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- Convenor:
-
Theodoros Kyriakides
(University of Cyprus)
Send message to Convenor
- Chair:
-
John Borneman
(Princeton University)
- Format:
- Panels
- Location:
- Horsal 5 (B5)
- Sessions:
- Thursday 16 August, -, -
Time zone: Europe/Stockholm
Short Abstract:
This panel examines the ways in which relations between alterity and otherness are increasingly mediated by socio-political hierarchies and cosmopolitical contexts and encounters.
Long Abstract:
Alterity and otherness are important social concepts through which people negotiate everyday sociality and identity. This panel examines how relations between alterity and otherness are increasingly mediated by socio-political hierarchies and cosmopolitical contexts and encounters. Ethnographic analyses of Amazonian perspectivism and Melanesian dividuality showcase how understandings of the self and the individual interact and become diffracted through processes of human and non-human (such as objects, spirits, and animals) relationality. Reconfigurations between self and otherness also become evident in contexts where a transition into capitalist and privatised modes of production is being made. More recently, in the direct aftermath of political crisis, alterity and otherness have become the axis on which political hierarchies and alliances of solidarity and social welfare are negotiated and constructed within Europe. The capacity to conduct a movement between self and other is hence a social and cognitive skill through which alterity and otherness are discerned and granted intent amid milieus of increasing socio-political hybridity and inequality. Theorising the movement between self and other hence demands that we pay attention to historical and contemporary mechanisms of social inclusion and exclusion which such movement between self and other is encouraged or prohibited. Such theoretical endeavour likewise demands attention to the manner in which collective understandings of individuality and otherness shift or become further embedded in transitionary processes, as well as the ways in which and social boundaries are drawn.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Thursday 16 August, 2018, -Paper short abstract:
Analysing Serbian problems with 'self-destructive' national sociality and yearnings for 'proper' Western privatisers, this presentation rethinks desires for submission from the point of view of local cosmo-economics, and the humiliation that core-periphery relations comparatively entail.
Paper long abstract:
By focusing on a Serbian town in which an iconic car plant has been privatized by FIAT, this paper reads Balkanist humiliations through Oceanic eyes, and vice versa. Recalling how the factory was managed in the past, town inhabitants appropriate its privatisation into a local theory of the problematic national 'we': one that threatens its own existence. Scorning Italian management as 'bigger conmen than we are', they weave stories of Western Europe as a place of social cohesion and economic longevity, what I call the 'genealogical West'. I argue that such desires for 'proper capitalists' develop not simply out of geoeconomic dependence and market hegemony, but as internal critical commentaries. They summon a Western privatiser as a strict, yet necessary external regulator of 'us' and 'our own' mishandling of the common good - in local terms, as more of a 'domaćin' (traditional pater familias) than 'us'. This reveals balkanism as a variation of what Sahlins called 'humiliation' moment in social change: a point at which people start to see their way of life as flawed, and actively debase it. Putting privatisations in continuity with cultural echoes of agricultural economy and Yugoslav self-managed socialism, humiliation ensures legitimacy of state-mediated foreign capital. A foreign proprietor becomes a Stranger-Domaćin, one who saves 'our own' property by becoming the definite owner of it. Such cosmo-economic reform, however, has its specificities in the semi-periphery: a space where boundaries between autochthony and alterity are relative, Stranger-Kings disappoint, and the cargo of market salvation is repeatedly deferred.
Paper short abstract:
This paper considers changing understandings of self and other in the context of austerity through the lens of the recent forest fires in Attica, Greece (Summer 2018)
Paper long abstract:
Drawing on my research on grassroots community based healthcare initiatives in Athens in the context of austerity, and the recent wildfires just outside of Athens, this paper asks how understandings of the relationship between "self" and "other," "home" and "displacement" are changing in Greece. The displacements of hundreds and maybe thousands by the fire speak to an overarching context in which the meaning of displacement, and the shape of the social and political body in Greece have radically changed. I argue that the 2018 fires and their aftermath are the latest and most dramatic example of the ongoing precaritization of a populace that increasingly does not recognize itself "at home," and which has (in the view of many) been left "to burn" by the state and by Europe. I ask how this configuration of citizenship challenges us to rethink understandings of citizenship, displacement, and insiders and outsiders. The dominant liberal vision of European citizenship—in which citizens are entitled to civil rights, and non-citizens (or "aliens") must claim and seek human rights—no longer seems to apply on Europe's margins.
Paper short abstract:
This paper looks at Akha (Northern Thailand) attitudes and practices towards outsiders in both subsistence and capitalist contexts.
Paper long abstract:
When a newly capitalist entrepreneur (a member of the Akha minority group) from the hills of Northern Thailand wanted to spend the profit he made in the coffee business, he built a coffee house that was essentially a 'welcome center'. At least in the past, Akha customary practices/rituals and ideas held concepts of inclusion of the 'other' (literal term) and a relativistic attitude towards the practices and ideas of other (non-Akha) groups. This was part and parcel of a cosmic embeddedness of both self and other, and of a maintenance of a balance between inner and outer. Many argue that this type of embeddedness gets destroyed with capitalism and an exclusive individualism emerges. As the Akha move from a mainly subsistence economy to a capitalistic cash crop/wage labor economy, I still find resonances of these inclusive practices (which may vary by class). While the example above can be seen as the continuation of hospitality practices in new businesses which deal with outsiders from many different groups, it is also 'good for business'. This paper is based on fieldwork conducted among the Akha of Northern Thailand from the early 1980s to the present (2018).
Paper short abstract:
Based on fieldwork among Western spiritual practitioners in Pondicherry, I explore xenophilia in terms of the porous self, whereby strangers and unfamiliar places emerge as active, relational agents in the expats' constructions of selfhood through narratives of karma, connection, and calling.
Paper long abstract:
Academics are often highly critical of Western spiritual seekers experimenting with or practicing Eastern spiritualities such as yoga and meditation, Zen Buddhism, and Taoism, where such engagements are seen to be forms of cultural appropriation and consumption. Without overlooking the problematics of contemporary spiritual seeking, this paper proposes that contemporary spiritualities might offer the possibility of xenophilic engagements with hitherto strange(r) people and places. Based on ethnographic fieldwork among Western spiritual practitioners living in Pondicherry for at least a decade, this paper explores the expat practitioners' narratives of 'karmic connection', 'being called' and 'surrendering' with respect to their gurus and India. Using Charles Taylor's notions of the porous self, I argue that porosity opens the self to theurgical connections with gurus across cultural and geographical boundaries. Can these openings to divinity (where the guru is seen to be the very embodiment, not simply the instrument, of the divine) and the construction of selfhood through the intertwining of human-divine agency be thought of as xenophilic? Further, does such selfhood mitigate the strangeness of the local but culturally distant environment? By focusing on the socio-cultural insularity of Sri Aurobindo ashram, located in Pondicherry, with which many (but not all) of my interlocutors are associated, I point to the limits of the xenophilic possibilities of porosity. Nevertheless, insofar as porosity straddles the strange and the familiar, in the context of my study, it invites us to rethink modes of relationality in the contemporary quest for fullness across borders.
Paper short abstract:
This paper discusses international encounters in a town on the borders of China, Russia and North Korea, the clashes between understandings of the role of 'difference' within relationships which result, and how this encourages to reframe our anthropological understandings of friendship.
Paper long abstract:
Amidst the highly localised cosmopolitanism of a small Chinese town on the three-way China-Russia-North Korea border, international encounters are also meetings between people with very different ideas about the role 'difference' plays within relationships. As a prominent notion in (post-)socialist international ties, 'friendship' (Ch. youyi, Rus. druzhba, Kor. chinsŏn) is considered by locals to be the most salient potential bond among individual citizens of the three states. Yet 'friendship' is not equivalent for everyone, a fact I demonstrate ethnographically by focusing on contact between local Han Chinese vendors and government officials and members of a shifting Russian community comprising semi-permanent residents (all nevertheless on 'tourist' visas) and regular day-tripping shoppers. The numerous friend-making attempts which arise from encounters between these groups commonly result in Russian complaints of an overly utilitarian approach from their Chinese hosts, who in turn find Russians too reluctant to mix business interactions with the ceremonial act of cultivating 'feelings'. This may initially appear to be a division along an oft-cited 'instrument'/'affect' axis, but I show that there are limitations to this analysis and argue that the frequent failure of Sino-Russian friend-making here in fact results from differential approaches to 'difference' within relationships: whilst Russians broadly seek a bond which elides their friend's Otherness as much as possible, Chinese counterparts are far more comfortable with friendships wherein each party occupies an Otherness-encoding subject position, including host/guest, local/foreigner or indeed vendor/client. Perceiving this may in turn inform anthropological approaches to Otherness and friendship in the field.
Paper short abstract:
Guests in Western Kenya often eat without their hosts. While scholars tend to interpret such 'hospitality without commensality' as attempts to foreclose the premature establishment of kin-like relations, we analyze it as acknowledging already existing relations whose exact nature is still unknown.
Paper long abstract:
Western Kenyan hosts often serve guests food without partaking in the meal. Inspired by studies that consider commensality and hospitality two sides of the same coin, ethnographers interpret such actions of not sharing substance as preventing a premature establishment of kin or kin-like relations with strangers. In contrast and building upon ethnographic data gathered between 2009 and now, our paper understands these acts of 'hospitality without commensality' as being built upon an acknowledgment of already existing relations whose exact nature is conceptualized as unknown. It is not the guests who are strange, but the puzzling nature of the relations they already share with their hosts.
Regarding a larger analytical framework, we suggest that the attribution of kin-relations in Western Kenya went through a figure-ground reversal. The ground is no longer an "enduring, diffuse solidarity" (Wagner 1977, 'Analogic Kinship') which social actors cut into "analogic flows" that stand out as figures (such as patrilineal relations). Rather, this "enduring, diffuse solidarity" has itself turned into the figure that stands out against the ground of a multiplicity of "diffuse flows" of relatedness (patrilinearity, friendship, relations established by 'care' etc.). This new figure is epitomized in the concept of chuny, a form of social substance already shared before contact and related to Christian notions of body and soul. While hosts share chuny with their guests without being sure what that precisely means, 'hospitality without commensality' gives time to postpone an ultimate decision.
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores everyday conceptions of difference in the diverse London neighbourhood of Kilburn. I argue that such emic visions of difference are best understood through two continua, one of proximity, from xenos to ego, and another of malleability, from fixity to fluidity.
Paper long abstract:
When asked if the 'multicultural experiment' in Britain had failed, the novelist Zadie Smith replied that "as a child I did not realize that the life I was living was considered in any way provisional or experimental by others: I thought it was just life."
Smith's native Kilburn has famously been depicted as a cosmopolitan milieu, where encounters with difference have become normalized. Here, difference takes on a liminal status, imagined as accessible and so never wholly alien, yet perpetually out there, and so never wholly capable of becoming familiar. Yet in focusing on such liminal conceptions of difference, scholars looking at Kilburn have come to overlook where difference is conceived in more absolute terms. Indeed, in Smith's own writing, intercultural differences remain stubborn sources of significant friction.
Drawing on my own ethnographic work in Kilburn tracing locals' own visions of what 'differences make a difference', I argue that there is a need to understand our imaginaries of difference along multiple dimensions. In this paper, I focus on two such dimensions, tracing how for Kilburn's diverse residents, an imagined continuum of strangeness, running from ego to xenos intersects with imaginaries surrounding the malleability of difference, ranging from fixed to fluid. While xenophobia may emerge when others are seen as both fixed and alien, ethical projects of xenophilia may emerge when difference is seen as collectively malleable. To illustrate this, I draw on ethnography of a community centre run by and for young Muslims, and on a local radio station, as settings where the meaning of difference is continually reworked.