Click the star to add/remove an item to/from your individual schedule.
You need to be logged in to avail of this functionality.
Log in
has 1 download
1
- Convenors:
-
Florian Mühlfried
(Ilia State University Georgia)
Hans Steinmüller (London School of Economics)
Send message to Convenors
- Chair:
-
Natalia Buitron
(University of Cambridge)
- Format:
- Panel
- Location:
- 14 University Square (UQ), 01/007
- Sessions:
- Thursday 28 July, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
This panel is about the nightmares that haunt egalitarianism: What are they? And how do they relate to the scales of the imagation?
Long Abstract:
Whereas anthropologists take great efforts to understand how "egalitarian societies" operate without centralized power and institutionalized means of coercion, they have paid less attention to the nightmares that haunt these societies. We'd like to explore these nightmares and the ways they relate to, or maybe even underpin political practices orientated towards an egalitarian treatment of people. Instead of foregrounding an ethos of "keeping up with the Joneses" based on sanctioning wealth and individual success, we take nightmares literally and ask for their role in egalitarian worldmaking. Nightmares can have (at least) three meanings in relation to egalitarianism:
• Violent nightmares help maintaining a productive dynamics of autonomy and mutuality and prohibit the emergence of commensuration and scaling
• The core of these nightmares is 'egalitarianism', as commonly understood: a dialectics of freedom and submission, which is a zero-sum game where the freedom of some relies on the submission of others
• These nightmares are thus the flip-side of an autonomous imagination: that cannot be tied into hierarchies and scales, and instead engages with them productively and moves beyond them.
We are interested in ethnographic and theoretical explorations of the affective and generative dimensions of "real existing egalitarianism". Contributions should explore visions of doom, relations of mistrust, gratuitous violence, or any imaginative practice that is directed against the emergence of the "cold monster of the state" (Clastres).
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Thursday 28 July, 2022, -Paper short abstract:
This paper ethnographically explores how the demand to perform a green transitioning within the Danish Folk Church evokes the twin nightmare of there being at once too many and too few leaders to ever get anything done.
Paper long abstract:
It was an unnamed bureaucrat, the myth goes, who originally formulated the now common designation of the Danish Folk Church as being a “well-ordered anarchy”. This nickname, which unknowingly echoes Evans-Pritchard’s description of Nuer society, is meant to highlight the Church’s proud tradition of being ruled “from below”, i.e. not by the state or by its bishops, but by local parish councils operating as self-governing units (although the Folk Church is financed through taxes and has the Queen as its formal governor). Based on fieldwork among different church actors working to reduce carbon emissions, I explore how the Church seems to currently be caught between two nightmares that persistently haunts its egalitarian ethos: that of being governed by the state and that of never getting anything done. To pursue its ambition of being green frontrunners, the Danish government has recently put pressure on the Church to get going with a green transitioning if it wants to avoid government interference. This threat, I argue, calls forth another rendition of the before mentioned nickname: it is also used to designate an experienced “leadership vacuum” within the church. A vacuum which, according to some, leads to utter chaos and deadlock as projects become dominated by the conviction that all collaboration entails the risk of losing sovereignty. As such, the looming nightmare of a state implemented green transition confronts the church with its twin egalitarian nightmare: there is at once too many and too few leaders and decision-makers to get anything done.
Paper short abstract:
By focusing on the affective and generative dimensions of a dialectics between trust, distrust, and mistrust, this paper examines the nightmares pro-independence Left Basque activists face by performing everyday political work.
Paper long abstract:
Although the Basque Country has undergone a peace process in the last decade and ETA no longer exists since 2018, Left independentist are haunted by two interrelated nightmares. One has to do with the scales of political imagination, namely, how to deal with a state fetishism that impregnates their project of an independence from Spain and France. The other has to do with their egalitarian project of both, macropolitics and treatment of people, under conditions of accusations of exaltation of terrorism. Such nightmares underpin their everyday politics in explicit and subtle ways. While they might help activists to maintain productive dynamics of social creativity, political autonomy, and mutuality, they do not prevent the emergence of commensuration and totalising notions of society. The conundrum of self-determination faces them with the complexities of nightmarish questions: How to avoid - in Clastrean terms-the cold monster they question? How to deal with the harming consequences of performing political work under siege -within institutional conditions derived from the legal and sociopolitical doctrine of "all is ETA". The paper seeks to explore these two nightmares and the ways they relate to each other focusing on the affective and generative dimensions of a dialectics between trust, distrust, and mistrust within everyday independence political practices.
Paper short abstract:
Based on Yanomami ethnography, this paper explores trust as a commitment to non-aggression which involves a necessary willingness to share a risk that relations may not be trustworthy. Exploring the two sides of the trust coin, it examines peace/aggression, and the coexistence of harmony/disharmony.
Paper long abstract:
Taking cue from social relations in an egalitarian Amazonian society, this paper explores the part of trust based on the rational expectation that others share a certain commitment towards oneself in a given domain (Hardin) and the part of trust based on moral, emotional and cultural reasons (Baier). Yanomami society can be described as a system based on the repeated administration of proof that others can be trusted (whether that is relatives and friends, co-residents, proximate neighbours, or more distant allies.) In daily peaceful relations, trusted people are defined as those who can be relied upon, that is, those capable of producing and guaranteeing the provision of food, goods and help, thereby ensuring solidarity and reciprocity in ceremonial life and the meting out of justice. In the face of conflict and perceived or real aggression, trustworthiness lies in the ability of people to stand and fight alongside you. At the same time, trust-building relies on establishing a "minimal zone of trust" so that individuals in a local group can rely, not on the fact that other people are de facto regularly around (and therefore usually trustworthy), but on a genuine commitment to non-aggression among those who inhabit a given area. The Yanomami are perfectly aware that this implies a risk, and elaborate on this risk in manifold ways – this is perhaps the darker side of the trust coin. There is, therefore, always a share of risk that one accepts to take towards trusted others, without which no social relations would be possible.
Paper short abstract:
Ideological egalitarianism in the Moroccan High Atlas is predicated on psychic autonomy. This generates widespread mistrust. The shadow-figure haunting this landscape is the thief (amkhar), who steals not only property, but also information about others, thus threatening their autonomy.
Paper long abstract:
As I have argued in extenso elsewhere, ideological egalitarianism in the High Atlas is predicated on the idea that other people have a right to practical and psychic autonomy - viz. they are supposed to be inscrutable as regards their motives, thoughts and personality traits. The upshot of this is that they are rarely supposed to be trustworthy. This generalised economy of mistrust often focuses on the figure of the thief (amkhar). The term is used not only to describe thieves of physical goods, but also anybody who obtains information by cunning or subterfuge. Extracting such information from others threatens their psychic autonomy and so potentially undermines the conditions of equality.
The thief, however, is not so simply pigeon-holed. The qualities of trickery or guile he demonstrates are also classically weapons of the weak and are lauded when deployed against more powerful social actors. This is best demonstrated by local folktales, whose classic (anti-)hero is the hedgehog, most cunning of animals and thief par excellence. This paper explores the ambivalence of both thief and guile and the boundary-work they perform in maintaining an idea of equality.