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- Convenors:
-
Aet Annist
(University of Tartu and Tallinn University)
Michaela Haug (University of Freiburg)
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- Stream:
- Extinction
- Sessions:
- Friday 2 April, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
We invite contributions with theoretical, empirical and/or methodological focus to realities emerging from the expectation of catastrophic futures, and the creative and systematic ways in which people study, guide, abandon or embrace the expectation of profound, catastrophic change.
Long Abstract:
This panel proposes to consider anthropologically the understanding and meaning of and responses to the expectation of catastrophic futures. Such future imaginings can trigger powerful affect and may demand action, directing both individual and social responses. The panel brings together research on how catastrophic futures create new identities, socialities, movements; how these channel the imagination into action - to prevent, to mitigate, to prepare and prefigure - and with what results.
Further, we would pay attention to how does this new, alternative future world that is being thought up correspond to the imaginings of catastrophes and collapse. How do fear and hope, renewal and disintegration exist side by side in the lives of individuals and movements? What are the social, cultural, creative and systematic ways in which people study, guide, abandon or embrace the expectation of profound change in the world where nothing is guaranteed? We welcome ethnographic and theoretical insights into what frames and guides futures, and how do different focuses on future - climate change, pandemics, resource exhaustion, extintions, civilisational crises - formulate different present outcomes.
We also invite methodological scrutiny of studying the future: where is the ethnographer when the people with whom they study struggle with their visions of terrible futures? What is the "curious practice" that "staying with the trouble" (Haraway 2016) could mean for the fieldworker, especially the one who has "gone native" with activism and/or subscribes to the same concerns; what possibilities - ontological, epistemological - does this hold open?
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Friday 2 April, 2021, -Paper short abstract:
This paper explores how young Dayak in Indonesian Borneo imagine their future while they grow up in a rainforest environment that is rapidly shrinking and undergoing profound change.
Paper long abstract:
Indonesia owns some of the largest remaining rainforest areas on this planet – which are shrinking at alarming rates. Reports on past and present forest loss and future predictions of further deforestation and their contribution to the ever more threatening global ecological crisis are thus omnipresent. For the people that live in and depend on the Indonesian rainforests, these bleak future scenarios are not only frightening images, that pop up in the media. For them, they pose a serious threat to their livelihoods and many experience the effects of deforestation and environmental degradation in their daily lives.
Drawing on my research among the Dayak Benuaq, an indigenous group of Indonesian Borneo, my paper explores how people imagine their future while being faced by catastrophic predictions that suggest that they live in a doomed environment. My focus lies primarily on the perspective of young people and how they respond to these gloomy forecasts in their endeavour to create their own individual futures.I present their hopes and worries and discuss an ambivalent feeling of being torn between the hopes associated with individual planning for the future and rather gloomy expectations regarding general developments.
Paper short abstract:
Social complexity challenges our knowledge and blurs a sense of responsibility to avoid catastrophic futures. By examining Japan’s anti-nuclear movement after the Fukushima disaster, this paper argues that emotional practices expand one’s identity beyond ‘here and now’ and create ethical agency.
Paper long abstract:
In March 2011, Japan experienced a catastrophic disaster of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, due to the massive earthquake and tsunami. Yet, ten years after the disaster, the Japanese government still promote nuclear power in the country where another mega-quake is predicted to occur. While our modern technology could bring devastating damage to the future, today’s complex social systems undermine scientific reasoning to calculate risks and blur the attribution of responsibility. How can we imagine another catastrophe in the future and start action to prevent it? Based on the author’s fieldwork, this paper finds a possible new ethical agency in the practices of the post-Fukushima anti-nuclear protesters in Tokyo. Rather than projecting a clear vision of the future dystopia or utopia, these protesters are taking action based on their own emotions here and now. One of the notable emotions is a sense of regret about being indifferent in the past. The disaster disclosed their hidden complicity because the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant had generated energy for the Tokyo region. Then they took to the street to ‘engrave’ the pains of those who had been silenced and started their action, hoping to redeem their pride by creating a better future. By examining these practices through a new materialist framework, this paper argues that although the cognitive imagination of an individual body tends to be limited to here and now, the protesters are reformulating ethical agency for the future through encountering other bodies and “engraving” affects onto their own bodies.
Paper short abstract:
The presentation examines the experience of political crisis of August 2020 in Belarus, as it was lived through by the particular Polish community, engaging with social life of grievances and temporal hopes and historical trajectories of marginalization and quests for dignity
Paper long abstract:
Against the background of reflection of their 'civilisational misplacement' and structural injustice, Polish communities approached the political crisis of 2020 with mindfulness towards vastly uneven infrastructural promises of the two countries, different belongings to whose geo-political projects (the 'European' one of Poland and the quasi-Soviet one of Belarus) they shared. In this context, I analyse the interjections of communal reflexion of changing times and openings for the nation-wide meaning-making of civic participation, framed as hopes for the abolishment of generational injuries against human dignity, with everyday teleologies of educated hopelessness.
I engage critically with literature on state formation, citizenship, ethical life and temporality. Hope informed by both vague images of the past (cf. Jansen 2014), the early 1990s marked by the collapse of seeming congruous dispensation (the Soviet one) and similar release of the pressure valve, and by the idioms of belonging to the alternatively framed structure of [Polish] statehood (cf. Greenberg 2016 on workings of comparison) - all somewhat surprisingly resulting in unexpected emotional investment in the idioms of nation-wide civic participation in the Belarusian 'revolutionary' project.