ABSTRACT
How are bodily, material practices entangled with beliefs? How do these practices constitute intimacies between object and subject that are generative and transformative of life worlds? And how does ethnographic methodology and writing, as well as the theory generated, shift when attention is given to these embodied gestures and motions as agentive, connective forces in daily acts of worldmaking? These are just some of the provocative questions explored by the contributors of this volume, an interdisciplinary cohort of scholar–ethnographers who are at once practitioners, protesters, artists, weavers, historians, and environmentalists. Across chapters, they have productively engaged with “efficacious intimacy,” a theory of how life worlds are constructed through the agency of material practices (Introduction, this volume; Mohan 2019; Mohan and Warnier 2017). The result is a rich tapestry of ethnographic material, theory, and methodology that compels us to consider the granular agency of “bodily-and-material” intimacies as they relate to power, hierarchy, statecraft, and history.
