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- Convenors:
-
Ståle Wig
(University of Oslo)
Charline Kopf (University of Oslo)
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- Chairs:
-
Ståle Wig
(University of Oslo)
Charline Kopf (University of Oslo)
- Discussant:
-
Catherine Alexander
(Durham University)
- Format:
- Panel
- Location:
- Peter Froggatt Centre (PFC), 03/007
- Sessions:
- Tuesday 26 July, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
The panel invites ethnographic explorations of the absurd across regions, political contexts and institutional arrangements, from everyday moments of pointless waiting or standing in a queue to seemingly senseless processes in bureaucracies, international institutions, and workplaces.
Long Abstract:
Across a range of ethnographic cases, anthropologists have encountered experiences people classify as absurd, purposeless, illogical. In the USSR, a common joke among employees was that state employers "pretend to pay us, while we pretend to work", describing their labour as fundamentally meaningless. Today, anthropologists have sounded the alarm about "bullshit jobs" that are so pointless that even those who hold them fail to explain their existence. Despite deeming such practices absurd, people continue engaging in them, finding themselves caught in a paradox. So far, the absurd has mainly been studied as a fundamental condition of humanity. This panel invites participants to engage with "states of the absurd" through ethnography, in two ways.
First, "states of the absurd" refers to states of being that people characterize as senseless; when they feel "stuck," lost in repetition or waiting. What do people do in these moments of sustained absurdity and how do they envisage a future? When are irony and cynicism used as coping mechanisms for absurdity? Panelists are also encouraged to reflect on what we define the absurd against. What, in other words, is not absurd? And how does absurdity differ from meaninglessness?
Alongside ethnographic explorations of subjective experiences of absurdity, we invite scholars to consider the meaning of "states" in a second sense: What are the links between political and socio-economic configurations, and experiences of absurdity? Are there certain political-economic structures or characteristics, such as a lack of accountability, that provide fertile ground for states of absurdity?
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Tuesday 26 July, 2022, -Stefano Pontiggia (Politecnico di Milano)
Paper short abstract:
The paper aims to describe the effects of the Italian migration procedures as the production of absurdity. It will do it by looking at the story of an undocumented Nigerian citizen and the paperwork affecting his living conditions.
Paper long abstract:
The paper will describe the migratory experience of Merule (fictional name), an undocumented Nigerian citizen who has been living in Italy since 2009. His condition is heavily affected by his status as an undocumented migrant and the documents the state institutions have produced about him over time. The paper will describe some of those documents to highlight how the Italian migration laws produce long waiting times and precarity, but also absurd situations such as having three different tax codes.
Merule lies at the center of two different but complementary rules regulating migration to Italy. He entered the country legally through the so-called decreto flussi (a measure by which the Italian government determines how many foreign workers may enter the country each year and for what work placements) but fell into irregularity three years later. In 2020, he enrolled in one of the recurring regularization programs that have punctuated the last thirty years of migration management.
The intertwining of these two legal and administrative procedures has produced a situation that can be defined as absurd but not meaningless. Paperwork and confusing, contradictory, and exclusionary norms regulating one’s legal status as a foreigner made him feel “stuck” in a prolonged condition of waiting for something to happen and have the paradoxical effect of putting him into a “not-not” situation. Incapable of obtaining all the rights he can aspire as a foreigner regularly residing in Italy, he cannot enjoy the relative freedom irregularity brings with it.
Sarah Howard (Birkbeck, University of London)
Paper short abstract:
Rural public servants in Ethiopia are well-versed in the absurdities of meaningless governance. This paper will concentrate on how public servants made illogical - or 'illegible' - policies legible through their labour, and the consequences for perceptions of the state as embodied in them.
Paper long abstract:
Rural public servants in Ethiopia are well-versed in the absurdities of meaningless governance. From the fake latrines that stud the landscape to the promotion of infant feeding practices that ignore both questions of access and local norms, government health workers are aware that the policies they are responsible for enacting often do not accord with existing realities or priorities. While local people resist, subvert and performatively accept the development edicts they find absurd, state employees struggle to reconcile their status, aspirations, beliefs and duties with the materialities of rule. Based on long-term ethnographic research in Amhara Region under the Ethiopian People's Democratic Revolutionary Front (EPRDF) government, this paper will concentrate on how public servants made illogical - or 'illegible' - policies legible through their labour (Mathur 2016; Das 2004). This labour took place on and through paper, through audit techniques and production of documents, but also through the physical and sensory realms. In the case of latrine promotion, this involved their movement around the remote and inhospitable space of the local area, and into latrines, to see and smell peoples' shit. Their labour only sometimes resulted in the desired outcome of constructed and utilised latrines, but more importantly these 'materialities of rule' (Navaro-Yashin 2012) had socio-economic and affective consequences for government employees, and for perceptions of the state as embodied in them. Absurdity, then, is far from meaningless; rather, it is central to how state power is understood and enacted in particular contexts.
Ståle Wig (University of Oslo)
Paper short abstract:
Drawing on 18 months of ethnographic research in Cuba, this paper suggests that authoritarian states with centralized economic structures and leaders who are unaccountable to the people's feedback and sentiment, are prone to produce popular experiences of absurdity.
Paper long abstract:
In everyday chatter and in popular culture, Cubans tend to depict the state as an entity capable of both great power and great folly. While the official governing apparatus of Cuba can inspire fear and alarm, at the same time people portray the state as a ridiculous entity, prone to making absurd decisions and declarations. As when a four-star, 91-year-old general announced on countrywide TV that the popular masses should start rearing ostriches to create a shining path towards national economic development, or when lawmakers suddenly banned all private 3D cinemas for no apparent reason. People use jokes, hyperbole and cynicism to critique and comment on these states of absurdity. Although absurdity is a possible tendency of human existence anywhere, this paper argues that Cuba’s centralized and authoritarian political-economic system produces absurdity of a particular kind. Furthering a comparative argument, I will attempt to draw parallels between Cuba and similar post-socialist states, in which official discourse is often strictly controlled, and where decisions are made by leaders and lawmakers who are partly insulated from, and unaccountable to ordinary people's feedback and sentiment.
Charline Kopf (University of Oslo)
Paper short abstract:
This paper is based on fieldwork at railway stations in Mali where despite the absence of trains, the workers kept coming. To clarify the difference between the absurd, the illogical and the nonsensical, I examine the workers’ continuing routines and the state’s promises to renovate the railway.
Paper long abstract:
In 2021, it had been three years since the railway workers in Mali had seen the last train pass. They had been left in a legal void, or as a worker put it: ‘We find ourselves in an artistic blur’, a vague state of limbo characterised by unpredictability. ‘We don’t know who we are working for, who is sometimes paying our salaries, who we belong to’, another colleague added describing the railway’s privatisation and failed renationalisation. ‘It would be almost comical, if it weren’t so tragic’, they claimed. Nonetheless, most of the workers continued to arrive at their workplace every morning to tend to their routine activities and wait.
This paper looks at the work routines and situations labelled by my informants as meaningless, absurd and tragicomical. I show how the workers deemed the state’s promises of railway renovation illogical and contradictory: The Transport Ministry's attempts to maintain the railways, cutting the overgrown weeds between the tracks and making inventories of stations, did not tackle the main reasons for the railway’s demise. I argue that the production of the absurd is linked to a para-state situation where the government is perceived as absent and its actions ineffective. I demonstrate how my interlocutors nonetheless endured these paradoxical moments by waiting and engaging in practices that they also considered devoid of meaning. Analysing the workers’ responses, ranging from jokes, cynicism to protest, I draw on my empirical material to clarify the differences between absurd, illogical and nonsensical.
Rine Vieth (McGill University)
Paper short abstract:
In this paper, I explore how juxtaposing absurdity alongside agnotology helps elucidate how unpredictability, irrationality, and instability of state bureaucracies is a tool of b/ordering.
Paper long abstract:
What happens when a state’s humanitarian migration framework is based on a policy goal of making life as hard as possible for migrants? As the UK’s “hostile environment” policy approaches its tenth anniversary, I highlight how migrants—particularly asylum-seekers appealing an initial refusal—wrestle with unpredictability and absurdity, particularly while attempting to justify their claims to humanitarian status. Drawing on a year of fieldwork in the UK, as well as several years of legal and policy research, I argue that contestations of the UK immigration regimes frequently rely of depictions of “absurdity,” farcical processes that seek to render visible the deliberate uncertainty that has become state policy. These framings extend outward into jokes that permeate migrants’ interpersonal interactions, and demonstrate a refusal to fall into nihilistic pessimism. Further, I contend that an anthropological consideration of absurdity alongside agnotology—the study of deliberate ignorance—may shed light on how states exert power through rendering invisible data about marginalized populations. This additional consideration can help consider absurdity, in the context of migration, as a tool the state uses in processes of b/ordering.