Magical Realist Sociologies of Belonging and Becoming: The Explorer

277 Pages·2020·11.341 MB·English

by  Rodanthi Tzanelli

Magical Realist Sociologies of
Belonging and Becoming
At the bottom of the sea, freedivers find that the world bestows humans with
the magic of bodily and mental freedom, binding them in small communities
of play, affect and respect for nature. On land, rational human interests dis­
solve this magic into prescriptive formulas of belonging to a profession, a
nation and an acceptable modernity. The magical exploration is morphed by
such multiple interventions successively from a pilgrimage, to a cinematic and
digital articulation of an anarchic project, to an exercise in national citizen­
ship and finally, a projection of post-imperial cosmopolitan belonging.
This is the story of an embodied, relational and affective journey: the
making of the explorer of worlds. At its heart stands a clash between indivi­
dual and collective desires to belong, aspirations to create and the pragmatics
of becoming recognised by others. The primary empirical context in which
this is played is the contemporary margins of European modernity: the post-
troika Greece. With the project of a freediving artist, who stages an Under­
water Gallery outside the iconic island of Amorgos, as a sociological spyglass,
it examines the networks of mobility that both individuals and nations have
to enter to achieve international recognition, often at the expense of personal
freedom and alternative pathways to modernity.
Inspired by fusions of cultural pragmatics, phenomenology, phanerology,
the morphogenetic approach, feminist posthumanism and especially post-
colonial theories of magical realism, this study examines interconnected var­
iations of identity and subjectivity in contexts of contemporary mobility
(digital and embodied travel/tourism). As a study of cultural emergism, the
book will be of interest to students and scholars in critical theory, cultural,
postcolonial and decolonial studies, and tourism/pilgrimage theory.
Rodanthi Tzanelli is Associate Professor of Cultural Sociology at the University
of Leeds, UK. She is author of numerous research papers and chapters, as well as
11 monographs.
Routledge Advances in Sociology
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Or How We Have Become Decadently Indignant
Diana Stypinska
278 Nostalgia Now
Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives on the Past in the Present
Edited by Michael Hviid Jacobsen
279 Magical Realist Sociologies of Belonging and Becoming
The Explorer
Rodanthi Tzanelli
280 Queer Campus Climate
An Ethnographic Fantasia
Benjamin Arnberg
281 Children in Social Movements
Rethinking Agency, Mobilization and Rights
Diane M. Rodgers
282 The Global Citizenship Nexus
Critical Studies
Edited by Debra D. Chapman, Tania Ruiz-Chapman and Peter Eglin
283 People, Care and Work in the Home
Edited by Mohamed Gamal Abdelmonem and Antonio Argandona
For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/
Routledge-Advances-in-Sociology/book-series/SE0511
Magical Realist Sociologies of
Belonging and Becoming
The Explorer
Rodanthi Tzanelli
First published 2020
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2020 Rodanthi Tzanelli
The right of Rodanthi Tzanelli to be identified as author of this work has been
asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any
information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the
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trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent
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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Tzanelli, Rodanthi, 1974-author.

Title: Magical realist sociologies of belonging and becoming :

the explorer / Rodanthi Tzanelli.

Description: Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2020. |

Series: Routledge advances in sociology |

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019052875 (print) | LCCN 2019052876 (ebook) |

ISBN 9780367432393 (hardback) | ISBN 9781003002000 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Belonging (Social psychology) | Group identity. | Critical theory.

Classification: LCC HM1033 .T93 2020 (print) |

LCC HM1033 (ebook) | DDC 305--dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019052875

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019052876

ISBN: 978-0-367-43239-3 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-003-00200-0 (ebk)

Typeset in Times New Roman

by Taylor & Francis Books
For Majid and Evelyn
‘I can’t help it. That’s how I see it’ (Charles Sanders Peirce)
‘Fascism is the afterimage [of the inhospitable blinding age of big-scale industrialism].
In its reflecting mirror we recognize ourselves’ (Susan Buck-Morss)
In the end, what is [play] all about? It is about bursting the heavens, it is about
going too far’ (Georges Bataille)
‘Zarathustra says: “Let every thought which does not make you burst out laugh­
ing at least once be regarded as false”’ (Friedrich Nietzsche)
‘Pain, pleasure and death are no more than a process for existence. The
revolutionary struggle in this process is a doorway open to intelligence’ (Frida
Kahlo)
‘Never fall in love with the victim’ (Bosch 2019, Season 5, Episode 5)
Contents

List of images ix

Acknowledgements (about the ‘journey’) x

A preface not to skip xii

An epistemological and methodological introduction 1

PARTI 1

Dialogues between (nominated) centres and peripheries 1

Methodological notes on the book’s organisation 14

PART II 25

Field, time–space and iconic mobilities 25

Reading one: The pendulum of environmental and artistic firstness 37

Design mobilities and magical naturalism 37

PART I 38

The aesthetics of nature: on geo-topographies of beauty 38

Ecoaesthetics and values: the craftsmomentum 45

PART II 52

Photographic aesthetics of movement: the deep as a magical

atmospheric world 52

A. Diagrams, affects, emotions 52

B. Orientations 57

Conclusion 63

Reading two: Thanatourism and community-making 65

Breathing life and death through technology 65

PART I 70

Immersed in the deep: anarchic and romantic hallucinations 70
viii Contents
PART II 80

On land: conviviality in two frames 80

Conclusion 87

Reading three: (Inter)national aesthetics: Cinematic thirdness 89

Into governmobilities 89

PART I 95

Networked content: from events on Amorgos to travels

in iconicity 95

Indexical centrifugalism: Greece’s multiple modernities 105

Deep aesthetic structures and agencies 112

PART II 118

Symbolic centripetalism: natality and biopolitical freedom 118

From choreopolicing to magical-realist ballet: exorcising

morphostatic discourse 124

Conclusion 136

Reading four: International indexing: The biophysics of land(scape) 140

PART I 140

The environmental uncanny: the nature/culture conundrum 140

Practical poetics as global connectivity 147

PART II 152

Breaking the link with religion: digital and environmental

revolutions 152

The reproductive loneliness of the environmental sublime 158

From play to plot: gendered and racialised imaginaries

of belonging 178

Conclusion: Reading zero: Dual (un)consciousness and the

mathematics of being 181

From sediment to sentiment: upsetting Master Modernity’s

deep blue 181

Morphogenetics of violence: thanatourist creativity as the

harbinger of life 185

Bibliography 191

Index 237
Images

3.1 The famous ‘Big Blue’ (Απέραντο Γαλάζιο) window of the

Monastery of Panayia Hozoviotissa, Xora, Amorgos. 98

3.2 The façade of the Monastery of Panayia Hozoviotissa,

which is built on a rock by ‘divine intervention’, according

to local legend. 99

4.1 ‘Anthropocene’ by Jason deCaires Taylor, Museo

Subacuatico de Arte (MUSA), between Cancun and Isla

Mujeres, Mexico. 165

4.2 ‘Archivero de los Sueños’ (‘The Archive of Lost Dreams’ –

more commonly known as ‘Dream Collector’) by Jason

deCaires Taylor, Museo Subacuatico de Arte (MUSA),

between Cancun and Isla Mujeres, Mexico. 166

4.3 ‘Viking ship museum’, Roskilde, Denmark. 169

4.4, 4.5 Tropical World, Roundhay Park, North Leeds UK.

and 4.6 A tropical imaginarium species for educational

consumption. 171

4.7 ‘Gaia/Earth’, Museu do Amanhã (Museum of Tomorrow),

Porto Maravilla waterfront, Rio de Janeiro. 174

4.8 ‘The house of knowledge’, Museu do Amanhã (Museum of

Tomorrow), Porto Maravilla waterfront, Rio de Janeiro. 176