Paper short abstract:

The rise of Hindu nationalism in India has spawned killer squads policing and realigning public conduct in accordance with a Hindu civil order. My analysis will explore the trepidation experienced by small-scale community patrol groups in Mumbai while negotiating this new nationalist terrain.

Paper long abstract:

The rise of Hindu nationalism in India has spawned killer squads responsible for the moral policing of social behavior, and realigning of public conduct in accordance with a Hindu civil order. Spread across the rural and urban landscape of the region, these civil policing groups are called anti-Romeo squads, anti-Love Jihad task teams, and cow vigilantes, and are responsible for a range of violent actions from public shaming of lovers to honour killing of women to lynching of Muslims accused of consuming/purchasing beef. Against this backdrop of aggressive mass policing promoted by a wider Hindu nationalist discourse, my analysis will explore the crisis of identity experienced by small-scale, everyday community patrol groups (anti-theft night patrols, 'slapping aunties', anti-crime neighbourhood uncles), that negotiate the new nationalist terrain with confusion and trepidation. Using Mumbai as my ethnographic landscape, I show how lower class, marginalized urban communities which have 'respectable' monitoring practices to compensate for the lack of state protection in their residential colonies, grapple with the local, national and global rise of the right, the latter having usurped the notion of 'policing the other' under a right-wing discourse. Being increasingly thrust into the periphery of the capitalist progress that is integral to the urban growth of Mumbai, I argue that these surveillance groups often acquiesce to the electoral agendas developed within the realm of powerful populist politics in order to avoid further social vulnerability and urban economic precariousness, which have little to do with ideological commitment to political nationalism.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores personifications of nationhood during the 2014 Scottish independence referendum, focusing on the overused metaphor of marriage - analogy for the union between England and Scotland. I unpack this crude theory of (strained) kin relations to consider the 'state' of 'Britain' today.

Paper long abstract:

'Divorce is an Expensive Business' has been an anti-independence cliché in local Labour Party campaigning literature since 1999, when the Scottish Parliament opened. However, metaphors of marriage, households and persons estranged found fresh resonance during the campaign for the 2014 Scottish independence referendum.

On one hand, 'Better Together' campaigners argued against the break up of Britain, warning that in times of austerity, nations - like married couples - should only contemplate constitutional separation (divorce) if they can be sure of balancing their 'household' budgets on their own - like a newly-single divorcee. Meanwhile, Scottish Nationalists caricatured this logic, claiming it appropriated tough economic times as a misguided rationale for binding unhappy and longsuffering bedfellows together, likening Scotland to the abused spouse in a bad marriage.

Following the referendum, these debates gave way to new talk of persons estranged. Many considered the two-year debate over Scotland's constitutional future divisive and as having fuelled sometimes-bitter splits within families. I argue that the consequences of these divisions are still finding new and unstable forms in the dramatic political shifts that have taken place in subsequent Scottish elections.

Drawing on recent anthropological and sociological scholarship on Britain, nationalism and personhood, I provides an account of the uses (and abuses?) of the overused metaphor of marriage, as an analogy for the union between Scotland and England (with 'Britain' constituting the conjugal 'household'). I unpack this crude, and deceptively superficial, theory of (strained) kin relations to interrogate the shifting state of Britain and 'Britishness' today.

Paper short abstract:

This paper focuses on the ability to master emotional outbursts in a Mongolian political landscape which is widely considered as shadowy and opaque. I will explore how a morality honoring power and vitalistic virtues, referred to as a wolf desire is shaping new forms of political agency in Mongolia

Paper long abstract:

This paper focuses on the ability to master emotional outbursts in a Mongolian political landscape defined by transition and uncertainty. I will explore how aggressive acts called Agsan is affected and shaped by a morality honoring power and vitalistic virtues in Mongolia. Agsan is an emotional act during which a person is said to lose control over their Sülde Hiimori (potency, vitality) and give in to their buun har yum or dev (inner darknesss, bad energy) where, mainly men will give into emotional outbursts either crying or aggressively attack their surroundings. I wish to argue that these aggressive outbursts are not only a question of drunk men being uncontrollably frustrated in a post- socialist setting, but that Agsan is the destructive side of what people would refer to as "choniin husel" (desire of the wolf)' an emotional shadow side everyone possess. A shadow side which also holds a reverse; a creative potential which can be harnessed and used for productive purposes such as doing and acting in a political landscape which is widely considered as shadowy and opaque itself. Politicians who are said to master their shadows are referred to as wolves feared and admired for their ability to use their aggressive power to "eat" everyone who threatens their position in politics and in society.

The question explored is, what does it take to master one's shadow-side and what kind of morality does its mastery entail?

Paper short abstract:

This presentation explores the recent rise of xenophobic sentiment by urban Panamanians towards Colombian and Venezuelan nationals. It argues that Panama's neoliberal regime impels new forms of cultural racism and reorders racial hierarchies within the nation-state.

Paper long abstract:

In 2009, former right-wing president Ricardo Martinelli advanced Panama's global market integration through an 'open door' immigration pledge, inciting regular waves of populist anti-immigration protest throughout Panama City. Based on their everyday experiences with newly arrived Colombian and Venezuelan migrants, Panamanians have begun to piece together 'bricolages of critique' (Kalb 2009) against them in response to growing dispossession and loss of racial privilege within the nation (Hage 2012). At the same time, Panamanians themselves have been attributed with negative cultural traits by foreign employers, the Panamanian Government, and the general public, under structural conditions that set new norms and standards of 'ideal worker citizens'. Neoliberal states premised on ethics of competitiveness and economic potential ultimately therefore place 'downward pressure' upon mostly working class citizens in their attempts to capitalise on global capital flows and service the global proletariat. This paper examines the ways in which shifting neoliberal states fundamentally promulgate shifting and uncertain racial terrains.

Paper short abstract:

Populist protest votes are challenging the centrist projects of liberal democracy. And radical reconfigurations of nationalism and state are redefining personhood. What light can an international conversation shed on crises of advanced capitalism and the politics of the contemporary moment?

Paper long abstract:

The centrist projects of liberal democracy, a long-term ally of multiculturalism and neoliberalism, are struggling in Europe and the US in the face of populist protest. In England and North America, 'left behind communities' of post-industrial capitalism found their voices in votes for Brexit and Trump. Across Europe right-wing, right-of-centre, or fascist movements claim to speak for those abandoned by a vision of progressive society built on austerity measures, fracturing regional geographies, increasingly inequitable service economies, alliances between white middle class, black and minority ethnic aspirations, and gendered liberation movements.

This sense of fracture is not confined to Europe and the US. In India, for example, a right-wing assemblage of anti-Muslim, Hindu nationalist movements threatens to demolish the secular modernity of the past with an anti-liberal, anti-left-wing, anti-establishment cultural nationalism. The gendered dynamics of this conservative mind-set mean women's resistance, and fights for equal access to the competitive opportunities of India's rapidly developing neoliberal capitalism. While in Mongolia, crises of post-socialism have spawned nativist movements of novel kinds. These include the unleashing of 'the wolf spirit', which sees, in the violent subordination of women, the opportunity for the resurgence of masculinity, which young men perceive to be under threat and in crisis.

This paper explores how attempts to reconfigure the projects of nationalism and the state are also projects to do with reconfiguring the very idea of society and the experiential state of being of persons.