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- Convenors:
-
Karen Lane
(University of St Andrews)
Emily Mannheimer (Erasmus University Rotterdam)
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- Stream:
- Who Speaks and for Whom?
- Sessions:
- Tuesday 30 March, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
Anthropological study of (post) conflict situations focusing on victims/perpetrators, causes & consequences leads to a dominant metanarrative. But some dwell in the interstices of these conflict narratives. How are these muted or silenced voices represented? Who is researching against the grain?
Long Abstract:
Anthropology recognises a responsibility to give voice to oppressed, ignored, and silenced peoples. Individual anthropologists take seriously their ethical responsibilities; the discipline is renowned for detailing everyday lives and to nuanced analysis; and working collaboratively affords new avenues of knowledge-production. But where does responsibility lie in the discipline’s contribution to academic metanarratives? Working with people in conflict societies usually entails studying victims and perpetrators, analysing causes and consequences. Even in post-conflict situations the same populations are ubiquitous as a focus of study. This can lead to unintentional stereotyping of conflicted places where conflict becomes the anchor point to which everything else responds. Who speaks up for those who dwell in the interstices of these narratives? Who is researching against the grain? What collaborative, local and institutional challenges do they face?This panel explores the unexplored in societies affected by conflict and interrogates rigorously anthropology’s responsibility – or not – to dominant disciplinary discourses; on the ontological, epistemological and ethnographic challenges in choosing with whom we work, who represents them and how. What is the role of the researcher in perpetuating stereotypes of conflicted places? Are anthropologists (un)wittingly drawn to ‘the exotic’? Is ethnographic seduction at play? How may we challenge dominant modes of academic thinking about conflicted societies? Is focusing on the causes and effects of conflict anthropological virtue signaling? Is there an unsaid but understood institutional taboo on which topics are ‘unacceptable’ – to institutions, to funders, to policy-makers? This panel seeks ethnographic and theoretical papers on these and related topics.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Tuesday 30 March, 2021, -Paper short abstract:
In this paper, I explore some of the problematic ways in which Beirut has been conceptualised in relation to (past) violence. Drawing on my doctoral thesis, I suggest that ‘ethnography-inspired’ research can help overcome such reifications: through conversations and a focus on complex temporalities.
Paper long abstract:
The city of Beirut and Lebanon in general, their physicality and history have been written about as cases of a city/country at war or post-war, grappling with their history in a linear or cyclical way. Scholarship focusing on Lebanon is dominated by the protracted conflicts of 1975-1990 and violence, as well as their consequences and memorialisation, and labels Beirut as a ‘post-war’, ‘post-conflict’, ‘(violently) divided’ and ‘sectarian’ city and the Beirutis as ‘divided’ people.
In this context, memory, time, space and place have mostly been approached as flawed, missing, wrong, divided and divisive, without taking into account their fluidity and ever-changing nature, their respective temporal and spatial aspects. Furthermore, the use of prefixes such as ‘post-war’ or ‘post-conflict’ does not seem to mean ‘peace’. I argue that these prefixes give undue weight to past violence in the construction of the present and future of Beirut, and reifies the city’s relation to war in an uncritical manner, defining the present solely in relation to (past) violence.
In this paper, I explore some of the problematic ways in which Beirut has been conceptualised and thought about in relation to (past) violence, and some of the ways in which divisions and communities have been reified and essentialised. Drawing on my doctoral thesis in which I rejected the war-focused and sectarian-focused labels used to describe Beirut, I suggest ways in which ‘ethnography-inspired’ research can help overcome such reifications: through conversational methods, narrative analysis and a focus on complex temporalities.
Paper short abstract:
Belfast is academically stereotyped as a city recovering from conflict and anthropologists have a disciplinary responsibility to counter this metanarrative because it effectively mutes or even silences non-conflict voices. The paper explores how metanarratives occur and how to counterbalance them.
Paper long abstract:
This conference asks whether anthropology should be held responsible for the knowledge it produces? It is probably uncontentious that academics have a responsibility for their individual knowledge-production, but I argue that anthropologists in particular have a disciplinary responsibility for their contribution to, and the effect of, an anthropological metanarrative. Judged by publication output on Northern Ireland, and Belfast in particular, it is almost exclusively analysed, directly or indirectly, as a place and a people of (post) conflict. ‘Belfast, more than many other European cities, has been stereotyped to death’ (Dawe 2003:277); this quote succinctly (and ironically given the language choice) articulates a truism and yet academic stereotyping of Belfast continues unabated, as a city subjected to and recovering from a 30-year civil war fuelled by ethnic and religious division and sectarianism, or research into the ethnic nuances of one or both of the ‘two traditions’ of Catholic nationalism or Protestant unionism. This effectively mutes, or even silences, non-conflict narratives. For a discipline with an uncomfortable history (as part of a colonial project) and one given to disciplinary self-reflection (through a plethora of ‘turns’) this panel gives a timely opportunity to question our collective anthropological responsibility. The paper explores how and why non-conflict research in Belfast is such a minority activity, critiques the discipline’s response, suggests that conflict stereotyping goes beyond Northern Ireland, and offers a pathway for those wishing to research against the grain.