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- Convenors:
-
Julia Sauma
(Goldsmiths, University of London)
Tone Walford (University College London)
- Formats:
- Panels
- Stream:
- Politics
- Location:
- All Souls Wharton Room
- Start time:
- 20 September, 2018 at
Time zone: Europe/London
- Session slots:
- 2
Short Abstract:
Reflecting on its potential for rethinking anthropology, this panel considers the work that the idea of "frontier" does to conjure divisions - between places and people - and intersections, such as those between matter and sociality, human and nonhuman, the conceptual, empirical and political.
Long Abstract:
"Frontier" is the propeller of expansive imaginations, of heroic and foundational conflicts in Euro-American imperialism and nationalism. As part of such imaginaries it has also come to describe empirical situations, places and peoples who have been drawn into this way of thinking the world, often in violent ways.
In the contemporary postcolony, the concept of frontier not only describes Empire's ever-shifting territorial boundaries, but also works to shape multiple and contested zones of extraction, control, exclusion and inclusion. These zones are both internal and external to metropolitan centres, areas of militarisation and conflict, national boundaries, scientific networks, biospheres and atmospheres; internal and external to people, who can be both citizen and alien. Ultimately, frontier makes explicit the endurance of colonialism (Stoler, 2016), instigating us to rethink its myriad divisions as intersections between, amongst other things, matter and sociality, the human and nonhuman, the past and the present, the conceptual, empirical and political.
The panel invites submissions from those who are interested in thinking frontier across a range of contexts, in transitional zones, or those who are reflecting on more self-conscious "internal frontiers" (Balibar 2002). What are the infrastructural and boundary-making projects that have transformed landscapes into frontiers? How does frontier as concept and practice delimit or extend ideas of time, personhood and place? What linguistic and cultural relations and transformations have emerged specifically from these zones? How are relations between the human and nonhuman different (or not) from within the frontier? We welcome papers that address questions such as these.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Paper short abstract:
Based on anthropological research with astrobiologists, this paper shows how astronomical conceptions of 'distance' are being redefined and illustrates that the interplanetary medium is losing its privileged status as the boundary of boundaries.
Paper long abstract:
Exoplanets are currently all the rage. Such planets that orbit other stars than the Sun are among the frontiers of cutting-edge astronomy and their discovery in the 1990s is commonly portrayed as one of the great advances of modern science. Yet there is something strange about this setup: exoplanets have no counterpart. They are, by definition, very faraway — lightyears away in fact. Nearby, here down on Earth, there apparently exist no equivalents. In conventional astronomy there is no such thing as an endoplanet. Based on research with astrobiologists, this paper documents the appearance of an alternative wherein the nearby is, astronomically speaking, not less interesting than the extremely distant. What does it mean to be 'faraway' and to be 'close-by' anyway? Nobody envisages dinosaurs as aliens. Even though extinct, they are still our family; we may be distant relatives, but all terrestrial life is ultimately connected. While it may have looked quite differently during the Cretaceous Period, the ancient Earth is never qualified as an alien planet. Martian forms of life, if they are ever found, will be qualified as aliens however. And Mars itself is, by default, an alien planet. So the distance between 'us' and dinosaurs is deemed less than the distance between 'us' and hypothetical Martians living today. The ancient Earth is conceived of as somehow closer to our present Earth than contemporary Mars. Astrobiologists have begun to suspect that this peculiar conception of distance is a rather arbitrary feature of modern metaphysics.
Paper short abstract:
The paper explores how the notions of living on the frontier of Europe and being "in-between" the East and the West influence the work of astrophysicists in Serbia.
Paper long abstract:
Serbia has gone through turbulent times in the past decades. The fall of communism and breakup of Yugoslavia, as well as the rise of nationalism, have affected the country and its people in numerous ways. It can be said that Serbia is both politically and ideologically situated on the European frontier, "in between" the West and the East, a notion which translates into all aspects of culture, including scientific practice.
The paper is based on ethnographic research conducted at the Belgrade Astronomical Observatory during 2016-2018 period. The research focuses on scientific practice as a specific aspect of culture. As such, astrophysics in Serbia can be viewed as a product of numerous socio-political circumstances in addition to base scientific research. The main circumstances that shape scientific work at the Belgrade Astronomical Observatory are: economy (funding), historical aspects of post-socialism and a strong cultural notion of being on the frontier.
As a result of this dynamic, astronomers in Serbia feel the need to prove themselves to the Western scientific community and to seek Western approval in order to make their work relevant. This is a direct consequence of existing on the frontier of Europe and the ambivalence of being "in between" the East and the West. The paper explores how Serbian astronomers navigate this "in-betweenness".
Paper short abstract:
This paper deploys the frontier concept to study the intersection between place-making, identity formation, and agrarian change in conflict-affected Muslim Mindanao, Southern Philippines.
Paper long abstract:
This paper deploys the frontier concept to study the intersection between place-making, identity formation, and agrarian change in conflict-affected Muslim Mindanao, Southern Philippines. The analytical value of the frontier concept is that it bridges the disciplines of social anthropology and human geography, thus enabling a richer analysis of the material effects that stem from geographic imaginations. To illustrate this argument, the paper utilizes the findings from an ongoing case study that follows the making of a banana plantation in a remote town in Muslim Mindanao. Development of the plantation, which represents to date the single biggest investment in Muslim Mindanao, began in the aftermath of the 2014 peace agreement between the Government of the Philippines and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front. The paper combines Tsing's take on the frontier as an 'imaginative project' (Tsing, 2005) with Massey's relational approach to space (Massey, 2005) to explore the material, discursive and affective construction of a "post-conflict" space in and through which the process of plantation-making unfolds itself.
Paper short abstract:
My paper explores what kind of subjects/persons/selves emerge in the entanglement of political, public health, bio-medical, social, institutional, interpersonal and interspecies relations in the liminal space between life and death during Animal-Assisted Therapy in institutionalized dementia care.
Paper long abstract:
Medical and public health narratives of dementia are dominated by ideas of erosion and loss of personhood, cognitive abilities, self-awareness and agency. People with dementia are portrayed as living in liminal zones between living and dying (Kaufman 2006; 2015), challenging the differentiation between life/death, body/mind, person/non-person. In this debate, personhood, though occupying a central role, remains heavily associated with human exceptionalism. I propose an exploration of sociality in both dementia and human-animal relations, by following two paths. The first, critiquing the Western philosophical tradition of personhood, alongside the medical hegemony of blurrily diagnosed dementia, using conceptualisations of personhood both anthropological (dividual personhood; porous subjects), and care-based (relational citizenship; embodied knowledge and agency; intercorporeal personhood). The second, explores the interspecies relations that takes place in the complex system of contact zones (Haraway 2008) between people with dementia, relatives, medical staff, therapy dogs, volunteers, trainers, and veterinarians. Using ethnographic data, I explore the entanglement of political, public health, bio-medical, social, institutional, interpersonal and interspecies relations that become interlaced through Animal-Assisted Therapy in the liminal space of dementia between life and death, human and animal interaction. I explore what subject/self/person types emerge, shaped by new opportunities of being and becoming with each other. Finally, I explore how a multi-species moral community might alter knowledge about dementia and redefine the status that non-human animals play in the wider medical, public health and social community, targeting 'marginal' relations as potentially challenging hegemonic assumptions about what it means to be alive, human or animal.
Paper short abstract:
Attempts at decolonisation and reconciliation have radically altered the theory and practice of museum ethnography, making museums a new frontier in decolonized relationships. This paper looks at the impact of privileging a relational Anishinaabe centered approach to the person/objects in museums.
Paper long abstract:
This paper takes as its starting point a Canadian Anishinaabe perspective regarding the personhood of drums who are spoken of and treated as wiikanag, ritual brothers in their ceremonial context. In a museum context, these person/objects are also treated as animate; we would not have museums if we did not believe in the capacity of artefacts to educate. But what does this mean in a post-colonial museum? Can person/objects have transformative effects in contemporary museums? Can person/objects which have been alienated from family contexts reassert displaced memories and find unfettered contemporary aboriginal meaning? Do person/objects have dissonant voices sufficient to reset the history of their conscription to the project of enhancing the prestige of other nation's national institutions? Can the multisensory presence of drums who exist as sound in the consciousness of those who know them, counteract the colonial inertia of museums? Can objects participate in the border-crossing and contaminations which undermine colonial certainties and generate museums which are more fully 'heterotopic spaces.' This paper uses Alfred Gell, Marilyn Strathern and others to look at the nature of personhood in the museum, and at the apparent social agency of two Ojibwe drums both once owned by the same man, an Ojibwe medicine man named Naamiwan who lived in northern Manitoba from 1850 to 1943, and their role in changing two museums , one in Canada and the other in the US.
Paper short abstract:
In this paper I present a portrait of a town at the Amazonian frontier of Ecuadorian settler colonialism, Macas. I do this by going back and forth across the borders and divisions (class, gender, race, sexuality, temporality) that constitute it, and that constitute it as a frontier town.
Paper long abstract:
In this paper I present a portrait of a town at the Amazonian frontier of Ecuadorian settler colonialism, Macas. I do this by going back and forth across the borders and divisions (class, gender, race, sexuality, temporality) that constitute it, and that constitute it as a frontier town.
This paper will dialogue with two important work in Latin American thinking about borders and frontiers. Borderland / La Frontera, by Gloria Anzaldua is an autobiographical reflection on what it is to live at the borderland between Mexico and the US, but also between heterosexuality and homosexuality, between male and female, and other such binaries. Razon de la Frontera y Fronteras de la Razon, by Colombian mathematician Fernando Zalamea, examines the tools used by marginal scientists and artists to think the border and go beyond the limits of reason, especially the divide between science and art.
In these maps of pleasure and desire, I look for the points where they turn into their opposite, pain and aversion, or vanish into numbness and indifference. I also follow people who themselves go back and forth across these borders, such as indigenous transgender people, or mestizo settlers sent by the State to indigenous territories, and interrogate the knowledge that they produce. What do they do to concepts such as « border », « liminality », « mestizaje », « transition », « transgender », « crisis », « alternation », or « dialectics » ?