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Paper short abstract:

This paper analyses the personal and collective transformation of patriotic activists in Jordan. I focus on the role played by salient stereotyped figurations in mediating ethical transformations and forms of moral reasoning and self-narration, and hence, the framing of actions as (un)intentional.

Paper long abstract:

This paper analyses the personal and collective transformation that patriotic activists in a poor, tribal neighbourhood of Amman, Jordan, during the Arab Spring, from loyalism to oppositional activism, as they came to understand their political existence through the concept of 'dignity.' I focus on the role played by salient stereotyped figurations in mediating this transformation, not only in social interactions but more importantly, in forms of moral reasoning and self-narration. I argue that the activists understood what they did, and what ought to be done within constantly shifting axes of differentiation between co-constitutive stereotyped figurations, rather than a fixed set of concepts and referents. Part of the story of ethical self-transformation I give is a story of how the meaning of patriotism has shifted during the protests. Within shifting axes of differentiation of what is patriotic and what is not, being a patriot is always a process of becoming a patriot—a transformation, but also a continuity. In this interplay of continuity and change in living out a practical identity, reasons for action gain a particular significance in the articulation of intentions and hence in the ability to narrate a personal biography. Beyond the ethnographic case, the larger aim of my paper is to draw some broader conclusions regarding the anthropological study of intentions. I urge that intentions should not be understood as a general dimension of all individual and collective human behaviour, but rather as a dimension of 'meaningful' action as grounded in what Wittgenstein called ‘language games.’

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Paper short abstract:

Neoliberal solutions to sustainability challenges often have negative side effects that are dismissed (or analyzed) as an unintended consequence, while others see them as unfortunately but necessary, which this paper examines through the lens of intentionality and its relation to indexicality.

Paper long abstract:

Anthropologists (and geographers) often treat the negative impacts of market-driven sustainable development schemes as unintended consequences of otherwise well-intentioned plans. This paper builds on previous work that ethnographically problematizes this assumption (Archer 2022), examining the trope of the “unintended consequence” through the lens of linguistic anthropology. Specifically, and drawing on an analysis of interviews and documents relating to corporate decarbonisation efforts, it brings together theories of intentionality and indexicality to explore the formation and maintenance of semiotic communities that actively embrace neoliberal solutions to socio-ecological problems, even as they recognize the social and environmental costs of these approaches. Examples of these costs include toxic pollution and labor abuses associated with the the excavation of new mines in sensitive (political) ecologies, driven by increasing demand for minerals like lithium and manganese in response to the development of new "renewable" energy projects. These costs are variously described as both unintended consequences and necessary evils, sometimes by the same people, which has interesting consequences for theories of intention and intentionality. As such, the paper bridges conceptual and empirical concerns with intentionality across several spatial and temporal levels: the individual, the group, the organization, and so on.

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Paper short abstract:

I analyze “resonances” inside Multi-Family Structured Psychoanalytic Therapy in Buenos Aires, where both analysands and analysts shift their attention from the semantic content of talk to its poetic structure and thereby discover the “real motives and feelings” which animate the utterance.

Paper long abstract:

In this presentation I focus on the concept of resonance as an embodied practice that defies the here-and-now of sound production through the poetic function by analyzing how words sound and resound in the listener. I explore “the music in the words” or how messages/sounds/words resonate in the therapeutic encounter. By analyzing excerpts from meetings of Multi-Family Structured Psychoanalytic Therapy (MFSPT) in Buenos Aires, in which both analysands and analysts shift their attention from the semantic content and referential function of an utterance to its poetic structure, I question what kinds of textual artifacts are being produced in this setting when the focus is not on the text but rather on what the text evokes in the listener. Moreover, I problematize the concept of intention when the “real motives and feelings” of the analysands inside MFSPT do not belong to the producer of the utterance but to the expert listener who is attuned to—or “touched” by in Nancy’s terms—the unconscious realm. In this setting, a particular form of reported speech emerges in which what is being reported is not an indirect or direct form of quotation, but instead the report of unconscious motives and actions. Thus, the type-token relationship in this form of quotation is complex, because many different tokens of the same type can emerge (e.g., when listeners hear different meanings in the same utterance). Thus, the diffuse, multivalent intentional organization associated with the poetic function comes to override the individualized intention localized in the speaker’s utterance.

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Paper short abstract:

This paper analyzes an essay by author Elif Batuman on her interaction with ChatGPT and her reactions to the chatbot’s replies for how her moral expectations around intention and accountability in conversation interact with her reflexive knowledge of the fact that she is interacting with a machine.

Paper long abstract:

This paper will discuss metapragmatic expectations of intention and accountability (Sidnell & Enfield 2017) in conversation with chatbots based primarily on an essay by author Elif Batuman from September 2023 in which she offers an account of her interaction with ChatGPT. Batuman’s essay illustrates astute, gendered expressions of attunement to conversational norms as she metapragmatically reflects on her experience of disappointed conversational expectations which give rise to her mistrust of the chatbot’s affordances as well as disgust with the master/servant dynamics programmed into the chatbot (cf. Murphy 2022). It will analyze how human interactants deal with confounded expectations as an example for the ways that the semiotic ideologies evident in this conversation indicate shared cultural intuitions about what it means to be human but also become grounds for the anthropomorphic theorization of non-human things (cf. Handman 2023). This paper seeks to contribute to the growing work in linguistic anthropology on large language models in contemporary popular culture in order to contribute to the “cultural interpretability” of machine learning algorithms (cf. Jones et al. nd) from the perspective of an ethnomethodologically grounded theory of social action.

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Paper short abstract:

This paper examines how Turkish Jews seek an inconspicuous presence through register switch for passing as part of Sunni-Muslim majority. I identify notions of class and race in performances of the salient (Sunni-Turkish) personhood and their aesthetic aspects to analyze ideologies of markedness.

Paper long abstract:

Jews in Turkey are regularly categorized as foreigners in everyday life despite their status as full citizens and their historical presence in the region for over 500 years. As a religiously marked minority who historically experienced violence and discrimination in Turkish context, most Jews downplay their religious identity in public sphere, erasing public markers of Jewishness to appear “less Jewish” then they are. Apart from erasure, some occasionally perform affiliation to majoritarian Turkishness through performing a figure of Muslim-Turkish personhood regarded as ethnoreligiously unmarked in the national context. This paper examines instances of register switch of my Turkish Jewish interlocutors towards performing similitude to and membership in the Turkish-Muslim majority. To analyze broader ideas around ethnoreligious markedness and unmarkedness in contemporary Turkish context, I study the citational practices through which my interlocutors index a rather unmarked or inconspicuous presence with particular focus on intentionality, embodiment, and performance. I point to crystallizations of a figure of personhood, and an aesthetic register that has classed and racialized undertones. Such codeswitch and roleplay, I argue, are neither simple acts of mockery or dismissal, nor result of conscious decisions at times; but (1) they provide protective passing in potentially anti-Semitic environments; and (2) they serve as to mark what has historically and socially been regarded as national “standard” or unmarked. By looking into the embodied aspects of these enactments, I discuss the unconscious, mechanical, and habitus-al workings of what my interlocutor calls “invisibility tactics.”

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Paper short abstract:

This paper interrogates questions of shared intent and friction in remittance sending, through analysis of the language that Senegalese in France used to describe how and why they shipped second-hand objects to their relatives in Senegal via shared shipping containers.

Paper long abstract:

This paper interrogates questions of shared intent in remittance sending, through analysis of the language that Senegalese in France used to describe how and why they shipped second-hand objects to their relatives in Senegal via shared shipping containers. Much slower and less frequently available than other means of sending money or goods to Senegal, the material affordances of shipping containers make it possible to send items of a size, weight, and monetary value that would otherwise be impossible to transport between the two continents. Filled with largely secondhand items: refrigerators, freezers, barrels of second-hand clothing, motorcycles, and used car parts, the stories that surround shipping containers reveal how people’s (expressed) intentions in sending are socially and linguistically produced through metapragmatic processes of typification

First, I consider shared intent as an emic ideal in Senegal, through analysis of the phrase “nio far” (meaning “we are together” in Wolof) as used in bids for alignment in discussions regarding monetary arrangements. Second, I examine the semiotic processes through which “intent” comes to appear embedded in objects themselves through analysis of narratives surrounding objects typically sent by container. Finally, I analyze tensions between senders and receivers in remittance transactions and the ways migrants sometimes intentionally create friction in their transnational transactions in order to limit expectations to send.

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Paper long abstract:

The paper explores the tensions surrounding the register of prayer (dua) observed in the interactions between the Turkish state’s women preachers (kadın vaizi) and their female congregants. In the context of state-sponsored sermons for women, the pivotal moment is when the preacher imparts a prayer, often in Arabic, to the audience. The paper contends that prayer, along with metapragmatic commentaries, plays a crucial role in the religious education provided by the Turkish state for adult women. For many participants, mastering the art of prayer is equated with the ability to effectively communicate with and seek divine intervention from God to address personal challenges. In this context, the metaphor of “medicine” is frequently used to characterize prayers. However, not all state preachers endorse the idea of using prayer to “treat” worldly problems. They instead urge their students to redirect their intentions toward the afterlife (ahiret), underscoring the importance of embracing uncertainty regarding whether God’s response aligns with their hopes in this world (dünya). The paper suggests that these cautions from the preachers aim to instill a specific understanding of limited human agency in contrast to an omniscient and omnipotent God, encouraging individuals to embody the virtue of humility. In sum, the paper illustrates how the folk theorization of human and nonhuman agencies among Turkish Muslim women is in constant negotiation, shaped by conflicting semiotic ideologies that teach different approaches to aligning one’s mind, language, and body with the act of intending.