Click the star to add/remove an item to/from your individual schedule.
You need to be logged in to avail of this functionality.
Log in
- Convenor:
-
Tanya King
(Deakin University)
Send message to Convenor
- Format:
- Panel
- Stream:
- Sui Generis
- Location:
- NIKERI KC2.214
- Sessions:
- Wednesday 23 November, -
Time zone: Australia/Melbourne
Short Abstract:
The Sui Generis panel brings together papers that respond to the notion of 'Life Support' from varied points of view and environments.
Long Abstract:
The Australian Anthropology Society's 2022 conference invites contributions that respond to the notion of 'Life Support'. This theme draws our attention to the principles, processes, activities, and ideologies of humans and non-humans who variously foster, care for, legitimise, frustrate, and explicitly reject particular forms of life. 'Life support' is ambivalent. It evokes the discipline's focus on mutually-constituted lived experience, and the ethical drive of many disciplinary practitioners to work in support, advocacy, and activism, as well as the status of the discipline as one in search of a thriving future. Through this theme we invite panels, papers, events, provocations and performances that explore the strengths, gaps and frailties of anthropology as a practice, a discipline, a legacy, a strategy, a tool, a trope, and as a life.
'Life Support' evokes the institutions and technical apparatus that are increasingly necessary for survival at a range of scales, from the microscopic to the global. It suggests processes and situations at their beginnings and ends, the etiology of triage, entropy and palliative care, of birth, (re)creation and transubstantiation.
The theme is intentionally provocative and the conference organisers therefore also welcome contributions that critique ideas of 'life support,' including in relation to their associations with colonial histories of exploitation and pastoral care. We also welcome papers that do not explicitly speak to the theme but reflect research in the field.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Tuesday 22 November, 2022, -Paper short abstract:
This paper examines how work to support an alternative economy was inflected with entrepreneurial logics by the bureaucrats tasked with its promotion. It highlights how middle-class ideas of status and ethics influence policy realisation and, by extension, ideas of a dignified life.
Paper long abstract:
The Popular Solidarity Economy (PSE) is a policy framework of the Ecuadorian government to try and create an alternative economy that “puts people above the market” and supports people in living “una vida digna” (a dignified life). Employees of the National Institute of Popular Solidarity Economy (IEPS) are tasked with supporting the PSE. They do not just do this in their work, however. They also try to live their values through their consumption patterns.
In this paper, I pay close attention to a new ethical consumption regime among Latin America’s emerging middle classes—in particular, how the idea of middle-classness is, in some circles, becoming tied to a sense of being part of a global community of ethical consumers. I then show how the ethics of this consumption regime affect PSE policy realisation. IEPS staff are involved in both the consumption and production of ‘ethical products’ for the PSE. They influence both supply and demand for PSE goods and services. Their preferences and ethics influence how they realise policy and, as a result, the dignified life the PSE enables becomes shot through with markers of their emerging middle-class status.
By examining government bureaucrats, I show how economies are shaped by the ethics and consumption patterns not only of consumers but those who enact policy. Despite wanting to push against the insecurities created by capitalism, IEPS staff tended to promote economic forms that reflected their own precarious employment and the entrepreneurialism they valorised.
Paper short abstract:
This paper considers how untruth shapes the ethical projects of union members and leaders. Responding to the importance of reflection in creating ethical subjects, I assert the significance of (self)deception in responding to the set-backs and unequal rewards of progressive social movements.
Paper long abstract:
Long Abstract
Like many Global South unions, the Mineworkers Union of Zambia has fragmented into multiple near identical organisations. These unions rarely strike and they are incentivised to cooperate with management and to compete for members by offering workers gifts and financial services. Zambian union leaders increasingly find themselves responding to this disempowerment through obfuscation, self-deception and outright lies. Rather than dismissing their actions as corruption, this paper considers how untruth shapes the personal and collective ethical projects of union members, bureaucrats and leaders. Linking the anthropologies of unionism and bureaucracy, the paper explores how members and bureaucrats co-create public and populist secrecies, which protect unionism's utopian goals and narratives of strength from practices shaped by disempowerment. Responding to works that foreground the importance of reflection in the creation of collective ethical subjects, I assert the significance of (self)deception in responding to the constant set-backs and unequal rewards of progressive social movements.
Paper short abstract:
This article will discuss how Turkish people in the suburb of Broadmeadows in Melbourne, Australia, construct nostalgia for their earlier days as migrants. Further, it will highlight the didactic and ethical role this nostalgia plays within the Turkish community.
Paper long abstract:
This article will discuss how Turkish people in the suburb of Broadmeadows in Melbourne, Australia, construct nostalgia for their earlier days as migrants. Further, it will highlight the didactic and ethical role this nostalgia plays within the Turkish community. Turkish migrants began to manifest nostalgia for the earlier days in Australia once the dream of returning back to the homeland began to wane. This nostalgia presents an image of the ideal Turk to the younger generations in Australia and therefore helps to preserve the Turkish identity. This nostalgia also enables Turks to distance themselves from negative images of the contemporary homeland, allowing them to present themselves as authentic Turks; it also helps Turkish Australians to cope with their economic marginality in Australia. Nostalgia for the early days in Australia therefore has many purposes for Turkish Australians today.
Keywords: Nostalgia, Migration, Turkishness, Homeland, Identity, Generations
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines how Japanese-Indigenous Australian mixed descendants in Broome utilize memories of food cooked by their Japanese first-generation ancestors to support the narrative of being the product of mutual exchange relationships between Japanese migrants and local Indigenous Australians.
Paper long abstract:
This paper focuses on how food cooked by Japanese first-generation migrants to Australia is remembered and re-interpreted by their Japanese-Indigenous Australian descendants in Broome, Western Australia. From the 1880s to the 1960s Japanese migrants flowed into Broome to work in pearl-shelling and related businesses. Despite hurdles like the White Australia and anti-miscegenation policies, and internment and deportation during and after World War 2, some of them, mostly men, stayed and intermarried with local Indigenous people, resulting in mixed-heritage descendants who now live ethnically dispersed, seemingly ‘integrated’ into the multicultural society of present-day Broome. These descendants often brought up their Japanese forebears’ home-cooked food in conversation. Drawing on David Sutton’s argument that preparing and giving food are exchange processes, this paper investigates how food-related memories are utilized in this context. In particular, it highlights the utility of food-related memory in articulating a Japanese heritage in the absence of strong Japanese cultural traits reinforced by a cohesive ethnic community. Broome’s mixed-heritage descendants also use food-related memory to promote themselves as the legitimate product of mutual exchange relationships between Japanese migrants and Indigenous Australians, created through the pearl-shelling history of their hometown.