Abstract
In this article, we explore the power of shared embodiment for the constitution of an affective community. More specifically, we examine how people afflicted by long-term, arduous experiences of war, migration, and discrimination sensually articulate and, at least temporarily, renegotiate feelings of non/belonging, care, and in/exclusion. Methodologically, we draw on emplaced ethnography and systematic phenomenological go-alongs with a group of elderly migrants, born and raised in different parts of Vietnam, who had arrived in Germany within different legal–political frameworks and who, during the time of our psychological–anthropological research, frequented the same psychotherapeutic clinic. We apply the notion of “affective communities” (Zink in Affective Societies: Key Concepts. Routledge, New York, 2019) to grasp how the group experienced a sensual place of mutual belonging outside the clinic when moving through different public spaces in Berlin as part of their therapy. Particular attention is paid to the participants’ embodied and emplaced memories that were reactivated during these excursions. Shared sensations and spatiality, we argue, made them feel they belonged to an ephemeral community of care that was otherwise hardly imaginable due to their distinct individual biographies, contrasting political attitudes, and ties to different social collectives. In analyzing this affective community, we highlight how significant spatio-sensorial modes of temporal solidification can be in eliciting embodied knowledge that positively contributes to therapeutic processes.
Highlights
On a grey, cloudy, and windy day in late March 2017, we organized a boat cruise on the Spree river for the participants of a bi-weekly group therapy for Vietnamese migrants that usually took place within a psychotherapeutic outpatient clinic in Berlin.1 For many years, the participants, all of them elderly Vietnamese-born women and men, had been suffering from unvoiced feelings of non-belonging and social exclusion
We draw on emplaced ethnography and systematic phenomenological go-alongs with a group of elderly migrants, born and raised in different parts of Vietnam, who had arrived in Germany within different legal–political frameworks and who, during the time of our psychological–anthropological research, frequented the same psychotherapeutic clinic
The aim of this article was to show how a group of elderly Vietnamese migrants, whose self-perceptions were dominated by feelings of numbness, powerlessness, and dependence, came to sensually reenact a mutual and modified form of care as a temporal affective community by playfully “creating, sustaining and reproducing bodies, selves, and social relationships” (Nguyen, Zavoretti and Tronto 2017:202; italics in original)
Summary
Cloudy, and windy day in late March 2017, we organized a boat cruise (a so-called “historical sightseeing cruise”) on the Spree river for the participants of a bi-weekly group therapy for Vietnamese migrants that usually took place within a psychotherapeutic outpatient clinic in Berlin. For many years, the participants, all of them elderly Vietnamese-born women and men, had been suffering from unvoiced feelings of non-belonging and social exclusion. Cloudy, and windy day in late March 2017, we organized a boat cruise (a so-called “historical sightseeing cruise”) on the Spree river for the participants of a bi-weekly group therapy for Vietnamese migrants that usually took place within a psychotherapeutic outpatient clinic in Berlin.. The participants, all of them elderly Vietnamese-born women and men, had been suffering from unvoiced feelings of non-belonging and social exclusion. These feelings were directly linked to their often arduous migratory experiences, which could be similar and quite diverse, depending on their respective biographies, their contrasting political attitudes, and their ties to different social collectives. In a humorous way, all the others who were present on that day commented on the situation referring to their statuses as “outpatients of a psychotherapeutic clinic”, and were joined in laughter and an intense affective resonance
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