Paper short abstract:

This paper explores freedom through the existential struggles of first hermits in the Candelaria Desert during the 1600s. Examining conflicts within the asceticism of Augustinian friars in the New World, I revise the category of the hermit as a mode of subjectivity at the base of the colonial order.

Paper long abstract:

Hermits have been recently rediscovered during the Covid-19 pandemic. The secrets of those living in solitude and seclusion became appealing for citizens around the world experiencing severe lockdowns. However, more than a trend, hermits have stayed across time and space exemplifying a viable and “deliberately” intense way of life centred on liberating isolation (e.g. from the material world, from others, from themselves). This paper explores the other side(s) of (mental and spiritual) freedom through the experiences of the first hermits founding the Candelaria Desert and Candelaria Convent at the heart of the Colombian Andes in the early 1600s.

Hermits of Candelaria Desert or “Candelarios” lead the expansion of Christianism in the New World. Their evangelizing mission was based on a great asceticism oscillating between two conflicting dimensions: outside the convent, they practised an intense and dynamic catechesis of indigenous populations; while inside, friars´ lives were ruled by seclusion and introspection. Isolation was seen as a route towards freedom but also as a source of mental unrest and disquiet. Drawing on the documents of the Augustinian order and my ethnographic material on present-day exchanges between locals and Augustinian friars, this paper seeks to explore how hermits’ existential struggles became constitutive of particular moral and social beings with sets of relationships within colonial order that still haunts the present predicaments of a free life.

Paper short abstract:

Through ethnographic engagement with the everyday lives of sex working migrants from 'Eastern European' countries in Berlin, this paper discusses how labour mobilities, sexual liberties and 'European' freedoms acquire ambivalent meanings for people positioned at the fringes of (Western) 'Europe'.

Paper long abstract:

Freedom(s) and liberties are defined as cornerstones of the European Union and feature prominently in evocations of 'European' values. At the same time, the history of 'European' liberalism and its current neoliberal manifestations clearly illustrate how the provision of these freedoms is based on structural exclusion and exploitation of those who are juxtaposed to hegemonic (Western) 'Europe' as non(-fully) 'European' others.

Yet, what do these 'European' freedoms and liberties mean to people who, as citizens of the European Union, are granted certain rights and freedoms, but who do not embody the gendered, racialized, classist and sexualized norms of (Western) 'Europeanness'? This paper discusses this question based on ethnographic encounters with migrants from 'Eastern Europe', who engaged in sex work in pre-pandemic Berlin.

For my interlocutors, (labour) mobilities as well as transactional sex represented both economic necessities due to precarisation and possibilities to embody 'modern' (Western) 'European' subjectivities. While the Berlin as a liberal 'European' metropolis held the promise of realising the latter, the German capital also proved to be an urban space in which the prospects of (Western) 'European' freedoms and liberties had to be constantly negotiated due to manifold experiences with exclusion and exploitation. In this context, freedoms and liberties acquired ambivalent meanings, which contributed to participants being caught in a tension between a (desired) participation in (Western) 'European' freedoms and a marginalization as 'Eastern Europeans'.

Paper short abstract:

Covid-19 public health restrictions in Ireland were opposed by various groups and individuals, many of whom invoked particular notions of individual freedom as their rationale. This paper offers an ethnographic and political analysis of these expressions of freedom and liberty.

Paper long abstract:

The impact of the global Covid-19 pandemic manifested in particular ways in Ireland, with the Republic enduring some of Europe's longest and most stringent periods of lockdown, while simultaneously experiencing one of the highest rates of voluntary Covid-19 vaccination take-up. Despite high levels of overall compliance with public health measures, and State measures that aimed to protect workers who had lost their jobs through the Pandemic Unemployment Scheme, there was also a small, but vocal resistance to lockdown measures, mask-wearing, and the Covid Digital Certificate. Protesters expressed themselves online via social media platforms such as Facebook, WhatsApp and Telegram, as well as through street demonstrations. Many invoked the concept of individual freedom and liberty, as well as appropriating and simultaneously mocking the language of progressive campaigns such as that of the reproductive rights movement (e.g. "my body, my choice"), topical in Ireland following the 2018 referendum that legalized abortion. Others drew on alternative medicine, spirituality and esoteric Celtic mysticism as part of an imagined past of national purity and freedom. This paper explores the conceptions of freedom and liberty underpinning these narratives, arguing that in the post-Trump globalized digital age, the rhetoric of freedom in opposition to Covid-19 measures has both international and specific national manifestations within the Irish context.

Paper short abstract:

This article explores the tension between kinship, individual desires, and the state politics surrounding the search for the Polish missing in Poland and abroad. It asks how the search for the missing relates to the rights to freedom and autonomy in liberal democracies.

Paper long abstract:

Researchers of enforced disappearances, which result from political repressions and state violence, argue that people cannot just “disappear” and that the families have a “right to know” where their missing are. The families’ “right to know” is also ensured by international law. However, in liberal democracies, most disappearances happen in more mundane circumstances and the reasons for disappearance are often unknown. Some people are presumed to disappear voluntarily, wanting to escape from their families and communities. Considering that liberty and personal autonomy are fundamental constitutional rights in democracies, the key question becomes whether the search for a given person is morally and legally justified. Do people have a right to disappear and who has a right to know about their whereabouts? Should the state help the families to search for their missing kin and does the search interfere with people’s right to self-constitution? This paper answers these questions by focusing on the tensions between kinship, individual desires, and the state politics surrounding the search for the Polish missing in Poland and abroad. I interpret the ensuing tensions as a clash between the missing as a legally defined “abstracted individual” whose kin have no bearing over his/hers individual rights, and the missing as a relational person who disappears in relation as a family member (Edkins 2011). The article is based on ethnographic research conducted in Poland and the Netherlands, offline and online, between 2020-2022.

Paper short abstract:

Lino e Silva presents his most recent book: "Minoritarian Liberalism". The arguments are based on years of fieldwork in Favela da Rocinha, one of the largest in Brazil, where residents articulate their own politics of freedom against the backdrop of multiple forms of oppression.

Paper long abstract:

Normative liberalism has promoted the freedom of privileged subjects, those entitled to rights—usually white, adult, heteronormative, and bourgeois—at the expense of marginalized groups, such as Black people, children, LGBTQ people, and slum dwellers. In this visceral ethnography of Rocinha, the largest favela in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Moisés Lino e Silva explores what happens when liberalism is challenged by people whose lives are impaired by normative understandings of liberty. He calls such marginalized visions of freedom “minoritarian liberalism,” a concept that stands in for overlapping, alternative modes of freedom—be they queer, favela, or peasant.

Lino e Silva introduces the audience to a broad collective of favela residents, most intimately accompanying Natasha Kellem, a charismatic self-declared travesti (a term used in Latin America to indicate a specific form of female gender construction opposite to the sex assigned at birth). While many of those the anthropologist meets consider themselves “queer,” others are treated as “abnormal” simply because they live in favelas. Through these interconnected experiences, Lino e Silva not only pushes at the boundaries of anthropological inquiry, but also offers ethnographic evidence of non-normative routes to freedom for those seeking liberties against the backdrop of capitalist exploitation, transphobia, racism, and other patterns of domination.