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- Convenors:
-
Henrike Donner
(Goldsmiths)
Pauline von Hellermann (Sussex)
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- Chair:
-
Deborah James
(LSE)
- Format:
- Panel
- Transfers:
- Open for transfers
Short Abstract:
The panel invites ethnographically informed accounts of decline that may only be coped with in the face of everyday violence, but also bear the possibility of regeneration, which requires anthropology to reorientate itself toward the present.
Long Abstract:
The current phase of capitalist expansion constituted in the form of multiple crises is marked by the experience of constant decline. Whether it is demise of the welfare state and its institutions or the climate crisis, rather than being a state of exception, decline has become a permanent state of being for many. As Vigh (2008) emphasises anthropologists are centrally concerned with how the chronic crisis plays out in real life, and how related fields including decay (Hage 2021) and ruins (Tsing 2015) may help us conceptualise the present. Decline emphasises not only an abrasive rather than stabilising continuity of the status quo, but invites interdisciplinary conversations with those documenting and debating it: scientists, demographers, politicians, among them but also activists, artists and philosophers quantifying, measuring, categorising and mobilising it’s various conditionalities.
The panel invites contributions that are ethnographically informed accounts and acknowledge that decline represents an embodied and affective state with innate possibilities and diverse fields of social and institutional activity, networks and entanglements. We want to think with ethnography through heritage, species, and infrastructures to name a few sites and discuss practices of place-making, value-attachment, and dissent under conditions in which improvisation and coping with decline provides ‘unexpected disruptions and opportunities’ (Greenhouse 2002) and scope for regeneration (see von Hellermann’s RAI 2024 panel), whilst not denying that for a majority decline enforces modes of what Berlant called ‘cruel optimism’ as a forms of everyday violence are perpetuated that require anthropology to reorientate itself toward the present.
Accepted papers:
Paper short abstract:
A stone wall on a mountainside collapses. Decay suspended. What does it mean to seek its repair?
Paper long abstract:
The following paper is based on fieldwork in 2021 in a mountainous area of southern Spain, the Alpujarras, largely abandoned during a rural exodus expedited by the construction of industrial greenhouses on the coast. The collapse of once cultivated terraces is not only caused by leaving them in a state of disrepair, but by changes in the flow of water which exert effects along its entire trajectory. Water which once flowed in a system of fertile acequías (water channels) meandering across the mountain, having now been largely redirected to new sites of value on the coast, traces the region’s decline. Decay is not singular. But by pronouncing a ‘knotted’ world (Ingold 2015) as lifeless, dead, and thereby timeless, capitalism has been allowed to thrive. Leaving a wall to rupture, much like tubing up an acequia, is to overturn a certain body of time, to choose for another rhythm, to let water slip across its surface without sinking in. This paper follows a path undertaken by foot, ‘reiterating’ (Solnit 2000) the movements once taken from the village to the forest on its periphery, and in doing so, uncovers the inhabitants’ relations to waste, time, memory, questioning how the desire to salvage, both plays into and clashes against engrained logics of modernity.
Paper short abstract:
This paper considers how counter-hegemonic notions of economic and ecological sustainability are built ‘from below’, by engaging the criminalised practices and socialities of radical ‘outlaw’ farmers in the toxic legacy of an industry in decline.
Paper long abstract:
Building on multiple interviews with long-time members of Mercato Brado (Feral Market), an outlaw farming collective located in central Italy, this paper considers re-ruralisation as a set of individual and collective political practices to investigate how counter-hegemonic notions of ecological and economic sustainability are co-produced in relation to industrial decline and to state regulation of late industrial landscapes (Fortun 2012). I track the trajectories of my interlocutors, first generation farmers who chose to ‘go rural’ as a strategy to gain autonomy from a work-society imperilled by the ever-accelerating individualisation and precarisation of labour and citizenship regimes, and who became outlaws once they chose to farm lands or engage in low-tech food-transformation practices recast by state authorities as hazardous, but understood by them as restorative and life-making. I follow Jason Pine’s notion of late industrial alchemy (2019) to conceptualise re-ruralisation as a generative process that transforms the (material and immaterial) toxic inheritances of industrialisation and deindustrialisation into nourishment, value, selves and socialities. This alchemical process, contra state discourses on environmental degradation, imagines toxicity not as the effect of an alien presence that could and should be excised, but rather as an organic quality of the man-ruined landscapes we inhabit. Thus I argue that, in my field, re-ruralisation follows a particular future-oriented yet recursive, non-discrete temporal logic according to which non-toxic social ecologies can only be nurtured through conscious and sustained acts of exposure, which simultaneously work to reckon with the past and its presence, and enable the latter to be transformed.
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines how young Parsis challenge reductive narratives of decline through playful online visual practices. I propose that the images transform crisis into a generative space for cultural renewal, and offer creative re-imaginings of continuity, identity, and belonging.
Paper long abstract:
The Parsis in India, a minority community that fled Persia between the seventh and eighth centuries to escape the Arab Conquest, have faced a dramatic population decline due to low nuptiality, strict endogamy, and high emigration. Often described in media and academic discourse as a community on the brink of “extinction” or “disappearance,” these narratives are echoed in Tanya Luhrmann’s The Good Parsi, which frames the community as shaped by a “discourse of decay” and an “aching sense of loss.” Such representations have reinforced reductive tropes of decline that many within the community critique and resist.
This paper considers how young Parsis critically subvert these narratives of decline through visual practices. By creating and sharing playful, dynamic images online, such as memes, I propose that members of the community reimagine crisis as a space of possibility, transforming perceived decline into a generative site for cultural renewal. These web-based “ludic” practices offer creative reinterpretations of identity and heritage, challenging traditional characterisations of the community as mired in loss. Drawing on eighteen months of ethnographic fieldwork, I further reflect on the knotty and complex ethical obligations of conducting research amidst scepticism of the anthropologist in the field. Situating the Parsi experience within broader anthropological debates on decline and regeneration, this paper highlights how crisis can be reoriented toward creative re-imaginings of continuity, belonging, and identity.
Paper short abstract:
This paper interrogates women's homing work in the course of struggles over housing based on research in Kolkata, India and argues that poor women’s homemaking constitutes infrastructural labour, which we may read not as acts of resilience, but practices of managing decline.
Paper long abstract:
Infrastructures have gained prominence in critical urban theory and often draw on the experiences of cities and citizens in the Global South. This paper interrogates how poor women's homing work presents infrastructural labour in the course of struggles over housing. Based on research in Kolkata, India it argues that poor women’s homemaking creates urban life in the face of state disinvestment and a politics of dispossession and suggests that in order to address the current crisis of care we need to pay attention to the way such labour is distributed across time and space in the making of the city. The article looks at what makes the conditions of dwelling in places possible and highlights in particular the gendered (and caste/religion/ethnicity-) based regimes of labour that create homes under processes of neoliberal governance which are built on colonial histories and capitalist presents. Finally, it argues for a reading of such homemaking practices not simply as acts of resilience and survival, but as practices of managing decline and permanent crisis.
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores how Palestinians development workers, hired by the Israeli state, navigate daily life in a worsening reality, politically and economically. Embodying memories and histories these workers struggle to generate meaningful political actions under seriously restricting conditions.
Paper long abstract:
How do people act when violence is a norm and precarity is unremarkable?
This paper ethnographically explores what constitutes the idea of creative political action as generated through the labour of Palestinian development workers in Jerusalem. Situated uncomfortably between the Israeli state, as their employer/Occupier, and their own communities with whom they work, these practitioners must navigate their actions in a morally laden, precarious and violent daily routine.
A focus on ‘resistance’ in the study of Palestine, had shaped Palestinians ultimately as resisters, who boycott and act against Israel’s oppressive mechanisms. Palestinians who seemed to adapt to the ongoing reality of Occupation by interacting with it, especially as workers, were often called ‘collaborators’ or ‘normalisers’ who normalise the abnormal Occupation. Acting from their impossible positionality, my interlocutors find creative ways to widen this spectrum while considering their people’s ongoing struggle for national liberation, and the pressing and honest need for improving their and their communities’ living conditions in the immediate time. In a reality that is constantly worsening, politically and economically, how do they navigate these pressures?
Through a cross-cutting lens of politics, affects, and the moral realities of deprived populations, I explore how my interlocutors consciously make-sense of these tensions, and cultivate space for political action under seriously restricting conditions and critiques. I introduce the concept of ‘creative political action,’ to explain how people act outside of the usual traditions of Resistance, in order to challenge existing socio-political structures and norms in an ongoing violent reality of Occupation.
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores redundancy to think through the relationship between decline and regeneration. It examines redundancy as a contemporary societal as well a personal phenomenon, drawing on online and in person dialogue as well as auto-ethnography.
Paper long abstract:
Over the past couple of years, I have been exploring, with fellow anthropologists, the idea of “regenerative anthropology”: an anthropology that fosters planetary and personal regeneration, and in so doing helps to regenerate our struggling discipline itself. However, regenerative anthropology must begin by understanding and indeed centring decline: there is no regeneration without decline, the two are inextricably linked. This paper explores this by focusing on redundancy. Whilst there is no unemployment crisis as such at the moment (official unemployment figures still being historically quite low), there are nevertheless rising redundancies across a number of professional sectors: TV, journalism, IT, charities, public services and higher education. With no end to cuts in public spending, marketisation, inflation and indeed the rapid rise of AI, it feels like this may just be the beginning. This paper examines redundancy as a contemporary societal but in particular as a personal phenomenon, drawing on online and in person dialogue as well as auto-ethnography. It explores both the experience of redundancy itself, but also what happens in the months and years afterwards, in particular the “best thing that ever happened to me” narrative. What does a focus on redundancy teach us about regeneration?