Paper short abstract:

The institutionalization of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) as an industry and its formalization of the medicinal plant fangfeng as an official anti-Covid-19 remedy has contributed to the (un)making of commons amongst the plant harvesters of rural eastern Mongolia.

Paper long abstract:

The institutionalization of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) and its promotion of organic plants as the therapeutic ideal have led to a practically-insatiable demand for ‘wild’ plants across industrialized East Asia. Prior to Covid-19, the rural Mongolian border town of Magtaal benefited from this rising market to emerge as the epicentre of wild fangfeng harvesting, a plant widely used in TCM against colds and fevers. In the late summer and early fall, town residents from every age bracket and social class would go out into the countryside, mimicking historical ideals of pastoral labour pooling and distributive sharing, to cooperatively benefit from this resource boom. However, with the emergence of Covid-19, a process of bottlenecking through economic, legislative formalization emerged: first, the Chinese price for fangfeng skyrocketed attracting Mongolian business interests who instigated the government to illegalise rural harvesting; China closed its border to Mongolia and the plant became scarcer. In Magtaal, this has resulted in a series of traumatic changes to the previous consensus of fangfeng as benefit commons, as the residents fracture into two groups: 1) those that increasingly see the plant as a reproductive labourer, trying to learn its biological, ecological and distribution patterns to help it create more-than-human capitalist benefits; or 2) those that participate in mafia-esque networks, using the law as a tool to parasitize off of the former group and monopolise profit.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the transformative potentialities of a cultural practice centered around mutualities. It asks how Ikarian paniyiria have changed during periods of crisis, and what has persisted through them, and proposes a way to think about commons and their capacity to re-orientate change.

Paper long abstract:

In the Greek island of Ikaria, the village festivals, known as 'paniyiria', have been diachronically the locus of a gift economy centered around care for the saints, the deceased and the living community members. This paper focuses on a change that occurred during a period of crisis and social transformation to explore how paniyiria have shaped and have been shaped by social transformations. In the 1870s-1890s, what was previously given as a gift to the saints and in memory of ancestors, and was redistributed among the participants, was now sold and the earnings were directed towards 'common-good projects'. Since then, the semantic content of the 'common-good project' did not stop changing and, besides churches, it included schools, roads, water systems, and community centers. That is, projects that evince care for the commons (e.g. education, water), and occupy or create new spaces of the commons. Drawing from long-term ethnographic and historical research, this paper argues that such projects bespeak of their era, while also participating in the historical transformations of each era. The turn of paniyiria towards common-good projects was the local response to wider processes of enclosure of the ecological and civic commons. At the same time, it ensured the continuity of the interpersonal, intergenerational and intercommunity exchanges centered around care and grounded on a long tradition of commoning. Within this foundational relationship between the gift economy and commoning lies the key for understanding the transformative potentiality of care, which radiates in the common-good projects financed by Ikarian paniyiria.

Paper short abstract:

My paper explores commoning as an economic practice in reaction to crisis and the creation of different ‚mutualities‘. Using examples from China, I suggest that both hierarchal and egalitarian ‚kinship commons‘ create new chances, but only the latter constitute alterities to the existing order.

Paper long abstract:

My paper starts from the Polanyi’an premise that crisis events may generate new forms of economic embedding: processes of ‚re-socializing’ that aim at mitigating a given crisis destructive effects. It answers the panel‘s call to distinguish between emancipatory versus ‚reactionary’ commoning processes by drawing on ethnographic material from China. Western scholars have often identified a ‚Chinese habit‘ to re-socialize supposedly abstract relations (of law, market transactions, intellectual property rights etc) and either lauded or criticized its effects (e.g.‚Confucian capitalism‘, versus ‚corruption‘). I shall argue that such efforts at ‚re-socialization‘ - which create new mutualities and often employ a kinship idiom - can be understaod as commoning processes. They have historically taken on two forms - (1) hierarchical commons(‚lineages‘) that compete for profit with perceived adversaries and (2) egalitarian commons (fraternities/sororieties) which constitute alterities to the established order. Commoning here seeks to mitigate risks, yet in markedly different ways. By exploring and comparing these dynamics, my paper hopes to contribute to a general theory of commoning in anthropology.

Paper short abstract:

Communities worldwide are facing different but also similar challenges of commons grabbing or undermining the commons in neo-liberal/post-colonial contexts. This comparative paper examines local reactions, strategies and new bottom-up institution building against this 'undoing' in Africa and Europe.

Paper long abstract:

Comparative research in the last 15 years in Africa and Europe have indicated that many commoner's organizations struggle to either maintain their common property undermined since colonial times or struggle to keep the governance of the commons. This undoing process is in African context often related to not just land but commons grabbing as local communities lose not just their land but land related common-pool resources since colonial times. This undermines their resilience, especially of groups who need to be mobile or depend on seasonal resources. In Europe, more concrete in Switzerland, research has shown that while common property is secured, the transition to industrial society has lowered the market value of common-pool resources leaving few people with a high working load to maintain the commons and facing top-down state subsidy policies. In both contexts, especially states and experts do not recognize that local commoners have maintained and crafted biological diverse cultural landscapes via their common property institutions with rules and regulations to manage the common-pool resources on the land. Either governments and the private sector call for development via large-scale investments on the previous common lands or for conservation and green development for 'sustainable' food and energy production. Against these green commons grabbing processes several cases (for this paper examples from Sierra Leone, Kenya, Morocco and Switzerland) show that local people have developed new bottom-up rule building processes against the 'undoing' of the commons. This cases show conditions under which doing human mutualities is possible in a neo-liberal world.

Paper short abstract:

The author intends to use his four-year environmental journalist perspectives and eight years world water source summit organizer experience as a comparative ontological/cognitive materials to make sense of water crisis commons conundrum: crisis by the people, for the people and of the people.

Paper long abstract:

When the author explores the water issues from 2005 onward first as Xinhua News Agency environmental beat writer and convenor/organizer sponsored by many international organizations such as. Konrad Adenauer Stiftung, he witnessed a gradually worsening water ambience both in China and beyond, due to damming, water transfer, mining, water footprint flaws of burgeoning new economy and ensued lifestyle change; he will first connect the ecological water issues to the prototypical narratives of regime transition and social upheavals through ethnographical evidences and essential socio-cultural scripts (Water Margins Novel and its resonance as art of being ungoverned – floods mutually being used in Chinese history to refer rebels and malgovernance). Based on this water like society delineation, the author attempts to use a water conservation initiative starting from 2014 to 2023 to describe the necessity and difficulty of motivating/ mobilizing in ecological conservation campaigns and preliminarily answer why intersubjective belonging matters in innovating commons as cultural crisis/inter-species conflicts taking tolls here and beyond. Beginning with an empty basket of water drawing, this paper discusses another “multimodal/soteriological object” also related with bamboo basket: Sound Observing (Guanyin, Bodhisattva鱼篮观音) Avalokitesvara deity who always carries a bamboo basket with fish in it, in this “porous bamboo basket scenario”, another trans-species regime appeared -- the fish resides simultaneously in the air, out of water and temporarily in artificially woven “bamboo infrastructure build for salvation/co-existence.”

Paper short abstract:

I will be looking at the regions with earlier experience of collapse, such as the post-socialist regions and ask to what degree has the resulting undoing of commons undermined capacity to respond to future unravellings. I will explore the potential for (re)commoning in such desolate circumstances.

Paper long abstract:

Crises are not only singular events but build on experiences with earlier crises. The regions where a relatively recent collapse is still alive in living memory may thus enter a crisis from a different point and address the elements of crises differently than a region where a collapse is an entirely new experience and potential. Depending on the issues that the earlier crises have triggered, these contexts may be better or worse equipped for handling its results, for example undermined or strengthened mutualities and creation of hierarchies or development of equalities lays the ground for very different potential for crisis commons.

I will be looking at the challenged future vistas through the prism of regions with earlier experience of collapse, such as the neoliberal post-socialist regions, Estonia in particular. I will ask to what degree has the undoing of commons (nearly all of them) in the 1990s and 2000s imposed or enabled a particular mainstream way of living, rather than an alternative one, and whether this has undermined the ways in which the society is prepared for future unravellings. When focusing on the crises threatening survival, commoning appears to mostly be pushed to the background and uncommoning along various dividing lines is advocated. Do the intense processes of uncommoning nevertheless provide any possibility for unexpected emancipatory commons? Might these reach across the divisions created in the cusp of earlier changes and their aftermaths? And finally, are there any ways to increase the capacity for (re)commoning in desolate circumstances in general?

Paper short abstract:

In this paper, I analyse how the brazenly neglectful response of Belarusian authorities to the COVID-19 pandemic at its early stage first promoted despair and alienation in the atomised countryside, while later the plurality of experiences of abandonment prompted political and moral mobilisation

Paper long abstract:

In my paper, I examine the COVID-19 pandemic in Belarus, as it was experienced in the countryside; a rollercoaster of visceral and solitary despair, that later gave way to a search for solidarity and political mobilisation. The paper is based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork, done from 08.2019 to 09.2020 in one of the rural localities in Northwestern Belarus.

For decades, the unilateral social contract in Belarus presumed political passivity towards the authoritarian regime, in exchange for economic stability and extended social support, including universal healthcare. As the COVID-19 pandemic emerged, however, the state responded to it with brazen neglect, denying the dangers of the virus and forcing people to attend the workplace, whilst blaming victims for carelessness.

Lack of any trustworthy public health information and outward disregard for the very lives of people, in turn, led to emotional and moral disaster in the countryside, already bereft of public venues for collective organisation and struggling with poverty. Despair, fear, distrust, and moral numbness, caused by the inability to do anything – those were the predominant emotions of April 2020 in the Belarusian countryside.

In my paper, I engage critically with the recent anthropological discussions on social reproduction in disastrous times, as well as with those from the anthropology of state, power, and social contracts, arguing that it was precisely the abruptness and profundity of state neglect and the grim despair it caused, that lead to political mobilisation in summer 2020, rooted in the (re)discovered mutuality, the one based loneliness and abandonment.

Paper short abstract:

Drastic austerity-driven pharmaceutical reforms triggered ongoing pharmaceutical shortages in Greece. This paper investigates the commitments, both ethical and economic, which undergird the emergence of pharmaceutical commons and trade between different neighborhood pharmacies.

Paper long abstract:

When Greece implemented austerity at the behest of international creditors in 2010, the state was chided for its clientelistic character, and the directive was clear: paying back its loans would depend on purging political and economic exchanges of the murky potential for corruption introduced by personal relations. Greece’s pharmaceutical spending was slashed, which triggered ongoing pharmaceutical shortages, and liberalizing reforms, which the 2010 Economic Adjustment Programme insisted would “enhance competition in open markets.” Enacted in the name of competition, these reforms misfired, deepening the kind of personal relations they sought to obliterate and seeding new mutual ties. Informal networks of pharmaceutical exchange took shape across the city, with pharmacists trading scarce pharmaceuticals in order to each satisfy the needs of their long-term clients, a practice that has continued as COVID challenged supply chains. This paper understands such networks as a “commoning project” (Varvarousis & Kallis, 2017) whereby cooperative pharmaceutical sharing not only bolster the resilience of each pharmacy in the context of precarious supply chains, but also create relationships of interdependence and support between different pharmacies and their pharmacists where before, there was often only familiarity. Interviews with neighborhood pharmacists in Athens and Karditsa, Greece, suggest that although Greece boasts a particularly dense pharmacy economy, the crisis did not deepen competitive relations. Rather, these networks of mutual pharmaceutical exchange suggest a new commons emerged out of a shared commitment, both ethical and economic, to fostering the neighborhood intimacies and the ethos of accommodation that undergird the business of neighborhood pharmacies.

Paper short abstract:

The COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated the sociopolitical divide in the United States, further undermining any sense of a world in common. Drawing on analytic insight from philosopher C.S. Peirce, this talk considers prospects for “Redemption” by examining Reddit’s infamous “Herman Cain Award” community.

Paper long abstract:

Hosted on the Reddit website, the “Herman Cain Award” (HCA) subreddit is an online community that tracks COVID-19-related deaths among COVID-deniers, anti-maskers, and anti-vaxxers who had publicly denied the reality of the virus and/or the effectiveness of public health measures against it. In the fall of 2021, the subreddit gained media exposure and public notoriety for celebrating the deaths of disproportionately conservative and Republican victims of the virus. This notoriety led to the rapid growth of the community—today, with nearly 500,000 members—which is symptomatic of a society deeply divided by crisis. However, the HCA community also includes a sub-category, called the “Redemption Award,” that is conferred to nominees who publicly changed their minds about COVID-19, typically because of near-death encounters with the virus. This talk draws on a broader examination of 68 “Redemption Awards,” focusing on transformative learning experiences as narrated by former COVID-deniers in their encounters with the virus. The phenomenology of encounter with the virus, including its devastating physiological and emotional effects, illustrates learning experiences that simultaneously ignite profound reorientations to the virus, medical practice, and wider community. These narratives are analyzed with reference to C.S. Peirce’s account of “self-consciousness”—as interactionally emerging in the nexus of self, world, and other—and his approach to the politics of science, or the “method of experience” that he counterposes to authoritarian forms of knowledge, that has been neglected in anthropological scholarship.

Paper short abstract:

This presentation will use the concept of a 'crisis common' to describe managed mistrust as a result of collective efforts to ensure security, both by myself and my research participants, during wartime fieldwork in the northeastern margins of Russia.

Paper long abstract:

Violent conflicts reshape pre-existing principles of social organization, fostering an 'affective atmosphere' (Anderson 2009) marked by suspicion and mistrust, even in areas not directly impacted by the conflict. While ethnographers have analyzed mistrust as a stable characteristic of a 'low-trust' context (e.g., Carey 2017, Højer 2019) or as a characteristic of a dynamic conflict context (e.g., Glasius et al. 2018; Macaspac 2019; Malmström 2019; Peinhopf 2022), their focus has predominantly been on its effects rather than the process of managing and negotiating the trust/mistrust boundary.

In this presentation, I will use the concept of a 'crisis common' to describe mutually managed mistrust as a result of collective efforts to ensure security by myself and my research participants in the northeastern margins of Russia. During November and December 2022, amid Russia's full-scale military invasion of Ukraine, I conducted fieldwork in the Magadan region of Russia, an area distant from the frontlines. Nevertheless, the war significantly influenced the public mood, leading my research participants to become suspicious of strangers and fearful of espionage.

As a 'halfie' anthropologist, I shared this mistrust, harboring concerns about potential interrogation by the state security service. I will delve into how my research participants and I navigated this dilemma by engaging with significant others and relying on collective sense-making. By highlighting the idea of managed mistrust, I aim to argue for its emergence as a 'crisis common,' enabling daily life in wartime.