Paper short abstract:

Although appearing sporadically in ethnographies and theoretical discussions, tactics have not been explicitly attended to by anthropologists. This panel aims to act as a platform for an anthropological exploration of tactics as ethnographic and conceptual objects.

Paper long abstract:

Although appearing sporadically in ethnographies and theoretical discussions, tactics have not been explicitly attended to by anthropologists. Our impression is that the notion of tactics has been underlying anthropological thought for long now - concealed in concepts and anthropological literature on agency, ethics, power, praxis, cunningness, reflexivity, and event - but never placed at the centre of ethnographic analysis. This panel aims to act as a platform for an anthropological exploration of tactics. An inquiry into tactics can address everyday practices and cognitive states of cunningness, trickery, urgency and dexterity which often evade philosophical accounts of the intellect. An anthropological account of tactics instead gestures to the contingent and violent nature of becoming, and the ability of social agents - individual or collective - to recruit, manage and incite wordly circumstance. This paper aims to act as a provocation to an anthropological theory of tactics. The paper visits the ethnographic archive to locate where the notion of tactics has been lying dormant yet potent, and to what other concepts within anthropology it can connect and be animated through.