Nodding by the fire: appreciation of the Derry Temple

ABSTRACT

I represent an ethnographic inquiry on sacrifice, precarity and reconciliation in a sectarian context through an amalgam of photographs and poetry, to transubstantiate fieldnotes and journal entries into an aesthetic account embodying the art installations that are this ritual process incarnate. I explore the production, consumption and disposition of an artwork called ‘Temple’ by sectarian communities in Northern Ireland through the orchestration of bricoleur artist David Best, which took place in Derry/Londonderry in the spring of 2015. I present a set of photographs that limns the event to anchor a series of poems that unpack the researcher’s and participants’ apprehension of their engagement with the installation. I emphasise material, spatial, emotional and ideological dimensions of the event. Photopoetic representation greatly enhances the researcher’s sensual attention and emotional resonance in the field, challenges the imagination to craft an evocative account of deep, multi-perspectival fidelity, and opens up lived experience to the possibility of empathic intervention.

KEYWORDS:

• Autoethnography
• aesthetics
• precarity
• sacrifice
• servicescapes
• ritual

Acknowledgments

The author thanks his colleagues Hilary Downey, John Schouten and Robert Kozinets, the artists David Best and Stewart Harvey, the organisations Burning Man and Artichoke, and the people of Derry/Londonderry, Northern Ireland, for challenging him to represent his Temple experience in as many genres as ability permits.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

John F. Sherry

John F. Sherry Jr is an anthropologist who studies brand strategy, experiential consumption and retail atmospherics. He is past President of both the Consumer Culture Theory Consortium and the Association for Consumer Research. He is a Fellow of the American Anthropological Association as well as the Society for Applied Anthropology. Sherry has edited and written 10 books, and authored more than 100 articles and chapters. He is an avid flatwater paddler, but has all but given up trying to perfect his seventeen foot jumpshot on a driveway he shares with his six dogs.