ABSTRACT
Based on ethnographic fieldwork with contemporary male and female life drawing models in Vienna, Austria, and Tehran, Iran, this chapter presents the case for an ethnographic practice of gradualness as a deliberate bodily mimesis and as a worldly methodological approach to attentive thinking for studies in which multisitedness and decentralised structures are involved at their core. As presented here, an ethnography of gradualness provides the opportunity to preserve the memory of moments with people, of places, of situations, and of circumstances at distinct time periods, as well as of conditions and positions in which one finds oneself. But it also opens the horizon for hidden qualities as well. Nourished by both theoretical and ethnographic resources in my study, the chapter discusses this perspective by exploring the marginalised narrative of emotions as one of the consequences of today's decentralised lives. I discuss the invisibility of emotions and the visibility of embodied emotions – a theorem emerging from my ethnographic practice that traces life models’ perceptions of body and embodiment, role identity and agency, and their sociopolitical engagements within the artistic and the social fields. Ultimately, taking cues from life models, I argue that an ethnography of gradualness is significant for rethinking ethnographic practice itself by making the unseeable visible. The narrative of the unseeable in a globalised world is often located in the margin or goes beyond the fieldworker's gaze or even beyond the fieldwork itself, but can be held and worked on – and with – in myriad ways.
