Showing papers in "History and Anthropology in 2016"
TL;DR: The hope boom in anthropological studies as mentioned in this paper suggests that it reflects two converging developments: a sense of increasing unpredictability and crisis, and a lack of political and ideological direction in this situation.
Abstract: This introduction discusses the hope boom in anthropological studies, suggesting that it reflects two converging developments: a sense of increasing unpredictability and crisis, and a sense of lack of political and ideological direction in this situation. We further identify two overall trends in the anthropological literature gathered under the rubric of hope: an emphasis on hopefulness against all odds and one on specific formations of hope and temporal reasoning.
126 citations
TL;DR: The authors argue that modern linear historicism is often overridden in such moments by other historicities, showing that in crises, not only time, but history itself as an organizing structure and set of expectations, is up for grabs.
Abstract: This article focuses on how the economic crisis in Southern Europe has stimulated temporal thought (temporality), whether tilted in the direction of historicizing, presentifying, or futural thought, provoking people to rethink their relationship to time. The argument is developed with particular reference to the ethnographies of living with austerity inside the eurozone contained in this special issue. The studies identify the ways the past may be activated, lived, embodied, and re-fashioned under contracting economic horizons. We argue for the empirical study of crisis that captures the decisions or non-decisions that people make, and the actual temporal processes by which they judge responses. We conclude that modern linear historicism is often overridden in such moments by other historicities, showing that in crises, not only time, but history itself as an organizing structure and set of expectations, is up for grabs.
124 citations
TL;DR: In this article, the uncanny present is proposed to refer to a particular sense of present-ness produced by futures that cannot be anticipated, and it is argued that crisis becomes such precisely because it brings the present into consciousness, creating an awareness or perception of presentness that we do not normally have.
Abstract: This article posits that the vernacular understanding of crisis as existing in a different sort of time needs to be mined for what it tells us about social perceptions of temporality. Using three ethnographic examples from Cyprus, I ask here what temporal features we may identify that lead our interlocutors to see certain periods as “times of crisis”. In particular, I propose a notion that I call the uncanny present to refer to a particular sense of present-ness produced by futures that cannot be anticipated. Crisis, I claim, becomes such precisely because it brings the present into consciousness, creating an awareness or perception of present-ness that we do not normally have.
77 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors analyse two apparently different types of mobilization that have emerged after the 2008 crisis, trying to understand what grievances and objectives pull people together, i.e., the local expression of new social movements and the remaining expression of working-class organization.
Abstract: Structural adjustment policies in Europe underscore the lack of sovereignty and responsibility of nation-states towards the well-being of their citizens. As a result, in popular mobilizations arguments of inequality and injustice, expressed in a demand for dignity, are intertwined. The article explores this shift away from older arguments of exploitation and domination. Using ethnographic material from an industrial town in Galicia (Spain), I analyse two apparently different types of mobilization that have emerged after the 2008 crisis, trying to understand what grievances and objectives pull people together. One is the local expression of new social movements; the other is the remaining expression of working-class organization. Each of these models reinterprets a particular historical tradition of struggle while developing a new interpretation of the social objectives and subjectivities of the future. My hypothesis is that a “moral economy” framework has superseded a “political economy” framework in the ...
76 citations
TL;DR: In this article, the future and past are separated from the present in a process that decontextualizes forced migrants both temporally and spatially, and practices that challenge currently accepted humanitarian ethics are identified.
Abstract: The humanitarian system and people living with and in long-term refugee situations envisage the future differently. This article explores different notions of the future that may be found in humanitarian policies and among humanitarian workers. Understandings of emergency, crisis and ethics in humanitarianism have particular impacts on how situations of protracted displacement are understood. The policy context for Syrian refugees in Jordan is analysed with particular reference to the ‘humanitarian reason’ which tends to separate between biological and biographical lives. Here, the future and past are separated from the present in a process that decontextualizes forced migrants both temporally and spatially. Through focusing on what humanitarian workers do, practices that challenge currently accepted humanitarian ethics are identified. By way of conclusion, and supported by feminist discussions of temporality and the ethics of care, the article suggests some possible ways of integrating a concept of the f...
69 citations
TL;DR: For example, during the Spanish housing bubble, the mass access to mortgages for private homeownership, and the subsequent acceptance of the debtor-creditor agreement, was founded on common perceptions of secure income, endless economic growth, rising housing prices, and investing for the future.
Abstract: During the Spanish housing bubble, the mass access to mortgages for private homeownership, and the subsequent acceptance of the debtor–creditor agreement, was founded on common perceptions of secure income, endless economic growth, rising housing prices, and investing for the future. Assumptions about the prosperity of household economies were consistent with linear understandings of life projects, where the purchase of a home was a landmark event. Since the onset of the economic crisis which triggered an increase in home repossessions, people have questioned the principles of finance capitalism and their own prioritization of homeownership over the substantial risks of investment and indebtedness. The events of the economic crisis have led people to reconsider the moral economy and their basic rights to subsistence. The experience has already had an enduring effect on how people articulate the past times of financial prosperity, the present era of poverty, and their expectations for rebuilding their futu...
48 citations
TL;DR: Eriksen and Hylland as discussed by the authors presented some of the salient features of the accelerated post-1991 world, emphasizing the importance of comparison for theoretical development in anthropology and the relevance of contemporary history for anthropological research on globalization.
Abstract: This special issue, which includes articles on Sierra Leone, Peru, Estonia, Hungary, Norway, the Philippines, Britain and Melanesia, presents some of the salient features of the accelerated post-1991 world. We emphasize the importance of comparison for theoretical development in anthropology and the relevance of contemporary history for anthropological research on globalization. We also demonstrate the importance of taking ethnography seriously in research on globalization. This article outlines the origins and central features of the post-Cold War world, showing the significance of shifting between global, transnational, national and local perspectives in order to understand the processes of change affecting communities in all parts of the world. This article also introduces the overheating approach to globalization [Eriksen, Thomas Hylland. 2016. Overheating: An Anthropology of Accelerated Change. London: Pluto], indicating ways in which new forms of connectedness and acceleration can shed new l...
34 citations
TL;DR: This paper explored the local history and set of conditions central for the rise of coal nationalism in the post-industrial town of Doncaster, showing how Doncastrians were not merely victimized by the effects of neoliberal restructuring programmes and deindustrialization, but strived to cope with and give meaning to the changes affecting their lives.
Abstract: The article explores the local history and set of conditions central for the rise of “coal nationalism” in the post-industrial town of Doncaster. Based on ethnography, interviews and archival research, the essay shows how Doncastrians were not merely victimized by the effects of neoliberal restructuring programmes and deindustrialization, but strived to cope with and give meaning to the changes affecting their lives. In the space left by the dissolution of industrialism, new competing scale-making projects over meaning, memory and future played out. Several social actors nostalgically invoked the industrial past to cope with existential insecurity. Some called upon the lost empire or the EU, while others turned to exclusionary Englishness as the solution to current hardship and grievances. United Kingdom Independence Party (Ukip), strategically locating their annual conference in 2015 in the white-majority working-class town, tapped into local anxieties and disillusionment, promising to secure fut...
32 citations
TL;DR: In this article, a critical conversation between anthropological replications of hope that seek to valorize indeterminacy as a principle and studies in the political economy of hope is presented.
Abstract: This article aims to contribute to the formulation of an analytically operational notion of hope best suited to its treatment as an object of ethnographic investigation. First, it dissects epistemological and political assumptions of recent writings on the burgeoning anthropology of “hope”. Then, reflecting on an ethnographic study of temporal reasonings in the “Meantime” in supervised, post-war, postsocialist, post-Yugoslav and presumably Europeanizing Bosnia and Herzegovina, it constructs a critical conversation between anthropological replications of hope that seek to valorize indeterminacy as a principle and studies in the political economy of hope that seek to understand determinations of hope (including people’s engagements with indeterminacy) in particular conditions. The article argues that the latter approach—conceiving of hope as a relational phenomenon in historical time—is better placed to capitalize on the specific strengths of ethnographic research.
32 citations
TL;DR: In this article, the exploration of configurations of hope in our social world has been explored, and the authors are more than pleased that their work has helped propel an area of investigation of such importance.
Abstract: Needless to say, I am more than pleased that my work has helped propel an area of investigation of such importance as the exploration of configurations of hope in our social world. Hope has activat...
32 citations
TL;DR: The Majes Irrigation Project has transformed 15,000 hectares of desert to fertile land and has become a hub for economic opportunities as mentioned in this paper, but the planned second phase of the project, a new dam will be built to extend the amount of irrigated land and foster large-scale export-oriented agribusiness.
Abstract: The boom in extractivist industries since the 1990s has resulted in a concomitant increase in socio-environmental conflicts in Peru. In the southern region of Arequipa, the Majes Irrigation Project has transformed 15,000 hectares of desert to fertile land and has become a hub for economic opportunities. In the planned second phase of the project, a new dam will be built to extend the amount of irrigated land and foster large-scale export-oriented agribusiness. Contrary to the government’s promises about progress, modernity and employment, the planned extension triggers anxiety among the local farmers who fear privatization, corporate dominance and a neo-colonial return of foreign big estates. This article examines four different stories – both overlapping and contradicting – about Majes. The first story envisions expectations of growth and modernity, while the second focuses on hard work and sacrifice. The other side of the coin appears in the third story about debt, loss and vulnerability followi...
TL;DR: The recent financial crisis has become a trigger for reflection on highly affective, shocking and upsetting silenced pasts in Reggio Calabria, as Benedetto Croce suggests as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: The recent financial crisis has become a trigger for reflection on highly affective, shocking and upsetting silenced pasts in Reggio Calabria. Personal consideration of the present, as Benedetto Croce suggests, unlocks the archives of past crises such as the displacement of adults and children as a result of natural disasters—events which, for long periods, have remained shrouded in silence, inaccessible and well guarded. I argue that silence should be understood as a nonpathological transmission of knowledge of the past.
TL;DR: This paper examined two localities built for homeless families and elderly individuals in post-disaster El Salvador during the early 2000s, and explored what these spaces say about their makers' hopes for better futures.
Abstract: This paper considers hope and utopia as value-making processes and their relation to space. It examines two localities built for homeless families and elderly individuals in post-disaster El Salvador during the early 2000s, and explores what these spaces say about their makers’ hopes for better futures. Drawing on recent works in the field of utopian studies that adopt a materialist view on utopia as an imperfect contingent process, this paper explores whether the notion of everyday utopia is helpful in order to appreciate the actualization of these spaces. It argues that anthropological scholarship on value and ordinary ethics can be a productive framework to study the pathways between hope, utopianism, and space.
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors explore the relationship between men and mining technology in an Estonian oil shale mine and argue that the end of socialism might not have been as radical of a change as changing the mining technology.
Abstract: This paper explores the relationship between men and mining technology in an Estonian oil shale mine. It traces the linear time of socialism and postsocialism, arguing that for Estonian miners, the end of socialism might not have been as radical of a change as changing the mining technology in early 2000s. The introduction of the new technology changed the nature and perception of miners’ work, as well as the opportunities of controlling the everyday tempo of work. The way miners talk about new technology (novaia tekhnika) opens a window for exploring the different temporalities of socialism and capitalism. It allows seeing the way the time, through the state and the market, shapes small time of the everyday, the tempo of and rhythm of work. The wider changes from socialism to neoliberal capitalism which alter workplace relations, and create new class structures, are most acutely experienced at the nexus where new technology changes the rhythm and pace of work, the bodily activity of production wh...
TL;DR: In this article, the authors examine how borders are constructed, reproduced and contested by a variety of actors, using techniques, institutions, laws, policies and social interactions at different scales, indicating the shifts in border regimes following the alleged weakening of national borders after the Cold War.
Abstract: Drawing on fieldwork among irregular migrants in Norway, this article examines how borders are constructed, reproduced and contested by a variety of actors, using techniques, institutions, laws, policies and social interactions at different scales. It indicates the shifts in border regimes following the alleged weakening of national borders after the Cold War. The implementation of European integration, for instance through the Schengen Agreement, has made it increasingly difficult for undocumented travellers to cross the external Schengen borders, and within the nation-states, internal boundary processes facilitate, obstruct and set yardsticks for migrants’ entrance to society. Drawing on scholars who have explored the spatial dimensions of border controls (delocalization), the temporal dimension, and the role of non-state actors in shaping border policies (denationalization), I investigate borders through three critical moments for migrants: the movement to Europe, the waiting in Europe and the ...
TL;DR: In 2006, the iron mines in Marampa Chiefdominion, in the Northern Province of Sierra Leone, re-opened, and this event sparked a widespread feeling of excitement and hope among the local population, and gave rise to a landscape of expectations in which memories of both relative prosperous and "dark" pasts were invoked and imaginations of a better future flourished as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: In 2006 the iron mines in Marampa Chiefdom, in the Northern Province of Sierra Leone, re-opened. This event sparked a widespread feeling of excitement and hope among the local population, and gave rise to a landscape of expectations in which memories of both relative prosperous and “dark” pasts were invoked and imaginations of a better future flourished. However, soon after the re-opening and initial development of the mines, it appeared that the expected opportunities would not materialize everywhere and for everybody. Frustration, disappointment and loss of hope became part and parcel of the dynamics in this place, which is seen as a hot-spot, a notion that is applied to highlight the numerous frictions and negotiations within this investment landscape. This paper examines this momentum of rising expectations in the hot-spot by scrutinizing its connection to the area’s recent past of boom and bust, the increased global demand for raw materials, especially from China, national development agendas...
TL;DR: The authors examined the relation between different kinds of indigenous speech and music and various iconographic forms such as petroglyphs, house painting, basketry designs and also features of landscape that are understood in graphic terms.
Abstract: This paper deals with the relation between different kinds of indigenous speech and music and various iconographic forms such as petroglyphs, house painting, basketry designs and also features of landscape that are understood in graphic terms. It examines how Northwest Amazonian myth-history is structured and memorized, how it can appear in both verbal and non-verbal forms, and how contemporary books, maps and diagrams produced by indigenous organizations as part of programmes of research and education show continuity with these traditional forms. Rather than making firm distinctions between peoples with and without writing, I argue that it is more profitable to focus on how various mnemonic systems—“writing”—work in tandem with different narrative forms—“myth”. When “writing” and “myth” are understood in indigenous terms, contemporary written documents appear in a new light.
TL;DR: The authors argue that jokes about one another's religion and ethnicity are a means by which cultural intimates articulate anti-communal perspectives on public life, and suggest that profanity is a style of interaction that relates to an anticommunal sociality which distances itself from the politics of sanctity.
Abstract: On the shopfloor of an Indian automobile plant, a multi-ethnic workforce exchanges potentially offensive ethnic jokes with one another while remaining largely silent on actual incidences of communal violence. This paper shows how silence and profane humour are important aspects of an inter-ethnic sociality in the workplace, which distances itself from the retaliatory logics of communal violence. Speaking in the indirect register of irony, I argue that jokes about one another's religion and ethnicity are a means by which cultural intimates articulate anti-communal perspectives on public life. I suggest that profanity is a style of interaction that relates to an anti-communal sociality which distances itself from the politics of sanctity.
TL;DR: The authors explored how displaced Palestinians confront the future from a depleted present by exploring different modes of confrontation: reaction, experimentation, and refusal, revealing the different temporalities and geographies that are key to the experience of the future.
Abstract: Displaced Palestinians are faced with an array of “enemies” and a degraded, disappointing political leadership. They are offered few road-maps for a way out of these conditions. Drawing on long-term research with Palestinian refugees across the Middle East, this essay explores how they confront the future from a depleted present. It considers two instances of future encounters, to explore different modes of confrontation: reaction, experimentation, and refusal. These modes of encounter reveal the different temporalities and geographies that are key to the experience of the future.
TL;DR: In this article, the authors examine the circulation and reception of a song that catalyzed a youth movement and widespread protest in 2011 Portugal, and argue for the importance of attending to micro-shifts in aesthetic form, engagement, and response, to understand macro-shift in public and political feeling.
Abstract: This article examines the circulation and reception of a song that catalyzed a youth movement and widespread protest in 2011 Portugal. Through a theorization of “register”, it argues for the importance of attending to micro-shifts in aesthetic form, engagement, and response, to understanding macro-shifts in public and political feeling.
TL;DR: In the 2013 elections, the Sicilian city of Messina voted-in a mayor from the Cambiamo Messina dal Basso (CMDB) movement as discussed by the authors, who was perceived as a Messiah sent to save the city from years of political and economic mismanagement.
Abstract: In the 2013 elections, the Sicilian city of Messina voted-in a mayor from the Cambiamo Messina dal Basso (CMDB) movement. Perceived as a Messiah sent to save the city from years of political and economic mismanagement, it soon became clear that it would not be easy for him to negotiate the bureaucracy of the traditional clientelist political establishment. This paper explores how the CMDB movement has come to terms with negotiating bureaucratic and structural time while attempting to maintain their Messianic ideals.
TL;DR: This article argued that UN projected population growth will not only lead to more Muslims in Asia's cities in a purely numerical sense, but also to more Muslim cities in proportional and cultural sense through the continuation of existing trajectories of de-cosmopolitanization.
Abstract: This essay argues that UN projected population growth will not only lead to more Muslims in Asia’s cities in a purely numerical sense, but also to more Muslim cities in a proportional and cultural sense through the continuation of existing trajectories of ‘de-cosmopolitanization’. Urban life will be deeply affected by this increasing shift from cities that are not merely majority Muslim, but are also increasingly Muslim in moral, social or political terms. Inevitably such changes will affect the lives of urban citizens, none more so than women. The essay then asks whether population growth will allow these cities to maintain their ‘globalizing’ trajectory of increasing interconnection. Having framed its analysis around the ‘hard’ outcomes of demographic change, the analysis then turns to ‘soft’ outcomes by tackling the question of the likely contours of the increasingly divergent versions of Islam produced by the competitive religious economies of the modern Asian city.
TL;DR: The authors consider how traumatized subjects contribute to emerging political landscapes, arguing that slow motion traumas root lived crises that can become shared, informing critical perspectives, agencies, and grounding potentially disruptive ethics and politics.
Abstract: Bringing literature on trauma and politics together with Deleuze's writing on sense and events, this ethnographic study considers how traumatized subjects contribute to emerging political landscapes. I argue that slow motion traumas root lived crises that can become shared, informing critical perspectives, agencies, and grounding potentially disruptive ethics and politics.
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TL;DR: This article argued that the Christian modern is close to the secular modern with fragments of rational planning and calculation in constant interplay with fragment of the magic of speculative modernity and argued that both communism and market capitalism are ideological cousins of Christian millenarianism.
Abstract: The widespread notion that the city is secular and that therefore society’s future is secular is in need of serious reconsideration. This paper argues that religion does not melt away but rather morphs into modern forms of aspiration, speculation, and contention. Religion is therefore crucial to social inquiry into the nature of the urban. The paper argues that in Asia the Christian modern is close to the secular modern with fragments of rational planning and calculation in constant interplay with fragments of the magic of speculative modernity. Both communism and market capitalism are ideological cousins of Christian millenarianism. In a comparison of India, China, and Singapore it argues that the Christian form of modernity has been much better able to penetrate and coalesce with Sinic civilizational traditions than with Indic civilizational traditions.
TL;DR: The authors argued that urbanists' utopian visions might be better characterized as cosmological rather than as more narrowly religious, thereby permitting a more productive comparison between those visions and everyday experience.
Abstract: In responding to van der Veer's magisterially broad analysis, I urge greater emphasis on those aspects of religion in the city that reflect the more intimate concerns of its citizens, especially where their religiosity appears in the form of domestic spatial organization and of everyday sin and its recognition, rather than of strict doctrinal practice. I also suggest that urbanists’ utopian visions might be better characterized as cosmological rather than as more narrowly religious, thereby permitting more productive comparison between those visions and everyday experience. In agreeing with van der Veer’s description of modern Asian cities as “protestant”, I suggest that their protestantism is not necessarily of primarily Christian inspiration; urban conditions encourage interest in religious reform as people grapple with the scalar aspect of his perspective.
TL;DR: Ritual brotherhood, or pobratimstvo, is attested by a range of sources dealing with the Adriatic hinterland between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: Ritual brotherhood, or pobratimstvo, is attested by a range of sources dealing with the Adriatic hinterland between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. Read one way, pobratimstvo shows us a border society characterized by cohesion and tolerance, where Christian and Muslim frontiersmen find ways to overcome religious and political boundaries, recognizing their common interests and shared values. Read another way, however, the same institution (and sometimes even the same documents) also offers an insight into the persistence of frontier conflict and the pervasiveness of its violence, drawing attention to other, no less bloody divisions between predators and victims. In teasing out some of the possible meanings and uses of ritual sworn brotherhood on this early modern frontier, I attempt to give due weight to the complexities of a specific place and culture. But the problems highlighted by the institution of pobratimstvo are more widespread: the troubling ambiguities of friendship, with its qual...
TL;DR: This paper analyzed the face-to-face performances, the legalistic stenographic documentation, the collective crafting of a single authoritative style, and a unique temporal frame as an important background to understand a hallmark volume in Siberian studies.
Abstract: The multi-generation book project "The Peoples of Siberia" enabled a group of Leningrad-based scholars to reshape their museum into a Soviet ethnographic community. This article analyses the face-to-face performances, the legalistic stenographic documentation, the collective crafting of a single authoritative style, and a unique temporal frame as an important background to understand a hallmark volume in Siberian studies. The authors argue that the published volume indexes nearly thirty years of scholarly debates as much as it indexes the peoples it represents. The article concludes with a critical discussion of how this volume was translated and received by a Euro-American readership influencing the perception of Siberian peoples internationally. It also links the volume to contemporary post-Soviet publication projects which seem to retrace the same path. The article is based on extensive archival work and references collections recently discovered and which are presented for publication here for the fir...
TL;DR: The authors compare anthropological monographs about a Pakistani Sufi cult founded by a living saint, known as Zindapir, with a translated hagiography written about the same saint by a devoted poet-khalifa.
Abstract: The paper compares my anthropological monograph about a Pakistani Sufi cult founded by a living saint, known as Zindapir, with a translated hagiography written about the same saint by a devoted poet-khalifa. It aims to compare two representational strategies of an historical figure—on the one hand, that of an anthropologist writing for a wider audience of expert social scientists and Islamic scholars and, on the other hand, an indigenous devotee who knew the saint well, claiming divine inspiration in his writings intended to honour his departed saint and to sacralize his name. The paper interrogates the fuzzy boundary between hagiography and ethnography, literary and descriptive text, fact and fiction, truth and myth, history and archeology in order to raise questions about the limits of dialogical anthropology.
TL;DR: Subic Bay, an area that had been economically, politically and socially dependent on the patronage of the US Navy, was now undergoing major transformations as discussed by the authors, becoming the vanguard platform that allowed for the introduction of an “overheated” form of economic globalization into the Philippines.
Abstract: Over the course of just half a year, a catastrophic volcanic eruption and an unexpected political victory would come to act upon and dramatically alter the location of Subic Bay in the Philippines. As a consequence, the annus mirabilis of 1991 brought a (temporary) end to more than a century of US tutelage for the Philippines. Subic Bay, an area that had been economically, politically and socially dependent on the patronage of the US Navy, was now undergoing major transformations. The land and infrastructure left behind by the Americans were turned into the Philippines’ largest special economic zone, becoming the vanguard platform that allowed for the introduction of an “overheated” form of economic globalization into the Philippines. Amongst the foreign direct investors now active in Subic, a South Korean shipbuilder has become a new hegemon, building a giant shipyard inside the bay that today employs 34,000 Filipino workers. Paying particular attention to how contested gendered relations between...