Short Abstract

This panel attends to everyday practices that create continuity and regularity, as people seek to “carry on” in the face of rupture and after the demise of the apparent stability and predictability of modern imaginaries, infrastructures and ways of life.

Long Abstract

Much recent anthropology foregrounds crisis and, often in response, creativity. Yet, while life amidst decaying state infrastructures, abandoned development interventions, closed-down industries or ecological destruction can be destabilizing, in the long meantime, people tend to carry on. They continue their lives - repeat daily routines, maintain relationships and assets - trying to endure, keep what is familiar. At times, pursuing continuity takes effort, while at other times refusing to acknowledge change may be the path of least resistance. Carrying on might take the form of mundane habits and regularities, or engrained habitūs, maintaining styles that sustain respectability (e.g. dress, speech and bodily comportment that reference anachronistic status or subjectivity), or repurposing resources and positions (e.g., adapting defunct infrastructures, or exploiting left-behind materials or social networks). At times, such attempts to maintain things as they are/were expose cracks and tension within the present, but they may also reveal what remains important and worth holding on to. This panel asks how people remain committed to conserving and continuing life as it is (was or should be) after both older certainties and more recent modernist assumptions of predictability have “fallen apart”, and in how such everyday routines strive to make life habitable and meaningful, amidst forms of institutional inertia or decay, receding horizons of collective progress and personal prosperity, and unknown futures. Such work of sustaining – as both withstanding change and seeking anchorage in the past – can take diverse, surprising forms, and we encourage participants to explore this space widely.

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