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- Convenors:
-
Rosabelle Boswell
(Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University)
Jessica Thornton (Nelson Mandela University)
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- Format:
- Panel
- Transfers:
- Open for transfers
Short Abstract:
In recent decades anthropologists of the global South have been encouraged to pursue a decolonial representation and 'truth'. This panel signifies the mobility of the anthropological mind, highlighting the creativity, imagination and multiple routes of anthropological knowledge in the global South.
Long Abstract:
In recent decades, anthropologists of the global South and specifically in southern Africa and southwest Indian Ocean region, have been encouraged to offer incisive, empathetic and decolonial representations of the truth in their societies. However, this 'imperative', rooted in the belief regarding the value of decoloniality to freedom, has made it challenging fo anthropologists seeking a different reference point for the representation of identity and diversity. The panel proposes that more anthropologists of the global South are searching for new routes of identity and representation via creativity and imagination. In doing so, they are diversely representing the human condition and the expression of human culture and diversity in the global South. In this panel, presenters are encouraged to share the diverse and creative ways in which anthropology in the global South is producing new 'routes' of knowledge. These routes of knowledge may be sensory (i.e., visual, auditory, olfactory) or literary (i.e. poetic) and or digitized. The aim is to discuss how anthropology is unfolding in these spaces, and how, perhaps such spaces offer the discipline alternative forms of 'worlding' as offered by Pnina-Cabral (2014) and those interested with alternative loci of identity. The panel encourages reflection on the nexus between anthropology and creativity and the liberatory potential of a creative anthropology for scholars of the global South.
Accepted papers:
Paper short abstract:
Divination methodology explored as creative transontological technique, alongside archival retrieval and critical heritage studies, offering new perspectives for the interpretation of underwater cultural heritage on the Southern African Indian Ocean coastline in the era of climate change.
Paper long abstract:
2024 has been a watershed year in the frequency and intensity of major climate events. On the Southern African Indian Ocean coastline, increasingly powerful storm surges are reshaping the coastline, in the process revealing fragments of shipwrecks hidden in the sand for centuries. Originating in the era of Portuguese expansion, violent insertion to dominate Indian Ocean trade routes and the appropriation of existing insitutions of slavery as a pre-cursor to the industrial scale of trans-oceanic slavery that would follow, these shipwrecks offer a record both of the origins of the modern world sytem which produces the era of the Anthropocene and climate change, and the trajectories of alternative lifeways as survivors from the margins were incorporated into indigenous communities. This paper utilises a critical heritage studies approach, informed by the theoretical position of Trouillot's explorations on power and the production of history (1995), and Haartman's critical fabulation (2019), to explore divination methodology as creative response to the ontological limitations of previous approaches to interpreting underwater cultural heritage in Africa, alongside archival retrieval of marginal stories of shipwreck survivors and their afterlives.
Paper short abstract:
I would like to offer a glimpse into my ethnographic research at the C4AI in São Paulo using an arts-based approach. By interpreting the AI development through the lens of the metaphor of antropófago , a decolonial socio-technical imagination of "anthropophagic AI" is envisioned.
Paper long abstract:
In my presentation, I would like to offer a glimpse into my ethnographic research at the Center for Artificial Intelligence (C4AI) in São Paulo, Brazil. While both the site and my research are embedded in what Crawford describes as "registry of power" in an unjust world, my aim is to enable an alternative reading of the findings of anthropological research through an arts-based approach. Arts-based research as a paradigm within the spectrum of post-qualitative research (Busch & Franco 2022) may serve as a way of creating and fostering decolonial knowledge (Leavy 2018). In my anthropological research, which is partly based on laboratory ethnography (Latour & Woolgar 1979), I try to interpret the findings using the metaphor of antropófago. The anthropophagic movement was initiated in 1928 by Tarsila do Amaral's painting Abaporu, which in Tupi means 'the man who eats people', and Oswald de Andrade's Manifesto Antropófago (1928). As a metaphor for cultural appropriation, anthropophagy is closely related to concepts such as "hybridity" or “creolization”, but with a certain “Brazilian” specificity (Dunn 2010).
Reading and reinterpreting the C4AI's efforts to create an AI "from the South, for the South" through the lens of "anthropophagic incorporation" allows to envision a distinctly decolonial socio-technical imagination of “anthropophagic artificial intelligence” (Cantarini 2023). For me, the route to this new imagination begins with the oil colours of Amaral's painting and leads through the alienation and appropriation of cultural elements, to the provisional end of an AI whose futuristic potentials cannibalise themselves in a neo-colonial world.
Paper short abstract:
Poetry can offer a pithy, visceral narrative for the human embedded in an apocalyptic setting. This paper considers poetry on ocean management and decline, as well as complex narratives of human relations with the sea in southern Africa.
Paper long abstract:
The climate change crisis is presently articulated by specialists embedded in 'serious' fields of enquiry, such as ocean governance and marine science. Artists, creatives and poets do not yet feature as 'serious' contributors to global narratives of climate change. In this paper I draw on recently (2024) published poetry to articulate and appeal to a visceral, embodied experience of human relations with the sea, experiences which appear to be universal. The presentation proposes that poetry can be a useful path to engaging the apocalyptic aspects of the climate crisis, as well as the place of humans in an unfolding story that, in many ways is beyond human control. Poetry in this regard can be narrative, source of solace and empathy. The paper considers the poetry of David Whyte, Pnina-Cabral's (2014) concept of worlding(s) and Braidotti's (2016) transmateriality, to propose the possibility of imagining diversely expressive post-apocalyptic coastal worlds, where entities such as the sea and shore relate. The aim of the poetry (and of the presentation) is to elicit a view of earthly experience as a process that exists outside of explicit human intervention. Five poems will be presented and discussed to shift the anthropogenic 'gaze' (Urry 2000) on nature.