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- Convenor:
-
Mateusz Laszczkowski
(The University of Manchester)
Send message to Convenor
- Formats:
- Workshops
- Location:
- R13 (in V)
- Sessions:
- Friday 13 July, -
Time zone: Europe/Paris
Short Abstract:
It is often assumed that social and spatial formations are made to last, but certain formations are meant by their members to be ephemeral and transient rather than permanent. The discussion of ethnographic examples is intended to stimulate more general methodological reflection. When is ephemerality a constraint on social relations? When and for whom may it be a tactical asset? How does ephemerality work socially, and what might be its uses? What challenges does it pose to anthropological research?
Long Abstract:
While anthropologists recognize that social aggregates and cultures are in principle emergent, always changeable, require constant maintenance and even can perish, it often seems assumed that both space and society are generally made to last. Such methodological assumptions of a perpetuity of being and identity can be usefully challenged by ethnographic research that acknowledges transience and ephemerality as defining characteristics of certain spatial and social formations.
Some examples of such formations would be the transient audiences of street art, the "single-service friendships" in air travel, flash mobs, internet chatrooms, the communities of homeless shelters, happenings and music festivals, nomad encampments, guerrilla cells, or tourist groups.
The following questions drive the panel: What spatial and social forms are meant by their members to be ephemeral and why? When is ephemerality a result of oppression or domination, when is it a compromise, and when and for whom may it be a deliberate end in itself? Are transient formations marked by uncertainty and disquiet, or by the members' relief that commitment need not be maintained forever? Just how fundamental is the relative permanence of the spatial and the social for anthropological theory and method? Should we even research ephemerality at all? As a discipline that has long emphasized the diachrony of structure as well as favoring depth of understanding, how can anthropology deal with seemingly superficial and a priori transient phenomena? To address these epistemological challenges, the panel seeks to assemble stimulating cases of ephemeral socio-spatial formations.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Friday 13 July, 2012, -Paper short abstract:
The paper deals with the modern Tuareg society, called ishumar, and concentrates on social and spatial ephemerality in a modern nomadic society.
Paper long abstract:
"If one assumes an ashamur in Sebha (Libya), he emerges in Ghat (Libya). Here he remains for several weeks or month before he turns to Tamanrasset (Algeria), return somewhat later again, moves to Agadez (Niger) or Kidal (Mali) and works finally a couple of month in Benghazi (Libya). His property fits in a small bag. Accomodation he gets with other ishumar who live in family-similar structures. He is coming and leaving without large ennouncement, one day here, the other there." (Kohl 2007:99)
This is a typical description of the recent Tuareg youth, called ishumar. Their transnational and situational movements are the result of the uncertainity and disquiet in the Sahara. Global economic interests, political upheavals, local unrests, as well as climatic changes and natural crisis have turned the life in the Sahara into a challenging business. The Tuareg has been increasingly forced to switch from nomadic to urban lifestyles, pressed into sedentarization, pushed into making transnational border crossings, or left behind by respective states. The ishumar movement is the result. They are neither migrants, refugees or exiles, nor do they form a diaspora community. They are better described as a traveling culture (Clifford 1992), for whom moving is the rule.
Paper short abstract:
Situated on offshore grass islands and remotely isolated from mainland politics and fishery management processes, these ephemeral migrant fishing communities experiencing tensions with fishery authorities. Community-based management programmes are failing to recognise these floating environments.
Paper long abstract:
Lake Chilwa, in southern Malawi, is a fluctuating but highly productive resource, which follows varying cycles of recession, and impacts profoundly upon the surrounding ecological environment. In response to Lake Chilwa's endemic fluctuations, resource-users have sustained a traditionally mobile livelihood system. Significantly, these livelihood strategies demand occupational and geographical mobility. As a result in all areas and villages around Lake Chilwa, migrant fishers and actors play a central role in economies. Due to occupational constraints of fishing in Lake Chilwa, the majority of these migrant groups are found inhabiting floating houses in reed islands several kilometres off-shore. The locations of these communities depend on seasons, in which they follow fishing grounds. Since 1995 however, particular development discourses that have influenced policy-making around Lake Chilwa's resources have led to a widespread adoption of community-based-natural-resource-management programmes. Externally defined notions of a bounded 'community', which assert simplifications of collectiveness, can prove problematic within Chilwa's cultural and economic environment. Therefore, this paper argues the importance of anthropological research to understanding these economically essential groups and to improving policy-decisions. It asserts the necessity in this context to seriously consider the ephemerality of these communities in participative processes in fishery management.
Paper short abstract:
This contribution looks at rebel governance in Côte d'Ivoire as an ephemeral formation. It argues that both insurgents and civilians in Côte d'Ivoire have perceived rebel governance as a temporary state of affairs and that this disquiet has shaped the formation itself - positively and negatively.
Paper long abstract:
This contribution addresses rebel governance in Côte d'Ivoire as an ephemeral socio-spacial formation. Ephemeral is a relative term, of course and the notion "governance" already implies that a rebel group has become more than ephemeral. It must have achieved certain qualities including relative stability and durability which has given rise to such notions as "insurgent governance" (Mampilly 2011), in the first place.
This paper will argue that both insurgents and civilians in Côte d'Ivoire perceived rebel governance as irregular and transient. This perception, shared by most Ivoirians, has shaped the formation of rebel governance itself, as well as the relationship between rebels and civilians.
Based on ethnographic research, this contribution aims at elaborating first, to what extent rebel governance was considered to be temporary by the actors involved. In a second step, I will examine how the perspective of its ephemerality shaped the formation itself.
Some of the violent actors and businessmen tried to profit as much as possible from opportunities arising in this phase of uncertainty. On the other hand, the fact that rebel governance was perceived as something ephemeral eased conflicts between civilians and combatants. As the first post-conflict elections were postponed over and over, the population and some of the combatants, too, began to feel even more tense. Many wanted to move on with their lives. The candidate the rebels supported is in office now, but rebel governance has yet to be dismantled.
Paper short abstract:
This paper considers neoliberalism to understand the purpose of allocating gap year volunteers into a series of ephemeral project groups. Thinking with neoliberalism to understand ideas and practices, this paper shows how ephemerality shapes persons into particular kind of individuals.
Paper long abstract:
The paper posits the importance of studying impermanent social configurations. It seeks to show how the ethnographic method is capable of investigating these forms of life. It argues that transience is a common feature of a neoliberal context and therefore it is necessary to comprehend how it affects social life. This paper further argues that experiencing constant transient change shapes persons to suit a neoliberal economy as they learn to be flexible in order to cope with uncertainty and risk. This crafting of persons is incomplete as individuals seek forms of stability through ongoing relationships.
The paper presents material from multisited ethnographic fieldwork with Endeavour (a pseudonym), a gap year charity. Endeavour's gap year programmes are focused on the personal development of its volunteers. One of the means of doing this is to recombine the volunteers into new groups every three weeks. This teaches them how to make relationships and form strong teams quickly, as well as how to let go of previous ties. Through playful initiation rites, participants leave their old groups with tears and angst, but are able to incorporate themselves into their new ones with vigour and excitement. Prior arguments, attachments and characters are unknown, leaving volunteers free to refashion themselves. Drawing on techniques replicated in human resources management, Endeavour teaches volunteers how to conduct themselves in a unstable, risky and ever-changing environment with the minimum of disquiet.
Paper short abstract:
Although it is assumed that once monuments are installed, they become fixed and immovable objects, post-Soviet Georgian space reveals a constant movement and relocation of material objects. The paper specifically looks at the ways in which new iconographies of the state are being initiated, erected, transformed and relocated by political regimes and how they are contested, negotiated and tamed by different artists on the ground.
Paper long abstract:
This paper is about the transformation of material landscape and its relation to time and temporality in the city of Batumi, which is located on the Black Sea coast in the Republic of Georgia. The paper specifically looks at the ways in which new iconographies of the state are being initiated, erected, transformed and relocated by political regimes and how they are contested, negotiated and tamed by different artists on the ground.
Although it is assumed that once monuments are installed, they become fixed and immovable objects, post-Soviet Georgian space reveals a constant movement and relocation of material objects. Most of Batumi's Soviet and early post-Soviet symbols have been removed, moved, or replaced with new monuments. Memorial plaques symbolizing the Soviet legacy have been ripped off buildings, leaving (anti-memorial) "scars" on their surfaces; on the city's central square the statue of national leader of Georgia, Ilia Chavchavadze has been replaced by the Roman God Neptun, signifying the European orientation of the city; and the monument of Georgian hero, Memed Abashidze fighting against the Ottomans has been removed to less visible place because of new geo-politics of the region considering Turkey as one of the main economic partners of the country.
Drawing on these lines, this paper aims to shed light on how these movements create traces of the past and hints of future, and how actors endeavor to tame the temporal dimensions of public landscapes in Georgia.
Paper short abstract:
An ethnography of the game Encounter in Astana, the capital of Kazakhstan. In Astana, the aesthetics of urban space has acquired great political and ideological significance. Encounter players inject surreality into various spaces in the city, opening up socio-spatial temporary zones of liminality.
Paper long abstract:
Encounter is an online-coordinated network of active urban games, present in cities across the former Soviet Union. One of the most popular varieties of Encounter games consists in searching for codes hidden at various locations in the city, from industrial ruins to mid-construction skyscrapers to most celebrated nation-state monuments. Another game type requires taking surrealistic, absurd, difficult to arrange photographs in public space. Thus, by being played directly in the real spaces of the city, Encounter introduces stark aesthetic contrasts and unsettles the meanings and functions of various sites. In Astana, urban renewal has been used powerfully as means to represent a vision of the nation-state's future. The aesthetics of urban space has thus acquired fundamental ideological significance. Simultaneously, some older parts of the city are being abandoned to oblivion and decay. Encounter's unanticipated uses of space suspend and subvert such fundamental categories as central and marginal, thriving and abandoned, or serious and absurd. The game changes the meanings and functions of space. While not confronting any official ideology head-on, Encounter manages to carve out interstitial space of ephemeral autonomy. It defies any attempt at extending hegemony over the imagination by means of control of spatial aesthetics. While particular interventions of Encounter are only temporary, I suggest that the game may have more lasting social effects. It is an experience of possibility, of society in the subjunctive. Moreover, it creates autonomous socialities centered on creative practice. Encounter players form social networks whose relevance extends beyond the activity of playing.