Chronic com-position in ethnographic research
Résumé
This paper is grounded in the ethnographic study with(in) chronic patients organization in Russia – Russian Multiple Sclerosis Society [RuMSS]. I advocate for an embodied approach to chronic patients’ movement in STS accounts. Movement of knowledge, spaceshifts, concerns, emotions, chemical reactions,
capital, and power. I question how to move along in ethnographic research? How to maintain different movements in a mutually nourishing way? What are the prompts for moving with different rhythms, directions, memories, and relations? I discuss a concept of com-position - based on my movements with(in) RuMSS from 2016. I start with tracing the process of embodying patients’ movement which puts an ethnographer in com-position (position together) with affects, sensations, demands, remorses, pains,
stillnesses, exercises, which are already at place. Doing rehabilitative yoga, making art together, aiding with going to the toilet in non-accessible places, translating. Com-position always means change and mutation. It is never on time - always too late. And its traces stay at place. I continue by discussing instances in com-position: waiting for openings, staying available, resisting to analyze prior to deep listening. Pausing is a mode of patient activism from which ethnographers can learn: of researching chronically ill body, tuning in with illness rhythms, looking for openings to stage a media appearance. Com-posing creates places for patients - not in terms of place-making, but as fitting in, saving life resources, fixing, maintaining what is at place to compose with.