Christina Garsten
(Stockholm University)
Shalini Randeria
(Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen)
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Format:
Workshops
Location:
18
Sessions:
Friday 29 August, -, -
Time zone: Europe/Ljubljana
Creolizing anthropology: connectivity, diversity, and reflexivity in a globalizing world.
Panel W113 at conference EASA08: Experiencing diversity and mutuality.
The session will be aimed at stimulating discussions around processes of creolization of creative ways of interlinking cultural flows - and of the organization of diversity, connectivity and reflexivity. The session also invites papers on the state of anthropology itself of its connections and articulations with other disciplines and areas of research, and of possible future scenarios.
Long Abstract:
Contemporary society is a globalizing society – yet one in which cultural flows filtrate unevenly and often in unforeseen and creative ways. Contemporary globalization is at once multifaceted and internally contradictory, involving an intensification and diversification of transnational relations, enhanced opportunities for connectivity, but also intensification of cultural clashes and confrontations. Multiculturalism, cosmopolitanism, identity politics and diversity management are buzz words that bring to mind various ways of dealing with and of organizing diversity, and that constitute ways of relating to the world - as well as objects of study in themselves. Contemporary global processes also involve new and creative avenues for reflexivity. Reflexivity here brings attention to the various ways of individually or collectively representing oneself, portraying oneself, measuring oneself - and others.
To understand the state of the world today we need to pay closer attention to processes and structures extending beyond the nation-state, and the complex ways in which transnational cultural flows articulate with local processes and structures, with expert systems of knowledge and with popular culture. We also need to keep a keen eye on the ways in which these ideas, ideologies, and knowledge are mediated, reorganized, and reframed. Social anthropology has contributed to deepened knowledge of these processes of creolization – of creative ways of interlinking cultural flows - and of the organization of diversity, connectivity and reflexivity.
The session will be aimed at stimulating discussions around these topics, inspired by the significant contributions of Prof Ulf Hannerz to social anthropology. The session also invites papers on the state of anthropology itself – of its connections and articulations with other disciplines and areas of research, and of possible future scenarios.
Globalisation, business anthropology, cosmopolitan ethnography, interconnectedness of cultural flows. This research based on a large and complex change management project in the Egyptian telecommunication industry examines flows and interconnectedness in the light of temporality and spaciality.
Paper long abstract:
This article based on the macro ethnographic research of a large and complex change management project in the Egyptian telecoms investigates the interconnectedness of time and space. The macro level analysis of this deterritorialised action net project focuses on multiple spacialities and temporalities including references to religion and gender.
Concretely, it will investigate participants' interactions in reference to time and space and what causes flow, i. e. the dynamic spaces of overlap and interaction and/or rupture and in what way both, namely flow and rupture generate new cultural approaches.
It is necessary to reflect on these contemporary global processes in order to make them transparent.
Firstly, the concrete focus will lie on the analysis of the endeavours necessary to create connectivity as the highly diverse actants are dispersed over continents, and by that, they create flows and ruptures. Next, examples of "Being there and doing the job" will illustrate transnational cultural flows merged into local processes and structures. Finally, financial power centres inherent to a global project of this scale will illustrate the multifaceted interconnectedness of power and systems. This project is idiosyncratic of today's globalised society.
This paper reflects upon the experience of high-school educators in urban Morocco as they wonder how to ‘shape’ the future generation, trying to creatively organize the diverse cultural flows that cut hierarchically through the educational system and Moroccan society itself.
Paper long abstract:
This paper explores the experience of public high-school teachers in urban Morocco as they conceptualize the educational future of their students. Product of the ambivalent project of Arabisation (Morocco's de-colonizing and nationalizing initiative) and of the policy of rapid privatization (which favors instruction in French), public education is intimately entangled in the ambiguities of a (post)colonial context as it transits into its more globalized form. These ambiguities involve the maintenance of Arabic as the language of identity and cultural production, which is simultaneous to the unashamed promotion of French as the language of "progress" and social mobility. Carrying their respective ideological positions as "old" and "modern", Arabic and French re-invent themselves through technological development and the social uses that ensue from it, without necessarily altering the power dynamic between them.
Through the questioning of educators as to what cultural and moral basis to build the new generation on, Morocco emerges as fundamentally indescribable along a local socio-cultural line. And even though the rallying slogans of press and public concentrate on the dualism between tradition and modernity, an emphasis on performative paradoxes by teachers and their students shows Morocco as irreducible to absolute schisms either. This way, the multi of language is here a plurality that points to the fissures of social structure as it sketches itself "otherwise" for the future.
In a moment when the boundaries of the local burst symbolically, how do educator and ethnographer alike conceptualize their tools for organizing this particular space of global diversity?
This paper critically examines recent discussions of culture, "cultural hybridity" and "creolisation." These are analysed as residues of several crossings between racial, linguistic and cultural practices, theories and discourses, behind which lurks the chimerical figure of the “non-hybrid.”
Paper long abstract:
This paper critically examines recent debates on the nature of culture. In the last several years concepts such as "cultural hybridity" and "creolisation" have come to the fore in anthropological attempts to deal with what appear to be new cultural forms and practices in a post-modern idiom. In an attempt to overcome what were seen as narrowly monolithic conceptions of culture, various models have been advanced which draw on "creole" linguistics and the ethnography of "creole" societies. Types of societies, languages and/or cultures considered "mixed, hybrid, creole," formerly confined to the margins of the ethnographic record, are being brought into the spotlight and even proposed as models for a new understanding of "globalised" humanity. This process has sparked a series of fairly intense debates. Have we been witnessing a process whereby once-pristine cultures are "brought into contact" under modernity, or was the entire concept of (unitary) culture an ideological fiction to begin with? To what extent is the "creole" concept of culture beholden to that which it seeks to displace?
The paper asks whether, as notions of reflexivity and social constructions have spread in social science, anthropology has failed to reproduce and disseminate its messages of anti-essentialism and of culture as being socially and historically contingent.
Paper long abstract:
Reflexivity is an essential aspect of anthropology both in the sense that a reflexive stance to one´s position in fieldwork is an established part of the traditions of the discipline, and that theoretical development has often emanated from turning the analytical instruments used in studying culture to the discipline´s own concepts and practice. Doing fieldwork outside her own social setting, the anthropologist has become aware of the cultural and historical contingency of her own concepts. In the recent decade, notions that are wellknown to anthropology such as social construction and reflexivity have gained a wider currency in social science. The present paper will argue that in this process of dissemination, and in the increasing preoccupation of anthropology with Western culture, some aspects of anthropological self-reflectivity have become lost and "reflectivity" has become more of a formulaic demonstration of moral standing. The dimensions along which reflectivity is expected are often represented by a standardized list of social categories which in themselves are essentialising. Rather than reflecting insights into how frames of interpretation are moulded by cultural flows and historically and socially specific contingencies - thus recognizing cultural diversity- the categorizations mobilized for the reflective exercise tend to be based on generalizing and functionalist assumptions of how interest shapes ideas. The notion of social construction, simultaneously, becomes more concerned with the opposition towards naturalism, than with contextual variation.
The main thesis of this paper is that, building on the difference between representation and appropriation, different modes of communicative interaction can be identified and evaluated by a concept of appropriation and alienation.
Paper long abstract:
In describing the development of civilizations Shmuel Eisenstadt and Immanuel Wallerstein unfortunately pay little attention to cultural aspects like the communicative exchange between cultures. Therefore, the most important contribution to the theory of civilization is the work Ulf Hannerz has done on making the cultural factors and the exchange of meaning between cultures and their relevance explicit. Nevertheless, I want to argue that the application of Hannerz' creolization concept to political processes leads to an inappropriate reduction of political processes to state actions directed to influence the national culture. Therefore, a concept of creolizing aspects is needed that allows more differentiations than the former linguistic concept of creolization, as it is used by Hannerz. This is why I want to propose a concept that embraces different types of appropriation such as passive and active forms and a normative criterion to evaluate power asymmetries and highlight symmetrical modes of intercultural communication.
Taking into account creolization’s—and creole terminology’s—historical semantics and combining them with socio-linguistic approaches distinguishing creole and pidgin variants of language helps unfold heuristic potentials for a more differentiated analysis of contemporary processes of interaction and mixture.
Paper long abstract:
"Creolization" has often been terminologically equated with "hybridization", "syncretization" and other notions referring to processes of mixture. As well, what and who was labeled (a) »creole« has largely been determined by ideological preferences and emic labeling rather than by scientific reasoning. I argue for a more concise understanding and use of the "C-Word". Examining the social and historical context of creolization and tracing the etymology of »creole« and its meanings through times shows that creolization may have meant "lots of different things at different times" (Stewart 2007) but has nevertheless been distinct in that it involved indigenization and—to varying degrees—(neo-)ethnogenesis of a—more or less—diverse and—in large parts—foreign population. Thus, historical creolization has not been a process aimed at overcoming ethnic identities and boundaries in favor of local varieties of cultural mixture and identification but one aimed at their (re-)construction under new—and often awkward—conditions. Taking into account creolization's—and creole terminology's—historical semantics helps unfold the latter's heuristic potentials for a more systematic and comparative analysis, conceptualization and differentiation of contemporary processes of interaction and mixture. By connecting the historical semantics with socio-linguistic approaches distinguishing between creole and pidgin variants of language, historical creolization's major contemporary »outcome«—pidginization of culture and identity—comes to light, a process prevalent particularly in postcolonial societies.
*Title makes reference to Palmié's article "The 'C-Word' Again: From Colonial to Postcolonial Semantics", in: Stewart, Charles (ed.) (2007): Creolization. History, Ethnography, Theory. Walnut Creek: Left Coast Press.
This paper explores some contemporary possibilities for re-inventing comparativism as a method and an anthropological genre and how it might be articulated with more recent discussions of hybrid texts, montage and multi-cited ethnography as a basis for representing, reflecting on and intervening in transnational cultural flows and intersections.
Paper long abstract:
Since the late nineteenth century, anthropology has identified itself increasingly both with ethnography as a research method and with the ethnographic monograph as the most widely practiced form of anthropological writing. This disciplinary endorsement of ethnographically grounded particularism has often been portrayed as a repudiation of the universalizing claims associated with an earlier tradition of comparative anthropological scholarship, represented by such nineteenth century figures as Morgan and Tylor. Although comparativism (usually on a more restricted scale) continues to be represented in anthropology, its recent status has been that of a minority pursuit, engaged in predominantly by senior scholars with an already established record of ethnographic research and publication. In this paper, I explore some contemporary possibilities for re-inventing comparativism as a method and an anthropological genre. I argue that burgeoning global interconnection renders such a task both timely and necessary. In making this claim, I emphasize the productive and combinatorial possibilities of comparative scholarship rather than its habit of recourse to preconceived and totalising explanatory schemes. I consider some the ways in which comparativism as an older (pre- ethnographic) mode of anthropological writing might be articulated with more recent discussions of hybrid texts, montage and multi-cited ethnography as a basis for representing, reflecting on and intervening creatively and critically in transnational cultural flows and intersections. Finally, I suggest that creative re-engagement with anthropology's comparative legacies might serve as a basis for imagining new modes of anthropological writing attuned to a world characterized by often surprising and unforeseen linkages and juxtapositions.
Within the contemporary Swedish Armed Forces, critique, contingency, and disruption seem to be at stake in ways that are decidedly timely. This presentation explores how the military in fact intimates particular challenges to the anthropological conceptual toolkit, and it asks how we could approach such contexts in analytically productive ways.
Paper long abstract:
Cultural critique has endured as a powerful mode of anthropological inquiry. The strategy to disrupt the present and "make it strange" has proved particularly productive, and abundant examples illustrate its continuous potential within the discipline. Today, however, an increasing number of contexts outside anthropology have also come to encompass facets of this approach. The contemporary Swedish Armed Forces constitutes one example. "Culture" has for instance become an important tool for the military in their attempt to reform and rethink old assumptions. Furthermore, an increasingly self-critical approach has emerged through new collaborative forms where military personnel work with NGOs such as Amnesty International. These varieties of "critique" certainly seem productive for the military. Yet it remains unclear what a critical mode of anthropological inquiry into this kind of situation would look like. A common saying within the Swedish Armed Forces is that they tend to do things "fort men fel" (fast but faulty). Perhaps as anthropologists we should instead stop here for a moment to think. In this presentation, then, my focus diverges from recent debates on the relationship between anthropology and the military. I am interested in the military primarily as a space where critique, contingency, and disruption seem to be at stake in ways that are decidedly timely. More specifically, the presentation explores how the contemporary Swedish military in fact intimates particular challenges to the anthropological conceptual toolkit. It asks how anthropology could approach such contexts in an analytically productive way that retains the intellectual vitality of cultural critique.
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