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- Convenors:
-
Dace Dzenovska
(University of Oxford)
Larisa Kurtovic (University of Ottawa)
Send message to Convenors
- Discussants:
-
Ruben Andersson
(University of Oxford)
Jeremy Morris (Aarhus University)
- Format:
- Panels
- :
- SO-D207
- Sessions:
- Tuesday 14 August, -
Time zone: Europe/Stockholm
Short Abstract:
This panel invites papers on emptiness as an increasingly common feature of contemporary political and economic landscapes, as well as a powerful analytical lens for understanding shifting patterns of global (dis)connectivity.
Long Abstract:
There is a proliferation of stories and images of emptiness in the global public domain: from a rapidly depopulating Eastern Europe to post-Fordist ghost towns in North America; from sites of industrial or natural disaster, such as Chernobyl in Ukraine and Beichuan in China, to fishing villages in Bangladesh and Alaska that are disappearing under water due to climate change; from war-ravaged and militarized Afghan cities devoid of civilians to securitized African borderlands. These stories and images conjure up a pervasive sense of emptiness as ruination of material, social, and economic life, and the coming of a radically different future. And yet, emptiness remains poorly understood, empirically understudied, and theoretically underconceptualized.
This panel invites papers on emptiness as an increasingly common feature of contemporary political and economic landscapes, as well as a powerful analytical lens for understanding shifting patterns of global (dis)connectivity. The papers will take up emptiness as an observable reality, a modality of experience, a constitutive category of modernity, or a trope for reflecting on modernity's demise. Some papers will be based on studies of "left-behind" people and places, while others will consider emptiness as a constitutive feature of accumulation of capital. Some papers may undertake historical analysis of emptiness in contexts of settler colonialism, while others may reflect on emptiness as a malady of modern life or a commodified aesthetic. Taken together, the papers will explore the multiple faces of emptiness and reflect on the analytical potential of the category of emptiness.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Tuesday 14 August, 2018, -Paper short abstract:
Based on ethnographic work in the Latvian-Russian borderlands, this paper will reflect on "emptiness" as an object of study and a lens for analyzing how people and places become disconnected from and attempt to reconnect with what they understand to be meaningful life.
Paper long abstract:
Western philosophers have long written about emptiness as a malady of alienated and disenchanted moderns. However, in the once vibrant, but now deindustrialized Latvian-Russian borderlands, residents talk about emptiness as something that remains when the promises of modernity have been betrayed. When discussing it, they talk about the number of houses or apartments that stand empty and the number of people who have left. They describe how empty streets, stores, and homes produce discomfort, even nausea. For the locals, emptiness is not a temporary state of falling behind the global march to prosperity, but a transitional state between a world that has ended and a world whose contours are not yet visible.
This paper will reflect on "emptiness" as an object of study and a lens for analyzing how people and places become disconnected from and attempt to reconnect with what they understand to be meaningful life. It will mobilize the concept of emptiness developed on basis of ethnographic research in the Latvian-Russian borderlands as a "portable analytic" that can be useful for understanding contemporary reterritorialization of power that produces emptiness as an enduring form of life.
Paper short abstract:
Set in Bosnia-Herzegovina, this paper chronicles wartime and postwar histories of "emptying out" of social spaces and analyzes the political concerns these processes render both visible and describable. I argue that emptiness is itself filled with presences, some of which are utterly horrifying.
Paper long abstract:
Between 1992-95, half of the population of Bosnia-Herzegovina became displaced through the now infamous and tragic campaigns of wartime ethnic cleansing. Twenty-three years since the signing of the Dayton Peace Accords, many homes that were burned-down or otherwise devastated during the war remain empty, even when they have been fully reconstructed. However, recently, another kind of emptying out has been taking place in Bosnia, prompted by massive outmigration of people who are leaving in search of work and more viable futures for their families.
This paper traces these distinct but related processes of "emptying out," focused on material things and human communities, and the political concerns they render both visible and describable. One of those concerns, my interlocutors suggest, is not who is leaving but who is staying behind. Remaining attuned to my companions' readings of the political present, I argue that emptiness, in fact, is not a negative, austere space, but is itself filled with presences, which other absences bring into relief.
Through three ethnographic scenes, one focused on the period of war, and another two on the postwar disappearance of people and life-nourishing substances, such as water, this paper suggests that the eeriness of emptiness comes from its ability to reveal other horrifying presences.
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores the material and discursive registers of emptiness amongst Gbaya artisanal miners in the afterlife of a gold-rush. It considers emptiness in relation to classic debates on resource scarcity by focusing on emptiness as a lived experience in relation to a past material abundance.
Paper long abstract:
Drawing on over 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork, this paper explores several registers (both material and discursive) of emptiness in the lives of Gbaya artisanal miners living in the aftermath of a gold-rush in eastern Cameroon. The role of gold mining as the community's main source of income and identity has been radically destabilised by the recent arrival and departure of Chinese mining companies. Their rapid depletion of the landscape's gold stocks through mechanized extraction has transformed a remote and already impoverished border region into a space of rapid socio-economic change, oscillating from material abundance to resource scarcity. Using informal and makeshift mining practices the Gbaya now extract ever smaller quantities of gold left in the wake of the Chinese and declare that "the gold is gone".
In this space of social upheaval, discourses and practices of emptiness pervade local communities as they speak of the 'lack' (buone) or 'end' (sona) of gold, cultivated food and money and the new 'dryness' (cota coti) of the village characterised by an absence of people, money, activity and change. Through mining, the Gbaya continue to work the soil which has been emptied of its gold and value, engaging in a productive activity that no longer produces but is instead generative of emptiness. Drawing from these ethnographic insights, this paper proposes to consider emptiness in relation to classic debates on resource scarcity by focusing on emptiness in the aftermath of a material abundance and as a lived experience.
Paper short abstract:
Being a museum attendant in a little frequented museum can lead to face emptiness. How are they managing the void? From bricolage to tactics, time perception changes in relation with the place. How, as anthropologists, can we study such moments of emptiness?
Paper long abstract:
What happens when nothing happens during your job? When this emptiness fills the majority of your working day?
I spent months in the Contemporary Art Museum of Ljubljana (+MSUM) with museum attendants. Their job is built around two periods of time: first, when they are alone in the room, surrounded by art pieces and white walls; second, when visitors are present. In this specific position, and in a non-over-frequented museum, perception of time change: they are fulfilling it with different activities, connected with expectations and introspections. Suddenly when a visitor enters their room, the atmosphere shifts, and the long ballet of mobility, visibility, stillness and invisibility can start between the newcomer and the museum attendant.
The unexpected part of this study was to discover a work environment not just made of suffering, but also of readings, thought, organization, and attachment. Can letting time, empty, free from tasks, to employees be a way of rethinking what is a job? The feeling of "having time" depicted so often into interviews is unusual for a world where the rhythm of productivity invades all areas of life (Rosa, 2013).
In terms of method, how can we, as anthropologists, study such moment of solitude? Studying solitary experiences implies working with inclusive methods. From these questionings I developed a method involving visual and elicitation tools to engage museum attendants in a reflexive comment about their own experience. Part of the results and the method are visible in the documentary In Between, made out of it.