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- Convenors:
-
Beata Świtek
(University of Copenhagen)
Matan Shapiro (King's College London)
Roger Casas Ruiz (Austrian Academy of Sciences)
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- Format:
- Panels
- Location:
- SO-E497
- Sessions:
- Wednesday 15 August, -, -
Time zone: Europe/Stockholm
Short Abstract:
Mass spatial movements and emphasis on social mobility dominate representations of the current global condition. But what if you cannot move? Considering mobility and stillness as more than spatial phenomena we invite contributions focused on the experiences of 'being stuck' in various contexts.
Long Abstract:
Mass movement away from environmental disasters and war zones, as well as economic and leisure migrations, have dominated representations of the current global condition. Alongside this emphasis on spatial mobility, climbing up professional and social ladders have become tokens of success. The quicker one can achieve a desired rank the better. With late-modern communication technologies, speed matters and time spent still is time wasted.
But what if you cannot move? What if you have taken the journey across the sea only to get stuck in a refugee camp? What if you are trapped in economic deprivation and cannot afford moving somewhere safer, with better housing or schools? Or conversely, what if you are 'stuck' in motion under coercive policies or market dynamics that force you to keep moving? What if you cannot find permanent employment and are restricted by the increasingly constraining conditions of the 'gig economy'? What if you are confined to a life trajectory you would have rather not taken?
Considering mobility and stillness as more than spatial phenomena, this panel seeks to expand our understanding of 'things that stand still' (Salazar and Smart 2011) and the notion of stasis (Glick Schiller and Salazar 2013). We call for ethnographically informed contributions exploring the experiences of 'being stuck' on various empirical grounds. We invite theoretical reflections on the relationships between stillness and mobility and on what stillness does to life projects, hopes, the self, ethical and political imaginations, and to economic strategies in a world enthralled with mobility.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Wednesday 15 August, 2018, -Paper short abstract:
This paper examines the work and living conditions of both old and new Syrian agricultural migrants who have settled in the Bekaa Valley. It shows how the stuckedness of Syrians is not only physical and legal but also operates in the work place.
Paper long abstract:
This paper examines the work and living conditions of both old and new Syrian agricultural migrants who have settled in the Bekaa Valley, which hosts the largest concentration of Syrian refugees and also happens to be the largest agricultural area in Lebanon. My arguments are based on in-depth ethnographic research including participant observaitons being currently conducted with agricultural workers in Bekaa. Having the highest refugee per capita in the world, Lebanon does not legally recognise refugee status and falls short on protecting migrant workers. Since 2014, and despite historical relations including freedom of movement with Syria, the government imposed a series of arbitrary and illegal restrictions on borders, internal mobility, work, and residency for Syrians, which further encouraged exploitation. I argue that these regulations have not only driven Syrians' legal and physical 'stuckedness', but also led to the emergence of other more complex forms of dependencies, which work interrelatedly and affect new categories of workers including women and children. Dire socio-economic conditions resulting from the refugee influx have forced Syrian agricultural workers and migrants to get stuck in a powerful and exploitative system which provides them access to both a home and a job.
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores the 'existential immobility' experienced by Serbian migrant women who feel stuck, unable to achieve a desired future "stolen" from them by Serbia's perpetual transition. I argue that a focus on 'stuckness' uncovers the values people hold dear when imagining their life trajectory.
Paper long abstract:
Premised on eight months of field-research in Germany and Belgrade, this paper focuses on the 'existential immobility' reported by Serbian migrant women. I follow the life-history narrative of one research interlocutor currently residing in Belgrade, who is in the process of migrating to Germany. The narrative exposes the structural climate of feeling stuck as this relates to the woman's projections against the horizon of the promised democratic and prosperous future for Serbia that has been effectively "stolen" from its citizens by the perpetual transition that the country has been undergoing. My analysis emphasises three elements: (1) enforced presentism; (2) divergences between imagined and felt futurity; and (3) inability to meet expectations of a worthy path in life within an imagined time-frame for progression and fulfilment. I will thus show that for the woman in question, the possibility of migration emerges as an aspired to solution to feelings of stuckness and immobility. Migration is imagined as an exciting motion out and away from enclosure and lack of potential. I argue that researching staying put and 'stuckness' offers much insight into the values people hold dear when imagining their life trajectory at large. My presentation focuses on the temporal dimensions of stuckness as a heuristic device for the production of meaningful anthropological knowledge.
Paper short abstract:
Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork among the Tai Lue of Sipsong Panna (P.R China), this paper explores the gender dynamics of mobility and stillness among this ethnic minority in the contemporary period, looking both at official discourses and vernacular aspirations and practices.
Paper long abstract:
The market economy in P.R. China promises unlimited possibilities for both the material and symbolic mobility of its people. At the same time the Chinese state mobilizes discursive and legal tools to manage this theoretically boundless potential, producing, arranging and re-arranging populations and geographies according to its own, shifting goals. In connection with this, the recognition of non-majority identities (inscribed in individuals' ID cards) as well as long-lasting stereotypes portraying these groups as infantile, primitive and feminine (Harrell 1995), establishes immaterial, discriminating borders with very real effects in the articulation of the ethnic subjects' aspirations.
While their identity has often been explained in terms of their ability to move across borders (Wasan 2007,2010; Davis 2003), and the increasing flow of commodities and people crossing the region notwithstanding, the official representation of the Tai Lue of Sipsong Panna (Yunnan Province) as a gentle and peace-loving but backward people seem to help perpetuate their subordinated role as agricultural producers and tourism industry workers. How do these official portraits affect the fashioning of Tai Lue mobility imaginaries? And how do such imaginaries differ according to whether one is a man or a woman?
Based on long-term fieldwork in Sipsong Panna, this paper looks at both state and market discursive practices, and the individual experiences of male and female Tai Lue, in order to give account of the complexities and tensions informing the dynamics of mobility and immobility among these minority people, paying special attention to gender differentials in experiences of stillness.
Paper short abstract:
While the omnipresence and success of Chinese merchants in Africa are usually attributed to high mobility, ethnographic research suggests that they are largely immobilised - both spatially and socially. Specific economic strategies and social practices often put social mobility abroad on hold.
Paper long abstract:
In recent years large numbers of Chinese merchants have occupied dominant economic positions across Africa, are generally portrayed as highly mobile and flexible - and hence successful. Ethnographic research conducted in West Africa (2011-2015), however, suggests that the majority of Chinese merchants in Africa (entrepreneurs and employees alike) are trapped in a state of liminality and stillness. I argue that their subjectivities are characterized by multiple dimensions of immobility and stasis rather than mobility. Entrepreneurs feel stuck in temporary destinations, unable to return to China rather than moving back and up the social ladder by means of anticipated quick profits. Employees are immobilized by sets of institutional constraints including employment arrangements, behavioral norms and immigration regimes - their spatial mobility highly restricted, their social mobility at least postponed.
Drawing on a large corpus of qualitative data I will demonstrate how the initially successful economic strategies universally employed by Chinese merchants across Africa and beyond tend to become major obstacles for mobility - both spatial and social. I will discuss how behavioral inflexibility within the Chinese socio-cultural context results in an ethnic cluster in stasis, with severely limited ability to adapt social practices to local contexts and to develop alternative economic strategies. I will elaborate how individual social isolation and alienation from Chinese society during prolonged stays in Africa further limit mobility choices. Finally, I will shed light on the specific immobilizing effects that employment relations in Chinese trading companies - typically family businesses - have on Chinese migrant employees.
Paper short abstract:
Based on research with irregular migrants in Nepal, who spend months or years before reaching their destination countries, this paper explores the migrants' experience of being stuck, i.e. 'being in the process', and the 'economy of waiting' as a key technology of the migration industry in Nepal.
Paper long abstract:
'We are in the process' was the phrase often used by my Nepali interlocutors, soon to be migrants, who were waiting for their departure abroad, often to the Gulf States and, more recently, to the so-called 'big countries' the US, Japan or one of the EU states. 'Being in the process', i.e. essentially 'being stuck' in a state of limbo with migrants lives being put on hold for the duration of the journey, could take anywhere from several months, when one was going to the Gulf or Malaysia, to several years, when one embarked on an irregular perilous journey via South American route to the US. Based on conversations with (ir)regular migrants whose journeys failed and also those who successfully reached their 'final' destinations, this paper explores the experience of being stuck on the one hand and the 'economy of waiting' as a key technology of the migration industry in Nepal, on the other. It suggests that the 'economy of waiting' is used by the migration industry actors in Nepal as a deliberate technique of controlling aspiring migrants' movement, exploiting their desires and hopes, and extracting surplus value, turning the migration industry in Nepal into a major system of profiteering and forcing many of the aspiring migrants into a situation of grave debt - with their lives put on hold all over again until the debt is repaid, even when their dreams of physical mobility are fulfilled.
Paper short abstract:
The paper discusses mobile aspirations, experiences and practices as an ongoing and dynamic quest for freedom embedded in larger personal and collective projects. This quest, especially when taking perilous and uncertain paths, may involve immobility, 'stagnancy' and stillness
Paper long abstract:
Drawing on the mobile aspirations and experiences of Afrobahian Capoeira teachers from the state of Bahia in Brazil and of Syrian refugees in camps in Northern Greece, the paper approaches the interplay between mobility and stillness as an urgent, dynamic and ongoing quest for freedom. Leaving home and precarious lives behind is a project that builds upon hope and necessity and can be both personal and collective. However, these projects are always in peril. Quite often, they are challenged by international laws that regulate migration, as well as by racist, postcolonial and neoliberal practices, discourses and interventions. At the same time, the social subjects' quest for freedom is not a novel one and does not simply involve spatial mobility. The paper will identify how ideas of freedom guide action and shape perceptions of mobility and stillness and will explore their creative and transformative capacities in an unevenly connected world. By connecting migratory experiences and in particular, periods of 'stuckness' and trauma to larger, ongoing life projects that extend beyond the present moment and include past and future, relationships and persons in the making, we get a better understanding of how people experience, perceive and manage disempowerment, stillness or 'stagnancy' in their present
Paper short abstract:
Presenting a detailed ethnographic account of the recent 'pump' and 'dump' in Bitcoin value, in this paper I will analyze the structural dynamics and social rhythm of being stuck in Bitcoin future salvation.
Paper long abstract:
Wild value fluctuation and apprehensive regulators still encumber the contemporary cryptocurrency ecosystem with Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt (also known as 'FUDs'). In Bitcoin sociality, such market unpredictability often also becomes radically affective, as periodic collective scares prompt owners to abruptly sell their holdings. Yet, selling-out is a tricky gamble. While you may indeed make profit in state-controlled ('fiat') currency, you might also suffer huge potential revenue loss if Bitcoin's value will indeed one day 'rise to the moon'. After all, the Bitcoin space is replete with tragic myths foretelling the stories of those who sold their holdings only to bitterly bemoan later on due to exponential surges in value. Dedicated analysts, early-adopters and cryptocurrency gurus across the web thus routinely advise community members to 'HODL': 'Hold On to Dear Life'. The longer you HODL, the less Bitcoin you spend, the richer you become in the future.
Based on my ongoing fieldwork at the Bitcoin Embassy in Tel Aviv, I nonetheless argue that a 'HODLING' strategy is paradoxical. While persons initially buy Bitcoin to liberate themselves from intermediaries, third-parties and the Big Other more generally, economic autonomy here becomes contingent on hazy potentialities. In generic cosmological terms, 'decentralised Freedom' itself thereby becomes intrinsic to centralised 'enslavement', and vice-versa. Presenting a detailed ethnographic account of the recent 'pump' and 'dump' in Bitcoin value, in this paper I analyse the structural dynamics and social rhythm of being stuck in Bitcoin future salvation.
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores how the attempts to construct meaningful subjectivities by Japanese Buddhist priests, who are 'stuck' in their role of religious specialists, change Buddhist proselytising and forms of religious engagement in a secularised Japanese society.
Paper long abstract:
Buddhist temples in Japan are typically headed by male priests who take the position from their fathers. Such temples are similar to family businesses providing income and living quarters for the family. Should the head priest cease to fulfil his or her role, the family needs to relocate and seek new employment. The expectation that the children will take over rests, therefore, not only on the religious sense of mission, but also on the need to secure the family's material wellbeing. Whatever the aspirations of the young, they need to be recast or abandoned in light of these expectations.
Becoming a Buddhist priest in Japan also means taking on a role that has lost much of its social resonance. Popular indifference and sometimes hostility towards one's self and what one stands for mark the wider social milieu in which Buddhist priests operate. In this context, those priests who might have chosen a different career had they not been born into a temple, find themselves 'stuck' in the position of a religious specialist in a society that does not have much interest in what they represent.
How, then, do these priests move on with their lives and construct meaningful subjectivities both as religious specialists and as individuals with personal aspirations? How do their attempts at overcoming popular indifference change Buddhist proselytising and, more broadly, religious engagement in a secularised Japanese society? These questions are explored through an analysis of empirical research among Buddhist priests and laity in Tokyo between 2016 and 2017.