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- Convenor:
-
Lori Allen
(SOAS)
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- Stream:
- Advocacy and Activism
- Sessions:
- Wednesday 16 September, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
This panel seeks to challenge some standard anthropological tropes of resistance and "the local" by considering oppositional politics through different analytical frames. We reconsider notions of sovereignty, fieldwork, and the archives through ethnographic cases in the Middle East and India.
Long Abstract:
A persistent fetishization besets the discipline of anthropology: fieldwork and "the local," (where difference is found) remain at the heart of the anthropological project for many. Alongside this quest for difference in belly-button places, there also remains a desire to identify resistance, usually by small actors in small corners of the world. Although Lila Abu-Lughod and Saba Mahmood have called out this romantic attachment to a liberal notion of freedom,"resistance"—and its ally "agency"—are sought by ethnographers who sit with occupiers, walk with marchers, and proclaim victory in human rights declarations.
This double panel consisting of papers engaged with Turkey, the Middle East, and India seeks to challenge these standard tropes by exploring what else we can learn by considering oppositional politics through different analytical frames, expanded senses of place, and with diverse methods. Rather than lionize resistance, we consider oppositional politics as claims to hegemony, and as demands for political efficacy (that anthropologists should assess in those terms). Rather than finding these hopeful assertions of agency through fieldwork in "local places," we search the archives and other sources for everyday practice and political claims. And rather than celebrate sovereignty in its diminutive forms, we consider how law's definitions of sovereignty and citizenship limit people's demands and curtail political imagination in both its geographic scope and senses of what constitutes an identity.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Wednesday 16 September, 2020, -Paper short abstract:
Troubling clear distinctions revenge and oppositional politics, between agency and haunting, this paper engages in a speculative reading of the Tehlirian trial as an archive that holds in tension genocide recognition, legal definitions of sovereignty, and moral and political testimony.
Paper long abstract:
Tehlirian, whose family had perished in the Armenian Genocide in 1915, was tried in a Berlin court in 1921 for killing Talaat, Ottoman official and architect of the genocide. The verdict that led to Tehlirian's acquittal was based on expert testimony that diagnosed his condition as "psychological epilepsy," marked by recurrent visions of his dead mother who summoned him to avenge the family. Although the German court disavowed any judgement on the state-led mass murder of Ottoman Armenians, the trial turned into an international platform for exposing genocidal violence. But if Tehlirian was perceived by Hannah Arendt as a righteous avenger, he would also subsequently be revealed as an assassin appointed by the Armenian Revolutionary Federation, and a "false" witness who had not in fact seen the killings first hand.
Complicating clear-cut distinctions between between personal lie and collective truth, revenge and oppositional politics, agency and haunting, the medical discourse of insanity and the legal discourse of intentionality, this paper engages in a speculative reading of the Tehlirian trial as a transnational archive that holds in tension genocide recognition, legal definitions of sovereignty, and moral and political testimony. I do so by taking seriously the ghost as a presence in the courtroom. Attending to the epistemological, political and legal work the ghost of Tehlirian's mother did throughout the trial troubles romanticized notions of resistance, and beckons us towards a new political imagination at the fraught intersections of personal suffering and collective justice, melancholy and revenge, haunting and political strategy.
Paper short abstract:
I consider the everyday politics and discursive resources of the rural the Hirak protests in Central Jordan, suggesting the ways they are conflated into general and regionalised discourses of protest are often misleading, and might better be approached through an examination of moral economy.
Paper long abstract:
This paper considers the discursive recourses and conditions of possibility for the Dhiban Hirak in the Madaba region of Jordan, where I conducted my doctoral fieldwork. This largely rural and East-Banker dominated movement of loosely-connected labour unions and activists surprised many academic and policy commentators by emerging from the supposedly 'tribal' and loyalist regime heartland in 2011, challenging but self-consciously partaking in generalised narratives of an 'Arab Spring'. Since then, the Dhiban Hirak, largely made up of young unemployed Bani Hamida Bedouin, has been at the forefront of land disputes and unrest. I trace the intersection of Hirak with broader opposition politics, examining the use of repurposed and reimagined notions of a tribal Bedouin past, particularly through talk of broken social contracts (especially concerning land), corruption and the nature of traditional shaykhly authority, patronage, and hierarchy that I term representational sovereignty. I suggest that the heuristic concept of moral economy has value here, connecting experiential accounts of protest, often analysed in the anthological literature through affective concepts of waithood and stuckedness, with wider scales of analyses focused on political economy and 'the global'. By focusing ethnographically on the language of consumption (interlocutors described at times the state as 'eating' and 'bleeding' its subjects, analytical focus can be gained on the way norms and values of hierarchy, patronage and shared reputation are reproduced and contested in the everyday politics of protestors. This can serve as a corrective to much recent anthropology of protest, in and beyond the region.
Paper short abstract:
The study of the socio-spatial representations of the city of Setif (highlands of eastern Algeria) based on a socio-cognitive approach reveals a spatial french colonization strategy. It's an edifying example of the superposition of a traditional mental map on a modern physical structure.
Paper long abstract:
The city presents as a mosaic where old and new meet, engaged in a permanent conflict between an urban past "city of the other" and this incessant need to renew itself. In its civilizing mission, France applied a spatial colonization strategy by opposing the traditional indigenous cultural model based on the principle of introversion to an imported, imposed model which is the extraversion. Some authors speak, moreover, of "colonial rap". The natives have been transposed into a new space-time framework in order to disorient them. This will later generate ambiguous territory practices. Like the city of Sétif (highlands of eastern Algeria), where the superposition of a traditional mental map on a modern physical structure. A study of the socio-spatial representations of Sétif based on a socio-cognitive approach allows to reveal the colonial territories, on which urban identities are built today. These same urban identities which refer to constitutive systems of representations of an exogenous cultural system. The place of the fountain "ain el fouara" is an edifying example of the superposition of these two models: The first one is the traditionnal indigenous one (el Attik mosque).The second one is the new imported modern model (the place of the representation of the colonizing power : the place of fountain « aîn el fouara). There is an antithetical dialogue on the same territory between spirituality (place of cult) and sensuality ( naked nymph statue). Sometimes "the city of the other", the colonial city, remains today in the collective memory a privileged territory.
Paper short abstract:
How the new security clearance techniques in Turkey are different from old disciplinary techniques and whether they point to a different imagination of state-citizens relationship. The exclusionary regime of citizenship reduces people to 'disposable' subjects who are deprived of their rights.
Paper long abstract:
Extensive security demands and practices triggered new techno-biological control and surveillance techniques over ordinary citizens for decades around the world. Security vetting nearly standardised for immigrants, visa applicants, or staff for military establishments or government is now used in USA, China, European countries and also many parts of the world. In Turkey, additional security clearances and archival background checks carried out by the Turkish National Intelligence Service and/or the Security General Directorate became a requirement for public-sector and private sector hiring, particularly at private hospitals and universities after the coup attempt of July 2016. Security vetting under the emergency law after the coup attempt led to 250,000 people - considered as a threat to the national sovereignty of Turkish state - to be sacked with a government decree and without right to appeal. The same security vetting limited citizenship rights of more than 1,500,000 individuals only for being family members of these people dismissed from their jobs. How the new security clearance techniques are different from old disciplinary techniques and whether they point to a categorically different imagination of state-citizens relationship. The exclusionary regime of citizenship reduces targeted people to 'disposable' subjects who are deprived over the longue durée of the opportunity to reclaim their social, economic, and political rights, even after they have been acquitted or the state of emergency lifted.