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- Convenors:
-
Koreen Reece
(University of Bayreuth)
Diego Maria Malara (University of Glasgow)
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- Format:
- Panel
- Location:
- Main Site Tower (MST), 01/004
- Sessions:
- Tuesday 26 July, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
In this panel, we link genealogical with socio-political understandings of 'generation' to investigate how intergenerational relations (re)generate history, and generate change.
Long Abstract:
Crisis is frequently cast in generational terms: the 'lost generations' of war, genocide, or the AIDS pandemic, for example; or the disinherited generations left to live with the failures of their forebears to avert financial collapse, or climate change. The trauma of these crises are increasingly understood to be inherited across generations, rendering them continuous, chronic, and self-reproducing. Intergenerational thinking is key to describing the moral dimensions of crisis, and to situating it in time - whether by assigning causation and responsibility, conveying urgency, or keeping crisis responses oriented towards the future, hope, and action. And, we suggest, intergenerational friction - whether interpersonal or political - opens up critical opportunities for the recalibration of history, as well as for social transformation.
How do people formulate, deploy, evade or refigure generations in times of crisis? How do generations create (or revive) new sorts of commons, among kin, communities, or across global political spaces? How do bequests, inheritances, and succession figure in personal and collective responses to crisis? And how do these practices - and conflicts that emerge around them - shape understandings of history, and possibilities for the future?
In this panel, we will explore how the idea, discourse and practice of 'generation' tracks changes in social reasoning about the past, present, and future - creating frictions that instigate transformation in relationships, identities, and values in turn. We invite papers that link the genealogical with the socio-political, to invesitgate how intergenerational relations generate history and change in times of chronic crisis.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Tuesday 26 July, 2022, -Melissa Blanchard (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS))
Paper short abstract:
Building on a fieldwork I carried out with Argentinians of Italian descent, this paper tackles the nexus between the longstanding Italian emigration towards Argentina, which is characteristic of older generations, and the current emigration of young Italian generations towards European countries.
Paper long abstract:
Building on a fieldwork I carried out with Argentinians of Italian descent who “return migrate” to Europe, this paper tackles the nexus between the longstanding Italian emigration towards Argentina, which is characteristic of older generations, and the current emigration of Italians towards European countries, that has been recorded from the 2000s on and that is mainly composed by young generations. This nexus is rooted in the existence of a plethora of transnational families, which span over time and space as a result of the historical Italian migration towards Argentina. Such families build on what we may call a migration culture, which is transmitted from one generation to another. Indeed, old Italian emigrants pass on to their grandchildren the habit to consider migration as an ordinary practice and a ready-to-use response to the difficulties of everyday life. On their hand, young Argentinians of Italian descent move towards Italy and other European countries thanks to the Italian passport they inherit from their grand-parents by virtue of jus sanguinis.
This paper will show, on the one hand, how the generation of Italian emigrants’ grand-children use the national membership they inherit from their grand-parents as a way to emigrate to and within Europe in times of chronic economic crisis. On the other hand, it will examine how these new mobility dynamics, which stem from a deep-rooted migration tradition transmitted within transnational families, contribute to forging new futures for young Italian generations that were born and raised abroad.
Sergen Bahceci (London School of Economics)
Paper short abstract:
Based on an ethnographic study of what Turkish Cypriots call the ‘war generation’ (savaş nesli), I argue that the production of historical knowledge and experience in northern Cyprus is entangled intimately with the subjectivities of elderly war veterans in northern Cyprus.
Paper long abstract:
Based on an ethnographic study of what Turkish Cypriots call the ‘war generation’ (savaş nesli), I will argue that the production of historical knowledge and experience in northern Cyprus is entangled intimately with the subjectivities of a special category of elderly people in northern Cyprus: the veterans of the historic paramilitary organisation called the ‘Turkish Resistance Organisation’ (the TMT). The TMT was a secret organisation that was formed in the final years of British colonial administration in Cyprus in the late 1950s to fight against the Greek Cypriot anti-colonial movement, and for the division of the island between Greece and Turkey. The membership of the TMT was through an ‘oath’ (yemin) of secrecy. The present-day Cyprus appears very similar to what the TMT desired: it is divided between Greek and Turkish Cypriots.
However, as the idea of a reunited Cyprus has been gaining more support among Turkish Cypriots since the early 2000s, the past actions of the TMT are being revaluated. During my fieldwork, I noted how many young Turkish Cypriot considered the elderly veterans of the TMT, a social category which often includes their fathers and grandfathers, to be ‘living histories’ who in their ‘oath-bound’ (yeminli) subjectivities hold the true knowledge of the past events which led to the ethnic conflict and division in the island. As ‘oath-bound’ subjects, however, the TMT veterans often resist younger generations' attempts to have them ‘confess’ the past, making the production of history intertwined intimately with the subjectivities of the elderly TMT veterans.
Ilana Gershon (Indiana University)
Paper short abstract:
In this paper, I explore how Americans use generation as a taxonomic classification to address recent changes in capitalism, focusing in particular on HR webinars geared towards offering insights into intergenerational conflict in the workplace.
Paper long abstract:
In this paper, I explore how Americans use generation as a taxonomic classification to address recent changes in capitalism, focusing in particular on HR webinars geared towards offering insights into intergenerational conflict in the workplace. As a native anthropologist, I explore the appeal of generations, a taxonomic stereotype, and, for Americans, a welcome alternative to more charged dyadic typifications based on race or gender. In US workplaces, people frequently turn to taxonomic stereotypes to imagine patterned forms of conflict resolution, or explain how social interactions unfold in quotidian spaces in which people find it useful for personalities – which are functioning as an interpretative lens on behavior -- to be typified. My starting point is contrasting taxonomic stereotypes with dyadic stereotypes. In dyadic stereotypes, Self and Other emerges from an A/not-A logic. Not so for taxonomic stereotypes, which are on a set of positive contrasts (Silvio 2019). Different categories in a taxonomic classification may share the same qualities, both Virgos and Capricorns might be lovers of order, or millennials and Generation-Xers might both require a sense of passion to remain at their jobs. What makes a category distinctive is the precise way in which it combines a number of attributes. In this paper, I explore the implications of using taxonomic stereotypes to think through narrated workplace dynamics, asking what lens this offers for understanding how people interpret their experiences of capitalism, conflict, and social change.
Saskia Jaschek (Bayreuth International Graduate School of African Studies)
Paper short abstract:
This paper reflects upon the Generation Tasgotbas (Just Fall). Based on ethnographic research on Sudan’s current revolutionary movement, it asks who considers themselves part of it, what is new about it, how it's related to former movements and how it's linked to political and social transformation.
Paper long abstract:
“Tasgotbas!” (English: “Just fall”) was one of the main slogans of Sudan’s youth-led December Revolution. Starting with uprisings in December 2018, the continuous protests led to the overthrow of dictator al-Bashir in April 2019. Since then, the imperative tasgotbas! has been used as a description for Sudan’s youth, more particularly those, who grew up under the former Islamist regime, that had been in power since 1989.
This generation has been growing up in what Vigh (2008) calls “crisis as context”: It has witnessed an oppressive regime, a devastating civil war and the separation of their country, as well as economic malaise and infrastructural decay.
Not just since 2018 have young people been working in resistance, and they have not stopped even after a recent coup d’état carried out by military in October 2021. This talk is meant to explore the phenomenon of the Generation Tasgotbas. It is to draw out its new identities and significant attributions in its relation to the political resistance of previous generations.
This depiction is based on results of an ethnographic research in Sudan, which took place from October to December 2021 as part of my dissertation project about political subjectification within Sudan’s current resistance movement.
The exploration of the Generation Tasgotbas can make an empirical contribution to the panel’s goal to “link the genealogical with the socio-political”, by drawing out how a seemingly well-defined cohort is shaped by the narratives and discourses of change, resistance and dissidence.
Elisa Tamburo (Harvard University)
Paper short abstract:
The paper investigates how third generation mainlanders in Taiwan 'regenerate' the contentious history of their grandparents, the refugees of the Chinese Civil War, as they preserve their military quarters. While creating new opportunities, they reconfigure contested histories in Taiwan.
Paper long abstract:
How do third generations of mainlander Chinese endeavour to preserve the history of their grandparents in today’s Taiwan? In 1949, the Nationalist Government of China led by the Kuomintang was exiled to Taiwan in the wake of the Chinese Civil War, bringing with it 1 million refugees, of which 600,000 were military personnel. Although KMT soldiers were promised they would soon return to mainland China, the Nationalist Government never brought them back and soldiers permanently settled in makeshift military quarters in Taiwan. The introduction of the martial law, which would last until 1987, thus followed this military occupation of the island.
Today, as military villages are vacated and the first generation of mainlander veterans is passing away, their children and grandchildren endeavour to preserve the contentious history of their parents and grandparents through the conservation of the military settlements. Yet, how do third generations reconcile their mainlander genealogy with their own socio-political identity, and the challenges they face, such as economic stagnation and rampant youth unemployment? How do they set out to reinterpret history through the lenses of their own epoch? By ethnographically documenting the preservation of military villages in Taiwan, I will show how the youth endeavours to ‘regenerate’ the history of their grandparents, in ways that not only aim to transmit their history intergenerationally, but also reconfigures the history of mainlanders in Taiwan, creating new opportunities for their own generation.