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- Convenors:
-
Farhan Samanani
(King's College London)
Hugh Williamson (University of Exeter)
Taras Fedirko (University of Glasgow)
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- Discussant:
-
Dace Dzenovska
(University of Oxford)
- Format:
- Panels
- Location:
- SO-B497
- Sessions:
- Friday 17 August, -, -
Time zone: Europe/Stockholm
Short Abstract:
Anthropology has paid little attention to the diversity and everyday lives of liberal ideas, focusing largely on (neo)liberal governmentality. This panel takes a reinvigorated look at how the social grammar of liberalism is articulated in complex ways across contexts and scales.
Long Abstract:
The anthropological lens has been fundamentally shaped by liberal categories and preoccupations (Keane 2007). This has meant that in the past, liberalism itself has eluded the anthropological gaze, while more recently it has come into focus mostly in the singular vision of neoliberal governmentality.This conceptual history has been an obstacle to understanding liberalism "on the ground" more broadly as a mobile project of transforming social, political and material relations the world over. Although space has been opened up by contemporary anthropological investigations of human rights (Englund 2011; Goodale and Merry 2007), multiple modernities (Bear 2014), public spheres (Ansell 2015; Lempert 2012) and universalism (Englund 2006; Povinelli 2002; Tsing 2005), we suggest that there is further ground to be gained by attending to liberalism' as an explicit area of anthropological enquiry.
This panel aims to explore the diverse ways in which liberalism's grammar of idealisation and universalisation, detachment and abstraction, its particular socio-historical imaginaries and socio-material arrangements are articulated across diverse contexts. To this end, we invite ethnographic papers that explore the social life of liberalism, however configured. How do liberal ideas, and the grammar of liberal ideology, become unbundled and reassembled, differentiated and made to cohere? How is this grammar deployed to "speak for" subjects, how do subjects themselves "speak with" it, and to what effects? By developing a comparative perspective on liberalism, we hope not only to identify it's local articulations and entanglements, but also to trace how these are made mobile, and enrolled within broader, durable configurations.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Friday 17 August, 2018, -Paper short abstract:
In contemporary Europe, new identities are being forged that fuse the liberal and the illiberal in unique configurations. This paper rectifies an absence of attention to the liberal side of this through an ethnography of romantic liberalism in rural Transylvania.
Paper long abstract:
European Union programmes of cultural and monetary integration (and their discontents) have created a space in which new European identities are being forged that fuse the liberal and the illiberal in unique configurations (Holmes 2009). Anthropological studies have tended to focus on the more illiberal variants of this, such as religious (Muehlebach 2012) and neofascist (Holmes 2000) movements, at the expense of the more liberal. This paper presents an ethnography of young cosmopolitan Romanians in the context of British-Romanian conservation and rural revitalisation initiatives to argue that we should pay more attention to new liberal identities. British conservation projects in the Saxon villages region of Transylvania have been motivated by a romantic, integralist re-imagining of the villages that sees in their way of life an escape from modern alienation. Practically, the projects have been brought into alignment with EU structures and technologies of social and economic reform. Local participants have taken up both romantic imaginaries and liberal technologies in order to contest intransigent social norms, revitalise the rural environment and provide opportunities for belonging and livelihood, against a situation of steep economic decline and massive emigration. Rethinking liberal identities requires attending to the situations against which they are a reaction and the range of liberal and non-liberal resources they draw upon. Focusing on the liberal-illiberal nexus also allows us to reconsider the importance of the much-maligned category of identity in contemporary Europe.
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores 'failures' of political imagination and what they can tell us about distribution of an ability to be 'creative' in contemporary Europe. It focuses ethnographically on a collaboration between social anthropologists and LGBTIQ activists in Montenegro.
Paper long abstract:
This paper explores 'failures' of political imagination and what they can tell us about distribution of an ability to be 'creative' in contemporary Europe. It focuses ethnographically on a collaboration between social anthropologists and LGBTIQ activists that took place from 2014 to 2016 in Montenegro. The aim of the collaboration was to think together about how to engage in progressive sexual politics beyond liberal opposition between 'individual freedom' and 'societal oppression', in a country that is hegemonically seen as 'lagging behind' and needing to 'catch up' with Europe.
'Queering Montenegro' was a collaborative initiative that attempted to offer practical answers to this dilemma. It was an attempt to think together about how to work on sexual freedom, emancipation, and progress if we understand LGBTIQ people as persons deeply embedded in relations of kinship, friendship, and various forms of obligatory reciprocity within the local social worlds, rather than as individual agents free from coerciveness of social relations. The results of the initiative were meagre: one ethnological-cum-artistic project and one 10-page publication outlining the political platform of the initiative. Many participants were somewhat disappointed by this failure of the initiative.
The paper thinks through the reasons for this, which include different organization of time in contemporary academia and NGO activism; the prevalence of civilizatory, balkanizing and paternalistic discourse of LGBTIQ human rights, as well as a particular political economy of creativity and originality in contemporary Europe.
Paper short abstract:
Based on an ethnography of a courtroom in Paris which specialises in free speech cases, this paper explores the everyday material-semiotic production of two classic liberal forms, the public/private distinction and the mutual entailment of individual freedom and individual responsibility.
Paper long abstract:
French free speech legislation is built around a late 19th century statute which self-consciously sought to frame the end of state censorship and the liberal ideals of the Third Republic. This procedurally complex law, the judges and lawyers who specialise in its workings and the courtrooms where it is applied, together weave a thin but resilient network of liberal governance which establishes responsibilities and consequences - in public - for words and images which have been made public. Based on an ethnography of one of these courtrooms, this paper explores the everyday material-semiotic production of two classic figures of the liberal imagination, the public/private distinction and the mutual entailment of individual freedom and individual responsibility. These evanescent ideals are materialised at the intersection of publication, publishing and publicity.
Paper short abstract:
Building on research among political journalists working for independent liberal publications in Kyiv, Ukraine, my paper explores how freedom is pursued by subjects whose speech depends on that of powerful, unreliable and potentially manipulative others.
Paper long abstract:
Liberal ideologies of public speech often presume sincerity, autonomy and equality as the requirements for free speech. In this framework, to be free, speech must be governed by immaterial meanings and values (Keane 2009) and be realised by autonomous, equal subjects whose words are demonstrably disentangled from the material world of transactions and social constraints. Responding to this, emerging ethnographic literature on free speech has focused on the actual ways in which the value of freedom is realised in specific social circumstances (Englund 2018; Roudakova 2017).
Building on research among political journalists working for independent liberal publications in Kyiv, Ukraine, I explore how freedom is pursued by subjects whose speech depends on that of politicians -- self-interested, unreliable and potentially manipulative figures who themselves frequently lack political autonomy. I thus examine how reporters, who seek to reconstruct what they see as a hidden reality of power, come to relate to and rely on politicians seeking to influence media; and how journalists deal with political, epistemic and moral complexities that inhere in these relationships. In doing so, I trace how freedom and autonomy are achieved and publicly demonstrated amid ostensibly unequal relations that edge on unilateral dependency.
Paper short abstract:
In my presentation I will discuss the case of Polish-Vietnamese diasporic activists focusing on: 1) Interplay between various contexts in which the crucial concepts of the pro-democratic narrative are embedded, 2) Centrality of the concept of rule of law in the pro-democratic narrative.
Paper long abstract:
Pro-democratic political activism constitutes a large share of global phenomenon of "diaspora politics" practiced by migrant communities originating from non-democratic regimes. While in the case of Vietnamese diaspora the notion "liberalism" (chủ nghĩa tự do) is rarely incorporated into the ideological vocabulary of the dissidents - which is parralled by its insignificant presence in the Vietnamese political thought - the cluster of terms dân chủ - tự do - nhà nước pháp quyền (democracy-freedom-rule of law), strictly connected with the liberal thought is routinely used. In my presentation, I will discuss the case of the Vietnamese diaspora, focusing on the Polish-Vietnamese activists who have played a noticeable role within the Vietnamese dissident movement (ie. Dan Chim Viet newspaper). The Vietnamese migrants from Poland have been labeled as closely linked to the institutions of the Vietnamese authoritarian communist state due to the state-sponsored genesis of the formation of migrant community. However, the pro-democratic movement drawing inspiration from activity of global Vietnamese diaspora (particularly American-Vietnamese), Polish anticommunist opposition (Solidarity movement) and Vietnam-based activism has been developing among the community since the early 1990s. In my analysis I intend to focus on two issues: 1) Interplay between various contexts (global, Vietnamese and Polish) in which the crucial concepts of the pro-democratic narrative, such as democracy, freedom and rule of law are embedded, 2) Centrality of the concept of rule of law in the pro-democratic narrative of the Vietnamese diaspora, associated with key role played by lawyer activists in the movement.
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines how a group of radical Irish artist-activists invoke and challenge the liberal values of freedom and agential will. I suggest that my informants' will to be otherwise, and the value they place on detached critical reflection, exists at once inside/outside liberal aspirations.
Paper long abstract:
This paper presents analysis of Irish anarcho-communist artist-activists' simultaneous invocation and refusal of the liberal values of freedom and agential will. Drawing on theorisations of positive and negative freedom (Berlin 1969), and on recent anthropological approaches to freedom as aspiration of the ethical self (Laidlaw 2014), I consider whether freedom and agential will, as ethnographic grammars of 'actually existing' liberalism (cf. Collier 2005), offer a path toward thinking beyond the 'false opposition' between structure and agency (Baumann and Gingrich 2004).
In keeping with Collier's (2012) critique of neoliberalism as overly 'structuring' explanatory Leviathan, I advocate a recentring of ethnographic insight on the ways in which the 'advanced liberal' agential citizen-subject (Rose et al. 2006) might at once invoke and challenge the practicability of exercising a will toward freedom. To this extent, I explore how my informants' arts practice and anti-neoliberal activism require existing 'inside/outside' classically liberal aspirations (Yurchak 2013). I argue that it is precisely the fact that they characterise freedom as 'the will to be otherwise' (Povinelli 2012), and the critical work of questioning as the extent to which one might 'get free of oneself' (Foucault 1990), that allows them to sidestep the totalizing structural work that 'neoliberalism' often accomplishes.
I suggest, then, that what is at stake in comparatively recentring everyday liberal grammars is also what is at stake in my informants' art/activism: namely, the extent to which behemoth explanatory and political categories prophetically foreclose the work of detached critique, itself a legacy of liberalism.
Paper short abstract:
Isiah Berlin's distinction between positive and negative freedom makes a distinction between 'freedom to' and 'freedom from'. This paper asks how 'freedom from' informs the work of the Right in England as they simultaneously critique and further selected liberal ideas.
Paper long abstract:
This paper is based on ethnographic work among the libertarian Right in England. I draw on the valourisation of 'freedom from' in quests to further and defend certain freedoms seen as threatened by a plethora of political forms. While broadly neo-liberal in orientation, I suggest that certain liberal notions form the bed-rock of such work in ways that bring these ideas into sharp focus, thus indicating how both liberalism is both an object of suspicion and a touchstone for the Right.