Sun, Mar 17, 3:00 pm

I’m starting this journal of my experience and relationship with my craft of egging – this is how in the egging community we colloquially call our Egg Batik or traditional (sometimes semi-traditional) craft of wax resist on eggs, in Ukrainian tradition it is called pysanky (when referring to the objects – the decorated eggs) or pysankarstvo (when referring to the tradition).

Within the context of the MA in Folkloristics and Applied Heritage studies which I started in September at the university of Tartu, what I am doing here in this journal is called auto-ethnography. But I don’t quite know yet what that means other than the obvious – observing and recording my own experiences in the ethnographic manner with the methods of social anthropology, or something like that. 

I have a method I will follow though, and I am bringing it from my previous life as a philosopher, more specifically, as a phenomenologist. The method is called body hermeneutics, and it has been created by my philosophy teacher, Sam Mallin, based on the philosophies (both as theory or conceptual framework and as practice) of Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger, and Nietzsche. I am listing them in a counter-chronological way, because it would be probably fair to say that Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy has contributed most to the method itself, and Nietzsche’s the least, if one were to assess it by “content”. However, this order of listing them also reveals the lineage, because Merleau-Ponty was studying Heidegger and being influenced by till the last year of his (Merleau-Ponty’s) life, and Heidegger, or course, has been studying Nietzsche, even though at some point around WWII he seems to distance himself from Nietzsche and Nietzsche’s metaphysics. 

<This into is becoming too long, am I avoiding the plunge?>  Sam used these type of brackets in his own notes to indicate hyper-reflections, especially of this somewhat critical type.

Briefly about the method – I have to say this, because this will not be a solely private text, it will become public. The method in based on the description of a situation that has a hold on us (in this case my situation is the practice of egging, the doing of the craft of egg batik, but it can be any situation, as long as it captures us sufficiently for us to stay in it). The description is done by feeling out and describing our experience through the four “regions” (Merleau-Ponty) of our phenomenological body (perceptual, motor-practical, social-affective, and cognitive). We describe both how the situation (including things and phenomena participating in the situation) is/feels/appears to us (through our bodily regions), as well as how the situation influences and adjusts the functioning/style/attitude of our capacities themselves. This all sounds very theoretical, but to give an example, we describe both how something looks to us, as well as how what we are looking at influences our vision. Still abstract, but it will have to do in the intro, and hopefully some examples will follow eventually.  We circle through the descriptions repeatedly, and eventually we get somewhere, we learn something about the situation, though often not immediately, not in the first few sessions. It is a cumulative sort of process.

Sam suggested three major steps to go through each time we do the work.

1) sketch out questions – what are the things we are wondering about as we are starting today’s phenomenological journey. The questions can be of different kinds – from specific questions about this specific “project”, to more general questions, and even more general questions, to specific questions that might seem unrelated to the project, but still are somehow in our side view.

Sometimes it’s not a bad idea to have a bit of a break or change of place between step 1 and step 2.

2) do a round of observation or “silent descriptions” of how the situation works – feel out the situation without writing anything down. 

3) write out the descriptions systematically, follow up of the insights that might have presented themselves in step 2, work through all 4 regions if possible. When stuck or even when not stuck, a good strategy is to explore a region that seems least relevant or least engaged in the situation, though if that doesn’t work, then start from anything that works. 

If one has a lot of time to do the work, one will keep switching between steps 2 and 3, as one writes something out and then needs to take time to feel out without writing, or sometime to re-attune oneself to the situation. Sometimes one will take breaks, and usually one will not go back to step 1 even after a break, unless one feels that would be useful.

My process of writing eggs is such that I cannot write on the eggs and write notes simultaneously, but I do have periods when the egg is in the dye and I have to wait for it, so maybe that will work just fine.

So enough of avoidance, here I go.

(3:45 pm) Questions

1. Start with the most difficult and the ultimate for me: What is my relationship with the eggs, and with the egging, with the research of the tradition, and the “experiments” I will need to do? Who am I in this: the researcher, the crafts person, the egger, the dyer, the scientist (???), the anthropologist or the ethnologist, the philosopher/phenomenologist (permanently so?)?  Or maybe a Ukrainian, a human, a woman? Or something else? How do these different options and roles change my attitude, or my treatment, my involvement with the eggs/egging? And then the other side of the relationship: what is this egging and these eggs? (I am already refusing to use any of the typical categories – craft, folk art, artefact, even the generic “thing” and opting for an everyday colloquial word that doesn’t even exist in that same way in Ukrainian – what does this tendency or preference of mine mean, how does it affect my relationship, and what affects this tendency in my existing relationship?)
2. Ukrainian identity, language, history, tradition, current war – how do all these influence my relationship with egging and eggs, and through which bodily regions? Social affective to some degree, cognitive also? How do I feel about this thing being Ukrainian? What are the mixed feelings, what are the seeming contradictions? In what ways do I want to claim the Ukrainianness, and in what ways do I want to avoid it or bracket it?
3. The motor region – the rhythm and pace, and the manifestation of that through the sound of egging – the stylus on the egg, the dunking in the dye, all that. How do those reflect my initial mood/emotional attitude, how do they change as I work on it (work? Is that what I will be doing and what does that mean, which meanings of “work”)?
4. The usual anxieties and/or excitements about a new project. What are they, how do they manifest themselves, how are they the reflection of my more general values, needs, desires, passions?

I think that’s more than enough to start. I’m itching to do it, so here I go. 

(4:03pm)

I am not including my notes in this post, the notes need to mature, both as they are written, and also some distance needs to be developed between the written note an me, some time needs to pass to let the notes become the notes, solidify in time, something like that. I might even post the whole notes of this first day or parts of them later, but it is too early to do it now. Or so I feel today.

But I will include the photos of the egg, most of which (except the final background color) was completed on that first day.

This is an egg from Vira Man’ko’s The Ukrainian Folk Pysanka, table 4-17, Lviv region. For some unknown reason I often start my season with this egg, it’s a warm-up egg for me. Yellow is coreopsis with alum, red is sappan wood with alum, the black initially was not working, so I etched it back to white and did a few dips into logwood with alum. Technically, it’s dark purple, but looks almost black. There stylus was new, the egg shell did not cooperate very well, so there are several issues visible on the egg, but for a warm-up it’s OK.