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- Convenor:
-
Aimee Joyce
(St Andrews University)
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- Stream:
- Who Speaks and for Whom?
- Sessions:
- Wednesday 31 March, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
This panel seeks to break with traditional conceptions of nation-building by exploring the ways in which we conceive of nations and nationalism through the lens of multiple temporalities, looking at how imaginations of past, present and future all intertwine in the process of nation-building.
Long Abstract:
This panel seeks to explore how national imaginaries are constructed through an assemblage of multiple temporalities, such that past and future projections of "national utopias" contextualise and lend meaning to lives in the present. Drawing from the recent explosion of work on the anthropology of the future as well as classic work on nations and nationalism, this panel will challenge the notion of the future as intangible and indeterminate. Instead, it will argue for an approach to nationalism that focuses on concrete futural orientations (in terms of mobility, space, ecology, and ideology) which help inform behaviour in the present. Moving away from traditional linear historical constructivist approaches to nation-building, this panel seeks to emphasise the way current tumultuous politics are perceived as an assemblage of multiple temporalities involved in imagining the nation as an entity simultaneously anchored in the past and projected into the future. Who imagines the nation? And for whom is that nation imagined? In a time of increasing political instability, marked by the rise of nationalism and right-wing extremism, it is increasingly crucial to understand how imagined and reconstructed pasts, poignant and charged presents, hopeful and threatening futures all intertwine and work together to shape a clear vision of the multitemporal nation. Crucially, then, this panel seeks to explore how a closer study of the multiple temporalities involved in the imagining of a nation can help us understand the way in which people orient themselves to nationalism in the present.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Wednesday 31 March, 2021, -Lucy Barkley (University of Exeter)
Paper short abstract:
Engaging with the concept of ‘settler time’ (Rifkin 2017), this paper explores how Palestinians in Britain use food to imagine the future transformation of the Palestinian political landscape. Cuisine, as cultural heritage, is shown to be a crucial resource in practices of identification and refusal
Paper long abstract:
Based upon ethnographic fieldwork undertaken between 2015 and 2020, this paper analyses the temporally complex ways that Palestinians (re)construct and engage with the nation, asserting both their belonging within the national community and the possibilities open to that community in the future.
Drawing on recipes handed down through the generations, young Palestinians in Britain are shown to be transforming their culinary inheritance, both materially and symbolically. Through the multiplicity of spatiotemporal connections that exist within a single inherited recipe, my interlocutors map and attempt to overcome their fragmentation. Yet dishes are marked by both what they are, and what they are not (Palestinian, authentic, traditional…). Cuisine therefore becomes a productive tool for a political critique of the present and is used to underscore narratives of futurity that strive for change. Although highly personal, taken together these narratives can be read as a collective investment in the future of the nation, one that is enacted through the prism of culinary habits in the present.
Crucially, each plate of food produced is a tangible representation of Palestinian refusal; a challenge to the hegemonic Israeli temporality that forecloses Palestinian nationhood. Culinary heritage therefore provides both the impetus and the platform from which to develop and give voice to ideas and ideals of the nation. What emerges from the kitchen is a new generation of Palestinian cooks, a generation with their own recipes not just for Palestinian cuisine, but for the future of Palestine itself.
Katharina Lange (Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient)
Paper short abstract:
In Iraq's Kurdistan Region, land is a symbol for nationalist projections, but also a contested material resource, driving future-oriented practices. The juxtaposition of productive, extractive, and speculative valuations of land provides an idiom to speak of responsibility, complicity & corruption.
Paper long abstract:
Drawing from fieldwork in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq between 2013 and 2018, I explore the ways in which productive, extractive, and speculative valorizations of land engage different future-oriented scales and rhythms. Since 2003, the future-oriented potentiality of Kurdish territory with its rich natural reserves has significantly featured in local political rhetoric to mobilize popular support for the Kurdish Regional Government in its antagonistic relation with Baghdad. In this region, marked by conflict and displacement, land in its material as well as immaterial dimensions serves as a powerful if polyvalent symbol for nationalist projections. As territory, it is imagined as site of ancestral lives (and violent death) and claimed as home for future generations, thus bridging between past, present and future. Yet as a contested material resource, land also makes fissures and tensions within the imagined national whole and its projected future visible: calculating time from harvest to harvest, envisaging it in terms of lifecycles and generational sequence, or measuring in geological eons, different future-oriented uses of land may contrast and be set against each other. When severe political and economic crisis hit the region in 2014, interlocutors began to question why the promises of a brighter future could not be realized, (self)critically pointing to self-interested, short-sighted extractivist and speculative practices sitting at odds with more productive or sustainable uses of land.Engaging with the concept of 'resource nationalism', the paper asks how responsibility, complicity and corruption in national future-making are allocated or denied through different ways of valuing land.
Hana Hawlina (University of Neuchâtel)
Paper short abstract:
The paper will explore the dynamic processes of re-imagining of the collective present and possible futures that were triggered by the global pandemic of COVID-19, focusing on the ongoing situation in Slovenia.
Paper long abstract:
The paper will explore the dynamic processes of re-imagining of the collective present and possible futures that were triggered by the global pandemic of COVID-19. Focusing on the ongoing situation in Slovenia, I will present a longitudinal investigation (a combination of online interviews, focus groups, and a mixed methods survey) of the imaginative processes of sense-making that people employ to cope with a disrupted chronotope; the pandemic has destabilised the present and derailed personal and collective trajectories, positioning people in a sustained state of liminality. While national imaginaries are often theorised as crystallised, reified, and structurally embedded, situations of collective ruptures allow us to study their dynamic unfolding – how imaginaries are used as resources to make the unfamiliar familiar and can provide a sense of ontological security, or they can be destabilised and re-opened for interrogation, negotiation, and radical imagination. We can observe both movements in Slovenians’ responses to the crisis; on the one hand, there is renewed vigour in the visions of a nationalistic utopia, which fuels support for increasingly totalitarian restrictive measures. On the other hand, the radical reorganisation of everyday life has opened up new avenues for utopistics and visions of societal transformation. The interplay of utopian and dystopian outcomes has produced diverse new imaginings that see the future as an inevitable departure from the present and from the pre-pandemic status quo.