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Paper short abstract:

The article analyses the memories and prefigurations of multiple (in-)justices among left-wing agents of 1990s generation in Georgia. Contributing to bottom-up theorizing among ordinary agents, it calls for a revitalization of the anthropological turn in the transitional justice scholarship.

Paper long abstract:

This article analyses the memories and prefigurations of multiple (in-)justices among left-wing agents belonging to the 1990s generation in Georgia. Drawing on a combined methodological framework of discourse theory and critique as social practice, it utilizes ethnographic conversation data (n=20). The empirical material suggests that the category ideology is suitable to structure justice interpretations of past, present and future. Furthermore, the paper showcases that the concepts of spirit, ghost and demon can serve as metaphors for the conceptualization of interlocutors’ transmitted (in-)justice memories about the Soviet Union — that is a symbiotic-affirmative, a symbiotic-negative and an antagonistic relation — and allow to identify thematic and ideological resonance between these distant memories (past), memorialized injustices during post-Soviet politics (present) and imagined visions of justice (future). Contributing to scholarship on bottom-up theorizing among ordinary, critical agents, the article calls for a revitalization of the anthropological turn (Hinton 2011) in the transitional/transformative justice scholarship.

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The paper examines strategies that the US government has employed to address the opioid epidemic: a 70-year old “war on drugs” and new “harm reduction” strategy and how they fit into the “dominant but dead” neoliberal context as well as the growing emotional upheaval within the American nation.

Paper long abstract:

The paper examines how the supposedly “dead” neoliberalism still dominates the politics of the United States, where an opioid epidemic has been decimating the working-age population for about 25 years now. Around the year 2000 Big Pharma caused numerous people to become addicted to supposedly non-addictive yet extremely powerful opioid painkillers. Then users briefly switched to heroin but the real calamity came in 2013 with the introduction of fentanyl to black market economy. The state’s response was to further expand on the “war on drugs” – a 70-year old approach that has failed remarkably bringing no reduction in drug trafficking but an unprecedented raise in prison population. When Joe Biden became president the strategy change to “harm reduction”, i.e. providing help, medical attention and treatment to people with drug dependency problem. Driven by borderline intense emotions, those affected by the crisis both personally or communally created numerous social movements, most of which are led by family members of those deceased of opioid overdose. They focus either on supporting others who mourn a death of a loved one or influencing lawmakers to either introduce harsher sentences for drug offences or to further “harm reduction” services. Within the American neoliberal system stakes, including those financial ones, are high for each party and each constituency. The result of November presidential election is going to determine which strategy the US is going to employ in dealing with the epidemic that is now a leading cause of death for citizens under the age of 45.

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The paper examines local struggles for hegemony in the context of 'green transitions' in Central Germany. It shows how the strategies employed by mobility transition actors also reinforce neoliberal modes of governance.

Paper long abstract:

This paper adopts a Gramscian perspective to examine local political processes in the Saalekreis in Saxony- Anhalt around the aim of decarbonizing (passenger) mobility and shifting it towards cycling and the use of public transport.

The Saalekreis aims to become a role model for a successful industrial transformation and a sustainable society, which makes it a worthwhile example to explore the proclaimed 'sustainability transition'. Since the processes are heavily influenced by political guiding principles and initiatives from ‘above’, I use the concept of hegemony (Gramsci 1971) to examine the socio-cultural struggles around local future making. On the basis of my qualitative data collected through ethnographic field research, I show how hegemony, in the sense of creating cultural leadership for the ‘transformation, is organized locally. I thereby focus on how a model project for strengthening public transport advances particular sets of meanings through building alliances, having specific interests able to gain recognition and using certain knowledges, expertise and framings.

I suggest that in the material context of fierce competition for financial resources the attempts to shift mobility are integrated into hopes of re-industrialization, economic development and technological progress through specific hegemonic practices, which adhere to neoliberal techniques of governance. I thus argue that organizing consent for the transformation goes along with reinforcing neoliberal modes of governing.

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In 2023 a squatting enabled the opening of a center for (migrantized) homeless people in Frankfurt (Main). After a decade of struggle, the grassroots initiative Project Shelter found itself negotiating with city officials – and amid current contestations of the ‘Social’.

Paper long abstract:

In this contribution, I present observations and insights from my PhD research with the grassroots initiative Project Shelter in Frankfurt (Main), of which I have also been a member for many years. The group has organized accommodations and support for homeless migrantized people for almost a decade. After several unsuccessful attempts to open a self-organized center for migrants by squatting vacant buildings, Project Shelter succeeded in 2023 as part of a coalition with the solidarity kitchen ‘ada kantine’ and the collective ‘Freiräume statt Glaspaläste’ (‘autonomous spaces instead of glass palaces’).

Surprisingly, city officials not only tolerated this new squat, but actively mediated between activists and the building owners. When the owners eventually decided to demolish the building, a city politician found an alternative house and financially supported the move and renovations through their department. Although the new building (so far) is only temporary until the end of 2024, this marks a definite turning point in the relationship between city officials and the grassroots initiatives involved.

Through collective struggle, homeless migrantized people seem to have shifted from objects of exclusion to objects of local 'welfare', presenting Project Shelter with new constraints and modes of control – but also opportunities for subversion and coalition building. Using the concept of social (state) regimes at the intersection of border regime analysis (Hess) and critical research on the social state (van Dyk/Haubner), this paper explores how the crisis of neoliberalism unfolds on the ground as the simultaneous collapse and re-making of social structures.

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This paper discusses the political condition of the present by analysing the imagination of the future. Based on an ethnography of the Portuguese education system, it explores the multiple spatio-temporalites that political anthropology must consider while reflecting upon the “current interregnum”.

Paper long abstract:

This paper reflects upon the political-economic conditions of the present by analysing how they impact the imagination of the future. My research is based on an ethnography developed in the Portuguese education system. In the Portuguese context, multiple crises converge in the collective experience of an uncanny present (Bryant, 2016), awakening and re-assembling multiple pasts and futures. We take educational policies as a privileged locus for investigating how different agents strive to answer this “current interregnum”. In 2017, the Portuguese Ministry of Education proposed a new political vision for the future based on the “Student’s profile by the end of compulsory education”. But this specific vision is challenged by the diverse perspectives of students, teachers, educational agents and communities, by their day-to-day efforts in producing futural orientations (Bryant & Knight, 2019) capable of overcoming a desolated present. These dialogues, but mostly the misunderstandings the ethnography encountered, create new understandings of citizenship, new spaces and times for agency, and new political identities and affinities. From hegemonic discourses to local practices, the negotiation between powers and agents produces an array of interrelated liminal spaces where each agent seeks to domesticate change. In these in-betweens, politics and the political are profoundly reconfigured. Considering all these processes, we inquire how the negotiation of a future through schooling produces new political responses, as hegemonic as emancipatory. This paper argues that a political anthropology of the present must consider the multiple spatio-temporalities that emerge, and are forged, in the contemporary relations between subjects and institutions.

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This paper discusses the ambiguities in political representation by focusing on the informal practices, face-to-face relations, and subjective knowledge that shapes local politics, inquiring about the intertwinement of hegemonic and anti-hegemonic spaces, practices, and discourses.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores political representation and politics in their ambiguities, reflecting upon how an anthropological approach to local politics can reveal a field of practices and discourses that challenges a view of political ideologies and top-down state strategies as cohesive forces. Inquiring how the hegemonic notions of national and cultural belonging, as well as otherness, operate in local politics, we focus on the ambiguous subjective ways local politicians mobilize, perceive and act upon the concepts of “race”, ethnicity and nation vis-à-vis political party frameworks and bureaucratic procedures. It's based on an ongoing ethnography about Portuguese political parties’ views on immigration and racial and ethnic discrimination in articulation with the legal and symbolic boundaries of national belonging. At the local level, we focus on the political life of Loures, a multicultural town in the Lisbon district, where we follow the practices of politicians and social technicians involved in the negotiation of the meanings and means of “inclusive integration” of racialized or/and migrant populations.

We find local politicians’ actions often sustained on informal practices, face-to-face relations, and subjective knowledge, leading to complex relations between racialized populations and ethnically discriminated groups and political representatives. While creating alternative spaces of mobilization and participation in the face of the state's inadequacies in guaranteeing certain rights and opaque bureaucracies, their political gains and emancipatory potential remain uncertain. We thus inquire about the intertwinement of hegemonic and anti-hegemonic strategies within the political volatility that emerges from the overlap of subjective relations and political representation concerning marginalized populations.

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The paper outlines an anthropological approach to the concept of interregnum.

Paper long abstract:

A political anthropology of the present faces a situation when the neoliberal hegemony has declined but no alternative hegemony is taking shape. Based on his experiences in 1920s Italy, Antonio Gramsci has called such an in-between period “interregnum”. The paper seeks to align his description with anthropological concepts developed to study conditions of political turmoil, social disintegration, and individual insecurity. Support for democratic procedures had already been undermined by neoliberal depoliticization; now that neoliberalism is still “dominant but dead” (Gavin Smith), the economic realities of increasing class division has further delegitimized democracy as an elite project.

Among the “morbid symptoms” generated by the interregnum, according to Gramsci, the rise of an authoritarian counterpolitics is probably the most striking. For this reason, the paper sketches the tasks and pitfalls of a political anthropology of the present with regard to the rise of fascism in Germany.