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Paper short abstract:

Taking the form of a speculative memoir of the author's involvement in the Orkney-based Papay Gyro Nights art festival this presentation considers what role an engagement with the past might continue to play for an anthropology oriented toward the imagining and enacting of alternative futures.

Paper long abstract:

Taking the form of a speculative memoir of my involvement in the Orkney-based Papay Gyro Nights art festival this presentation considers what role an engagement with the past might continue to play for an anthropology oriented toward the imagining and enacting of alternative (more just, livable, sustainable) futures. It does so via a reappraisal of Edward Tylor's concept of "survivals" ("processes, customs, opinions . . .which have been carried on by force of habit into a new state of society different from that in which they had their original home"). Like other recent re-readers of Tylor (e.g. art historian Georges Didi-Huberman) I emphasize not his stadial vision of social evolution but rather the unsettling and untimely character of survivals, their capacity to cast doubt on the seeming self-evidence of the present by being in it but not fully of it. Survivals thus open a space for dissident and minoritarian forms of creativity and offer a potentially powerful challenge to atavistic and exclusionary appeals to the past by contemporary right-wing ethno-nationalisms (in Europe and elsewhere). Founded by two émigré artist-curators (from Hong Kong and Kyrgyzstan) and featuring contemporary artworks in a variety of media, Gyro Nights invoked conventionally folkloric elements from North Atlantic storytelling and performance traditions to explore alternative modes of collectivity, premised not on readymade criteria of inclusion and belonging, but on an open-ended and experimental

engagement between humans and other than humans. The past featured not as a guarantee of sameness but as an active power of difference.