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- Convenor:
-
Mark Johnson
(Goldsmiths, University of London)
Send message to Convenor
- Discussants:
-
Pnina Werbner
(Keele University)
Ghassan Hage (University of Melbourne)
- Formats:
- Workshops
- Location:
- V505
- Sessions:
- Friday 13 July, -
Time zone: Europe/Paris
Short Abstract:
This panel extends critically Pnina Werbner's work on cultural imaginings and vernacular cosmopolitanisms by asking, what are the conditions that constrain, sustain or enable an everyday ethics of care and hospitality in an age of anxiety?
Long Abstract:
The precariousness and anxiety produced by global capitalism and routinely experienced by people in the south are increasingly coming home to roost in the north in ways that disturb the easy complacencies of both liberal middle classes and cosmopolitan elites. Some look to a reinvigorated analysis of political economy for new explanatory frameworks. Our central contention is that what anthropology more than any other social science can bring to the table is an understanding and appreciation of the importance of the cultural imagination in crafting and celebrating ethical and meaningful lives amidst the most turbulent and precarious of situations. More specifically, we ask, following Pnina Werbner, how and in what ways do cultural imaginings enable people to feel and experience agency even or perhaps especially when cultural acts and performances are not directed at changing unequal distributions of power or controls over resources? In what sense might we continue to speak of cultural production as a relatively autonomous field of affective relations, because distinct from, in Bourdieu's terms, the field of power? Finally, if affective cultures enable people to create, affirm and contest forms of sociability and different measures of what counts or qualifies not just as bare but as humane life, what are the conditions that constrain, sustain or enable an everyday cosmopolitan ethics of care and hospitality within and across own and other cultures in an age of anxiety?
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Friday 13 July, 2012, -Paper short abstract:
Drawing from current debates on the ethics of care and ethnographic research, my paper conceptualises the intergenerational cycles of care constituted by Filipina migrant domestic workers and their families as a form of gifting in the global economy.
Paper long abstract:
Feminist scholars have recently renewed their calls for a caring society and a new ethics of care, proposing a re-evaluation of typically underpaid and socially devalued care work. Care and domestic work have been analysed as deeply emotional, affective and corporeal forms of labour, which create value that is at the core of what it means to be human. As such, they transcend the logic of the market, draw from and create ethical principles, holding the potential for crafting alternative modes of conviviality. On the other hand, critical scholars have analysed an increased commodification of intimacy and care, and numerous studies on migrant domestic workers seem to document this process.
Relating to these debates on the background of my own research on Filipina migrant domestic workers, my paper contributes to an ethnographic analysis of the practices of care and the everyday politics by those who engage in it. Being subject to precarious living conditions abroad, Filipina domestic workers build solidarity networks and strategies that help them to organise their everyday lives in the diaspora and create wider principles of mutual care and support. Moreover, they are part of intergenerational projects of transnational care and migration, constituted by social bondings and obligations. In my paper, I wonder what we can make of Filipina carers' claims that they love the people they take care of and regard their work as part of a wider ethical project. Finally, my paper asks whether the gifting of care within the contemporary global economy constitutes a cosmopolitan ethics in its own right.
Paper short abstract:
The paper builds around the analytical frame of actually existing cosmopolitanism and the phenomenological paradigm of embodiment in understanding the bodily ways in which marginal Muslim communities in southern Philippines sustained a performance heritage by embracing hybridity.
Paper long abstract:
This presentation examines the notion of embodied cosmopolitanism in live and video compact discs (VCD) versions of pangalay, a celebrated dance-musical heritage of Tausug-speaking Muslims in southern Philippines. Engaging analytically with the Csordasian paradigm of embodiment and drawing contextually from a yearlong ethnographic fieldwork in the area, the paper illustrates how pangalay performers and video producers of Sulu and Zamboanga expropriate and recast globally drifting Hollywood, Bollywood, Southeast Asian, and European musical and terpsichorean imaginaries into locally familiar performing heritage. Usually performed in spirited wedding and religious festivities, trans-culturally imbued pangalay performances have been woven into the fabric of Tausug sociality thus rendering local community gatherings a bodily-animated cosmopolitan affair. Such practice offers a critical lens in thinking about an actually existing form of cosmopolitanism that does not necessarily articulate the cosmopolitan ideals of flexibility, adaptability, and openness through abstract and cerebral discourses but rather kinesthetically performed within the context of everyday life.
Furthermore, the paper locates the pangalay within a habitus of trans-local exchanges that had historically engendered the kindred and performative connection of Tausug communities to the old but broader world of maritime Southeast Asia. Although the rise of the imagined communities of Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines, and of market-led globalization reconfigured the old power, social, and economic relations of the maritime world, the age-old practice of melding, remaking, and indigenization of trans-local performances have actually endured. Meaningfully, they evince a portrait of a community that sustains a heritage by embracing and embodying globally diverse cultural imaginaries.
Paper short abstract:
The paper examines the cosmopolitan social networks of Romanians in London. Building on recent theorisations of ‘everyday’ forms of cosmopolitan sociability, it explores the interplay of ethnic and non-ethnic elements in the constitution of cosmopolitan migrant ties, their benefits and limitations.
Paper long abstract:
Romanians are a recent addition to London's highly diverse population. Their low 'ethnic' visibility and relatively modest numbers raise questions about the extent to which they partake in London's diverse social landscape or retreat in familiar, ethnic spaces. This paper examines how Romanians forge ties and socialise with migrants from diverse backgrounds in work and residential contexts. The analysis has two aims. First, it contributes to recent theorisations of 'everyday' cosmopolitanism, showing how cosmopolitan attitudes and behaviours emerge not only amongst privileged migrants but also in contexts of precariousness. Whilst some scholars envisage cosmopolitan sociability as uniting individuals despite ethnic and related differences, I show how Romanians' cosmopolitan networks comprise both ethnic and non-ethnic elements. Migrants' non-native status and experiences of vulnerability in Britain constitute non-ethnically marked commonalities that engender migrant solidarities. Yet migrants' ethno-cultural background sometimes becomes an important ingredient of cosmopolitan socialisation, revealing the ongoing currency of ethnicity in participants' daily experiences. Second, the paper examines the role of cosmopolitan networks. Contrary to common assumptions about the universal benefits of cross-ethnic ties, Romanians' narratives reveal both their advantages and limitations. Migrants' cosmopolitan ties yield significant cultural and social capital, providing companionship, daily support and opportunities for personal development. However, these ties also evidence important downsides, due to their convenient and fleeting nature as well as limited capacity to facilitate migrants' institutional integration and upward mobility. Unpacking these aspects contributes to a more nuanced view of the nature, role and limits of 'everyday' cosmopolitan socialisation in migrants' lives.
Paper short abstract:
Together with ethnographic data gathered at the Mediterranean Borders of the EU, this paper develops theoretical thoughts on “critical” or “situated” cosmopolitanism.
Paper long abstract:
From the perspective of cosmopolitanization, "the local" increasingly becomes the site of immediate encounters with and struggles between the diverse, uneven processes and actors of globalization. The mediterranean border zone of the European Union can be seen as an especially cosmolitanized space: here, the movements of migrations from the South confront a transnational, Europeanized border regime, and here, the impact of neoliberal as well as neocolonial politics towards inner and outer margins of Europe are made visible and put to contestation. While these local complexities are causing violence, precariousness, and anxiety, they also foster "situated cosmopolitanisms" around the contested issue and the practiced imagination of citizenship.
Drawing upon a long-term ethnographic research at the Spanish-Moroccan border, we will explicate this perspective empirically. The data was gathered following a group of African migrants entering Spain illegally, as "adventurers", as they called themselves. From this point, we will take a deeper look into how solidarities, collaborations and (in-)formal belongings (such as citizenship) are negotiated in an extremely precarious situation amongst the group, but also at the crossroads with NGOs, social movements or Spanish citizens. In these local encounters, we can witness a continuous struggle between universalized "cosmopolitan" ideas and their rupture by neocolonial thoughts/practices of exclusion/racism. This calls for a concept of "cosmopolitanism" that is locally redefined from below "critically" or "situated" within a global design of power.
Paper short abstract:
Vital to the cosmopolitan project of anthropology is the limning of universal moral procedures: the inscription within a global rule of law of the duties and dues of an individual human life. How to allow for the journey of Anyone across social milieus, among cultural traditions and beyond?
Paper long abstract:
Vital to the cosmopolitan project of anthropology is the limning of universal moral procedures: the inscription within a global rule of law of the duties and dues of an individual human life. How to allow for the journey of Anyone across social milieus, among cultural traditions and beyond? Cosmopolitanism asserts that rights and duties inhere to an individual human life: lived amid and among others' but intrinsically distinct from them.
Moral argument has tended to concern what people should and should not do to others; less has been said about what they might choose for themselves. "Perfectionism", however, suggests that each human being should develop their nature: perfectionism gives a central place to self-regarding duties, telling each person to develop their own talents, their own rationality and capabilities—and help others do similarly.
This paper approaches the dialectics of self-interest and mutuality by considering social arrangements that might safeguard a kind of moral space that locates individuals beyond any existing relationship and identity such that they might be free to fulfil their capacities for self-creation: to 'come into their own' beyond others' agendas.
Distant from a Durkheimian perspective that would tie the moral to the conventional (so that the moral is synonymous with social reproduction), one conceives of the moral as a kind of space existing beyond social arrangements and allowing for exit from them: a personal preserve of which individuals are assured as (makers of) themselves.
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines interactions between state and people as an untangling of two kinds of morality to illustrate the roles of violence and public sanction against faulty persons in the enforcing of cosmopolitan spaces for the law. A new emphasis on disclosing individuals as law-breakers reinforces the legitimacy of state and re-positions it as caring.
Paper long abstract:
This paper considers the production of the state in Guyana as a singular caring body through a focus on particular persons as the problem. Certain individuals within familial settings as well as those in public office are unveiled as faulty persons where the problem of violence and injustice is seen to be the failure of persons to demonstrate care and responsibility. This failure is engaged through a kind of moral responsibility which is at odds with a morality that has also sanctioned illegal practices: illegality became 'normalised' within everyday settings following economic and political instability from the 1970s. The new emphasis on the law as an ethos of shared responsibility co-resides with a new publicness of violence carried out in domestic settings. Suddenly, as part of various state and NGO's initiatives, people are being named, shamed and criminalized in unprecedented ways for hitting a loved one or carrying out other forms of abuse. The outcry and publicity create a distinctive public person representative of an emergent violent space. The uncovering of violence in the name of rights repositions the state in a cosmopolitan space: however, this space is also reliant on blame-sharing where certain individuals have to be separated from both the state and the family and held as culpable. Whilst particular state actors endeavour to use universal laws as an external source of empowerment, they also draw on 'community morality' to demonstrate others in local settings that are also produced as 'cosmopolitan.'
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores issues of cosmopolitan aspirations and friendship in contemporary Tunisia. This will be approached by focussing on the example of online hospitality networks and their Tunisian members’ motivations to get involved and connect with Western tourists in the context of strong feelings of disquiet due to perceived ‘Islamophobia’.
Paper long abstract:
Online hospitality networks are organisations whose members offer free overnight stays for other participants at their homes. In the last decade, they have induced the fastest growing new form of tourism practice worldwide and have found an overarching moral claim in the promotion of cosmopolitan values and peace through free and universal hospitality.
My research in Tunis focussed on one network, CouchSurfing, which has contributed to widen the range of people with whom Tunisian members can possibly connect. Today, hundreds of Tunisians aspire to seek friends elsewhere and use CouchSurfing to contact international tourists travelling to the country. Despite their limited access to international visa, they can still live out their cosmopolitan aspirations. Involving a perceived ethnic and cultural Other, the primary characteristic of their friendships with Western participants is that they stand outside of common forms of socialising among people in their usual surrounding.
This paper explores the variety of Tunisian members' motivations to get involved. Despite a strong commitment to place and the self-perception as 'ambassadors' of Tunisia or Islam, members insist on the personal choice of identity. Through intimate relationships, they strive to challenge 'Islamophobia' and experience agency in the opportunity of immediate encounter and discussion. I draw on recent anthropological debates on friendship and empathy, which can be a fruitful approach to understanding cosmopolitan aspirations. In particular, I highlight the ways in which members promote or discourage understanding of themselves, in the context of strong feelings of disquiet due to perceived antipathies against Arabs or Muslims.