Paper short abstract:

Based on ethnographic work in the Latvian-Russian borderlands, this paper will reflect on "emptiness" as an object of study and a lens for analyzing how people and places become disconnected from and attempt to reconnect with what they understand to be meaningful life.

Paper long abstract:

Western philosophers have long written about emptiness as a malady of alienated and disenchanted moderns. However, in the once vibrant, but now deindustrialized Latvian-Russian borderlands, residents talk about emptiness as something that remains when the promises of modernity have been betrayed. When discussing it, they talk about the number of houses or apartments that stand empty and the number of people who have left. They describe how empty streets, stores, and homes produce discomfort, even nausea. For the locals, emptiness is not a temporary state of falling behind the global march to prosperity, but a transitional state between a world that has ended and a world whose contours are not yet visible.

This talk will reflect on "emptiness" as an object of study and a lens for analyzing how people and places become disconnected from and attempt to reconnect with what they understand to be meaningful life. It will mobilize the concept of emptiness developed on basis of ethnographic research in the Latvian-Russian borderlands as a "portable analytic" that can be useful for understanding contemporary reterritorialization of power that produces emptiness as an enduring form of life.

Paper short abstract:

Drawing upon research on urban renewal in the Polish city of Gdańsk, this paper examines the ways in which the production of empty spaces reconfigures the relationship between people and local history, and functions as political capital for those who promise to 'reorder' the city's past.

Paper long abstract:

Several studies in the social sciences have examined the ways in which urban renewal results in the reconfiguration of relationships between people and places. Yet the issue of how the production of empty spaces may serve to rewrite national and local history requires further exploration. Drawing upon research conducted in the Polish city of Gdańsk, this paper examines the redevelopment of the shipyard that was the cradle of Solidarity, the mass social movement that contributed to the downfall of the Socialist state in the 1980s. In official and popular discourses, the shipyard represents a monument to Polish freedom and a symbolic terrain where Poles articulate their relationship to the state and national history. However, despite the shipyard's significance in official discourses, many buildings associated with the history of the Solidarity movement have been demolished, and more are likely to be pulled down to make way for the construction of a shopping mall, luxury apartments and office space. In discussing how the emptiness resulting from the demolition of such buildings marks a transitional state between the city's industrial (and Socialist) past and a post-industrial era, the paper highlights a paradox: it pursues the argument that while the production of empty spaces sets out to erase some material traces of the city's recent past, it may also be political capital for those who promise to 'reorder' Gdańsk's complicated history, especially at a time when everything (including Poland's political situation) is fluid and uncertain.

Paper short abstract:

In contemporary China, where a compelling discourse casts depopulating rural regions as devoid of life as well as meaning, emptiness resides not only in deserted homes, but also in people's minds.

Paper long abstract:

Since the early 1990s, when the urban bias took root in government policies as well as people's minds, life in China's countryside has been denigrated in the popular imagination as empty of meaning. Whereas the city, housing the nation's growing middle class, is viewed as a place of affluence and progress, the country has come to figure as the city's binary other: a hotbed of poverty and a metonym for backwardness. The perceived dearth of opportunities for crafting meaningful lives in rural China fuelled more than three decades of migration to the cities. Probing the impact of a discourse that renders depopulating rural regions as 'voids' - empty not only of people but also of significance - on the lives of their residents, this paper shows that emptiness manifests not only in deserted homes, overgrown paddy fields, severed social bonds, and eerie silence, but also in people's minds. Emptiness is as much around as in those who either choose to remain or are forced to do so due to deprivation. Emptiness haunts them. It troubles and torments residents who wittingly or unwittingly adopt discriminating narratives and sustain them through acts of self-condemnation. Drawing on research in an emptying village in south-western Guizhou in 2015/16, this paper sheds light on the discursive work that goes into the production of emptiness as a mode of experience. Top-down and bottom-up classificatory processes work together with a changing environment to influence the ways in which people perceive and cope with emptiness.

Paper short abstract:

This paper is concerned with emptiness as gap between social and economic value in the status of tea within the local economy of a former collective farm in Georgia: from the centre of economy, to something devoid of economic value retaining social and symbolic value.

Paper long abstract:

In the wake of the demise of the Soviet Union, the workers of the Nasakirali sovchoz - a collective farm in Georgia that exported tea -, were faced with the urgent need to find an alternative source of income. At first, they experimented with goat rearing. Later, conflicts among local households led to abandoning this in favor of hazelnut production. While hazelnuts epitomize globalized capitalism (see Nutella), the tea plantations were left abandoned.

The emptiness with which this paper is concerned is to do with the radical reconfiguration of the status of tea within the local economy: from the centre of economy and work, it became devoid of economic value, while retaining its social and symbolic value. At the same time as the involution of the means of production (from mechanized to manual harvesting), there was an inverse shift in tea gathering, from an activity of work to leisure. This ethnography documents the polyhedral, all-pervasive nature of tea-talk: simultaneously a thing, a beverage, a plant, and the measure of social relationships, where emptiness is the gap between social and economic value.

This points to tea's declined economic career - the perfect symbol of the fallen dreams of socialist control over man and nature, tea plantations have reverted to quasi-natural space. This paper thus interprets such apparent absences in the space of tea (as plantations in the environment, as well as idiom-beverage in individuals' lives), through a Lefebvrian recollection of what is dissimulated in them in terms of power relations.

Paper short abstract:

I will explore conflicting notions of past, present and future in a series of mining-government meetings in Miguel Burnier, Brazil. Here, I ask whether imagining a different future for Miguel Burnier - through preserved architecture - may mitigate a troublesome present characterized by depopulation

Paper long abstract:

Cultural heritage, while preserving achievements of the past, is used by companies to offset future industrial activities. Looking at a series of meetings between a mining company, the affected community in the small district of Miguel Burnier in Ouro Preto, Brazil, and mediators between the former two - members of a municipal council for cultural heritage (COMPATRI) - I explore conflicting notions of past, present, and future. Having suffered from the mining industrial pollution for decades and subsequently from deficient infrastructure and depopulation when businesses closed down, residents in Miguel Burnier found themselves between a rock and a hard place. The expansion of the mining area desired by the current company brings the promise of a better future (jobs) and the risk of a worse quality of life (pollution). Residents' concern was at odds with the mining company's offer to invest in heritage in compensation for the expansion of its business in the area. When looking at hierarchies of priorities between the parties involved, I analyse the material implications of temporality and participation in development policies in empty cities.

Paper short abstract:

My paper will weave together a series of ethnographic short stories, born out of rumours, gossip and newspaper reports, that relate to the increasing number of empty properties in Central London, while simultaneously investigating the scope of storytelling within anthropology.

Paper long abstract:

When it comes to empty homes, most people in London have a story to tell. These stories come in different shapes and with different levels of insistence on factual accuracy. Some stories are shaped as complaints against the councils, and some are shaped as suspicions about new developments and new owners, while others as rumours about the ghosts that live in empty mansions. They may be referring to squatters that often occupy empty properties, or to houses with old and aloof inhabitants, where silence and stillness can stir up concern, or perhaps to homes which continue to get renovated, repaired and maintained by owners who live far away. I will compile an odd number of ill-fitting stories, which cannot be categorised into any single political narrative, to understand the ways in which people live alongside empty homes. Some of the characters of my stories comprise of two Polish workers who lost their lives while transporting a sofa to the second floor of an empty home in Cadogan Square, a bucket that was placed by the residents of the Sutton Estate to combat a leak that was left unattended by the council, a man obsessed with murder stories connected to his estate, and a group of cleaners who take care of empty homes in Chelsea. Through a patchwork of these distinct yet related stories, I hope to bring together the study of the home and the wider landscapes of mobile capital.

Paper short abstract:

This paper argues for the importance of the notion of emptiness in discourses on urban informality; and illustrates these proposals with data from an ethnographic study in Lima, Peru.

Paper long abstract:

In contexts of rapid urbanisation and informality, the struggle for space tends to obliterate the notion of emptiness. This paper engages with imaginations and memories of emptiness as analytical lenses to explore divergences between material advancements in livelihood construction and persistent land tenure insecurity in such contexts.

Drawing on a wider ethnographic study on resilience to water scarcity in an informal settlement in Lima, Peru, imaginations and memories of emptiness are explored to understand how, 12 years on from the occupation of an empty mountainside, residents' lives have become suspended within multiple and nested processes of rapid change.

The discord between residents' exhaustive investment into livelihood construction and continued absence of title deeds is charted along residents' memories of the empty landscape at the point of occupation; imaginations of the lives they hoped to create from this; and set against their lived experiences of struggles over now-scarce space.

As efforts to obtain land tenure are persistently thwarted by political obstructionism, yet communities continue to exhaust mental and material resources in pursuit of this goal, memories and imaginations of emptiness serve to unravel how processes of normalization and the interaction of multiple forms of scarcity have converged to obstruct feasible pathways towards the goal of titling provision.

As the empty fringes of rapidly urbanising areas continue to transform into highly contested spaces, the paper concludes by reflecting on the risks of disregarding the notion of emptiness in discourses on rapid urbanisation and informality.