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- Convenors:
-
Ståle Wig
(University of Oslo)
Charline Kopf (University of Oslo)
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- Chairs:
-
Charline Kopf
(University of Oslo)
Ståle Wig (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, -Paper short abstract:
This paper explores how absurdities are constantly challenging athletic plans for stability and structure. Enigmatic bureaucracies, scheming managers, or weird random encounters abroad shape athletes’ careers and lives and force them to develop strategies to handle the uncertainty of the absurd.
Paper long abstract:
The first advice a young athlete in the Kenyan highlands receives from older, internationally experienced veterans is to not only keep a balanced training plan but also a thought-trough career plan. He must find stability which enables them to successfully manage the uncertainty of bodily performance through training, but also be prepared to defend their dream against different kinds of challenges often described as absurd, weird, or ridiculous. Often this absurdity is the result of an institutional or individual logic unknown and therefore strange to the athlete, yet, they have to engage with it repeatedly (and sometimes despite better knowledge) if they want to pursue a career in running. The absurd can take the form of a foreign bureaucracy and its unknown inner workings producing uncertainty, anger, the failure of plans, as well as new plans, hopeful but set to fail, like in the interactions of young scholarship athletes with the US embassy in Nairobi. It can take the form of fraud, often by scheming managers who cheat or withhold price money. This can lead to, in itself, absurd retaliation by athletes, like a faked hostage situation at a Chinese airport. And it can take the form of intercultural encounters abroad, not in itself threatening careers but world views and conceptions of the world. While the first reaction to these absurdities is often sharp sarcasm on the state of running and its institution, athletes developed diverse practices of solidarity, sharing knowledge and tricks with younger athletes, and hope.
Paper short abstract:
This paper recounts and theorizes the experience of holding a job with a University’s IT-Department during the COVID-19 Pandemic. It argues that absurdity’s complexity necessitates a framework in which the Subject is understood as a nexus of (in)finitude to grasp absurdity in daily reality.
Paper long abstract:
Kafka once argued, that the secular individual only comes into contact with divinity while being engaged with a state’s bureaucratic institutions. And yet, when a database answers ‚Already Done. Nothing Changed.‘, what happens with the Divine and do we still want to find it?
This paper recounts and theorizes the experiences a working person made while holding a job with a University’s IT-Department during the ongoing COVID-19 Pandemic. It argues that a deeper understanding of absurdity’s complexity necessitates a framework in which the Subject is understood as a nexus of finitude and infinitude in order to grasp the violent avenues through which guilt-, violence-, and pleasure-inducing mechanisms of absurdity interpellate the Subject within the framework of a decaying (dis-)order of signification and of a fraying symbolic reality.
This paper argues that Absurdity might serve as a technique of governing the Subject and as a means of subjectification by perpetuating cynicism, a contradictory enjoyment of one’s situation and through (mis-)identification with one’s misery and pleasure. This regime of absurd interpellation is not an accidental byproduct of current modes of exploitation, but it is central to extracting surplus from the subject that finds itself within these conditions.
Paper short abstract:
In wartime, mundane activities become impossible, unrecognizable, or turned upside down by circumstance. This paper offers ethnography from three moments during the war in Ukraine (2014, 2018, 2022) when my interlocutors saw everyday life turn increasingly absurd.
Paper long abstract:
Anthropological work on the absurd, particularly in the former Soviet Bloc, has tended to focus on frustrating but also sometimes humorous habits and conditions of the everyday. Yet 'absurd' is also a word that my Ukrainian interlocutors have used to describe life during wartime. Although war in Ukraine has only recently skyrocketed to global attention, the conflict there has been burning for over eight years. This paper draws on three ethnographic moments over eight years of war in which my interlocutors spoke of how mundane activities became impossible, unrecognizable, or turned upside down by circumstances. In Odesa in 2014, internally displaced people from the initial violence Donbas described the trials of food provisioning, both as shells rained down and once the state was providing for them. In Kyiv-controlled Luhansk in 2018, when the ceasefire was mostly holding, Ukrainian workers for an explosives clearance organization struggled with their employer's lack of a detonation license: 'deminers' flagged anti-tank landmines for removal, but never saw the job completed. In Germany in 2022, Ukrainian refugees spoke of calling friends and relatives in Russia, describing the devastation they had witnessed in Ukraine, only to be told that what they had experienced simply had not happened. And yet they continued to call.
Rather than focusing on the absurd as an absence of meaning, this paper suggests absurdity is experienced as a distortion of precisely what one might find most meaningful.