Paper short abstract:

What are the technologies of Utopia? How does the state navigate between history (including those of its reproductive technologies) and the utopian, even impossible futures that lie always beyond its grasp? This speculative work explores these questions through three cartographic portfolios.

Paper long abstract:

This work explores "the island" as a figure for cognizing states of (spatial) nonbeing. Historians of cartography have shown how, beginning in the 13th century, islands accorded the graphic conventions for visualizing that crucial feature of the state, the territory (Steinberg 2005). The social life of cartographic islands can be extended from the Medieval Islamic world—where the mapping of nonexistent islands indicated a place's richness—to the 'Utopia' of Thomas More (1515), which collapsed island, city, and state into a single nonexistent (perhaps satirical) entity that proved fertile for mapmakers and political theorists, and beyond: habits of visualizing islands motivated 20th century German "language island" research, where maps "revealed" German speakers stranded "in a sea of foreign language and culture" (Braun 2016, Höfler 1955).

Drawing inspiration from Turnbull's 1989 'Maps are Territories: Science is an Atlas,' the present work comprises three cartographic portfolios "conceived and structured not as a linear verbal narrative[,] but as a progression of...exhibits [that] exercise the [viewer's] skills of visualization and visual analysis" (v): (1) Mapping Riches, Insularity, and Comprehensibility; (2) Suggestive Cartography and the Linguistic Image of Empire; and (3) Fixing Master-Planned Futures. Through these portfolios, I explore the following questions: what are the technologies through which territory, space, and (non-)place are visualized? How does the state navigate between and relate to the histories of its means of visual-technological reproduction and the creative production of ideal, not-yet-existent, even impossible futures (or pasts) that lie always beyond its grasp?

Paper short abstract:

Through a Scandinavian lens, this paper will explore the frictions beyond a state of non-being of asylum-seekers not belonging to welfare Denmark and the constant presence of the welfare state through interactions in the lived space at an asylum centre for 'unaccompanied asylum-seeking minors'.

Paper long abstract:

Asylum-seekers are classified as stateless, illegal or migrants; all these categories have an embedded ideology of being in a state of not belonging to a nation-state. When asylum-seekers arrive in welfare Denmark, the situation shifts to one of almost absolute surveillance, more so for those arriving under age and without their parents, those in the legal category of the 'unaccompanied asylum-seeking minor'. This paper will address from an ethnographic stand how young refugees experience living in a liminal place within the framework of a welfare state. What tensions are created between the uncertainty of a future in Denmark and a highly regulated state where 'what they eat', 'how they behave', or 'how they clean their room' is under surveillance? How does a shared space with others in the same category affect the sense of belonging and identity of young asylum-seekers in Denmark?

Paper short abstract:

This paper examines citizenship for sale in Southern Europe, using interview data from Russian and Chinese citizenship investors who buy property in Spain in order to gain citizenship and welfare state benefits.

Paper long abstract:

This paper examines how, in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, Spain has sought to forge new economic connections with Asia as relations with EU core countries sour. One means of solidifying this new geopolitical relationship is through a national program called 'golden visas' that offers EU visas linked to purchasing second homes. This strategy of incentivized investment through visas, and eventual citizenship, is becoming popular in Southern European countries with housing gluts, sovereign debt, austerity measures, and aging populations. It also threatens to undermine basic concepts of citizenship and fair migration practices. In this paper, drawing from interviews and ethnographic fieldwork with potential property purchasers from non-EU countries (predominantly Russia and China), I show that those seeking visas are not only motivated by political conditions in their home countries and investment opportunities, but they also are 'buying into' EU welfare states. Many home-purchasers see their new cities not as a chosen community but as a means to cheaply access welfare state services unavailable in their home countries and they make longsighted geopolitical predictions through the purchasing of homes and the visas that come with them.

Paper short abstract:

What traces of the State are left on economic systems developed to bring financial products to the nation's poor? I redirect the focus on processes and categories through which States operate to engage instead with the dynamics of anticipation and hope that underwrite specific cultures of cover.

Paper long abstract:

In 2015 the Central Bank of Paraguay (BCP), in conjunction state-led social welfare programs, rolled out a nationwide "financial inclusion" initiative. The BCP capitalised private ventures that sought to bring financial products and services to the nation's poor. At the heart of this initiative is insurance: everyday risks to health, life, property, and work, recast as matters of market-based actuarial accounting.

Anthropologists in the region have approached the question of humans at risk from the vantage of the rights of urban populations challenged by the wider biopolitical imperative to protect life (Biehl 2013; Goldstein 2012). However, ethnographic approaches that focus on the processes and categories through which States operate have not yet engaged with the dynamics of anticipation and hope that underwrite specific cultures of cover. Building on the themes of this panel, this paper asks what 'states of being' beyond the biopolitical might dispose people to buy into new financial regimes, including insurance cover? Is the "economization of life" (Murphy 2017) always and inevitably a project of legibility to the State?

This project also experiments with alternative ways to engage with the relentless drive towards legibility at the heart of actuarial sciences. I will present the beginning phases of my collaborative graphic non-fiction project (i.e. comic) that seeks forms of ethnographic representation for "states beyond States."

Paper short abstract:

Boxing in Ghana is both nationalised and ethnicized, placing boxers at once beyond and within the nation state. The tensions inherent to Ghana's post-colonial state between ethnic distinctions and the unitary nation are manifest in the sport. This paper explores how the boxing community negotiate and embody these tensions in training and the ring.

Paper long abstract:

Boxing in Ghana is implicated in multiple state-making projects, at once both strongly associated with the Ga ethnic group of central Accra, and deployed in Ghanaian nationalist discourse.

Accra is the political and economic hub of Ghana, fields recently dominated by ethnic groups from outside Accra. This has left Ga people feeling marginalised within a city which is notionally theirs. This marginality is manifest in the (often violent) contestation and disruption of "traditional" Ga practices across the city.

Boxing, one such “traditional” Ga practice, is simultaneously deployed in articulations of the Ga state as distinct from the Ghanaian state, yet is also part of the Ghanaian state-making project. Building on ethnographic fieldwork with the Accra boxing community, I analyse how boxers and coaches simultaneously embody an association with Ga ethnicity, and actively perform narratives of the nation-state in a globally connected industry. I take the spectacle of public bouts, and boxers' regimented training regimes as different yet interconnected sites of state-subject formation. I argue that Ga identity both constitutes part of the Ghanaian state, and also articulates a sense of difference to that state. Bodily associations with Ga ethnicity in the city speak to enduring preoccupations with the immediacy of modes of living, and simultaneously constitute claims to inclusion in a life beyond the state, as part of a globally connected industry. This paper explores the complexly layered and dynamic nature of state-subject relationships by asking how the boxing community is reflexively involved in multiple, and often conflicting, state-making processes.

Paper short abstract:

For Levinas, the 'secrecy of subjectivity' is a foundation of both knowledge and morality, preceding states of cultural classification. This talk suggests a solution to Levinas's challenge: a cosmopolitan anthropology writing the individual life imaginatively and the human species systematically.

Paper long abstract:

The philosophy of Levinas poses a challenge to anthropology. For Levinas, the 'secrecy of subjectivity', the absolute incomprehensibility of one individual to another, is the fundamental fact of human being. It is also the foundation of any moral society, acknowledging the irreducible mystery and integrity of individuality as preceding any claim to knowledge, any state of culturo-symbolic construction. This talk briefly outlines some of the major tenets in a Levinasian metaphysic and traces their biographical origin in Levinas's experience of the Holocaust, and their intellectual origin in a reading of the Old Testament where Abraham answers 'Here I am' to a divine presence of which he has no possible experience. According to Levinas, each owes to the human Other the same 'inspired' response as to the incomprehensibility of divinity. The talk moots a passable solution to the Levinasian challenge: a cosmopolitan anthropology that looks to write the individual life _imaginatively_ while writing the human species _systematically_.

Paper short abstract:

This paper is an enquiry into displacement and placemaking at a time of shifting governance. It tracks the creative and energetic moves of a woman from Central Australia as she attempts to navigate the new terms of her metropolitan life.

Paper long abstract:

When the state in relatively benevolent mode is replaced by a more coercive governance regime, what responses are available to governed subjects? One option is to leave the places where hard governance takes hold, acting on the state’s own promise that better life prospects might be found elsewhere. This paper is an ethnographic enquiry into a contemporary situation of displacement at a time when the Australian federal government is shifting the terms of its engagement with Aboriginal people of small remote towns. It tracks the creative and energetic moves of a highly competent Aboriginal woman from Central Australia as she attempts to navigate the new terms of her metropolitan life. Existential crisis and excruciating frustration are common, as possibilities for transformation meet the realities of protracted unemployment, poverty and punitive welfare regimes. In the absence of extended kin and associated place-based forms of ontological anchorage, negotiating the shifting terms of state surveillance is a high stakes game. Travelling with Nungarrayi we glimpse subtle differences and gruelling continuities experienced by Aboriginal people as they move between differently governed jurisdictions. Oscillating between the crushing state of limbo and the euphoric promise of new found freedoms; between interactions with case workers who act like state agents and those who do not; between the coercive capture of paperwork and the unopened letters addressed to persons long since moved on, we glimpse differently ordered forms of value, ways of relating to places and splinters of hope for a differently ordered future.