Click the star to add/remove an item to/from your individual schedule.
You need to be logged in to avail of this functionality.
Log in
- Convenors:
-
Denis O'Hearn
(Binghamton University-SUNY)
Andrej Grubacic (California Institute of Integral Studies)
- Stream:
- Migration/Borders
- Location:
- D2
Short Abstract:
This panel includes case studies of groups who have self-organized outside of state structures and the accumulation regimes of capitalism. Possible examples include pirates, maroons, Cossacks, Zapatistas, shack-dwellers, urban communities, political prisoners.
Long Abstract:
From the earliest proto-states, as James Scott has shown, groups of people attempted to escape from central control and to establish self-governed communities. As new regions were incorporated into the emerging capitalist world-system, the problem was not simply how to escape states but also how to escape capitalist relations and processes of accumulation that were bundled up with state control.
Historical examples of escape include Cossacks, pirates, and maroons; contemporary examples include Zapatistas in Mexico and even political prisoners in Ireland and elsewhere. Structural escape has been identified in urban communities in Kingston, Jamaica and on the outskirts of large South American cities. Thus, "exilic spaces and practices" are made by people who are expelled from or voluntarily leave the spaces and/or processes of world capitalism.
Our research questions include: How do they try to accomplish this? Who do they identify as "the enemy"? Do they practice mutual aid and solidarity in communities or organize mainly on a household basis? Are there rules of entry and exit? How are their practices located with respect to nation-states, the interstate system, and structures of world capitalist accumulation including property regimes? What kinds of bargains do exiles make with states and how does this affect their ability to sustain autonomy? Finally, how are outcomes affected by rhythms and developments of the capitalist world-system, including economic cycles, processes of incorporation and peripheralization, changing hegemony, the rise of new leading sectors and world-wide divisions of labor, and the changing presence and experiences of anti-systemic movements?
Accepted papers:
Session 1Denis O'Hearn (Binghamton University-SUNY)
Paper short abstract:
Prisoners in many countries are isolated to separate them from each other. Nonetheless, they often control prison spaces and develop practices that are oral, communal, and based on mutual aid. This paper examines such communities/practices and compares them to other kinds of exilic communities.
Paper long abstract:
Prisoners in many countries such as the US and Turkey are placed in isolation to separate them from each other. Nonetheless, they often take control of prison spaces and develop practices that are oral, communal, and based on mutual aid. This paper examines such communities/practices and compares them to other kinds of exilic communities. It examines how prisoners create coalitions or "loyalty bargains" to obtain resources that help them build and maintain community. It compares them with other historical instances of exile including Cossacks, Zapatistas, and others.
Andrej Grubacic (California Institute of Integral Studies)
Paper short abstract:
This paper is concerned with the relationship between exilic practices and self-managed system in socialist Yugoslavia. Was socialist Yugoslavia an exilic space?
Paper long abstract:
Exilic spaces can be defined as those areas of social and economic life where people and groups attempt to escape from capitalist economic processes, whether by territorial escape or by attempting to build structures that are autonomous of capitalist processes of accumulation and social control. The question that i would like to address in my paper concerns the nature of the relationship between exile and the state space of socialist Yugoslavia. Would it be possible, and accurate, to analyze Yugoslav self-management in the context of exilic practices? And, if so, were these practices hierarchical or cooperative?
Agnes Horvath
Paper short abstract:
Taking the title by Galbraith as a starting point we are working on an analysis of civilizations, proposing to speak about some of the new ways in which comparative civilizational analysis and political anthropological have recently been interacting.
Paper long abstract:
The term innocent fraud is coined by John Kenneth Galbraith, concerning the impersonal role of market forces. It is this corporate management of a functional anonymity that is the target of the 'Rebel', whose sole purpose is to retain his own entity and virtuous integrity, in winning his own life. In particular, we propose to discuss the role of Charisma and Rebel, as it is portrayed in respective works by Max Weber and Albert Camus, as a way of turning away from depersonalization, which - no matter how innocent it is - is always a fraud.
Readings:
John Kenneth Galbraith, The Economics of Innocent Fraud: Truth for Our Time, Houghton Mifflin, 2004.
Albert Camus, The Rebel/ L'Homme révolté/ A lázadó ember
Agnes Horvath, Modernity and Charisma, Palgrave, 2013
Arpad Szakolczai, Comedy and the Public Sphere, Routledge, 2013
Ben Bowles (SOAS)
Paper short abstract:
Itinerant boat dwellers in England are liminal to, and partially separated from, both capitalism and the British state. This is a result of their dwelling choice, a deliberate move to the margins of sedentary society.
Paper long abstract:
The itinerant boat dwellers (Boaters) of South East England have an unusual relationship with capitalism and the state; a relationship marked by a partial detachment from the processes which dominate the lives of their sedentary neighbours. They tend to resist capitalist consumption and the "hoarding" of wealth, particularly consumer valuables, and to subvert the cash economy by exchanging gifts, working for favours, trading, bartering, and operating cash-in-hand practices. Boaters' business enterprises aimed at other Boaters are not thought of as exploitative; as a participant explained to me "A coal boat [servicing the fuel needs of the waterways] isn't a capitalist enterprise, it is an expression of the community's need for coal!" Yet the Boaters do enter into the capitalist economy- most have jobs, utilise local shops and pay taxes. Similarly, Boaters are marginal to the state, often living without a postcode and beyond the legible (Scott, 1998) reach of the centralised bureaucracy (although the Boaters are not invisible or beyond the margins of the state and can make use of or be sought out by the police, health workers and other agents of governance). This paper interrogates the nature of this marginality or partial separation and describes how the Boaters seek to subvert capitalist and state systems both in rhetoric and in reality. It is argued that Boaters mark themselves out as deliberately liminal citizens, metaphorically betwixt and between the utopian freedom of the free-flowing water and the solidity of the sedentary, state-form, bankside.
Aet Annist (University of Tartu and Tallinn University)
Paper short abstract:
Focusing on the morality of migration, I will look at two waves of recent migration from Estonia, pointing out the voluntary and involuntary dimensions of such mobilities and the value of migration research in understanding the various ways capitalism can be challenged and rejected – or unintentionally reinforced.
Paper long abstract:
My presentation will be focussing on the morality of migration. I will frame my fieldwork since 2012 amongst Estonian migrants to the UK within a broader taxonomy of morality and mobility. This bridges two waves of recent migration and points out the surprising similarities of and differences between those deported to Siberia or escaping the Soviet terror on boats in 1940s and those self-deporting or escaping the relative lack of wealth on bolstered seats of passenger planes since 1990s. Shaking up such emotionally charged divisions enables a discussion on the moral dimensions of migration throughout the era of nationally bound identity and identity-cushioned nation states. Within such frameworks, new relations between those who are mobile and who remain static are formed, contributing to class formation regionally, nationally and globally. Have such migrants and their diasporic efforts contributed to the undermining of the capitalist nation states or have they reinforced its central tenets? What are the obedient and rebellious dimensions of migration? Can migration and diaspora research tell us anything about rejecting capitalism?