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- Convenors:
-
Claudio Pinheiro
(Rio de Janeiro Federal University)
Subhashim Goswami (Shiv Nadar University)
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- Stream:
- Extinction
- Sessions:
- Monday 29 March, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
This panel foresees discussing how immateriality and intangibility are affecting society including our relations to regimes of time, whether or not resulting from processes of dematerialization, corrosion or extinction.
Long Abstract:
The world is dematerializing. Sounds no novelty that ordinary life is becoming immaterial and intangible, impacting our relationship with time. Understandings of de-materialization relate to the future, through ideas of progress, efficiency and immateriality, and to the past, through concepts of deterioration, corrosion or undoing. Most of these transformations have been accelerated by Covid-19 pandemic, a triggering event that helped readdressing regimes of time. While banking and judiciary systems move online, our contact with currency, stamps, certificates or paper, vanishes. Distant learning expanded, paired by a substantive reduction of knowledge being produced or circulating in printed format be it the absence of books, articles, notebooks, syllabi or prohibitive costs of such material leading to its extinction - especially in the global south. Coupled with this is the new sociality of the online/virtual space which has placed a challenge on ethnography to draw from a loss of the material and the tangible.
What kind of futures can we envision in the wake of immaterial worlds, and how are anthropologists poised to inhabit and study such futures? Is the process of dematerialization a productive void fostering new forms of sociability? What possibilities are enabled or disabled within our pedagogic/research frames? How to produce ethnographies of inaccessible or intangible sites; of what we cannot reach, see, smell, listen to or interact with? This panel invites papers addressing how immateriality and intangibility are affecting society including our relations to temporality, whether or not resulting from processes of de-materialization, corrosion or extinction.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Monday 29 March, 2021, -Paper short abstract:
This paper focuses on the ways in which, in an age of populist identity politics driven by resentments, the German Green Party negotiate between the dematerial effects of climate change and the material premises of climates through electoral politics.
Paper long abstract:
The German Green Party and its electoral politics on climate change and environmentalism have gained considerable traction in the recent decades, sufficient enough for it to become the ruling party in Southern states of Germany like Baden-Wuerttemberg and claim the second-highest number of seats in the German Parliament. In an age of populist identity politics driven by resentments against material and dematerial tenents of society and economy, what makes European green parties’ electoral politics interesting is the way in which it continuously negotiates between articulating the dematerial effects of climate change and the material premises on which climates can be controlled and altered. This paper will specifically focus on the ways in which Green Party policies and politics ensure its electoral mandate in Germany by focusing on improving the micro-climatic conditions of Germany by actively resorting to renewable energies and reducing its carbon footprint. In doing so, the paper shall reflect on the possibilities of a conversation between the anthropology of electoral politics and anthropology of climate change that could reflect deeper into the material and dematerializing basis of the contemporary economy of the political.
Paper short abstract:
This paper is a methodological reflection which argues how an ethnography can be produced without the presence of an ethnographer and through the immateriality of the tangible.
Paper long abstract:
This paper is a methodological reflection of an audio-exchange project which took place in the form of exchanging conversation through audio recordings between two sets of people across significantly distinct contexts. Groups of people from a city and a very remote rural location speak to one another by sharing physical recordings over a year. Soon this exchange became about sharing precise information like how much to pay for a photocopy in the city to exchanging physical plants and ferns to treat illnesses, to recording soundscapes of the village like rice boiling, goats bleating besides recording songs which laid out the long history of lives lived and a very tangible sense of the everyday of both the village and the city. The recordings as a response to one another were in-depth ethnographic material which were all produced without really asking a question and certainly without the presence of an anthropologist. The exchange of physical audio recordings, mediated through a sense of knowing the other unravelled a gradual yet definite presentation of the self when such a demand was not made or asked by the other. Using vignettes and content of this audio-exchange project, this paper argues how the materiality of an ethnography can very well be produced when the limitation of an anthropologist’s absence becomes productive of producing an ethnography when one may not have intended so nor envisaged a sociality to emerge when people across distinct contexts do not meet but only listed to sounds and voices.
Paper short abstract:
This paper envisages discussing how immateriality and intangibility are affecting education at large and the university in particular, including our relations with temporality, whether or not they result from dematerialization, corrosion or extinction processes.
Paper long abstract:
Brazil became top ranked country at the 2020 United Nations E-Government Development Index, regarding the digitalization of information and e-governance in economics, public administration, baking, education etc. Less information circulating in printed format is largely associated to ideas of progress and future, even if narratives of development and future have vanished from Brazil’s political and economic agenda. The outbreak of Covid-19 had an impact on it, changing our relationship with regimes of time and our ability to plan for future times.
This paper is part of an ongoing project observing the effects of changing temporal regimes, to focus on mapping and analyzing the impact of the pandemic on the Brazilian educational capacity, considering: 1) the consequences for the maintenance of different scientific fields (humanities, life sciences and engineering); and 2) the capacity of resilience of the Brazilian scientific production, expressed in the willingness to form new generations. Among the expected impacts are: a) the generation of instruments that help universities and scientific and educational authorities to promote programs to defend and promote scientific education; b) the creation of mechanisms to mitigate the impact of the pandemic on the interruption of careers and life cycles of scientists in training, and c) the materiality of the university and activities related to education.