Correspondence as care 

by Emelie Isaksen (she/they)

MA Visual Anthropology, Goldsmiths University of London

eisak001(@gold.ac.uk)

Anthways, 2024 © Emelie Isaksen

In 2023 Thandiwe Gula-Ndebele, Jana Mlaba, Sol Sinclair Brazier, Thando Mlambo and me, who had gotten to know each other over a couple of years when I lived in Harare, Zimbabwe, started a slow-moving transnational collective. All of us are artists whose work addresses topics such as ecology, community, queer identity, and healing. We set up the collective after two of us moved countries, as a space to both reflect on issues that linked our practices as well as a way for us to keep in touch and update each other. We did this by starting an email chain, where we share thoughts on care intertwined with anecdotes and an eclectic selection of everyday moments that provide a window into our daily lives. This format felt particularly conductive for exploring topics that we did not already have a clear opinion on, but were discovering slowly. The correspondence allows for reflection, each intentionally crafted email between us feeling like a small gift when it lands in your inbox. Poet and black studies theorist Fred Moten captured this feeling of gaining insights through everyday practice well when he said that “study is what you do with other people. It’s talking and walking around with other people, working, dancing, suffering, some irreducible convergence of all three, held under the name of speculative practice” (Harney and Moten, 2013), On the same note, author and poet Maggie Nelson writes in her book On Freedom that; 

(I)f we want to divest from the habits of paranoia, despair, and policing that have come to menace and control even the most well-intentioned among us – habits that, when continuously indulged, shape what’s possible in both our present and future – we are going to need methods by which we feel and know that other ways of being are possible [emphasis added], not just in some revolutionary future that might never come, or in some idealized past that likely never existed or is inevitably lost, but right here and now.

Nelson, 2022, p. 17

Nelson suggests that we look at freedom not as an imaginary emancipated future, but as an ongoing venture, echoing anthropologist David Graeber’s call to “act as if one is already free” (Graeber, 2007, p. 430; Nelson, 2022, p. 15). Doing this involves exploring ways of being in this world that divert from hegemonic narratives. This is an area in which one could hope that anthropology, as the study of human behaviour and culture, can bring about at least some degree of further understanding. The open-endedness that is offered by both artistic practice and anthropological inquiry creates a space in which an assembly of perceptions beyond binaries are awarded validity (Rikou and Yalouri, 2018; Wright, 2018). Many artists and anthropologists investigate the relationship and exchange between themselves and the world around them, furthered by the shift towards increased attention to subjectivity in both disciplines.² Correspondence and gift giving are thus concepts that are central to both fields; and as an example, practices such as letter writing, and forms of auto-ethnography, often linger unsorted in between the two. This article tries to uncover the use of reciprocity and exchange in writing and literature that refuse categorisation and carry elements of autoethnography, poetic art practice and critical theory, as a method to grow ongoing practices of care and offer insights into other ways of being together (Nelson, 2022, p. 17). It examines three books on personhood, sexuality and art that all explore corresponding; Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke, Fanny Sjödahl and Alva Jeppsson’s Vem är du som bor här? and lastly, Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts.³The format creates an exciting and usually more accessible space than that of academia or that of a gallery. 

Correspondence and gifts in art and anthropology 

As noted, both correspondence and gift are recursive concepts, postulated many times within both anthropology and art. In art, the gift has been explored by, for example, the situationists and other avant-garde movements, and later also by artists turning towards “relational esthetics”, where art is read as a situation of encounter and social relations (Bourriaud, 2002). According to anthropologist Roger Sansi-Roca, who explored the concept at length in his book Art, Anthropology and the Gift, artists orchestrate “free, spontaneous, personal, and disinterested events, in opposition to commodification and mass consumption” (Sansi and Strathern, 2016, p. 426). That is; some form of “free gift” is received by participants who are proposed to be complete equals in the gallery (in contrast to within society at large); creating an event in which new forms of relations can take place. Anthropologists would however argue that there are still hierarchies between for example artist and participant (Strathern, 1988; Mauss, 2002; Sansi-Roca, 2015). Although there is an exchange ‘without hierarchy’, value resides around the artists themselves, as they remain ‘authors’ of the event. Additionally, hierarchies rebound again once you walk out of the gallery space, leaving potential small potential for tangible change. 

Anthropologists have instead applied an increasingly intersectional lens and paid careful attention to power. Marcel Mauss’ essay The Gift set the tone in 1926. When discussing the importance gifts have with relation to value and exchange, he argued that “(i)n a good number of civilizations exchanges and contracts take place in the form of presents; in theory, these are voluntary, in reality, they are given and reciprocated obligatory” (Mauss, 2002, p. 3). Another classic work that shaped how the gift was further theorised was that of anthropologist Marilyn Strathern who, based on research conducted in Melanesian societies, highlighted the need to read gift-giving as a practice grounded in gendered social relations (Strathern, 1988). In contrast to hegemonic Western conceptualisations (and to a large extent the contemporary art world) where they are still often seen as “freely given objects”, Strathern accounts how gifts are inherently gendered and play an important part in fostering, upholding, or disrupting social relations and hierarchies. Taking this into account, a study of gifts is one that can “make explicit the dependency of the relations of gift exchange upon the nature of things” (Strathern, 1988, p. 167). In other words, gifts are an extension of people and their (often hierarchical) relations, rather than free entities or objects. 
To link the concept back to writing, I find filmmaker Trinh T Minh-ha’s discussion on gifts and poetics to be useful. She suggests that a piece of poetic writing is propelling when it becomes the site of “interrelations between giver and receiver” (Minh-Ha, 1992, p. 25). She explains how sometimes a work “assumes this double movement, where reflections on what is unique to the artistic form and sets it off from other forms are also reflections on its inability to isolate itself, to prevent itself from participating in the flow of social life, and from engaging in other forms of communication” (Minh-Ha, 1992, p. 25). The work is both separate from the world as well as intrinsically linked with it. Minh-ha famously holds that ethnography should “speak nearby” rather than about (Minh-ha in Chen, 1992). She calls for a sort of “speaking that reflects on itself and can come very close to a subject without, however, seizing or claiming it” (Minh-ha in Chen, 1992, p. 87). Similarly, she suggests that art and writing can (and should) speak to rather than about. She explains; “ “Speaking to” the tale breaks the dualistic relation between subject and object” (Minh-Ha, 1992, p. 12). This creates an intertwined relationship between author, reader, and context, thereby giving the story agency. Through autoethnographic correspondence, truth and subjectivity merge and “(d)irectly questioned, the story is also indirectly unquestionable in its truthfulness” (Minh-Ha, 1992, p. 14). 

Exchange uncovering relationships

To delve into what this relation-focused outlook could encompass, I have looked at three examples of writing. They all carry elements of correspondence and deal with topics of auto-ethnography while simultaneously having been published as literature. They all refuse to be categorised by genre. But more importantly, they go beyond refusing, they offer. They offer a form of interaction that seems at once unpolished, open-ended, and generously precise. They offer to “open up our perception to what is going on there [in the world] so that we, in turn, can respond to it” (Ingold, 2021, p.7). 

Letters to a young poet, Reiner Maria Rilke (1929)

Rilke, who was an Austrian poet, is known to have written an enormous number of letters in his lifetime and this book, while never intended to be published as such, is one of his most widely read works. Over the course of six years, Rilke exchanged letters with the younger aspiring poet and military officer Franz Xaver Kappus, who asked for and received advice on artistry, work, sexuality, and solitude. Tim Ingold wrote on letter writing that it “highlights two aspects that I take to be central to correspondence: first, that it’s a movement in real time; and second, that this movement is sentient.” (Ingold, 2013, p.105). He then draws the conclusion that reading letters – awaiting them and relaying – is an act that you continuously do together with the person you are corresponding with, never alone. He explains; “It is as though the writer was speaking from the page, and you – the reader – were there, listening” (Ingold, 2013, p.105). Corresponding is done with animacy, with care and constant motion – the reader and writer equally intertwined in the social relations and expectations of the act. Containing only text, it is not a direct representation of events, but rather a process of building a shared world in which indexical recollections are piled up and brought together to create something new. In addition, the haptic elements of reading and tracing the lines of written words on a paper further blur the lines between person and letter. Most of Rilke’s letters start with a greeting and short description of his current context, both physically and mentally. Take for example the letter sent from Rome on the 29^th of October 1903:

Your letter of 29th of August reached me in Florence, and only now – two months on – do I give you news of it. Forgive me this delay, but I prefer not to write letters when I’m travelling because letter-writing requires more of me than just the basic wherewithal: some quiet and time on my own and a moment when I feel relatively at home.

Rilke, 1929, p.35

Rilke is generously giving his time, advice, and reflections from his own life. The letters are an intentional but unfinished product, one that has no clear goal or end, but that keeps on moving forward. The content of the letters is often centred around movement and growth, and an attempt to find a way to interact with one’s surroundings in a meaningful way. When Kappus chooses to pursue a career in the military, Rilke responds:

“Art too is only a way of living, and it’s possible, however one lives, to prepare oneself for it without knowing; in every real situation we are nearer to it, better neighbours, than in the unreal half-artistic professions which by pretending to be close to it hurt its very existence /…/ I am glad, in a word, that you have withstood the dangers of slipping into all this, and that somewhere you are living alone and courageous in a rough reality.”

Rilke, 1929, p.73

Building on both Strathern and Kimmerer’s understanding of gifts as both building and uncovering the nature of relationships (Strathern, 1988; Kimmerer, 2013) – I would argue that this specific act of correspondence blurs the hierarchy between what could be described as teacher and pupil, young and older. The gift the letters constitute is perhaps not one of advice but rather one of company and care:

I think of you often, dear Mr Kappus, and with such a concentration of good wishes that really in some way it ought to help. Whether my letters can really be a help to you, well, I have my doubts. Do not say: Yes they are. Just let them sink in quietly and without any particular sense of gratitude, and let’s wait and see what will come of it.

Rilke, 1929, p.68

To us, however, who are reading the letters not as intended recipients but as spectators, the gift is of another kind. Kappus published the letters – in themselves perhaps more ethnographic artefacts rather than prose – arguing that they were “important for the insight they give into the world in which Rainer Maria Rilke lived and worked, and important too for many people engaged in growth and change, today and in the future”(Kappus in Rilke, 1929, p.5). As there is no claim to represent an authentic history or story beyond that of the author’s, the book itself however erupts as an artistic work by a poet, located in between fiction and the real. The book offers perspective, an invitation to explore what was important to the two poets and in prolongation what is real and important to us. 

Vem är du som bor här? Alva Jeppsson and Fanny Sjödahl (2020)

In the book which title translates to Who are you that lives here? Alva Jeppsson and Fanny Sjödahl discuss rural/urban belonging and identity in what they call “an artistic field study”. Through an exchange of emails that are directly transcribed into a book, they explore the questions why did we move away from here, where do we belong now and what is left? Although radically more instant than letters, emails too are acts of correspondence, waiting and exchange. By reading their conversations we are invited to share thoughts on their respective rural upbringings in different parts of the Swedish countryside as well as their hopes and wishes for what is to come. The book invites us to enter a dense space where hope, queer and femme experience, nostalgia, and anger meet. In correspondence, thoughts never have to be fully developed before they are sent off to be picked up by the next person, making it possible for the authors to be both reflexive and reflective and think collectively. After some changes have been implemented in the village where she grew up, Sjödahl writes:

my approach to the countryside is in short “don’t move here and try to change it, if you’re going to move here you have to adapt or go back to where you came from. but preferably don’t move here at all, if you don’t already live here, you can leave because then you’re just a city dweller. but at the same time, don’t let the countryside die, hey, why don’t you give a shit? why doesn’t anyone want to move here? why would anyone move here?” i’m a walking paradox, i realize that. i don’t think i can stand for what i’m writing right now. but i have to write it because the anger in me is boiling, i can write things i can stand for later.

Sjödahl and Jeppsson, 2020, p.74

As the email is addressed to a friend, uncensored spontaneous thoughts inject the narrative. Sjödahl’s trail of thought, written all in lowercase, is as much an inquiry into herself and her immediate surroundings as it is an opening up of the question to Jeppson. Responding to Sjödahl, Jeppson writes:

With regards to what you wrote on having to adapt if one is to move to the countryside, I don’t agree. I think that’s maybe what I like most about the countryside, that we’re such a motley crew. That there is space (both spacially and and mentally) to be who you are and develop the sides of yourself that might not fit in a city.

Sjödahl and Jeppsson, 2020, p.75

Unrehearsed ideas, frustrations and vague recollections take up space in the book, just as comfortable and well-practised topics or romantic prose focused on mundane beauty does. In one of Sjödahl’s emails specifically tackling the paradox of feeling like one belongs to two worlds at once and neither of them at the same time, she signs off by summarising:

“I am a countryside-queer in urban exile.”

Sjödahl and Jeppsson, 2020, p. 51

Linking this back to Minh-ha’s arguments on art as situated between the giver and the receiver, the book encapsulates this equilibrium between truth and subjectivity. This book stayed with me after reading it as it aligned closely with my own experience. In fact, it sparked a small email chain on the same themes between me and the friend who had gifted me the book – perhaps acting as inspiration years later when the new collective was set up. The informal tone of the emails and rapport between the two young women opened access to my own memories, and the organisation of the study allowed for something more than simply an affect or poesies. It has what Wright calls ”a productive ambiguity” (Wright, 2018), circumventing rules of ethics, aesthetics and format that it might have been constrained by, had it aligned itself with one discipline. The book is a particularly generous offering of honesty from both authors’ individual and multilayered perspectives. It’s accessible, poetic, and intellectual at once. 

The Argonauts, Maggie Nelson (2016)

In The Argonauts, Maggie Nelson has filled 178 pages with careful, blunt, intimate, and sharp thoughts on identity, freedom and queer parenthood. At the centre of the book is her relationship with her partner Harry Dodge, who is gender fluid, as well as her own transformative experience of pregnancy. These personal stories are interwoven with critical theory presented in palatable bites and made relevant through their explicit links to Nelson’s own experiences. Almost all pages are either addressed to or bouncing off her relationship with Dodge and as a reader, you feel almost as if caught reading someone’s private and personal (incredibly expressive and well-structured) diary.

I told you I wanted to live in a world in which the antidote to shame is not honour, but honesty. You said I misunderstood what you meant by honour. We haven’t yet stopped trying to explain to each other what these words mean to us; perhaps we never will. 

You’ve written about all parts of your life except this, except the queer part, you said. 

Give me a break, I said back. I haven’t written about it yet.

Nelson, 2016, p.40

Again, the format of correspondence allows for changeability and inconsistency. The book is a conversation, not a manifesto bringing us to a destination but a request to partake in finding one of many answers to the many questions life throws at us. The Argonauts is described on its cover as a “genre-bending memoir” (Nelson, 2016) and is actively refusing categorisation by positioning itself as both auto-ethnographic, academic, and poetic. According to Graeber, auto-ethnographic work is the research method with the biggest potential to formulate new visions as it is attempting to map out hidden logics behind specific social action, in which oneself feels a part and has a vested interest. He argued that “(t)hese visions would have to be offered as potential gifts, not definitive analyses or impositions” (Graeber, 2005 p.200-201). I think that is just what Maggie Nelson does. 

I’m not on my way anywhere, Harry sometimes tells inquirers. How to explain, in a culture frantic for resolution, that sometimes the shit stays messy? I do not want the female gender that has been assigned to me at birth. Neither do I want the male gender that transsexual medicine can furnish and that the state will award me if I behave in the right way. I don’t want any of it. How to explain that for some at some times, this irresolution is OK – desirable, even /…/ whereas for others, or for others at some times, it stays a source of conflict or grief?

Nelson, 2016, p.67

Nelson has submerged each page in care, each academic or poetic reference in personal vulnerability. By sometimes simply adding the reference as a name in the margin, the text reads smoothly but contains its multitudes with accuracy. You are in conversation with the author, who is talking not with an expert voice, but from her own perspective and as a peer, friend or loved one. This way, conversations around topics that are within themselves fluid are allowed to flow and fluctuate within the scope of the correspondence.

Further elaborations of care

All these authors are creating and furthering social relations within their practice, and the works themselves carry these relations into new territories. These books – artistic but with autoethnographic elements – employ correspondence as a method to uncover other forms of being in this world. The author(s) in each book give their correspondent the gift of engaged and ongoing dialogue, with care that perhaps can only be inserted into a text that is addressed to someone you know and deeply care about. This form of correspondence also allows you to finish your thoughts without interruption and get to the bottom of an argument before you await a response – something that to me seems rare in a time when cutting in with an immediate response or counterargument has perhaps become the norm. You as a reader have in turn been granted the opportunity to eavesdrop into an intimate conversation, giving you the choice to tap into feelings or acts of gratitude and reciprocity. Informally addressed, these books put forward an example of a relation between two people and with the world that surrounds them. They become, if we will, a type of interlocutor with which we can ponder on the same questions.
Letter writing and forms of correspondence can be approached as both art practice and autoethnography and examples span way beyond those explored in this text. Practitioners leveraging the medium of letters or emails to explore themes of personal and collective significance are not necessarily merging ethnography and art practice, but rather borrowing from and reinventing the two by showing there is a slippage between categories. Although there are limits to what a sole piece of literature can do, correspondence as a method has the potential to grow relations that we need to deepen to make the world we live in slightly more habitable. Relations that are fostered with care and through inquiry, and shaped by practices of giving that we understand as reciprocal and generous. When writing is peppered with artistic curiosity creativity and ethnographic self-awareness, it can help us map out new ways of looking at and with our surroundings, beyond binaries and taxonomy, right and wrong. Help us study and navigate human behaviour and culture. This brings me back to my practice; the forest, and the collective. The process of learning and relating continues, and my research in the Swedish forests has offered a great opportunity to further explore correspondence as a method. Listening to and interacting with people whose relationships and views on the forested landscape I travel through both overlap with and contrast mine, camera in hand, has allowed space for open questions and diverse opinions. It has granted me the opportunity to get beyond the ‘stereotyped’, and to see people and places as their stories. As for the collective; unsure yet of what is to become of our emails, we continue exchanging and gifting thoughts with care while it feels regenerative for us. If it might uncover something of interest for others too, is yet to be determined. 

To end this article, dear reader, I want to leave you with another quote from Harney and Moten’s conversation in Undercommons. I hope this perspective can deepen your relationships just as it continues to do mine. 

When I started working with Fred, social life, to me, had a lot to do with friendship, and it had a lot to do with refusal – refusal to do certain kinds of things. And then gradually /…/ I started to think about, “well, refusal’s something that we do because of them, what do we do because of ourselves?” Recently, I’ve started to think more about elaborations of care and love.”

Harney and Moten, 2013, p. 120

Best, 

Bibliography

Rilke, R.M. (1929) Letters to a Young Poet. Little clothbound classics 2023. Penguin Random House.

Sjödahl, F. and Jeppsson, A. (2020) Vem Är Du Som Bor Här? En Konstnärlig Fältstudie Av Landsbygden. Malmö: Exakta.

Nelson, M. (2016) The Argonauts. London: Melville House UK.

Further references

Bourriaud, N. (2002) Relational aesthetics. Dijon: Les presses du r el (Collection Documents sur l’art).

Chen, N.N. (1992) ‘“Speaking Nearby:” A Conversation with Trinh T. Minh–ha’, Visual Anthropology Review, 8(1), pp. 82–91. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1525/var.1992.8.1.82.

Graeber, D. (2005) ‘The auto-etnography that can never be and the activist’s ethnography that might be’, in A. Meneley and D.J. Young (eds) Auto-ethnographies: the anthropology of academic practices. Peterborough, Ont. ; Orchard Park, NY: Broadview Press.

Graeber, D. (2007) Possibilities: Essays on Hierarchy, Rebellion, and Desire. Oakland, CA: AK Press.

Harney, S. and Moten, F. (2013) The undercommons: fugitive planning & black study. Wivenhoe New York Port Watson: Minor Compositions.

Ingold, T. (2013) Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture. Routledge.

Ingold, T. (2021) Correspondences. Cambridge, UK ; Medford, MA: Polity.

Kimmerer, R.W. (2013) Braiding sweetgrass: indigenous wisdom, scientific knowledge and the teachings of plants. First edition.. Minneapolis, Minnesota: Milkweed Editions. Available at: https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/goldsmiths/detail.action?docID=1212658 (Accessed: 7 January 2024).

Mauss, M. (2002) The gift: the form and reason for exchange in archaic societies. London: Routledge (Routledge classics).

Minh-Ha, T.T. (1992) ‘Cotton and Iron’, in Ferguson, R., Gever, M., and West, C., Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Culture. MIT Press.

Nelson, M. (2022) On Freedom: The electrifying new book from the author of The Argonauts. 1st edition. Vintage.

Rikou, E. and Yalouri, E. (2018) ‘The Art of Research Practices Between Art and Anthropology’, FIELD, 11. Available at: https://field-journal.com/editorial/introduction-the-art-of-research-practices-between-art-and-anthropology (Accessed: 21 April 2024).

Sansi, R. and Strathern, M. (2016) ‘Art and anthropology after relations’, HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 6(2), pp. 425–439. Available at: https://doi.org/10.14318/hau6.2.023.

Sansi-Roca, R. (2015) Art, anthropology and the gift. London: Bloomsbury Academic.

Strathern, M. (1988) The gender of the gift problems with women and problems with society in Melanesia. Berkeley: University of California Press (Studies in Melanesian anthropology, 6). Available at: https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/goldsmiths/detail.action?docID=837207 (Accessed: 11 April 2024).

Wright, C. (2018) ‘Uncertain Realities: Art, Anthropology, and Activism | FIELD’, FIELD [Preprint], (11). Available at: https://field-journal.com/issue-11/uncertain-realities-art-anthropology-and-activism (Accessed: 18 February 2024).

Yalouri, E. (2021) ‘Art Meeting Anthropology: Affective Encounters | FIELD’, FIELD [Preprint], (18–19). Available at: https://field-journal.com/the-lfd-project-afterthoughts-three-years-later/art-meeting-anthropology-affective-encounters (Accessed: 21 April 2024).