Minding the emptiness of nothing: methodological nothingness and the spatial anthropology of futility.

As an exercise in autoethnographic fieldwork, resolving to sit in meditation practice (zazen) in the middle of a road traffic island, flanked by the concrete expanse of an expressway flyover, one’s presence partly concealed by vegetation, does seem a rather pointless endeavour. And insofar as it does lack an obvious rationale, its ‘purpose’ becomes that of an exercise in futility predicated on the phenomenology of both emptiness and nothingness. <italic>Emptiness</italic> here is invoked with reference to the Mahayana Buddhist concept of <italic>sunyata</italic>, which prompts awareness of, and philosophical reflection on, the constitutive entanglements of form and emptiness. <italic>Nothingness</italic>, for its part, is oriented towards observation of what Georges Perec calls the ‘infraordinary’, a process of seeing and writing ‘flatly’ that is ‘barely indicative of a method’. Taking this method-that-is-not-a-method as its performative starting point, this paper sets out some tentative thoughts towards a spatial anthropology of futility that is centred around a futile fieldwork experiment in methodological nothingness. In keeping with the subject matter under discussion, the paper is written ‘on the go’ in the sense of starting from nothing and foregoing a purposeful direction of travel other than that which is tactically premised on the methodological elicitation of something from nothing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]