Birgit Abels and Patrick Eisenlohr, "Atmospheric Knowledge: Environmentality, Latency, and Sonic Multimodality" (U California Press, 2025)

Summary

Podcast Summary:

New Books Network — Interview with Birgit Abels and Patrik Eisenlohr on "Atmospheric Knowledge: Environmentality, Latency, and Sonic Multimodality" (U California Press, 2025)
Host: Khadija
Date: November 7, 2025

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Episode Overview

In this intellectual and wide-ranging conversation, host Khadija interviews Birgit Abels and Patrik Eisenlohr on their co-authored open-access book, Atmospheric Knowledge: Environmentality, Latency, and Sonic Multimodality. The book explores the ways in which sensory experiences—especially sonic ones—form alternative and often overlooked types of knowledge. Drawing from ethnographic research in the Pacific Islands, Mauritius, and Mumbai, the authors interrogate how sound, ritual, and multisensory practices shape our embodied understanding of environments, time, community, and belonging, especially as these concepts relate to indigeneity and religious life.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Introducing “Atmospheric Knowledge”

• The Book’s Central Aim
  • An interdisciplinary investigation of “felt bodily knowledge” and how sensory practices, chiefly sonic, generate forms of understanding beyond language.
    • “It’s really about ethnographic cases...about the ways in which sound-based practices establish a relationship to our environments and lead to a particular form of knowledge that is non-verbal, pre-verbal, and holistically felt bodily.” — Patrik Eisenlohr [02:47]
  • Explores dialogues between different epistemologies: the academic and the lived, indigenous and scientific.
    • “Modes of knowledge, ways of knowing, can enter dialogue and enter conversations themselves...the meeting of epistemologies of different kinds...” — Birgit Abels [03:55]

2. Why “Atmosphere”? (Concept & Modality)

• Inspired by neo-phenomenology, especially through fieldwork in Micronesia, Abels highlights that “atmospheric knowledge” is a kind of understanding neglected by dominant colonial epistemologies but central to many indigenous worldviews.
  • “Atmospheric knowledge...extends into the felt body, opening up felt bodily ways of knowing...accommodated beyond those purely reflective, discourse-oriented ways.” — Birgit Abels [05:26]
• Eisenlohr emphasizes atmosphere’s universality as a precondition for perceiving the world, preceding and shaping reflective thought:
  • “Atmospheres are actually something quite fundamental and absolutely inescapable. They precondition what surrounds us and give us a kind of feel of something before we can verbalize it.” — Patrik Eisenlohr [07:17]

3. Atmosphere and Time (Chapter 1)

• The authors relate atmosphere to the “temporality of latency”—a sense of something about-to-happen, a future-oriented hunch experienced somatically before articulation.
  • “Atmospheres are tied to a temporality of latency...about a holistic, felt bodily sensation of something that is still meaningful but diffuse and may actually come about.” — Patrik Eisenlohr [09:04]

4. Sonic Atmospheres in Religious Practices (Chapter 2)

• Eisenlohr’s research on Nath (devotional poetry) recitation in Mauritius foregrounds the importance of voice and sonic qualities over textual or discursive authenticity:
  • “My friends and interlocutors...always wanted to talk about the voice and about vocal qualities...metaphors of motion, like traveling to Medina, spiritual journeys to encounter the prophet in person.” — Patrik Eisenlohr [11:15]
• The interplay between the discursive meaning and the atmospheric, sonic power of recitation is illustrated as central to religious experience.

5. Sound, Islands, and Relational Belonging (Chapter 3)

• Abels discusses how Pacific Islanders conceive of the ocean not as separation but as “passageway,” linking islands through music and bodily resonance.
  • “The ocean...enables you to get somewhere else...ties in very neatly with the relational component inherence in atmospheric knowledge.” — Birgit Abels [14:21]
  • Analysis of a Palauan cover of “Aloha Oe” illustrates music’s role in evoking belonging across distant places.

6. Atmospheric Belonging and Urban Politics (Chapter 4)

• Eisenlohr addresses how sonic processions by Mumbai’s Twelver Shia Muslims foster a felt sense of belonging—an “atmospheric right to the city”—in an era of increasing marginalization.
  • “Citizenship is not something that is entirely legal...but achieved only through performance...sonic and other practices give...a particular Shia feel that even lingers on after the processions are gone.” — Patrik Eisenlohr [18:12]
• Atmospheres are theorized as collective, externalized affective fields—“feelings that are poured into space.”

7. Multisensory and Multimodal Atmospheres (Chapter 5)

• The discussion expands from the sonic to highlight that atmospheric experience is inherently multimodal, encompassing sound, light, touch, and movement.
  • “Atmospheres are really about an entire range of sensory modalities that play into each other. Multisensory perception and feeling is prior to the separation of different, separate modalities.” — Patrik Eisenlohr [24:25]
  • Abels stresses “holistic appraisal” and “felt bodily resonance” as the crux of atmospheric knowledge:
    • “What atmospheres do is they afford a change of perspective...they make us look at intensity, at proximity, at the processes with which we respond to those suggestions of motion.” — Birgit Abels [28:16]

8. Choreo-Music Analysis & Aesthetic Labor (Chapter 6)

• Abels introduces the idea that dance—better termed “structured movement”—in Pacific societies is a way of spatially and somatically relating to one’s environment.
  • “Structured movement is by nature space as felt bodily connection...atmospheric knowledge is something that allows us to make sense of how we felt bodily extend into our environment.” — Birgit Abels [29:59]
  • “Aesthetic labor” is framed as the creative process by which individuals mold their spatial and environmental awareness through movement.

9. Latency, Somatic Time, and Mediatization (Chapter 7)

• Eisenlohr elaborates on “latency” as both a phenomenological and specifically religious (Twelver Shia) experience, focusing on the Urdu term “mahol” (atmosphere/mood).
  • “Atmospheres are powerful because they modulate the sense of past, present, future by intervening into the projection of motion.” — Patrik Eisenlohr [34:54]
• Discusses how media (analog and digital) shape atmospheric knowledge by storing, reproducing, and even generating new sensory moments, connecting the somatic body with digital space.

10. Atmosphere, Environmentality, and Indigenous Stewardship (Chapter 8)

• Abels concludes by situating atmospheric knowledge within discussions of indigenous responsibility and environmental wisdom in Micronesian chant.
  • “Chanting is a way of making resonate that which is meaningful for the community...atmospheres...give me an opportunity to frame that in a way that makes it more accessible to North Atlantic academics.” — Birgit Abels [43:09]
• Atmospheric understanding emphasizes relationships, stewardship, and bodily ways of knowing over rational discourse.

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Memorable Quotes and Moments

• On Meeting of Epistemologies:
  “Modes of knowledge, ways of knowing, can enter dialogue and enter conversations themselves. And then something very interesting and very productive happens.”— Birgit Abels [03:55]

• On Atmosphere’s Pre-Reflective Power:
  “Atmospheres are actually something quite fundamental and absolutely inescapable. They precondition what surrounds us and give us a kind of feel...before we can verbalize it.”— Patrik Eisenlohr [07:17]

• On Sonic Recitation and Motion:
  “They used a lot of metaphors of motion, like getting on a bus or traveling to Medina, spiritual journeys to encounter the prophet in person. This is really what really got me interested.”— Patrik Eisenlohr [11:15]

• On Dance and Spatial Relation:
  “Structured movement...is the space as experienced by the felt body. And that is not necessarily something...to do with distances, with dimensionality in the Cartesian sense. But it has to do with how the felt bodily, how the felt body moves through space and makes sense of that space.”— Birgit Abels [29:59]

• On the Power of Latency and Mediatization:
  “Atmospheres are powerful precisely because they modulate the sense of past, present, future by intervening into the projection of motion, which is really this fat bodily correlate of the potential as future.”— Patrik Eisenlohr [34:54]

• On Multisensory Atmospheres:
  “What atmospheres do is they afford a change of perspective. They direct our attention to more holistic appraisal of the multisensorial...what happens in between and beyond those sensory modes.”— Birgit Abels [28:16]

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Notable Timestamps

• [02:47] — Book introduction and discussion of “felt bodily knowledge”
• [05:26] — Defining “atmosphere” as concept and beyond neo-phenomenology
• [09:04] — Atmosphere’s connection to time and latency
• [11:15] — Nath recitation and debates over vocal authenticity in Mauritius
• [14:21] — Music, resonance, and Pacific relationality through “sound ties”
• [18:12] — Sound, citizenship, and belonging for Shia Muslims in Mumbai
• [24:25] — Atmospheres as multisensory, multimodal phenomena
• [28:16] — The importance of resonance and “suggestion of motion”
• [29:59] — Dance/structured movement as environmental and atmospheric knowledge
• [34:54] — Latency, the felt body, and media in devotional practices
• [43:09] — Chanting, indigenous stewardship, and the explanatory power of atmospheric knowledge

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Conclusion

Abels and Eisenlohr’s Atmospheric Knowledge offers a rigorous, nuanced reflection on how embodied, sensory, and especially sonic practices generate alternative forms of knowing the world—forms that interweave time, place, community, and environment across cultures. The authors encourage interrogating and learning from non-discursive, multisensory knowledge traditions, with implications ranging from religious practice to environmental stewardship and digital mediation. Their dialogue is rich with ethnographic detail, theoretical insight, and an insistence on the importance of atmosphere as both concept and lived experience.

Transcript

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[Khadija]

Hi all. Welcome to a new episode of the New Books Network podcast. My name is Khadija and I'll be your host for the day. I'm here to interview Birgit Abels and Patrik eisenlova about their 2025 book Atmospheric Knowledge, Environmentality, Latency and Sonic Multimodality published by the University of California Press. The book is available as open access to all of us. Thank you so much for joining me today. Professors, many congratulations on the release of Atmospheric Knowledge. It is such a fantastic read. It honestly sort of blew my mind away. How would you like to introduce the book to our listeners?

[Patrik Eisenlova]

Patrick Evil thank you. Khadija, thank you so much for having us. It's a great pleasure to speak on the podcast New Books Network and thank you for giving us the chance to talk about our book. It's really a pleasure. Well, our book is really an investigation of knowledge through the senses and felt Beverly Knowledge from an interdisciplinary perspective. So it's really about ethnographic cases that deal with sound based practices, but it's really about the ways in which sound based practices establish relationship to our environments and to lead to a particular form of knowledge that is kind of non verbal or pre verbal and holistically felt bodily. So we are dealing really in this book with alternative ways of and alternative forms of knowledge that are really about sonic practices, data about transoceanic knowledges, and a lot of it has to do with ritual or religious practices and music.

[Birgit Abels]

Many thanks for having us from here as well, Khadija. I'm very happy to be here. Well, to me the book is some kind of summary of what's occupied my mind for the past, well more than a decade by now. And in many ways it's an approximation, I'd say, between the various planes of knowledge, if you will, you encounter when you do ethnographic work. You go to the field carrying all that luggage of academic epistemologies and all those expectations which you tend to project on what's going on in the field. And then at some point you realize that modes of knowledge, ways of knowing can enter dialogue and enter conversations themselves. And then something very interesting and very productive happens. And to me this book is all about that. The meeting of epistemologies of different kinds of being in the world and of.

[Khadija]

Knowing the world for that kind introduction. It's always fascinating to read and understand new forms, ways and being of knowledge as such. And before we go into the details of the book, atmosphere is quite a niche area of study. Why atmosphere and how do you approach it as both a concept and a modality?

[Birgit Abels]

Well, to me, atmospheres in the neo phenomenological sense, which is the way we use it throughout the book, is something that came to me in the field during, you know, during my my research with, with people in the Pacific island world. My research has been Located in Micronesia for. For most of the past, well close to 20 years now. Atmospheric knowledge in the broad sense, going beyond the more narrow neophenomenological definition is a type of knowledge that in so many parts around the world has been buried under more dominant and aggressive ways of knowing. Colonial epistemologies and the insight that there are, you know, ways of knowing that go beyond the material body, extending into the felt body, opening a felt bodily ways of knowing, that those registers of knowledge, if you will, are something that indigenous cultures, indigenous cultural frameworks have value, continue to value as something that's been refreshing and very path opening in the intellectual sense. And then the idea, oh well, maybe the, the entire neo phenomenological framework of atmospheres is something that to me opened up conversation with those ways of knowing and that opened an avenue that accommodated these ways of knowing beyond, you know, those purely reflective, discourse oriented ways of framing how we tend to know the world, which is still a dominant in North Atlantic academia, obviously.

[Patrik Eisenlova]

Yes, and I obviously agree with Birgit and I just want to add that Khadija, you're right in saying that atmosphere is a niche field or kind of niche field in academics or scholarship. It's not really a niche thing in everyday life. It's really a fundamental condition of disclosing the world to us to get a feel of a situation, of a surrounding, of an interaction and the environment before we even become fully and consciously aware of it. So basically, atmospheres are actually something quite fundamental and absolutely inescapable. So they're always there, they're preconditioned what surrounds us and they give us a kind of feel of something before we can verbalize it or before we can frame it and socio culturally. But of course, atmospheres are very diverse and they can also manifest as very different epistemologies as we have tried to shown in this book. With basically our combined scholarly perspectives of musicology, anthropology and different parts of the world. We have absolutely.

[Khadija]

I also feel like, you know, ethnosphere is always there and you sort of take it for granted. And after reading your book, I feel like more sensible to the variety of atmosphere that's around me as such. Also going ahead in chapter one, you draw a fascinating link between atmosphere and time. How do you explore the epistemological approach to time as connected to the fundamental dimensions of our being in the world?

[Patrik Eisenlova]

Yes, let me say something about this. I mean this is actually something we, both of us thought was an unexplored aspect of, of atmospheres, even from a phenomenological perspective, we basically make the case that atmospheres are tied to a temporality of latency. So they're about something which is not quite manifest. They're about a hunch, a future oriented hunch of something that is about to be. So in that sense, atmospheres are kind of a holistic, felt bodily sensation of something that is still very meaningful but is kind of diffuse and that may actually come about. It's just about like we follow the German philosopher Hermann Schmitz on this point, who actually wrote that one of the central working mechanisms of atmospheres from a phenomenological perspective or suggestions of motions are the crucial thing. It's not manifestly executed motion like a step in a dance or something, but it's the feeling of motion that right before you have the suggestion of motion, right before it becomes executed. So in that sense we think that atmospheres are really tied to this temporality of latency which is future oriented, which is about. In phenomenological terms, it's about potential. But we are engaging with it at level of not just cognition, but in a more holistic sense of felt bodily effectiveness. So it's really the suggestion of motion, something that moves you for that time is known to move you.

[Khadija]

In chapter two, you sort of focus on Nath recitation practices in Mauritius. I was especially struck by the debate where you mention about the vocal quality and style of Nath. How do you approach these aspects relating to the textual authenticity of Gnath recitations across different atmospheres?

[Patrik Eisenlova]

Yes, thank you also for that question. I mean, now we are getting to the part which got me really interested in atmospheres years ago, about. Sometime some 10 years ago and even earlier when I was in the field in Mauritius. Since as you may know, I'm a trained linguistic anthropologist. So I was really interested in Nat devotional poetry and on of the Prophet Muhammad from a more discourse oriented point of view. So was interested in participation roles and the poetic parallelisms and of course the language of it and their linguistic differentiation, etc. Different language and then the language used in everyday life among Mauritian Muslims. But basically my friends and interlocutors, they always wanted to talk about the voice and about vocal qualities of the voice, sonic qualities of the voice. They made the case to me that it has to be right. It shouldn't sound like for example, the voices of Bollywood singers. So it had to do with vocal qualities that they could not always put into words. Exactly. But a lot of that had to do with motion. So they used a lot of metaphors of motion, like getting on a bus or traveling to Medina, spiritual journeys to encounter the prophet in person. This is really what really got me interested. So we are dealing here with the sonic atmospheric suggestion of something that is not yet spelled out, not yet manifest on one hand, which is. And then we are dealing with discourse as another modality of knowledge. And the two are not neatly separated because they come together in the human voice. Right. So it's all part of what we could say, language and an expanded sense. And here, the art of this recitation, the kind of contingent performance that can go right or wrong, it can succeed or fail, is to have the. Let's say the discursive meanings align with the sonic motion of the voice, so they both reinforce each other. Right. But of course, as my friends in interlocutors and mershows, they were also concerned that one could botch the entire thing so that basically the vocal recitation would be such that it would be at odds with what the words want to say. So it's really about art and performance.

[Khadija]

Yeah, thank you so much for that wonderful description. It sort of reminded me of my own grandmother. You know, she had preferences, quite a bit of preferences when it came to the vocal style as such, be it like Quranic recitation or religious sermons as well. Thank you for that. And in chapter three, we sort of moved to the Pacific islands. B developed the idea of sound ties in relation to music making and the island's bodily material resonance. Could you walk us through how you frame that connection?

[Birgit Abels]

Yeah, I'm happy to. In the Pacific island world, in actually, I'd call it indigenous scholarship, it's not necessarily academically framed, but there's a lot of, you know, ancestral wisdom that that's circulating there. And people have the idea that the ocean, this huge Pacific Ocean, is not at all something that separates little land masses, islands, tiny as they may be, but instead, the ocean is, well, what Epedi Haofa, one of the probably most famous intellectuals from the Pacific region in the 20th century, is called the. A passageway. So the ocean is a passageway as something that enables you to get somewhere else, move from A to B. And that is something that ties in very neatly, I feel, with the relational component that is inherent in atmospheric knowledge or in atmospheres as knowledge. So in this chapter, I look at historical recordings of popular music and how in Palau, which is one of the westernmost island groups in the Pacific, in Micronesia, a cover version of the famous song Aloha. He was very much en vogue in the 1960s and then I go on and look at, you know, how this worked and what people did with it and how it actually resonated and how that sense of Pacific belonging, again, the Pacific Ocean is huge. The idea that this could be a space where people feel some kind of affiliation with one another is quite something. So how is it possible that a cover version of a song like this evokes feelings of belonging across such vast distances? And then, you know, as I analyze both the original or, you know, one of the original notions, I should say, of Aloahe and the COVID version, what manifests is that the atmosphere or the musical play with atmosphere. Perhaps that's one way of putting it. You know, creatively engaging with the atmospheric potential inherent in music is something that teases out potential connection. And it doesn't matter at all whether the geographic distances we're talking about are huge or whether it's about next door. And then looking at how that happens and how people frame this, how they relate to it and what they make of it, is something that speaks very loudly, actually, to those ideas of Pacific passageways, of Pacific belonging, of Pacificness.

[Khadija]

Thank you, B, for walking us through sound and size, of music making and islands, bodily material resonance as such. Also, before I go into the next question, I should remind our listeners about the fantastic audio samples in the book. I really enjoyed listening to some of them. Now, going into chapter four, which is set up in Mumbai, where Patrick discussed the feeling of belonging experienced by 12 Shia Muslims as an atmospheric right to the city. How do you examine this playing out in the precarious times of contemporary Muslim life in India? As such?

[Patrik Eisenlova]

Yes, in that chapter, basically, I, together with Birgit, we investigate how our atmospheres can be political and they can actually be relevant for issues like citizenship. As we all know, citizenship is not something that is entirely legal, a matter of passports or documents, but also something that anthropologists have worked on for a long time. It's also something that is cultural. So basically, there are always. Citizenship in everyday life is often achieved only through the performance of particular social, cultural, science and practices, or the signaling of particular ethnic, religious or other forms of belonging. And as we all know, Indian Muslims face a difficult situation, contemporary India, where there's the rise of Hindu nationalism and where their belonging to the Indian nation is often put into question. So they always have to prove that they're good citizen and citizens in a way that, for example, Hindus usually do not have to. So basically in that chapter, this chapter is also again, another investigation of atmospheres as alternative forms of knowledge. Somatic forms of knowledge that in this case, and go counter a discourse of citizenship which puts Muslims at a disadvantage and marginalizes them. And here we also tie into a growing field of work on urban atmospheres. We all know that, of course, urbanity is not just a matter of population density and architecture and this and that, about economic concentration, but it also has. It's about a particular feeling of urbanity. So we can of and distinguish particular cities by their feel. And again, this again comes down, a lot of it comes down to felt, bodily, atmospheric sensation. And this chapter is really about discussion about how ritual practices, especially processions in the month of Muharram and the 12 Ashi Muslims of Mumbai have been since the 19th century, famous for staging these huge processions in the Islamic month of Muharram. And so it's a practice of place making, where sonic and other practices give particular parts of the city, like the south central neighborhood of Dongri, but also part other pockets of the city, a particular chia feel that even lingers on after the rituals and the procession is gone. So basically, it's a kind of a feel that is on a somatic level that cannot easily be denied or discussed away through language. In that way counters assertions that they do not really belong. Ever since the work of the sociologist Henri Lefebvre in the late 1960s, research on cities has been occupied by this question, the original question, the right to the city. So who has a right to the city? Who has more rights and who doesn't have rights? And that's really a new take up on that question. On a very different level, it's on the atmospheric level that is really about sonic and other sensory practices and that can be sensed by the felt body. And it's also about how atmospheres are not just about the individual sensation or something or an individual feeling we might have, but because they're always collective. Because. Because atmospheres, as we take them, drawing on phenomenology, are really feelings that are poured into space, right? So that we basically proceed from this idea that emotions and feelings are not just inside people or even inside head or something like that, as it is often asserted in European modernity, but feelings and emotions are really literally forces that are out there that can seize felt bodies, they can pass through bodies. And sonic phenomena are very good exemplification of that. So it's really about the collective, the social, the political implications of that. And the interesting thing is that, of course, it's a vague feel of shihaness, but that, let's say, shia Muslims and especially media centers and religious specialists and activists among them, have a way of channeling these kind of vague feelings of belongings or response.

[Khadija]

I was really, you know, thinking through the contemporary relevance as such. And now going into chapter five, which is specifically on the multi sensory reality of atmosphere, you argue that atmosphere can never be reduced to a single sensory practice or sensation. What does this open up for us in terms of thinking about the Atmos atmospheric as such?

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[Patrik Eisenlova]

Yes, it's really about paying attention to multisensory reality and multimodality as a fundamental fact of life. So our book of course is about sound and sound related practices from musicological and anthropological perspectives and two different parts of the world. But on the other hand, we prefer, as you may have noticed, we often prefer the term sonic because the sonic is really this kind of wave like kinetic energy that propagates through space that activates not just the sense of listening within a relatively narrow range of frequencies, but also it activates touch and kinesthesia. So it quite literally moves us or gives us to use that phenomenological language I mentioned earlier, the suggestion of motion, the feeling or hunch, the of motion and motion of direction. And that chapter really is a kind of juxtaposition of basically sound based practices. On the one hand, drawing from my own research here, in that case in Mauritius and other work on atmospheres here, my Danish anthropological colleague Michael Bille, who's done very interesting, insightful work on atmospheres of light and lighting in Danish homes. And so I'm trying to combine that. And I really, basically, in that book, we conclude that they both lead us to this insight that atmospheres are really about an entire range of sensory modalities that play into each other. And let's say other anthropological colleagues have worked on, for example, how the sensorium may not need be based on universal distinctions or can be culturally shaped. And I would agree to that to some extent, saying that basically that multisensory perception and multisensory feeling is prior to, let's say, the separation of different, separate modalities that often come after the fact. So they always play into each other in some ways. But as you may have noticed, we've concluded a chapter with a kind of bias towards the sonic. Because if you. Let's say the sonic has here this comprehensive way that goes beyond sound and hearing has already this kind of fair share of this multisensoriality in multimodality, quasi inbuilt. It's basically in its original settings. And this is why we make this. We have this sense that there's a certain sonic privilege in the study of atmospheres if they are holistic felt bodily sensation with the entire felt body, because the sonic already stretches across several of these conventional modalities that we usually distinguish. But the case is also that once you look at visual perception or affection through light, you come to the same result, right? There's something. So light is not just an optical quality in a narrow sense, but it's about also about light can also suggest motion. It can stretch beyond that narrow section of the optical in the sensoria. This brings us. So in that sense, atmospheres are always about more than just sound or light, but it's about a broader range of sensation that is vaguely meaningful, not yet clearly defined.

[Birgit Abels]

If I may chime in here, I fully agree with every word Patrick said. And by vaguely meaningful, what we mean is not mildly meaningful. This is a very, very powerful way of suggesting meaningfulness. But what atmospheres do is they afford a change of perspective. They direct our attention to more holistic appraisal of the multisensorial without dismissing the specific, the aura, the visual, the olfactorial. It's not about dissecting sensor registers, but atmospheres. What they do is they make us look at what happens in between and beyond those sensory modes. They make us look at intensity, at proximity, at the processes obviously, with which we respond to those suggestions of motion. And if we take the. That idea of motion impacting on felt bodies, literally what sound waves do is they create resonances. And there's felt bodily resonance to these suggestions of motion. And that's their focus that atmospheres afford and that they offer.

[Khadija]

Thank you so much for this fantastic oil discussion as such. Also in chapter six, Birgit sort of introduces a choreo music analysis of structured movements. Which eventually led to the formation of atmospheric knowledge. How does this connect to ideas of oceanic temporarities and aesthetic labor?

[Birgit Abels]

There's a connection on several levels. Actually. In the Pacific island world, dance is a very. It's a complex thing. In many places there's not even a word for dance because it's not something that's set apart. It's supposed to be, you know, a performance with a clear beginning and a clear end on the stage. And still it's very, very embedded in rituals and processes that have their own. That basically have their own background and that tie into tradition and mythology in many ways. Now, the idea that structured movement, I call it structured movement in the chapter because of that, because dance is not necessarily a term in many places in the Pacific island worlds. The idea that structured movement is by nature space as felt bodily connection is something that the chapter puts forward. So Hermann Schmitz, who we've quoted before, has suggested that to dance is basically a greeting from that different space which he calls three dimensional space. So to Schmitz, there's dimensional space, which is Cartesian space. Space as we know it. You can measure distances and move through it. You can move from A to B. And then there's three dimensional space, which is the space as experienced by the felt body. And that is not necessarily something that is to do with distances, with dimensionality in the Cartesian sense. But it has to do with how the felt bodily, how the felt body moves through space and makes sense sense of that space. And that is also the locus of atmospheres. And that is something that resonates quite nicely with oceanic ideas of what dance does. So it's a way of creatively playing with how we relate to and co create our spatial environment. And that is basically the concept that's been lingering in our discussion so far. That's relationality, which in turn is related to environmentality, which is also in the title of the book. So atmospheres and atmospheric knowledge is something that allows us to make sense of how we felt bodily extend into our environment. It's not that we have clear physical boundaries. That's it and then the environment begins. But the felt body allows us to feel the environment around us and to even be a part of it. So there's that gray area where my body ends and that which is not my body, the environment begins. And that's something that the idea of the felt body and atmospheres make operable. And the way dance allows us to, you know, tease out the potential of that play with it is something that, drawing on Gernot Bulmer, another Neo phenomenologist, we call a type of aesthetic knowledge. And that's aesthetic, with AI, not aesthetic, referring to the sensory stream of perception that we encounter at that very first stage of felt bodily perception of the world, which is preconceptual, relating to pre dimensional space. This is all very abstract, but it's the foundation of neo phenomenological thinking. So in that aesthetic stream, that sensory stream, there are not yet objects, they're only felt bodily experiences which we then gradually make sense of. And then suddenly there's, you know, an object we realize that is a table. But there's, you know, a whole lot of felt bodily experiences of what we then come to identify as a table before we do that. And that is what dance, you know, celebrates in a way. It's a way of playing with that, with that gradual coming to an awareness of the environment around us. And that is something that the chapter explores as aesthetic labor, the labor we do on the aesthetic plane to mold our spatial environment into the world as we want it to be.

[Khadija]

Also chapter seven brings in the theme of latency. And I really enjoyed the discussion of the Urdu word mahol, loosely meaning atmosphere or mood, based on the question of latency. How are somatic atmospheres felt and what role does mediatization play in shaping them?

[Patrik Eisenlova]

Yes, yeah. This chapter actually directly builds on what Birket just explained, the bodily, basically, when she was talking about dance and structured movement as this original side of the suggestion of motion that generates atmospheric knowledge. So in here, chapter seven is about something quite similar, but it's much more geared towards discussion of time, towards the theme of latency that I mentioned earlier. And basically in this chapter is really about mediatic circulation of devotional practices, or azadari practices that are very common in the month of Muhammad among 12 Ashi Muslims and India and another part of parts of the 12 or she world. We are actually stitching different layers of argument together here. On the one hand, it's this idea that there's a universalistic component of the argument. It's really about this idea that Something that we all humans all share is a particular human sense of being in time that is about this constant interplay of past, present, future that is constantly constituting a chaga. And this is actually something that we may also share with other animals, such as companion animals such as horses, dogs and cats, that many of us around the world live with and basically have a memory and anticipate the future. And both the intersection is the presence. But basically this idea here we expired by the French phenomenologist Merlot Ponty, Maurice Merlot Ponty, who actually came up with this idea that actually the origin of our sense of time as past, present, future, and as something that we could also extend to companion animals. I would speculate this sense comes from the feeling of bodily motility. So it's really the past is really our body memory, and the future is really the suggestion of motion or the projection of motion. And the present is simply the feeling of being a body. And all these three components, they're just intermingle every time. So basically there's a kind of somatic basis, bottom up, you would say, of our sense of past, present and future. So it's not just about intellectual or purely cognitive anticipation or mem where there's a kind of embodied perspective to it that really makes it possible. And atmospheres are powerful precisely because they modulate the sense of past, present, future by intervening into the projection of motion, which is really this fat bodily correlate of the potential as future. So there's this layer of argument which is very broad and we tie it then here to latency is a much more specific, culturally framed and religiously framed term among the 12, because they are very big on latency by virtue of the Kabbalah paradigm. So there's the sense that the name of this tradition to a vaci comes from the assumption, really the strong belief that the 12th Imam, the last final Imam among the 12 Ashi, is disappeared a long time ago, more than a thousand years ago, but he still co present. He's an occultation according to Twelveashi theology. And he's ready to return and re emerge anytime as a kind of savior, a messianic figure at the end of time. So there's this sense that they are mourning the loss of the battle of Karbala, the killing of Hamman, the original tragedy of Tuwalbachi life, the killing of of Hussein the Prophet, grandson of the Prophet Muhammad, and other members of the family of the Prophet. But there's this element of messianic redemption there which is latent in the future, but can come anytime. It can just erupt into the present anytime. This Kabbalah paradigm is constantly reactivated and repeated through annual commemoration and so many other little devotional practices. You will have it there. And there's a whole, whole range of scholarship on the Kabbalah paradigm. And this is actually, we'll find that the sense of latency can take many different forms. And here it's a particular religious form, it's a particular theology of latency that is central to torpashi in life. And then since the estes. As an anthropologist of religion, I've long worked in a field of media and religion where it's basically taken for granted that in the most different religious traditions around the world, we people draw on media with their technical, formal aspects, to access whatever is the divine for them and to interact with it and to make it present or have some sort of connection or sort of deal with the fact that they're not necessarily organically one with the divine all the time. Of course, ism, like other traditions of Islam, have long made use of media, including modern media. And latency is here from that perspective also something that is quite technical, really inbuilt feature of media technology, like in 19th and 20th century media technology. It's really about storage and reproduction, right? So that something that is stored from the past may be reproduced and can sort of is latently there can sort of be made present again anytime. So for example, when I'm playing a film recorder of decades ago or an audio recording of a voice of a person who has long been dead, so we sort of bring this kind of captured sensory sensation of the past into the present, having the past and the present collapse in that way. And then again at the end of the chapter, there's some discussion on digital media, because the digital media are not just about storage and reproduction, but they also bring this kind of technical novelty of generating, auto generating the new. So I'm not just reproducing that which has been recorded before, something we all know when we go through social media feeds or we go shopping online. So the digital suggests something for us, it feeds forward, right? In the words of the media theorist Mark Hanson, it suggests the new for us. It gives us nudges and recommendations that. And this layer of latency is also there. And we also make a case here that while digital media may alter the balance of the sensory continuum we've talked about and restrict, in some ways, the felt body in a phenological sense is different from the physical body in that it can exceed the latter's boundaries so it can intermingle with its surroundings. So the felt body, as this side of atmospheric sensation and knowledge actually can also intermingle with the digital. It can intermingle with this kind of space we are dealing in now. The zoom conversation and therefore atmospheric knowledge is also very relevant for digitally mediated interactions and digital media, including in this particular religious setting.

[Khadija]

Thank you so much for this response. And here we have the last question for the day, which is from chapter eight that is taking us to Micronesia, where you discuss atmosphere and environmentality as pressing concerns. Indigenous practices such as chanting seem to contribute deeply to oceanic wisdom and knowledge. How do you study these practices in terms of our understanding of atmosphere?

[Birgit Abels]

Well, this again speaks to the conversation as I frame it between divergent modes of knowledge, between ancestral wisdom in the Pacific island world and the notion of. Of atmospheres. Patrick already mentioned the idea that there's some mildly universal. At least you could frame it like that component here in how we felt bodily perceived the world. The chant that Chapter 8 deals with is very interesting because it's brings up traditional responsibility for the water and the land, if you will. It spells out what we, in this particular case, Palauans, need to do for the water and the land, how they need to relate to the spirits of the land for their whole relational world to remain intact or to remain spiritually healthy. The way we can approach this with atmospheres to me is clearly conversational. To me, it's all about opening up that space that comes about between ways of knowing. So the moment we use atmospheres to tease out the relational potential inherent in music making and in traditional wisdom of the land and human stewardship of the land, that is the space where we can understand more about how indigenous wisdom takes. Well, has something to offer in a post colonial setting, I'd say. So an atmospheric understanding of the world is based on very different things than, you know, rational understanding and discourse. There's a wonderful monograph on he Nalu, which is Traditional Hawaiian Surfing as a Way of Understanding the world. And the author, that's Karen Ingersoll. It's clearly a recommendation for everyone who hasn't read it. It's called Seascape Epistemology. She really explores how, you know, moving your body. That of course, say, the felt. The felt body through the water is a way of knowing your environment, how your literacy of how you move your body to improve your surfing abilities and to improve your surfing, how that is a way of relating to your environment, of understanding and knowing your environment. And I'd say something very similar about chanting. And that chanting is a way of making resonate that which is meaningful for the community. In this particular case, for the Palauan community and atmospheres. As I'm a firm believer in explanatory pluralism. Give me an opportunity to frame that in a way that makes it more accessible to North Atlantic academics. Ways of knowing, of understanding the world. And specific ethnographic situations and moments.

[Khadija]

Thank you so much, W K and Patrick, for your time. And dear listeners, I'll be back with another episode on the same channel.