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- Convenors:
-
Huon Wardle
(St. Andrews University)
Nigel Rapport (St. Andrews University)
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- Stream:
- Who Speaks and for Whom?
- Sessions:
- Monday 29 March, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
If, to paraphrase Bentham, 'each one shall count for one, no-one for more than one' in our ethnography, what are the consequences of honest attention to each individual and their world for our analysis, when we might hope to make universal, cosmopolitan claims? How to cross the methodological gap?
Long Abstract:
If, to paraphrase Bentham, 'each one shall count for one, no-one for more than one' in our ethnography, what are the consequences of honest attention to each individual and their world for our analysis, when we might hope to make universal, cosmopolitan claims? How to cross the methodological gap? This panel offers a debate on the opportunities and responsibilities of a cosmopolitan anthropology in its ethnographic exploration of human difference and commonality. It asks how anthropology can enrich the idea that we all live in the same world amidst our differences, recognising the responsibilities we hold in common. We will discuss ideas of human citizenship, imagination, aesthetics and moral sentiment, difference and commonness, the weight they may be given and their refiguration in a cosmopolitan anthropology. In particular, the panel takes stock of the cosmopolitanizing of contemporary human experience, and of the radical Kantianism and other cosmopolitan ideas emerging from these changes. It considers the interiority of the ethnographer and of their interlocutors as cosmopolitan actors who together try to give form to each other's worlds and in the process create something new.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Monday 29 March, 2021, -Paper short abstract:
Examining poems as a version of interiority, this paper interweaves contemporary poetry written by Chinese factory peasant-workers with my ethnographic research on rural-urban migration in China, exploring the individual deep feelings that might be shared as universal truth expressed about homing.
Paper long abstract:
Poems such as ‘‘A Massively Single Number’, ‘Going Home on Paper’ are written by Jinniu Guo, a poet and a Chinese factory peasant-worker. In this paper, I read his poems as his inner consciousness that is frozen into words—a version of his interiority. They reveal to us his state of mind, wondering about his fate as well as the fate of the innumerable millions of factory peasant-workers in China. They express an individual’s perception of how the millions of migrants are perceived without individuality but as ‘a massively single number’ and their long trek of homing interiorly. Interwoven with my ethnographic research on rural-urban migration in China—working and living with factory peasant-workers for 14 months in South China, I attempt to explore the individual deep feelings that might be shared as universal truth expressed about homing, a visit to one’s interior world.
Paper short abstract:
Inspired by Levinas’s idea of 'the irreducibility of the Other,' the paper proposes a methodological attitude that acknowledges the limitations of any anthropological investigation to know and the responsibility of the ethnographer to carefully attend the call of an interlocutor’s presence.
Paper long abstract:
In a world in which contingency and indeterminacy are perceived as a prevailing condition of existence, what are the stakes of considering uncertainty an integral part of the anthropological concern? How does uncertainty call for a reconfiguration of the ethnographic endeavour? International migrants in the city of São Paulo and actors involved in the implementation of a cultural heritage policy in Brazil consider instability to be part and parcel of their trade and daily struggles.
In acknowledging uncertainty as a pervading state that requests ethnographic attention beyond notions of regularity and generalisation, the paper finds in the debate of a cosmopolitan anthropology an opportunity to show how considering what is singular and unique can be a valid approach in this regard. Inspired by Levinas’s idea of 'the irreducibility of the Other,' it proposes a methodological attitude that acknowledges the limitations of any anthropological investigation to know and the responsibility of the ethnographer to attend to an interlocutor’s presence by understanding the ethnographic encounter through ethics. In this, the paper considers such encounter rather a form of attendance to the presence of others in the world than a form of knowledge, discussing the importance of modesty as an ethnographic attitude.
Paper short abstract:
In this paper we focus on how solid historical facts can be found in ethnographies of individual life stories of Polish builders and workers-peasants in late socialism. At the same time, we claim these experiences may be considered both as common affects and as emerging cosmopolitan subjectivities.
Paper long abstract:
The aim of this paper is to propose an experimental ethnographic-historical work that would align oral sources of fieldwork with historical factuality and thus anchor the historical facts anew in individual life-stories. Taking into account the extended critique of representation in historical narratives (H. White), and in archives (A. Stoler), we would like to go back to 'basic' (J. Topolski) or 'existential' (J. Pomorski) historical facts, as built on the ground of individuals’ lives – which should not be confused with the study of 'meaning'. It is instead a search for 'private facts' and '(inter)personal truths' that tend to be omitted by historical narratives. We argue that a sort of cosmopolitan subjectivity appears here, albeit in a quite different way. Drawing from the puzzling switch from individual microcosms to other, societal forms of life (of affect, imaginary, and practice), we examine the founding role of affective togetherness in individual narratives. The protagonists of this research are Polish urban construction workers and factory workers-peasants in late socialism, some of them building a parallel on their own, who participate in the collective affect of 'rebuilding' and 'building' Poland (P. Kenney, J. Stacul). We argue that this societal, visceral affective work may be considered as a particularly powerful mechanism, putting together individual microcosms with the experience of the common, thus paradoxically engendering a very particular, cosmopolitan subjectivity. These experiences and subjectivities require a new historical-anthropological narrative of late socialism and 'transformation' (not only) in Poland.