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- Convenors:
-
Alexandra Ciocanel
(University of York)
Pedro Silva Rocha Lima (University of Manchester)
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- Stream:
- Irresponsibility and Failure
- Sessions:
- Friday 2 April, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
Starting from the question "What role does time play in the attribution of (ir)responsibility within crisis?", we invite contributions that look at various types of crises - economic, medical, political - in an attempt to critically engage with the concept of crisis and its temporal reasonings.
Long Abstract:
This panel explores the temporal dimensions of assigning (ir)responsibility within crises. Crises are often surrounded by attempts to make someone accountable either for their generation or for their bad management, constructing failure around the question 'What went wrong?'. This usually comes along a forward/backward temporal reasoning in an attempt to contain uncertainty and establish some sense of order. Retrospectively, blame can be assigned through claiming a lack of preparedness or its faulty implementation as in the case of Covid 19 crisis, or through critiquing speculation in economic crises. In the present, various actors may be held accountable for not acting with urgency or in a timely way, as in humanitarian crises. Scrutinizing the future, blame might be assigned through criticizing an incapability to act now for the future, as in climate change calls to act for future generations, pointing to a notion of kairos in relation to crisis. This panel invites critical reflections on financial, humanitarian, climate, medical (e.g. pandemics), and other crises starting from questions such as: What temporal horizons are at play when assigning blame and responsibility in crisis? How does the unfolding of events through time in a crisis shift the attribution of responsibility between different actors? How are disruptions of temporal experiences in crisis explained by different patterns of finger blaming? What temporal affects surround the attribution of (ir)responsibility within crises and failures? What new modes of responsibility can emerge and how are they related to persistence and change in social systems?
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Friday 2 April, 2021, -Guillermo Stefano Rosa Gómez (UFRGS - Brazil) Cornelia Eckert (UFRGS - Brazil)
Paper short abstract:
This paper reflects on how crisis and discontinuity are lived by working communities that experienced the end of their profession. Through an anthropological study of the memory of railway workers and miners we emphasize the different temporal modes they used to narrate and endure these ruptures.
Paper long abstract:
This paper discusses how crisis are experienced and narrated by working communities and which are their strategies to endure the end of their profession during retirement and aging. Based on ethnographic studies between coal miners in France and railroad workers in Brazil, we approach how these persons dealt with multiple discontinuities that followed as a consequence of the privatization or "modernization" of their work and caused obsolescence of their knowledge, mass layoffs and the deterioration of living and labour spaces. We propose an ethnography of the crisis, aiming at interpreting the temporal disorder in the time experienced by these communities. Considering that crisis narratives and memories are endowed with a peculiar temporal rhythmic, we investigate the ways in which the workers present themselves in the face of destabilization. We show different temporal modes of the narrated and experienced crisis: it can be a sudden and unexpected break or a slow agony, a rumor or a metaphor for the unbelievable. The end of the work takes on a fantastic temporality and does not obey chronological time: in some cases, it never occurred, in others, its temporality is extended and constantly remembered. But not only fatality and mourning constitute the crisis reports. Despite the emotional difficulties of facing the drama of the disappearance of their way of life, the railroad workers and the miners make the crisis plausible, reversing the harmful signs and inserting them in a register of protagonism and agency.
Claudia Eggart (University of Manchester)
Paper short abstract:
I will explore the intersection of the times and spaces of crisis by looking at how mobile cross-border traders at two post-Soviet markets negotiate their market experiences and strategies in the context of multiple intersecting crises (economic, political, pandemic).
Paper long abstract:
Crisis has often been conceptualized according to its historicity (Koselleck, 1973), or its temporality (Roitman, 2014). To more fully understand the plurality of explanations for and meanings of crisis for different people, I suggest expanding the retrospective or future-oriented approach by exploring how crisis-reasoning also produces a spatial dimension. The entanglement of space and time in crisis-talk is well reflected in the claim of my informants – market traders at the gigantic retail bazaar in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan – that we are experiencing a ‘global crisis’ (mirovoy krizis). Responsibilities varied from local politicians, the Chinese government, the demise of the Soviet Union, or global capitalism. The explanatory means of crisis extensions are related to one’s specific position within larger, yet shifting paradigms of power and possibility. The sudden standstill of international mobility in the face of SARS-CoV-2 creates a hazard for cross-border traders, who are dependent on the circulation of goods, people, and capital. But ‘Do Bazaars Dye?’, as the anthropologist Hassan Karrar (2017) provocatively asked in a study of the condition of trade at the Dordoi Bazaar in Bishkek. Traders at both markets are hardy to crisis and have a complex understanding of its personal and economic assets and drawbacks. I will explore the intersection of the times and spaces of crisis by looking at how mobile cross-border traders at the two post-Soviet markets, Seven Kilometer Market (Sed’moi) in Odessa, and Dordoi Bazaar negotiate their market experiences and strategies in the context of multiple intersecting crises (economic, political, pandemic).
Annerienke Fioole (University of Amsterdam)
Paper short abstract:
This paper dissects interplays between the passage of time and the assumption of responsibilities during scandals on women and men’s out-of-wedlock relationships in Morocco. I show how people refigure their mutual positions by banking on the retrospective-prospective possibilities of these events.
Paper long abstract:
Based on 14 months of fieldwork with families in the region of Skhirat-Témara, I elucidate how assuming responsibility and playing into the retrospective-prospective possibilities of events works out on the scale of everyday interactions between family members, neighbours, and friends in a Moroccan small-town.
Women and men in my research generally agreed that sexual relations outside of marriage are shameful, sinful, and illegal and therefore need to remain secret. Nonetheless, these intimacies also embody pleasurable opportunities as well as delightful tales to share with others. Beyond appearing as secretive transgressors in opposition to others, Moroccan couples in out-of-wedlock relationships involve family members, neighbours, and friends to create intricate cover-ups. Their enactment of cooperative discretion, I show, implicates all parties involved: those who hide their affairs, those who cover for them, and those who ignore others’ concealments.
Yet instead of keeping out-of-wedlock intimacies as covert as possible, in some cases people to the contrary play out (the imminent threat of) an arising scandal to forge the course they desire for their relationships. I elucidate how exposure of out-of-wedlock relations for some men and women features in their stories not as the ultimate problem to be avoided, but as a solution in time that allows them to move forward. I dissect how people handle exposure of their relationships by banking on the passage of time and thereby prompt others among their family, friends, and neighbours to rearrange their positions and refigure their responsibilities towards one another.