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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:
The panel convenors will introduce the panel's theme, framing and members & outline how the discussion meets paths of thinking and how it articulates with the 'Ethnographic Horizons' Balzan research project.
Paper long abstract:
The panel convenors will introduce the panel's theme, framing and members & outline how the discussion meets paths of thinking and how it articulates with the 'Ethnographic Horizons' Balzan research project.
Paper short abstract:
This paper focuses on the nationalist project of a group of bureaucrats and politicians self-identified as the Unity Team. Based on their claims about national crisis and using anthropological theory on temporality, I delineate the configurations of their particular kind of nationalism.
Paper long abstract:
This paper focuses on the nationalist project of a group of bureaucrats and politicians that worked In the Papua New Guinean (PNG) Parliament and that self-identified as the Unity Team. The ethnographic material I use comes from my fieldwork in Parliament in 2015. The Unity Team was responsible for implementing the Restoration, Reformation and Modernization Program (RRMP), which was spearheaded by the Speaker of the 9th Parliament (2012-2016), Hon. Theodor Zurenuoc. The RRMP became known for initiatives such as the removal and dismantling of carvings that embellished the façade of the Parliament and for pushing a motion that established a donated 400-year-old Bible as a national treasure.Anthropologists’ concern about nationalism and nation-making in the Pacific region are not a novelty. Anthropological work, in particular, has increased throughout the decades, moving from scepticism (Babadzan 1988; Keesing 1989) to an inquiry into the different ways in which national expressions are crystallized (Hirsch 1990; Foster 1992). More recently, attention has been drawn to how and where Christianity centres amid these broader discourses and to what difference they make (Robbins 1998; Baker 2013; Handman 2015). Based on my informants’ claims about national crisis and their responsibility on the face of it and using anthropological contributions to themes such as temporality and postcolonial critique, I delineate the configurations of their particular kind of nationalism.
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores the emergence of the Bougainville Crisis by re-orienting the analysis of the armed conflict to a concern with local conceptualizations of the ‘crisis’ and its relationship to temporal concerns over who ought to be responsible for the violent past and future possibilities.
Paper long abstract:
This paper explores the emergence of the Bougainville Crisis by focusing and re-orienting the analysis of the armed conflict to a concern with local conceptualizations of the ‘crisis’ and its relationship to temporal concerns over who ought to be responsible for the violent past and future possibilities. By attending to the diverse everyday narratives and understanding of the crisis I attempt to demonstrate how people caught up in the armed conflict located the locus of responsibility for the difficulties visited upon their everyday lives by the crisis. Through an ethnographic account and analysis of what unfolded and became to be known as the ‘Bougainville Crisis’ the paper characterizes the ways in which the political upheaval unevenly unfolded in different moments in time and place engendering in its wake serious questions about responsibility. I shall demonstrate how the temporarily and spatially rooted understandings of the conflict problematizes prevailing conceptions of ‘crisis’ as a monolithic political epoch defined by a singular and overarching category. Bougainville islanders and their Papua New Guinea compatriots unanimously agree that ‘Bougainville Crisis’ forms an important part of the country's political history. That’s the relatively easy part while the issue of where to locate the responsibility for the crisis is contingent upon who one speaks to; and where there are differences in viewpoints and positions, disagreements can rapidly travel down the reductive slope where causation and responsibility for the political turmoil is assigned to a few easily identifiable actors.
Paper short abstract:
The paper addresses “crisis” as a complex phenomenon in capitalism which changes the socialist perspective of problem-solving and introduces new divisions of responsibility residing in an individual and responsible self.
Paper long abstract:
The introduction of capitalism in Latvia in 1990ies has also opened doors to “crisis” in various areas of life - economic, moral and the family. Family crisis centres can be seen as much taken for granted reality in the Western world, however, when compared to the socialist period imaginations of family troubles, the “crisis” opens up a new complex configuration of responsibilities. During the late socialism, research showed that alcohol abuse and cramped living conditions were responsible for the falling birth rate and under Marxism-Leninism ideology, materialistic solutions of the reduction of alcohol consumption and apartment construction programmes were applied. Based on media text analysis and ethnographic fieldwork data collected by a team of researchers in several regions of Latvia during 2019-20, the paper argues that the definition and management of “crisis” allow individualising cases of violence and obscures its causes. Women and children as victims of violence are entitled to short stays and free of charge social rehabilitation at institutions literally called “crisis centres”, where the state and municipalities take the responsibility, however, expecting the victims, women and children alike, adhere to the imposed order both by proving their societal value and vulnerability and by taking responsibility for their future lives, restoring the ideal of an individual, independent and neoliberal self. The crisis management thus strengthens the idea of the violence as individual responsibility of the victim; allowing overall social fabric and structural causes of violence remain intact.