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- Convenors:
-
Catherine West
Matt Barlow (University of Pennsylvania)
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- Format:
- Panel
- Sessions:
- Tuesday 30 November, -
Time zone: Australia/Sydney
Short Abstract:
The city is a challenging ethnographic field site which is often conceived as a place of material, political, and economic excess. This panel aims to reimagine the city as a site that also includes the immaterial, ideological, virtual, and spiritual.
Long Abstract:
'That we construct "religion" and "science" is not the main problem; that we forget that we have constructed them in our own image - that is a problem.'
Bell (1996, p. 188).
We invite you to consider how anthropologists might have constructed 'the city' in their own image, and promptly forgotten that they have done so. As a large physical entity with complex fast-moving parts, the city is a challenging ethnographic field. It requires 'political imagination' (Hoffman 2017) and a maddening flexibility to appreciate its specificities and holism simultaneously, the kind of reflexive work that anthropologists do best. However, while the anthropology of the urban has the ambition of 'seeing like a city' (Mack & Herzfeld 2020) it struggles to find a position that balances both affinity and distance. For example, recent urban anthropology tends to overlook kinship and religion to instead focus on political economy. Is this an un-reflexive repetition of Durkheim's separation of the sacred and the profane, exacerbated by anomie? Or perhaps an attempt to remain relevant within an extant neoliberal system, where religion is out, and infrastructure is in? What gets obscured in the assumption of the city as a secular place of development and material excess? We invite papers that speak to the theoretical, methodological, and ethical challenges of an urban anthropology that is attuned to the immaterial, ideological, virtual, and spiritual.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Tuesday 30 November, 2021, -Paper short abstract:
The author discusses the role of performances in city-making processes. Based on two urban case studies from Croatia, the author analyses the creation of performative spaces as a way to imagine and activate urban futures.
Paper long abstract:
The author discusses the role of performances in city-making processes. The majority of texts on urban planning focus on the architectural solutions, as well as political, ideological, technological and economic factors that influence the material creation of a city. In such studies, performances and everyday practices are often treated as temporary interventions in the urbanscape, which are not of permanent value in defining and understanding the city. This paper challenges that approach and highlights the importance of performances in creating the city as a lived space. It examines ways in which performances bring to life or alter the affective capital of urban spaces. In doing so, it brings together the complementary perspectives of “social production” and “social construction” of urban space (Low 2006, 2017). In this paper, performances are also treated as practices of imagining and activating urban futures.
The author draws her insights from two case studies in Croatia. The first example focuses on public spaces in Zagreb, the country’s capital, and the performances that celebrate or comment Croatia’s accession to the European Union. The second case study deals with the harbour city of Rijeka and the cultural events planned, but partially realized due to COVID-19 epidemic, in the frame of the 2020 European Capital of Culture programme. Based on those examples, the author analyses the designing of performative spaces as a way to (re)create a city as it should be, to affirm, negotiate or transgress city policies, orientations and developmental strategies.
Paper short abstract:
How do religion and nature interact in myriad ways in producing the social fabric of the city? Drawing on the architectural, material and religious qualities of the Peepal tree shrines, the paper looks at how tree worship and tree shade are significant actants in shaping the urbanizing Bangalore.
Paper long abstract:
Peepal tree shrines are a common site in Bengaluru. It consists of a Peepal tree, Neem tree and a serpent stone on a raised platform, making it a primarily religious space where people come to pray and tie sacred threads to fulfil wishes. While they were part of the rural fabric of Karnataka constructed to safeguard the villages, with the growing urbanization in Bangalore, most of these shrines continue to blend with the city. Given the large circumference of Peepal tree that provides a widening tree shade and the elevated platform, they are also an ideal social space for people to meet and chit-chat. Men and women sit under the shade to watch the city unfold in breeze. For many migrant workers, it is a good resting place. Autorickshaw drivers find it the ideal place to park their autos for the shade. As people engage in idle sitting, it also becomes an informal bus station as distinct from the formal bus station. Roadside vendors place their carts under the tree shade. These gatherings enable many small-scale kiosks around it. These everyday events which in itself make the city cannot be understood without the material and architectural properties of Peepal tree shrines and the tree shade. The relative non-tangibility of shade also makes it an understudied theme in urban formation. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Bangalore, the paper will explore how tree worship and material qualities of the Peepal tree shade are significant in shaping the urban life.
Paper short abstract:
In this presentation, I aim to instigate a discussion about what an anthropology of tropical urbanisms might look like. This might include bringing environmental anthropology into the city to think about 'urban environments' alongside the displacement of the temperate climates of the global north.
Paper long abstract:
Many urban infrastructures carry with them an ecological disposition of the global north. Underground sewers were invented in Paris and London in the late 19th century, incineration of waste is championed by Sweden who claim they have 'run out of waste', and much of the worlds infrastructures continue to rely on a combustive model of energy based on fossil fuels that can be traced back to the invention of thermodynamics in Glasgow in the early 19th century. What might a city look like if it were instead imagined from a tropical environment, and what can anthropology contribute to such an endeavor? Building out of my doctoral fieldwork in Kochi, India and my subsequent engagement with a research collective in Darwin, Australia, I want to think through what an anthropology of tropical urbanisms might look like. In particular, I am interested in generating conversations about pedagogy, method, and multi-modal outputs that engage with imagining an anthropology of tropical urbanisms.