This semester, I officially began my fieldwork for my doctoral dissertation in the city of Bogotá. As part of an ethnography, I will be wandering through different neuroscience laboratories in Colombia, observing some of their studies as well as certain outreach activities they prepare. My questions aim to understand the academic and non-academic ties that enable the consolidation of research networks, and how these networks are also articulated with other spaces.
The use of the word wander is not accidental. I feel that my fieldwork experience has been an exercise in walking through a constant state of errancy and drift. It reminds me of the sensation I get from Italian neorealist films, which have so deeply influenced cinema and literature in Colombia: those characters suspended in a limbo, wandering through a city in ruins. I would also like you to experience, if only slightly, that same feeling in the form of this text: a world of aimless wanderings, without a fixed center, yet full of questions and encounters.
My situation is not as extreme as that of those characters at the end of the war. I do not know to what extent others share this same experience, but in my case, the PhD has made me feel as if I am constantly shifting labels: I am a student, I am a worker, I am unemployed. It is something I cannot share with anyone. The groups dedicated to critical studies and social analysis of science in the country are small, and increasingly excluded and reduced. Because of this, there is no clear place for me within the faculty; my peers are also grappling with the dilemmas of their own situations, so interaction is not very frequent. This brings with it a solitude that is mild, yet profound.
Nor does it help to dispel that feeling that Bogotá is undergoing a major transformation of its infrastructure. The construction of the first metro line advances, tearing down almost entire neighborhoods; real estate speculation and gentrification begin to open their jaws amid the fragments of demolished granite. The neighborhoods where I grew up and where my grandparents once lived are being radically transformed.
In this situation, it becomes very interesting to focus attention on the ties of others. While I observe how their networks grow, I notice the opposite in my own case.
I would like you to try to put yourself in my place. An ordinary day of fieldwork may consist of attending a neuroscience conference and watching researchers gather fraternally: they speak about the new laboratories that universities are building, about how their community grows and seeks ever more connections; they create innovative outreach spaces and develop artscience projects. I leave the event, put on my headphones, choose a post-punk playlist, and, with nothing much to do, begin to walk. I keep walking for an hour or two, past the green construction meshes that only affirm the city’s profound transformation, until I reach my apartment.
Approaching Wandering Through the Lenses of Philosophy and Anthropology
Video still from Feeling Adrift in the Ethnography of a Laboratory (Photo: author)
In his books on cinema, Deleuze (1987) grants wandering a special place within the transformation that films underwent in the postwar period. The classical structure of the Hollywood narrative—based on action and its resolution—gives way to a form in which the visual and the sonic acquire a more ethereal and volatile character. This new configuration resembles more a religious encounter, where time, objects, and sensations become characters amid a tide of fortuitous encounters that sweep through the actors. A Japanese cup contemplated before sleep may express the violence of time; a face, salvation; a factory, hell. And all this without the need for any violent movement to underscore it: it is enough to remain attentive, in our own drift, to perceive it.
Deleuze (1987) speaks about cinema and seeks to explain the great revolution brought about by neorealism and the French New Wave that followed it. Yet I find resonances between those reflections and a kind of experience, a particular sensitivity that arises when we wander and fail to fit anywhere. That “backdrop” which usually goes unnoticed when we are too busy—and which in complex cities like Bogotá is especially dense and rich—comes to the foreground, and many of the city’s dynamics, as well as its moving details, become more evident.
Watching a person spend half an hour delicately placing a small flower on top of a soda bottle cap suddenly becomes the happiest moment of the day. Moreover, we too are part of that “backdrop” for others, and those who share our same condition of wandering already recognize us, know our habits, and we greet one another.
This experience contrasts with the kind of narrative usually found in laboratory ethnographies, which are generally centered on a single space and heavily focused on the academic environment. This initially made me feel insecure about what I was doing and what I was paying attention to. Over time, however, I have begun to think that, on the contrary, this experience may allow me to observe other connections between the laboratory and the social life of the city. To recognize that there may be a sensory ethnography capable of enriching the depth of our analyses.
For this, it was very important to encounter Kathleen Stewart’s beautiful book Ordinary Affects, in which the author engages in a speculative ethnography that seeks to sketch the affect-laden everyday life of her surroundings. Two concepts are key:
The first is the ordinary, which Stewart defines as:
“A shifting assemblage of practice and practical knowledge, a scene of both liveness and exhaustion, a dream of escape or of the simple life.” (Stewart, 2007, p. 1)
The second is the affective, which she describes as:
“The varied capacities to affect and to be affected that give everyday life the quality of a continual motion of relations, scenes, contingencies, and emergences. They’re things that happen. They happen in impulses, sensations, expectations, daydreams, encounters, and habits of relating, in strategies and their failures, in forms of persuasion, contagion, and compulsion, in modes of attention, attachment, and agency, and in publics and social worlds of all kinds that catch people up in something that feels like something.” (Stewart, 2007, p. 2)
What would happen in an ethnography of laboratories that took into account the ordinary and the affects around them: the potholes, the informal workers, the gray and rainy sky, the melancholy and the joy of their shops? It is a complex question, but so far it has made me realize that there are different affects, practices, and shared interests that emerge from the everyday encounters between neuroscience laboratories and other spaces in the city, such as art or journalism, and that these are fundamental to understanding how the neurosciences have expanded in Bogotá. And perhaps I will have to study this in more detail—these connections may also have contributed to the insertion of these laboratories into international neuroscience circuits. Maybe it is this shared ordinary that has been decisive for them.
Neuroscience researchers understand that there are other forms of knowledge and encounters in the city that are not necessarily directly associated with the lineages of science, and they also recognize that, historically, science has carried a strong imposing component, operating both in the North and, especially, in the Global South. They show a deep interest in building more horizontal relationships. Accompanying them has been a source of humility, as they reveal a practical and theoretical understanding of geopolitics: they are experts in what I am interested in studying and, in an aspect where neither my community nor I are, in the capacity to make this knowledge serve as a means to create alliances that can secure a place for it within society.
I feel that my final work will be a constant movement back and forth between our own position and what we can learn from what takes place within the neurosciences. It has also led me to think about the importance of capturing—or even hijacking—some of the techniques these laboratories use to disseminate information or conduct research, in order to explore the force of their sensitivity. To wander with the instruments they employ may help them become more aware of their possibilities, to trivialize them in a way, and thereby detach ourselves from the mystical aura we sometimes project onto them. It is also a way of entering into dialogue with those actors interested in these forms of expression, a way of dissipating the solitudes that traverse contemporary critique.
Expanding Ethnography Through the Affect of Drifting
I believe that placing wandering at the service of ethnography—or ethnography at the service of wandering—opens the field to a series of interesting challenges: unfolding a singular sensitivity toward what surrounds our research, creating artifacts that account for those sensibilities, and attempting to articulate the laboratory with the life that courses through our cities, without losing sight of the analysis of the laboratory’s own internal dynamics.
In my personal attempts to respond to this challenge, I have drawn on some of the tools of artscience—not with the aim of popularization, but to present certain ideas through video essays and to visually transform elements of the history of the neurosciences. The videos that accompany this short narrative were created in that way: I intervened in Ramón y Cajal’s and Camillo Golgi’s illustrations—the latter—as well as in my PhD proposal and various texts I have read for my thesis, which appears at the beginning of the piece. These two figures are fundamental in the history of brain research; engaging with their work and transforming it is an exercise that, as I mentioned earlier, helps to denaturalize established narratives and, from the perspective of social studies of science and critique, opens up possibilities for making meaningful contributions.
Over time, I hope to develop an intervention that allows for more complex approaches to the place occupied by the image of the brain and the role it plays in our society. For now, I am only just beginning, and the ideas I would like to accompany these images are still yet to be built.
In one way or another, this short text was an attempt to share the sensitivity of wandering that has marked my fieldwork experience. My solitude, and my attempts to escape from it.
References
Deleuze, G. (1987). La imagen-tiempo: Estudios sobre cine 2. Paidós.Stewart, K. (2007). Ordinary affects. Duke University Press.
