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- Convenors:
-
Tony Crook
(University of St. Andrews)
Marilyn Strathern (Cambridge University)
Send message to Convenors
- Discussant:
-
Thomas Strong
(National University of Ireland Maynooth)
- Stream:
- Who Speaks and for Whom?
- Sessions:
- Thursday 1 April, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
The contribution that identifying a crisis may play in the attribution of responsibility
Long Abstract:
Ethnography from contemporary Amazonia and Melanesia raises questions about where people locate the responsibility for certain kinds of crisis, and how that attribution of responsibility can bring about (further) crisis. Thus the very manner in which a situation is figured as a 'crisis' plays its part in generating a response that itself becomes a crisis, and conversely a crisis response may back-figure the original dilemmas. A focus on contemporary crises and dilemmas raises questions about practices of attributing responsibility.The panel invites papers sharing this approach: for example, talking about crises precipitated by such situations as religious prophesy that relativises the notion of future catastrophe, commodities as a devolution of colonialism, bureaucracy in need of moral reform, endemic armed conflict, and ultimately what kind of crisis is envisaged at death. The panel invites reflection on the concept of crisis and modes of responsibilisation with such questions in mind, and welcomes further papers of as well as beyond these two regions.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Thursday 1 April, 2021, -Paper short abstract:
Ecological degradation and cash transfer policies changed how the Apanjekra people (Central Brazil) dealt with cities and loan sharks when acquiring food and commodities. From the new hazards that emerged in recent years, I analyse how responsibility is considered in Apanjekra response to crisis.
Paper long abstract:
In the last fifteen years, the Apanjekra people in Central Brazil saw changes in their relations with settler colonialists. The advent of cash transfer policies and the growing ecological degradation of their lands helped to shape a scenario in which traveling to the cities to obtain food and commodities became normal. At the same time, different hazards emerged, from new diseases (such as diabetes) to complicated relations with loan sharks, regarded as a necessary part of the epoch the Apanjekra inhabit.In Amazonia, the idea of danger presupposes the agency of a particular source. Understanding how the source operates offers a way to respond to it. Body production, for better or worse, is a result of a successful or failed response. These transformations also show how a particular notion of time is embedded in agency and body theories. This paper is concerned with the questions the Apanjekra face when dealing with new hazards derived from their relation with settler colonialists, in particular the way they articulate their agency theories with attribution of responsibility. Their answers to crisis contain a reflection about the epoch they live in and the possibilities of action, a point I would also like to explore.
Paper short abstract:
In dialogue with critical appropriations of the concept of Anthropocene, I propose to discuss elaborations of Amazonian indigenous peoples on crisis contexts, in which the anthropological exercise is fundamental for the attribution of responsibility for the predicted catastrophes.
Paper long abstract:
In the academic debate about the Anthropocene, scholars criticize the concept for universalizing responsibility for climate change. According to critics, holding all humankind accountable for ongoing catastrophes would be a way of exempting those who contribute most to causing them: the nations and the subjects at the top of the capitalist hierarchy. Such criticisms are based on an anthropological exercise, which contrasts the ecological impacts of highly industrialized cultures with those of so-called traditional cultures.Amazonian indigenous peoples recurrently predict the extinction of the world, which they consider to be degenerate due to the immorality of some of its inhabitants. There are those like the Kapon and Pemon, who in contexts of intense colonization prophesied the advent of a cataclysm, associated to the promise of indigenous salvation in the Christian paradise and the conquest of the colonizers’ goods. Such prophetisms addressed the need to transform a world marked by asymmetries between Amerindians and Europeans. Currently, some Kapon and Pemon are adherents of the Areruya religion, which transforms the reverse anthropology of the ancient prophets, both by relativizing the coming catastrophe and by considering all non-indigenous elements as inferior to those indigenous, including technology. There are also leaders like the Yanomami Davi Kopenawa who highlight the leading role of industrialization in the planetary environmental crisis.In dialogue with critical appropriations of the Anthropocene, I propose to discuss some of these Amazonian elaborations on crisis contexts, in which the anthropological exercise is fundamental for the attribution of responsibility for the predicted catastrophes.
Paper short abstract:
Discussion
Paper long abstract:
Discussion