Short Abstract

This panel explores how everyday violence (Das 2013) takes shape within economies of care and neglect and through the moral and material infrastructures that sustain and erode social worlds. We invite papers that trace how violence folds into care and how people make sense of its slow demands.

Long Abstract

In polarised worlds, violence does not only erupt in spectacular acts of conflict: it seeps through the quieter logics of abandonment, extraction, and excess that contour everyday life. This panel explores how everyday violence (Das 2013) takes shape within economies of care and neglect and through the moral and material infrastructures that sustain, and sometimes erode, social worlds. Everyday violence surfaces in gestures of maintenance and bureaucratic procedure, in moments of endurance and improvisation, and as people navigate uneven terrains of care and responsibility. Violence is not always visible: it hides in the work of keeping things going, in the distribution of care, and in the exhaustion of those who tend to what is left behind.

We invite ethnographic contributions that trace how violence becomes ordinary, how it folds into care, and how people make sense of its slow demands. How do acts of repair or attention intertwine with exclusion or depletion? What does it mean to study violence not as rupture but as rhythm, a way of inhabiting worlds structured by asymmetry and fatigue, yet still animated by fragile human and more-than-human attachments?

By attending to the ordinary as a site where both destruction and endurance take shape, this panel asks what possibilities anthropology might open by revealing the generative and corrosive potentials of violence. How might ethnographic attention to the slow, the residual and the entangled help us think otherwise about the possibilities of enduring within an increasingly fractured yet still shared world?

This Panel has 6 pending paper proposals.
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