Dialogic Probe on the Atmosphere of Law: A conversation between Florencia Marchetti and David Howes

Florencia Marchetti
Interdisciplinary Humanities Doctoral Program, Concordia University

David Howes
Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Concordia University & Faculty of Law, McGill University

This probe is a conversational piece based on Florencia’s comprehensive examination in Sensory Studies.

15 July 2020

“Untitled” (from the series That which remains), Florencia Marchetti, 2019.

 

 

 

 

 

 

David Howes (DH): The term “atmosphere” has gained significant currency in the emergent field of sensori-legal studies, both as a theoretical concept in, for example, the work of Andreas Philoppopoulos-Mihalopoulos, most notably his “Atmospheres of Law: Senses, Affects, Lawscapes” (2013), and as a topic of empirical investigation in, for example, my own work on legal atmospherics – specifically the atmosphere of the courtroom in “Troubling Law’s Sensorium” (2019). The question of how such an ostensibly nebulous notion can be operationalized in sensori-legal studies remains a thorny one, though. It obviously supervenes on the idea of “the law in books” and gestures towards “the law in action,” but could we be more specific? In reading the Ph.D. comprehensive exam you wrote for me, centring on the notion of atmosphere, I found a commendable effort to ground these discussions. Hence, it seems to me that your notes could constitute important steps towards an “archaeology of legal perception” (after Foucault’s archaeology of medical perception in The Birth of the Clinic [1963]). Perhaps we could start with a foray into the tangible intangibility, or material immateriality of this (potentially) tremendously productive percept?

Florencia Marchetti (FM): As you know, David, my own research does not focus on legal perception per se, so I find your framing rather intriguing. It was my interest in researching the present affective and sensorial traces or – as I’ve come to term them – “ripples” of Argentina’s latest military dictatorial period that led me to delve into the atmospheric turn in contemporary scholarship. Let me draw from my notes to review a few key usages of the term “atmosphere” by way of beginning.

Making the diffuse tangible

Consider Paolo Gruppuso’s chapter on “Vapours in the sphere. Malaria, atmosphere and landscape in wet lands of Agro Pontino, Italy” in Exploring Atmospheres Ethnographically, a volume edited by Sara Asu Schroer and Susanne B. Schmitt (2017). Gruppuso explores the early, complex understanding of the concept of atmosphere “through the lens of physicians, meteorologists and aestheticians in the period between the 18th and the 19th century” (46). In their writings about the “bad air” (mal aria) emanating from the marshes, these scholars used the terms effluvia, atmosphere, air and miasma interchangeably. Most importantly, a material character was attributed to them.

The notion of miasma as vapour “makes evident the relations between atmosphere, body and landscape: vapours rise from the soil, permeate the atmosphere and seep into human bodies” (52). “It seems as if breathing the particular air of the Marshes was seen as tantamount to becoming part of it, to acquire its features,” Gruppuso writes. Air itself “was thought of as fluid, dependent on geographical and meteorological conditions, able to affect the living body in multiple ways.” (53) This is why health experts were interested in understanding the material qualities of air, so as to identify the potential dangers in particular atmospheres.

For scientists and humanists who crossed or approached the Marshes, the “bad air” was certainly understood as “an-all enveloping infusion” that is, a medium, as Tim Ingold (2015) would have it. Gruppuso, however, is interested in taking this notion a step further and argues that in these early writings atmosphere appears to be “more than a medium:”

It was something tangible which manifested itself through different phenomena that could be perceived through sight, smell and hearing. Moreover, as we have seen, the Marshes’ atmosphere was considered as an enemy, beautiful and dreadful at the same time, as an object of aesthetic contemplation and scientific measurement, and as something against which to take precautions. […] The ‘bad air’ was understood as a concrete presence with which travellers had material relationships” (56, emphasis added).

Atmosphere was thus not simply a medium of perception: it was “encountered as a tangible, material entity both threatening and mesmerizing at the same time” (56, emphasis added).

DH: I found it interesting how, in the next section of your literature review, the notion of atmosphere acquires a more vaporous character. Could you please elaborate on what you found out about the understanding of atmosphere and how it relates to the law in early twentieth century French anthropology.

 FM: Yes, as you know, it was Marcel Mauss’ interest in society’s totalities what drove this next elaboration of the concept. Vaporous as it was, it turned out to be a difficult element to grasp by classic ethnographic techniques alone. Here’s what I wrote on this.

 French anthropology and the challenge of grasping a society’s atmosphere

 Marcel Mauss’ well-known essay The Gift (1925) theorized social exchange systems such as the Melanesian Kula Ring as total social facts. This essay modeled what ethnographers should try to grasp and describe in any given society, i.e.: the totalities that permeate social life. But while The Gift models the analysis in action, it is in Mauss’ Manual of Ethnography that we find a range of  further instructions on how to understand and grasp these totalities. The notion of atmosphere is explicitly referred to in the section titled “Moral Phenomena.”1

In it, Mauss discusses morality as the diffuse and unformed mass that surrounds the law. His definition of moral phenomena as those that surround juridical acts seems to trace a parallel between the law and the earth: the law constitutes the explicit foundational materials of a society while morality is conceived of as the more vapour-like, diffuse mass that surrounds the law, in the same way that the atmosphere surrounds the globe. Mauss’ specific advice for grasping this diffuse matter was to gather moral and juridical statistics (to account for good and bad deeds) or to focus on literature, particularly proverbs. “Having completed an investigation of this kind,” the Manual notes, “one will be able to define the moral tone of the society under study, making an effort to remain within the ethos of the society” (148). It is here that the term atmosphere finally appears in Mauss’ text, at least in the original French text: “Au terme de pareille enquête, on pourra définir la tonalité morale de la société observée, en s’efforçant de rester dans l’atmosphère de cette société.”

What follows these remarks makes explicit what Mauss means: no judgement should be made from outside of a society’s moral sphere: “it is good to practice the vendetta, it is good to be able to offer a human head to your fiancée” (ibid.) if that’s what the ethos (read: atmosphere or moral tone) of the group dictates.

DH: This slippage from atmosphère to ethos that happened in the translation of the text has deep methodological and epistemological consequences. Could you elaborate?

FM: Yes, my discussion of the implications of the (mis)translation of atmosphère as “ethos” for anglophone scholars are mostly drawn from the preface to the English translation of a book by Vincent Debaene titled Far Afield: French Anthropology between Science and Literature (2014).

As mentioned before, early twentieth century French anthropology, influenced by Marcel Mauss’ teachings, conceived atmosphere as the moral tone of a society, which was graspable only by a complete bodily immersion in the studied society. The body as a bundle of sensory powers (such as you describe in your writings) was an instrument in the research process. In contrast, ethos or culture (the two terms were used interchangeably) came to be operationalized in American anthropology as collectible items, patterns, customs. Debaene puts it this way:

Contrary to Franz Boas’ students, ethnographers trained by Mauss were not trying to grasp an ethos, they were trying to breathe an atmosphere; they were not deciphering patterns, they were seeking a radical mental transformation. Although it was rarely explicit, the bodily experience of the ethnographer was seen as central since ‘the social’ is by essence incarnated ‘in body and in mind’ (as eighteenth century theories of the climate would have it). This bodily experience became a precondition for the comprehension of the social fact as opposed to the understanding of culture, a concept that Mauss described as “even worse” than that of civilization, itself already “pretty bad” [“assez mauvais“]. (xiii-xiv)

DH: Fascinating. Please tell us more about the implications of this substitution.

FM: Debaene’s book is actually dedicated to the discussion of the blurry boundaries between science and literature in the French anthropological tradition. The notion of “moral atmosphere” and the total immersion required to capture it is central to this, for it raised particular difficulties, both in the field, when encountering it, and at the time of transcription:

If the ethos of a society can be characterized only as a ‘climate,’ a diffuse and impalpable air or quality, then ‘how can we hope to give a scientific description of [a society] and apply it to the evaluative criteria that would make it an observable fact?’ (Karsenti quoted by Debaene, 72).

It was this tension that gave rise, in Debaene’s view, to the publication of secondary, more literary books, which attempted “to compensate for the shortcoming of a science founded on a documentary and museum-based model” (20). Interestingly, although literature was first rejected in the name of science, it was desired for its evocative capacities. According to Debaene, literature:

appears as a technical art that renders moral and immaterial realities vivid and that, ideally, enables the reader to subjectively experience them. […] As we can see, therefore, both its object (the social fact understood as a totality) and its method (the requirement of fieldwork and the continuity it implies between individual affectivity and objective knowledge) situated anthropology squarely between the contradiction generated by the application of the documentary paradigm to moral facts. The generalized references to the “atmosphere” of the society under study are a good indicator of these tensions (74).

DH: Such a different approach! You know, as I have argued elsewhere (Howes 2003: ch. 1), what could be called the “literary turn” in American anthropology has had a number of pernicious effects. It started with Clifford Geertz’s suggestion that cultures be viewed “as texts” to be read in the same way a literary scholar would analyze a work of literature. This “interpretative” paradigm subsequently morphed from “reading” into “writing culture” (Clifford and Marcus 1986) with all the latter’s emphasis on “representation,” and ethnography as a “process of textualization.” Stephen Tyler, one of the contributors to Writing Culture, went so far as to state “perception has nothing to do with it” (quoted in Howes 2003: 40) – the “it” being ethnography, conceived as a process of textualization. This transmutation all but obliterated any attention being paid to sensation. Since then, fortunately, sensation has come roaring back thanks to the “sensory turn” as announced in The Taste of Ethnographic Things: the senses in Anthropology (Stoller 1989) and The Varieties of Sensory Experience: A Sourcebook in the Anthropology of the senses (Howes 1991). Sensory ethnography, which is the methodology of sensory anthropology, offers a way out of the “crisis of representation” which beset anthropology in the 1980s, for it involves “sensing cultures” rather than reading or writing them, and utilizes a wide array of other media besides writing (e.g., sound recording, film, performance) to “conceptualize, design, conduct, and communicate ethnographic research” (see Elliott and Culhane 2017). It is my view that sensory ethnography has turned the tablets and propelled anthropology in a more sensuous, less literary direction once more.

FM: Exactly. And this is why I chose to work with you and the other members of my Ph.D. thesis committee in order to develop a multimodal ethnographic approach to the corporeal and atmospheric dimensions of the dictatorial regime I grew up in (Argentina’s last military dictatorship, 1976-1983). In relation to your previous point, you know Debaene actually argues that the book Writing Culture was never translated into French because the title didn’t make any sense in the francophone tradition. He writes:

French anthropology’s relationship to literature, when it is present, does not imply a hermeneutic stance and rarely involves a “cultural representation”; it takes place either earlier in the construction of anthropological discourse—in the bodily experience of the ethnographer and its translation into words—or later—in the reflections on ways to use, display, and present the results of the work performed. (xiv).

In any case, the vaporous understanding of the moral tone of a society as atmosphere proposed by Mauss remained too imprecise and the ethnographic toolkit available at the time too ill-equipped to grasp and account for such an amorphous aspect of relational social fields. It wasn’t until phenomenological attention came to be paid to the relationship between environmental qualities and human states (Böhme 2017) that the term would come back with renewed force.

DH: And with this turn it came to stay! You allude to the influence of Gernot Böhme. His work has had a tremendous impact across a large number of fields. But it is only recently that that work has become widely accessible in the anglophone world. A few of his essays were translated, but it is only with the publication of The Aesthetics of Atmosphere (2017) that most of us became conversant with his ideas. The anglophone world is deeply indebted to Jean-Paul Thibaud for consolidating Böhme’s many essays and overseeing their translation into English for The Aesthetics of Atmosphere. I tip my hat to him.

FM: Indeed. German philosopher Gernot Böhme is one of the most prolific and influential writers in what might be called the ‘atmospheric turn.’ His theorization of the notion of atmosphere and his use of it as the foundation for a “new aesthetics” is quite original. And attention to the bodily and the experiential, including of course the sensorial, are central to his thinking. Here are my notes on some of his main contributions.

 Atmospheric re-entry: Ecstasies, resonances and other variations on the co-presence of things

In his article “Atmosphere as the fundamental concept of a new aesthetics” (based on two lectures given in Germany in 1991 and first published in English in 1993), Böhme offers a critique of Kantian aesthetics for its excessive concern with judgement and little interest in sensuous experience itself (as the original Greek notion of aesthetics would have it). The centrality of judgement, Böhme argues, has led to the predominance of language and semiotics, and the assumption that works of art are to be “read as signs,” and thus mined for meaning. In his view, “it is necessary to remember that a work of art is first of all itself something, which possesses its own reality” ([1993] 2017: 115).

The generalized aesthetization of life and politics in contemporary western societies, and the increasing staging of atmospheres for commercial and artistic purposes in particular, require, in the philosopher’s view, a different conceptualization of aesthetics. Böhme draws from new phenomenology and philosophies of the body to do just this.2  In brief, according to Böhme, the human being must be conceived as a body (in lieu of a soul) and objects should be thought in terms of how they radiate out on to the environment. Citing Hermann Schmitz’ elaboration on atmosphere in the context of a philosophy of the feeling body, Böhme espouses the idea that “atmospheres are always spatially ‘without borders, disseminated and yet without place that is, not localizable.’ They are affective powers of feeling, spatial bearers of moods.” (119).

However, Böhme also argues for the need to overcome the ‘ontological unlocalizability’ of Schmitz’s atmospheres and claims that this is best done by liberating them from the subjective-objective dichotomy (120). According to traditional ontology a thing is “what it is, independent of its existence, which is ascribed to it ultimately by the cognitive subject, who “posits” the thing.” (121) His example: a blue cup. His proposal, to think of blueness as

something which radiates out to the environment of the cup. Colouring or “tincturing” in a certain way this environment, as Jakob Böhme would say. […] In this way, the thing is not thought of in terms of its difference from other things, its separation and unity, but in the ways in which it goes forth from itself. (121)

DH: Ah, Jakob Böhme! You know, when I met Gernot at a conference at Harvard, he told me he is a direct descendant of Jakob Böhme, the great seventeenth-century German Protestant mystic. What a lineage! Jakob Böhme is a very important figure in the Western history of the senses. He elaborated what Constance Classen in The Color of Angels (1998) calls an “alchemical sensory cosmology.” In his book Aurora, he held that “at the heart of the cosmos are seven spirits: Astringency [or Sourness], Sweetness, Bitterness, Heat, Love, Sound and Nature. These spirits continually interact with and generate each other” (Classen 1998: 21). Imagine that! Imagine conceiving of sensory qualities, such as sweetness and bitterness, as elemental, cosmic forces. This went completely counter to the empirical philosophy of John Locke, who taught us to view such properties as mere “secondary qualities.” It is a great pity that Locke’s corpuscular, empirical philosophy is the one that has stuck (Howes 2018). Please continue.

FM: Well, these of course aren’t secondary qualities in Böhme’s proposal. For him, these are ways of going forth that he terms “the ecstasies of the thing” ([1993] 2017: 121). Colour, smell, and tuning are easy to think in terms of ecstasies. Extension and form, not so much. Forms are normally thought as “limiting and enclosing” but they also have external effects, radiating “as it were into the environment, taking away the homogeneity of the surrounding space and filing it with tensions and suggestions of movement.” Same for volume, “voluminosity is the power of a thing’s presence in space.” (Ib.)

Following all this, Böhme conceptualizes atmospheres as spaces “tinctured through the presence of things, of persons or environmental constellations, that is through their ecstasies. They are themselves spheres of the presence of something, their reality in space.” (121, emphasis added) Accordingly, their character must always be felt: “by exposing oneself to them, one experiences the impression they make.” This is something he states in “Atmosphere as an aesthetic” (originally published in German in 1998, English translation 2017: 26). In this article, Böhme discusses the power of atmosphere to affect:

Atmospheres are experienced as an emotional effect. For this reason, the art of producing them – above all in music, but also throughout the entire spectrum of aesthetic work, from the stage set to the orchestration of mass demonstrations, from the design of malls to the imposing architecture of court buildings – is at every moment also the exercise of power (27, emphasis added).

DH: This makes me think that what Constance Classen and I were after in our sensori-legal analysis of the  architecture of the courthouse and décor of the courtroom in the chapter titled “The Feel of Justice” in Ways of Sensing (Howes and Classen, 2014) was not that far off what  Böhme has to say about atmosphere. For example, Constance and I wrote:

court buildings are usually designed to look massive and heavy. Employing stone as a building material conveys notions of the social weight of the edifice and the enduring nature of the principles upheld within (99)

and:

The furnishings of the [modern courtroom] resemble those of the modern office, with blond wood often preferred over the sombre dark woods of the traditional courtroom. Such ‘no fuss’ courtrooms suggest a justice system that will operate in a brisk, business-like fashion unimpeded by antiquated rites or regulations (101)

However, I can see now how this analysis remains attached to the tangible qualities of the stone or wood, rather than the “in between” of subject and object, as Böhme would have it. It would be more in keeping with Böhme’s theorization had Constance and I approached the design of the courthouse and courtroom as a form of stage design.

FM: Yes, this is indeed the kind of approach that Böhme proposes in a later chapter: “The art of the stage set as a paradigm for an aesthetics of atmospheres” ([2011] 2017) and it has been picked up on by a number of other scholars who are at the forefront of the “atmospheric turn,” such as Mikkel Bille, Tim Flohr Sørenson, Tim Edensor, and Shanti Sumartojo.3

Regarding staging, Böhme asks:

[C]an one really make atmospheres? The term making refers to the manipulating of material conditions, of things, apparatus, sound, and light. But atmosphere itself is not a thing; it is rather a floating in-between, something between things and the perceiving subjects. The making of atmospheres is therefore confined to setting the conditions in which the atmosphere appears. We refer to these conditions as generators (31, emphasis added)

Böhme turns to scenography to clinch his point about how generative this process can be,  arguing that, as an art form, stage design is not interested in shaping objects but rather creating phenomena: “The manipulation of objects serves only to establish conditions in which these phenomena can emerge. But that is not achieved without the active contribution of the subject, the onlooker.” (31) As we can see, the feeling body emerges yet again in a co-productive relation with the staged environment.

And again, in “Music and Architecture” ([2004] 2017), he observes that:

Bodily space is neither the place a person’s body takes up nor the volume that it constitutes. A person’s bodily space is the sphere of his or her material presence. The latter continually transcends the limits of the body. […] it always has an emotional character as well (180-181),

In this piece Böhme wonders what would happen if, instead of conceiving of architecture as a visual art, it was rather understood “as an art of space.” Then, “its true experiential means [would be] bodily feeling” with the architectonic shaping of spaces as immediate effects (181, emphasis added).

I wonder how these suggestions would add to the analysis of courthouse architecture and courtroom decor you bring up above. How is the weight of law’s enduring principles conveyed in the ecstasies of stone as building material or the “no-fuss” (business-like) furnishings of many a contemporary courtroom?

Legal Atmospherics

DH: I hear what you’re saying. If we read these reflections of Gernot Bohme alongside – or better, into – the emergent use of the concept of atmosphere in sensori-legal studies, we can see both the lacuna and the potential for a more sensible approach to the study of law (and morality) in this area of inquiry. For example, we begin to see how Philoppopoulos-Mihalopoulos’ (2013) use of the term atmosphere is more metaphysical than sensual. Conversely, we can see how the discussion in the chapter on “The Feel of Justice” in Ways of Sensing (Howes and Classen, 2014) is overly physical. It is now clear to me, thanks to this exchange with you, that Constance and I in writing that chapter tended to reduce “feeling” to haptics – that is, to the modality of touch, rather than the ecstasies of persons, things and architectures the way Böhme would. In effect, Constance and I described a metanarrative. According to this narrative, writing came to supplant touching or handling in the transition from premodern to modern times. Thus, in the premodern period, an accusation was signalled by striking the accused on the forehead instead of issuing a summons; property was transferred by the physical prestation of a clod of soil instead of by deed; a witness was sworn in by having them touch the Bible while taking an oath to tell the truth; and, a legal judgment was signalled by a stick (the festuca) instead of a written decision. I want to emphasize that I stand by this metanarrative. That there has been a shift to the ratio or balance of the senses seems to me ineluctable. And perhaps the constatation of this substitution of writing and reading for touching helps account for the separation of law and morals in modernity. At the same time, aren’t all of these writings still “ecstatic” (in Böhme’s sense)? After all, to be served a summons still provokes feelings of unease.

Thanks so much for your work laying (or, rather, excavating) the foundations for an “archaeology of legal perception.”

Notes

  1. The Manual of Ethnography was published posthumously in 1967 and was drawn from lecture notes gathered by his students. Its aim was to teach “how to observe and classify social phenomena” (7). The chapters are divided according to the areas of knowledge that a good ethnographic monograph should cover: social morphology, technology (which include Mauss’ original remarks on techniques of the body), aesthetics, economic, jural (including political, social and domestic organization), moral and religious phenomena.
  1. New Phenomenology emerged after the Second World War in an “attempt to comprehend the devastating dynamics of the mass support for Nazi Germany that had raised radical questions concerning the seclusion and autonomy of the Enlightenment subject.” (Riedel 2017: 172). One of the main figures in this new school of thought was Hermann Schmitz, who saw in Nazism evidence “that feelings are not private but collective” (Ib.). The turn to spatial and atmospheric thinking allowed Schmitz to theorize how such ‘mass’ could be formed. Instead of keeping with the split between a material body and an immaterial soul (and the mind/ body dualism that derives from it) Schmitz emphasized the importance of the felt body and its specific dynamics. Böhme follows Schmitz thinking in a number of ways
  1. See especially the two edited journal issues published in 2015: “Staging Atmospheres: Materiality, Culture, and the Texture of the in-Between” published in Emotion, Space and Society edited by Mikkel Bille, Peter Bjerregaard, and Tim Flohr Sørensen; and, “Designing Atmospheres: Introduction to Special Issue.” published in Visual Communication, edited by Tim Edensor, and Shanti Sumartojo. Mikkel Bille’s writings are particularly good ethnographic examples of the many insights that accrue from focusing on atmospheric practices. See “Lighting up Cosy Atmospheres in Denmark” in the above mentioned issue of Emotion, Space and Society and “Ecstatic Things” in Home Cultures (2017).

References

Bille, Mikkel. 2017. “Ecstatic Things.” Home Cultures 14(1): 25–49. https://doi.org/10.1080/17406315.2017.1319533.

———. 2015. “Lighting up Cosy Atmospheres in Denmark.” Emotion, Space and Society 15: 56–63. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.emospa.2013.12.008.

Bille, Mikkel, Peter Bjerregaard, and Tim Flohr Sørensen. 2015. “Staging Atmospheres: Materiality, Culture, and the Texture of the in-Between.” Emotion, Space and Society 15: 31–38. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.emospa.2014.11.002.

Böhme, Gernot. 2016. The Aesthetics of Atmospheres, edited by Jean-Paul Thibaud. London: Routledge (Ambiances, Atmospheres and Sensory Experiences of Spaces series).

Classen, Constance. 1998. The Color of Angels. Cosmology, Gender and the Aesthetic Imagination. London: Routledge.

Clifford, James, George E. Marcus, Mike Fortun, and Kim Fortun, eds. [1986] 2010. Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, 25th Anniversary Edition. 2nd ed. University of California Press.

Edensor, Tim, and Shanti Sumartojo. 2015. “Designing Atmospheres: Introduction to Special Issue.” VISUAL COMMUNICATION 14 (3): 251–65.

Debaene, Vincent. 2014. Far Afield: French Anthropology between Science and Literature. Translated by Justin Izzo. Chicago ; London: University of Chicago Press.

Elliott, Denielle, and Dara Culhane, eds.. 2016. A Different Kind of Ethnography: Imaginative Practices and Creative Methodologies. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Gruppuso, P. 2018. Vapours in the sphere: Malaria, atmosphere and landscape in wet lands of Agro Pontino, Italy. In S. A. Schroer, & S. B. Schmitt (eds.), Exploring Atmospheres Ethnographically. London: Routledge, 2017.

Howes, David. 2019a. “Prologue: Introduction to Sensori-Legal Studies” The Canadian Journal of Law and Society 34(2): 173-90.

Howes, David. 2019b. “Multisensory Anthropology.” Annual Review of Anthropology 48: 17-28.

Howes, David. 2018. “Embodiment and the Senses” in Michael Bull, ed., The Routledge Companion to Sound Studies, 24-34. London and New York: Routledge.

Howes, David, and Constance Classen. 2014. Ways of Sensing: Understanding the Senses in Society. New York: Routledge.

Mauss, Marcel. 2007. Manual of Ethnography. Oxford: Berghahn Books.

Philoppopoulos-Mihalopoulos, Andreas. 2013. “Atmospheres of Law: Senses, Affects, Lawscapes.” Emotion, Space and Society 7(1): 35-44.

Riedel, Friedlind. “On the Dynamic and Duration of Atmosphere. Sounding out New Phenomenology through Music at China’s Margins.” In Exploring Atmospheres Ethnographically, edited by Sara Asu Schroer and Susanne B. Schmitt. London: Routledge, 2017.

Schroer, Sara Asu, and Susanne B. Schmitt, eds. Exploring Atmospheres Ethnographically. London: Routledge, 2017.