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Paper short abstract:

What are the temporalities surrounding 'back to the land' projects in France and Italy? Producing an ethnography of incoherence is necessary to grasp contemporary dialectics and the possibilities of social change but also to enable epistemological debates on the anthropology of time.

Paper long abstract:

What are the temporalities surrounding 'back to the land' projects in France and Italy? Faced with the anguish generated by the climate, democratic and economic crisis, these people have chosen not only to practice an agricultural or pastoral activity, but have also chosen to mutualise life spaces and production tools. On the basis of an anthropological participant observation carried out between 2015 and 2022, I intend to test the paradigm of the multiplicity of temporalities in order to improve the understanding of the relationship to the future among these populations and the effect that these representations have on their social practices. Focusing on how individuals relate to the future and how it shapes emotional states (whether individual or collective) is of undeniable heuristic interest for grasping contemporary dialectics and the possibilities of social change.

I wish to demonstrate that producing an ethnography of instability (of populations within collectives, of ideas, of affects, of power relations) and ideological incoherence is necessary to enable epistemological debates on the anthropology of time. The fact that people mobilise antinomic visions of the future, both utopian and dystopian, would indeed imply a critique of the bias of homogenisation and ontologisation of the representation of time in anthropology, embracing the idea of disorder, disruption and the perpetual movement of future possibilities.

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Paper short abstract:

This paper will explore how imaginaries of early, indigenous, and non-European cultures shape the experiences and identity of New (Age) Travellers. It will argue that their subsequent recursive fractal cosmological practices and relationalities contribute to their coherence and endurance.

Paper long abstract:

Though members of the mobile alternative community focused on in this paper are often referred to in academic literature and by NGOs as ‘New’ Travellers, they were previously widely known as ‘New Age’ Travellers. The former title was developed to denote their being ‘new’ in comparison to longer standing Gypsy and Traveller groups, as they only formed as a community from the 1960s onwards. It was also because, despite many early New Travellers having previously been part of the Hippy movement, many of those who subsequently joined from other counter-cultural groups did not identify with the connotations they felt the ‘New Age’ title implied. However, the group’s initial formation was indeed partially based around new age religion, practice, and ideology, as well as other imaginaries of early, indigenous, and non-European cultures. This paper will explore how these early cosmological ideas, ideals, and practices shaped, and continue to shape, the experiences and identity of the group. This will include how the ways they mark, celebrate, and perform rituals and festivals, e.g. for deaths, marriages, and seasonal cycles, somewhat structures the imagined past, present, and future of the group and provides opportunities for new members to join. I will suggest that despite New Travellers’ having what anthropologists may consider a romanticised ley understanding of cultural groups whom they borrow from, the subsequent recursive, fractal cosmological practices and relationalities permeate and shape their processes of worldmaking, and in doing so contribute to the coherence and endurance of this diverse and now disparate group.

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Paper short abstract:

This article considers the aesthetic experience of music as mediating the sentient landscape secularist capitalism denies. I incorporate Kant’s aesthetic into tracing the continuities between the Indigenous Siberian Sakha people’s traditional Ohuokhai, and their contemporary pop music.

Paper long abstract:

This article considers the aesthetic experience of music as mediating the presences that secularist capitalism denies – and, specifically, the loving, creative persons in a sentient landscape. The ethnography traces the continuities between two forms of song, the Ohuokhai choral dance and contemporary pop, linked by their situation in a single territory – Sakha (Yakutia), Siberia – and community, the Indigenous Siberian Sakha people. I juxtapose Kant’s philosophy of the aesthetic with the aesthetic experience of Sakha music, to show how Sakha musicians have adapted the technologies of capitalist popular music into their ongoing relationship with creative beings in the land. Kant’s aesthetic can help us appreciate the ontological ambiguity of music. His positioning of aesthetic experience in the interstices, and yet also beyond, knowledge and communication affords music the mediation of non-human presences Sakha musicians describe. This Enlightenment philosopher – who nonetheless preceded high modernism and disaster-stage capitalism – can be co-opted into the articulation of a sentient landscape and its non-human persons. Capitalism’s secularist assumptions are doubly undermined, through the insights of both contemporary Sakha musicians, and a founding father of the liberal intellectual tradition.

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Paper short abstract:

Highly marginalised groups such as Travellers and Gypsies have been invested in making alternative worlds for centuries. This paper explores purity taboos, men’s prerogative to provide for their families, and social isolationism as survivance strategies that make Travellers' worlds.

Paper long abstract:

When considering the world-making practices of Travellers and Gypsies, David Graeber’s suggestion that we could easily make a different world to the one in which we now live appears somewhat myopic (2015). Of course, Graeber is referring to the wide-scale devastation late-liberalism has wrought on the planet, but the fact remains that highly marginalised groups have been, and continue to be, deeply invested in making alternatives for centuries. This does not mean that Travellers and Gypsies are unconventional in the sense of countercultural movements, rather that their traditions, while subject to transformation, provide a sense of continuity and stability.

Regarding this, the paper asks: how do groups such as Travellers and Gypsies endure when states and broader host societies have purposely set out to obliterate their lifeways? And what can we learn from their adherence to tradition (seemingly past-oriented practices) regarding future-focused activity? To respond, this paper draws on my ethnographic research with Travellers living in a roadside encampment in South London. Here, seemingly conservative practices such as purity taboos, men’s prerogative to provide for their families, and social isolationism will be explored as survivance strategies.

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Paper short abstract:

This paper discusses how the Georgian port city Poti deals with the results of transformation brought by the famous ‘Rose Revolution’ and how locals create new and re-create old informal economic and cultural practices in order to live beyond the state.

Paper long abstract:

In the context of development and change this paper discusses how the inhabitants of the small port city of Poti deal with the results of transformation brought by the famous Georgian “Rose Revolution '' in 2003. For the purposes of this work, I look at one of the aspects of new institutionalist reforms implemented by the revolutionary government that was directed towards negotiating the sea between private fishing companies and local fishermen and study how this reforms altered the everyday practices of locals and led to reinventing old and establishing new informal economic practices as a response to the new neoliberal regime. In order to place the Georgian case in the global context, I study what is the role of Anchovy production for the Georgian economy. Tracing the route of the fish from Georgia to Turkey and then to the global market, I show what role does Georgian Anchovy play in the global economic chain, how and if Georgia benefits from the resources offered by the Black Sea. Using the theory of informal economy I discuss how port city dwellers maintain their contact with the sea in order to reclaim their rights to the sea resources and accordingly their rights for the better future.