Karl Andersson

Anthropologist

Study diary

Week 30: 20-26 July 2020

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This week I attended my first academic conference: EASA2020: New anthropological horizons in and beyond Europe. Which was organised in Lisbon but took place online.

  • On Monday I attended the network meeting for Enqa (after first checking in with Vaneasa where not much was going on).
  • Tuesday was the keynote by Marilyn Strathern.
  • On Wednesday the conference started for real and I listened to the panel Languages of entanglement: mapping the ethnographic modes and media, convened by Melissa Nolas and Christos Varvantakis:
    • Alexa Färber: Detangling the different media mobilities in multimodal research
    • Sanderien Verstappen: How to make anthropology accessible for smartphone viewers?: A manifesto for ultrashort and low-resolution films
    • Harshadha Balasubramanian: An Invitation to Feel Colour and Draw Sound: Proposing Cross-modality as a Participatory Method in Multimodal Fieldwork
    • Saadia Mirza: Sensing Landscape as a Media Object
    • Vanessa Wijngaarden: In dialogue with research collaborators and the public: Reflexive audio-visual ethnography and dilemmas of production and dissemination
    • Alexandra D’Onofrio: From multimodal research to imagining the future of publishing a multimodal monograph
    • Mark Westmoreland: Multimodality: Shifting Paradigms
  • Followed by a useful Combined Academic Press/Duke Press Meet the Editors session, with Ken Wissoker and Gisela Fosado.
  • But it was Thursday’s lab Drawing as Anthropology-Making, led by Letizia Bonanno and José Sherwood, that was the real meat of the conference for me. Such an inspiring double session, which will influence my practice.
  • On Friday I rounded off with the first couple of talks in the panel Despite differences? Identity politics and solidarities in/of feminist and queer projects, convened by Anika Keinz and Monika Baer:
    • Ahmad Al-Kurdi: “From concert halls to the streets”: (re)framing intersectionality in Lebanese LGBT organizing
    • Alexandria Petit-Thorne: “Queer Solidarity Smashes Borders”: queer organizing against the deportation of migrants in the United Kingdom

I did have some editing sessions, after discussing a new version with S. I also talked to a lawyer about my film. On Monday I had my first restaurant dinner since breaking the quarantine, with A on his birthday. I’m keeping up Anki in the mornings, or usually until 15 or so.

This weekend I’ve discovered a childhood dream of mine: Animation. As in making them. Both yesterday and today I was immersed for hours on end while creating my first two animations. It’s nothing short of magic to see the character come to life by moving. I think I sat from after lunch until 21 today. Yesterday maybe from 22 to 3.30. I upgraded Clip Studio Paint from Pro to Ex to be able to animate more than 24 frames (one second, that is, or three seconds for me since I use anime’s classic framerate of eight frames per second). I basically draw one drawing per frame, or at least the moving part of it. I’m sure there are various tricks such as tweening and the like, but I like doing it the classic way, at least in the beginning (plus I don’t really know the programme that well and just wanted to start). The result is a very analogue feeling, where some lines move slightly despite they “shouldn’t”, and small ink blobs appear on certain frames – just as if it was done on film! I was frankly completely blown away by my first animation. And this experience is also super relevant for my research, as it’s about creating a reality.

Japanese

Anime

Week 29: 13-19 July 2020

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After some discussion we decided to end our self-imposed quarantine. Thus: Pad thai and beer at the Wasserturm in Prenzi on Monday, and my first visit ever to Sommerbad Kreuzberg on Tuesday. Too salty vegan burger from Kiiro on the terrace at night.

I edited some of the days. On Friday I half-heartedly participated in a Zoom seminar on visual representation. But basically I just wanted to edit.

I tried a new working technique on Saturday: From 15 to 18 I did 6 Pomodoro blocks à 25 minutes, each one followed by a 5 minute break. Then food break for half an hour followed by 2 hours of non-stop editing 18-30-20.30, because by then I was already in it. I HAD A GREAT TIME! The Pomodoro sessions were a great way to force myself to get there, instead of spending the day procrastinating and miserably getting to it at 20, 21 or 22. Now I was done in the studio at 20.30, backed and packed up for 15 minutes and biked home. After tea and Wataru I kept working for four and a half hour until 2.

The mornings were for Anki.

Japanese

  • Flashcards Deluxe: 31 min per day
  • Anki: Ca 90 min per day

Anime

EASA2020 Lisboa film

  • Nous Sommes Ensemble (We are Together) (Ascanio Varroni 2019 | 33’ | Cameroon / Norway)

Seminar

Articles

Week 28: 6-12 July 2020

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I delivered a new cut to my supervisor on Tuesday. We talked on Thursday and I proceeded to edit.

A new class on curating ethnographic exhibitions started on Tuesday.

I read a section of Nagayama Kaoru’s Eromanga Studies – his language is really hard, it took time. In comparison the first couple of pages of an article in Eureka’s Otoko-no-ko issue were not so hard to understand, although I didn’t get all the kanji readings.

We’ll attend the EASA 2020 conference online next week and we started watching some of the films.

Japanese

  • Flashcards Deluxe: 35 min per day
  • Anki: Ca 80 min per day
  • Nagayama, Kaoru. 2006. “ショタ、またはオート・エロティシズム”. In Ero manga sutadīzu: “Kairaku sōchi” to shite no manga nyūmon. Tokyo: Īsuto Puresu. 238-44.

Anime

EASA2020 Lisboa

  • Histórias de Lobos (Faber) (Agnes Meng 2018 | 22’ | Portugal)
  • Guardians of the Night – Guardianes de la noche (Alexandrine Boudreault-Fournier 2018 | 17’ | Cuba / Canada)
  • Sudanese Industrial Sound: Sonic Labour in a Truck Workshop (Valerie Hänsch 2019 | 3’ | Sudan / Germany)
  • Zigzag (Zeynep Merve Uygun 2018 | 9’ | Turkey)

Book chapters (reread)

  • Allan Bloom: The Closing of the American Mind (1987)
    • Race 91-97
    • Sex 97-108

Week 27: 29 June – 5 July 2020

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Cleaned up my studio to get into the right editing mood. We shot some more footage of me and I kept on editing. It feels much better now. The film feels like a whole but with a few gaps. I will finish some kind of rough cut again for my supervisor on Tuesday. And I must quote S after I showed him a new sequence I cut yesterday. He said:

When it works it works.

On Thursday I participated in an ethnographic film screening online. It turned out I had already watched Withering House (and met the filmmaker) in Freiburg. I think it was even better this time around.

Tonight I finally watched Ruben Östlund’s Play, which has been on my list since it came out – in 2011! It was as brilliant as Force Majeure and The Square. Think Michael Haneke doing Lord of the Flies.

Japanese

  • Flashcards Deluxe: 34 min per day
  • Anki: Ca 90 min per day

Anime

Cineclub Film Screening & Discussion

  • Dhruv Satija: Welcome Valentine 2017
  • Shreyas Dasharathe: Bismaar Ghar (Withering House)

Film

Articles

Week 26: 22-28 June 2020

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An editing week, sort of. S watched the third version of my rough cut and we discussed it for hours. I’m becoming a filmmaker. It’s a process, in which I make cuts which divert in various directions. You roll back one thing, strengthen another, and not least, find a story, a red thread. But it’s also like a puzzle: You change one thing and then other things stop working. I felt overwhelmed.

On Thursday I met with a classmate in a park to discuss our projects, which intersect a bit. It was only my second social meeting since we got back from Japan. He seemed surprised when I dodged his goodbye hug.

I biked to FU on Friday to validate my student card in the one machine they have opened for that. Unfortunately I forgot my face mask but was let in by the guard at the entrance anyway. It was completely empty.

I impressed myself by building a simple (but still!) kanji quiz in Javascript and Jquery. I put in all the 3,000 Heisig kanji in the arrays but limited the test to the first 2,200, which are my friends. Then I managed to add a box for a custom number instead. And yes, this was procrastination (since I was feeling overwhelmed), although I had wanted to create a super simple kanji randomiser for some time. Check it out!

Another way I procrastinated was by closing all 240 tabs in Firefox. I signed up for Pocket to deal with the separation anxiety. Again, browser tabs are the piles of paper you have on your physical desk, and closing them equals clearing the desk in one satisfying blow. Pocketing maybe equals taking a phone photo of some of the most important-looking papers. In both cases I will probably never return to them.

Dream Girls was an amazing film that we watched as part of the Fringe! x RAI Queer Eyes festival.

Japanese

  • Flashcards Deluxe: 39 min per day
  • Anki: Ca 80 min per day

Anime

Fringe! x RAI: Queer Eyes

  • Dream Girls (Kim Longinotto, 1994, 50 min)

Articles

Video

  • Apple WWDC keynote, Marques Brownlee’s summary, some Matt vs Japan, and my new favourite Japanese channel while falling asleep.

Week 25: 15-21 June 2020

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I start feeling that the kanji become my friends. As if I’ve been to a huge mingling party for years on end, and finally started to get to know the people there, one after the other. The feeling came not from Heisig, but from when I started to write down the words in the sentences in the Japanese Core 6000 deck. All of a sudden the words became so much easier to pronounce and read fast – I read them out loud along with the speaker. It felt as if I recognised them as individuals. Friends. Male, female and in other forms. Magic, love, ecstacy!

I finished the second volume of Yankī Shota to Otaku Onēsan. It’s such a lovely story that centers the conflict (?) of 2D and 3D realities, in the form of a woman (the otaku) and a boy (the shota) who always seem to end up together, which causes the woman stress about whether her interest in fictional 2D shota says anything about her predilections in the 3D reality. Again, there are several scenes with direct bearing on my research. The fact that they are there says something about what the readers have on their minds. Pop culture is a perfect source.

As for the language, thanks to having mastered the 2,200 kanji in Heisig (which I keep repeating in flashcards), I can understand so much more in manga now than before. I’ve never been as immersed as when I read the last three chapters of Yankī Shota in one sitting (in my favourite corner of the sofa) on Wednesday. I had planned to do other stuff, but I just kept sitting and reading. I felt like a child who has just discovered reading (and who has his long summer break from school so he can just read all day long). Japanese is opening up for me. A whole world of literature and research is becoming accessible.

I absolutely loved this text, which I found via Khatzumoto’s email:

It turns everything I’ve known about language learning upside down. Ever since I studied Czech at university, my approach has always been “just show me the grammar tables”, because I felt that private language schools always tried to hide those since they thought people were intimidated by grammar. And although I still stand by that criticism, it doesn’t mean that grammar is the way. This text, Krashen’s principles, MIA, Ajatt, and so on stress the importance of input. Two mind-opening excerpts:

In the last few decades, classroom language teaching has undergone a major upheaval in the English teaching world, possibly because people cottoned on to the fact that they were hopeless at German even after studying it for 5 years. Now, the emphasis is on “communicative competence.” Accuracy, which used to be paramount, has effectively been replaced by fluency, and grammatical errors are given minimal attention.

…

And you can study as much grammar as you want, because you’ve already internalised the language that you’re analysing. Using grammar rules will no longer be blindly gluing words together, but understanding why the language you already speak works the way it does. Now you’ve got some bread to put the butter on.

Made a PS5 meme with Wataru.

Japanese

  • Flashcards Deluxe: 51 min per day
  • Anki: Ca 90 min per day
  • 新にほんご500問 N2: Week 4 (pp. 213–), test: 23/35.
  • Manga: 星海ユミ: ヤンキーショタとオタクおねえさん, volume 2, chapter 12–15 + extra, pp. 61–154.

Anime

Articles

Video