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- Convenors:
-
Teruko Mitsuhara
(University of California, Los Angeles)
Matthew McCoy (Anthropology)
- Formats:
- Panels
- Stream:
- Politics
- Location:
- All Souls Wharton Room
- Start time:
- 19 September, 2018 at
Time zone: Europe/London
- Session slots:
- 2
Short Abstract:
This panel examines the ways in which societies, communities, and individuals come to form fragile barriers and estrangements between themselves and others. We ask, in what ways do people imagine, contest, and normalize the creation and maintenance of divisions?
Long Abstract:
The wall has again become the dominant trope in current discourses and imaginaries. For some, walls signify the potential for utopia and for others, the wall serves as protection against those beyond. Accordingly, this panel examines the ways in which societies, communities, and individuals come to form fragile barriers and estrangements between themselves and others. Recently, Wendy Brown (2010) has argued that during periods of waning State sovereignty, walls "produce not the future of an illusion, but the illusion of a future aligned with an idealized past." We want to open a space for ethnography to address the varieties of practices, interactions, narratives, ideologies, and subjectivities emerging in such spaces. We are, however, aware that walled spaces or enclosures within the contemporary global context are what Peter Sloterdijk calls, intertwined "co-fragile systems." Using the metaphor of "foam," Sloterdijk conceptualizes society "as an aggregate of microspheres (couples, households, businesses, associations) [...which] are layered over and under one another, yet without truly being accessible or effectively separable from one another" (2016). In this way, we can see communities as precariously layered by multiple and porous enclosures. We encourage panelists to explore their ethnographic data on segregated or enclosed communities to address the role of participants' (co-)constructed imaginaries in constituting barriers. These barriers may take form in border regions, religious enclaves, ghettos, intentional communities, gated neighborhoods, and other spaces. In short, we ask, in what ways do people imagine, contest, and normalize the creation and maintenance of divisions?
Accepted papers:
Session 1Paper short abstract:
This paper focuses on a utopia project comprised of international and Indian religious migrants to rural India. It explores how the commune has become a 21st century critique of today's "societies of control" as people attempt to disentangle from capitalism and create their own world.
Paper long abstract:
The communitarian ideal defined as "an ideological template emphasizing sharing and community" (Bennett1975) holds a longstanding place in the Western tradition. From the early and medieval Christian sects rebelling against the Church to the 19th century socialist utopias of French theorists like Fourier and Saint Simon critiquing emergent bourgeois capitalism, the "commune" has become an expression of true modern self-fashioning for social reform on the community-wide level. The last two decades have seen a proliferation of "intentional communities" and utopia projects, and this paper explores how the commune has become a 21st century critique of today's "societies of control" (Deleuze1992). Drawing from eighteen months of fieldwork, this paper focuses on a religious utopia project where international and Indian families are moving to Mayapur, a rural village in West Bengal, India to create a homeland for devotees of Krishna and model a "spiritual UN" for the world. In the last decade, rapid urban-to-rural migration to Mayapur has transformed the Bengali village into a 5,000 member international town. This paper focuses on what the search for utopia means for people opting out of mainstream society. Specifically, I focus on interviews from and other ethnographic data on parents who have migrated to Mayapur to leave the "rat race of the material world" to create a better life for their children. This paper addresses how these utopians create boundaries for their community, situate themselves in opposition to the world, and (dis)entangle their lives in pursuit of the "good" life.
Paper short abstract:
Based on ethnographic fieldwork with Protestants and Catholics who live on opposite sides of a series of peace walls in east Belfast, this paper examines how these walls have shaped the possibilities for cultivating a good life amidst the ongoing legacy of conflict, poverty, and segregation.
Paper long abstract:
Nearly fifty years ago, walls began emerging between Protestant and Catholic working-class neighborhoods in Belfast, Northern Ireland during the outset of "the Troubles." Some of these walls were built by residents to protect their homes, but soon afterwards the official State policy mandated the construction of "peace" walls by the British Army as a temporary measure to quell sectarian violence. Today, twenty years after the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement, these walls remain. Life within these walls is shaped, in part, by interactions with them. Through a person-centered ethnographic approach, this paper aims to show the everyday ethics and moral sensibilities of Catholic and Protestant residents who face localized security mechanisms such as "peace walls," CCTV, and continual police surveillance. This paper also engages the recent "ethical turn" in anthropology to frame the ways in which individuals cultivate a sense of moral personhood amidst the walls. Based on ethnographic fieldwork with Protestants and Catholics who live on opposite sides of a series of peace walls in east Belfast, this paper examines the manner in which these walls have shaped the possibilities for cultivating a good life amidst the ongoing legacy of conflict, poverty, and segregation. Individuals on each side of the wall often describe experiencing the mood of "bitterness" that prevents ethical cohabitation. The segregated spaces created by the peace walls have become "moral laboratories" (Mattingly 2015), and this paper shows the manner in which these moral subjectivities captured by local discourses on"bitterness" and "walls in the mind" are often elided by counter-discourses promoting Belfast's "post-conflict" status.
Paper short abstract:
The paper will map some of the larger, complex network of transnational private and public actors who advocate for or against the use of electronic monitoring of migrants and analyze the experience of border control in the most intimate spheres, in homes and on bodies.
Paper long abstract:
The electronic bracelet, developed 40 years ago for the criminal justice system, is often promoted as a cost-effective alternative to immigration detention, by the very same corporations that were central in the expansion of the 'criminal industrial complex' and the 'immigration industrial complex'. Migrants can now be monitored at a distance in their homes, at their jobs or as they move around in public space. At the same time, they are traceable at all times and can quickly be arrested if they disrespect a curfew or if their immigration case amounts to a deportation.
First, the paper will map some of the larger, complex network of transnational private and public actors who advocate for or against the use of electronic monitoring of migrants, with a focus on the political and economic logics which have contributed to the spread of this new technology of confinement and its application to the wrists of increasing numbers of migrants.
Second, based on ethnographic fieldwork among so-called 'criminal deportees' in New York who have experienced electronic tagging, the paper will analyze the ways in which these new technologies of confinement are experienced and embodied, when border control is ensured in the most intimate spheres, in homes and on bodies.
Paper short abstract:
Drawing on fieldwork conducted in rural Central France (Allier), I will look at discourses about linguistic practices qualified as "patois" in contrast to French, and the effects on the regimentation and hierarchization of people, of their social-semiotic association with spatiotemporal ensembles.
Paper long abstract:
France is generally said to consist of three romanic language areas: to the North, the Langue d'oïl, to the South, the Langue d'oc or occitan, and to the East and around the city of Lyon, what is known as francoprovençal. But this "tripartition of gallo-romania" (Tuaillon, 1976) is more than just a description of linguistic status, as it emerged scientifically in contrast to the putative existence of a homogeneous modern French nation, with only one language (standard French) (Zantedeschi, 2012). It is to be apprehended as an integral part of French nation-building, through a paradoxical process of both glorifying the diversity of folklore and languages within the Nation, and using this extreme diversity to justify the necessity for a monolingual, Parisian-centered state (Thiesse, 1997, 2003).
Stemming from this historical linguistic ideological discourse (Schieffelin, Woolard & Kroskrity, 1998; Silverstein, e.g.: 1979, 1992, 2003), the urban/rural, central/peripheral, native/foreign distinctions are nowadays reproduced and contested in metalinguistic discourse, and mapped onto social personnae (Agha 2005). They thus account for the contrastive emergence of images of territory, epoch and humans as social beings, of what Bakhtin called chronotope (1981).
Drawing from fieldwork conducted in a rural community in the Allier département (Central France), I will analyze the process of mapping categories of the rural vs. urban onto speaking selves and others, thereby essentializing or even naturalizing the rural peasent persona, and its (self-)marginalization within French national spacetime, through the chronotopic formulation (Agha 2007, 2015) of the infra-national border.
Paper short abstract:
Through an ethnography of rumours, knowledge claims, and daily practices among Malian Kel Tamasheq in Bamako, this paper enquires into the formation of heterogeneous positions in relation to this collectivity's own imagination, the state, and the current political crisis.
Paper long abstract:
In 2012 a Kel Tamasheq-led rebellion expelled the Malian army from the northern regions and proclaimed the independence of the new state of Azawad. Although the latter was short-lived, this outburst sparked an ongoing insecurity in the region, coupled with radicalisations of religious armed groups, fraudulent regional trafficking, and the establishment of foreign forces and the UN mission, MINUSMA, in the country. While peace accords fail to be implemented, in Bamako, the Kel Tamasheq community is caught into (re)framing its position toward the crisis, the state, and its own collectivity. These processes unveil a plethora of heterogeneous positions.
Based on an ethnography of political imaginaries among Kel Tamasheq families, this paper enquires into the formations and normalizations of walls within these communities, mainly molded around affiliations to genealogical lineages and social status. These spaces define co-fragile formations in support of the Malian and/or Azawadian states.
This paper will present, first, Kel Tamasheq's (political, social, and economic) heterogeneous positions, and, second, narratives and practices organising relationships among these groups. In so doing, it asks: How are Kel Tamasheq's internal conglomerations formed, as well as abolished, depending on the context? How does the imagination of a utopic state of Azawad disappear, only to then (re)surface in people's narratives and daily practices? How do discourses and actions reassert the family's, as well as the individual's, positions towards their closest group of reference, the state, and the crisis? And what do all these dynamics tell us about the magmatic creation of co-fragile formations?
Paper short abstract:
The "muro" (wall) and the "puente" (bridge) are equally embedded in the cultural practices of Americans and Mexicans of Ciudad Juárez and El Paso. The paper discusses the liminality of the borderland and it's construction as a social space in-between the static and the mobile (Kearney, 1998).
Paper long abstract:
There are two cities that make up a distinctive space in the border states of Chihuahua (Mexico) and Texas (United States of America): Ciudad Juárez and El Paso. The two cities, united and divided by bridges, steel fences and a river and the product of politics, wars, drugs and the economies of scale of multinational corporations make up a space divided and united in two complementary and antagonistic parts. The chaotic, vibrant, uncontrollable and dangerous Ciudad Juárez, an urban paradise for assembly plants, drug trafficking, artistic youth expression, good and accessible food and cheap legal and illegal fun is the "obvious" counterpart of the McDonaldized (Ritzer, 2003), orderly, predictable and residential El Paso, aseptic and safe space, a city of reliable administrative, financial, educational and health services.
Marcus and Fischer (1986) have discussed organising in the borderlands as a particular complexity of constructing and representing the social, a "stable" space of separation, mobility, exchange, transformation and even "freedom". Berdahl's (1999) indeed calls for an understanding of the societies of the borderlands not as enmeshed in existing social and power relations but as different "ethnic" groups. Kearney has suggested the "wall" and the "bridge" epitomise the liminality of the borderland, a social space in-between the static and the mobile (Kearney 1991, 1995, 1998).
The paper discusses the authors fieldworks experiences with the pasojuarense population of the borderland in particular with women, families and youngsters.
Paper short abstract:
Based on interviews in C Niger and S Algeria, this piece looks at the local caste-like social system of exclusion by descent, and how people of nomadic Tuareg heritage re-imagine their origins after times of insecurity, to facilitate integration in a new location.
Paper long abstract:
The social fabric of the Saharo-Sahelian region is characterised by caste-like divisions, associated with differential control of scarce resources and labour, determined according to notions of perceived descent merging with territorial attachment. This is the homeland of the nomadic Tuareg, a vast zone of exceptional geographical and climatic variability, now divided by multiple international frontiers. Repeated politico-environmental crises down the centuries have threatened the hegemony of local leaders and their entourages, as new systems of government and administration have attempted to take control of these vast ungovernable spaces: French colonialists, independent state administrations, international corporations, security agencies. Every change forces exceptional mobility of individuals and families, before these repeated and progressive attempts to exclude them from their cultural homelands, as new walls are erected.
Local leaders use notions of descent exclusivity in attempting to consolidate their position. Strategies to avoid exclusion are examined: people of inferior descent may choose to relocate to the fringes of the Tamashek-speaking world and beyond, renewing their notions of descent there; others may choose to retain their Tuareg heritage in view of opportunities that come with this allegiance. People of superior descent status may reinterpret their extensive bilateral kinship links in order to activate connections in a new location, especially when crossing international frontiers. Personal biographies show the multiple descent allegiances which may be activated at different times during life periods spent in different locations within and beyond the cultural heartland. This piece is based on interviews in Central Niger (2010) and Southern Algeria (2011).