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- Convenors:
-
Francisco Martínez
(Tampere University)
Lili Di Puppo (University of Helsinki)
Martin Demant Frederiksen (University of Copenhagen)
Send message to Convenors
- Discussants:
-
Jamie Saris
(Maynooth University)
Eeva Berglund (Aalto University)
- Format:
- Panels
- Location:
- SO-B487
- Sessions:
- Thursday 16 August, -, -
Time zone: Europe/Stockholm
Short Abstract:
The peripheral is not just a a location or a feeling; it is a form of knowing too. This panel explores the ways in which peripherality can be considered a way of thinking about problems, questions, and evidence, gathering papers that deal with or reflect on edgy methods and politics in anthropology.
Long Abstract:
This panel is an invitation to rethink how fringeness can be incorporated into ethnographic research as a generative condition, as well as an edgy methodology and conceptual framing for knowledge production. We draw on the assumption that peripherality is not only a space in the making or a marginal condition, but also a form of making theory and a mode of attention that is change oriented, thinking-doing (Simone 2010; Roy 2011); .
In anthropological studies, peripheries and margins are presented as imbued with a sense of ambiguity, and often as being misinterpreted by a centre or hidden in the process through which things are made to seem clear, bounded and fixed (Green 2005). A focus on peripherality gives us access to those people, practices and affects that are out of the dominant scope of vision (Khalvashi 2013), revealing complex dependencies that reach both ways - to and from centers and margins. Moreover, peripheries may be seen as grey zones in which the fantasy realm finds its physical location (Scott 2000), or as spaces of marginalia, ex-centricity and renewal (Stewart 1996). Yet the peripheral can also be seen as an invitation to stay with unknowability and make space for it; finding a language to write the invisible (Mittermaier 2017).
Thus the panel approaches peripherality not as framed in exclusively geographical terms, but rather as situated at the edge of dominant paradigms. We invite papers that explore how peripheries, and peripheral wisdom, challenge established hierarchies, showing a distinct form of reflexivity and experimentation.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Thursday 16 August, 2018, -Paper short abstract:
An account of DIY transformations impinged on our anthropological practice in a context of urban and financial crisis in Spain 'peripheralising' disciplinary knowledge with our epistemic partners in the field.
Paper long abstract:
The global financial crisis at the beginning of the decade brought a period of political unrest in Spain. Despite the crisis (or maybe because of it) its cities experienced a moment of political creativity and urban inventiveness. In this context, many kinds of peripheral knowledges blossomed: This happened against the background of a deep unrest and mistrust with regards to expert-based and disciplinary knowledges. Thrown into the urban landscape left behind by austerity urbanism policies we worked intimately with architects and neighbours turned into 'insurgent' and inclusive urban planners, and collaborated with activist designers and people with functional diversity. Sharing these circumstances with what we came to call 'epistemic partners' in the field required us to undergo a deep mutation in the ways in which we undertook anthropology: We were confronted from the onset with the ways in which institutional forms of epistemic authority were put in crisis, including ours. Unexpectedly, we found in them the companions we lacked in the local academic/disciplinary context. With them we learned to problematise the contemporary situations of crisis and precariousness. From them we learnt how to arrange and care for inclusive ambiences to think together. We also had to learn how to foster ambiences to make them participate in our academic and institutional contexts, in a gesture 'peripheralising' our disciplinary boundaries. Mirroring the makeshift city growing in front of our eyes, our anthropological practice also grew in the peripheral disciplinary interstices: a DIY anthropology, done together with our epistemic partners?
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines the relations between design and ethnography drawing on an experience of learning design through ethnography by exploring the notion of "peripheral experiments" focusing on the epistemological dimensions and their implications for enriching design-practices based interventions.
Paper long abstract:
Exploring the infrastructures, spaces, forms of relationship and methods of ethnography, we'll try to de-coding an open and experimental sensibility in fieldwork, shifting its focus from the process of writing to the embodied practice of the fieldwork in the public space. We depart from an earlier emphasis on city as context from thinking-doing (Ingold 2013) to explore through senses, patterns and the body the correspondence in unknown encounters. Infrastructuring relations, conversations and sentient attention through ethnography in a design process, we aim to understand the correspondences from design to ethnography and vice-versa.
While "experimental collaborations" (Estalella and Sanchez-Criado, 2015) goes beyond observational and individualistic ways of fieldwork, the notion of "pheriperial experiments" helps foster new forms of design ethnography theorization, bringing the creative process from an individual sense-making to a collective creativity open-ended design intervention. "Peripheral" experiments situate the body as a strategy of resistance and openness -the unknown territory of the no-verbal, de-centering the field work experience from the need of verbal accounts and rational knowledge production. Collaboration is then a method and a matter of survival to start conversations and exploring with "the others" embracing the strange and the unknown. The fieldwork become the place and the medium of the new collaborative scenarios where the design practices are leaded by ethnographic principles that, reshaping the open design interventions, are operating as a learning system of embodied knowledge.
Paper short abstract:
In this paper, the peripheral is explored both empirically and analytically: As a geographical site, Tønder, DK, and as an analytical position that thrives on edginess, transformation, elusiveness and blind angles.
Paper long abstract:
'Being in the periphery' focuses on Tønder as the empirical site. Over a couple of decades, Tønder has been under transformation from being a borough in the province of Denmark towards becoming a place in the outskirts. This change is connected to a restructuring of welfare institutions moving them from province towns to larger cities. The change is also connected to a shift in the discourse about places situated remote from large cities.
'Thinking from the periphery' as an analytical position allows for exploring ambiguity as implicit in anthropological thinking, thereby it offers a method to reach otherwise disguised sides of empirical settings. The impact of an analytical focus on the edgy, deserted, ambiguous and disguised will be explored and discussed through the case study of Tønder.
Though this double strategy, the paper questions how to decide on the difference and the interdependency between center and periphery, geographically as well as analytically. Also, the ways periphery and center folds into each other is discussed. Furthermore, periphery as a an analytical position is explored as a way to focus on places in transformation, on practices and thinking by inhabitants of edgy sites, and on the fringy sides of the relationships between spatial and social relations.
The paper is based on fieldwork in progress conducted in Tønder as part of the research project Spaces of Danish Welfare.
Paper short abstract:
Sufism in Volga-Ural appears as absent yet present. I reflect on my field research to ask how to approach the elusiveness of Sufism. Sufism transcends efforts to frame it into certain categories; it invites us to go beyond a conventional mode of knowing to consider the invisible realm it opens up.
Paper long abstract:
Sufism in Russia's Volga-Ural region is considered nowadays as a marginal phenomenon and even as extinct. It appears at first sight as invisible and absent. However, Sufism starts to become more and more present the more one searches for it, following hints of its elusive presence. Sufism thus appears as one thing and the other: absent yet present. I relate the changing shapes that Sufism can take and its in/visibility to the nature of the gaze that is used to view the phenomenon. Sufism transcends efforts to frame it into certain categories and determine its nature; it invites us to go beyond a conventional mode of seeing and knowing to consider the invisible realm it opens up. I bring together two "failed" or uncertain attempts to apprehend the phenomenon that appeared in the first stages of my field research. A first attempt concerns the process of defining a local Muslim identity in Volga-Ural. When conversing with Muslim representatives and scholars on Islam, I noticed how Sufism appeared and disappeared. It was relegated to the past; celebrated as an integral component of the region's Muslim history that could be "revived"; or viewed as alien and irrational. The difficulty to frame Sufism into the conception of a local Muslim culture due to its elusiveness echoes my own uncertain attempt to "capture" the phenomenon through conventional fieldwork methods. In a second part, I relate my "failed" observation of a ritual and my difficulty to name and understand my experience of this ritual.
Paper short abstract:
Against a background of multiple cultural peripherality within Scotland as a geographical periphery, the paper charts the emergence of 'Creative Ethnology', a movement of cultural activists and academic researchers seeking out new ways of engaged anthropological practice, inspired by geopoetics.
Paper long abstract:
The political and public confidence built up over nearly two decades of devolution has resulted in an increasingly clear expression of what culture means for Scotland, and where this differs from what is articulated by the UK government and mainstream media. The debate around independence before and in the aftermath of the 2014 referendum has shifted what some Scottish politicians appear to view as the key terrain of cultural policy. Against that background of multiple cultural peripherality within a geographical periphery, the paper charts the emergence of a 'Creative Ethnology' movement in which cultural activists and academic researchers are coming together to find new ways of engaged practice, drawing on diverse sources. Particular emphasis will be on Kenneth White's (2004) call for a renewal of anthropology through geopoetics, and on the development of "thinking machines" inspired by the interdisciplinary work of Patrick Geddes.
Paper short abstract:
The marginal Indian State of Assam had—and still has—an ambiguous reputation. This image is being transformed by the growing tourism and pilgrimage industry. Marginality becomes a resource: Assam is depicted as nestling untouched natural beauty and age-old traditions to be discovered by the visitor.
Paper long abstract:
Located in the Eastern most edge of the India Union, the State of Assam is believed by many Hindus to be the land of odd esoteric practices and black magic. Notwithstanding its striking natural beauty—the mighty river Brahmaputra flows through verdant plains and hills—till recently Assam was cut of from the domestic and international tourism industry.
Sensing the economic potential of Assam, Indian Central Government, together with Assamese politicians, is promoting tourism and pilgrimage to Assam. In February 2018, the Advantage Assam fair was organized at Guwahati, Assam capital, to attract investment. Indian and foreigner politicians and businessmen attended this huge event, which was inaugurated by Indian Prime Minister, Narendra Modi.
Based on extensive fieldwork, this paper explores the image of Assam that is being constructed by the rapidly expanding tourism and pilgrimage industry. The Awesome Assam campaign, launched in 2017, portrays Assam as the enchanting land of unexplored wilderness and poorly known artistic and cultural traditions. Several handicrafts and performing arts are displayed, such as Assamese handloom, tea gardens, the spring Bihu dance, mask making of Majuli riverine island, etc. The ancient Kamakhya temple—Assam most visited pilgrimage place—plays a pivotal role in shaping the image of a spiritual place. Marginality becomes a resource: Assam is depicted as being rooted in its age-old traditions to be discovered by the visitor. The unknown, the incomprehensible becomes the mystery to be explored. Centre and periphery conspire to create (and sell) the image of a mystic, charming Assam.
Paper short abstract:
Taking the case of Israelis engaged in 'Solidarity Activism' this paper argues that their activism grew out of repeated 'weird encounters'. Weirdness is an affect which describes the failure of hegemonic expectations, reveals the fringes of ignorance and allows doubt and political dissent to emerge.
Paper long abstract:
The fringes of knowledge are strange and discomforting places. Social practices, values and norms don't quite fit with what we've come to expect. Anthropologists have long realised that no one 'stands alone directly confronting a world of solid facts' (Wright Mills, 1967), rather we interpret life through the hegemonic system of acculturated meanings. A feeling of Weirdness arises when the world we encounter fails to accord with our acculturated expectations. It represents the limits of our understanding, the fringes of our ignorance.
Based on ethnographic fieldwork with Jewish 'Solidarity Activists' in Israel and the occupied Palestinian Territories, this paper argues that repeated 'weird encounters' help foster political thinking and allow for the emergence of critique and collective action. Such fleeting, disingenuous occurrences may leave only trace affects but they can also reveal disjunctures between the professed liberal polity in Israel's hegemonic narrative and its illiberal social practices with regards to Palestinians.
The moment of weirdness does not cause shame or moral outrage but it does cause us to pause, to think, perhaps to wonder why. Yet just as Arendt (1971) saw thinking as a crucial political faculty which causes us to doubt the 'common-sense' world, the feeling of weirdness can also cause us to doubt the veracity of the hegemonic discourse. By highlighting the cracks in the patina of acculturated understanding, weirdness reveals the fringes our ignorance, opening the way for creative agency and transformative action.
Paper short abstract:
This study results from the peripheries of the field of trucking, and epistemologies that surround it. We have focused on stories of people and ordinary objects that remain outside the scope of studies in trucking. The project problematizes spatiality and mobility with a focus on materiality.
Paper long abstract:
We made a quick ethnography project in 2017 that focused on women truck drivers in Canada. With 'object-oriented storytelling', we have revealed the truck cabin, showing how it is a dynamic space that is defined both as home and work through socio-material practices (Smith, 1981). The project encompasses three peripheral positions. Firstly, the study focuses on women truckers who comprise 3% of the trucker workforce in Canada; and thus incorporates the meanings that are often overlooked in trucking, traditionally a male-dominant industry. Second, the study centers on the objects that are placed in the truck cabin, as opposed to the objects that are being transported as commodities. Therefore, the reality that we draw rests on the stories of ordinary objects that travel across boundaries; and not the mobility of commodities in a supply-chain that are often the focus of political-economic analyses. Lastly, we have conducted a 'quick ethnography', which falls outside the traditional ethnographic practices that values long-term immersion into field site. Our involvement with the field was rapid but deliberate and interventionist (Pink et al. 2013). These peripheral components of the research enabled us to rethink the conversations that commonly surround the trucking industry; provided space for the emergence of different stories of mobility and spatiality. These marginal positions enabled us to move through scales with a narrative ease; and opened up the research data to be used in different ways. So far, the research outputs have taken the form of a short film, and an interactive narrative game.
Paper short abstract:
The contribution uses "remoteness" as a theoretical framework to describe the existing relationships between centres and peripheries within the Italian National Strategy for Inner Areas, analyzing the set of power relations that influence policy-making strategies and identity-making processes.
Paper long abstract:
Much of the Italian territory is organised around "minor centres", often small hubs that guarantee their residents only limited accessibility to essential services. The specific features of these territories represented in 2012 the starting point for a wider reflection on rural/mountain areas development and the resulting policy making process. As a consequence of that, the Italian Minister for Economic Development has recently launched the "National Strategy for Inner Areas" (SNAI), aimed a finding an integrated approach that could help providing the inhabitants of such territories those basic services perceived to be insufficient. As of today 20 of the 65 selected areas are drawing up their preliminary strategic plan and so far it was possible to observe two sets of processes: a top-down one, that has the objective of preselecting the areas and providing the general guidelines for the strategy, and a bottom-up one that sees those same areas as actively involved in drawing up their future development plans. The paper aims to investigate the relationship between power and knowledge and whether this relationship is reflected in the policy language used in the textual tools SNAI is based on, starting from the assumption that policy language can be both an effect and an instrument of power. Using "remoteness" as a theoretical framework to describe such areas could be a way to analyse the existing relationships between centres and peripheries, implying the existence of a set of power relations that influence policy-making strategies, as well as identity-making processes.
Paper short abstract:
We examine children's lived experience as knowing subjects. Drawing on evidence from a multimodal ethnographic study on the relationship between childhood and public life we trouble what it means to tune into peripheral wisdom in relation to key theoretical terms (public, private and non-human).
Paper long abstract:
Described as 'the century of the child', children from the 1900s onwards became a central focus of nation building, a way of prefiguring the future in the present. In this paper, we examine the consequences of 'the century of the child' for children's lived experience as knowing subjects. While childhood has become the obsessive preoccupation of adults, we argue that children, conceived as radical others to professional and technocratic systems of knowledge, have much to teach us about peripheral knowledge, its production and recognition. Drawing on evidence from a multimodal ethnographic study (the ERC funded Connectors Study) that looks at the relationship between childhood and public life, and deploying an anthropological sensibility that recognises children's everyday lives as idiomatically constructed, we engage with the acoustics of peripheral wisdom. Children, we argue are largely caught up in the contemporary phenomenon of hearing without listening. We carry out a reflexive idiomatic reading of what it means and feels like to encounter childhood on over 300 collective fieldwork encounters with forty-five six- to eight-year-old children living in three international cities (Athens, Hyderabad, London). We argue that dominant understandings of listening to children rely heavily on cognitive, conceptual and rational models of an idealised form of communication that ignore the everyday, embodied and lived experiences of idioms of childhood. Through ethnographic thick description we trouble what it means to tune into children's worlds, and present findings on the meanings and practices of key theoretical terms, public, private and non-human, for children.