Irreconciliation and its divergences,

In Denktagebuch (Thought Diaries, 1950-1973) Hannah Arendt wrote that acts which cannot be forgiven are beyond punishment and hence cannot be reconciled to. In this annual 2023 Firth lecture, I draw from Arendt to further theorize and extend the concept of irreconciliation and reflect on the lessons that we can learn from it. Following Raymond Firth’s focus on individual divergences as a source of social change rather than social organizations, I reflect critically on the interdisciplinary scholarship on reconciliation, apology and forgiveness and theorise irreconciliation as a less examined lens of analysis through which such change can be aspired for. Most post-conflict reconciliatory exercises make it incumbent upon survivors to forgive and seek closure as an exhibition of ‘moving on’. Rather than being in opposition to ‘peace’, irreconciliation instead allows us to interrogate the status quo by refusing to forgive endemic impunities, particularly in the aftermath of staged processes of justice and absence-presence of the rule of law. Drawing from Firth’s exposition on social organisation and behaviour, his work on the Naval Intelligence Report and kinship in Europe, I will try to explore the political and psychic potentials that might lie dormant in the phenomenon of irreconciliation. As an ethnographically less examined phenomenon (which doesn’t just provide critique), I argue that irreconciliation allows an important examination of the rule of law within processes of unresolved genocidal injustices, debates relating to the ‘enslaved’, Black Lives Matter, institutional responses and might offer some possibilities for an engaged anthropology in these troubled times.

Bio:

Nayanika Mookherjee (FRSA) is a Professor of Political Anthropology and Co-Director of the Institute of Advanced Studies in Durham University. Based on her widely acclaimed book The Spectral Wound: Sexual Violence, Public Memories and the Bangladesh War of 1971 (2015 Duke University Press), in 2019 she co-authored (with a Bangladeshi visual artist Najmunnahar Keya) a set of guidelines, graphic novel and animation film Birangona: Towards ethical testimonies of sexual violence during conflict and received the 2019 Praxis Award from the Washington Association of Professional Anthropologists. The guidelines and graphic novel have fed into the Murad Code (named after the Yazidi sexual violence survivor and 2018 Nobel Peace Prize winner Nadia Murad) developed by the Prevent Sexual Violence Initiative of the UK government. Her focus on ethics emerges from her own research as well as being an Ethics officer of the ASA (2007-2012) when she updated the ASA ethics code in consultation with the members.

She has published extensively on anthropology of violence, ethics and aesthetics including editing volumes like ‘The Aesthetics of Nation’ (2011 with Christopher Pinney), ‘The Self in South Asia,’ (2013); Aesthetics, Politics and Conflict (2015 with Tariq Jazeel) and her recently edited volume is On Irreconciliation (2022). She has had fellowships with ESRC, Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, British Academy, Leverhulme and the Rockerfeller Foundation at Bellagio. She is finalising her manuscript Arts of Irreconciliation and funded by the British Academy she is carrying out research on war babies, conflict and transnational adoption. She did her BA (Honours) in Political Science from Presidency College (Calcutta University, India), and MA in Sociology and Anthropology from Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU, Delhi, India) and her Phd in Social Anthropology from SOAS (University of London). She was in the Sociology department in Lancaster University before joining the Anthropology department in Durham in 2011. 

Plenary Roundtable: Methods for an Unwell World

Anthropological methods are undergoing a period of rapid innovation. On one hand, the Covid-19 pandemic and decolonisation movements have seen an undoing of geographic estrangement as the cornerstone of ethnographic enquiry. On the other, the movement toward sensory, embodied and artistic modes of research creation sees our field sites unbounded. In the wake of these transformations, new possibilities are opening up for the uses and applications of anthropological knowledge at grassroots level, in civil society, and in policy making. This round table asks - what do anthropological methods have to give to an unwell world? It brings together anthropologists working at the intersections of our academic discipline, and policy, activist and art worlds. 

Yael Navaro is Professor of Social, Political and Psychological Anthropology at the University of Cambridge. She is the author of Faces of the State: Secularism and Public Life in Turkey (Princeton 2002) and The Make-Believe Space: Affective Geography in a Postwar Polity (Duke 2012), and co-editor of Reverberations: Violence Across Time and Space (UPenn 2021). 

Nandini Sikand (they, she) is an anthropologist, filmmaker, dancer/choreographer, and Professor at Lafayette College. They are the author of Languid Bodies, Grounded Stances: The Curving Pathway of Neoclassical Odissi Dance (Berghahn Books, 2017) and are currently working on Visualizing the Thug(gee): Colonialism, Race and Criminality and a non-fiction collection of essays about parenting while brown. 

Chika Watanabe is Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester. Her research and teaching interests are on development and humanitarianism, disaster preparedness, pedagogy, and play in the contexts of Japan, Myanmar, and Chile. 

Anjana Bala is an LSE Fellow in Anthropology. Her research, based in Chennai, Tamil Nadu, explores material process of psychic experiences. She is also a dance artist and is interested in how bodies are transformed by space, place, and histories and how this impacts practices of movement.  

Marina Peterson is professor of anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin. Her work attends to elemental forces and shifting modalities of matter, exploring diverse and innovative ways of encountering and presenting the ethnographic. Her recent monograph, Atmospheric Noise: The Indefinite Urbanism of Los Angeles (2021, Duke UP), engages mobilizations around airport noise to address ways in which noise amplifies modes of sensing and making sense of the atmospheric. She is the author of Sound, Space, and the City: Civic Performance in Downtown Los Angeles (2010, UPenn Press) and co-editor of Global Downtowns (with Gary McDonogh, 2012, UPenn Press), Anthropology of the Arts: A Reader (with Gretchen Bakke, 2016, Bloomsbury), and Between Matter and Method: Encounters in Anthropology and Art (with Gretchen Bakke, 2017, Bloomsbury). Articles have appeared in Anthropological Quarterly, Popular Music Studies, Postmodern Culture, Space and Culture, Social Text, and South Atlantic Quarterly.