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- Convenors:
-
Monica Heintz
(University of Paris Nanterre)
Sharon Macdonald (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin)
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- Format:
- Plenary
- Location:
- Whitla Hall
- Start time:
- 29 July, 2022 at
Time zone: Europe/London
- Session slots:
- 0
Short Abstract:
This plenary revisits the notion of urgent anthropology in the 21st century, by inviting scholars whose research is devoted to critical situations to position their research priorities independently of ‘urgent’ political agendas and of the past meanings of the term.
Long Abstract:
The term ‘urgent anthropology’ evokes the salvage anthropology of the turn of the 20th century, with its urge to document quickly endangered cultures through observations and the physical collection of their material culture. With the criticism of the Western perception of ‘vanishing’ cultures, the term and the method lost its momentum, before it came back after decolonisations to mean the study of behavioral change among societies undergoing rapid change. This applied anthropology sense has increasingly been interwoven with the first sense of salvage anthropology in most projects labelled ‘urgent anthropology’ in the past decades. Meanwhile, funding and institutional requirements to pursue research topics with rapid societal ‘impact’ also challenged anthropology’s ‘slow’ research based on long-term fieldwork and lifelong immersions in a society. As a result, ‘crises’ (such as Covid, the environmental crisis, the refugees crisis, wars, etc.) become urgent research focuses, with urgency taking on a political and moral priority relatively independent of other anthropological research priorities.
This plenary wishes to revisit the notion of urgent anthropology in the 21st century, by inviting scholars whose research is devoted to such critical situations to position their research priorities independently of ‘urgent’ political agendas and of the past meanings of the term. The temporality of anthropological research allows us to step back from ‘urgency’ to reconsider the basics of human sociability and commoning, aside from the erratic inscription of actions in time and space, in order to reinvent ways to circumvent the indeterminacy of the future.
Accepted papers:
Paper short abstract:
Drawing on the experience of two decades’ of fieldwork with the military, this presentation shows how long-term ethnography reveals aspects of life – including embodied – that cannot be derived from other kinds approaches.
Paper long abstract:
Long fieldworks give answers to questions never asked up front. The power of contextualized fine-grained ethnography is to illuminate the complexity underlying people’s everyday life. Ethnography allows us to analyse cases holistically and is our source for new theory building.
I worked for two decades on military culture and over the years I conducted many long fieldworks. Doing fieldwork is a slow research process, and sometimes ground-breaking. Doing fieldwork in a military special operations unit is harsh: I never got enough sleep, all my muscles were sore after walking with them during Hell week, I was always hungry and frozen deep down to the marrow after long hours outdoors in the cold Arctic climate, and I parachuted in a tight James-Bond-like black one-piece jumpsuit. I felt like the personification of Douglas’s ‘matter out of place’. An 18-month fieldwork was my entry into this all-male world, finding my way into closely knit and intricate networks. I ended up describing part of their culture which had never been academically discussed and analysed.
The complexity of real life cannot be reinvented in an artificial lab-experiment. Surveys can give fast and systematic data but are often just a fragment of the big picture. It is in this time and age – with covid-19, wars, climate changes, and globalism – we need thorough analyses and answers on the topics the urgent political agendas never raise. Ethnography is the key tool to deepen understanding of the contemporary order and disorder. By providing thick descriptions of how people, conditions, and scale are at play at the same time, we can describe the cacophony of real life, and thereby better inform ongoing discussions on the big issues of our era. Over time we become more competent, we are listened to, and build relationships with people – including people with power. Independently of erratic ‘urgencies’ of our time, that is what makes long term impact.
Paper short abstract:
This paper will try to reconcile time spent in the ethnographic field with the urgency created in a rapidly developing social context. Reviewing work undertaken on conflict over rituals during the Northern Ireland peace process, it suggests that fieldwork and anthropological models have potential for rapid intervention.
Paper long abstract:
Anthropology has the great asset of offering slow and in-depth qualitative methodologies which can be justified and should be defended. Yet contemporary ethnography is frequently taking place in spaces of crisis where people are experiencing rapid change. This paper will try to reconcile time spent on ethnographic fieldwork with the urgency created by a rapidly developing social context and the potential to have important impact. By reviewing work undertaken on conflict over rituals and symbols through the Northern Ireland peace process the paper will suggest that ethnography and anthropological models can provide the potential for rapid intervention. Most importantly, the interactions built up through fieldwork have the potential to provide relationships of trust that can generate informed policy impact in relatively short periods of time. Such work raises some significant ethical challenges but also offers a reminder that anthropology can provide a vehicle for significant activism.
This paper will review the work undertaken during and after the disputes over parades in Northern Ireland particularly in the 1990s and examine why ethnographic fieldwork made a difference. It will look at some of the ways in which urgent outputs, such as published reports, had impact. By reviewing engagement with politicians, people parading, people protesting and the police, the paper will examine the potential and pitfalls in what might be termed ‘urgent anthropology’.
Paper short abstract:
Examining the disaster that affected Japan in 2011 – a large-scale earthquake, a tsunami, a nuclear accident –, I show how an urgent mode of documentation often has the effect of crystallizing the analysis on a marked break between before and after, and thus misses crucial aspects of the situation.
Paper long abstract:
Some investigations require a change of pace. A priori, a disaster situation, such as the one that affected Japan in March 2011 (a large-scale earthquake, a tsunami, a nuclear accident), calls for an urgency mode, designed to document, as closely as possible to the source (temporal and geographical) of the disaster, what is happening. While it offers valuable insights into forms of emergency intervention, conceived as responses to crisis situations (whose scenarios were nevertheless planned well in advance), this urgency mode often has the effect of crystallizing the analysis on a marked break between before and after. The investigation I have been conducting in Japan since 2012 has convinced me that there is, on the contrary, everything to gain by disengaging, slowing down, taking detours, persevering. As a Japanese proverb invites us: "If you are in a hurry, take a diversion" (急がば回れisogaba maware). Initiated classically as an investigation into the programs for measuring radioactivity in the air, soil and food through which the inhabitants were learning to experience their new living conditions after the disaster, my research has been diverted by a number of episodes that highlighted a disturbed regime of temporality, both from the point of view of the people involved and that of the investigator. Taking note of these successive disruptions, I would like to render how changes in the methods used in the field were linked to the very object in question: life in contaminated territory.
Paper short abstract:
In this presentation I examine the shortcut as a powerful idea that is built into the notion of urgency. I argue that shortcuts are essential for our understanding of the ways in which Covid-19 is written as stigma in health research and policy today.
Paper long abstract:
In this presentation I examine the shortcut as a powerful idea that is built into the notion of urgency. In urgent situations, shortcuts seem necessary and legitimate. Typically, shortcuts refer to paths that are shorter than the ordinary road. My case for investigating the politics of the shortcut are rapid assessments of stigma during the coronavirus pandemic. In 2020, health researchers raised the alarm about an urgent threat to healthcare workers and patients who are facing stigma and discrimination all over the world. In my presentation I examine the shortcut that made this framing possible in the first place. I argue that shortcuts are essential for our understanding of the ways in which Covid-19 is written as stigma in health research and policy today.