[...]pt of ‘worlding.’ [to consider our] writing as an inscription that configures the spaces of form and event in daily living
•Stewart slowed ethnographic practice: Why does writing matter in ethnography? How do forms of writing change cultural theory? What questions do forms of writing raise about subjects and objects, forms of attention, the possibility of thinking through description? How do you describe a scene, a character, an event, a situation, a collective sensibility, a difference, a world? What does it mean to add density and texture to ethnographic description? What can ethnography do?
•attuned to the *forms and forces* unfolding in scenes and encounters --> *apparatus of conceptualization* [pulled into (a tricky) alignment with (your field's) immanent concerns and with the concerns of the worlds.] your (anthropological) objects have to “be walked around,” “approached from precise angles,” and seen as “states of being,” emergent, or suspended in potentiality, or collapsing, or residual, roosting on live matter. *culture ~= [*]the cultural: “a resonant and magnetizing field that registered in people and things living through events and conditions.” we try to describe sensibilities hitting people and traversing [...] things:
◦bodies of thought
◦assemblages of infrastructures and institutions
◦new ecologies
◦the rhythms of a daily living
◦the strangely connective tissue (produced by handheld devices and social media)
 }--> to compose a register of the lived affects of the things that took place in a social-aesthetic-material-political worlding [=/= “to track the predetermined effects of abstractable logics and structures."] ***singularities*** take place as a series of precisions (across sociality, materiality, infrastructure, etc.) they are “events of,” emerged in the lived problematics of a present ==> they could be brought to bear, deployed, maneuvered, suffered, or played with. [*]affects: “registering of life as an assemblage of elements thrown, in the course of events, into a contact aesthetic” [=/= the side effects of systems, codes, or imaginaries (located in an elsewhere)]
•return (anthropology) to sense and sensation (<== affect) (Olearius missed this, the “world” is proposed to him anchored in the consciousness of [his] humanist subject or its categories of thought. he misses Iran as a world charged with affect, which is a prolific, mixed-use contact zone in an ongoing state of transition that leaves [Iranian] people “improvising with already-felts” [~=? Golestan Sa'di]) -- affect added an affirmative critique that registers surprise at what and how things happen.
[*]affective subject: “a person who waits in the company of others for things to arrive, one who learns to sense out what's coming and what forms it might take, one who aims to notice what crystallizes and how things ricochet and rebound in a social-natural-aesthetic ecology of compositions and thresholds of expressivity.” --> “For the affective subject, there is always the weight of the world in what can be hoped for and what must be feared, in what flourishes and what matters.”
[*]Life: “an experiment of being in a world, of finding ways to be in circuits of force and form, an aspiration to get something out of the alchemical transmogrifications of things that twist off on trajectories far beyond humanist models of suffering or the usual hyperlegible registers of normativity and the state.” --> “[Life] takes place in the inhuman gestures of demons and angels, in the struggles of addicts and the rage of racists, in the endurance of the unbelievably injured or the oddly still curious.” (Stewart)
•a world deliteralized (with no endemic divide between a naturalized given order and the exceptionalism of event)
•things, to become recognizable as something to be in or near, or else to oppose and resist
•(affect --Deleuze-->) differential ontology: the prolific generativity of difference and connection taking place in a field of possibilities. affect studies now hitting:
◦anthropology
◦new materialism
◦object-oriented ontology
◦naturecultures
◦multispecies work
◦science studies
◦new ecologies
 --> “the generativity and volatility of life as such, to its capacity to actively shift or harden into forms of peace or violence, pleasure and pain, collectivities and chaos.”
[...] it looks for ways to describe what precedes and exceeds the categorical in the labors of living through historical presents.
[...] affect-inflected [study] leans into its descriptive objects with an eye to their hardenings into something recognizable (=/= what is often called ‘critical thinking’: habits of snapping, to catch the world in a lie, dualist dead ends of modernist humanist social science, independent logic of data, the conviction that something is wrong --> paranoid approaches to the world)
•ethnographic method of mattering, [why conceptuality might take radically different forms in Iran?] attention to the still unfolding [--> Foad's (mental habit of) describing the fixed object of destiny (of Iran).] how to move in the manner of things slipping in and out of existence? the way a world (in this case: Iran) elaborates in prolific forms, taking off in directions. the Iranian real is alchemical, traveling in circuits of impact and reaction, in which things happen. we must train ourselves on an effort to describe the iterations/durations/modes of “being taking place.”




Said: “the idea of representation is a theatrical one: the Orient is the stage on which the whole East is confined. on this stage will appear figures whose role it is to represent the larger whole from which they emanate...”
[when we use “theater” in a cartographic sense it refers to the dynamic space where the “I” or the “self” sees itself engaged in a public space (of kin, of others, of economic and political forces)]

the theatrical arts: spoken work + visual spectacle --> rise of opera
[--> rise of natural history]


observers of the differences between their civilization and that of the Persians, their standards of measure were those of the West:
Xenophon
Herodotus
Quintus Curtius Rufus
Strabo
Pausanias
Ammianus Marcellinus
Barnabas Brissonius
Pietro Bizzarri
Johannes de Laet
Thomas Herbert
Hans Schiltberger
Hans Christoph von Teufel
Stefan Kakasch
Anthony Jenkinson
Anthony and Robert Sherley
Thomas Coryat
Pietro della Valle
Garcai de Silva y Figueroa
Jean Babtiste Tavernier
Raphael du Mans
Olearius (1636)
Engelbert Kaempfer

a Greek invented dichotomy:
(Greek) small democracies =/= (Persian) powerful empire
modestia (cult of the simple and good) =/= superbid (pride)
law =/= monarch


‘conflict’ is a theme


Europe/Persia reasons for contact according to Cambridge History of Iran:
1- religious incentive (moharek محرک)
2- both against the Ottoman Turks
3- commercial incentive
4- travelers passed through Persia


Duke Frederick's commercial venture that would put the tiny territory on the map, as it were, and eliminate all its debts [...] with Adam Olearius chosen to chronicle the mission as its official secretary
“Duke's stated aim in sending the embassy to Persia was to establish a trade route with Persia and obtain exclusive rights to export silk from the area, thus squeezing out the other European competition, especially the Dutch”

his methodology
(Olearius's citational mobilization) a typical Baroque writer, he cites classical and Renaissance sources copiously and compares them to each other, thus paying homage to the scholarly tradition
•list the main features of a subject under discussion
•quote classical and contemporary authorities --> elicit different opinions
•

*correction of faulty source material imperative*

Harvey's new theory of the circulation of blood

Olearius:
•seasickness could be caused by motion of the waves
•“monsters” living along the Siberian coast are wrong
•

Olearius's methodology is that of a comparatist
he juxtaposes (the customs and social structures of the people he meets with those of his native land)

Olearius's trip ==> production of (superior maps)
Olearius ==> maps
Qazwini ==> lists
Sa'di ==> de-vice

Olearius's The Vermehrte Newe Beschreibung includes large, detailed, fold-out maps describing...
as well our technique i[...]