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- Convenors:
-
Ben Jones
(University of East Anglia)
Daniel Wroe
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- Stream:
- Displacements of Power
- Location:
- Julian Study Centre 0.01
- Sessions:
- Wednesday 4 September, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
This panel looks at local institutions and everday political culture in provincial places, not only rural villages, but also trading centres and towns.
Long Abstract:
How are local institutions and everyday political culture being challenged by the growth of small towns? In the developing world rapidly expanding cities have been the setting of much of the recent research on social and political change on the continent. They have also been the focus of much development oriented funding. We want to look at challenges in more provincial places, not just rural villages, but also the thousands of trading centres and towns that are becoming, perhaps, the dominant landscape of the developing world. To what extent are the theoretical frameworks developed in the context of the urban centres helpful for understanding changes in small towns or district capitals? How are youth and the emerging middle classes shaping institutions in provincial places? How might we link changes in larger and smaller urban centres? What are the limits of urban theories derived from megacities and how do they shape the way we consider social and political transformations in the world?
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Wednesday 4 September, 2019, -Paper short abstract:
Using an ethnographic case study from Malawi this paper explores whether 'trading centres' need to be theorised as spaces distinct from both 'rural' and 'urban'.
Paper long abstract:
Scholarship on migration in Malawi has concentrated on three main dynamics - internal movement between rural areas and major urban centres, internal movement between rural areas and transnational migration. This reflects the focus of research on the rest of Africa. Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in Malawi, this paper explores the case of a family's move from a rural village to a small trading centre. Examining the reasons behind the move in detail it suggests that trading centres provide unique social and economic possibilities to those people that live in them. The paper proposes that there is a need to theorise trading centres as distinct spaces of possibility.
Paper short abstract:
The paper ethnographically explores the sense of marginalization lived by rural communities in North-Western Italy. It analyses how rural communities negotiate a new cultural centrality through embracing quality food production and tourism.
Paper long abstract:
What is the future for Italian rural communities? They are living a fast marginalization of rural communities marked by the lack of infrastructure and depopulation, aging, and impoverishment.
The paper answers to this question by exploring ethnographically the ongoing institutional and social transformations in a small municipality in North-Western Italy.
The article reads the new forms of entrepreneurship linked with quality food production and tourism as an endemic response to the diminishing of the communities' condition. In so doing it points at the profile of a paradoxical dynamic: while it is increasingly difficult for villagers to get access to the services offered in the cities, urban dwellers are getting more and more interested in the traditions and products made in the rural areas, moving to the villages.
This paradox of distance foreshadows the future of small municipalities; a time in which rural communities could become little more than ethnic zoos for the anthropological curiosity of city inhabitants.
The paper is developed on the basis of the ongoing ethnographic work conducted by the author for over ten years in North-Western Italy.
Paper short abstract:
This paper looks at competing narratives around the movement against the naming of the student halls at the university in Sylhet. It shows how local politics are entangled with national discourses and might allow us to question transnational presumptions about the secular-religious dichotomy.
Paper long abstract:
This paper looks at competing narratives around the movements against certain names for the student halls at the university in Sylhet around the year 2000. The consequent conflict and protests, which resulted in prolonged closure of the university and profoundly impacted national electoral politics, have widely been interpreted as a conflict between 'secularist' and 'religious' or 'fundamentalist' groups. Other narratives, however, show that these movements were part of the power struggles of local politics in the context of highly factionalist party politics and interpersonal conflicts. Rather than assuming these aspects as alternative and mutually exclusive interpretations of the movement, this paper argues that these aspects are co-constitutive. The arguments are based on interview data, vernacular local newspapers and long-term fieldwork between 2015-2018, connecting this history to more recent incidents. Contestations around 'secularism', 'Islam' and 'religion' are highly entangled with party politics and partially function as signifiers of party belonging. The wider contestations about the names of students halls were thus at the same time about (non-)religious sentiments, struggles about the hegemonies of different parties, and a result of local politics and their embeddedness in patron-client relationships. Detailed ethnographic perspectives on politics in provincial cities might thus allow us to rethink not only the role of 'secularism' as a national contentious issue but also academic debates about the secular-religious dichotomy. The particular case presented also shows that local, national and transnational levels are interlinked without being mere reproductions of the same contentious configurations.