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- Convenors:
-
Alberto Corsin Jimenez
(Spanish National Research Council (CSIC))
AbdouMaliq Simone (University of Sheffield)
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- Formats:
- Panel
- Mode:
- Face-to-face
- Sessions:
- Tuesday 23 July, -, -
Time zone: Europe/Madrid
Short Abstract:
Hegemonic and pluriversal discourses inhabit similar orientations towards the adventitious as time-space assemblages of the probable, plausible or unforeseeable. But what if the unpredictable was not a curated hermeneutics of factuals and counterfactuals, but an arts of politics for surplusfactuals?
Long Abstract:
White privilege is based on the promise that “everything will be alright”, where empirical details are ignored in favor of an image of sufficiency propped up by the enforced precarity and expendability of others. In urban conditions where there is no conceivable way of working around the costs that the predicted abstractions of humanity wrought, the right to be human is either buttressed at all costs or abandoned all, together. Ethnographic scholarship has alternative shown how counterplanning, everydayness or the incidental often conjure unpredictable worlds. In both cases the predictable and the unpredictable are imagined as declinations of the adventitious: temporal and spatial assemblages of the probable, the plausible or the unforeseeable. But what if the unpredictable was not an expression of futural agnosticisms or indeterminacies, a curated hermeneutics of factuals and counterfactuals, but the collective accrual of otherwisefactuals? What may it mean to speak of unpredictability as an arts of politics for surplusfactuals?
This panel invites urban ethnographies where unpredictability is collectively maneuvered and enfolded as a surplus of existence: What methodologies of emergent convocations, complementary deployments of difference, and circulations of bodies with and through each other constitute new substrates of urban life? What are the vernaculars, techniques, and practices of strange alliances, collaborations across different kinds of distances, engagements with urban residents off the map, with people and practices often seen as impossible to accompany each other? How to risk instigating new dispositions with a sense of ethics—and what would those ethics be?
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Tuesday 23 July, 2024, -Andrew Johnson (Stockholm University) Daena Funahashi (University of California, Berkeley)
Paper short abstract:
We examine sites of accident and haunting within Bangkok that emerge as a "counter-plan" to urban models that emphasize efficiency and production. Here, nonhuman forces demand recognition, calling into question models of space and place, planning and certainty.
Paper long abstract:
Urban planning builds on a rationalized distribution of space allocated by use and connected by highways and boulevards designed to increase efficiency of transport and production. But within the urban plan, the unforeseen emerges: a counter-discourse to the urban plan. Accidents take place, despite all attempts to plan. In Bangkok, Thailand, such accidents are often recognized as the insistence of entities that pre-exist all notions of plan, calculation, and urban design, calling to be recognized by a plan that ignores their existence.
Here, we argue that within the plan is a counterplan, one built on a counter-instrumental logic of the timeless sacred. Turning to roadside shrines of such chthonic beings, we explore how these sites are more than dedications to the lives claimed. Rather, they mark places that snag against the fabric of urban planning and rupture its smooth surface. These shrines thus mark the insistence of otherwisefactual realities that insist of co-existing with a plan devoid of chthonic, non-human presences. Via an ethnographic look at these shrines, we see how they offer potential to not only rethink space, but also to re-theorize what is to be taken into account in planning.
Ester Gisbert Alemany (Universidad de Alicante)
Paper short abstract:
This landscape ethnography in Alicante's huerta engages with diverse stakeholders in a collective reimagining of water relations. Practical design work serves as a screen, allowing participation in a conversation where these projects contribute to the rich tapestry of existence in Montegre's basin.
Paper long abstract:
This paper unfolds a practice based ethnography, immersing itself through landscape design in the endangered huerta of Alicante. The project engages (or is confronted) with many projects by diverse stakeholders, including neighborhood associations, 'West 8' Landscape Design Studio, agro-industrial enterprises, migrant workers, and local activists, fostering a collective reimagining of water relations. The practical work of landscape design becomes a screen that allows us to take part in the social game of giving each other ambiguous signals. Work with the 'Sindicato de Regantes' and water distribution workers unveil diverse imaginings—from relocalizing irrigation for large enterprises to ambitious plans for river recovery initiatives, just in the last two decades. This landscape design processes intertwine past endeavors, such as Felipe II's 16th-century construction of the Tibi reservoir, oldest working dam in Europe, with contemporary visions of living sustainably within the huerta. To this design ethnography, we add a series of semistructured interviews with women participating in informal vending of vegetables at mobile markets. Their narratives illuminate shifts in economic and social flexibility, shedding light on the impact of transitioning from informal setups to regulated markets, from them we learn to think with surplus, abundance and overflow.
The fragmented and partial projects imagined by these stakeholders are generators of social life, and rarely unfold exactly as envisioned. Instead, they contribute to the rich tapestry of social existence in this territory, weaving together historical legacies with the collective dreams, challenges, and adaptations of those navigating the complex landscape of Alicante's huerta.
Simone Toji (University of Sheffield)
Paper short abstract:
In considering the constellations of actors from the garment small businesses in São Paulo as collective economies dealing with unpredictability, the paper explores how different interlocutors create contradictory socialities to cope with the challenges of such industries.
Paper long abstract:
In the routine of the small businesses within the clothing production in central areas of the city of São Paulo, numerous actors are involved in its multifaceted processes. Accounts from some participants of these industries reveal that in the concreteness of their daily affairs much of their decisions and activities are embedded in the unstable and ever-changing conditions of complex and convoluted manufacturing settings. The decentralised arrangement of the multiple stages of textile fabrication, clothing design, sewing, washing-up, finishing, ironing and packing, for instance, contingently assembles and disassembles an assortment of entrepreneurs, employees, professionals and casual workers that navigate the volatility of the day-to-day demands of fashion cycles and fiercely compete among themselves.
Although pervaded by circumstances considered to be of informal and illegal nature, such a sector has been historically accommodating national and international populations arriving in São Paulo that otherwise would not find other opportunities in the metropolis.
In considering the constellations of actors from the garment production of small businesses in São Paulo as collective economies organically dealing with unpredictability, the paper explores how different interlocutors at times create contradictory socialities, building relations of neighbourhood or activism or resorting to senses of kinship, cronyism and ethnicity, to cope with the challenges posed by the dynamics of the clothing industries. In this line, the paper also intends to problematise straightforward criminalisation of certain practices in these industries, nuancing essentialised portrayals and spending efforts to reach an ethical ethnographic approach that does not commit epistemic violence towards research participants.
Andrés González Dinamarca (University of Oxford)
Paper short abstract:
By exploring different cityscapes within historical Mapuche territory, serving as a background to twelve months of ethnographic fieldwork, I show how ephemeral contestations of hegemonic discourses sediment new collective senses, aiming to navigate unpredictability amidst ongoing colonial relations
Paper long abstract:
Some monuments have recently been toppled while others have been reaffirmed, making explicit the conventional narratives that build the urban space and those which are to be permanently excluded. By exploring different cityscapes within historical Mapuche territory, serving as a background to twelve months of ethnographic fieldwork, I show how ephemeral contestations of these hegemonic discourses sediment new collective senses, aiming to navigate unpredictability amidst ongoing colonial relations. The systematic efforts of invisible yet ubiquitous forces to erase the erupting departures from standard monocultures, raise questions about the reconcilability of overlapping ways of existing on the land, while simultaneously bringing to the forefront the extent to which modern cities have inherited the structures of settler-colonial dominance.
Maja Petrović-Šteger (The Scientific Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts)
Paper short abstract:
The paper explores how certain ways of imagining the self, the collective, the good and time align people to a social world. What are the conditions for and patterns of imaginal practices that demand social transformation?
Paper long abstract:
Anthropologists can be over-hasty in characterising the pace and the mediators of sociohistorical change. This paper suggests that, in documenting change in a society, researchers should tarry with the imaginary and ‘imaginal’, rather than appropriate it too quickly for the language of the factual -- even surplusfactual, and otherwisefactual --, political or economic.
The paper considers a range of people, who in politically and economically volatile Serbia, envision possibilities conducive to deep societal revision. These interlocutors depart from the typical language of precarity, invoking instead notions of 'caring for society', 'the need for clarity' and 'the healing of the collective mind'. Their ideational and visionary projects are oriented towards a supposed renewal of Serbia's moral, spiritual and political fabric (the political valence of these initiatives remains thoroughly indeterminate). The analysis recognises these practices of imagining alternative scenarios as critical because of their unusual distance from mainstream thinking, in which the present figures as a scarce, frayed, exhausted or even threatening category.
The paper asks how do people in Serbia imagine historical change? What seems to be of vital, real-life importance? What characterises individuals and groups who are willing to step out of the common time - a supposedly improbable, exhausted or barren after-time - and adopt longer internal and historical perspectives, projecting both into the imagined past and future? The work is centrally motivated by questions of how ideas are incorporated into an emerging order, and how they gain prominence or priority in a collective psyche or mind.
Klavs Sedlenieks (Riga Stradins University)
Paper short abstract:
I argue that while unpredictability is often seen as a problem, it is in fact a precondition of life and is fundamental for some morally salient processes. The presentation does not introduce new ethographic data, opting instead to traverse the terrain of existing knowledge
Paper long abstract:
I propose a contemplation upon the some unforeseen aspects of unpredictability and uncertainty. Traditionally perceived as adversities necessitating resolution, I posit an alternative perspective. I argue, that when it comes to life (in general or specifically human life), one can live without certainty (we all do), but we cannot live without uncertainty. Paradoxically, it is in the embrace of uncertainty that life's essential processes find manifestation. Embarking from this ontological premise, I undertake a reexamination of classical anthropological themes, contending that while human proclivities incline towards certitude and recoil from instances of profound uncertainty, domains of profound moral significance—such as belief, friendship, gift, and hope—reside within and are contingent upon the ambience of uncertainty. This exposition refrains from the introduction of novel ethnographic data, opting instead to traverse the well-trodden terrain of existing knowledge, albeit with a view to unravel the unforeseen latent within the ostensibly predictable (or rather, predictability in reverse).
Lara Sarlak (UBC)
Paper short abstract:
In the aftermath of two major disasters with (un)predictable impacts—the pandemic and earthquake—Istanbul’s informal recycling workers are compelled to navigate the changing valuation and accumulation of waste, adjusting their everyday lives amidst infrastructural collapse.
Paper long abstract:
On February 6, 2023, a magnitude of 7.8 earthquake struck southern Turkey, Kurdistan, and Syria, ranking among the world’s deadliest earthquakes in the past decade. This catastrophe claimed thousands of lives, leaving in its wake a trail of collective trauma, devastation, and disbelief. Turkey, long recognized as an “earthquake country”, with the lasting impacts of 1999 earthquakes, was expected to have better prepared for a predictable, if not an expected, disaster in the region.
Disasters often inhabit the liminal space between predictability and unpredictability. For instance, although the COVID-19 pandemic as a global disaster was not foreseeable, many anticipated the breakdown of healthcare infrastructures across the world. This paper turns to waste as a persistent and predictable by-product of infrastructural collapse following disasters. While not at the forefront, waste, in its various forms, is a foreseeable excess heavily impacted by disasters, rapidly accumulating with the absence of infrastructures to manage it. Based on a 15-month ethnography in Istanbul amongst informal recycling workers, I examine the unpredictable implications of disasters on the recycling industry and urban waste infrastructures, resulting in fluctuations in prices of recyclable waste, emergence of mountains of hazardous rubble, or disruptions in waste trade with months-long border closures. How do informal recycling workers, haunted by the pervasive fear of an imminent Istanbul earthquake maneuver their everyday lives collecting waste while expecting a potential catastrophic displacement? What forms of collaborative efforts emerge when workers are forced to survive off collecting materials suddenly devalued in the post-pandemic era?
Danielle Isler (University of Bayreuth)
Paper short abstract:
This paper discusses spatial formations in Cape Town from the analytical perspective of predictable unpredictabilities. It discusses constructions and the effects of Whiteness in space, exclusions, violence, and the art of survival with which PoC navigate spaces of predictable unpredictabilities.
Paper long abstract:
Three decades have passed since the official end of Apartheid, and the signs that read ‘Whites only’ or ‘White area’ have disappeared, but South Africa remains a country with racial segregation as the norm rather than the exception. Cape Town is amongst the South African cities with the most pronounced racial segregation, with the majority of the Black population living in poverty and undignified conditions. It is also known for its extensive Whitened spaces where Black people and PoC are made to feel unwelcome. To them, Cape Town remains a “city of exclusion” and of White domination. An implicit assumption persists that the city belongs to Whites whereas Black people are “temporary sojourners” whose place is in the townships. Thus, the struggle of Black people for a ‘right to the city’ – the right to live and work in Cape Town –, which started in the 1970s, is still ongoing. PoC navigate everyday forms of exclusions, structural violence, and Whitened spaces that re/produce multiple and complex forms of predictable unpredictabilities.
This paper discusses spatial formations in Post-Apartheid Cape Town, which is also referred to as a post-traumatic space, from the analytical perspective of predictable unpredictabilities. It discusses constructions and the effects of Whiteness in space, exclusions, trauma, racial spatial segregation, and structural violence, and how they re/produce predictable unpredictabilities and, vice versa, how predictable unpredictabilities re/produce the former. It also discusses the art of survival with which PoC navigate Whitened Cape Town, a space full of predictable unpredictabilities.
Valentina Napolitano (University of Toronto)
Paper short abstract:
Through a political theological understanding of 'immanent singularity,' I draw on the (mystical) divine as a disruptive force. Referring to Catholic spaces in MexicoDF and Detroit, I explore urban unpredictability, sovereign incision and their de-secularizing theopolitical forms.
Paper long abstract:
Technology is not a straightforward, one-way street dictated solely by our intentions, problem-solving endeavors, or intended applications. The accident and the unpredictable emphasize a multidirectional and recursive relationship inherent in the technology and the urban (Virilio and Ruby 1998). This intervention engages with Political Theology and the urban, particularly through what I have called 'immanent singularity' (Napolitano 2022). Focusing on immanent singularity as a ‘techne of reason’ that resonates with a mystical tradition of kenosis and 'self-emptying' helps us conceptualize the divine as a force of (urban) disruption rather than a matter of ethical, 'peaceful' discourse. This intervention invites a debate on an unknown and kenotic nature of urban spaces, drawing on theopolitical sovereignty 'from below' and its spaces of indecision, by referring to urban (Catholic) sanctuary spaces such as the Augustinian Church of La Soledad in Mexico City, and the phenomenon of Catholic Church ‘mass mob’ constituted by 'white' suburban devotees making a sacramental 'incision' into urban, black downtown Detroit. Through an Anthropological theopolitical lens, I focus on unpredictability, and sovereign incision that orient urban forms of both justice and injustice. The intervention further contributes to an ongoing de-secularization of our discipline, fostering a more capacious understanding of the political and sovereignty, in the relation between the human, the more-than-human, and the more-than-natural (Fernando 2022).