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- Convenors:
-
Mario Schmidt
(Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology (Halle))
Martin Fotta (Czech Academy of Sciences)
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- Discussant:
-
Silvia Posocco
(Birkbeck, University of London)
- Format:
- Panel
- Sessions:
- Thursday 28 July, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
"I thought that escalating change must always lead to climax and destruction of the status quo" (Bateson, Angels Fear, 1987). Discuss.
Long Abstract:
The standard narrative about the history of anthropology recounts how static approaches were surpassed by processual analyses capable of capturing change. As exemplified by the theme of the EASA2022 conference, transformation is indeed the dominant esprit of our discipline today. When thought along with proliferating discussions on future(s) and futurity, we could—with some exaggeration—say that, if the "ethnographic present" characterised the structural-functionalist mode, the "ethnographic future" characterises anthropology's current analytical trends and "ethnographic speculation" its political hopes. If things are not transforming, they, at least, should.
We are neither disputing the legitimacy, nor the urgency, of this orientation (given, e.g., the environmental collapse or the reckoning with anthropology's colonial past and present). As a conceptual exercise, however, this panel pauses to think through observations made by one of anthropology's earliest proponents of relational complexity, ecological thinking and (escalating) change. "I could not in 1936", wrote Gregory Bateson (1987), "see any real reason why the culture had survived so long, [or how it could include self-corrective mechanisms that anticipated the danger]."
We invite ethnographic contributions of social and cultural practices of self-correction, stabilisation, and even stasis without falling into the facile talk of conservatism. Why do some changes not escalate into climactic transformations? What is maintained stable in different imaginaries of transformation? What notions of reproduction—cultural, social, biological—are implied in anthropologists' accounts of the future? Can we think of complexity without change? What happens to responsibility within anthropology's unspoken consensus on complex transformations "all the way down"?
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Thursday 28 July, 2022, -Camille Darche (Université Paris Nanterre)
Paper short abstract:
Can we consider the institutions dealing with ethical issues in European societies - especially regarding digital science and technology - as mechanisms of continuity set up to respond to the transformations in the relationships between digital science, politics and economy ?
Paper long abstract:
The idea of disruption is often used when commenting on the effects of digital innovation. However, it seems problematic : turning these innovative knowledges and technologies into vectors of unfathomable novelty makes the transformations they engender appear as unthinkable. This rhetoric therefore hinders our ability to observe changes in our social existences and especifically, how digital science and technology contribute to the transformation of the relationships between the fields of science, politics and economy.
Contrasting with such a rhetoric and based on a two-year investigation within the French National Digital Ethics Committee, this paper tries to consider this ethical board as a mechanism of continuity and self-correction.
The observation of the collective writing of ethical reports enables a more accurate perception of the dual movement characterising ethics : it aims to reach universalisable principles and concurrently tends to adapt to technological developments and to the expectations of society. Such oscillations lead to some sort of circular thinking, feeding on technological and moral changes in society while seeking to influence their course. Thus, through concrete examples of discussions where scientific, political and economic discourses were interwoven, I will analyse the ability of ethical discourse to mobilize different tones - from descriptive, to prescriptive, prospective, or even performative - in order to produce some continuity in our conception of the world despite the changes experienced.
Describing the entanglement of these tones enables us to understand both what is perceived as changing and the mechanisms put in place to act upon these transformations.
Gil Hizi (Goethe University Frankfurt)
Paper short abstract:
This paper describes how young adults in urban China who pursue self-development perceive statis in their social world. I further discuss the significance of stasis in the perceptions of personhood under capitalism, as well as the possibility to suspend the fetish of change in ethnographic enquiry.
Paper long abstract:
Social change has been spotlighted as a dominant social fact by both the critical social sciences and more positivist proponents of capitalism and its signature technologies. Youth and young adults tend to embrace this sense of dynamism, both as they represent the prospects of society and as individuals who aspire self-development. Yet self-development also prompts perceptions of stagnation and backwardness in the wider social order. In this paper, I elaborate upon this tendency based on my fieldwork in extracurricular programs in interpersonal skills in urban China, a globally recognized emblem of ‘transformation’. First, market-driven self-development often ascribes underdevelopment to various actors and social practices. In China, this dynamic incorporates modernist ideologies that identify fixed ‘cultural’ values that inhibit personal growth and individual autonomy in domains such as interpersonal obligations, familial roles, and public education. Second, young adults encounter ubiquitous obstacles for their social mobility that counteract the spectacles of development communicated by state campaigns and market actors. This phenomenon is widely defined in China through the term ‘involution’ (neijuan) and is often also accompanied by critique on problematic cultural ‘mindsets’ that invites more wholesome social transformations. I describe these issues in length, while expanding the discussion to the significance of stasis in the constructions and perceptions of personhood under global capitalism.
Hadas Weiss (Humboldt University of Berlin)
Paper short abstract:
Drawing on my fieldwork on family-based childcare and eldercare in Germany, I will show how family attitudes towards care work stabilize contemporary capitalism and self-correct the potential friction its most vulnerable subjects might generate; constituting a conservative force for capitalism.
Paper long abstract:
The reproduction of capitalist society has always relied on the activation of workers to support nonworkers, among them children and the elderly. This has been accomplished through public (pre)schools and institutionalized eldercare; though the commodification of care work, employing primarily low-cost, feminized, migrant labor; and through the conscription of the family to care for its nonworking members. Melinda Cooper (2017) has shown, for the US, how the importance of the family and of family values has grown to compensate for the withdrawal of public support. At first glance, Germany offers a counterexample. Identified in comparative studies (Reher 1998) for its “weak” families in terms of family allegiance and authority over the individual, Germany’s family policies of recent decades have further socialized some of the care burden that mothers and daughters carried. Still, even in Germany today, family remains the final arbiter of care for the young and the elderly; just as this care is commonly considered what the family is for. Drawing on my fieldwork on family-based childcare and eldercare in Germany, I will show how family sentiments and practices regarding care work stabilize contemporary capitalism and self-correct the potential friction that its most vulnerable subjects might otherwise generate. I will examine, thereby, the extent to which even the “weak” family, which prioritizes individual autonomy, constitutes a conservative force for capitalism.
Taylor Riley (University College London)
Paper short abstract:
Same-sex reproduction possibilities are formed in the shadow of violence and exclusions in the past and present. This paper will critically contemplate the ethics of stasis and change as it theorizes reproductive travel, including across time, from a queer anthropological perspective.
Paper long abstract:
Drawing on eugenic histories and narratives of same-sex family-making, the paper considers social and biological transformations found in futures of same-sex reproduction and examines how reproductive violence and possibilities themselves travel in queer ways. This ethnographic speculation highlights the everyday labor of queer kinship that is forming chosen family and the labor of navigating landscapes of laws, norms, and reproductive technologies. Both raise questions of discrimination and privilege, where prospective queer parents face many exclusions but can also contribute to racialized inequities in the realms of commercial surrogacy and adoption. Both labors also involve being on the move, from a journey across the street, or along the branches of a genealogical archive, or down a fallopian tube, to a plane ride, or ten, halfway or more across the world. As it considers that travelling across space, the paper also examines expeditions across time into worlds where single-sex ‘biological’ reproduction (an imperfect, often misleading term) is as banal and simple as opposite-sex reproduction. As such, I analyze records of forced sterilization in the 20th century US, observations on lesbian parents from ethnographic research I conducted in South Africa between 2015 and 2016, transnational reproductive trends, and current developments in biomedical research to examine the pitfalls and potentials of queer reproductive travel across space and time.