Book review: Researching Otherwise: Pluriversal Methodologies for Landscape and Urban Studies

Bathla Nitin (ed.), Researching Otherwise: Pluriversal Methodologies for Landscape and Urban Studies. ETH Zürich: gta Verlag, 2024; 264 pp.: ISBN: 978-3-85676-467-8, €32.00/£26.69 (pbk)

This edited volume provides methodological inspiration for how researchers in landscape and urban studies might pluralise their research strategies. Rather than discuss the chapters in order, or by their intended subdivisions, in this review I rearrange the contributions to place them in dialogue with each other and the overall themes of the book (noting, in the process, how some highlight or fill lacunas in others). Finally, I offer some reflections on the framing and overall themes. While successful in providing ‘hints and orientations’ (p. 262) for researchers, the text would have benefited from a more in-depth critical engagement with ontological literature and themes throughout.

Luke Harris, Cara Turett and Bonnie Kate Walker open the book, providing useful guidelines for how drawing can be both a form of ethnographic practice and a kind of analysis. Specifically, they propose what they call ‘relational drawing’ as a method simultaneously borrowing and diverging from common architectural draftsmanship. The relations they refer to exceed those visible at any given site, encompassing ‘webs of connection’ (p. 54) at multiple scales. By illustrating how to integrate relational drawing into ethnographic field research, the authors demonstrate how drawing can allow one to investigate, analyse, and represent hidden vistas and connections.

Ludo Groen’s contribution also discusses how to visualise the invisible using ‘open source intelligence tools’. The bulk of the chapter details a study of subterranean Swiss banking. It offers inspiring hints for how to use open source tools. However, I would have appreciated a more schematic breakdown of those tools and methods and consideration of what kinds of knowing they allow. We learn how open source tools can generate other kinds of stories – and maps – than official ones (or, perhaps more accurately, fill gaps in official accounts and representations). But the degree to which this constitutes knowing ‘otherwise’ or pluriversally is unclear. de la Cadena’s (2015: 117–151) work on indigenous archivists provides a useful point of comparison in this regard.

In counterpointing the relationship between ‘techno-scientific approaches to ocean management’ and her experiments in ‘immersive’ ways of knowing, Couling’s thematic contribution is clearer (p. 153). The chapter details several ethnographic and imaginative experiments in knowing oceanic spaces undergoing rapid urbanisation. More discussion of the connection between epistemological and ontological politics could have enriched it further, however. Couling intimates that techno-scientific ways of knowing construct oceanic spaces as ones of investment and urbanisation. Which raises the question: how do the other ways of knowing she encourages us to engage and experiment with construct the ‘ocean’ differently?

Many of Couling’s examples involve audiovisual technologies, whose politics and potential Klearjos Eduardo Papanicolaou explores. The contribution balances nuanced critique of filmic objectivity with appreciation for how situated encounters between researchers, audiovisual technologies, and pro-filmic realities can enable experiential and embodied ways of knowing urban and other spaces. The chapter provides a concise but thorough overview of trends in ethnographic filmmaking and useful breakdowns of key scenes in the examples provided. I do miss some discussion of cognate genres such as ‘landscape film’, however. Alongside their relevance to landscape and urban studies, they have influenced the trends Papanicolaou discusses, like sensory ethnography, and could inspire further ethnographic experiments.

Papanicolauou ends by describing Tarkovski’s individual filmic reflections. In contrast, Andreea-Floretina Midvighi’s text explores collaborative ones. The chapter provides a powerful account of experiences of Palestinian refugees doubly displaced from the Yarmouk refugee camp. It will greatly interest those concerned with Palestinian history and the experiences of refugees. However, the chapter does not sufficiently engage with ethnographic film or detail the author’s visual methods. While we learn much about what kind of empirical ‘counter-knowledge’ it seeks – namely, a ‘counter-archive’ of Yarmouk – epistemologically, the contribution to the book project is less clear.

Denise Bertschi’s chapter also discusses visual methods, namely the process and thinking behind a three-channel video installation on the Swiss–South African gold trade. The ‘otherwise’ is also somewhat opaque in this chapter. Other than contemporary trends in documentary archival methods in urban studies? Bertschi’s methodological reflections on mapping with the camera by walking are productive. But the text focuses on the author’s intentions regarding how audiences might interpret the resulting material. Having viewed the exert provided, it is not clear to me whether audiences would grasp what Bertschi intends. Since the voices of audiences are not presented or engaged, we cannot query them.

This issue is creatively addressed by Metaxia Markaki’s contribution on performance ethnography. The chapter offers an example of how anthropologists, performers and audiences can co-create a dialogic space: the space of theatrical performance. Markaki cogently theorises and models collaborative ethnodramatic practice and how it breaks down various ‘epistemological obstacles’ (p. 118). I particularly appreciated the attention to interpretative roles played by the audience within the theatrical space. I do find it questionable to imply performance as inherently ‘collaborative’ and ‘critical’, however, which Markaki seems to do. Monologues and one-person shows are part of theatre, after all, and performance art can also become elite and institutional.

While Markaki draws our attention to human audiences, Johanna Just asks us to consider non-human participants. She provides detailed guidelines for what she calls ‘multispecies walking’ with experts and the kinds of knowing it can enable. By keeping the category of ‘expert’ open – and defining it through reference to (embodied) experience more than formal qualification (p. 250) – Just exemplifies the book’s goal of expanding on rather than ‘reject[ing] established forms of research methods’ (p. 20). Her chapter offers a useful guide for walking alongside a diversity of knowers and projecting ourselves imaginatively into diverse perspectives, human and non-human.

This is also true of several of the stimulating acoustic experiments presented by Ludwig Berger, such as the acoustic model of a beehive (p. 141). I would have appreciated more discussion of what kinds of perceptual shifts listening can produce, what Pisaro (2010) calls ‘framing considerations’ (proximity, degree of focus, time, etc.) for recording, and the poetics of editing (see Littlejohn, 2021). Berger could also have linked examples more to the pluriversal theme. As Salomé Voegelin (2014: 32) argues, recording and editing sound ‘allows us to think of the soundscape as another world, as a possible world, within a universe of worlds that includes the landscape of which it is one slice and from which it is accessible’ (emphasis added).

Which brings me to some overall reflections on the book project. The chapters largely fulfil the promise of providing inspiration for experiments in landscape and urban studies research. Many of them offer useful hints for researchers aspiring and established. Acts of ‘fabulation’ – a term undefined, but which I understand, per McLean (2017: x), as not ‘the representation of a world assumed to be already given, independent of its figuration … but rather the participatory carrying forward of material world-forming processes in which human acts of creativity are always already implicated’ – also feature significantly.

The contributions could have engaged more with the theme of ‘restitution’, however. Bathla defines restitutive methods in the introduction as those which ‘obligate researchers to investigate relationships of power and hegemony in more-than-human worlds and catalyse steps for the restitution of the objects of their research to the communities that have been affected by them’ (p. 31). The chapters grouped under ‘restitutive methods’ certainly investigate relations of power. But they do not provide obvious pathways towards the restitution of objects of study (or restitution in a broader, political sense).

Most crucially, not all chapters engage explicitly with the concept (or meaning) of ‘pluriverse’ and related terms such as onto-epistemological anarchism. Those concepts – most notably, ‘pluriverse’ – are left undefined and the debates surrounding them undiscussed in the introduction and elsewhere. Which means that the reader unfamiliar with or unconvinced by recent turns in ontological theory will need more. For this reason, I recommend the book be seen as a methodological accompaniment – to be read alongside work like Escobar’s (2018) Designs for the Pluriverse, for example – rather than standalone.

References

de la Cadena M (2015) Earth Beings: Ecologies of Practice Across Andean Worlds. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Crossref; Google Scholar

Escobar A (2018) Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Crossref; Google Scholar

Littlejohn A (2021) Sonic ethnography. In: Audiovisual and Digital Ethnography: A Practical and Theoretical Guide. London: Routledge. Crossref; Google Scholar

McLean S (2017) Fictionalizing Anthropology: Encounters and Fabulations at the Edges of the Human. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Crossref; Google Scholar

Pisaro M (2010) Ten framing considerations of the field. Available at: http://media.experimentalmusicyearbook.com/emy_media/2010/michael_pisaro/pisaro_essay2010.pdf (accessed 11 October 2024). Google Scholar

Voegelin S (2014) Sonic Possible Worlds: Hearing the Continuum of Sound. New York: Bloomsbury Academic. Google Scholar

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