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- Convenors:
-
Daniel Knight
(University of St Andrews)
Martin Demant Frederiksen (University of Copenhagen)
Fran Markowitz (Ben Gurion University)
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- Stream:
- Extinction
- Sessions:
- Tuesday 30 March, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
This panel ignites discussion on the ethnographic and affective qualities of vertigo, the timespaces in which one may encounter the vertiginous and what theoretical advantages we may gain through focusing on the concept.
Long Abstract:
This session invites ethnographic and theoretical engagement with the vertiginous as ethnographic quality and theoretical concept. Contexts of dramatic social change, chronic crisis and omnipresent anticipated violence can conjure a sense of vertigo - affects of nausea, shortage of breath, anxiety, palpitations as life-worlds are sent spinning into an unnavigable vortex. A perpetually dizzying condition encompassing body, mind, individuals and institutions, the vertiginous has its more and less intense moments, but it conveys a lack of resolution, or endpoint. The vertiginous may be experienced by individuals battling long-term health conditions, someone living in a society stuck in permanent economic decline, or in a state where violence continuously seeps through the futural threshold to populate the everyday present. It takes hold when political rhetoric is at odds with material observation, in timespaces of emptiness, decay, disengagement, in complex socio-technical landscapes where technology co-exists alongside custom.The vertiginous may be experienced as time slowing down, going backwards or repeating itself in a continuous spiralling loop. It distorts perspective to create disorientation and confusion: Where and when does one belong on timelines of pasts and futures? Situations of heightened anxiety or anticipation can make the present feel elongated or uncanny, perpetually caught in the temporal ricochets between past and future. The vertiginous knocks one off balance, leading to questions of trajectory and belonging.This panel ignites discussion on the ethnographic/affective qualities of vertigo, the timespaces in which one may encounter the vertiginous and what theoretical advantages we may gain through focusing on the concept.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Tuesday 30 March, 2021, -Paper short abstract:
This ethnographic analysis of almost-peace, almost-war, and the social effects of COVID-19 in Israel, aims to spur discussion of almostness as a lived part of the vertiginous state that includes anxiety, adaptability, inertia, acceptance, and hope.
Paper long abstract:
Although Israel has not been engaged in a full-fledged war since 1982, the country has never settled into the domestic complacency of peace. The long-term ethnography that we've conducted as 21st century citizen-researchers leads us to view life in Israel as an unending yet fluctuating condition of almostness. Focusing on everyday practices of affect, time and space, as well as the ways in which Israelis describe their ways of doing and being in the world, we suggest that they perceive their lives as being lived along a fitful, often dizzying, continuum of almost-peace and almost-war.
We now ask, how do the restrictions, fears and threats of the current pandemic fit into, or challenge this almostness scheme? How do Israelis experience these pressures in everyday practices and through their perceptions of physical and social realities? In what ways does their previous experience of almostness in almost-war flareups influence their navigation of this extraordinary reality? And how are contemporary conceptualizations of issues such as danger, privacy, patriotism, and responsibility tested, played with, and communicated?
Our goal in presenting this ethnographic analysis is to spur discussion of almostness as a lived part of the vertiginous state that may include overlapping discourses, behaviors and affects of anxiety, adaptability, inertia, acceptance, denial and even hope. Whereas the elusiveness of almostness can promise no resolution or endpoint, it does conjure social imaginaries of much worse and far better scenarios, and can thereby inspire cultural creativity, social action and assurances that everything will eventually work out.
Paper short abstract:
This paper focuses on absent timespaces in the form of missing and silenced histories, unrealised futures, and unmaterialised cities. It explores their role in shaping the vertiginous experience of a city and in producing a sense of loss and confusion in its inhabitants.
Paper long abstract:
In this paper, I reflect on the role of absences and how they shape the vertiginous experience of people living in Latina, in Central Italy. I focus on absences in the form of missing and silenced histories, unrealised futures, and unmaterialised cities. Latina was built in 1932 with the name of Littoria by the fascist regime. With the end of the dictatorship, the city was re-named Latina and underwent substantial changes. In the 1950s, Latina was included in a development fund for the South of Italy, which brought significant industrial developments to the area, followed by a decline of the industrial sector once the program ended. Both events were referred to, during my fieldwork, as illusions, having launched the city towards a modern future that never materialised. Moreover, given its relatively recent foundation in 1932, Latina was often referred to as “a young city with no history”, while carrying the weight of a short and contested past, often silenced. Here, I focus on the affective charges exuded by these absent timespaces: as missing or silenced pasts and unrealised futures, and as the defeated potentialities of cities that never materialised. My interlocutors were caught in vertiginous reiterations of these multiple latent cities, which unsettled their sense of belonging, by disrupting the city’s temporal and spatial boundaries. I explore the ways in which these absent timespaces and vertiginous trajectories define the city’s existence, while at the same time also disrupting it, producing a widespread sense of loss and confusion among its inhabitants.
Paper short abstract:
Drawing on fieldwork in Iceland, the paper explores crisis-driven interdependencies between the past, present and future, which manifest themselves in vertiginous forms of anticipation. It focuses on affective future-making and problematises temporalities of ethnographic knowledge production.
Paper long abstract:
In Iceland, the economic crisis is once again looming large on the horizon and producing social alertness and anticipatory moods. Although the crisis has not yet come and resides in the realm of imagined and possible, its locally contextualized presentiments already affect social understandings and actions. From economic and political turbulences to more mundane, tangible and intangible aspects of everyday life, they all seem to remind of not only ‘what has happened’ in the past, but also ‘what is about to happen’ in the near future. As a result, the ethnographic present is gradually fading away and becoming replaced by the vertiginous relationship between the emergent and the possible. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Iceland, the paper seeks to explore crisis-driven interdependencies between the past, present and future, which manifest themselves in vertiginous forms of anticipation. It focuses on affective future-making and problematises temporalities of ethnographic knowledge production. By unpacking the vertiginous, it aims to illuminate existing imaginaries and social practices, including those formations which are still in a state of becoming. Our ethnographic attentiveness to anticipation, future-oriented actions and active meaning making in motion offers insights into the lived affective and temporal ways of being in the world.
Paper short abstract:
Through insights from Greece, I propose a theorization of vertigo as means to capture the intense temporal disorientation brought about by life in crisis.
Paper long abstract:
I propose 'vertigo' as a theory to capture the intense temporal disorientation brought about by life in crisis. In the whirlpool of unforeseen social change, people experience confusion as to where and when they belong on timelines of previously unquestioned pasts and futures. Through individual stories from Greece, I explore the everyday affects of vertigo: nausea, dizziness, breathlessness, the sense of falling, and unknowingness of Self. Being lost in time, caught in the spin-cycle of crisis, people reflect on belonging to modern Europe, neoliberal promises of economic progression, defeated futures, and the existential dilemmas of life held captive in the uncanny elsewhen. Insights from de Martino, Runia, and Kierkegaard, among others, help to unpack vertigo as affective orientation.