Conflicting temporalities in the anthropology of the future
Social processes take place across varied temporal frameworks, timings and paces. Future orientated action is often challenged by human and non-human actors who follow competing temporal logics. This panel explores the confrontation of different futures under conditions of constraint and coercion.
Critical Kashmir scholars offer a capacious ethnographic “field” and archive that speaks to the silences and fabrications of scholarship tinted and tainted by majoritarian ideologies. Taking this to be ethnographic theory is the practice of decolonizing anthropology.
Dear Members and Friends of the Network of Ethnographic Theory,
Just a reminder that the deadline for panel proposals for the next EASA conference is fast approaching! Are you thinking of submitting a panel? Do you think it would fit the interests of the NET? We welcome submissions for our Network of Ethnographic Theory panel at the 16th EASA Biennial Conference, 21-24 July 2020 in Lisbon, on the conference’s theme of “New anthropological horizons in and beyond Europe.” It is worth noting that the panel we select is guaranteed to be accepted at the conference! We are interested in panel submissions that engage ethnographic theory in new and interesting ways. And we welcome panel submissions that move beyond the classic format. Proposals should consist of a panel title a short abstract of less than 250 words, and should be submitted to us by October 15th (leaving us the time to make a selection and you submit to the EASA by October 21).
For more information in the conference’s overarching theme: https://easaonline.org/conferences/easa2020/theme.shtml
Remember, anyone who is a member of EASA (or who intends to become a member in 2020 to attend the conference can submit (membership in EASA is very reasonable! https://www.easaonline.org/membership/)
If you have any questions or queries, please feel free to contact the network’s co-convenors, Scott MacLochlainn and Sonja Moghaddari.
Scott MacLochlainn, maclochlainn@mmg.mpg.de
Sonja Moghaddari, sonja.moghaddari@graduateinstitute.ch
/Call for NET-sponsored panels at the EASA Conference in 2020
The next EASA conference is coming up in Lisbon in July 2020! The Call for Panels is now open, with a great variety of options beyond the classic format. Are you thinking of submitting a panel? Do you think it would fit the interest of the NET? We are happy to sponsor a selected number of panels. Please note that this year, the regulation changed and networks cannot be guaranteed an accepted panel. If you would like to increase your outreach, we warmly invite you to send us your panel proposal before October 10 (leaving us the time to make a selection and you submit to the EASA by October 21).
/Report on the NET Panel at the Biennial Conference of the Finnish Anthropological Society 29-30 August 2019
A quick note to thank everyone for participating in our EASA sponsored panel “Anthropologies, Futures and Prediction” at the Biennial Conference of the Finnish Anthropological Society 29-30 August 2019, in Helsinki. We were delighted to have fantastic papers and visual media on futurist aesthetics in Bolivia (Karl Swinehart), forced departures and uncertainty of asylum seekers in Germany (Sonja Moghaddari), the future imaginaries of asbestos victims and activists in Italy (Agata Mazzeo), to forms of abstraction surrounding extrajudicial killings in the Philippines (Scott MacLochlainn), and neo-rural futures in France (Ieva Snikersproge). And to top it off, we had the wonderful Felix Ringel as a discussant! We particularly liked exploring theoretical issues through ethnographic video and photos in our second session. Many thanks again to everyone!
/Articles
Pushing past the other to the otherwise, a great collection of short pieces in Cultural Anthropology by Laura McTighe and Megan Raschig.
The introduction to a special issue on “The ethical constitution of energy dilemmas” by Mette M. High and Jessica M. Smith in JRAI.
From our recent guest reading list author, Patrick McKearney, in Ethnos on judgement, critique, and surprise as engines of anthropological theory. And read his reading list on “Care” here!
Adam Scott Clark with a remarkably timely piece on the definition of “Chinese” in Hong Kong.
And we couldn’t not have something about the moon landing this summer!
Although not recent but still timely: Navaro-Yashin’s argument for a trans-paradigmatic ethnography.
A Tsantsa Special issue on decolonial processes in Swiss academia.
/Monographs
In case you missed this publication, this is what An Anthropology of Nothing in Particular can look like.
Cutting through a thick discourse with an ethnographic knife is Jean Jackson’s superb Managing Multiculturalism Indigeneity and the Struggle for Rights in Colombia.
Nicolas Argenti’s lovely book on absence in Greece, with Remembering Absence: The Sense of Life in Island Greece.
/Blogs
A blog collection on Muslim Humanitarianism curated by Till Mostowlansky.
Girish Daswani’s blog on the “continuing presence of an elite, masculine, and imperial habitus within the discipline, which has been […] internalized by all of us, even non-white anthropologists” and the need to decolonialize anthropology.
/Media
On the return of scientific racism.
And for those cinematically Korean inclined, the Korean Film Archive is uploading many classic Korean films to youtube!
Here we are again with our monthly digest of readings that inspired us! For those of you who didn’t yet do so, check out also our recent guest reading list on “The Ethics of Care” by Patrick McKearney! Have a great summer, everyone!
/Articles
In line with the interest of this year’s NET panel at the FAS conference, Bob Frame’s Typology of Antarctic Futures.
Check out the new ejournal Roadsites, on the social life of infrastructure and a first issue on temporalities.
Another recent ethnography-centered journal – in French mostly but partly also in English – is the Revue Terrain. Note in particular the recent collective issue on Apocalypses curated by Matthew Carey. They also have an interesting blog.
/Monographs
Rob Borofsky’s critical contribution, An Anthropology of Anthropology: Is It Time to Shift Paradigms?, is available for download here.
Kathryn Yusoff’s A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None about “the politics of the Anthropocene within the context of race, materiality, deep time, and the afterlives of geology”.
/Blogs
We want to be part of the places where you can find the change that Zoe Todd invokes when arguing why we need to go beyond elite anthropology.
Ashanté Reese incites us think of ethnographic refusal as care, which may call into question imperatives of academic knowing.
Mariam Durrani on how to “remap the traditional distinctions between university and community through rigorous scholarship and a commitment to social justice”.
Allegra Lab’s thematic thread on statelessness, displacement and disappearance.
Reading list on indigenous research methods by Helen Kara.
Dear all, June is here and here is also this month’s digest with some work we find inspiring.
Inspiring is also what we would like this website to be like, and if you feel you would like to contribute to this with a guest blog or a guest reading list (maybe you have some time to write this summer?), you are more than welcome. Just get in touch with us!
/Articles
William Mazzarella’s new Annual Review piece on populism
A fantastic new special edition of Radical History Review on boycotting
A JRAI special issue on anthropology and surealism
/Monographs & books
Nina Trige Andersen’s new book, Labor Pioneers, on Filipino labor in Denmark
Rebecca Bryant and Daniel Knight’s The Anthropology of the Future
/Blog
Thinking Spain and the archives of empire
On the politics of photojournalism
On Turkish immigration to Germany
Obituary of Binyavanga Wainaina
On Queer Futures in anthropological research by Tom Boellstorff and Cymene Howe.
/Media
A 5 minute deconstruction of Charlie Chaplin’s use of food in his movies, bringing together themes of memory, poverty and the residue of trauma, the psychology of comedy.
Jian Liu’s photos of Tiananmen 1989
Trying to define the cultures of generations
Allegra Lab’s podcast roundup
Our Digest for May…some plants, animals and the non-human. A free e-book on tobacco, others on ethnographic film archive, links to blogs and interviews on subjects such as decolonizing the classroom, intimacy and ecologies!
/Articles
Doing ethnography with and around plants? Check out the plant ethnography special edition at Anthropology Today.
While thinking plants, let’s think some animals this month:
“Animal Transference and Transformation Among Wounaan” by Runk, Ismare and Conquista in the Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology.
“Animal’s atmospheres” by Lorimer, Hodgetts and Barua in Progress in Human Geography.
“Interspecies Engagement in Medical Anthropology” by Leslie Sharp in Medical Anthropology Quarterly.
And finally, the anthropology of traps in the Journal of Material Culture.
/Books
Andrew Russell’s Anthropology of Tobacco: Ethnographic Adventures in Non-Human Worlds. And it is open access! Support OA!
We think this is going to be an important book! Katherine Groo’s Bad Film Histories: Ethnography and the Early Archive.
For those of us digging back into a bit of Mary Douglas and thinking about purity and danger, and looking for a counterpoint/straw man/update…what have you, a free e-book (for May) of Valerie Curtis’s Don’t Look, Don’t Touch, Don’t Eat: The Science Behind Revulsion.
/Blogs
If you are teaching, you may like to read this interview with Girish Daswani on decolonializing the classroom.
Cultural anthropology’s “Embodies ecologies” series curated by Andrea Ford, probes “the relationship between changing bio-scientific ideas about bodies and the lived realities of bodies in contemporary societies”.
Emma Kowal’s blog at The Familiar Strange’s on how she weighted combining political activism and anthropology in her work on progressive white Australian anti-racists, a debate that always remains relevant.
Polar, the Political and Legal Anthropology Review now features the “ethnographic explainers” on their website. Read here from anthropologists about current political issues all over the world.
The “Intimacies of Dissent” collection of the American Ethnologist edited by Tobias Kelly explore “how dissent is both enabled and restricted by our most intimate ties”.
Listen to Judith Beyer’s keynote on the art of listening in “On little and grand narratives in Central Asia” at Allegra Lab’s website.
It is official! The winter is over, the new year started (for those who celebrate Nowrouz/Newruz). We wish you a wonderful spring!
Our digest of this month, and we will have a new guest reading list this week! Also, one last chance to submit an abstract for our NET sponsored panel on “Anthropologies, Futures, and Predictions” at the Biennial Conference of the Finnish Anthropological Society 29-30 August 2019, in Helsinki.
/Articles
A fantastic new piece on PowerPoint and corporate Korea by Michael Prentice in American Anthropologist (see his reading list for us here at the NET last year)
For the title alone, but also for the subgenre of theoretically and ethnographically revisiting the milieus of previous generations of anthropologists, Knut Christian Myhre’s piece in JRAI
Joseph Streeter’s new piece in Anthropological Theory on belief
Dimitri Tsintjilonis writes about how narrations of the encounter of the devil in Greece confuse past, present and future and what that has to do with the country’s economic crisis
Anthropological Theory’s Special Issue on “Politics In The Time Of “Post Politics”: Rethinking Anthropology’s Conception of The Political For The 21st Century” edited by Nancy Postero, Eli Elinoff and Nicole Fabricant
/Books
Stuart Kirsch’s important book from last year in engaged anthropology
Joelle Bahloul’s book from the 1990s on domesticity and microhistory
Although not out yet, looking forward to the publication of the Fernando Coronil Reader published next month, and maybe it pushes us to go reread his work now.
/Blogs
The American Ethnologist just published their Orientations to the future series, edited by Rebecca Bryant and Daniel M. Knight
As a reminder to be conscious about racial inequality in academia and work (more) toward inclusion, here is Zoie Todd’s latest contribution to Anthrodendrum
On Focaal’s Blog, David Bozzini talks with Gabriella Coleman about the ethnography of digital politics
Allegra Lab’s interview with Ather Zia on ethnographic poetry
/Podcasts
Aisha J. M. Sultan created a podcast with Helen Lee and Shoshannah Williams which offers candid, vulnerable, and realistic insight into the quotidian experience of doing ethnographic fieldwork https://culanth.org/fieldsights/when-fieldwork-breaks-your-heart/Media
A Monsoon Assemblage keynote lecture by Tim Ingold
Dear NET members,
Here is this month’s digest with readings that we hope catch your interest!
This time, we have more news! For this year’s NET event, we will be convening a (partly unconventional) panel on the topic of “Anthropologies, Futures and Prediction” at the Biennial Conference of the Finnish Anthropological Society (in Helsinki, Finland on August 29-30, 2019)! We hope that this will be the occasion to meet some of you in person! Please check out the CfP at the bottom of the digest. Click here for more information on the conference.
/Articles
The first issue of the new journal Public Anthropologist is out featuring a collection of articles on silencing and structures of power within academia.
A fascinating article on data centers in Iceland, and the unsettled and in-betweens of tech infrastructures, by Alix Johnson
From inbetweeness to improvisation in an article by Nur Amali Ibrahim in Anthropological Quarterly last summer.
Cigarettes and marketing in Indonesia, by Marina Welker in the current issue of JRAI.
/Monographs & books
Nomi Stone’s ethnographically inspired poetry on fictive Middle Eastern villages in US Military trainings.
In her monograph published last year, Radhika Govindrajan writes about how human and animal worlds interweave.
/Blogs
Caroline Gatt and Joss Allen imagine an educational institution that embraces an onto/epistemology of correspondence: https://issuu.com/deveronarts/docs/correspondence_version_5 or https://culanth.org/fieldsights/1654-sketches-for-regenerative-scholarship?fbclid=IwAR1r8N2k8PZWHBoJX0TaOWHJV3yId6dZDbljXCY3hPuBGqhxgrHU39qyuKw (text based).
Eric Plemons’ reflections about Trump administration’s ban of transgender people from the US military.
Allegra’s Hypertext Thematic week which offers insights into the exiting world of digital ethnographies curated by Andrea Pia. Curious about playing a digital ethnography? Try out playing Peng.
Somatosphere’s “Diability from the South” Series arranged by Michele Friedner and Tyler Zoanni.
Malini Sur writes about shape-shifting and fieldwork related trauma cures across national medical systems.
How to decanonize anthropology with teaching its history from the margins? Check out this syllabus.
/CFP
“Anthropologies, Futures and Prediction”
“The future is not what it once was. Technological, political, and infrastructural changes have all effected new ways, not only of imagining, but of predicting and realizing the future(s). This workshop seeks to locate itself at the intersection of the multiple ways in which the future is known and imagined, taking into account the dialectics between the researcher and the field. What exactly is the future? Do we distinguish, like Derrida, between a “predictable, programmed, scheduled, foreseeable” future, and l’avenir—the unexpected and unanticipated? How do the temporalities of our fieldwork and our professional experience of uncertainty inform the way we produce knowledge about conceptions of future and prediction? And what of the contexts and extra-contexts in which the ethnographic emerges? Ranging from the online aggregation of predictive data to financial instruments and algorithms, state projects of governance based on prediction, to dreaming, death, and afterlives, to urban infrastructural planning, this panel, sponsored by EASA’s Network of Ethnographic Theory, asks how the future is part and parcel of what constitutes the social in all its utopic and dystopic forms. As part of EASA’s Network of Ethnographic Theory’s sponsorship, papers of this panel will be submitted as a special issue to Social Anthropology/Anthropologie sociale.
In addition to the usual panel format, as described above, we will have an additional session in which panelists are invited to engage the thematic of their own and their own ethnographic and theoretical interventions through alternative media forms, and amidst a more broader and inclusive discussion of “Anthropologies, Futures and Predictions.” Thus, we are interested in having panelists present papers in the first panel, and have opportunities to show ethnographic film, audio, installation forms, and so forth, in the second.
If you are interested in participating, please contact us. Abstracts for papers will be due March 31st. There will be some funding available for EASA members!
The NET wishes a happy 2019 to everybody! We need hope and our best imagination in the face of continuous inequality, violence, exclusion… and increasing political irresponsibility.
The sadly late Roy Wagner’s piece about the “self‐transformative and tactical character of the reciprocity of perspectives and its effects on language”.
Participation and the way anthropologist can confront the “challenges presently being posed by embodied cognition” is the subject João de Pina-Cabral recent article.
Bruce Kapferer reflects on how anthropology (as a generator of theory) risks alienation in the face of “the growth of economic pragmatism coupled with the current apotheosis of science and technology”.
The most recent recent issue of ANUAC features a thematic section about “The Malinowskian legacy in ethnography” curated by Elisabeth Tauber and Dorothy Zinn with contributions on continuities and discontinuities of Malinowski’s heritage around questions of race, infrastructure, historical anthropology…
Another return/redux of the culture concept by Martin Palecek
Zarin Ahmad’s Delhi’s Meatscapes theorizing and describing the politicization of meat butchers in Dehli
Daromir Rudnyckyj’s Beyond Debt on Islamic Finance
Four field shout-out, new archaeology book, Foraging in the Past edited by Ashley Lemke
Casey Golomski’s Funeral Culture on living and dying in Swaziland
Laura Yakas on her ethnography of timelessness, madness and the workings of what she calls, citing Johanna Hedva (2016) the “current regime of neoliberal, white-supremacist, imperial-capitalist, cis-hetero-patriarchy”
Speculative Anthropologies are fascinating us not least since we published Sabine Mohamed’s reading list. If you want to imagine how to “resist despair and to craft tangible ways of shaping and repairing the worlds we still hope for”, check out this blog collection curated by Ryan Anderson, Emma Louise Backe, Taylor Nelms, Elizabeth Reddy and Jeremy Trombley.
Elizabeth Hanna Rubio and Xitlalli Alvarez Almendariz invite us to reflect on political engagement in ethnographic knowledge production around a question of vocabulary: undocumented or illegalized?
Kristóf Szombati gives insights into the recent protests against the so called “Slave law” in Hungary and how they connect to other contemporary anti-neoliberal movements.
A fascinating digital interactive by Stanford University Press on Filming Revolution by Alisa Lebow
Two popular pieces on rethinking the Frankfurt School at the Boston Review and at Vox
Useful New York Op-ed by Pankaj Mishra, on Brexit, the partitioning of India and Pakistan, and important for thinking not only politics of the moment, but the bureaucracies
For our French-speakers, here is a Q&A with Philippe Descola on the political, social environmental challenges of our times and his life’s work.
On mental health in academia at Editage
And let us not forget this month’s NET Guest Post by Smita Lahiri on “On Nonrecognition and Feminist Epistemology: Doing Ethnographic Theory with Mary Steedly”
Patrick McKearney
University of Cambridge
June 2019
In her reading list, I was amazed by how elegantly Megha Amrith held in tension the multiple meanings of care and the diverse bodies of literature that intersect in the anthropology of care. I doubt I can repeat the feat. So what I want to do, instead, is try to focus in on what we might mean by the ethics of care.
The ethnographic record shows relationships of care are imagined and practised with often unimaginably diversity. And it also suggests that it is rare for them to be anything other than heavy with moral significance. Such relationships are places where the meaning of human vulnerability is weighed, contested, and borne in strikingly different ways. And they are often the means for people’s most concerted and culturally specific attempts to become (or turn someone else into) a valuable, desirable, and capable person. Their daily rhythms can be just as full of the comforting intimacies of dependence as they are pregnant with longings to transform and transcend such intense involvement.
This was certainly the case in the communal care home for adults with cognitive disabilities in the UK that I lived and worked in for my first fieldwork. In this context, carers pursue some of their deepest egalitarian values either by trying to make the people with intellectual impairments they support just as independent as anyone else, or by trying to form mutual and reciprocal relations with them in their dependence. But carers are continually thwarted by the fact that they do not know another way of keeping these individuals alive other than through an unequal relationship in which they not only perform most of the labour but also take many of the decisions.
I am fascinated by the fact that such asymmetrical dependence persists in my fieldsite despite everyone trying to make it disappear. Is there something about the way independence is imagined and valued in Britain that excludes people with disabilities (along with children, the sick, and the elderly) and makes them particularly in need of care? Are carers missing some tricks that would make relationships of dependence less hierarchical – or is their oddity, instead, that they are so committed to making dependence so egalitarian? Is this kind of care difficult because it is an unarticulated and undervalued moral practice in Euro-American societies, or because this kind of unequal dependence and vulnerable intimacy is always exposing and relationally fraught?
Engaging these questions properly and ethnographically requires resisting our temptation to rely on ready-to-hand and moralistic ways of talking about care that offer simple solutions to intractable ethical difficulties, and obvious descriptive categories that cover over the complexity of intimacy and dependence. But thankfully there is already a whole world of research out there that can help us do just that: a very unsystematic selection of which I present here …[1]
Debility and Moral Imagination in Botswana: Disability, Chronic Illness, and Aging (2005) by Julie Livingston
Livingston’s historical ethnography traces the ways in which Tswana have morally imagined what places people in need of care, and how they have distributed responsibility for actually providing it within and between kinship networks, communities, and the state. It enables us to go beyond the romantic and despairing stories we tell about the role of care in the past in order to explore how the practical realities of dependency actually played out. It contributes to a rich vein of anthropology that explores the relationship between different patterns of care and local visions of debility and personhood.
See Also:
Love’s Labor: Essays on Women, Equality, and Dependency (1999) by Eva Kittay
Kittay’s contribution to a long feminist tradition of thinking about the ethics of care and its burdens is to focus on the asymmetrical nature of certain kinds of dependence such as that we all experience in childhood. Love’s Labor challenges liberal philosophies and polities that try to realise equality through assuming independence by drawing attention to the fact that this kind of care is premised on a disparity between givers and receivers. If we are to have justice both for those who need care and for those who give it, should we not start not with independence but with the asymmetrical forms of dependence that we all, in practice, need?
See also:
Between Will and Thought: Individualism and Social Responsiveness in Amazonian Child-Rearing (Forthcoming) by Francesca Mezzenzana
Care is essential to keeping children alive and to teaching them how to care for others, right? Not according to the Runa of the Ecuadorian Amazon who value independence so highly that they leave their children to fend for themselves from astonishingly early ages, and think this the best way to teach them to be responsible. This paper develops a long lineage of work in the anthropology of childhood that challenges widespread assumptions about the necessity of care, and with it the characterisation of Euro-Americans as concerned solely with autonomy.
See Also:
Serenity: Violence, Inequality, and Recovery on the Edge of Mexico City (2015) by Angela Garcia
If you are addicted to drugs in Mexico City your relatives might pay for you to be kidnapped, confined, and tortured. Morally abhorrent surely… or might it actually be a form of care? Along with a range of challenging work in the anthropology of care, this article forces us to think more deeply about the intimate connections between care and what we typically treat as its opposites: paternalism, distance, and even violence.
See Also:
Bad Souls: Madness and Responsibility in Modern Greece (2012) by Elizabeth Anne Davis
This book leads us deep into the most intimate and intractable complications of caring relationships conducted in the shadow of the competing ideals of state intervention and contraction, biopolitics and liberalism, dependence and freedom. Its attention simultaneously to the subjectivity of care recipients and the ethical dilemmas of those who support them alerts us to the range and depth of aspirations we bring to care, as well as to the way they so often go tragically awry when actual people and relationships exceed the ethical categories with which we apprehend them.
See Also:
Loneliness and Its Opposite: Sex, Disability, and the Ethics of Engagement (2015) by Don Kulick and Jens Rydström
Care is nice. And care can stop you from doing all the things in life you’d like to. Particularly if you have a significant disability and you want to have sex. This book invites us to face – with Danish sex-workers, parents, and professional carers – the challenge of transforming care from something that denies erotic encounters into something that enables them. How, for instance, can someone support a couple with disabilities to have sex without turning it into a threesome? At stake in these kind of questions is whether we can imagine a kind of care that opens rather than forecloses the exciting and exposing possibilities of adulthood – and whether there might not be more to life than care.
See Also:
[1] This bibliography is, in no small part, the result of reading some works in the anthropology of care over a long period of time with such perceptive scholars as Zuzanna Marciniak Nuqui, Tessa Morgan, and Giulia Sciolli.
