Anthropology Colloquium Series - The Music in the Words: Poetics and Resonance in the Therapeutic Encounter

“In this presentation I introduce the concept of “resonance”: an embodied practice of reception that exceeds the here-and-now of sound production by virtue of the way words sound and resound in a listener. To do this, I draw on an ethnographic study of psychoanalytic listening in Buenos Aires, Argentina, where personal identities, conceptions of citizenship, and constructions of the political are rooted less in the performativity of speaking than in a particular genre of listening derived from the techniques of psychoanalysis. In Buenos Aires, this form of listening is social, dialogic, and ubiquitously performed across a diverse range of everyday interactional contexts, apparently transcending distinctions based on age, gender, and class differences. Exploring “the music in the words,” which is to say how talk resonates both within the therapeutic consultation and in seemingly mundane moments of social encounter, I ask what kinds of textual artifacts are being produced when the focus is not on the text but rather on what the text evokes in the listener.” - Dr. Vargas

Register to attend via zoom:

https://utoronto.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZMsdeCopz0uGd2ZdBm2Ex56qOtpHZHmJ8m9