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
- Convenors:
-
Carl Rommel
(Uppsala University)
Samuli Schielke (Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient (ZMO))
Send message to Convenors
- Format:
- Panel
- Location:
- Music Building (MUS), McMordie Room
- Sessions:
- Tuesday 26 July, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
Hope is shaped by creativity and imagination, and yet it is not freely available. This panel explores careers of hopeful personal transformation that become attractive because they are familiar, reproducible, and forceful - such as business, marriage, real estate, migration, and religiosity.
Long Abstract:
Hope is shaped by creativity and imagination, and yet it is not freely available. Humans in different positions have unequal access to forms and kinds of hope and the paths of transformation that hopeful forms gesture towards. Hope tends to be already formatted and pre-packaged by others. Rather than diminishing its appeal, this recognisability gives hope traction. It makes it attractive and possible to pursue.
Examples of prepackaged hope and ready-made paths of transformation are numerous: starting a private business, building a home, and marrying a respectable man or woman. Another example is when people who only marginally profit from capitalist flows and imperial formations make an effort to have a share in its symbols - such as migrant workers taking and sharing selfies in front of the Eiffel Tower or Burj Khalifa. Similarly, pious believers typically aim to live by an orthodox tradition rather than crafting one's own. They too hope to transform themselves along a ready-made path.
The panel invites papers that address careers of hopeful personal transformation that become attractive because they are familiar, reproducible, and forceful. What makes some hopeful schemes appealing and others less so? How do people work on themselves and their surroundings to become the people they hope to become? Last but not least, an understanding of pre-packaged hopes and ready-made paths might also delineate how alternative modes of hoping emerge in opposition to or in shadows and fractures of conventional paths, or as an unintended outcome of their success.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Tuesday 26 July, 2022, -Paper short abstract:
This paper explores how projects format hope in contemporary Egypt. Combining ethnography about small business projects and media analyses about megaprojects, it analyses how “the project form” facilitates imaginative dreams of improved futures and the work required to make such dreams come true.
Paper long abstract:
This paper explores “the project” as an organizational form structuring future-oriented imaginations and hopeful paths of transformation in contemporary Egypt. Drawing, on the one hand, on long-term ethnographic research with lower-middle class men who contrive and launch small-scale business projects (mashari‘) in central Cairo (e.g., cafés, taxis, kiosks), and, on the other hand, on media analyses about megaprojects in Egypt’s desert peripheries (also mashari‘), the paper examines a number of small and large examples of what I call “project dreamwork”: a combination of imaginative dreams and future-oriented labor formatted by the project’s recognizable template for planning, action, task coordination, and resource allocations, which transforms space, time, capital and subjectivities in visionary but often also conventional ways. My ethnographic material does not only illustrate that such dreamwork facilitated by projects constitutes an omnipresent pivot of material and imaginative future-making in Egypt today. Reading together data about projects of radically different scales, the paper also suggests that the project form is recognizable enough to cross-fertilize small and large dreams and visions. In Egypt, projects provide a taken-for-granted format for conjuring and working out personal as well as national futures. As differently scaled project dreamwork feed on and off each other, projects, of all kinds and sizes, are rendered all the more attractive.
Paper short abstract:
This paper addresses the Social Wardrobe, a clothing bank in Northern Greece. I argue that despite its charitable nature, the Social Wardrobe hosts pseudo-market transactions that allow actors to engage performances of dignified consumption and thus partially circumvent stigma and shame
Paper long abstract:
The Social Wardrobe is a clothing bank in the Northern Greek town of Xanthi. It is run by a small group of middle-aged volunteering women who offer garments and other necessities free of charge. Despite its charitable nature, the Social Wardrobe has a peculiar affinity with the market. The transaction of clothes is often informed by the sensibilities that guide market exchanges, including those of self-reliance, autonomy of action, and freedom of choice. Expressions like ‘Welcome to our shop’, ‘What would you like to buy?’, and ‘That’s a good purchase!’, serve to mediate performative exchanges between store-clerks and customers. Courtesy of a process that I term ‘performative commodification’, the used and bestowed objects of the clothing bank transform into idiosyncratic commodities, which allow disenfranchised actors to engage performances of dignified consumption and thus circumvent stigma and shame. Yet, unfolding in the absence of money, this arrangement is bound to be fragile and incomplete. Entailing a ‘shop’ that belongs neither with the market, nor with anti-capitalist critique, the Social Wardrobe ‘sells clothes for free’.
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores how, after the Nepali Earthquake of 2015, families in Kathmandu used financial procedures to imagine new futures wherein they could reconcile with their estranged kin. In doing so, families repurposed the prepacked futures built into such procedures to create new modes of hope.
Paper long abstract:
It is often argued that formal ownership--and the financial procedures that require it-- cannot be reconciled with the modes of property management that communities and kin groups utilize. Instead, these two approaches to property are often portrayed as contesting, with the family management practices resisting formal documentation. While this argument has been instrumental in broadening understandings of possession and ownership, this paper complicates this formal/informal dichotomy by exploring how, following the devastating Great Nepal Earthquake of 2015, families in Kathmandu used state bureaucracy and formal financial tools to not only rebuild their homes but also to create new hope for familial unity. After the earthquake, the Nepali state—and by extension national financial institutions—privileged proof of formal landownership in their distribution of reconstruction aid and loans, making undocumented landholding arrangements amongst kin. This decision disqualified the property claims of numerous Nepalis, creating conflict across Kathmandu as kin were forced to explicitly agree upon who owned what parts of the family estate before approaching the state and banks for financial aid. My paper examines how, in the midst of such conflicts, Kathmandu families used bureaucratic procedures to create new, more hopeful futures in which family members could eventually reconcile. In doing so, groups of kin managed to repurposed affordances built into financial documents, integrating their own sense of family into the pre-packaged modalities for financial aspiration and economic possession that formal finance and ownership offer. I explore both how this integration transformed finance and family in Kathmandu.
Paper short abstract:
Ethnographically mapping the frayed intimate worlds of three women, in ‘pre’, ‘present’ and ‘post’ marital heterosexual relationships in India, the paper shows the experience of managing private violence as centrally the work of managing gendered kinworlds, and attendant hopes of marital becoming.
Paper long abstract:
Drawing on 12 months of fieldwork in the fast ‘modernising’ city of Gurgaon, India, this paper proceeds through an ethnographic exploration of the love, affliction, and violence experienced by three women – an upwardly mobile young professional, an urban-rural housewife and a bottom-end professional worker – in their heterosexual relationships with their boyfriend, husband, and estranged husband, respectively. Through its changing forms of living, sociality, leisure, consumption, and work, the city provides the moral and material backdrop for these relationships. All three relationships are defined by the hope for an ‘ideal marriage’ – indexed by one’s personal transformation into ‘good womanhood’ and the pair’s transformation into 'good domesticity' appropriate to the changing urban context. Marriage features as anticipation in the first case, a daily contested reality in the second and as the site of ruin and collapse in the third. Each case is animated, for the women, by the desire to secure respectable social membership and realize full marital personhood and endure violence in bargain. Ethnographically mapping the frayed intimate worlds of three women, in ‘pre’, ‘present’ and ‘post’ marital heterosexual relationships in urban India, the paper shows the experience of managing everyday interpersonal violence as centrally the work of managing gendered kinworlds and the socially constructed hopes of marital becoming. The paper examines the ways in which these hopes are reconfigured in the light of failing conjugality and the creative ways in which marital personhood is re-imagined outside the bounds of conjugality, by engaging adjacent kin networks or other social tactics.