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- Convenors:
-
Martina Klausner
(Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main)
Livia Velpry (CERMES3/Université paris 8)
Milena Bister (Humboldt Universität zu Berlin)
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- Discussants:
-
Anne Lovell
(INSERM & U. Paris Descartes)
Susan Whyte (University of Copenhagen)
- Formats:
- Workshops
- Location:
- V411
- Sessions:
- Thursday 12 July, -, -, Friday 13 July, -
Time zone: Europe/Paris
Short Abstract:
The workshop will focus on examples where crisis does not pass by but persists as a matter of permanent threat (e.g. persistent mental illness) and demands continuous practices of integrating the uncertain into the daily routines. We will explore what happens when crisis becomes "a way of living".
Long Abstract:
Daily routines and habits are usually characterized as seemingly implicit and self-evident and repetitious in nature. At the same time they are understood as highly important to organize everyday life and generate a sense of predictability. Usually through the experience of crisis and fundamental shifts in life those routines become challenged. Such circumstances lay bare the continuous work that has been needed to make them run smoothly. The workshop intends to focus on examples where the ordinary becomes radically unstable, that is crisis does not pass by but rather persists as a matter of permanent threat. Such forms of ongoing, persistent crisis - be it e.g. through the experience of chronic illnesses and respective relapses or of social and geographical displacement due to migration - demand continuous practices of integrating the uncertain into the daily routines of life.
In the workshop we aim to attend to these examples to scrutinize firstly, how a sense of the ordinary (e.g. in social relationships, mobility, time structures) needs to be continuously adapted and re-organized in order to establish routines. Secondly, those cases encourage examining how the constant process of anticipating potential subsequent crisis reshapes the meaning and value of daily habits.
Drawing from our own empirical research with people experiencing persistent mental illness we invite scholars from other fields who are interested in exploring what happens when crisis becomes "a way of living" to join our workshop.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Thursday 12 July, 2012, -Paper short abstract:
My research explores different ways of understanding illness in acute and chronic schizophrenia. I examine the use of biomedical explanations of the origins of illness in the narratives of patients, and the role of the category of disease in the neutralization of the moral space.
Paper long abstract:
The experience of psychosis transforms the sense of self as well as the life-worlds of patients, and is often disruptive to and destructive of social relationships. I am interested in the ways in which patients understand the origins and nature of their illness, how the category of illness is constituted in the dialogue with psychiatrists, and how this category is adopted and often creatively transformed in the narratives of the patients. The category of illness allows for the externalization of agency, drawing a distinction between oneself and the illness, and the neutralization of the moral space of the relationships within which patients live. However, the category of illness becomes problematic in cases of chronic schizophrenia, where the distinction between oneself and the illness is not so easy to draw. I explore alternative understandings of psychotic experience and the ways in which patients and their relatives come to terms with their illness.
My work draws on research in acute and chronic psychiatric hospitals in the Czech Republic. In this particular context, the neurobiological orientation of psychiatry has been supported through a Marxist-materialist worldview that disregards alternatives to the biomedical conceptualization of mental illness. Also, the religious framework of understanding the 'supernatural elements' of psychotic experience is not readily available, and the cultural landscape of understanding schizophrenia is rather different from countries that were exposed to the psychoanalytic influence.
Paper short abstract:
Having and being a body are proof of a perfectly accomplished embodiment and allows the subject to participate in a coherent system of meaning. If illness creeps into life, corporality undergoes an irreconcilable fracture and a different relationship between the self and society becomes necessary.
Paper long abstract:
When pain creeps into life, uncertainty takes the place of obviousness. Thus is developed a "knowledge of crisis" which is in tension with scientific knowledge, given reality and established system. Any crisis involves a reconstruction and therefore every uncertainty becomes a synonym for a different way to experience. In order to observe this power of uncertainty it is necessary to proceed from the point of coincidence between certainty and obviousness to pose a question: what happens when the indisputable is problematized? Starting from my fieldwork research, the aim of this paper is to frame the disorders know as "Central Sensitivity Syndromes" and specifically the Fibromyalgia Syndrome; through an anthropology from the body, I will investigate the creative uses of the body as a field of re-negotiation of one's "being there", and demonstrate how the disease becomes a voice which examines the experience and testifies to a crisis, a doubt, a provocative pretext to re-create oneself and the surrounding reality. Thus it is starting from the illness itself that it becomes possible to make a good "social use" of it to establish new classifications of the real originating from a transformation that is, before everything else, personal. As a consequence of the aforesaid, illness can then be considered not only physical but above all, moral.
Paper short abstract:
The communication investigates care trajectories of patients suffering from Alzheimer disease, marked by successive crisis. Analyzing the tension between the necessity to develop daily routines and the radical redefinition of everyday life entailed by the evolution of the disease, it identifies different forms of integration of uncertainty.
Paper long abstract:
Defined as a brain disorder that causes problems with memory and behavior, dementia -among which Alzheimer disease - affects the patient's ability to carry out daily activities. The disease introduces various forms of vulnerability, according to its gravity but also to the social environment of the patients. In most cases, the disease leads to the reorganization of the daily life, implies both medical and social care, and requires an important involvement of informal family carers.
In this communication we investigate "trajectories of Alzheimer disease", analyzed as biographical trajectories of patients. Permanently threatened by unexpected crisis, the situations of these patients - which involve both the old person and the family caregiver - are characterized by uncertainty. The analysis exposes the results of a qualitative survey, based on the study of 60 situations of dementia. It focuses on the organization and evolution of the care arrangements, combining formal and informal resources, which are set up by families and professionals from the social and health sectors.
The authors argue that crisis is a mainspring of the organization/reorganization of the care arrangements. They also show that the tension between the necessity to develop daily routines which facilitate the everyday life of the patients and the radical redefinition of everyday life entailed by the evolution of the disease, has various forms, according to the life course and social resources of the patients. Different variables are identified which impact the way uncertainty is accepted and integrated as a "way of living" for the patients and their families.
Paper short abstract:
The paper explores the struggle of Valenza goldsmiths for redefining their routines and map of world after the traumatic experience of job loss. Drawing from Deleuze’s philosophy, it explains unemployment as a “limbo”: the ambiguous condition of being and at the same time not-being a goldsmith.
Paper long abstract:
"Every morning I got up and went to the firm. One day, I was told made redundant. The day after, I got up, I went to the firm, but the doors were closed to me. All my life has changed since."
Mario is one of the about 2500 Valenza goldsmiths who have lost the job since 2008. After Credit Crunch and the international slump of jewellery market, the annual net turnout of this city is halved; half of the city goldsmiths lost the job, a third of the firms closed down.
In this scenario of economic crisis, unemployment had become a quotidian challenge for many goldsmiths. For artisans who spent every day more than 12 hours working, unemployment obliged them to redefine completely their public and private daily routines; to re-invent the map (Deleuze, 1997: 322) their everyday life. Unemployment turned into a "limbo": an existential condition underpinned by the ambiguity of being and at the same time not-being a goldsmith.
In this paper, I will explore this limbo, explaining how the transformation of routines led to a redefinition of the sense (Basso, 1996: 54) that goldsmiths associate to the places and social relations. I will read unemployment as an oxymoric process of opening to becoming and un-becoming. In explaining how routines are reinvented, this analysis will offer elements to comprehend the actual possibility of an individual to depart from a community of practice (cf. Lave, 1991) through the redefinition of a new map of the world.
Paper short abstract:
Based on fieldwork with severely injured U.S. soldiers, this paper explores the vital importance of ordinariness in a moment of intense bodily and social precarity. Amid such precarity, the ordinary and its extra become inextricable as ordinariness emerges through a commonness of crisis.
Paper long abstract:
The experiences of severely injured soldiers living at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington D.C. reveal the emergence of ordinariness in a moment often understood as anything but. This ordinariness takes on a vital importance for soldiers during the months, and sometimes years, of their rehabilitation. But it is not smooth or steady in the way that ordinariness is sometimes seen to be. The lingering violences of war undermine the most seemingly solid facts of soldiers' physical and social worlds and threaten to upend the possibilities of a stable future. The inescapable public narratives of soldiers' extraordinary heroism, or their violent pathologies, insist that soldiers must be something out of the ordinary; marked for better or worse by the excesses of sovereign violence.
Distinguishing 'the everyday' as a rhythm of life opposed to crisis from 'ordinariness' as an emergent feeling of being in common with others even in its midst, this paper demonstrates how life in a space marked by violence makes stark the intimacy of the ordinary and the extraordinary. While living, rehabilitating, striving, rotting, recovering, waiting, and leaving Walter Reed, soldiers inhabit the razor thin space of the extra/ordinary, a cleave where life is tenuously suspended.
Paper short abstract:
In this paper, I explore the experience of a single Sarajevo family from the early 1990s through the present to understand what it means—and what it costs—to be resilient in the face of two decades of war, violence, and routinized crisis.
Paper long abstract:
Ethnographic engagements with survivors of war and disaster consistently trouble reigning social scientific and clinical approaches to trauma, resilience, and memory. In this paper, I explore the experience of a single Sarajevo family from the early 1990s through the present to understand what it means—and what it costs—to be resilient in the face of two decades of war, violence, and routinized crisis. What does it take to sustain and negotiate relationships of care, to endure the destruction of treasured imaginaries and values, and to keep on living in the midst of unimaginable loss, brutality, and betrayal? Through the life-or-death perils of the siege of Sarajevo to the chronic insecurity and fear of Bosnia-Herzegovina's post-war period, the family and its constituents have struggled through a physically and emotionally devastating gray zone: on the one side, bottomless melancholia, rage, and mourning; and on the other, the bittersweet promise of new social roles and repertoires of meaning, cobbled together out of necessity from the ruins of a lost world and the piecemeal resources left behind by humanitarian interventions. As they find precarious ways of sustaining life and relationships through interactions with health and psychiatric services, social support NGOs, government bureaucracies, and irregular and inadequate forms of employment, Sarajevans challenge us to ground our approaches to the psychosocial impacts of war in the complexity of lived experience over time—and to advocate for the value of this ethnographic knowledge, over and against technical analyses, in contemporary economies of truth- and policy-making.
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores aspects of living the ordinary in a situation of both protracted conflict and prolonged exile. It discusses daily strategies aiming at normalization of uncertainty and the potential of quotidian practices to transform and negotiate the meanings of crisis.
Paper long abstract:
Even during the most turbulent times, people try to lead an 'ordinary life'; however, the problem of living an 'ordinary life' in a violent context remains under-researched by anthropologists dealing with armed conflicts. This paper examines the processes of construction, re-construction and reproduction of the ordinary in a situation of an armed conflict. It begins with a discussion of everyday-life strategies adopted by people in order to contain the permanent feeling of insecurity and uncertainty. Secondly, this paper treats the ordinary as a site of struggle, where actors use various, both oppositional (de Certeau 1984) and hegemonizing (Jean-Klein 2001) practices through which they enact, transform and negotiate the meanings of conflict. Finally, simultaneously to the effort to normalize the experience of conflict, the ordinary is often being set against the violent status quo, as a form of its contestation, as well as an expression of a desired state-of-affairs.
This analysis will draw on a seven-months ethnographic fieldwork conducted in one of the Palestinian refugee camps in the West Bank. Unique characteristics of camp inhabitants' situation pose several theoretical puzzles that when explored may contribute to the understanding of the ordinary in times of crisis: due to the political situation on the ground, camp residents live in constant fear and uncertainty; their exile has been extraordinarily long and there are no encouraging signs of timely resolution of their plight; and throughout the residence in the camp their lives have been marked with an ongoing tension between permanence and temporariness.
Paper short abstract:
The economic crisis in Burkina Faso – a seemingly never-ending story – has moulded since decades and is still moulding everyday life in Burkina Faso and entails the evolution of values, attitudes and practices which make everyday life manageable or at least somehow predictable. On the basis of ethnographic examples, this will be analyzed.
Paper long abstract:
Since decades uncertainties are part of everyday life in Burkina Faso and are moulding especially the life of the lower-income classes, but also the life of the middle-income classes (impoverishment as consequence of the debt crisis of the 1980ties, the structural adjustment programs of the 1990ties, the FCFA devaluation of 1994, the rising food prices since 2007). Despite economic growth since 2000 the impoverishment of large parts of the population persists.
The dominating feeling of living in social insecurity is a part of daily life and demands the necessity of being prepared any time for uncertainties of every kind. This leads to the evolution of values, attitudes and practices which help to integrate the permanent insecurities in everyday life - thus to produce the ordinary. For instance flexibility is a part of it, but also the attitude of 'grasping at whatever is available in the present' (Johnson-Hanks 2005) or the production of meaning and interpretations to translate hazards into risks (Macamo 2008).
On the basis of ethnographic examples of the last ten years research conducted in the lower-income class of Bobo-Dioulasso, Burkina Faso, I will analyze how common habits are shaped by values, attitudes and practices, which women and men in face of permanent uncertainties developed to make everyday life manageable or at least somehow predictable.
Paper short abstract:
The paper describes how, at a local corporate fieldsite, a discourse of "returning to business as usual" is used to cope with an ongoing state of crisis. We examine how a series of mergers, acquisitions and redundancies generates practices that place contingency at the centre of daily routines.
Paper long abstract:
We most often recognise crisis when it is elsewhere or 'other' - particularly in the forms of warfare, natural disasters or forced migrations. Our fieldwork emphasizes how crisis should also be examined 'at home' where it is easily guised by the everyday practical survival skills of peoples and organisations, and becomes normalised to the extent that crises are no longer recognised as such.
This paper discusses how the everyday practices of workplace life at a corporation's local site mitigate against crises inherent to the industry and current economic recession, while also normalising such predicaments. In an industry known for its aggressive merger and acquisition strategies, most of which conclude in major restructuring and subsequent redundancies, the constant upheaval of workers fuels what has become a continuous state of crisis. With rising job insecurity, employees face workplace environments that have become increasingly unstable.
At our fieldsite, employees create routine practices for coping with the ways the company is continually restructured. Alongside formal practices (short-term budgets, accounting) and informal practices (composition of limited duration teams, collegiality), employees also invoke the myth of 'business as usual' as a coping mechanism. By envisioning 'business as usual' as a re-attainable 'steady state', however, they create a contradiction. While the quotidian presence of crisis is explained by the myth as 'temporary', it is employees' practices that instead reveal crisis to be 'a way of living'.
Paper short abstract:
Avalanches pose a constant threat to alpine communities, and therefore, they are a potent means to outline social orders as well as to negotiate them. How do those communities manage to cope with this threat and how do they incorporate natural disasters into their everyday life?
Paper long abstract:
While social orders, established in human action and knowledge, help establish reliabilities, put into place patterns of signification and experience, those very reliabilities become disputable and uncertain in the face of disaster.
However, as a result of disasters, social orders are often restructured, yet rarely extinguished: they continue to be. Furthermore, alpine communities face disaster not as a singular event, but are subject to enduring and permanent threat by natural catastrophes: avalanches are a quasi-common thing.
Based on the project "Avalanches as a threat to social orders" of Tuebingens Collaborative Research Center "Threatend Orders", our paper inquires how Alpine communities cope with avalanches. It presents in detail how by means of religious, cultural and technological forms of protection, disasters are integrated and incorporated into daily life, and, in the long run, become a part of the ordinary experience. The paper analyses "traditions of disaster": routines of disaster communication, structures of reactions, and patterns of remembrance and neglect - all of which help to re-stabilize, reshape and establish social orders.
Hence, a central question must be: Taken that disasters can be integrated into the everyday life experience and serve as both a pattern for future catastrophes and as a specific order with stabilizing effects, what, then, remains catastrophic about a catastrophe? The experience of disastrous events follows a twofold but simultaneous produce: In as much as the ordinary has to be produced in the face of crisis, the catastrophic has to be brought about in the face of the ordinary.