Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the effective of prefigurative politics among youth in north India. It argues that prefigurative politics is often effective with respect to individual's mood and mobility but less useful as a tool for social development in the north Indian context.

Paper long abstract:

Reflecting their distrust with formal politics as a mechanism of social transformation, several young people in the village of Bemni, Uttarakhand, north India, have channelled their political energies into a self-consciously prefigurative strategy of 'being the change they want to see in the world', even as other youth adopt the anti-prefigurative strategy of becoming corrupt political brokers in order to make money for their young children (who they hope won't follow them into the business of brokerage). After outlining these forms of youth social and poltiical work, this paper focuses especially on how young people reflect on their prefigurative action. We argue that prefiguration provides self-confidence and a positive outlook even while it fails to transform local social structures in highly unequal settings.

Paper short abstract:

The paper looks at several campaigns to clean up India's public spaces. It raises key questions about the moral and ideological premises of such initiatives, and what kinds of politics and 'publics' of hygiene and sanitation are they advocating and trying to constitute?

Paper long abstract:

In this paper I examine recent campaigns lead by middle class youth answering the call by the Prime Minister to clean up India. I look at what might be the ideological and moral premises of such initiatives and prefigurative action? What kinds of politics and 'publics' of hygiene are they advocating and trying to constitute? What do they reveal about India's youth, including their fears, need and aspirations? And how are we to understand the articulations between these "grassroots" or "civic" movements, and the efforts of the state. I argue, that while such campaigns might harbour good intentions and present a benign and positive outlook for a future India; they also mask and contribute to the reality of exclusion and subordination.

Paper short abstract:

Working with children in NGOs in the slums of Delhi I was often asked whether these children were better off because of their participation in these projects. In response to this question it is worth asking 'when does development happen?’ and 'under what moral conditions do we define development?'

Paper long abstract:

Temporality and morality are central to any discussions of 'development.' In this paper I draw on my experiences with children in NGO spaces in Delhi to challenge the necessity of an evaluation of development on its own temporal and moral terms. I do not suggest that the ideal of 'better off' is irrelevant or entirely compromised by its place within a developmental temporality but rather point to the ways that for the children I worked with development wasn't about being better off in the future, but making the most of the present.

In the 'Media' NGO in which I worked, children were trained in story telling, acting and performance. Here development was not a future but a staging of the present. Extrapolating from my experiences in this organisation, I look more broadly to the phenomenon of what I call 'extra-curricular NGOs': organisations, which engaged poor children in activities, like sport, dancing, acting and music. These organisations promoted alternative pathways and subjectivities built around the possibility of dreams coming true. To criticise these organisations as deceitful: proffering dreams instead of concrete efforts to ameliorate poor living conditions, would suggest that these children have been deceived. This I argue is not the case. The children I worked with were above all pragmatists; their participation was context dependent and defined by a range of considerations of which affirming NGO agendas was only one. To answer the question 'when does development happen?' this paper points to 'moments' rather than trajectories, presents rather than futures.

Paper short abstract:

The presentation shows how, from the 1950s into the present, two strands/ideals of Indian nationalism in Bengal – ideals of paradise and utility, respectively – come to constitute a third: education as a moral imperative.

Paper long abstract:

The presentation focuses on the Bengali bhadralok, for a time India's nationalist elite, and three strands, or ideals, of Indian nationalism, as they intertwined and overlapped from the 1950s to the present. I argue that culturally-specific debates about paradise and utility (utilitarianism), respectively, are two strands/ideals that, in turn, serve as the 'constitutive outsides' of a third strand/ideal, one that bound together education and nationalism in a manner that remains central in India. Part One focuses on paradise, seen as a present rarefied through awe-inspiring and transformative experience, experience that is a sensory-yet-spiritual and aesthetic-yet-moral end-in-itself. Bengal's aristocrats claimed that they alone could produce, or approximate, such heaven-on-earth. Part Two analyses utilitarianism as expressed in the postcolonial imperative of progress. The virtue of utility is the purview of the entrepreneur, who harnesses technological innovation and economic efficiency. The utilitarian agenda is, perhaps ironically, to establish means-to-end(s) modes of being as the nation's ultimate goal. In Part Three the presentation shows that both strands/ideals promote transformation, each is haunted by its own sense of decline, and each makes respective claims about who among 'the people' are to guide the polity. Significantly, out of these two strands a third emerges and endures: the ideal of education as a way of bringing together paradisiacal and utilitarian thinking and in a manner so as to produce a democratic polity. The argument has important implications for contemporary discussions about the interrelations among democracy, liberalism, and theology.

Paper short abstract:

This paper analyses Papua New Guinea’s village courts as public forums in which moral possibilities unfold in open debate, in contrast with the metropolitan view that these courts have no role to play in the seeking of justice.

Paper long abstract:

Papua New Guinea has a very scant record of sustained collective political action, due at least in part to the country's renowned internal diversity and a certain politics of distrust that have developed since independence in 1975. Papua New Guineans tend instead to voice their hopes and concerns for the future in other public forums, such as in church - and in court, which at the village level is a public forum of the most openly accessible kind. But village courts are also highly constrained forums for action, in part because of their limited jurisdiction, but also because of the very low expectations of what is possible to do in these courts among the country's elites. In the words of one highly-placed legal official in PNG, village courts can only achieve "peace, not justice" - either because justice is unachievable in a setting as unstructured as the village court, or because rural Papua New Guineans have no concept of the just. It is the latter implication I take up in this paper, as the evidence from my own work in the village courts suggest that this is precisely where not only does something recognisable as "a public" manifest in PNG, but where notions of the good, the just, and the right are offered up for public debate and discussion. Rather than foreclosing on the possibility of justice, then, the village courts are one of the few successful institutions in PNG in which a just future is conceivable.

Paper short abstract:

My paper looks into the value of time in Fiji, with a particular emphasis on the moral value of waiting

Paper long abstract:

There seems to be an increasing number of people with spare time on their hands around the world. Whilst some of the recent research on waiting - or even boredom - witnesses how little some people can actually do to utilise their abundant time resources, others display the ability to transform spare time into something of worth, ranging from sociability to time banking.

In Naloto village, Fiji, leisure and relaxing hold a positive connotation - even moral value - to the degree where the act of waiting, too, carries an air of dignity. This is evident in the way in which the high chiefdom of Verata is widely recognised for an emblematic ability in "wasting time", as the phrase solosolo vakaVerata is often translated. But the phenomenon extends beyond Verata to Fiji more generally, from religious imagery to national stereotypes, and from everyday rhythms and practices of rural life to what I have elsewhere labelled "levelling with time".

My paper is part of an ongoing research project that looks into time as a medium of value in Fiji. In this paper I want to draw particular attention to the phenomena of waiting and time wasting. I look into the positive moral evaluation of time wasted and the way in which such valuation relates to the idea of time as something oriented towards production.

Paper short abstract:

How can revolutionary graveyards, which produce martyrs for a national history, allow for the official rewriting of history? This paper wrestles with this question in the context of Beijing's Babaoshan Revolutionary Cemetery.

Paper long abstract:

Babaoshan Revolutionary Cemetery was established on the outskirts of Beijing as a burial ground for Revolutionary Martyrs in 1951. Since then, a surprising variety of people have been buried there, including government cadres and military officers of various ranks, ordinary citizens who have been found to have made significant sacrifices for the Chinese revolutionary and national causes, and even some non-Chinese nationals deemed to have made such sacrifices. Elaborate rules about who may be buried where in the graveyard, the size of tombstones, and even the memorial hall where cinerary caskets are placed have evolved over the decades to reflect the hierarchical imaginary of the government of the time. As the Communist government in China has repeatedly revised the official versions of its history it considers to be political correct, the relatively permanent commemoration of martyrs raises significant problems for the presentation of history. This paper examines how cemetery officials have managed this problem with an eye on questions of ritualization, politics and history. If ritualization is understood as a mode remaking social and power relations by granting certain hierarchies a sacred halo, then how can the relatively permanent halos constructed in the Revolution Cemetery contain enough ambiguity to survive the political revision of history?

Paper short abstract:

This paper analyses responses of Hong Kong Buddhist practitioners to the 2014 Umbrella Movement and argues that Buddhist notions of suffering and salvation elevate the Movement to higher goals that transcend temporality and thus attribute to the Movement a prefigurative character.

Paper long abstract:

This paper will explore religious notions of past, present and future in Buddhist perspectives on the Hong Kong Umbrella Movement (late-September to mid-December 2014). This exploration will allow me to relate temporal ideas of 'democracy' and 'universal suffrage' to spiritual notions of engaged-Buddhism that transcend this temporality. I will first present a short overview of the emergence and development of the engaged-Buddhism movement in Asia since the mid-20th century. Next I will indicate how engaged-Buddhist notions of reducing suffering (both individual and societal) in the here and now relate to notions of Buddhist salvation. Finally I will relate these notions to the 2014 Hong Kong Umbrella Movement to argue that for some Hong Kong Buddhist practitioners, by using the discourse of engaged-Buddhism, the Umbrella Movement has become a transformative social movement using 'prefiguration' as moral strategy to connect the goals of the Umbrella Movement to goals with broader spiritual horizons. Thus, I will show that for my Hong Kong Buddhist informants, the Movement was not merely about attaining universal suffrage and fighting to keep the unique Hong Kong identity alive, but more significantly a possibility to prepare oneself and society for possible salvation.

Paper short abstract:

This paper considers the moral conceptualisations of both places and temporalities in discourses about Aboriginal people in Australia. Preliminary observations from recent fieldwork in the Kimberley region will be presented.

Paper long abstract:

In popular discourse, Aboriginal people rarely inhabit their own contemporaneousness in positive terms but are instead conceptualised as either dysfunctional remnants of previously rich cultural traditions and/or as marking time until more desirable futures arrive. Aboriginal people of the northeast Kimberley region of Western Australia are an exemplar of this characterisation as people whose present-day lives have little moral value other than in their potential to change. While some projects encourage moral accountability of the individual to determine their own life, in regards to shaping Aboriginal personhood it is largely the state that is tasked with creating positive social transformations. To these ends recent government announcements have 'foreshadowed' the withdrawal of funding to social services in particular places, part of a strategy to encourage Aboriginal people to relocate to more urbanised locales. Problematizing remoteness as part of the past is therefore tantamount to a moral assertion connecting Aboriginal people's geographic residence to certain kinds of behaviour and lives constructed as dysfunctional. Conversely other kinds of places such as towns and cities are constructed as benign waiting rooms where Aboriginal people will be able to seize their intended futures. Drawing on the discourses surrounding Aboriginal people's lives in Australia, this paper teases out the moral connectedness of temporality and place and will present initial observations from recent fieldwork in the Kimberley.