Click the star to add/remove an item to/from your individual schedule.
You need to be logged in to avail of this functionality,
and to see the links to virtual rooms.
Log in
- Convenors:
-
Gil Hizi
(Goethe University Frankfurt)
Maria Nolan (SOAS University of London)
Send message to Convenors
- Discussant:
-
Ronald Stade
(Malmö University)
Short Abstract:
Against the requirement for entrepreneurial innovation and hyper-engagement in both academic work and social life, this panel examines indifference as a cultivated virtue that can undercut market apparatuses, impede the circulation of oppressive discourses, and foster viable communal life.
Long Abstract:
Anthropologists in recent years have been encouraged to respond to “pressing global challenges,” enhance their impact beyond academic circles, and thoroughly revise the principles of our discipline—all tasks that demand enhanced cognitive and emotional proactivity. Along with the obvious benefits of this approach, this ideal of hyper-engagement tends to overlap with entrepreneurial capitalist regimes that are at the heart of many of the problems that we address. Hyper-engagement, for example, fuels the value generation of online corporations, increases travel and consumption, and, moreover, may induce a sense of precarious lack and the imperative of constant “innovation.” Against this backdrop, this panel examines moderated engagement and indifference as possible alternatives. We seek contributions that attend to indifference not as a helpless withdrawal, but rather as a cultivated virtue through which people may seek to undercut market apparatuses, impede the circulation of oppressive discourses, and/or foster viable communal life. Indifference may manifest in moments of “flat affect” that resist conventional protocols for specific actions (Berlant 2015, Ngai 2005), in expressions of mutual trust (Amit 2020), and in attempts to prioritize longstanding and meaningful realities over impulsive inputs (Zizek 2002). The contributors may either describe emic approaches that promote indifference or discuss aspects of indifference in the anthropological research vis-à-vis our topics of research. We also welcome attention to the questions about the limits to indifference and the ethical risks at play in various circumstances.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Thursday 18 July, 2024, -Susana Boletas (ICS - Universidade de Lisboa)
Paper short abstract:
Doing fieldwork in a poor neightbourhood built by its residents that resist demolition, engagement is not only ethical, it is also required by the locals. It demands learning the balance between involvement, respecting peoples' agengy and keeping the necessary distance for critical thinking.
Paper long abstract:
Cova da Moura is a neighbourhood built by its poor, migrant, and multi-ethnic residents, mostly of African origin or descent, on the outskirts of Lisbon, using mutual aid practices which resulted in a strong and active associative network that resists demolition, relocation and expulsion. It's a place of symbolic and spatial borders. Cova da Moura is a mediatized space, and the object of hybrid discourses that stigmatize and rehabilitate it It is regarded as an ethnic enclave and a ghetto. It is also a touristic place, where guided tours are conducted. Kola San Jon, an event held annually, has recently become cultural heritage as part of a strategy to legitimize Cova da Moura and its population. The neighbourhood was recently the subject of a state initiative for socio-spatial qualification, which was subsequently suspended. It remains at risk of demolition and its population at risk of expulsion and of social exclusion, suffering frequently from police violence.I did fieldwork, which allowed me to have access to the neighbourhood’s routine, doing participant observation in a local association and I also researched media content and conducted interviews. Engagement was something that I felt I needed to do, but it was also expected of me. During fieldwork I observed how sometimes participation can be an imposition and learned that engangement has to be on the peoples' own terms. It demands learning the balance between involvement, respecting peoples' agengy and keeping the necessary distance for critical thinking.
Jelena Tosic (University of St.Gallen)
Paper short abstract:
This paper zooms in on lifeworlds of two heterogenous populations in contemporary Serbia, the educated urban middle-class and new immigrant population from Russia to critically explore the conundrum of indifference, class and authoritarianism.
Paper long abstract:
This paper zooms in on lifeworlds of two heterogenous populations in contemporary Serbia, the educated urban middle-class and new immigrant population from Russia. The paper’s entry point is the urban context of the contemporary Serbian capital, Belgrade, which is currently experiencing a radical demographic transformation due the arrival of (forced) migrants (Ukraine/Russia, Middle East, Africa) and labour populations from the Global South, as well as returnees from western Europe. Furthermore, Belgrade represents an interesting vantage point to explore urban social arenas of long-term and exhausted anti-authoritarian engagements in contemporary (Southeastern) Europe. Rather than reproducing the hegemonic imagined geography of south-east European "peripheries", the paper explores transformations of the Serbian capital as exemplifying the shifting nature of Europe as a locus of imigration and „good life“.
The two mentioned populations and a comparative assessment of their reasonings and practices are especially interesting for several reasons. They both share a privileged position under conditions of surviving authoritarian regimes, and can often afford to encounter the hardships of every-day life under authoritarianism with partial indifference and engage when seen as meaningful. At the same time there is a „common sense“ claim to themselves represent the „natural“ driving force of societal change and anti-authoritarianism, which potentially others working-class and immigrant populations as system-complicit and representing the „background“ of social change.
The paper is based on on-going ethnographic research and will dwell into the social circles, ideological reasonings and practices of the two populations to critically explore the conundrum of indifference, class and authoritarianism.
Saim Buğra Kurban (Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University Istanbul)
Paper short abstract:
Ecological communities are criticized for their lack of connectedness and social interaction. This study explores the concept of indifference as a valuable social practice by analyzing fieldwork data from four communities. It also aims to assess the impact of indifference within these communities.
Paper long abstract:
In recent years, ecological rural communities have become more prominent as a result of the growing interest in sustainable living. These intentional communities typically consist of ecological farms, villages, or rural communes and are established through the collaboration of individuals with urban backgrounds and professional careers. Furthermore, these communities impact both general political dynamics at a national level and local dynamics in various ways. They have faced criticism from the media and intellectual circles for disengaging from everyday life, while some political groups accuse them of avoiding involvement in the main political scene altogether.
There has been a noticeable increase in these communities in Turkey since the 2000s. This study is based on fieldwork data collected from four different ecological communities located in rural areas of Turkey. Here, one argument is that some of these groups can be classified as intentional communities, while another perspective suggests the inclusion of those that do not fit this classification. Some communities are linked to a lack of concern for social interaction; however, an important consideration at this point is indifference as a valuable social practice. How should we assess these communities within the framework of indifference as a virtue? Do the negative stereotypes linked to these introverted or isolated communities prove to be accurate? What are the implications of this within these communities?
Ricky Whitefield (Durham University)
Paper short abstract:
This paper meditates on the productive tension between the ethnographer as a determined meaning-maker whose task is to interact with a quotidian world and local experience of ‘ceilings’, ‘buffers’, or ‘thresholds’ in which meaning ‘finds early limits’ (Davies, 2015).
Paper long abstract:
In seeking to avoid the ‘mistake of intellectualism’ which is ‘driven by the general urge to explain’ (Boyer, 2007), my paper meditates on the productive tension between, on the one hand, the ethnographer as a determined meaning-maker whose task is to interact with a quotidian world of taken-for-granted meanings and, on the other, the discovery of how scholarly insistence upon meaning is itself taken-for-granted and in some respect is 'fictionalised' in encounter with local informants' own self-narrated ‘ceilings’, ‘buffers’, or ‘thresholds’ in which meaning ‘finds early limits’ (Davies, 2015). In other words, the daily suspension of lucidity’ which characterises the everyday lifeworld expresses the limits of any general urge to explain, and which might in fact be ‘the origin of indifference’ (Berliner, 2016). My paper discusses the genesis of ignorance (as an important precursor of certain kinds of indifference) in relation to emic descriptions of how the drive for meaning reaches and exceeds ‘limits’ at different speeds and according to different circumstances. These emic accounts are drawn from my own empirical research and forthcoming works. The paper ends by posing the sociological question of the extent of meaning available within plausible worlds which narrate their own sense of sufficiency (Berger, 1972; Davies, 1984).
Berger, P. & Luckmann, T. (1966). The Social Construction of Reality. Penguin.
Boyer, P. (2002). Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought. Basic Books.
Davies, D.J. (2015). Mors Britannica: Lifestyle and Death-Style in Britain Today. OUP.
Davies, D.J. (1984). Meaning and Salvation in Religious Studies. Brill.
Marie Odgaard (University of Toronto)
Paper short abstract:
Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork on queerness, play, and ethical uncertainty in Amman, Jordan, this paper discusses the potentials and pitfalls of allowing for more space for play and for an ethics of indifference (Davé 2023) in relations and in anthropological practice.
Paper long abstract:
There are times when spaces for playfulness and ethical uncertainty seem highly productive and plentiful in Amman, Jordan, where I have conducted fieldwork and spent time since 2015. Young artists and activists play around with spaces that are highly securitized and surveilled, showing the possibilities of an indifference to the powers that be. There are times, too, when both one’s own scholarly practice and conventions, as well as political and moral norms in the field, seem to close down such spaces for playfulness. Inspired by Naisargi Davé’s indifference as ethical praxis (2023) I reflect on the humanist urge to play in contexts where both one’s own creativity and the creativity of others, seem under attack by another humanist urge: namely to differentiate oneself from the other, and thus to create spaces where playful indifference is not allowed. This both in a particular (interlocutor/anthropologist in fieldwork in Amman) and a general (categorization, stigmatization, marginalization of particular groups, functions or individuals) sense.