Paper short abstract:

I investigate ethnographically how Serbian veterans of the post-Yugoslav wars framed their predicaments through narratives about multiple lacks and losses, as well as how they used them as a form of critique of the state policy of neglect and tools in their own political subjectivation.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper I investigate ethnographically how Serbian veterans of the post-Yugoslav wars framed their predicaments through narratives about multiple lacks and losses. I am particularly interested in the ways in which veterans mobilised their sense of (ab)normality and (lack of) direction to voice their discontent with what they perceived as a deliberate policy of state neglect. Their discontent was typically framed in reference to continued refusals by the Serbian political elites to formally acknowledge their direct involvement in the wars, instead referring to them as 'armed actions' and 'military maneuvers', as well as the disorienting social and political-economic context of their 'democratizing' state and society. The absence of a sustained effort to deal with the effects of the unpopular lost wars conditioned the emergence of new ways of knowing and acting so that veterans' associations started to flirt with civil sector organizations that were in the past typically regarded as belonging to the opposite side of the political-ideological continuum. Therefore, at the same time as the Serbian state appeared unable and/or unwilling to provide for war veterans and their families, the latter became an object of interest to a range of new stakeholders. Using these insights, I will place narratives about multiple lacks and losses within the existing body of knowledge of the anthropology of hope and displacement, as well as seek new routes to account for their uses in the emerging processes of veterans' political subjectivation.

Paper short abstract:

The paper addresses hopeful narratives and visions of Europe and EU within Albanian discourses. It questions whether people's hope for a better future is merely a consequence of their passivity, which embraces the waiting or is it an active stance which facilitates action and builds expectations.

Paper long abstract:

'E duam Shqipërinë si Europa' (I want Albania to be like Europe) was the sentence often heard in the media, political discourse and daily talk of Albanian people after the fall of the communist regime in 1991. Nowadays, when more than two decades have passed from that event, the term Europe as an idea and a place is still very present in peoples' daily conversations. The paper addresses hopeful narratives and visions of Europe and EU within Albanian discourses since the collapse of the communist regime, seeing them as imperatives of modernity and wellbeing. It questions how people replace their feelings of uncertainty with hope as a 'method of knowledge' (Miyazaki 2004) through which they envision their future. Their waiting for accession to the EU could be defined as an indefinite position which gives them feelings of hope (shpresa) and generates belief (besa) for a better future. By addressing what Navaro-Yashin (2003) posits as 'sensing the political' this paper will seek to understand the temporality which is shaped within the expectations and possibilities of articulation and enactment of hope for the future. Here I am particularly interested in how people generate the meanings of political, the state (shteti) and state-making. The question presenting itself here is whether their hope for a better future is merely a consequence of their passivity, which instead of embracing action embraces the waiting (pritje) or is it an active stance which in fact facilitates their action and builds their expectations (pritshmeri).

Paper short abstract:

This paper examines dystopian as opposed to utopian narratives, reflecting the dominance of dystopian narratives in contemporary society and its cultural artefacts.

Paper long abstract:

Influential utopic visions confronted prevailing social, economic, political and religious realities all throughout the 20th century (Mumford). Although these utopias were often considered naive in their demands they still represented a possibility of imagining different and better worlds allowing various social groups an opportunity to transcend their social and cultural limitations and endure hopelessness of their everyday life. The Spirit of Utopia provided a glimmer of hope in the guise of an opportunity of expressing resistance towards unsatisfactory social conditions (Bloch). However, the omnipresent rationalisation and prevailing utilitarianism shifted the 20th and 21st century towards dystopian narratives as an antithesis to great utopian narratives of the past centuries. These dystopian narratives omit the principal of hope, negate the possibility of positive social change and develop various dark scenarios for the upcoming future. These narratives are reflected in the recent uptick in dystopian films which seems even more urgent and more extreme than it has in the past. Although dreamlike at first glance utopias are realistically based, they provide a not merely ideological but also practical outlet for thorough societal changes. Societies that are incapable of creating their own utopias are headed towards decline and sclerosis (Cioran). This paper examines the following questions: Why have dystopian narratives in recent decades prevailed over utopian narratives? Do we as a society need to re-find our utopias? What is the relation between the concepts of utopia and dystopia and how does our understanding of these concepts influence our capacity for social change?

Paper short abstract:

This paper analyses the changing role of hope in the narratives of modernization and of apocalypse, focusing thereby on the political potential for subversion.

Paper long abstract:

Many ideological and political projects have been fuelled by the apocalyptic narrative of doom for the dominators and hope for the oppressed. The Revelation of St. John the Divine was, in the time of Roman persecution of Christians, a 'countercultural code for dissent' (Keller 2005). The same narrative matrix shaped also the projects that did not explicitly rely on the discourse of apocalypse (e.g. the Jacobins as the Elect (Sickinger 2004), the Nazi movement (Waite 1993), the Russian Revolution, the Great Depression, the Cold War, 'Y2K' issue and the feared Mayan end of the world in 2012). In order to demystify the narrative underlying many fears and social worries (overpopulation, eco-disasters, rapid technological changes), and to explain increased popularity of utopias and dystopias, created in the face of crises, we need to start from the fact that this underlying narrative has but rarely been acknowledged as being apocalyptic. Notwithstanding this, even those people who do not believe in it seem to be influenced by the apocalypse, in the sense of the End of the world, such a belief being something of a 'civilizational habit' (Keller 2005), capable of both revolution and reaction. We seem to be unable to provide an essential subtext but can recognise the performance of something that can be called the cultural apocalypse script (Keller 2005), which literalises itself in history in different ways through our different performances of it, similar to Scott's hidden transcript (Scott 1990), operating at the very core of centuries-long processes of modernisation.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the motivations of a group of residents in South Osaka, who have established a local 'mutual aid' system of volunteer services. Their feeling of hopelessness and impotence is contrasted with their strong sense of responsibility and their notable achievements.

Paper long abstract:

Long-lasting economic downturn and a rapid process of population aging, along with concomitant processes such as increasing atomization, appear to be responsible for widespread feelings of hopelessness in the contemporary Japanese society. Older people in particular suffer from increasing social isolation, to the extent that Japan has been described as a 'society without ties' (muen shakai). Dissatisfied with changes in their immediate surroundings, some local community residents aspire to create networks of support by engaging in a range of small-scale projects that help people to imagine alternative institutions, resembling what Erik Olin Wright has referred to as 'real utopias'. Building on Ernst Bloch's idea of 'ontologies of the not-yet', this paper explores the motivations of one such group of residents in South Osaka, who have drawn on the ideas of social activist Tsutomu Hotta to establish a local 'mutual aid' system of volunteer services. Narratives of hopelessness and an oft-reported feeling of inability to make a significant difference in the wider social world contrast markedly with peoples' sense of responsibility for others and for their own local environment and achievement in establishing an effective new network of support. This paradox foregrounds the role of motivation and virtue in considerations of hope in this contemporary urban context.

Paper short abstract:

This paper examines how different narratives of uncertainty and hope have encouraged social and political action in the post-disaster Fukushima.

Paper long abstract:

The meltdown of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear power plant, the news of continuous emissions of radioactive substances, the subsequent crumbling of the 'myth of safety' of nuclear energy and the loss of trust in any authorities in the face of constant lies and conflicting information, have left many of the inhabitants of Fukushima prefecture confused, anxious and, in some cases, on the brink of despair.

Drawing on the interviews collected in the oral narrative archive Voices from Tohoku, this paper traces the feelings and perceptions of hope and hopelessness in post-disaster Fukushima by juxtaposing the reactions of three different groups of local residents - farmers, mothers and Buddhist priests, focusing especially on their characterizations of radiation and its implications for individual and collective futures. Adopting Crapanzano's (2003) distinction between the abstract and concrete objects of hope, it explores how the particularity of the latter has spurred different social and political (in)action on the part of the respective groups, despite their considerably overlapping articulations of hope for the long-term survival and sustainability of the local life.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores hope and hopelessness in the lives and narratives of transnationally-adopted people, who cultivate hopeful visions of motherland and natural families. Powerful feelings make them travel, search, and meet their natural mothers, fulfilling, surpassing or betraying long-held expectations.

Paper long abstract:

At some point in their lives, people who have been adopted fantasize about their biological parents and long to be able to meet them, nourishing hopeful thoughts about their reason for abandoning them, about their current state in a distant place, about how a possible reunion would clarify doubts, recover the time lost and fill emotional gaps.

This paper explores the themes of hope and hopelessness in the lives and narratives of a group of Chilean-born children adopted by Sardinian families a few decades ago. While some of them feel they perfectly fit into their adoptive land and family, others feel misplaced and dream of a utopian motherland where they feel they belong, and wish to be able to return home. The adoptees articulate visions and expectations regarding the native land, that often assumes a dream-like contour, and the natural parents, especially the mother. The powerful drive of hope and imagination, combined with the need to relate to a natal land and feel part of the group of its inhabitants, urges some adoptees to cross the geographical, cultural and emotional boundaries and travel to Chile in search of their natural families. In such cases imaginaries, expectations and wishes meet reality with unexpected results.

The hopeful imaginary of the adoptees is paralleled by that of their natural mothers, who never ceased to nurse hopeful feelings about the children they had to relinquish, designing in their minds their comfortable and successful existence in a distant land, where life is imagined easier.

Paper short abstract:

This paper stems from fieldwork conducted with a thalassaemia patients association in Cyprus. I argue that if patient narratives of hope and hopelessness are to acquire pragmatic potency, they must be articulated in a political context of deliberation and contestation.

Paper long abstract:

This paper stems from fieldwork conducted with a thalassaemia patients association in Cyprus. Thalassaemia is a chronic blood disorder which due to genetic and ecological factors has a high prevalence in countries situated around the mediterranean basin. The paper focuses on the technology of gene therapy and patient expectations of therapeutic finality. Albeit still in an experimental stage, if successful gene therapy has the potential of providing a final cure to thalassaemia patients around the world. At the same time, such expectations have been perpetually deferred because of unsuccessful clinical trials. Using Byron Good's (1994) theory on the pragmatics of narrative, I explore how narratives of hope and hopelessness are differently articulated in political and non-political registers. I make the case that if scientific and also patient narratives of hope and hopelessness are to acquire pragmatic potency, they must be situated and articulated in a political context of deliberation and contestation. In return, by acquiring political relevance, narrative is granted the capacity of enacting, rather than simply contemplating the future.

Paper short abstract:

The paper considers a range of material practices, psychological gestures and rhetorical strategies concerned with the idea of the national psyche, mental wellbeing and hope(lessness) in Serbia at a time of political instability.

Paper long abstract:

Serbia's prosperity and political good fortunes after the wars of 1990s have been taken to hang on how committedly it seeks to foster values of reconciliation, as these might be informed by a deep-lying shift in national consciousness and self-understanding. This paper asks what is involved in this hopeful claim—in the idea that national well-being is dependent not on brute economic or social measures, but on a change of mindset? Its ethnography addresses a particular conjunction between the political imperative placed on the Serbs to reassess their recent past and what my informants in Belgrade and elsewhere call, in a more medicalised register, their 'mental hygiene'. Their 'mental hygiene', further, seems to be at this particular moment described through figures of weariness, doubt, hopelessness, fatigue. The paper asks in what circumstances can people construe their state of mind as a political good or as an economic asset? What are the technologies of mental health, at both an individual and a societal level? The analysis proposes contemporary preoccupation with mental hygiene in Serbia as some sort of active, if inverted, emotional and intellectual strategy against hopelessness and fatigue. The strategy both copes with the past and anticipates the future. This perspective reconfigures social fatigue in Serbia not as a burden, or something necessitating a change of mentality, but a resource for reflection, the ground for a new way of imagining or putting together the inner worlds of each individual, as well as of the country.