Paper short abstract:

Tacking back and forth between disaster preparedness actors’ struggles for the present and that of anthropologists’, this paper explores how the subjunctive mode of playfulness (the ‘as if’) and the ethos of patchwork ethnography might help both groups of experts keep hold of what is in front of us.

Paper long abstract:

Disasters are ordinarily approached as issues of the future (e.g. prediction) or the past (e.g. memory). But for many advocates of disaster preparedness and risk reduction in Japan and Chile, the struggle is for the present. How do we make the prospect of a mass disaster that might or might not happen in one’s lifetime, present in people’s everyday lives? This presence would need to feel immediate to urge action but not terrifying in ways that would be paralyzing. It would need to be concrete but with the imagination of future anticipation and past memories. Tacking back and forth between disaster preparedness actors’ struggles for the present and that of anthropologists’, this paper explores how the subjunctive mode of playfulness (the ‘as if’) and the ethos of patchwork ethnography might help both groups of experts keep hold of what is in front of us. The analysis suggests that the elusive present might be a challenge shared not only by these two groups but also by other knowledge professionals today.

Paper short abstract:

This year as a birthday gift I was given a haunting. It had once belonged to my dad. Working through the materiality of an uncanny death through its debris, documentation, and remnants, I consider the ever-present weight of the haunt, to think through an anthropology of presence, and the present.

Paper long abstract:

This year as a birthday gift I was given a haunting. My dad received it first on his 17th birthday, and shared it later with his sister. It was her brother too, she’d say, when my dad would claim the haunting as his own. Their other siblings were less inclined to be haunted, so they were never visited by their ghost brother -the man who I would never know personally as my uncle. But they didn’t deny the haunting. It was of course tangible, palpable, when we all gathered together for Sunday dinners. His scent would drift up from the cramped basement, mingling with the flavour of roast drippings. My grandmother was already haunted when her son died suddenly and strangely and messily. It involved fence wire. Uncannily? I don’t know, that last adjective is hard to get right. The details of the death can only be spoken late at night after much drinking. In this paper, I work through the materiality of this gifted haunting; its debris, documentation, and remnants. In other words, the ever-present weight of the haunt, in order to think through how ghosts move through time (or not), how they age with you (or not), and how they are inherited (or not). How do ghosts engage memory and present together, kin too, confusing the boundaries of present-tense desire and a longing for the past? Indeed, ghosts make sure the past is always present.

Paper short abstract:

'Poverty of Aspiration' suggests people living in poverty lack ability to hope or work toward a future, passing responsibility onto parents and children rather than institutions and structures. Counterpoint is offered here via children's auto-ethnography on nostalgia, hope and transformations.

Paper long abstract:

'Poverty of Aspiration' suggests that people living in poverty, "whether because of "[b]ehavioural biases or internal constraints such as myopia [or]lack of willpower" also lack ability to hope or work toward a future. This idea has been heavily critiqued in recent years because it passes responsibility for a presumed lack of aspirations onto parents and children, shifting responsibility away from government and schools. In attempts to move this debate beyond political and economic rhetoric, I focus here on how pre-teens conceive of 'present' and related horizons via ethnography created in the Anthropology By Children (ABC) project. The children's photovoice work discusses abstractions including 'nostalgia' and 'future' alongside their more immediate demands for replacement of broken playground slides, better social integration between year groups, and aims to create their own YouTube channels, undermining tropes of ambition-failure and unsettling preconceptions of what aspiration is and performs.

In Lambek's definition of horizons, "acting in the present always supposes orientations with respect to past and future […]They are outer limits but they are not limitations." Glissant offers a specific Imaginary: how each sociality perceives and conceives of 'world', including the mute possibilities of deep intergenerational pain. The children's audio-photographic archives speak to both: their challenges in Britain 'now' while looking forward to transformation. Rather than focusing on grand narratives of imaginary-horizonal thinking, I foreground small moments, reflecting on how hope renders visible to students unimagined pathways, connecting existing potential with practical conduits, providing alternate views on valuation and aspiration of young British people.

Paper short abstract:

By viewing events via the tripartire structure of ritual, the anthropology of events, crises, and revolutions has fed into a modernist perspective on socio-political disorder that requires resolution. What happens when we focus on the present without placing it in a sequence from disorder to order?

Paper long abstract:

In the midst of their country’s liberal democratic transition after its revolution, a collective of Tunisian left militants revive the ciné-club assembly as an occasion for public film screening and discussion. Through its long imbrication with political dissent, the ciné-club proposes a format for experiencing citizenship that jars with some of the most prominent normative frames of liberalism. Insofar as it introduces different chronotopes in an otherwise tightly defined liberal present, the ciné club constitutes what I call an “event of citizenship”. In this paper, I explore the differential effects of the ciné club event on the Tunisian social fabric in relation to different temporal frames. Specifically, I ask what happens when the ciné club assembly is seen through the lens of a national past in need of recalibration and through the futurist prism of transitional justice. I compare the above with the unfolding of the ciné club in the present tense. I suggest that the ciné club assembly in the present moment proves to be a revolutionary occurrence in the midst of liberal agreement, a liberal agreement sustained through both memory-making projects and the futurism of transitional justice. The paper argues that paying heed to the present allows us to reverse or even collapse the modernist sequencing of revolution to democracy, which is preserved in anthropology’s use of ritual theory to analyze crises and revolutions (Thomassen 2012). The reversal of this sequencing complicates the ontological difference between revolution and democracy and indicates that they are highly porous experiences.

Paper short abstract:

Drawing on ethnographic research and informed by workers' personal narratives, this paper considers how a focus on the concept of 'anticipation' could inform anthropological explorations of 'the present' and reframe ongoing debates on precarious work and labour in contemporary capitalism.

Paper long abstract:

Recent debates in the anthropology of work and labour have foregrounded the realities of precarious livelihood strategies across the world, frequently emphasising the 'novelty' of labour precarity in so-called 'Western countries'. While this framing has informed nuanced analyses of particular situations, it also risks obscuring the uneven distribution of capitalist forms across regional contexts, and the ways in which particular regional and industrial 'pasts' continuously colour workers' experiences and perspectives in the present.

Drawing on 13 months of ethnographic fieldwork in the Outer Hebrides of Scotland and considering the perspectives of workers employed in the local textile industry, in this paper I discuss the importance of locating contemporary experiences of labour uncertainty within particular histories – regional, industrial, personal. For most islanders I met, economic fragility, the threat of depopulation, and fluctuating employment propects were perceived not as particularly novel circumstances, but understood and experienced as part of long regional histories.

Examining workers' personal narratives through the lens of 'anticipation', in this paper I consider how people drew on their knowledge of those histories to make sense of their present circumstances, and to navigate, in resourceful ways, the 'predictable unpredictability' of everyday 'island life'. I suggest that paying attention to the anticipation involved in navigating various kinds of uncertainty – environmental, economic, social, existential – can illuminate how everyday experiences are shaped both by visions of the past and by shifting expectations of potential futures. Moreover, I argue, these perspectives can inform ethnographic research and anthropological knowledge-production in fruitful ways.

Paper short abstract:

Care for, and with, water reveals multiple present tenses in Jerusalem. Pasts and futures wield immediate action, so that beyond a temporal condition, the present is saturated with affective spectres and returns. I explore their effects, and the challenges in representation that they provoke.

Paper long abstract:

If time is not linear, what happens to the present? This question resonates in the daily encounters with water across its infrastructure in the city of Jerusalem. Care for, and with, water – the focus of my doctoral research – opens up the multiple tenses, and tensions, that the present brings about in this urban landscape. Pasts and futures emerge here precisely because of their immediate action. Futures impose on the now, returns to the past take visceral urgency, and historical moments of rupture are ever continuous. They make the present less a temporal condition – as it loops, folds, or collapses all together – but into an affective, bodily one. This lives in an obsession with ‘real-time’ water quality data, which elicits a particular affective affordance amongst the scientists who use it, to monitor potential contamination across the water network. It exists in the dynamic, intimate, and sensorial memories which accompany the repetition and return to age-old practices at a spring, or a small plot of land, in Silwan, East Jerusalem. It lives in the ‘everyday Nakba’ experienced by Palestinian Jerusalemites across the city, which carves out daily choices and larger refusals. I have confronted the challenge of these presents in the writing of my thesis. What does it take to ethically represent these continual loops, and their enduring effects, when writing of research encounters now past? Does the concept of ‘representation’ undermine this intention from the start? How could it be challenged in turn?

Paper short abstract:

This presentation will examine what kinds of arguments we can make from a present divested of anything other than itself.

Paper long abstract:

As the call for papers argues, abstractions remove us from the immediacy of here-and-now and insert experiences in broader patterns, schemas, sequences that make sense of those experiences in light of something other, something more, than their immediate selves. What would a present without abstraction look like? This presentation offers a possible answer to this experiment in the work of neoliberal philosopher Friedrich Hayek, who encouraged scientists of all ilks to renounce “the will to intelligibility” and let data be data. Through James Carrier’s work I will consider how this drive towards the present has played out in anthropology, particularly in its postmodern, post-structural and ontological garbs, and ask what can of arguments we can actually make from within a present taken in its immediacy, as raw and concrete as an experience can be – if any at all.

Paper short abstract:

Stimulated by the invitation to locate the present beyond the anthropology of time, this returns to certain abstractions found in the ethnography of Old Melanesia, for instance, in the paradox of ‘timeless time’.

Paper long abstract:

Stimulated by the invitation to locate the present beyond the anthropology of time, this returns to certain abstractions found in the ethnography of Old Melanesia, for instance, in the paradox of ‘timeless time’. What kind of ‘times’ are such abstractions struggling with? A vivid concretisation of ‘present’-day circumstances in New Melanesia introduces a new terrain of descriptive possibilities. What would it look like to take time out of the past and future as well?

Paper short abstract:

This paper takes inspiration from Trouillot’s insight that, ‘Only in that present can we be true or false to the past we chose to acknowledge.’ (1995: 151), to explore British anthropology’s lack of presence in racial justice struggles of the present.

Paper long abstract:

This paper locates British anthropology’s struggle to engage with the present and presence in its prevailing inadequacy at addressing and actively engaging with issues around racism and racial justice.

With issues of representation and anthropology’s literary and symbolic turn there came abstraction and distraction. Yet as Fabian (1990) so fervently put it, before representation there is presence. But, where were was British anthropology in the most recent calls for racial justice? Where were the urgently needed analyses, voices, commentaries on the current state of racial inequality, imperial debris and continuing colonial violence? This paper takes British anthropology’s lack of presence in racial justice movements as being emblematic of the disciplines inadequacy to tackle the struggles of our present, specifically those surrounding racial inequality.

Acknowledging the past in the present, this paper takes inspiration from Trouillot’s insight that, ‘…even in relation to The Past our authenticity resides in the struggles of our present. Only in that present can we be true or false to the past we chose to acknowledge.’ (1995: 151) Exploring the need for urgency and presence in engagement with struggles of racial justice, I aim to show that anthropology’s past is at the root of its misplacement of the present and by extension, that of a liberatory future.

Paper short abstract:

Odds are futures captured and put on sale today. Political gamblers seek out misprices in present odds, staking their claim to understand the geo-political present better than the market. Could a speculative anthropology arbitrate profitably in practice? If it can, should it?

Paper long abstract:

Normally thought of as a prospective activity, the presentism of gambling is often neglected. Political gambling specialists develop 'theses' that anticipate future political events and their outcomes, and compare these against current market prices, looking for misprices to exploit. This is a future-oriented activity, but it hinges upon an accurate understanding of the present. Are the British public fed up with Brexit? Are polling figures still skewed by respondent bias? Is President Biden feeling his years? Future profits hinge on up-to-the-minute understanding of the implications of now upon the future, and the ability to act upon them.

This mode of understanding is inimical to anthropological sensibilities, if not to anthropologists’ realities. When we produce research, the present is often presented as best understood in its sprawling ethnographic minutiae, delivering insight that other disciplines cannot. Anthropological presents are more often a ripple in the longue durée (across which humanity acts as it has and will), or a moment within an ongoing melee of structural forces. Efforts to arbitrate between the world as it is and as it will be surface more in departmental budget meetings and faculty appointment committees, not to mention impact case studies and calls to action. What would a more opportunistic anthropology of this moment look like? How might a speculative anthropology operate effectively in practice? Could political gamblers be a long-odds source of inspiration? In this paper I use my ethnographic knowledge of political gambling to push the analogy as far as I can.