Collective Intimacy Research Articles

A hidden population: A rhetorical genre analysis of the posts in the Baidu depression community

Since its beginning in the 1980s, the mental health rhetoric research (MHRR) has explored the rhetorical construction of mental illness from a genre perspective. Despite a growing body of research on the rhetorical study of mental health in the West, the discourse of depression has been rarely explored in the Chinese context. This study investigates a corpus of 3217 posts in the Baidu depression community in China with an attempt to identify typical rhetorical features of the posts in the depression community as a genre. We intend, through an exploration of the exigences, social actions, and consequences of the posts, to facilitate a better understanding of the depressed population in China. We argue that the social exigences for the posts in online depression communities can be regarded as a failure of the rhetorical environment in real life and that expressing emotions, exchanging information, establishing interpersonal relationships, and communicating across spatiotemporal boundaries are the typified social actions performed by the posts in the Baidu depression community. Moreover, as a genre, the posts have successfully created an ambience of collective intimacy. Taken together, the findings shed light on the rhetorical study of depression in China.

“I’m Outside the Box. Too Outside the Box, I Explode It!”: Exploring Literacies of Dignity with Middle School Youth

Dignity is an important construct for all students, especially those whose voices and perspectives have been historically relegated to the margins because of their racial, ethnic, and linguistic identities. With recent legislation that stands to further calcify the systemic oppression and racial violence that remains so deeply entrenched in US schools, it is urgent to understand how minoritized students broker dignity—or feelings of self-worth, value, and well-being—while navigating multiple and oftentimes intersectional keloids of dehumanization. Currently, we know very little about how dignity is developed and enacted by students within educational settings, and even less attention is paid to how literacy factors into these engagements. To address this gap, my paper is guided by the following inquiry, explored within the context of a yearlong youth participatory action research class: How do BIPOC, middle school youth leverage critical literacies and epistemologies to negotiate dignity? Data for this paper, which were drawn from a larger, critical ethnographic study, were analyzed using what I name as a literacies of dignity framework that utilized theories of critical literacies (Freire, 1970/2000; Janks, 2013), felt dignity (Gallagher, 2004; Stephens & Kanov, 2017), and youth epistemologies (Filipiak, 2020; Green et al., 2020; Kelly, 2023) to explore how middle school youth examined and critiqued three sites of devaluation: media, schooling, and adult/youth relationships. Findings reveal important ways youth were able to reimagine ways of being together and caring for one another in social, educational, and even global contexts that rendered them disposable, leveraging critical literacy engagements to broker moments of collective intimacy and vulnerability. This, in turn, fueled their sense of dignity, offering important implications for justice-centered literacy education.

Between Naïveté and Desire: Analyzing Collective Intimacy in Sun Yu's Films with a Time-based Annotation Tool

Between Naïveté and Desire: Analyzing Collective Intimacy in Sun Yu's Films with a Time-based Annotation Tool

“The World in a Verse”: Stevens, World History, and Global Modernisms

“The World in a Verse”: Stevens, World History, and Global Modernisms Gül Bilge Han I. Introduction IN HIS 1942 ESSAY “The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words,” Wallace Stevens commented on the situation of the modern subject in a global context in the following way: It is not only that there are more of us and that we are actually close together. We are close together in every way. We lie in bed and listen to a broadcast from Cairo, and so on. There is no distance. We are intimate with people we have never seen and, unhappily, they are intimate with us. (CPP 653) Written in the midst of US involvement in the Second World War, when seemingly distant events felt closer to home than ever, Stevens’s lines weave together the intimate and the global as a constitutive feature of ordinary, common life. His remarks highlight the emergence of new forms of cognitive and affective proximity between diverse places and subjects, fostered through new media technologies—particularly, the radio and how it relayed the news. The experience of a lack of “distance,” or of being “close together in every way . . . unhappily,” indicates an imposed mode of connectivity that threatens the demarcation of the boundaries between the individual and the collective, the local and the global, the private and the public realms. Stevens implicitly figures this new mode of collective intimacy as a threatening force against the domain of the individual self, which, in turn, suggests a common modernist trope. But Stevens’s poetic responses to the demands of the global and its distant others, especially from the 1930s onwards, express more than a desire to salvage a degree of individual autonomy and interiority from the intrusions of an increasingly globalized modernity, just as his skeptical reflections on the “broadcast from Cairo” do more than exhibit an anxiety over the advent of [End Page 133] communication technologies—resulting in “an extraordinary pressure of news” (CPP 655)—that brought the world closer in unprecedented ways. Certainly, the new media environment of the early and mid-twentieth century shaped the aesthetic and social sensibilities of modernist writers, including Stevens (Kalliney 121–56). Mass media and circulation of the news are, in fact, part and parcel of modernism’s global networks, in which the news sparked alternative forms of engagement with world events that were negotiated through different journalistic and media discourses. Such developments had crucial implications for modernist conceptualizations of world and self, since they allowed for new ways of imagining cultural and political transfers, across spaces and peoples, without necessitating physical closeness or direct contact. The news as a poetic and creative source, in particular, played a constitutive part in Stevens’s responses to the historical pressures of the actual world. He was, as Jahan Ramazani and Rachel Galvin have discussed most prominently, well aware of how the news “mediate[d] between the individual and the event,” how it shaped “the raw material of history” (Galvin 169), and thereby produced what Stevens called the “pressure of news . . . of a new world” against which he imagined poetry should and would push back (CPP 655). But what seemed equally pressing for Stevens, judging by his wartime remarks, is the emergence of a global collective consciousness reinforced by the news technologies and the media: the heightened presence of an imaginative collective vision, intensified by the globally perceived events of his epoch, which included the Great Depression, two world wars, and the rise of fascism. In “The Noble Rider,” Stevens refers to this shared collective sensibility as “the consciousness of the world,” which he feared would replace the “imagination,” as he put it in the same essay.1 “[F]or more than ten years,” Stevens wrote, “the consciousness of the world has concentrated on events which have made the ordinary movement of life seem to be the movement of people in the intervals of a storm” (CPP 655). Seen at once as a creative and suffocating force, this consciousness of the world manifests itself most markedly in Stevens’s envisaging of the poetic imagination as a potential source for a global vision of collectivity, or what he calls a “civil...

White Shadow by Roy Jacobsen

0 deserts her, and her father succumbs to religious charlatans. Married as a teen to a man twice her age, Nancy watches her husband get drunk every night. When he dies in an accident at a tuna-packing plant, she wonders if she’ll be granted “a moment alone with the 2,500 cans containing my deceased husband.” When disease attacks her uterus, she calls herself “Nancy Cancer” as treatment leaves her “skeletal, mutilated, barren.” Lloret invokes Exodus, Revelation, and other books of the Bible, and Nancy herself calls to mind Job. She’s beset by adversity; she refuses to quit. A nuanced character study, this book is also an indictment of misogynists and their enablers. Lloret occasionally relieves the tension with instances of fleeting beauty. In one, Nancy recalls the “collective intimacy” shared by bargoers listening to “a Peruvian waltz, or something even sadder.” Years later, she still favors downbeat songs. Some days, they’re her only solace. Kevin Canfield New York Roy Jacobsen White Shadow Trans. Don Bartlett & Don Shaw. Windsor, Ontario. Biblioasis. 2020. 264 pages. WITH EVERY SENTENCE in his new novel, Roy Jacobsen shows how his characters carve their morality out of the dried driftwood found on the small islands of war-ravaged Norway. White Shadow is yet another masterpiece by Jacobsen, who continues in this short novel to track the vicissitudes of the life of his young heroine Ingrid Barrøy, first introduced in 2020 in Unseen. Jacobsen has rigorously reduced the family cast of the previous novel to narrow in solely on Ingrid, now thirty-five years old, who is trying to make a living (rather than living her own life) during the last years of German occupation. Just a single drop of sentimentality could have drowned Jacobsen’s entire enterprise as it rests on a simple framework made of a m m In between the hand-offs of the diary, Rushdy tours Oman, negotiating his way through the dark, byzantine ancient and modern past, which is glossed over by glitzy buildings or tourist sites. Ibrahim keeps the pacing taut throughout the novel between the 1992 chapters and Warda’s diary, although the excerpts of the diary are the real treasure because they offer insight into what happened to the DLF. Ex-rebels from the group come out of the woodwork in 1992 but offer little to the narrator because they are afraid of government surveillance. His cousin Fathy encourages him to go to Salalah, near the site of the Dhofar Rebellion. There, he meets Warda’s brother-in-law, Abu Ammar, who gives almost nothing away about what happened to Warda and his brother, Dahmish. More importantly, Rushdy meets Warda’s daughter, Waad, who in her twenties looks astonishingly like her mother. She is the head of a woman’s center in Mirbat, the site of a failed DLF guerilla operation. Later, when he is invited to spend the night at the house of Warda’s brother-in-law, he makes love to Waad when she appears in his bedroom —the scene a rare example of a lapse in plausibility in the novel. We never really learn how Warda dies, but she lived long enough to give birth to a daughter, Waad, which means “promise” in Arabic. She was probably executed or died in prison. After Rushdy reads the last fragment of Warda’s diary, he realizes that he didn’t love Warda after all. He didn’t really know her—it was pure infatuation. Is nostalgia for the past like infatuation with a person? Is this really based on a true examination of the complex realities of history? The DLF “bloomed” in a certain moment, like Warda, the revolutionary rose, but the DLF and Warda were crushed by Sultan Qaboos and his foreign allies (the British, Iranians, and Saudis) whose priorities were economic interests and oil, rather than equity and justice. The DLF were not angels, either. Whatever their noble ideals in the beginning, the DLF were morally compromised by their commitment to violence. Yaarib, Warda’s brother, also a member of the group, threw his hat in with Qaboos’s government and betrayed his sister because he saw the way the wind...

Ethnographic journal of three quarantine fellows: between isolation and collective intimacy

This collective writing documents our first month of mandatory quarantine in the context of the coronavirus pandemic in Buenos Aires. As anthropologists and PhD students we face shared uncertainties. How to being there in this context? What ethnographic discourses can we produce? And, above all, how to accompany the situations of extreme need that deepened, in the territories where we work, in the face of the health emergency? Through an autoethnographic exercise we discovered an opportunity to share and discuss concerns about our fieldwork and the socio-affective ties built there, being isolated but together.

Transformations of cultural intimacy: An afterword

This Afterword provides an opportunity to consider the contribution of the assembled articles to our understanding of the expansion and exposure of culturally intimate information in the age of social media and uncivil populism. The new international style of bully politics creates special problems for anthropological ethics, in which anthropologists must increasingly accept responsibility for the social and political impact of their research without yielding to—and, indeed, while actively resisting—the neoliberal counter-ethics of blame (or “responsibilization”). Within that contentious geopolitical reality, discretion, new understandings of political strength, and cultural solidarity, and even displays of weakness and subservience may create opportunities for social solidarity. The world is in cultural flux, and the concomitant precariousness and deep provisionality of social experience mandate a flexible analytical style and a realization that collective intimacy is a fundamental resource, not only for the bureaucratic nation-state, but for all organizational structures, including our own academic discipline.

Les régimes génériques de l’enseignement

L’enseignement suppose trois grands piliers, présentés en un triptyque : le premier, disciplinaire, avec sa philosophie de l’éducation et ses renversements, et la règle d’asymétrie que suppose la relation enseignant/enseigné ; le second comme une machine de transformation du premier sur un espace générique, ne dépendant d’aucune science particulière, admettant l’idée d’inconnu « X », de démocratie des disciplines, de non-savoir, d’intimité collective comme mode d’échange, de discipline sous-déterminante pour assurer la cohérence, et son transfert sur la relation enseignant/enseigné ; le troisième énonçant les condition d’invention et de fiction que permet la mobilité entre ces trois piliers. L’ensemble s’achève sur une fiction sur la tristesse de la philosophie sévère.

“Come Together”: Dialogue and (Dis)Connection in the Beatles’ Lyrics

The article analyzes the Beatles’ 183 original recorded lyrics as a body of work, highlighting the lyrics’ thematic diversification and increasing narrative complexity as of 1965–66. Dialogical elements characterizing many Beatles lyrics extended to audiences the sense of collective intimacy that formed the core of the band’s identity and appeal. Group vocal arrangements on Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band permitted “heteroglossic dialog” through which the writers expressed and sought to reconcile the cultural and social tensions they perceived in their own lives and in the wider world. Lyrical innovations enabled the authors to respond to social and cultural currents—particularly how electronic media, drugs, and spiritual practices could bridge social, political, and interpersonal divisions and distances, yet also foster isolation and self-absorption. Lyrics on Pepper articulate this dialectic of connection and atomization.

Muted Speech, Apa Khabar Orang Kampung, and To Singapore, with Love

Both Singapore and Malaysia have policies making it difficult for one-time communist partisans living in exile to return home. The two films discussed in this article explore the lives of these political exiles through archival photos, montages of private correspondences, and clips of news reportage that link past and present perspectives. By creating a collective intimacy that draws viewers into the everyday lives of political exiles, the films animate their politicized silence, circumventing efforts to mute their voices.

From Customer Intelligence to Customer Intimacy

The theme of this year's Annual Meeting of the Industrial Research Institute, held in April in Seattle, was Extreme Customer Intimacy. Most of the presentations focused on the technology driving new forms of customer intimacy-such as additive manufacturing, which makes possible unprecedented levels of customization--or new ways of gathering the insights that power customer intimacy, such as modeling customer experience. But intimacy is not a technology; it's a relationship, and building that relationship requires more than amassing data, more than constructing smart algorithms or novel analytical approaches. It requires moving beyond customer intelligence, or even customer insight, to true engagement. Traditionally, this has been seen as a marketing problem. But the rise of servitization (see last issue's Resources for perspectives on that process) and a sharpening focus on design and mass customization mean that innovation is increasingly becoming less about technological development per se and more about providing unique and meaningful customer experiences. That means RD better analytics; and automated tools that allow companies to react to insights as they emerge from the data. Gaines's focus is on marketing, but her emphasis on the need to move thinking from demographies to individuals applies to R&D, as well. Like the marketing campaigns that support them, products and services must be designed to appeal to individual customers' needs, values, and emotions to be truly engaging. Joe Weinman, the subject of this issue's Conversations interview and author of Digital Disciplines, believes that big data can power a new kind of customer intimacy, "collective intimacy," which he defines in a 2013 Forbes post: "If customer intimacy entails multiple independent pairwise relationships between a firm and each of its customers, collective intimacy deepens each relationship via insights developed across all relationships." The primary example of this is the algorithm-driven recommendations engines of Amazon, Netflix, and Pandora, which make sometimes scarily accurate recommendations for individual customers based on data gleaned from across the user base. For Weinman, collective intimacy built on massive datasets, advanced data analysis and algorithm design skills, and hyperscale computing assets, "can form the foundation for market leadership." Rob Thomas, co-author of Big Data Revolution, suggests that big data tools can actually help businesses recreate an earlier era of individual customer intimacy. In a recent blog post, he focuses on the retail sector as an example, showing how big data tools are helping two clothing retailers build the kind of individualized experiences shoppers once had with their corner stores. …

Fado Resounding: Affective Politics and Urban Life by Lila Ellen Gray (review)

University Lila Ellen Gray, Fado Resounding: Affective Politics and Urban Life. Durham: Duke University Press, 2013. 328pp.When reading Lila Ellen Gray's Fado Resounding can almost feel the silence settling in the dark, before being softly disrupted by a guitar's first chords. The descriptions are so detailed and emotionally rich that it is hard to avoid feeling goosebumps when imagining Osorio's voice in A Meia Laranja. This is a beautifully written book, ethnographically rich and detailed, yet hard to classify: it is ethnomusicology, anthropology, linguistics, identity and gender politics. It is also poetry and music.Based on ethnographic work conducted in Lisbon between 1999 and 2010, but focused on the period between 2001 and 2003, Fado Resounding explores the traditional Portuguese musical genre fado, not just as an ethnographic object per se, but as an agentive aesthetic that generates and crafts around itself a range of phenomena: foundational discourses, identities, bodily performance, ways of being, divas, and, of course, feelings. For Gray, the discourses on fado-not just about its origins, but also about what it is-inform the ways in which postcolonial Portugal reframes its history on the lost empire, and shapes its place in the margins of Europe. Constituting an important element of national identity, expresses several narratives of the history of the country, placing Portugal in a modernity rooted in a colonial past.Fado emerges here as an ontology, not just in the sense that, as for many fadistas, is fate (fado in Portuguese literally means fate), but also because, for the Portuguese, as a particular epistemology shapes one's conception of the body, time, and space. Fado's epistemology includes the academic discourses on (both on its technical and historical constitutions), political and ideological discourses on identity their various relations with from the Portuguese dictatorship, from 1933 to 1974 until the beginning of the 20th century), and the knowledge that circulates through (in its performativity and reflexivity).Taking very seriously the concept of participant in participant- observation, Gray sings the herself. In the first chapter of her book, Gray describes this learning process which, in itself, contradicts the ethos of fado. Indeed, Gray is told, is not learned: is born with that feeling, with the fate of dedicating one's life to fado. As an American, therefore, Gray lacks the true soul of a fadista. Not only does she not sound like a fadista due to her accented pronunciation-she cannot say the words well-but also because her Americanness reinforces her alterity towards Portugal (and Europe) (56). Authenticity is thus not just a category at play in the evaluation and qualification of fadistas and their performances, but also a category that can either include or exclude a person from a feeling, from a way of being. Authenticity is also at play in the opposition between amateur and professional contexts. Professional performances are often considered soulless or too modern (31). In the amateur venues Gray observes, and in which she participates as a singer, the feedback other singers and audiences provide forms a major part of what is an unmarked teaching/learning process. This process also entails an unacknowledged set of rules about the role of generation, gender, status, and social networks in shaping definitions of authenticity. Other rules and preferences about performance are tacitly followed and help to shape structures of listening: the importance of silences, which create a collective intimacy; the importance of tears, which can be both symbolic (through the sound of the guitar) and literal; and the importance of constructing repertoires-a body of fado- that give an ontology, and fadistas a particular biography inflected through the lens of (41). These rules and preferences, in effect, form a pedagogical guide for how to listen, sing, feel, and talk about fado: after all, despite the fact that is born with the feeling of fado, one is not born knowing how to sing fado (69). …

Muddy Labor: A Japanese Aid Ethic of Collective Intimacy in Myanmar

Japanese aid has long been criticized for its focus on infrastructural projects, but Japanese aid actors have also valued non-infrastructural soft aid, especially through NGOs. Drawing on twenty months of fieldwork conducted with a Japanese NGO and its training program in sustainable agriculture in Myanmar, this article examines how Japanese and Burmese aid actors engaged in what I call an aid ethic of “muddy labor”—an emphasis on shared physical and relational labor that produced a collective form of intimacy. Scholars have tended to formulate humanitarian moral sentiments as responses to a distant suffering stranger. In contrast, I argue that the ideologies and political effects of a collectivist form of aid emerge in physical, relational, and geographic proximity. I demonstrate how the collective intimacy of physical and relational labor generated a meaningful sense of belonging among aid workers, while Japanese official discourses of soft aid indicated that this ethos of solidarity was also based on hierarchical views of Japanese superiority. The article ultimately asks how this ambiguity of the ethics of muddy labor challenges capacities for critique.

The Architecture of Collective Intimacy: Masonic Friendships as a Model for Collective Attachments

ABSTRACTDespite a growing recognition that interpersonal friendship informs wider forms of solidarity, there is little systematic analysis as to how community members extend the logic of friendship and intimacy to broader organizational and societal context. Masonic organizational practices provide a useful model for this inquiry. Drawing on an ethnographic study of contemporary Israeli Freemasonry, I examine the intersections of interpersonal, public, and collective intimacy in members’ ritual activities and everyday life. The juxtaposition of mundane sociability and Masonic sacred rituals serves to rescale the distance between interpersonal friendship and communal solidarity. As members take on the roles of citizen, bureaucrat, priest, and president concomitantly, they partly collapse the distinctions between personal and collective ties, between the familiar and the revered. These intersections of intimacy are offered as a programmatic research strategy to study how institutionalized patterns of sociability inform civic and national attachments.