrial residue, and fragments of private routines. Once discarded, these materials do not become absent. They decompose, leak, burn, and return through the air, the soil, and the bodies that remain closest to them. The landfill interrupts the comforting fiction that disposal is final. &nbsp; <img width="4928" height="3264" width_o="4928" height_o="3264" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/996402ef08de881dee1c6f3219df530e1830367c831be41ead4033c648d147ec/Abhishek_Images_01.jpg" data-mid="250034830" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/996402ef08de881dee1c6f3219df530e1830367c831be41ead4033c648d147ec/Abhishek_Images_01.jpg" /> 02. From the windows around Ghazipur, the view is shaped not by distance or relief, but by the everyday proximity of waste. 03.Clothes dry on a line outside a container house near the landfill, tracing the quiet continuities of domestic life at the edge of an industrial waste landscape. <img width="4928" height="3264" width_o="4928" height_o="3264" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/31c8c192da0a75d46e9a568c85f05f5d26da716eb81e4b10391718ec42e2c8b1/Abhishek_Images_10.jpg" data-mid="250034839" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/31c8c192da0a75d46e9a568c85f05f5d26da716eb81e4b10391718ec42e2c8b1/Abhishek_Images_10.jpg" /> <img width="4928" height="3264" width_o="4928" height_o="3264" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/10a2a0befa63ede817da9aaae9adb9e329b8b392edeb842780d93e688b34698d/Abhishek_Images_05.jpg" data-mid="250034834" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/10a2a0befa63ede817da9aaae9adb9e329b8b392edeb842780d93e688b34698d/Abhishek_Images_05.jpg" /> 04.&nbsp; The relentless pace of the landfill extends beyond waste disposal itself. Mechanics and welders work continuously to repair machines and vehicles worn down by the site’s constant demands. To photograph Ghazipur is not only to document waste, but to observe the social world that exists around it. The site functions through constant movement. Trucks enter and unload. Machines push and compress fresh layers of garbage. Mechanics and welders repair vehicles worn down by the relentless demands of the yard. Workers pause briefly for lunch in the middle of dust and machinery before returning to their tasks. What from a distance appears to be a singular mountain of refuse is, on the ground, an organised and continuous labour environment. For many workers, the landfill is not an abstract symbol of environmental crisis but a place of daily earning. Livelihood and hazard exist side by side. Kebal Singh, for instance, has spent nearly three decades working here. As a truck driver, he occupies a relatively stable position compared to many other contract labourers at the site. Yet stability at Ghazipur is always relative. The work is repetitive, exposed, and shaped by an environment that is never fully under control. 05. Lunch break at the yard. Amid dust, machinery, and noise, shared meals become brief moments of rest, companionship, and ordinary social life. <img width="4928" height="3264" width_o="4928" height_o="3264" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/6a33360547255bd6defbea7e89e8d341df6f65fd49e4afc18b913255b96b13fa/Abhishek_Images_06.jpg" data-mid="250034835" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/6a33360547255bd6defbea7e89e8d341df6f65fd49e4afc18b913255b96b13fa/Abhishek_Images_06.jpg" /> <img width="4928" height="3264" width_o="4928" height_o="3264" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/5e771db2224c9bbf548426ef80033921b0fcca2a2bebeb1382ebcd1de86d7910/Abhishek_Images_04.jpg" data-mid="250034833" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/5e771db2224c9bbf548426ef80033921b0fcca2a2bebeb1382ebcd1de86d7910/Abhishek_Images_04.jpg" /> 06.&nbsp; Kebal Singh has spent nearly three decades working at the landfill. Unlike many contract labourers on site, he drives one of the trucks—a role that offers relative stability within an otherwise precarious landscape of work. The landfill is also inhabited by other forms of life. Birds circle above the dumping zone, descending as fresh waste is unloaded. Dogs and cattle forage through contaminated material, unable to distinguish food from poison. Their presence complicates any simple boundary between nature and urban infrastructure. At Ghazipur, the city produces its own ecosystem, one built not through balance, but through neglect. The animals that feed here are not thriving in a natural habitat; they are adapting to a landscape created by human excess. There is a particular sensory force to this place. Dust hangs in the air and settles on skin, clothing, and machinery. Smoke from smouldering waste and recurring fires can drift across the site. In response, newly installed water sprinklers attempt to suppress airborne particles, offering partial relief in an environment where exposure is constant. Protective equipment (gloves, masks, boots) becomes more than a procedural requirement; it is often the thinnest line between labour and injury. Repeated contact with sharp or hazardous waste can quickly damage the body, even when danger becomes normalised through routine. Yet the photographs in this essay are not only concerned with spectacle or catastrophe. They are equally attentive to the quieter continuities of life that persist around the landfill. A shared meal during a lunch break. Clothes drying on a line outside a container house. A worker looking out from a window onto a landscape that has become ordinary through repetition. These moments matter because they resist the tendency to see places like Ghazipur only as scenes of ruin. They show how people build rhythm, familiarity, and forms of sociality within conditions that remain structurally unequal. <img width="4928" height="3264" width_o="4928" height_o="3264" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/00bcfd2ede210d11427e0072dd0e1c5cacdd9275cd7ad12f104ef783abfd2a68/Abhishek_Images_08.jpg" data-mid="250034837" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/00bcfd2ede210d11427e0072dd0e1c5cacdd9275cd7ad12f104ef783abfd2a68/Abhishek_Images_08.jpg" /> 07.&nbsp; Animals often bear the consequences of waste most directly. Unable to distinguish food from contamination, they forage among materials that slowly poison the environments they inhabit. 08.Dust remains one of the site’s most persistent hazards. Newly installed water sprinklers attempt to suppress airborne particles, offering partial relief in an environment defined by constant exposure. <img width="4928" height="3264" width_o="4928" height_o="3264" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/18b56575988e1e49514d0c024c0c638413b26906da3f9d9af86486ecca5ac4c9/Abhishek_Images_09.jpg" data-mid="250034838" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/18b56575988e1e49514d0c024c0c638413b26906da3f9d9af86486ecca5ac4c9/Abhishek_Images_09.jpg" /> <img width="4928" height="3264" width_o="4928" height_o="3264" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/382cd4d591e59b3cdf46165bac63a1d4bb84df0279179bb708919c8bf75dfd25/Abhishek_Images_02.jpg" data-mid="250034831" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/382cd4d591e59b3cdf46165bac63a1d4bb84df0279179bb708919c8bf75dfd25/Abhishek_Images_02.jpg" /> 09.As fresh waste is unloaded, a group of eagles circles and descends. At Ghazipur, what is discarded by the city becomes sustenance for other forms of life. 10.&nbsp; Protective equipment is often the only barrier between the body and injury. Without gloves, repeated contact with sharp and hazardous waste can quickly become damaging. <img width="4928" height="3264" width_o="4928" height_o="3264" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/c6bf0380a9ab2c84c3609cad73dec66853645aa5c34a6d9d52b999b590d187cb/Abhishek_Images_07.jpg" data-mid="250034836" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/c6bf0380a9ab2c84c3609cad73dec66853645aa5c34a6d9d52b999b590d187cb/Abhishek_Images_07.jpg" /> Ghazipur is not outside Delhi. It is one of the clearest expressions of how the city is organised. Waste is not distributed evenly, and neither are its consequences. Some neighbourhoods are cleaned, beautified, and protected from what they produce. Others are made to absorb the physical burden of what the city discards. The landfill therefore reveals more than a problem of sanitation or infrastructure. It exposes a hierarchy of visibility: what is removed from everyday urban life is not erased, only displaced, usually toward those with the least power to refuse it. Anthropologically, Ghazipur invites questions about labour, value, and proximity. Who is expected to live and work closest to the remains of collective consumption? Which forms of labour become indispensable while remaining largely unseen? What does it mean when environmental crisis is not an exceptional event, but an ordinary condition of everyday life? “Ghazipur Garbage Hill” approaches the landfill not simply as a site of waste, but as a social landscape shaped by endurance. It is a place where the city’s discarded materials continue to accumulate, but also where people continue to work, eat, repair, wait, and return home. To look closely at Ghazipur is to recognise that waste is never only about objects. It is also about labour, inequality, and the unequal distribution of risk that allows the city to keep functioning. <img width="640" height="640" width_o="640" height_o="640" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/df8017da4269210c9a130dc23a3b0fa39ffb7f2c839874192adb4fecf768ac8f/Profile-Pics.jpg" data-mid="250034826" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/640/i/df8017da4269210c9a130dc23a3b0fa39ffb7f2c839874192adb4fecf768ac8f/Profile-Pics.jpg" /> Writer Bio Abhishek Singh is an independent documentary photographer and visual storyteller based in Delhi NCR, India. His work explores environmental issues, migration, labour, and marginalized communities through long-term visual narratives. His photographs have been exhibited internationally and published by The Eye of Photography, India Development Review, and HAS Magazine. He is currently developing several self-funded documentary projects across India. Instagram Twitter Read Next&nbsp;︎︎︎ https://anthroprospective.com/Stillness-as-Resistance Wed, 03 Jun 2026 03:03:07 +0000 Anthroprospective – Research as Everyday Literature https://anthroprospective.com/Stillness-as-Resistance Stillness as Resistance &nbsp; The Role of Art in Rebuilding Empathy Words: Isabella WordsworthImages: Isabella Wordsworth Image caption:&nbsp; Ron Mueck Couple Under an Umbrella 2013, Isabella Wordsworth 1 July 2026 “Perhaps it is easier to empathise only when the other can speak back. When they can do the emotional labour. When they can educate you themselves.” Isabella Wordsworth <img width="3024" height="4032" width_o="3024" height_o="4032" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/81d8035b58f3e005c7ce98820d3f13e5b01ffecaebd5e117d9b3a20dfa4eec45/IMG_2582.jpg" data-mid="249044105" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/81d8035b58f3e005c7ce98820d3f13e5b01ffecaebd5e117d9b3a20dfa4eec45/IMG_2582.jpg" />01. As I wait in line to enter Ron Mueck's latest exhibition at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, in Australia, I am aimlessly scrolling my phone. I pass the news that yet another Minnesotan has been senselessly murdered in the protests against the ICE raids unfolding in America. As the 4K video plays, I find myself at the front of the line. I scan my ticket and stumble in. I grew up in Minnesota, a place that feels impossibly far away now, both in time and distance. Yet moments like this pull me roughly back. I see my classmates marching in the streets, my teachers fiercely protecting their students. I hear sirens in the background while on the phone with my father. The distance collapses. Standing before Ron Mueck's hyper-realistic sculptures, I find myself asking: what does it take to force empathy? Crisis as a First Language In this exhibition, as you stand amongst giants, you wait as if trying to catch them in the moment they gasp for breath. You are suspended in space and time, watching for the façade to crumble, watching for proof that these figures are alive. This suspense feels deeply familiar. It is no longer abnormal but a constant companion for anyone who has called America home in the last decade. That feeling of waiting for the shoe to drop but dreading the moment it does. My high school years were tainted by the height of the school shooting crisis from 2016 to 2020. What is meant to be some of the last carefree moments of adolescence became the birth of a generation marred by real-world threats imposing on our vision of the future. We marched then too. I remember making signs and walking out of class, feeling righteous in our freedom, our voices so young and carrying so far. In our shouts we could not yet hear the adults in charge still arguing about whether the problem was real. We didn't yet understand that this crisis wasn't new; it had been simmering for years, and years later it is still bubbling over. Even now, Everytown for Gun Safety, an American non-profit organisation which advocates for gun control and against gun violence, tracked 159 incidents of gunfire on school grounds in 2025, resulting in 53 deaths and 148 injuries. But to me, a defiant seventeen-year-old, it arrived fully formed, the way all crises arrive to those encountering them for the first time. My father is a humanitarian. The shape of his work has meant I have spent my whole life inside the seam between safety and its absence, growing up across India, China, Thailand, then the American Midwest, with migration and displacement as the furniture of our lives. He taught me that proximity to suffering is not optional. That you can be raised adjacent to crisis so consistently that the line between your life and disrupture begins to blur. I followed him into that work. I still do it now, in London, working with migrant populations encountering crises that journalists don't find compelling enough to grace the front pages. <img width="4032" height="3024" width_o="4032" height_o="3024" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/4ae6d9f9507ce96333dad5be2011381c0e421920225a85b4e135a5cd3475b38f/IMG_2552.jpg" data-mid="249044107" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/4ae6d9f9507ce96333dad5be2011381c0e421920225a85b4e135a5cd3475b38f/IMG_2552.jpg" /> 02. Ron Mueck chicken/man, 2019 Isabella Wordsworth 03. Ron Mueck Big Man 2000, Isabella Wordsworth <img width="4032" height="3024" width_o="4032" height_o="3024" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/12124d3cf6306e7db74f2acb4bc910e5f90299be6fefdf80655055ad89c260c1/IMG_2560.jpg" data-mid="249044106" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/12124d3cf6306e7db74f2acb4bc910e5f90299be6fefdf80655055ad89c260c1/IMG_2560.jpg" /> From the Streets to the Feed Watching these sculptures frozen in time, faces never twitching, you are left to wonder: what thought is trapped inside them?Each wrinkle, each mole crafted with meticulous intention. Their eyes never quite meeting your stare. What do they replay endlessly, over and over in their minds, for eternity? The summer George Floyd was murdered, I was in Minneapolis. I was there when the city burned and when the city held vigil and when the city tried, publicly, to reckon with itself. I marched in the streets with people I had gone to school with, through neighbourhoods I knew. The peculiar grief of watching people you love be forced to finally see themselves and their home clearly is difficult to describe. You want the reckoning to come. You dread what it costs. At first, that summer was treated as a marker for change. "The power of social media". In the UK I could very clearly see the "colonisers guilt" playing on my peers and tutors faces. There was an irony in their swift condemnation of racism in the US whilst the minorities in the UK find their voices going hoarse, begging people to hear them. Personally, that summer marked a turning point: a fearful apathy towards our screens. Each day our phones lit up with what had once felt like a uniting force, had become a dreaded death counter. And as the news started dripping away from our feeds, we noticed it wasn't just our feeds that it was disappearing from. We were watching something that had felt like a turning point slowly stop feeling that way. The news cycle moved on. The structural conditions remained. And those of us who had been in the streets found ourselves back at our phones, scrolling through grief that had been compressed into content, our own urgency now indistinguishable from noise. Each monumental human rights violation arrives like an echo. We ask ourselves: is this the moment we have been bracing for? A reckoning? A turning point? This, too, is familiar. History repeating itself. My voice grows hoarse, yet it feels as though my words mean nothing. Why must I beg you to listen? Empathy on Demand I peer out of the corner of my eye at the sculpture of an adolescent girl. Her posture is tense, arms drawn slightly inward, shoulders raised in the particular geometry of someone trying to take up less space. It is so effective that I find myself averting my gaze, as though my looking might make her more uncomfortable. The instinct is involuntary, and I notice it with some surprise, that I am modifying my behaviour in response to the discomfort of a figure who cannot feel me watching. Others are not doing this. Others stare openly. I find myself watching the viewers instead, the ones who stand close, phones raised, heads tilted with the relaxed entitlement of those who have decided that scrutiny is simply what art is for. It feels repugnant in a way I struggle to name precisely. Her eyes remain lowered beneath their gaze. And I wonder: how, in a gallery explicitly designed to incite empathy, can someone look so devoid of shame?&nbsp; Perhaps it is easier to empathise only when the other can speak back. When they can do the emotional labour. When they can educate you themselves. What has driven us to become so apathetic that the other must first prove they deserve empathy? Only then does their humanity demand recognition. Byung-Chul Han has written of our present condition as a transparency society, a world in which everything is made visible, and yet nothing is truly seen. Visibility, he argues, is not the same as perception; exposure is not understanding. The viewers with their phones raised are not witnessing the girl. They are documenting their own presence in front of her. Han's transparency is exactly this: the compulsive need to bear witness, without the time or space to understand the weight of the gaze (Han, 2015). Susan Sontag, writing on the photography of atrocity, observed that images of suffering may do less to generate solidarity than to foster a sense of distance, that to look at suffering from safety, mediated and framed, is already to be partially absolved of the obligation to feel it (Sontag, 2003). Mueck removes the frame. There is no caption and there is no scrolling away. There is only the room, the figure, and the choice to stay or leave. I have watched this demand for legibility in my humanitarian work. I have watched people require migrants to justify their displacement. I have watched audiences require grief to be photogenic before they will attend to it. Journalist Gina Fairley writes of Mueck's exhibition: "This is not about us. It is about them. And through them, we find ourselves." In their stillness, these figures hold a space where empathy is no longer immediate or automatic, but something that might return if we stay long enough to feel (Fairley, 2025). 04. Ron Mueck Pregnant woman 2002, Isabella Wordsworth <img width="3840" height="2160" width_o="3840" height_o="2160" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/71458f02962e985f25f0a8c5dacfed13ba04806c4b0c33daff9e6b8c2cde79c1/IMG_2530.jpg" data-mid="249044101" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/71458f02962e985f25f0a8c5dacfed13ba04806c4b0c33daff9e6b8c2cde79c1/IMG_2530.jpg" /> Distance as Illusion One of the final sculptures emerges as you round the corner: Couple Under an Umbrella. The light pours through the umbrella, painting the floor with colour so vivid one could think it is staining the ground. The man grips her arm, the wedding band imprinted on his finger the way his arm rests on hers. They are casually sprawled across each other, a gesture of familiarity, each place they make contact perfectly fitting the other's form. This is but a moment captured in a life long lived, but in that glimpse you see a permanence etched into their skin, making marks that time will not soon forget. I left Minnesota for London and found that leaving did not reduce the stakes, it raised them. The fear I had lived under in America, that ambient dread of violence without warning, had not stayed behind. I arrived abroad and found it already there, differently dressed. Gaza. Ukraine. And now Iran. The ongoing crisis of people fleeing countries that the news treats as distant problems until they are not. Living and working with people crossing borders, I have come to understand that the collapse of distance I felt in that gallery queue is not metaphorical. It is the actual condition of the world. The crises are not separate events in separate places. They are one long emergency, with different names. Leaving the States only gave me a clearer view of the shadow it casts, and the complicity other world powers carry within it. In daily life, it is difficult not to feel implicated in the actions of the country that shaped you. People land questioning gazes with every move America makes against their security, fearing the day its shadow reaches them too. And in the middle of all of it, the scroll, the algorithm, the compressed grief, the footage that autoplays before you have decided whether you want to see it, so in this world where grief is a commodity, what can art still do? Does it have a role in forcing empathy? Or, in a world of constant media and endless information, is art's role instead to slow people down long enough to feel anything at all? Stillness as Resistance As I emerge from the gallery into the shocking sunlight of mid-summer Australia, I instinctively reach for my phone again. Moving from a space where strangers shared moments of reflection and quiet admiration, I am suddenly returned to isolation. I stand among a crowd yet feel lost in another part of the world, watching protests met with brutality, communities grieving, while around me life continues uninterrupted. The screen delivers violence readily. It never delivers the time to truly process it. Standing among Mueck's monumental bodies, frozen in suspended breath, I was finally forced to pause, not only to look at what was in front of me, but to confront the emotions roiling inside my own mind. The gallery had done something the feed cannot: it made leaving the only way to stop witnessing. It removed the option to scroll past. Perhaps this is precisely what art can offer now: not as a spectacle that shocks us into morality, but as one of the last remaining places where time is made to slow. Jonathan Crary, writing on capitalism's progressive colonisation of attention, argues that the contemporary world has steadily eroded every space of non-productivity, rest, pause, the unmonitored hour, and that this erosion is inseparable from our diminishing capacity for sustained feeling (Crary, 2013). The gallery resists that logic. It manufactures stillness: moments where the viewer can no longer consume grief in transit, where attention cannot be redirected by an algorithm. Instead, the act of witnessing becomes something real again. Not just reflexes or reactions, but a choice, held open long enough to become a feeling. I do not think art can fix what is broken. I am not sure anything can, not quickly, not cleanly. But I think there is something worth preserving in the insistence that stillness itself is a form of resistance. That staying in the room, with the discomfort, with the figures who will not meet your eyes, with the emotions you arrived carrying and didn't expect to find named, is not passive. It is among the most demanding things we can do. My phone lights up in my hand. I look at it, then look away. 06. Ron Mueck Couple Under an Umbrella 2013, Isabella Wordsworth <img width="3024" height="4032" width_o="3024" height_o="4032" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/0e153157c88fa2221c28b3ad9cddf83841c9a5dc66079cbfc591e6305232d4a2/IMG_2597.jpg" data-mid="249044108" border="0" data-scale="84" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/0e153157c88fa2221c28b3ad9cddf83841c9a5dc66079cbfc591e6305232d4a2/IMG_2597.jpg" /> <img width="3024" height="4032" width_o="3024" height_o="4032" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/81d8035b58f3e005c7ce98820d3f13e5b01ffecaebd5e117d9b3a20dfa4eec45/IMG_2582.jpg" data-mid="249044105" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/81d8035b58f3e005c7ce98820d3f13e5b01ffecaebd5e117d9b3a20dfa4eec45/IMG_2582.jpg" /> 07. Ron Mueck Couple Under an Umbrella 2013, Isabella Wordsworth References Crary, J. (2013). 24/7: Late capitalism and the ends of sleep. Verso. Everytown for Gun Safety. (2025). Gunfire on school grounds in the United States. Everytown for Gun Safety. Fairley, G. (2025). Ron Mueck: Encounter. ArtsHub. Han, B. C. (2015). The transparency society. Stanford University Press. Sontag, S. (2003). Regarding the pain of others. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. <img width="600" height="800" width_o="600" height_o="800" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/61826da6ee322c45b7eb19f7e2dcce7904ab93e3e13019f232aedcb0ba663df9/P1010567.jpg" data-mid="249953635" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/600/i/61826da6ee322c45b7eb19f7e2dcce7904ab93e3e13019f232aedcb0ba663df9/P1010567.jpg" /> Writer Bio Isabella Wordsworth is a London-based Human Centered Designer and writer interested in empathy as a design problem, how spaces, images, and quiet rituals shape the ways we gather, witness, and remain with one another. Her work is rooted in designing with communities rather than for them. Moving between design and essay, she traces how culture is built collectively, layer by layer.@isabella.wordsworth Read Next&nbsp;︎︎︎ https://anthroprospective.com/How-Does-An-Anthropologist-Eat Wed, 03 Jun 2026 04:13:52 +0000 Anthroprospective – Research as Everyday Literature https://anthroprospective.com/How-Does-An-Anthropologist-Eat How Does An Anthropologist Eat? Reflections from Pondicherry, India Words: Sara BardhanImages: Sara Bardhan Image caption: Dosa and fried fish from a roadside stall 4 June 2026 “Through eating, the ethnographer encounters culture, not as an abstract system of symbols, but as something lived through the body. Food reveals how knowledge is cultivated through practice, how taste emerges through touch as much as through flavour, and how social worlds are negotiated through acts of sharing.” Sara Bardhan <img width="602" height="452" width_o="602" height_o="452" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/63a44fac844a2a8a5f649d0de22fc123e9bda9d3eb0b54ebff1a5b2de4580a4c/Picture1.png" data-mid="249044049" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/602/i/63a44fac844a2a8a5f649d0de22fc123e9bda9d3eb0b54ebff1a5b2de4580a4c/Picture1.png" />01. After a long day of fieldwork in Pondicherry, my friends and I stopped by a small kitchen near the beach for dinner. A single yellow bulb swung overhead, throwing long shadows across the tiny kitchen. Upon seeing us, Shanti Aunty threw her long shocks of curly black hair into a bun and placed a flat iron pan over the flame. The dosa batter, a pale mixture of split black gram, rice flour, and water, slid from her ladle onto the hot surface. With a surgeon’s precision, she spread it in widening circles. The batter hissed softly, edges lifting and crisping in the heat. Beside her, another burner crackled to life. Marinated fish hit the oil with a playful splutter, sending up bursts of turmeric, chili, and sea salt into the humid night air. When the dosa turned golden and brittle at the edges, Aunty lifted it delicately from the pan and folded it in half, steam escaping like a sigh. After wiping her sweat with a kitchen towel, she reached for a pile of onions. Her knife struck the cutting board in quick, practiced bursts. Within seconds, a sharp sting filled the air. After a dozen quick, sharp, rhythmic cuts, our dinner was on our laps: crispy dosa folded neatly beside glistening fried fish. My friend, who had never had fish with the bone in before, peeled away a corner of the crisp skin first, revealing soft white flesh underneath. Using her fingers, she gently separated the meat along the spine, feeling carefully for thin needle-like bones hidden inside. Between bites, she rubbed onion slices through the leftover masala on the plate and squeezed lemon over the fish, the citrus cutting through the richness and releasing another burst of aroma into the night. Around us, scooters buzzed past, waves collapsed against the shore, and the shack’s yellow light flickered in the warm coastal wind. <img width="543" height="666" width_o="543" height_o="666" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/80459820140ee7f7b35bf04bf72a5873f5dbf113216aff966115bdc0b764b1da/Picture2.png" data-mid="249044048" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/543/i/80459820140ee7f7b35bf04bf72a5873f5dbf113216aff966115bdc0b764b1da/Picture2.png" /> 02. Chicken biriyani with a side of eggplant salan (gravy) and onions 03.&nbsp; Sharing chicken curry and rice with colleagues after a long day of fieldwork <img width="602" height="605" width_o="602" height_o="605" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/8918f77c03ea504fa27d4c595c12eec8ade69615bf9ad599754000951260de62/Picture3.png" data-mid="249044047" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/602/i/8918f77c03ea504fa27d4c595c12eec8ade69615bf9ad599754000951260de62/Picture3.png" /> For an ethnographer, eating on the field is an exercise in reflection. With each pull, knead, tear, cut, bite, thrust, slice, an anthropologist is confronted with body-techniques involved in cooking and eating. By eating in the field and experimenting with one’s own eating, an anthropologist also discovers the continuum of technologies, techniques, flavours and foods that are embedded in the cultural geography they are working in. In Pondicherry, I wondered how women, like Shanti Aunty and my mother back home, learn the precise geometry of cooking a perfectly round dosa. How do they know exactly how much force to channel through the hips while kneading dough? When porridge is over stirred? Anthropologist Marcel Mauss (1973) articulated these techniques (with an emphasis on their plurality) as design accomplishments. Instead of taking how we move, eat, cook, and drink for granted, he denaturalised them as learnt behaviours transmitted through tradition. Bourdieu (1984) echoes this and further suggests that one’s habitus is acted out physically through “bodily hexis.” This bodily hexis or bodily knowledge (Heldke, 1992), is then embedded in one’s physicality and embodied through repetition. South Asian cultures are typically somatic culinary cultures. Apart from body-techniques that prepare one to one learn to crush potatoes into rice and lentils with precisely the right pressure and proportion using only their fingers, the ‘composite viscosity’ of eating with fingers (Mann et al., 2011) forces the anthropologist to rethink dichotomies of civilisation/exoticness. Moreover, it also then helps one think through the possibilities of how taste is constructed and experienced through sensorial modalities like touch. For instance, eating biryani by hand involves a finely coordinated choreography of fingers, one’s palm, and wrist. The fingertips first gather a small mound of rice, drawing together grains from different parts of the plate. A piece of meat is separated from the bone with the thumb and forefinger, while a sliver of onion is folded into the mixture. The rice is loose and grainy, the onion crisp, the salan slick against skin. Salan is then incorporated in measured quantities, not enough to make the rice runny, but sufficient to coat the grains with its tangy richness. The fingers knead these elements together lightly. Once assembled, the thumb acts as a lever, pushing the morsel balanced on the first three fingers into the mouth. Then the cycle begins again. Rice. Meat. Onion. Gravy. Mix. Lift. Eat. When I ate chicken biriyani (image 2) with my peers in the field, like Mann et al. (2011), I realised that tasting does not start once the sensorial data has reached the nostrils and tongue. Instead, ‘there is already “tasting” going on while my food is still on my plate’ (ibid). Invoking Sarah Pink (2009) in this context highlights how multisensory practices such as eating and cooking are not merely objects of ethnographic inquiry but also ways of organising, interpreting, and making meaning. Through these embodied engagements, sensory experience becomes a mode of analysis, revealing how meaning is generated through the intertwining of perception, movement, and practice. 04. Bun parotta - a crispy, flaky, soft bun fried in ghee (clarified butter) served with chicken or beef curry or vegetable korma <img width="602" height="801" width_o="602" height_o="801" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/cdd31a87dec49c570bdc9478b360e838860d585e609a659bf171520b7e72940b/Picture4.png" data-mid="249044046" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/602/i/cdd31a87dec49c570bdc9478b360e838860d585e609a659bf171520b7e72940b/Picture4.png" /> <img width="602" height="801" width_o="602" height_o="801" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/1278349c38eb5bca3d05aad0ea1349ca48d04e132e3c4d07ee89e81258928fca/Picture6.png" data-mid="249044044" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/602/i/1278349c38eb5bca3d05aad0ea1349ca48d04e132e3c4d07ee89e81258928fca/Picture6.png" /> 05.&nbsp; Ragi Koozh - a refreshing summer beverage with finger millet and yogurt served with pickle and onions Pink’s (2009) discussion of sensory ethnography, alongside broader conversations about embodiment, problematises eating, and particularly eating together, as practices that are more than merely everyday acts. As Marovelli (2018) notes, such practices are not necessarily convivial or collaborative, but can also be shaped by tension, exclusion, and unequal social relations. Anthropologists have long understood commensality as interactional, symbolic, and discursive (Douglas 1975; Fischler 2011; Vanderslice 2020), but in the field, shared meals often do more than generate sociality, in the Simmelian sense like Symons (1994) writes. They transform relationships, repositioning the ethnographer from observer to participant and, at times, into an informant whose body becomes implicated in the social worlds being studied. Eating-together, especially, outside of “commensal units” (Bloch 1999), like family, are usually acts of “exceptional commensality” (Giacoman 2016) in the field and they deserve critical attention in anthropological literature surrounding method(ology). Sharing food, therefore, presents both as the mode of analysis as well as the object of analysis. This is particularly relevant in the Indian context where food is a casteised object. Scholars like Louis Dumont (1970) have written in exceptional detail about the rules of purity and pollution that govern Hindu food exchange. During fieldwork, an invitation to share a meal can carry the weight of caste, kinship, and morality. As Mary Douglas (1966) argues, ideas of purity and pollution are not merely concerns about hygiene but systems for organising social boundaries and maintaining moral order. As an upper-caste ethnographer, the act of accepting a cup of tea, eating from a common plate, or sitting alongside others during a meal is entangled with long-standing ideas of purity and pollution and is subject to intense moral, social, and cultural scrutiny. Yet these moments are rarely straightforward. When people eat together across social boundaries, hierarchy does not necessarily disappear. Rather, it may be suspended, negotiated, or rendered temporarily ambiguous. A shared meal can create a fleeting sense of intimacy and equality while leaving the broader structures that organise social difference intact. It is precisely this tension that makes commensality analytically productive. Whether it is on the field or after a long day, sharing food with peers, colleagues, and interlocutors produces a range of new ethnographic meanings that are affective and embodied. 06. Fresh guava, boiled peanuts and sliced cucumber to go <img width="602" height="801" width_o="602" height_o="801" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/2a26710eb439fc2158fa738a54e2d1ae555054fa8d84c80f263af65842c6b5cf/Picture7.png" data-mid="249044043" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/602/i/2a26710eb439fc2158fa738a54e2d1ae555054fa8d84c80f263af65842c6b5cf/Picture7.png" /> <img width="602" height="801" width_o="602" height_o="801" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/477a21bc14c3c7267b4018bf2b80c8be23de67b8ab8df54af5323fdb7f03d8d4/Picture8.png" data-mid="249044042" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/602/i/477a21bc14c3c7267b4018bf2b80c8be23de67b8ab8df54af5323fdb7f03d8d4/Picture8.png" /> 07.&nbsp; Meen Kuzhambu - a spicy, saucy, tangy fish curry with roti (flatbread) Returning to Shanti Aunty’s beachside kitchen, what remains striking is not simply the food itself but the dense web of relations, techniques, sensations, and meanings that gathered around it. The circular motion of the dosa batter on the pan, the careful removal of fish bones, the tactile mixing of biryani and salan, and the shared meal among friends and interlocutors were not incidental details of fieldwork. This was fieldwork. Through eating, the ethnographer encounters culture, not as an abstract system of symbols, but as something lived through the body.&nbsp; Food reveals how knowledge is cultivated through practice, how taste emerges through touch as much as through flavour, and how social worlds are negotiated through acts of sharing. At the same time, meals expose the tensions embedded within everyday life: between intimacy and hierarchy, inclusion and exclusion, equality and distinction. To eat in the field is therefore to participate in these negotiations, becoming implicated in the very social realities one seeks to understand. Sensory ethnography reminds us that knowledge is not produced solely through observation or interpretation but also through the embodied acts of tasting, touching, cooking, and eating together. In this sense, the meal is never merely a meal; it is both a method of inquiry and a site where ethnographic knowledge is made.References Bloch, M. (1999). Commensality and Poisoning. Social Research, 66(1), 133–149. Bourdieu, P. (1984). Distinction: A social critique of the judgement of taste (R. Nice, Trans.). Harvard University Press. Douglas, M. (1966). Purity and danger: An analysis of concepts of pollution and taboo. Routledge &amp; Kegan Paul. Douglas, M. (1975). Deciphering a meal. In Implicit Meanings: Essays in Anthropology (pp. 249–275). Routledge. Dumont, L. (1970). Homo hierarchicus: The caste system and its implications (M. Sainsbury, Trans.). Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Fischler, C. (2011). Commensality, society and culture. Social Science Information, 50(3–4), 528–548. Giacoman, C. (2016). The dimensions and role of commensality: A theoretical model drawn from the significance of communal eating among adults in Santiago, Chile. Appetite, 107, 460–470. Heldke, L. (1992). Foodmaking as a thoughtful practice. In D. W. Curtin &amp; L. Heldke (Eds.), Cooking, eating, thinking: Transformative philosophies of food (pp. 203–229). Indiana University Press. Mann, A., Mol, A., Satalkar, P., Savirani, A., Selim, N., Sur, M., &amp; Yates-Duerr, E. (2011). Mixing methods, tasting fingers. HAU Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 1(1), 221–243. Marovelli, B. (2018). Cooking and eating together in London: Food sharing initiatives as collective spaces of encounter. Geoforum, 99, 190–201. Mauss, M. (1973). Techniques of the body. Economy and Society, 2(1), 70–88. Pink, S. (2009). Doing sensory ethnography. Sage. Symons, M. (1994). Simmel’s gastronomic sociology: An overlooked essay. Food and Foodways, 5(4), 333–351. Vanderslice, K. (2020). Making and Breaking: an embodied ethnography of eating. Graduate Journal of Food Studies, 04(01). <img width="3024" height="4032" width_o="3024" height_o="4032" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/b05ac59d195e7ab904b9b4fa75af095ba2b1f681196650aabb40e635f12731bc/IMG_3177_Original.jpeg" data-mid="249095629" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/b05ac59d195e7ab904b9b4fa75af095ba2b1f681196650aabb40e635f12731bc/IMG_3177_Original.jpeg" /> Writer Bio Sara is an applied social scientist and qualitative researcher. Their research, situated at the intersection of urban studies and critical theory, revolves around cities, spatial justice, embodiment, social reproduction, and world building. They are currently an Assistant Professor in Sociology at Somaiya Vidyavihar, Mumbai. Socials Read Next&nbsp;︎︎︎ https://anthroprospective.com/Music-as-a-Builder-of-Human-Relationships Wed, 01 Apr 2026 00:46:29 +0000 Anthroprospective – Research as Everyday Literature https://anthroprospective.com/Music-as-a-Builder-of-Human-Relationships Music as a Builder of Human Relationships Why is music considered a form of building human connection that grows communities? Words: Sydney Kaster Image caption: Courtesy of&nbsp;Gül Işık&nbsp; 1 April “Yet this interconnector of divine harmony and sonorous body, that is music, remains the one example of shared experience within social spaces that involves creativity, community, language, and sound.” Sydney Kaster <img width="655" height="955" width_o="655" height_o="955" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/72a6cf9319b09306413cd37e6491a40876c494b450a69dcc9039d33c02c4e9c1/Untitled-design.png" data-mid="246738100" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/655/i/72a6cf9319b09306413cd37e6491a40876c494b450a69dcc9039d33c02c4e9c1/Untitled-design.png" />01. Music relies on human interaction to build relationships between individuals and groups. It’s how humans understand each other without the barriers of traditional language and spoken word. Music requires the physical body, even in the instrumental form: the ears, the hands, and sometimes the feet and limbs, and in other cases, the tongue, the vocal cords, and the mouth. Sometimes, the whole body is involved, like in dancing. Music is something we listen to and enjoy, or sometimes, we have a strong distaste for it. Can we use it as a way to communicate and grow a community, either through creating music itself or, for example, sharing it from a streaming platform and sending a text to a friend who we think might like it? Are we already using music as a form of connection? And, is it truly a genuine way of building human connections, or are there other methods that are better suited? Firstly, let us briefly return to the roots of this fine social tool and look at how it has changed over time. Over 40,000 years ago, early humans and Neanderthals used vocalisations to communicate with one another, but evolving breathing capabilities of the jaw and cranium structures led these vocalisations to be more complex, shaping what we can assume was a song-like vocalisation, sprouting the seeds of things like singing and chanting (Montagu 2017). In accordance with these changes in the human body, instruments like pipes and whistles were crafted from animal bones, leading to some of the very first tools for making music, before eventually, more developed instruments like pianos and violins came along. Soon, music became a hallmark of human interaction, turning into a positive group activity that strengthened community bonds, especially within families and closely-knit circles, and even within group tasks, leading us to the birth of work songs, proving the theory that synchronised motions made together form positive social bonds (Montagu 2017; Dunbar 2014). Music is a prime form of human interaction, creating shared swells of emotion between individuals that other means of connection can’t quite spark; it is an intimately spiritual interaction. Harvard cognitive scientist Dr Samuel Mehr found that music is a feature of every single culture, specifically in terms of danceability and behaviour related to music, further supporting the theory that music can be considered a true builder of bonds between people, especially in a big group setting with many different types of individuals, all with varying interests and backgrounds (Atwood 2019; National Institutes of Health 2023). Music and the relationship it creates between people has been found on every continent, including Antarctica (Metallica 2013), deepening cross-cultural relationships and weaving sacred relationships with meaning and artistic purpose across borders and nations, whether in ancient Greece or modern-day Australia (In The Know 2023). It doesn’t matter where people live, where they come from, or how their day-to-day lives look; music is everywhere and a key part of our human evolution and existence. And now, music has even more capability with things like AI taking over mainstream technology and helping people build all kinds of relationships through it. We have come so far in our understanding and appreciation of music, and now we have these new fronts in creative technology to aid us. But can AI truly bring people together through music? Can it act as an additional part in fostering human connection? Or, is it something we should tread carefully with? Regardless of our collective position on AI’s involvement in our relationships with music, we are already seeing these advances take shape. For example, take the ABBA Voyage, the virtual live show where all four members of ABBA perform through digital avatars and LED screens (Griffiths 2022). Globally, this phenomenon has become a sell-out, with even the city of London building an official arena for it, allowing people to sing along to their favourite ABBA songs while mesmerised by the projections onstage. Could this be the modern version of how our ancestors grouped up to engage in song and harmony, forming long-lasting social bonds? Is it a modern interpretation of the Greek theatre? It may well be. Concerts and other live events hosted via virtual reality are already becoming commonplace, especially after the Coronavirus pandemic, allowing fans to interact more closely with their favourite performers through platforms like Tiny Desk and the metaverse (Bär 2025). However, this is evidently a stark contrast to the long-held ancient memory of sitting around a campfire. What would our ancestors think about these advances? And do these shifts represent our collective advancement and ideals of progress? Perhaps in some ways and in other ways perhaps not. Furthermore, does this kind of setup create a space for authentic human relationships to grow, or are these environments synthetic in a way that creates isolation even when people find themselves in oversaturated and populated spaces? Nevertheless, we humans in our fascinating ways remain connected across countries and cultures like never before in this digital age. Someone halfway across the world could be watching a performance by someone they might never meet in person, in a region they’ve never even heard of, in a language they’ve never spoken. We must at least recognise these advancements in the name of more authentic human relationships, and more choice in terms of the music we can listen to and the people we can interact with. We have many tools that can connect us to others, whether it’s through music, AI, or shared linguistics. Yet this interconnector of divine harmony and sonorous body, that is music, remains the one example of shared experience within social spaces that involves creativity, community, language, and sound. It is a relationship-building block in its own right, unbounded across location, economic status, religious belief, and even further. Music can be made with just about anything at any time with any kind of instrument. It can be as basic as tapping your foot on the floor or emitting a low hum. Making music doesn’t require money, rules, a designated time and place, or anything too restrictive. It simply requires the maker&nbsp; to be creative and put their mind and body to work, either individually or in a group environment. Now, more than ever, with issues like loneliness and digital addiction on the rise, people need to find ways that bring happiness, connection, and socialisation into their hearts and homes and I believe that music is a great way to start repairing that disconnection from self and from community. After thousands of years since its initial creation, music remains a genuine way of building community and enriching the lives of ourselves and those around us, and even those in foreign lands with the technological capabilities of 2026. So, to the reader, I ask you to ponder the following questions: how can you build your communities through music and the arts? And what makes you feel like you belong to a community of genuine connection and shared values? References Atwood et al. (2019). Universality and diversity in human song. Science, 366(6468). https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aax0868 Bär et al. (2025). On the edge of a digital event era: Which innovative factors influence the willingness to pay for virtual concerts?. Journal of Innovation &amp; Knowledge, 10(5). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jik.2025.100776 Dunbar et al. (2014). Music and social bonding: “self-other” merging and neurohormonal mechanisms. Frontiers, 5(1096). https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.01096 Griffiths, Daniel. (2022, December 28). ABBA Voyage: How does it work? MusicRadar. https://www.musicradar.com/features/abba-voyage-how-does-it-work-best-of-2022 In The Know (2023, October 25). Music’s Historical Influence: From Ancient Greece to Modern Times. Musicians Institute. https://www.mi.edu/in-the-know/musics-historical-influence-ancient-greece-modern-times/ Metallica (2013, December 9). Metallica Freeze ‘Em All in Antarctica. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nNx-zgqOfk Montagu, J. (2017). How Music and Instruments Began: A Brief Overview of the Origin and Entire Development of Music, from Its Earliest Stages, Frontiers, 2(8). https://doi.org/10.3389/fsoc.2017.00008 National Institutes of Health (2023, September 13). Is Music a Universal Language?. NIH Common Fund. https://commonfund.nih.gov/earlyindependence/highlights/music-universal-language &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp;<img width="2112" height="3088" width_o="2112" height_o="3088" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/f5ce3bb05e4574a9eb054671f4c0f652a0f7964b268ba38fcb9005c4abdc0a82/Sydney-Kaster-Pfp.jpeg" data-mid="246738149" border="0" data-scale="65" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/f5ce3bb05e4574a9eb054671f4c0f652a0f7964b268ba38fcb9005c4abdc0a82/Sydney-Kaster-Pfp.jpeg" /> Writer Bio Sydney Kaster is a multi-faceted Gen Z woman. She holds a BFA in Music Technology from Kingston University and is fascinated by all things pertaining to music, culture, and society. Sydney spends her time running a&nbsp;housesitting business, writing, cooking, making preserves from foraged fruits, and&nbsp;being in nature. Read Next&nbsp;︎︎︎ https://anthroprospective.com/River-of-Grass Fri, 20 Mar 2026 01:09:54 +0000 Anthroprospective – Research as Everyday Literature https://anthroprospective.com/River-of-Grass River of Grass Words: Ameyaa MallikImages: Ameyaa Mallik Image caption:&nbsp;The pastures open into a wide vantage point, revealing the snow peaks above and the dense forests from which we climbed. The children run between stray cattle roaming through the abundant grass. 20 March 2026 “...in living with the Van Gujjars, I came to understand musafiri as more than getting from one place to another. Musafiri functioned as a practice in which abundance is measured not by accumulation but by moving in step with what the land provides.” Ameyaa Mallik <img width="3681" height="5521" width_o="3681" height_o="5521" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/f0a16f987c7fa73f5d5e410d63dcfe9aeb5f8a4fe023d286c53ef47898cb74bf/vg5.JPG" data-mid="246275020" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/f0a16f987c7fa73f5d5e410d63dcfe9aeb5f8a4fe023d286c53ef47898cb74bf/vg5.JPG" /> 01. The cross-hatched husk roof kept us protected from the pouring rain, while the empty space where the door should have been let in the sound of loud, chirping thrushes and the smell of slowly wetting soil. As the sun began to set, Javed stepped outside the hut to recite the azan, the call to evening prayer. On the cusp of being coarsened by puberty, his voice, still gentle, spilled down the mountain valley, and the musical highs and lows of the call, together with all of us huddled around the warmth of the slow-burning hearth, held back the nipping Himalayan chill. For over a thousand years, the Van Gujjars have lived as nomadic buffalo herders across the western Himalayan region of North India. In 2025, I worked briefly with the NGO organisation, The Society for Promotion of Himalayan Indigenous Activities, which led to my initial introduction with the Van Gujjars. Thereafter, throughout the summer, I visited the Van Gujjars living across the densely forested mountain areas of Uttarakhand and the jagged, seasonal riverine plains of neighbouring Uttar Pradesh. I carried with me very little, including a duffel with an extra pair of pants, a camera, a pocket diary, and questions about subsistence ways of living – hugely accustomed to, yet deliriously critical of, my own urban lifestyle, as I was. The camera in this process became what it had always been: not a tool for documenting the chronology or facts of events, but a means of reclaiming the chance to reflect on the feelings we were experiencing together and alone. I only hoped to remember later when Ambu Ji milked the buffalo mid-afternoon while everyone was asleep, when Amna nudged me to take a stroll in the searing overhead sun to snatch a break from the congregation in the hut, or when I stood under the towering oaks, endlessly humbled. <img width="3893" height="5839" width_o="3893" height_o="5839" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/a0c872a9355b4e4b377453d7353a94fe87ff00e023f2a58fd890bda466e46a13/vg1.JPG" data-mid="246275025" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/a0c872a9355b4e4b377453d7353a94fe87ff00e023f2a58fd890bda466e46a13/vg1.JPG" /> 02. The days are divided around the care of the buffalo. The children in the family often keep watch over the herd while they graze, and the buffalo listen intently to their whistles and voices, knowing exactly which direction each call signals. 03.&nbsp; Walking the herd across the dried-up gorge at dawn. <img width="4994" height="3329" width_o="4994" height_o="3329" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/58aee3ab2f15ffd0e75beaa72a8308df29ac3940bed43870d531de1831aef9f6/vg2.JPG" data-mid="246275026" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/58aee3ab2f15ffd0e75beaa72a8308df29ac3940bed43870d531de1831aef9f6/vg2.JPG" /> The term the Van Gujjars use for nomadism is musafiri, the Urdu word for wayfaring or journeying. Fricatively soft, musafiri appears in Urdu poetry as a term associated with ‘epiphany’ – walking as a way of accessing a territory beyond the usual and, hence, walking as wisdom. Similarly, in living with the Van Gujjars, I came to understand musafiri as more than getting from one place to another. Musafiri functioned as a practice in which abundance is measured not by accumulation but by moving in step with what the land provides. At the same time, it carried a personal weight beyond ecologically driven migration, as an inherited and cherished way of life. The elders living farther from the high-altitude forests and pastures spoke of those places with deep longing. Lal Sain, working part-time as a watchman at a mango grove in the foothill plains, told me, “Wait till you have seen the rivers of grass up there; there’s nothing quite like it.” So addicted to walking in the forests was Lal Sain in his youth that he was known to pack up and leave for a few days, aside from the usual migratory patterns. He would take a buffalo along and drink its milk for sustenance, carrying his belongings himself instead of loading the animal, out of care. Now, in the plains, he slips into the neighbouring deciduous sal forest from time to time for a better night’s sleep. The forest is their home, and their knowledge of it runs deep. When I was down with the flu, Rani rubbed leaves of Lantana camara on my palms, bringing immediate relief. According to her elders, the flowering shrub had been introduced by the British in colonial India as an ornamental plant. Curiously, the same plant is hazardous in the mountains, yet in the plains it offers healing; these subtleties were carefully learned by watching the buffalo, who munch on it in the plains but leave it out in the mountains. As among the few vegetarian nomadic communities in the world, the Van Gujjars primarily consume dairy as the most accessible resource, supplemented by greens, herbs, and berries, oftentimes sourced from the forests. The abundance of wild-growing foods in the higher-altitude forests is one of the reasons Hasina eagerly awaits her family’s migration uphill, as she says while we collect wild fern nodes for dinner. 04. Sitting by the dam in the hazy afternoon sun and talking to her husband, who travels across India as a truck driver, she makes plans to travel together one day. The years have seen a diversification of side hustles: some men leave to find work and send money home, while the rest of the family remains busy with the care of the buffalo. <img width="3558" height="5337" width_o="3558" height_o="5337" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/63e3fac4ee1618a7e4ae3c11ab2512c0867005a2307d3946a66f678d9403c8b7/vg3.JPG" data-mid="246275027" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/63e3fac4ee1618a7e4ae3c11ab2512c0867005a2307d3946a66f678d9403c8b7/vg3.JPG" /> <img width="6000" height="4000" width_o="6000" height_o="4000" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/aaa9d1e4eb240ce7545665ff1fdb76d0e03f6a7af222b562ed84f4f94e2865bc/vg4.JPG" data-mid="246275019" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/aaa9d1e4eb240ce7545665ff1fdb76d0e03f6a7af222b562ed84f4f94e2865bc/vg4.JPG" /> 05.&nbsp; Resting on a bed of pine needles after reaching the alpine pastures. Challenges have always laced their movements across these lands, which they have continually resisted and negotiated. An example of this is the 1990s grassroots Van Gujjar movement, supported by local NGOs and extensive media coverage, which sought to undo Cartesian dualism, or the nature–human divide, that influenced conservation policies. With rapid development and changing local sociopolitical dynamics, increasingly impacted by global and transnational forces, the hurdles faced by the Van Gujjars have grown to encompass more than matters of ecological concern. Over two decades after the Van Gujjar movement, diminished public support for the cause has produced a reconfigured marginality wherein the Van Gujjars continue to assert their presence in the forest, yet their voices are far less heard when problems arise. The paths to the pastures, once forest trails, have become concrete roads dotted with growing threats such as traffic, denser populations, and a socio-political climate increasingly seeped in Hindu nationalism, and violence perpetuated against Indian Muslims. Saffron now deluges the green of Uttarakhand, provoking loose claims that cast the Muslim Van Gujjars as outsiders seizing more than one home, when in fact their home has always been walking with the swell of the seasons, the shield of canopies, taking only what is needed, and care as lived praxis. 06. The dwelling place of Van Gujjars, known as ‘dera’ (place of rest), is built using materials found in the forest. Here, I slept, beneath a star-studded sky visible through the small gaps between the stacked wood. <img width="12831" height="9813" width_o="12831" height_o="9813" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/c3fd879f7521b1b51975cfac621372e0f42190662114f47d935e87830b0db235/vg6.JPG" data-mid="246275021" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/c3fd879f7521b1b51975cfac621372e0f42190662114f47d935e87830b0db235/vg6.JPG" /> <img width="5463" height="3642" width_o="5463" height_o="3642" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/3698c3b835e3bc3f1cadec269413525e201846b4ce130985c24995042959a32d/vg7.JPG" data-mid="246275022" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/3698c3b835e3bc3f1cadec269413525e201846b4ce130985c24995042959a32d/vg7.JPG" /> 07.Throughout much of the day, when they are not out grazing, the buffalo remain in a shed close to the Van Gujjars’ dera. Here, the elders look after them, balancing the fresh grass they graze on outside with meals of dried husk. While milking the buffalo, the Van Gujjars take a few sips of the milk as a calf would, in a process known as dhar. “Boiled milk could never taste the same,” she says. <img width="3828" height="5742" width_o="3828" height_o="5742" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/4af9f57077c925f785fddc7cc3b5ab0d76f2b2efdcccbabaa50469e58bb1c775/vg8.JPG" data-mid="246275023" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/4af9f57077c925f785fddc7cc3b5ab0d76f2b2efdcccbabaa50469e58bb1c775/vg8.JPG" /> 08.&nbsp; Playing with pebbles while the buffalo herd grazes nearby. Back in the searing plains, we walked along dried riverbeds, taking the buffalo herd out to graze. The buffalo moved at an apathetically slow pace, giving us too much and too little to do in the meantime. We played games, tossing and catching river stones when we weren’t lounging on stubby patches of grass. Rani, who was my age and became a friend in no time, was fond of poetry and whispered a few lines she had written, later admitting they might have been influenced by a dialogue from a Bollywood film: “Hazaaron manzilein hongi, hazaaron karwaein hongi; zamaana humein dhoondega, hum na jaane kahaan honge.” (There will be a thousand destinations and a thousand caravans; time will look for us, but the search will be futile.) <img width="9950" height="13339" width_o="9950" height_o="13339" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/1bebd919ccc520d12eed833c14244cb88d814e6afb0face8e4406fbf1482cfc7/vg9.JPG" data-mid="246275024" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/1bebd919ccc520d12eed833c14244cb88d814e6afb0face8e4406fbf1482cfc7/vg9.JPG" /> 09.&nbsp;Looking up while searching the forest floor for wild strawberries on our way down from the pastures. 10. Deodars soaring through the mountain mist. <img width="3816" height="5724" width_o="3816" height_o="5724" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/23ea0412fa949e268bdca143bc5f20cddf7594c568324aea3ac74c4a0d871ec8/vg10.JPG" data-mid="246275028" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/23ea0412fa949e268bdca143bc5f20cddf7594c568324aea3ac74c4a0d871ec8/vg10.JPG" /> <img width="3594" height="5391" width_o="3594" height_o="5391" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/0bee155708fc2ecc9f2b1685959c60299f5afacd26dd10a9f332cf68d9d4a795/portrait.jpg" data-mid="246274960" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/0bee155708fc2ecc9f2b1685959c60299f5afacd26dd10a9f332cf68d9d4a795/portrait.jpg" /> Writer Bio Ameyaa Mallik (b. 2004, Delhi, India) is a photographer interested in emotional interiority, the ways our chosen and surrounding geologic landscapes reflect and extend it, and image-making as a conscious process with the ability to hold space between loss and change. 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