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- Convenor:
-
Arvid van Dam
(University of Bonn)
- Chair:
-
Leila Dawney
(University of Brighton)
- Formats:
- Panels
- Stream:
- Environment
- Location:
- Queen Elizabeth House (QEH) SR2
- Start time:
- 19 September, 2018 at
Time zone: Europe/London
- Session slots:
- 2
Short Abstract:
This panel seeks to understand the processes of unmaking and ruination in terms of their affective and creative qualities. It sheds light on the intertwinements of affect and (derelict) materiality, asking what social forms and imaginations inspire and emerge from ruination.
Long Abstract:
The goal of this panel is to stimulate debate on the processes of unmaking and ruination in terms of their affective and creative qualities. Departing from an understanding of ruination as an ongoing and active process, this panel engages ruins not through nostalgic contemplation, but interrogates the making of, and life among, ruins in the contemporary post-colonial and post-industrial world. In doing so, it sheds light on the intertwinements of affect and (derelict) materiality, asking what social forms and imaginations inspire and emerge from ruination and the creative-destructive processes of unmaking.
Ruination can take many forms. Across the globe, rural abandonment is depleting villages of its inhabitants; in mining regions, shifting towns respond to the growth of the mines they depend upon and leave behind their former walls; industrial and urban decay are often seen as dangerous voids in communities or as potential sites for regeneration; and forced displacement and violent conflict shatter ways of life and built environments. Recognising the multiplicity of forms of ruination, this panel seeks to bring together a variety of ethnographic studies in different contexts, including violent and non-violent, and rural and urban settings.
The panel's discussant will be Dr Yael Navaro-Yashin (University of Cambridge), who will draw on her expertise in ruins, ruination and environmentally produced affect.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Orietta Marquina Vega (Pontificia Universidad Catolica del Peru (PUCP))
Paper short abstract:
This paper seeks to recognize the intertwining of affect and derelict materiality emerged during artistic interventions of abandoned houses in process to be destroyed in Lima during 2008 to 2011. These acts of resistance helped to overcome dramatic changes of the urban face of the city.
Paper long abstract:
After more than a decade of applying a liberal economic program and to put in jail the head of terrorist group Shining Path, Abimael Guzman, Lima´s landscape had changed. There were many abandoned houses in the richest areas as result of people running away from Peru at the 1990s because of the internal war. The economic growth brought new foreign capitals interested in investing in Peru; but, new ways of being alive in Lima, too. The city had to make room for the bars, restaurants, malls, etc. were needed.
All along the city you would find large empty derelict houses showed that although they had been relevant to their owners and those to society, now they had to clear the path for the new inhabitants Lima was welcoming. Urban landscapes are configured by the natural, the historical, the social and the cultural of the scenes and encounters that take place at the city; but the brotherly fraternal bonds, the ideological, the hopes and memories of their inhabitants as well.
Artistic interventions of these houses about to be demolished was a way to resist the new social relations the new building proposed to the city as an urban space and to its inhabitants. There was no space for boys playing football on the streets, nor girls and boys flirting at the corners. Young artist decided to witness from its ruins, at least for some days, the world they were forced to say good bye.
Sofya Shahab (Institute of Development Studies)
Paper short abstract:
Through ethnographic encounters and analysis of the Islamic State's propaganda outlets, this paper will explore the creative-destructive processes of intentional unmaking undertaken by the Islamic State and its impacts on relationships to heritage, identity and community at the local levels.
Paper long abstract:
Places are formed through human interactions with space at the same time as those places shape human action; playing a vital role in the formation and realization of identities. Drawing on participant observation and oral histories produced in collaboration with Syrian and Iraqi refugees currently residing in Jordan and Lebanon, this paper will investigate the affects of heritage destruction by the Islamic State. Through ethnographic encounters and analysis of the Islamic State's propaganda outlets, it will establish the creative-destructive processes of intentional unmaking undertaken by the Islamic State and the impacts this has on relationships to heritage, identity and community at the local levels. As such, this paper will highlight the ways in which the Islamic State has specifically sought to establish their own identity through the destruction of the identity of others. It will also highlight resilience in the responses to this destruction by minority groups who have been targeted by this violence: exploring ongoing expressions of heritage and identity, as well as how these are reformulated in response to the destruction of place. This is important because a majority of commentary has focused on the universal value of heritage and the significance of its loss at an international and national level. By refocusing attention on local responses and those who are most directly impacted, this paper will enhance understandings of how the ruination of ruins can work to create and recreate identities and community.
Aet Annist (University of Tartu and Tallinn University)
Paper short abstract:
Based on fieldwork in South East Estonia, I will consider how indifference to and trivialisation of potentially damaging increase in logging arises in socially fragmented rural regions, and what role do cultural heritage allegiances play in this.
Paper long abstract:
Since several recent changes in logging policies, Estonian population has become alert to the possibility of unsustainable forest loss. This awareness has triggered intense debates in the conventional and social media, but has also led to actions such as protests and new organisations set up in response to legally questionable or unethical logging. In several communities in the North Eastern Estonia, logging has, through the aesthetics of destruction, ruination and loss, activated people to organise in previously unforeseen ways.
On the other hand, similar scale of logging has failed to have a similar effect in the South Eastern part of the country, despite the fact that the forest produce (e.g. berries and mushrooms) has been an important source of income for many locals ever since the difficult post-socialist years in the 1990s.
Drawing on my long-term fieldwork in rural Seto country in the South East, I will discuss how the same level of ruination in the forests is presented and perceived differently in regions with high social fragmentation. Seto country is recognised as a cultural heritage region, and boasts a considerable "heritage elite". I will reflect on the different views the members of this elite have on destruction of the culture and the forest, and the juxtaposition of this with the lives of the emerging lower classes.
Arvid van Dam (University of Bonn)
Paper short abstract:
This paper addresses the potential for anthropology to address unmaking by reflecting on how the presence of, and life among ruins, reveals the affective character of abandonment.
Paper long abstract:
Rural abandonment can be considered the flipside of rapid urbanisation. Globally occurring, abandonment threatens livelihoods and cultural heritage, leaving behind vulnerable spaces. This paper presents an ethnographic account of the lives of people in a village in the south of Spain and their relations to their material surroundings; of neighbours who know they are the last ones to ever live there, see their village crumble apart bit by bit, and recount stories of how life used to be and of the choices they have had to make that eventually led to irresistible abandonment. In this context, I interrogate the process of un/making of material structures, as well as the fabric of social life. Unmaking, I argue, appears not a simple, careless destruction, but as historically self-conscious and selective, engaged and affective. Unmaking relates to stories of pasts and challenges the possibility of futures, and in so doing coincides with hopeful or desperate forms of making.
Jodie Asselin (University of Lethbridge)
Paper short abstract:
This paper uses the ruins of abandoned farm fields as a space to contemplate (over)growth and the effects of land use policy on how the material reality of ruralness changes together with its perception of conservation, productive space, and social value.
Paper long abstract:
Ruins are the material and social consequences of wider processes; they are sites of what once was and sites of continued habitation and imagination. As such ruins stand between present and past, binding change to single locality where the consequences of economic, social, or political processes manifest in the lives of those who live within them. This paper will contemplate the space of abandoned farm fields in southwest Ireland as bureaucratic and economic ruins. In this case study, the claims for abandonment revolve around onerous land use policy, conservation initiatives, and aging farm families. Once abandoned, fields are overtaken by thick reeds and water, altering the material and cultural landscape. These ruins are then reimagined by locals and planners in binaries, as detrimental to or beneficial for local biodiversity; as natural vitality or social degradation; as future possibility or past failure. Meanwhile, they are lived sites of habitation for human and non-human beings and are the physical consequences of legislative decision making in far off places. What do these rural ruins signify materially and socially, and how can tracing these sites back to their bureaucratic origins help us understand the unmaking and remaking of rural livelihood in a way that privileges the spaces of daily life?
Eduardo Brito-Henriques (Universidade de Lisboa) Daniel Paiva (Universidade de Lisboa)
Paper short abstract:
In this paper we propose to explore the life of urban wastelands. That is, we will unveil the actions that take place in these spaces, their human and non-human authors, and the dynamism that those actions produce in the space itself, provoking sensitive changes in the landscape.
Paper long abstract:
We depart from the concept of 'evental geography', outlined by Shaw (2012) to designate an approach to the geographic world focused on events, which he defines as "the transformation of a world by inexistent objects and resulting change caused by their appearance" (622). More specifically, we want to disclose the events that take place in urban derelicts, thus disproving the common idea that wastelands are lifeless, hollow spaces.
Our exploration of the life of urban wastelands is based on two case studies in Lisbon, Portugal. One is an abandoned gas plant, located in the Eastern Zone of Lisbon, historically the industrial and proletarian part of the city. The other is a former aquatic amusement park, located on the Western Zone of the city, in a high-class neighbourhood. We conducted fieldwork in these sites over the last year, including non-participant observation, sound recollection, ethnoarcheology/archeology of the contemporary past, and a few interviews with users of the spaces. The work of ethnoarcheology was especially important. For González-Ruibal (2014: 1686), ethnoarcheology consists of collecting and identifying elements of abandoned material culture and detritus of contemporary societies, to understand behaviours through them and to know "intimate stories about ordinary women and men".
Our findings expose the subtle life of urban derelicts, composed by humans who dwell and circulate, drawn by the affordances and affective emanations of material remains; animals that look for food and shelter; plants that colonise new terrains and grow; and materials that change due to wind or water erosion.