ANT- A METHODOLOGY OF STORIES

“The head louse is a tiny, wingless parasitic insect that lives among human hairs and feeds on tiny amounts of blood drawn from the scalp. Lice (the plural of louse) are a very common problem, especially for kids. They're contagious, annoying, and sometimes tough to get rid of. But while they're frustrating to deal with, lice aren't dangerous. They don't spread disease, although their bites can make a child's scalp itchy and irritated, and scratching can lead to infection. It's best to treat head lice quickly once they're found because they can spread easily from person to person.”(Ruputal Christine, Head lice,

<http://kidshealth.org/en/parents/head-lice.html>, consulted on the 8 February 2017)

This description provides a sober scientific account of lice. Lice are parasites, feeding on blood in the human scalp. Head lice should be removed quickly in order to avoid contamination. While they are contagious, annoying and tough to get rid of, they are also harmless. The introductory journal excerpt from [first author]’s described a very different experience with lice, which involved feelings of anxiety, hysteria and aversion, but also close physical examinations and amusement among local staff and children at the orphanage. The lice were also attributed with a transformative capacity as Charlotte linked its presence with the transition of the lice-bearer to ‘become Nepali’.

This unsettled character of the louse illustrates one of the central anti-essentialist assertions of the material semiotics of ANT, which contends that things do not ‘poses’ a clear identity, sense or value. Rather, realities and identities are enacted and (at least temporarily) stabilized through relational and situated work. As a merely sketchy label for a plurality of research undertakings, ANT offers methodological guidance to describe (and hence to enact and interfere with) reality by encouraging a sensitivity towards the relational, the material, the multiple and ‘mess’ (Law, 2004, for examples in tourism see

Chapitre 6.Lice work. Non-human trajectories in volunteer tourism Jóhannesson et al. 2014, Beard et al., 2016). The social is perceived as an ongoing, strenuous and always situated enactment made up by humans as well as non-humans partaking in the crafting and stitching together of partially coherent realities (Latour, 2005; Law & Singleton, 2005, Law & Urry 2004, Mol 2002, for examples in tourism see van der Duim et al., 2012, Ren, 2011). In the analytical work to follow, we regard human undertakings as co-fabricated with and enabled through a larger and heterogeneous collectif comprised of people as well as discourses, places and things (Callon & Law, 1995).

In the following, the heterogeneous collectif of volunteer tourism is described by following the praxiographic approach of empirical philosopher Anne Marie Mol, according to which knowledge is created and situated in and through specific socio-material settings, which should accordingly be studied. In her seminal work The Body Multiple (2002), Mol shows how the body is enacted into being as a multiple object through the practices by which it is represented, handled and researched at a Dutch hospital. Through a praxiographical approach, it is not the ’ethnos’ (or meaning or understanding), which is studied but rather concrete practices. Her praxiographical approach entails that we do not study fix objects ‘out there’ from a (potentially infinite) array of angles and perspectives (described by Mol as perspectivism), but rather that objects, in her case bodies, are ongoingly ‘done’.

Law and Sinlgeton (2005) have elaborated the multiplicity of networked objects in their work with alcoholic liver disease, which both retain, but also undergo changes because of how they are enacted in multiple practices, for instance through medical, scientific inquiry. While some changes are fluid, others are more abrupt, turning the disease into a fire object “that jumps, creatively, destructively and more or less unpredictably, from location to location” (p. 347).

Viewing the object as multiple allows us to include a number of incompatible realities in our analysis. This will become apparent below, where discourses and practices converge, but also conflict – or, using a different term, other one

Chapitre 6.Lice work. Non-human trajectories in volunteer tourism another – in ways which rules out not only a cohesive or reconciled object, in this case the head louse, but also a unwavering volunteer subjectivity.

The interest in mess and multiplicity begs the question of how such accounts ever become credible and trustworthy as research and entails, more widely, a re-appreciation of what constitutes good research accounts. According to Law, ANT tells “stories about ‘how’ relations assemble or don’t” (2009, p.141), which avoid grand claims of coherence and purity (Law, 2004). Stories should not seek to represent or transcribe reality, as reality in ANT is seen as enacted through the concepts and theories applied to it (Law, 2004). The way we present our research is performative and we as researchers are also partaking in ‘world making’, or as coined by Mol, in ontological politics (Mol, 1999, see also Jóhannesson et al (2015) for tourism related examples).

In the present work, we attempt to tell meaningful stories which relate to our concern about non-human agency and subjectivities in volunteer tourism. Our stories of how lice work is carried out at the orphanage and how it entails an ontological choreography, which reconfigures host/guest relations, aim to craft and know about certain realities (rather than others) without claiming that they offer ‘the whole story’. They do not assert to represent reality, but are modes of discovery – or perhaps ways of ordering in a highly disorderly fashion. They do not wish to efface incoherences, but to shed light on them by describing complex workings, or lice work as we have termed it. As modest accounts, they distil insights of the effects and interference of the material. In our case, this was done through the careful composition of heterogeneous elements (Latour, 1999), of observations and descriptions of daily life activities, informal discussions with locals and volunteers, observations, fieldwork experiences and interview snippets which were collected, shared and discussed along the way.

Chapitre 6.Lice work. Non-human trajectories in volunteer tourism