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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:
Northern Ireland is most frequently presented as a 'deeply divided' society. This is not the whole story. Drawing on recent research on community arts, I put forth the idea of the 'post-post-conflict', a way of imagining Northern Ireland differently, as removed from its 'post-conflict' status.
Paper long abstract:
In academic scholarship and popular imagination alike, Northern Ireland is most frequently presented as a post-conflict, 'deeply divided' society. This image is reinforced by the region's visual landscape, its not-always-functional consociational power-sharing government, and the ongoing realities of segregation in housing and education, particularly in working-class neighbourhoods.
This is an important part of Northern Ireland's story, but it is not the whole story, as I was consistently reminded by my research participants. Drawing on recent ethnographic research with community artists and community arts organisations, this paper puts forth the idea of the 'post-post-conflict' society - not as a point of historical fact, but rather as an ideal shared by many of those with whom I researched. In this paper, I suggest that there is a widely-shared desire among those working and participating in community arts to present Northern Ireland in a different light, one removed from its post-conflict status: as a place that is simultaneously unique and boring, one-of-a-kind and just like numerous other places in the world. I examine a series of community arts projects that exemplify this post-post-conflict imagination, as well as the limitations placed upon it, which were most often attributed to what was seen as a backward-looking approach to public policy. I propose that the post-post-conflict ideal is held in a constant state of emergent tension, and that this tension renders it all the more important as a topic of anthropological study.
Paper short abstract:
While issues of ethnicity affect my Russian speaking interlocutors’ interactions with the national state in the Baltics, what they rather want is to be perceived as fully-fledged state subjects and not just minorities. Confusing the needs of minorities, we as researchers often fall in the same trap.
Paper long abstract:
This paper examines three former socialist cities in the Baltics: Visaginas in Lithuania; Sillamӓe in Estonia; and Daugavpils in Latvia. Being vanguard sites of socialism, all three experienced dramatic transformations after the collapse of the Soviet Union, including major economic restructurings, searches for post-socialist identity, and tensions with the titular nation - and hence the now national state - caused by the specific ethnic composition of their populations.Due to the latter, with the majority of the residents in all three cities being Russian speakers, most research on these sites in particular or Russian speaking minorities in the Baltics more generally focuses on questions of identity, belonging, etc., which are inevitably bound with issues of ethnicity, language, and/or citizenship. This often limits our gaze as researchers when it comes to more universal experiences of our interlocutors; for example, their experiences as working subjects and/or taxpayers. Whereas this was exactly what my interlocutors were striving against: issues related to their ethnicity were nonetheless important and affected their everyday interactions with the nowadays state; however, what my interlocutors wanted was to be perceived and treated as fully-fledged state subjects rather than just minorities.Therefore, this paper asks to what extent do interlocutors internalize the language and categories offered to them by the state (“Russian-speaking minorities”) and whether we as researchers reproduce the existing power regime by studying our interlocutors primarily as Russian speakers, documenting their experiences in a “nationalizing state”, hence supporting what the Baltic State is telling itself about itself.
Paper short abstract:
This paper reflects on researching the daily life of a hospital in Myanmar against the backdrop of the country's violent past and present. What does it mean to conduct research removed (geographically and temporally) from the violence that nonetheless occupies interlocutors’ minds and hearts?
Paper long abstract:
Myanmar is facing many internal conflicts, amongst them one of the longest active civil wars. The country is furthermore facing genocide charges against the Rohinga. Following a military coup in 1962 its population was suffering under a violent, xenophobic and superstitious military regime. This nominally came to an end only 10 years ago with the country's first civilian president, making way for the current democratically elected government under Daw Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy. Yangon, the former capital, and economic and intellectual centre today, has been for centuries the site of demonstrations of power of whatever army was in charge.
Much anthropological research has focused on Myanmar’s border regions where conflicts are the most pronounced as well as rural areas, while the canon of Yangon Studies is slim. Few scholars contribute work on Yangon which is somewhat (physically) removed from the raging conflicts as well as economically most disadvantaged regions.
This paper reflects on what it means to research the daily life, its rhythms and mundaneness, of one of Yangon’s public tertiary hospitals against the backdrop of the country's ongoing and historic violence. What is the ethnographer’s role and responsibility when researching geographically and temporally removed from these conflicts; not focusing on the country’s violence and "poverty" (exoticness?) but shining light on spaces that remain under-researched in favour of conflict areas, while these conflicts are nonetheless alive in interlocutors' lives?