Paper short abstract:

Life – one of the most characteristic romantic convictions – is a loose category to designate the connected virtues of flow, process, striving, and openness against form and stasis. The history and persistence of vitalism is the best track to follow the development of the romantic emphasis in life.

Paper long abstract:

One of the most characteristic romantic convictions has been the pre-eminence of life against form and stasis. Life is a loose category to designate the opposite, connected virtues of flow, process, striving, and openness. The configuration of ideas we call nowadays “vitalism” emerged in the late 18th Century and has persisted until now in Western thought, in spite of a tenacious and recurrent opposition from mainstream scientific establishment. The emphasis on the emergent, specific, qualities of the organic condition defied characteristically the most basic qualities of Western “normal science”.

The emphasis on life is inseparable from a strong sense of totality, a holist attitude to the elements of nature and of humankind in it. The pre-eminence of the whole upon the parts corresponds to a constant emphasis in the relatedness of all cosmological elements, re-establishing partially the sense of universal sympathy that had prevailed in traditional Western cosmology until the historical concrescence of modernity.

Art (and the human sciences) came to express more evidently the disavowal of intellectualist and rationalist models of the human world, and a vibrant bet on the powers of sensibility, subjectivity, creativity and authenticity. Vitalism developed in the parallel world of biological sciences, struggling to describe and confirm similar processes in the organic realm. Vitalist science renders explicit the value of an excess of life as against static, frozen, mechanic worldviews. It backs thus the romantic search for a more open worldview, devoid of present teleological rationalist anxiety.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores how French back-to-the-landers combine feral walks, meditation, shamanistic rituals and other practices aimed at overcoming nature-culture distinction with their desire to create environmentally sustainable societies.

Paper long abstract:

Willingly and unwillingly, anthropological writing has contributed to common knowledge and imagination about other social worlds that are radically different from ours, which could be leveraged in the context of imminent ecological disaster and political impotence. As the shadow of climate change looms ever greater, French ecologists find inspiration in the post-dualist approaches developed by such scholars as Phillippe Descola, Bruno Latour and eco-feminists. This paper explores how French back-to-the-landers combine feral walks, meditation, shamanistic rituals and other practices aimed at overcoming nature-culture distinction with their desire to create environmentally sustainable societies. It shows how the long history of Western yearning for radical alterity, particularly that which resonates with utopian imageries, confers anthropology to a particular place in Western thought, and how it is prone to romanticize alterity without effectively challenging the tenants of Western modernity.

Paper short abstract:

Romanticism in the European tradition was a response to the rise of "modernity" marked by anxieties about man's place in nature. A comparable phenomenon is happening in China now as youth there turn to nature to justify normative claims. How can the two sets of events mutually inform each other?

Paper long abstract:

This paper is based on fieldwork conducted in a Chinese high school in 2021. I begin with the gaokao, the university entrance exam, discussing its role in the imagined life trajectories of my informants. I contrast this "exam of a lifetime" with another aim of education that I observed, one that did not depend on academic success but focussed on what might be vaguely called "character" education. I give a historical discussion of the dynastic era examination system, the keju, in the twilight of the Qing Dynasty. In doing so, I contrast the pre-modern keju with the modern gaokao and elaborate on how the transition in the aims of education mirrored the transition into modernity for China. I defend the classical understanding of "modernity" as the separation of "fact" and "value" theoretically, historically, and most importantly, ethnographically. During the economic reform stage of Chinese modernity, I argue that the aims of education had become subordinated to the goals of nation-building. However, I also observed that some of my informants have been dissatisfied with the trajectory of nation building during the reform era. Turning to the "class meeting," which I believe to be the site of moral education in my field site, I argue that there has been a conscious "Romantic" attempt to re-join and fact and value in the Xi era. In the absence of any grand scheme like Confucianism and Marxism, I argue that my informants are increasingly relying on "Chineseness" as a natural normative identity.

Paper short abstract:

Climate activists often employ Romantic tropes, negatively contrasting the light of modernity and industrial society with the darkness of the past and nature. This paper explores new forms of climate activism that seek to build a new culture as the only solution to a profoundly unwell world.

Paper long abstract:

Climate activists often contrast ideas of pristine nature with the corrupting culture of modernity. This paper charts some of the forms of new climate activism that have emerged over the past decade including the school strikes, Extinction Rebellion, and Dark Mountain, through a combination of participant observation and interview data. Such movements are largely located in the populous centres of Europe and North America, and focus their critique on the industrial capitalist system generating the prosperity from which they have benefitted. Their activism holds an ambiguous position between complicity and rejection of that system. They negatively contrasted the “light” of modernity and the Enlightenment with the “darkness” of the past. Climate activists, like Romantic thinkers, perceive Enlightenment optimism as created through exclusions that deny all that does not fit within the narrative of progress. New climate activism has emerged over the last decade in the context of unprecedented climatic changes, calling for system change as the only solution to a profoundly unwell world. They perceive their own “Western culture” as corrupted by the capitalist system, and traditional climate activism as too late to accomplish its stated goals. Instead they reframe activism as a revolutionary act, one aimed toward building a new culture. This paper seeks to examine Romantic tropes in new climate activism through engagement with the anthropology of activism, particularly the work of David Graeber. In doing so, the aim is to bring together anthropological visions of living otherwise with activists’ increasingly urgent and disruptive calls for system change.

Paper short abstract:

This paper asks how might forest enchantment, emotions of fear and awe and their accompanying ritual practices, mythologies and imaginations offer a far richer and varied set of moral responses to the natural world than what exists in 'modern' ecological consciousness.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores what it means to 'be ecological' (Morton 2018) by drawing on, on the one hand, romantic poets and their relationship to an ecological consciousness, and on the other hand exploring the 'romantic' ideals within Sundarbans residents' mythology, specifically a set of chants (mantras) used to tame tigers by those who enter into a mangrove forest to fish, collect honey, and crabs. The Sundarbans are both dangerous and awe-inspiring forests located in the Bay of Bengal delta. On the basis of long-term fieldwork with fishermen, crab collectors and honey collectors in the region, my interest is in making connections between resident's cosmological views to the ideas and worldviews expressed in the poetry of English and American romantic poets from Coleridge, Wordsworth, William Blake, Mary Shelley to Emerson and Thoreau which reveal a holistic way of perceiving, depicting, dwelling and animating the natural world and its interconnections. While anthropology and anthropologists have often caricaturised the Romantic legacy, with the word 'romantic' oddly thought of as a derogatory way of perceiving the world, with more 'modern' ways of understanding the concept of 'nature' and the complex interrelations between people and the places where they live, work and play. This paper analyses Sundarbans residents' 'tiger chants' used to gain protection in a dangerous forest by embedding the ethos of these chants within a romantic tradition which offers a far more rich and varied set of responses to the natural world than is dreamed of in the conventional history of ideas.

Paper short abstract:

This paper examines how romantic fantasies of happiness and the good life inform social dynamics in two remote mountain villages in the High-Arctic (Norway) and Southern Patagonia (Argentina). It asks whether such imaginaries can challenge existing ways of living in the Anthropocene.

Paper long abstract:

Since its emergence as a broad cultural ethos that spanned across large parts of the west, particularly from the 19th century and onwards, romanticism has been associated with fantasies of happiness and the good life centered around the search for sublime experiences in pristine natural landscapes. In today’s world, the allure of the wilderness is fueling a rapidly growing tourist industry and the emergence of a new cosmopolitan migrant class formation. Formed principally by people who seek alternatives to what they perceive as the fast-paced, spiritually poor, and alienating urban lifestyles of late modernity, many seek to the world’s last remaining wilderness areas to “reconnect” with nature and the self, and find peace and happiness. The double movement of tourism and lifestyle migration produces tensions, transformations, and frictions along an emergent global frontier between civilization and the wild outdoors. I examine recent socioeconomic developments in two frontier towns in Svalbard and Patagonia in order to explore how life projects shaped by romantic fantasies of a retreat from modern life negotiate, challenge or reproduce the global dynamics of late capitalism. At the center of this exploration, is a concern with the potential of experimental and speculative anthropology to contribute with new ideas about what constitutes a good life in the Anthropocene and, furthermore, of the limits of practices and perspectives that focus on the radical reshaping of desire in producing actual social change.

Paper short abstract:

In equine-assisted therapy, a romantic ideal suggests that horses can calibrate human souls towards healthier ways of living. But this paper describes conflict between two versions of that romantic ideal, leading to a critical evaluation of the idea of mutual more-than-human flourishing.

Paper long abstract:

Equine-assisted therapy is gaining traction in the UK and US, in part, because horses are valued as authentic relationship partners given their capacity for embodied attentiveness and interdependence. This is held in critical contrast with the harmful, false and limiting normative moral orders of human society. Contemporary mental health care exists in a critical context, wherein normativity is considered particularly troubling. Traits once seen as unhealthy have been reframed as merely non-normative. While more and more people experience their troubles as mental health problems, therapists' authority is fragile.

In equine-assisted therapy, horses are thought able to calibrate human thoughts and behaviours towards authentic flourishing. This rests on the idea that the concept of 'good connectedness' carries across species. In fact, ethnographic observations show that two versions of this romantic ideal can conflict with one another. One version holds that as humans work on themselves and become healthier, horses will thrive in their company. The other version suggests that if humans can learn to behave in a way that horses respond well to, there will be therapeutic benefit. This article describes friction between what is good for horses and humans, demonstrating the artful role of the therapist in almost invisibly curating relationships of apparent mutual benefit.

This could lead to a critique of romanticism on its own terms - as it appears normatively produced, after all. Yet I consider the good brought about by the compelling idea that moral calibration should come from somewhere other than human moral orders.

Paper short abstract:

In Kilburn, London, young people involved in crime and violence often attempt to transform their lives by making music. For them, the potential of music trades ambivalently on a romantic notion of music as transcendent – where music generates phenomenological, cultural, and socio-economic excess.

Paper long abstract:

On a poor council estate, in the London neighbourhood of Kilburn, the harsh realities of marginalization often drive young people toward crime and violence – where, as part of a broader street or ‘road’ culture, they are able to recover an ambivalent sense of dignity, community and agency. Road life, however, can come with weighty costs, and youth often dream about and work toward breaking free from crime and violence. Many of these dreams and efforts centre around making music, especially rap – seen as a potent means of moving beyond or transforming road life.

This paper unpacks the power of making rap within road culture. It argues that this power plays on a romantic notion of music as transcendent. The transcendental capacity of rap is staged and experienced in three overlapping ways: phenomenologically, through evoking charged emotions and a sense of immediacy; culturally, where music serves as a means for pursuing diverse ends, from escalating violent rivalries, to facilitating cooperation and understanding; and socio-economically, where making rap evokes the prospect of breakaway success.

Kilburn’s would-be musicians, however, remain closely attuned to the constraints of life on the margins. Rather than treating music as transcendent in its own right, young people stage music’s transcendental possibilities in a recursive relation with harsh material reality – where each contains and generates the other. Through this recursive relation, making rap allows young people to probe the ethical and political affordances of everyday life, and thus to cultivate small but genuine prospects for change.

Paper short abstract:

This paper ethnographically traces how historical romantic tropes appear as a powerful driving force behind the consolidation of Viktor Orbán’s illiberal regime in Hungary, and how this revolutionary Romanticism seeks to redefine the political future of the European Union.

Paper long abstract:

Starting from the consideration that the establishment of a new political regime also means epistemic change, this paper looks at the ways in which illiberal knowledge politics in Hungary draws on the Romantic tradition that emphasizes community and emotions as a source of knowledge. I outline how next to institutional and economic control, the Fidesz regime has attempted to dominate the Hungarian intellectual sphere through knowledge institutions from art institutions to media, centralized education, research centres, universities, and finally extensive state-commissioned propaganda campaigns. I show how the knowledge emanating from this realm skillfully draws from a century-long epistemic divide in Hungarian public life known as the ethnopopulist vs. urban divide (népi-urbánus ellentét), with the former emphasizing community over the individual, rural over the urban, and the national over the cosmopolitan. How does 2020s Romanticism look like in the Hungarian context, and why is it so compelling as a political force? Considering that Hungary’s role in the European Union as economically integral but politically disruptive, how does the Fidesz regime’s national project of illiberal epistemology spill out to the European arena? How are goodness and future articulated in this Romanticism, and what are its limitations? Drawing on ethnography in communal events organized by Fidesz in Budapest, I trace the reappearance of revolutionary Romanticism as a driving political force in Hungary, and argue that it plays an instrumental role in illiberal epistemology that seeks to redefine European politics far into the future.

Paper short abstract:

This paper stages a thought experiment with material from India and the UK, in which "unrequited love" replaces "ecological grief" to illustrate how the socioculturally configured category of unrequited love can become a basis for romantic ecological action without appeals to hope or expectations.

Paper long abstract:

"Ecological grief" has become a go-to concept when people try to articulate what it feels like, viscerally and emotionally, to live amidst an unprecedented degradation of ecosystems, the irreversible harm known as the Sixth Mass Extinction, and extreme climate shifts that humans may not survive. As a stance for inhabiting what many perceive as an increasingly unlivable world, however, ecological grief has significant limitations. Its psychological orientation misses much of the sociality involved in attempts to render any world livable. Its emphasis on a grief without transformational properties, a grief that cannot be "worked through" in a "dying world," may encourage political paralysis, rather than leading to necessary reparative practices. One suggestion has been to balance grief with hope in discussions of environmental issues. But as a culturally configured affect, hope, too, has its critics, not least within anthropology. In place of an oscillation between ecological hope and grief, this essay stages a thought experiment that draws on the history of anthropology's creative entanglement with romanticism. Suppose that when gazing linearly and chronologically toward an imagined future, we were to approach that future with a politics of unrequited love. (Unrequited, because no future, however much desired, can guarantee to usher species safely "forward" in time or to offer ecological conditions that will enhance their lives, much less to love them back.) Material from India and the UK illustrates how unrequited love can become a basis for romantic ecological action that is meaningful without entertaining naive hopes or expectations.