Paper short abstract:

Provoked by 'Awakening social sessions' collective in Kimberley, South Africa, who host spiritual, creative interventions across a historical, highly segregated mining town, 'Plasticity in the city' offers a mesopolitical scale for researching embodied postcolonial and post-Apartheid urban life.

Paper long abstract:

“These is something wrong with celebrating a space where so many people have died” Tshepo, organizer of ‘Awakening social sessions’, says about the ‘Big Hole’ mining complex tourism centre at the heart of the diamond rush city of Kimberley, South Africa. He says the ‘Big Hole’ “sucks all our energy”. Tshepo and his team organize music, arts, and spiritual social events for Kimberley youth, in a set of strategic spatial moves that defy the inequitable material and spatial distribution across the city. They aim to build solidarity and care for present and future generations, and to appease the anger of ancestors who endured mass burial in the mines, inhumane labour conditions, land theft, invasion, and with Apartheid, eugenicist classification and segregation. This paper reads their interventions across epigenetic and Southern urban studies. Plasticity signals both a techno-scientific post-genomic research buzzword that de-centres the gene and demonstrates embodied change via environmental ‘signals’ , and centuries’ old human-environment imbrication. The city is site of interwoven socio-political, ancestral and imagined future life. It is and can be productively theorized from the South (Roy 2009, Robinson 2006, Bhan 2019) – and specifically, from the spiritual and creatively facilitated 'Awakening social session's rather than the cavity of the ‘Big Hole’. Plasticity in the city offers a mesopolitical scale for understanding and better imagining of postcolonial and post-Apartheid collective life.

Paper short abstract:

In the absence of formal traffic signals, motorbike drivers in Mandalay, Myanmar, employ a wide range of communicative acts to keep the city moving and avoid catastrophe. This paper is a reflection on the interpersonal and affective infrastructure formed by these acts.

Paper long abstract:

Mandalay, the final capital of precolonial Myanmar, is the centre of Myanmar’s rich motorbike culture. The city centre is formed by a square grid, mostly without traffic signals of any kind: to navigate Mandalay, one must employ a range of communicative strategies that cannot be formally taught but need to be learned through experience. During fieldwork conducted in 2019 and 2020, I observed how motorbike drivers use horns, head signals, eye contact, and subtle speed changes to avoid collisions and keep traffic moving, particularly in Mandalay’s colonial-period central grid; during interviews and “go-alongs” (Kusenbach 2003) with Mandalay residents, I learned to see (and, importantly, to feel) the city. In Star’s (1999, p. 382) now-classic formulation, infrastructure ought to be apparently seamless, and only become “visible on breakdown.” By contrast, Mandalay’s road system gives rise to a kind of interpersonal infrastructure (cf. Simone 2004) that is constantly visible, never seamless, and forces the active enrolment of drivers and pedestrians into communicative acts. Taking Mandalay’s motorbike culture as my starting point, I attempt to outline an anthropology that looks up from the “rubble” and “future ruins” (Gupta 2018) of infrastructure-in-progress towards the affective states and cultural patterns that emerge from that very rubble.

Paper short abstract:

This paper looks at how Yangon, Myanmar can be observed through the affective relationship between Yangon’s residents and milk. It argues that focusing on the everydayness of this relationship shows how city life functions, and contests broader narratives of the city.

Paper long abstract:

Prior to the 2021 military coup, and 2020 COVID-19 global pandemic, Yangon, Myanmar was a boom city. Sprawling construction projects, freely flowing foreign capital and the new opportunities that had been attached to the ‘hope’ of a transitioning democratic government made the city buzz. And yet, underneath these grandiose statements of the city’s future, the city had been divided based on ethnicity, religion and race (Furnivall 1948, Pearn 1971). How did one belong in the city when one’s place in the city had already been determined through the above divisions?

To answer such a question we can look at an ubiquitous, everyday ritual that nearly all Yangon’s city residents participate in: drinking milk tea. A cup of milk tea has many different symbolic meanings, but it is its everydayness that allows us to observe Yangon through it. Milk tea roots neighbourhoods together, provides routine for residents, and embodies lived histories. This paper argues that the affective nature of milk tea, its regimes of tastes and multiple purposes facilitates belonging for Yangon’s residents which subverts broader political narratives of what the city should be. Based off fieldwork conducted in Yangon in 2019 and 2020, this paper seeks to address how affect and its everyday connotations can reveal new insights on how cities function.

Paper short abstract:

Urbanisation is often studied through a positivist lens and its motivation described within the terms of political economy. I argue that anthropology should challenge this by embracing less readily quantifiable phenomena, such as the physical and metaphysical networks of urban religion and kinship.

Paper long abstract:

Urban anthropology has the critical tools to challenge the generally positivist bent of urban studies. To illustrate this, I tell the story of Harshini, who grew up in Narahenpita in the 1950s, on the peri-urban fringe of Colombo, Sri Lanka. She lives on the same street where she was born, which, when by the time I met her in 2016, had become a major inner-city thoroughfare. I extrapolate and integrate her lived experience with other forms of evidence that show the demographic, physical, and metaphysical changes that occurred in Narahenpita over five decades of urbanisation. While it is well documented that Colombo has been shaped by the Sinhala Buddhist nationalist agenda (and its shifting political and economic stances), I contend that there are also forces that remain unseen in the urbanist's rush to count the countable. Harshini's family background, religious practices, and economic fortunes provide additional layers of knowledge, rather than contradict the received wisdom of the city's urbanisation. Colombo was and is a multireligious city where the narrative of centralising state hegemony is complicated by pluralist religious practice, and interwoven histories of migration, caste, and ethnic heritage. Although urbanisation is often discussed in terms of observable physical and demographic change (underpinned by political economy) I argue that our image of urban life is constructed more completely when we attend to less readily quantified phenomena.