The Lives of Other Citizens

Abstract

The capacity for a complex inner lifeworld that encompasses ongoing streams of inner dialogue and reverie, as well as non-linguistic or image based forms of thought, is an essential component of being human and central to many everyday actions and practices. Simply put, without inner expression there would be no self-understanding or social existence in any recognisable form. Despite this, it is largely a terra incognita for anthropology or is seen as irrelevant or intangible, rather than an empirical phenomenon that is directly constitutive of people’s lived experiences and actions and therefore worthy of investigation. As such anthropology is at risk of only telling half the story of human life. This presents a deep-seated problem for disciplines like anthropology that are based on empirical evidence insofar as it is primarily a methodological and practical problem rather than a conceptual one, especially with regard to how to research and represent the transient, stream-like and ever-changing character of people’s interior expressions and experiences as they emerge in the moment. In response, this article attempts to offer an ethnographically grounded account of how people’s lived experiences of the city are mediated by complex amalgams of inner expression, memory and imagination that largely remain beneath the surface of their public activities. The accompanying video and sound recordings derive from an experimental practice-based research project, New York Stories, for which I recorded more than a hundred interior dialogues of random strangers as they moved around the city. The reader is invited to download sounds clips onto their phone or MP3 player and walk around their own city with someone else’s thoughts in their head.