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- 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 Wednesday 23 November, 2022, -Paper short abstract:
Practicing the Philosophy of Violence, the Chilean Urban Insurrection began on 18/10/19. COVID 19 suspended it on 27/3/22. In public space, self-identifying “el Pueblo” violently expunged those who were not, decimated material culture, de-civilized daily life, and selfied as cultural tourism.
Paper long abstract:
Che Guevara’s cold-blooded killing machine makes concrete humans abstract for the greater good of humanity. The Proletariat is self-identified by what is negated. In the Chilean Urban Insurrection, 2019, the self-identifying “el Pueblo” (the people) violently expunged those who are not el Pueblo from public space, decimating material and urban heritage and de-civilizing daily life. Plaza Baquedano, Santiago de Chile, was unmade as epicentre and monument to this national pandemic of violence. This psychodrama began with the attack on 20 Metro stations in 6 hours on 18 October 2019. Legitimized as the right to protest, the mass hysteria spread city-wide and then up and down the country. This collective psychosis claimed 27 lives through mass looting, arson, vandalism, and assault, before being suspended by COVID 19, 27/03/2020. The national cost was 4 billion USD in material damage and 3.5 billion in lost economic growth. The authors begin before the urban insurrection, mapping cultural tourism and responding with a series of community actions. After, the riots by the self-named Primera Linea (Frontline) are photographed and draw another cultural map. The authors’ protest interventions against the violence and destruction precede and follow the violent extortion of the writing of a new Constitution, the election of Lista del Pueblo (the People’s List), and the renaming of Plaza Baquedano as Plaza de la Dignidad (Dignity Plaza). To conclude, the authors intervene to assess foreshadowed laws of President Gabriel Boric’s coalition, Apruebo Dignidad (Pro-Dignity) for new Sites of Memory, and new Rights to Protest.
Paper short abstract:
Thinking with a drug policy reform network, this paper explores moments marked by "energy" or "aliveness". Utilizing both established theories of participation and recent approaches to multispecies liveliness, I explore how anthropology can contribute to understandings of participatory aliveness.
Paper long abstract:
Following ethnographic work with a drug policy reform network in Australia, this paper looks at moments when participants noted feeling “an energy in the room”—a sense of aliveness that ‘mattered’. These moments often took place when something new or somehow lively emerged: a new movement, a new sense of direction, or when an old disagreement or misunderstanding was worked through. This sense of energy may not be particularly surprising: Christopher Kelty has written about the ways in which, despite academic analyses of participation being “bloodless”, actual experiences of participation—often marked by connection with another or with a ‘mood’—are full of a sense of aliveness. Yet this “immediate, emotional experience of participation” (2019: 9) is rarely attended to.
While recent work on the ‘vibe’ or aliveness of connection or “something happening” has been written about by ethnomusicologists and anthropologists of surfers (Mark 2017, Rodger 2016, Witek 2019, Waitt and Frazer 2012), it is less commonly spoken about in policy worlds. And yet, ‘energy’, ‘aliveness’ and the ‘vibe’ are all routinely attended to in these worlds, even when such concerns were not supported by groups’ Key Performance Indicators. How can anthropology contribute to understandings of such aliveness and, perhaps, even to supporting spaces that allow for it? Attending to older theories of participatory experience, such as those of Lévy-Bruhl and Durkheim, alongside more recent geographical, architectural and multispecies approaches to atmospheres and liveliness, this paper considers what anthropology might have to offer for understanding—and perhaps supporting—participatory aliveness.
Paper short abstract:
The Covid-19 pandemic has caused disruptions in everyone’s life, including refugees who are already living on the margins of society in Malaysia. Based on ethnic Rohingya lived experiences during the pandemic, this paper highlights their vulnerabilities in three aspects: mobility, precarity and temporality.
Paper long abstract:
The Covid-19 pandemic has revealed the vulnerabilities of marginalised groups in society, including refugees. Malaysia does not recognise refugee status despite hosting more than 184,000 refugees and asylum-seekers registered by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). Without official status, refugees do not have the right to work, no access to formal education and limited access to healthcare. Multiple lockdowns and economic downturns caused the loss of livelihoods to many, especially foreigners with no legal documents to stay and no right to receive government assistance. When citizens are prioritised over non-citizens amidst rife xenophobia during the pandemic, refugees’ lives become more insecure with the hostile socio-political environment on top of the restrictive legal structure. Using Rohingya, the stateless ethnic group from Myanmar, which forms the biggest refugee group in Malaysia, as a case study, this paper highlights refugees’ vulnerabilities in three aspects: mobility, precarity and temporality. It will reflect on the lessons learnt based on the refugees’ lived experiences and what should be done to move forward. This research is based on ethnography conducted in Peninsular Malaysia in 2020-2021 with the refugee community and other relevant stakeholders.