Hazy worlds: Atmospheric ontologies in Denmark

Introduction

Susie, the bartender, stepped towards the table in a pub in Copenhagen, Denmark, with a lit tea light and proclaimed: ‘Here comes the hygge’. Hygge is a common term in Denmark, which generally translates as cosiness. It denotes a kind of atmosphere characterized by a particularly informal and relaxed spirit of being together, or even being alone. Lighting plays a key role in orchestrating such atmospheres and, hence, social life in Denmark. Since it was broad daylight, it was clear that placing the tea light was not about visibility, but about orchestrating a particular quality of atmosphere. Susie’s comment announced that hygge had arrived in the shape of a light, but also that being in the pub should be cosy.

If one were to write from the perspective of the so-called ‘ontological turn’ within anthropology and its insistence (at least in some cases) on taking the words of informants at their face value, this would be a clear-cut example that the candlelight does not represent cosiness but is cosiness; The divide between experience and analysis has collapsed (Henare et al., 2007a: 4). Susie is not alone in Denmark in her conflation of concept and matter in terms of cosiness and light – or unaware of a separation to begin with. In commercials for lamps, one sometimes sees expressions such as ‘turn on the hygge’ (‘tænd for hyggen’) and, in these days of economic crisis, one can buy ‘12 months of interest-free hygge’ (‘12 måneders rentefri hygge’) in the shape of a wood-burning stove. In home decorating magazines’ covering Danish homes, light and cosiness often seem more fused than separated. In candlelight, we apparently have a Danish counterpart to the emic lack of separation of concept and object that has been highlighted in recent discussions of multiple ontologies (Alberti et al., 2011; Carrithers et al., 2010; Henare et al., 2007b). Martin Holbraad’s (2007) exemplary fusion of matter and concept, whereby powder not only represents power, but is power, power-powder, is here presented as cosy-light. Judging from her proclamation and similar ones from my other informants, Susie literally came to the table with hygge. In the recent rise of case studies discussing the nature of objects, people – the anthropologist included – appear clear and settled about the ontological nature of things. Susie’s statement seems unequivocal, and the ‘12 months of interest-free hygge’ suggests that this will be the case at least for the next year. From an etic perspective, one can critique such notions of hygge and hyggelys for simply being common phrases that reduce both light and hygge. Yet, in Henare, Holbraad and Wastell’s version of an ontological turn, we need with ‘purposeful naïveté […] to take “things” encountered in the field as they present themselves’ (2007a: 2), so I am only taking my informants – Susie, PR bureaus, journalists and other people’s words – at face value: ‘Here comes the hygge’.

Inspiring and thought-provoking as the ontological turn may be, I want, however, to offer a methodological critique of the soundness of relying on apparently clear verbal expressions as expressing informants’ ontologically-conflated understanding of things and concepts. In recent anthropology on ontology, we rarely read, ‘I think, that maybe …’, or ‘I don’t know, perhaps it is …’. One might wonder whether the informant actually did not express any vagueness, or whether it was simply not noted down or reported by the anthropologists later on. It appears that clarification and radical expressions are of interest, while vagueness is less relevant.

With his notion of definiteness, sociologist John Law (2004: 24–5) points to the way in which the sciences – social sciences included – often view a lack of clarity as a methodological problem on the scholars’ side rather than because the world is enacted in that way. Following Annemarie Mol, Law argues that when the world is practised in different ways, not only different perspectives but different realities are created. In this sense, for the researcher, reality should not be considered a priori as definite.

But what if it is not even definite for the informant? What if informants are not quite sure what a thing or the ‘world’ in all its totality really is? What if a thing is perhaps more than just one thing to a single individual at one time, instead of multiple things depending upon the different individuals’ perspectives? Or what if informants feel that the words they use – and which anthropologists record or jot down – are not sufficiently encompassing to describe their worlds? Taking the question of ‘undecidedness’ as my point of departure, I argue that in understanding and presenting the informants’ world, we also need to take informants’ undecidedness at face value in order to explore how concepts and objects unfold in messy ways through vague, and at times contradictory premises.

The point here is not so much an ethnographic exploration of the social use of light or cosiness in Denmark (see Bille and Sørensen, 2007; Bille, 2013, 2014) but rather a methodological venture. First, I outline how light plays a key role in Danish social life. Then I question the way in which clear verbal expressions from informants are taken as access points in clarifying the ontology of objects. This critique is used to demonstrate how undecidedness becomes an analytical point of departure in studying the use of light for shaping cosiness in Denmark. From this, the article seeks to go beyond questions about what the world is to how the world is by investigating the recent academic interest in the concept of atmospheres. The article is based on 60 interviews undertaken in Copenhagen from 2011–12 on the introduction of energy-saving lighting technologies.

The ecstasy of light

I have previously argued for the importance, from an anthropological perspective, of understanding how light and luminosity are more than simply means of making things visible (Bille and Sørensen, 2007; Bille, 2013, 2014). Light reveals that something is present, but it does so in a particular way, through shadows, tones, contrasts, darkness, etc. In Denmark, electrical lighting, along with natural lighting and fire, is continuously applied in people’s practice of orchestrating spaces. Candles are lit as guests arrive, they burn out, new ones are set up, the electrical light is dimmed as the evening progresses, or fully lit when it is time to go home, and curtains are pulled as night falls turning the windows into dark surfaces. In other words, apart from being a material phenomenon, light comes to matter through practices including the way it is entangled in the social and affective lives of people – most often at the margins of attention.

A case in point of social embeddedness is the rise of energy-saving technologies. In 2012, the incandescent light bulb that had illuminated most parts of the 20th century was phased out to accommodate more energy-efficient light sources. Yet with these new lighting technologies also came increased attention to light quality. According to Danish lighting experts and in most media coverage, this change in technology has been for the worse in terms of light quality. Energy-saving lighting technologies are more expensive to purchase and hazardous to health if they break. Moreover the quality of the light does not live up to cultural ideals about visual orchestration of space and comfort. With incandescent light bulbs, consumers paradoxically understood light quantity in terms of energy consumption, in watts. Now a new conceptual apparatus has arrived in the wake of political pressure for increased energy awareness. As part of the energy-saving technology, people must no longer understand light in terms of energy consumption, watts, but in terms of lumens – the unit for measuring light quantity.

However, judging from the vast amount of attention the shift to energy-saving light bulbs has attracted in the media, it is not the quantity, but the quality of light that causes concern. Light from an incandescent bulb was in a sense ‘black boxed’ watts. The very notion of light is now being ‘white-boxed’ to the consumers who confront, a range of measures that define the nature of a bulb. Before consumers knew what they were getting when they bought a 40-watt incandescent light bulb with an E27 base. Now they have to know measurements of lumen, ra and kelvin, what kind of light is wanted in a specific spot, its distribution angle, whether the bulb is dimmable or not, and what kind of dimming contacts working with their particular technology. Energy-saving light bulbs, here defined as compact fluorescent light bulbs (CFL), also have several disadvantages from a technical point of view as compared to incandescent light bulbs. CFL bulbs are rarely dimmable: they are slow to light up, often taking up to a minute or more. The design of the bulb is so markedly different that its long spiral or elongated shape may not fit a lamp. Furthermore, they do not emit the same spectrum of light as incandescent light bulbs, with the effect that surfaces appear different in colour and texture. Most often, surfaces will appear to have less depth and take on greyish tones, that informants describe as ‘not cosy’ (ikke hyggeligt). Incandescent light bulbs have a colour temperature of 2700 kelvins, which means that they glow more reddish than energy-saving light bulbs, which often surpass 2900 kelvins. ¹ Colour reproduction, measured in ra, is likewise significantly different. The incandescent light bulb has a ra value of 99 compared to the sun's standard of 100, while the energy-saving light bulb is normally around 80–85.

In this example of the changing lighting technologies the point is that, light from light bulbs (as well as candlelight and natural light) mediates vision as it visually tints, shapes and affects the material properties of things and their surroundings. It is not an ontic question of whether it exists, or a strictly ontological question of what it is, but rather a question of how it is. Light, in this sense, becomes embedded in visual norms and habits, whereby minor nuances matter, as they change the appearance of the material world. From this perspective, the ‘being’ of a thing is not limited to its physical shape. The thing may step out from itself – be ‘ecstatic’, to follow the terminology of philosopher Gernot Böhme (1995: 32–4, 2001: 131–45) – and impose itself on other things, just as light quality from a light bulb imposes itself on other things. Take, for example, a blue glass. If the glass is placed alone in a white room, it will appear more vibrant to the bystander than if it were one among several other coloured glasses. And that glass will by mingling with light sources, throw shadows that are blue rather than simple dark shapes, thus radically altering the surface and the perception of other objects (Böhme, 1995: 32; Bille and Sørensen, 2012: 104–9). Thus the essence of an object’s ‘being’ also becomes the way it tones and is toned by other things. The important point here is that, when focusing on the ecstasy of things, what is needed is not an understanding of what a thing is but how the totality of (temporary) ecstasies makes it what it is and, by extension, how these ecstasies affectively shape the way objects are perceived by the viewer.

The vagueness of cosiness

When I interview people about their use and perceptions of various lighting technologies, they most often talk about hygge, homeliness, energy consumption and the ‘cold light’ from energy-saving light bulbs, compared to the ‘warm light’ from incandescents. All distinguish between ‘practical light’ and ‘cosy-light’, depending on activities conducted, rather than necessarily on specific rooms. Light is used to shape activities and the spatial feeling that is desired. In this way, informants would change the feeling of their homes during the day as natural light or activities would change, by turning on and off electrical lights or candlelight. In this luminous orchestration of places, hygge is a particularly appreciated atmosphere shaped through light. However, it is important to note that light alone does not determine hygge, which is equally influenced by many other objects, practices and expectations (Linnet, 2011). In the same way, informants would also stress how light may create other senses of atmosphere, such as ‘unsafe’ public areas with little lighting, or happy, festive spaces, with more performative lighting, such as nightclubs or music festivals. Light does not exclusively create such sensations, but it is an important part of them.

Despite variations in dwelling type, income, class and preference for interior decoration, all informants describe hygge as shaped by a particular kind of lightscape defined by dimming and shielding the electrical lights or using candlelight (called ‘living light’). Some informants, of course, challenge cosy-light for being too stereotypically Danish or enforcing a mood that is not welcome. Yet no one would light up a room with bare light bulbs but would always orchestrate it to some degree by shielding off or subduing the direct glare. Thus variations exist as to what constitutes the particular character of cosy-light, but the general setting is a dispersed, subdued light, most often including candlelight, whereby domestic light, in essence, becomes closely related to understandings and practices of how to be and feel at home. Candlelight has a diffuse and elusive materiality that shapes the room in a different way than electrical light, one that ties in with ideas of intimacy and confidentiality. Even if it may be an exaggeration, Edwin Ardener claims that, ‘In order to activate Danish domesticity, there needs to be candlelight’ (1992: 28, my translation). Similarly, although not in a Danish context, Gaston Bachelard poetically notes that, ‘Reveries of this faint light will lead us back to the wee space of familiarity. It seems that there are dark corners in us that tolerate only a flickering light’ (1988: 4).

Thus, subdued lighting is part of orchestrating a (wish for) cosy atmosphere, and this effect of light is simultaneously what cosiness is – or also could be. To illustrate, one informant, Catharine, pointed to this dual nature when commenting that, ‘Candles are hygge. They create hygge’, whereby cosiness is articulated as both cause and effect. Ardener (1992) calls this a contemporaneity, where the parts do not lead to or succeed each other, but are present at once: light is simultaneously a marker, an activator of action, a sign and a scene setter that shapes social spaces out of physical spaces, but without a clear meaning, more as a particular presence (Ardener, 1992: 27; cf. Armstrong, 1971: 31–2).

Catharine’s description above would fit in nicely with the methodological project of Henare et al., that is, a lack of separation between matter and concept, between light and cosiness in the Danish context. Yet, with further questioning, the informants’ expressions about cosy-light become less clear and they shift towards a more undecided position. The informants navigate interchangeably in a cross-field of clarification and doubt, interchangeably between a ‘pathic moment’ of pre-conceptual presence and being seized, and a ‘gnostic moment’ of conceptualization and classification of the perceived (Strauss, 1966: 10). Sensing in this way is not merely a mode of knowledge, but an affective relation to an exteriority (Strauss, 1966; see also Barbaras, 2004).

Rather than advancing a study of hygge in Denmark (see Linnet, 2011), the point here is to explore the role of such undecidedness in questioning the use of informants’ phrases such as ‘here comes the hygge’ as an expression of the ontological nature of the light. Most often my interviews about light and hygge shift between clarity and vagueness, for instance when Nanna states, ‘Hygge is many things, but of course, we say that candlelight is also hygge. I guess it is. Maybe it is also that. They set that kind of atmosphere. It is something, yeah, something you gather around’. Yet, later on in the interview she goes on to say that:

It is like I mentally tell myself that now I want to make it cosy, so I turn on this light. I guess it is like that. When I do this it becomes cosy. But it doesn’t. It may not lead to cosiness – I also know that. But the frame is sort of set for it. The stage is set by lighting the candle.

On the one hand, Nanna points to the way that candlelight instantiates hygge. However, after further reflection, doubt comes to mind – ‘I also know that it is not like that’ – after which light becomes a requisite for setting the cosy atmosphere. In other words, rather than an inseparable part of a thing, hygge becomes an affective condition – an atmosphere – achieved through the thing. Thus, while many informants immediately conflate hygge and a particular light setting, they remain undecided as to what both cosiness and light really are, since the word hygge covers too much. Or rather, hygge denotes multiple things and phenomena (even in the same grammatical form): tangible things, modes of appearance, ways of being together, which in essence capture an atmosphere. It is used in various ways, and in different grammatical forms, to describe a feeling of everything from a visit to a restaurant, a part of the city, a house, an object (hyggen), an activity (at hygge) or a quiet evening at home. Hygge, then, is a concept with vague definitions and an object with unclear borders. Most often it is defined by its absence but generally involves informality, the ideal of equality, downplaying rules. At the same time, hygge is also highly structured and planned, despite claims to the opposite (Ardener, 1992: 26–7). It is what is supposed to be achieved, and people interact with such knowledge and expectations, rather than from a blank slate.

While expectations, social practices, interaction and communicative forms are central to hygge, there is also, as alluded to above, a particular material character to hygge. It is about coming together through things: food, candy, television, or being alone with a book and a cup of tea, whereby the material infrastructure becomes the media through which cosiness unfolds. Simultaneously, as illustrated above, light is also hygge. Hygge is there, even if its character is vague and unclear. It is as if the informants acknowledge that the term hygge covers too much, but they are not able to reduce it further or be more precise. How, then, might we understand this use of light and these descriptions of the orchestrating cosy spaces in Denmark if we move beyond the conflation of matter and concept?

Aspects of decidedness

If we turn to the last decade of writing on ontology and multiplicity, we could get the impression that it is primarily about people on the margins of the Western world. Most often it is about various versions of shamans and healers, instigated by Henare, Wastell and Holbraad’s book, Thinking through Things (2007b), with its point of departure in Viveiros de Castro’s (1998) work on perspectivalism in the Amazon. However, beyond the confines of anthropology, a wide range of discussions of ontologies and multiplicity have been based in science and technology studies, with studies ranging from fertility clinics in the USA (Cussins, 1996) to contraception in Australia (Dugdale, 1999), Cumbrian sheep in the UK (Law and Mol, 2008), alcoholic liver disease in England (Law and Singleton, 2005), water pumps in Zimbabwe (Laet and Mol, 2000) and atherosclerosis in Holland (Mol, 2002).

In the latter study, Annemarie Mol eloquently shows how an ‘object’, atherosclerosis, as a composition of elements, actually represents different objects for different people, and not simply different perspectives on the same object. Mol unfolds this innovative argument through the ways in which hospital staff handle the disease, descriptions in journals, staff meetings, etc. When Mol observes and talks to the pathologist, atherosclerosis appears under the microscope as a thickening inner membrane. That is what atherosclerosis is (Mol, 2002: 30–32). When she speaks to the doctor in the outpatients clinic, however, atherosclerosis is pain or immobility. Atherosclerosis in the legs is a pain, weak pulse, cold skin and low blood pressure. In this way, Mol examines how different professionals, through performance, each conceive of different yet co-existing objects precisely because the disease comes into being through their different practices (e.g. Mol, 2002: 24–25, 30, 102, 108–10). Reality is ‘enacted’. If there are four different practices of atherosclerosis, then there are four different atheroscleroses, and not just different perspectives on the same phenomenon. These realities are not necessarily fragmentarily separated, however, but folded in and out of each other. In other words, Mol claims, the body (singular) is multiple (many) (Mol, 2002: 5, 84; Law, 2011).

From Mol’s performative perspective, an object is multiple and is what it does and is enacted to be. This would be a tempting analytical framework for Susie’s point about cosy-light. And it is not far from what Holbraad has suggested about the merging of concepts and things through people’s practices with them when stating that, ‘Instead of treating all the things that your informants say of and do to or with things as modes of representing the things in question, treat them as modes of defining them’ (Holbraad, 2011: 12; cf. Bijker, 1995: 77). Despite the difference between Mol’s performative perspective, whereby objects are enacted, and Holbraad’s representation-presentations perspective, whereby things and concepts merge, they have the analytically potent idea in common that things are multiple and variable.

Yet this particular perspective also carries with it its own ontological premise that goes beyond the systematic study of existence. Instead, it maintains that ‘ontologies are brought into being, sustained, or allowed to wither away in common, day-to-day, socio-material practices’ (Mol, 2002: 6). As Levy Bryant recapitulates and critiques, ‘The question of the object, of what substances are, is subtly transformed into the question of how and whether we know objects. The question of objects becomes the question of a particular relation between humans and objects’ (2011: 16). Bryant implicitly critiques what he calls ‘epistemological realism’, such as expressed in Mol and Law, where ‘materials do not exist in and of themselves but are endlessly generated and at least potentially reshaped’ (Law, 2004: 161). The ‘being of objects’ reduces to our access or relation to it, as it is enacted, even if this would not necessarily imply that the chemical and physical structure of the object is transformed (cf. Bryant, 2011: 18; Sartre, 1977: 65). As with quantum mechanics where all particles are both particle and wave, it is the observer that collapses the wave function into a particle by the very act of observation, rather than the facticity of the wave. This illustrates again how lack of clarity, e.g. that it is both particle and wave, is seen as a methodological problem rather than a premise of matter.

As illustrated, these ontological approaches may offer a lens through which to understand Susie’s comment. Yet, inspiring as they are, they also raise other points of critique. Although most studies of multiplicity are about the informants’ practices with the object, the arguments are most often tied to clear verbal expressions, where words are ‘modes of defining them’ (Holbraad, 2011: 12), such as, ‘We live in the worlds our forefathers let us see’ (Nielsen, 2013, my translation), or Mol’s pathologist: ‘Look. Now there’s your atherosclerosis. That’s it. A thickening of the intima. That’s really what it is […] Under a microscope’ (Mol, 2002: 30, cf. 1999: 77–8). One could ask what an anthropological study of multiple ontologies would look like if, instead verbal expression being its starting point or central to its argument, it had only practices? All things being equal, it is easier to convince the reader and oneself, and even raise the question of ontology with Susie’s ‘here comes the hygge’ than to rely solely on a detailed description of practices with things. It is also possible that the doctor in the outpatients clinic in the Dutch hospital is unable to use the understanding of atherosclerosis as a sclerosis (hardening) of the artery in the diagnosis and so, in his/her own practice, does not address this. There must, however, still be some sort of awareness that atherosclerosis could be something other than merely a weak pulse and cold skin, if nothing else than through knowledge gained at medical school. And, if this is the case, then are ontologies or merely aspects of a shared ontology being enacted?

Ludwig Wittgenstein famously talks about aspect-seeing when he shows how a drawing may depict both a duck and a rabbit, depending on how one looks at it (2009: 205). If informants are aware that the same object may appear in multiple forms, how, then, can the anthropologist state that informants ‘enact’ it as a rabbit simply because they momentarily (e.g. in relation to their professional conduct) see only this, or are forced to act as if it were only this singular object? According to Mol, the same person is also able to slide between one practice and the other (1999: 79; cf. Law and Mol, 2008). If the informant is able to slide between versions of atherosclerosis – or anaemia (Mol, 1999: 77–8) – then this means that every version must, to some extent, be a momentarily bound unity. Important for the argument here Mol (1999: 83) explicitly claims that it is versions and not aspects that the informant enacts. Yet the ability to slide between one and the other version, in practice as well as in the consciousness of the existence of each individual version, sounds more like aspect-seeing than multiple versions. Thus, the difference is between a point of departure in clear and defined versions as compared to one with vague and undecided aspects (cf. Laet and Mol, 2000).

From this follows the problematic nature of taking Susie’s word at face value without simultaneously listening to other ways in which she defines both light and hygge depending on the context. Light is both warmth, hygge, an element in staging hygge, dangerous, and just light, both separate and merged in what Ardener (1992) calls synchronisms of meaning, action and object. Susie’s quick and kind opening remark was an aspect of what light was, not the total ontological nature of light and/or hygge. Hence, the critique here is not the idea that things are enacted, that concept and thing may be conflated, or whether one can even talk about multiple ontologies. I believe these approaches could be used to analyse hygge and light with fruitful results. Instead, it is a critique of a position in which an object is only one thing at a time for an individual informant, rather than as yet unclarified numbers of things or aspects of things. An object may, as illustrated with the case of hygge, contain several – even contradictory – aspects for the same person, and some of these aspects may be clear or only come to matter in a professional part of life, while others may not. Yet there is still a unity to those aspects – they are aspects of a single ontology.

Furthermore, there may also be an undecidedness as to whether light is cosiness: ‘It [light] is hygge, or maybe hygge is not the proper word’, as several of my informants stated. Hygge is, after all, a comfortable word to use, but often used for lack of a better term for the plethora of situations it occurs in. Added to this is the social evaluation implied in describing a situation as marked by hygge. To these informants, light and hygge are both the same and different things, and neither the uniformity nor the difference is something the informants are completely decided upon. Zones of undecidedness are shaped by situation. There may be what we can call ‘temporary interests of perception’ orienting how an object becomes momentarily confined and categorized in a situation in order to let a practice proceed. Susie may merge light and hygge when she approaches our table, and her statement is seductively clear for the anthropologist to notice and use to introduce an academic argument. But Susie’s statement, where the light is the hygge, is not just an expression about how the world is in this exact moment but also a normative expression about how the moment should be – an interest of perception with a social evaluation of the nature of both a pub visit and a social gathering in Denmark.

So how much should we actually take our informants’ words at face value as ontological statements? When informants mean or do something, there is a potential danger with the current focus on ontology that it is interpreted more radically, without a close look at how the words they use may be just a common phrase, or may not necessarily fully cover their experience, worldview or ontology, if the latter two differ. A point here is that I can take the statement ‘here comes the hygge’ as a clear ontological statement that most informants explicitly used during interviews, whereby light and hygge merge in cosy-light, and thus follow in the footsteps of Henare et al. But I can also take it too much at face value. They may also state that this is not only the case, or at least that both hygge and light are also something else, and all these variation are part of one ontology. Hygge in Denmark is an overly diffuse and all-embracing concept and matter, and questions about undecidedness and vagueness are as important as the firm identification of the alleged nature of reality.

While the above concerns question the extent to which informants see aspects, have interest in perception, are decided or not, and whether language is able to capture this, I will in the following section point beyond the clarification of what a thing is, or is enacted to be, to the way things present themselves, as an element in informants’ and anthropologists’ understanding of inhabiting one world or another. To understand cosy-light, one needs to understand atmospheres.

The ‘being’ of atmosphere

Light plays a central, although by no means exclusive, part in the orchestration of affect, as has continuously been shown in art, architecture, film and theatre (Baxendall, 1995; Laganier and Pol, 2011; Plummer, 2012; Böhme 2013: 134–158). This feeling of a place or situation commonly goes by the term ‘atmosphere’ and influences the way people experience and interpret events (cf. Anderson, 2009; Daniels, 2014; Edensor, 2012, 2014; Hasse, 2002; Ingold, 2013; Navaro-Yashin, 2009, 2012; Olwig 2011; Stewart, 2011). Other terms such as ‘affect’, ‘mood’ and ‘ethos’ have also been used to highlight the experience, yet atmospheres, as illustrated below, focus on the spatial aspects (for a fuller review see Bille et al., 2014). Through such influences, one can experience exhilaration, a hateful or sad atmosphere, cosiness, intimacy or other such emotional responses to sensed places. But atmospheres may also escape one’s attention, or not be verbalized, and still play a key role in the appearance of the material world and in people’s practices through it. More than simply the informants’ atmosphere, anthropological data generation is shaped in light of such atmospheric attunements, whether the anthropologist recognizes them or not. The anthropologist may methodologically try to create an atmosphere that informants feel comfortable in, or which has a particular intensity that creates rapport, trust and data (the Balinese cockfight being exemplary).

The atmosphere is then translated into writing in order to catch the reader and undergird the argument and factuality of the fieldwork. Atmospheres are, so to speak, integral to the way things and emotions appear and how anthropological analysis is authored (cf. Geertz, 1988, 1957). In other words, to understand the worlds of our informants, we need to understand the premises of how atmosphere seizes the informants and the anthropologist – how the atmosphere can be the very feeling around which the emplaced informants structure their social and material life, such as hygge. In this case, words may not be sufficiently clear. At other times, the atmosphere simply extends beyond the limits of language and is something that ‘just is’ (Gilsenan, 1982: 265–6).

Atmospheres are not just a product of the human psyche. Architecture, for instance, is a material form that deliberately seeks to direct its atmosphere (Zumthor, 2006). However, much philosophical literature has also continuously argued that atmosphere cannot be reduced to the material qualities of infrastructure (Böhme, 1995; Bollnow, 1941; Griffero, 2014; Schmitz, 2014; Tellenbach, 1968). People bring a particular state of mind to a place, and this affect may be transmitted (Brennan, 2003). A joyful or exhilarated mood may be dampened by stepping into a funeral ritual, and discouragement may disappear when you meet people who are partying. As one of the prime proponents of the recent philosophical emphasis on atmospheres, Gernot Böhme describes this relationality in the following way:

Atmospheres fill spaces; they emanate from things, constellations of things, and persons […] Yet they cannot be defined independently from the persons emotionally affected by them; they are subjective facts. Atmospheres can be produced consciously through objective arrangements, light and music […] But what they are, their character, must always be felt: by exposing oneself to them, one experiences the impression that they make. Atmospheres are in fact characteristic manifestations of the co-presence of subject and object. (1998: 112–14)

Thus atmospheres are an integral part of being human, situated in place, and not necessarily something that can be verbalized or defined, even if felt as a relation to an exteriority. They ‘exist’ whether they have weak or strong intensity, negative, positive or insignificant influence. The appearance of the world is in essence shaped by atmospheres, the way spaces seize us and how we seize the ‘attuned spaces’ (Bollnow, 1963: 230; Böhme, 2006: 16).

The concept of atmospheres is drawn into a discussion of the methodological soundness of the turn towards ontology because of the ontological status of their in-betweenness. Atmospheres cannot be pointed out, as in ‘there it is’, and yet it is there as ‘the most familiar and everyday kind of thing’ (Heidegger, 2010: 130–1). It is both an ontological reality that is felt and an analytical implication of studying people’s practices and understandings of spaces, as well as material and social life. It cannot be confined to the physical boundaries of room or place, but is the volatile and changing sensation through which reality comes into being as a unity with innumerable nuances without borders or direction (Gumbrecht, 2006, 2011; Thibaud, 2002, 2011). Atmospheres are, in this sense, quasi-objective, to use Böhme’s terminology (2006: 16), something that is precisely defined by vagueness:

We are not sure whether we should attribute them to the objects or environments from which they proceed or to the subjects who experience them. We are also unsure where they are. They seem to fill the space with a certain tone of feeling like a haze. (1993: 114, my emphasis)

A focus on atmospheres thus means a shift from what a thing is or is enacted to be, to a focus on how and why the world is present as it is. To follow Renaud Barbaras, this shift forces a move from the ontology of objects, i.e. each individual thing, to the ontology of elements where ‘the element is not subjective, nor is it what is perceived. It is the dimension through which perception takes place’ (Barbaras, 1998: 222, cited in Thibaud, 2014). The material world in essence becomes what it is to the observer through the atmospheres that are created in the very interaction between matter, place and state of mind.

For the argument here, Böhme’s distinction in German between Wirklichkeit and Realität is also important, although both are translated as ‘reality’ in English. Realität denotes the ‘factual fact’ of what we may know about the object (2001: 57), whereas Wirklichkeit is the ‘actual fact’ of how things are experienced (2001: 57; see also Bjerregaard 2014). Contrary to notions of ‘relational materialism’ (Law, 2004: 83), where reality is enacted, it is precisely in the contact between the ecstasies of entities, bodies and affects that the constitution of the world is presenced to the observer as an actual fact. It is through atmospheres that cosiness, irony, gatherings, politics, power, morality, etc., take form. The uncertain and hazy nature of atmospheres accentuated by Böhme marks the undecidedness my informants have as to what – and not the least how – the atmosphere characterized as hygge becomes present. Decidedness certainty are not ethnographic realities in this case.

In this take on atmospheres, the properties of an object are not something it ‘has’ or is enacted to ‘have’. The object’s properties do not separate from its surrounding. Rather, this happens through the ‘articulation of its presence, the way and manner of its presence’ (Böhme, 1995: 32). The being of an object, in other words, is not defined by its physical, tangible separation from other things but by their presences and absences, their ‘ecstasies’ (Böhme, 1995: 155–76).

Conclusion: Vagueness as premise

So, to return to the ethnographic examples, we may, on the one hand, understand Susie’s proclamation that light is hygge as an example of how representation and presentation merge, or defy separation to begin with. A fair analysis would then be that the way Susie performs and talks about the light defines what it is. Yet, on the other hand, I want to push the analysis and talk about the way in which the material environment is enveloped in a ‘haze’ by the atmosphere (cf. Navaro-Yashin, 2012: 168; see Bille et al., 2014, for a critique of using affect to denote atmospheres), a world where affects and presences (or absences, or presence of absences) constantly shape the impression of the world through a haze, without necessarily a clear separation between things. With the diffuse borders and intensities of atmospheres, the world is shaped as a sensed place at times shared, but with the possibility of radically different perceptions among the people in the same attuned space; some will find it cosy, others not (thus hinting at how a phenomenological approach cannot stand alone in understanding social worlds). It may be unclear what the atmosphere precisely is in a given situation. Yet as an element of social practice, atmospheres also structure what the world should be – in all its unclarity. Susie’s proclamation that ‘here comes the hygge’ was not so much a statement about the ontology of the tea light or the emic concept of cosiness as it was an ontology of the elements – the atmosphere that is and should be. As subjective facts, atmospheres are the contact zone of in-betweenness that cannot be reduced to the object or subject but are always there: not only in the relation but as the relation.

The undecidedness as to the nature of the relationship between light and hygge is anchored in this double position of not quite object and not quite concept, but rather the in-betweenness beyond the collapse of representation-presentation dichotomies. The nature of atmosphere cannot be limited or even pinpointed materially or geographically, yet it has an ontological reality that tones and attunes the world, in the sense of not being the property of a thing but rather the ecstasy of a thing in concert with other things. How the world is to our informants depends on the atmosphere that is subjectively experienced, yet culturally informed and anticipated in the moment of praxis or description. The atmosphere is shaped through the intersection of ecstatic matter and people’s state of mind, social practices, communication and expectations, which thereby shapes what the thing momentarily is or needs to be. Atmospheres offer direction which, even if unclear, may bring a sense of comfort, despair, seize us or escape our attention as something that ‘just is’. They may create intensities that provoke a temporary interested perception, whereby an object is momentarily confined but then unfolds again as the atmospheric intensity drops.

My aim here has been to point to how interest in perception and aspect-seeing is a premise for proclamations such as ‘here comes the hygge’, in order to momentarily confine what something is and should be. This momentary confinement, I argue, is not a matter of ontologies but of aspects of worldviews shaped through the (wish for) intensities of atmospheres. In this respect, I wish to methodologically promote vagueness and undecidedness in line with Law when exploring ontologies rather than bypass them, for the sake of clarity. Vagueness should, in this respect, be taken seriously both theoretically and methodologically, while at times clear expression should be taken with caution.

At the same time, it has been the aim to point out that the way in which the world presents itself is (in part) toned by light settings that people often barely recognize, even if – according to some recent research – it guides moral judgement, creative processes and physical responses of the body (Chiou and Cheng, 2013; Czeisler, 2013; Steidle and Werth, 2013). Yet informants and anthropologists are not just in, but a part of this atmosphere since our moods and practices co-shape it. In some instances we cannot verbalize the feeling of space, or the concepts we have are too imprecise to fully satisfy the feeling. It is the ‘something’ that is taken for granted or overwhelms us that nonetheless shapes our conceptualizations and orchestrations of the world (Crapanzano, 2006). The interplay between language, affect, materiality, normativity and practice as subject of ethnographic analyses, in this respect can be explored through the impact of atmosphere on informants and anthropologists. In other words, how the world came to appear as it does becomes the focus rather than what the world is.