Paper short abstract:

In this paper, I discuss the ways in which social workers in Serbia deal with the current state reforms of their work, which leave them in a vacuum of "false transparency" and force them to "fake" either the bureaucratic procedures or "fieldwork" at their discretion.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper, I deal with the understanding of work, state, and NGO assistance at the Center for Social Work in a Serbian town. Drawing from my fieldwork research among social workers in a Serbian town, I discuss the ways in which they navigate state and council regulations, as well as increasing NGO assistance, in order to do their jobs. I argue that Michael Lipsky's famous argument that "street-level public service" everywhere embodies a paradoxical reality of treating all citizens equally regarding their claims on government, while at the same time being responsive to the individual cases when appropriate, has a special postsocialist twist. Postsocialist transformation of welfare services in accordance with the present-day global forms of flexible governance proved to be contradictory for social workers. They on one hand, have been pressured by formalized procedures of their work, while, on the other (hand), have to rely on personal resources and connections in order to deliver their service. This reform went hand in hand with the increasing involvement of the civil sector in the state organized social work, which social workers usually describe as "pretentious" and disconnected from the needs of the local community. Put together, those reforms produce a persistent feeling of abandonment where social workers find themselves in a vacuum of "false transparency" and force them to "fake" either the bureaucratic procedures or "fieldwork" at their discretion. Still, most social workers live under the persistent impression of professional shortfall caused by the current state reforms and without a clear solution in a nearby future.

Paper short abstract:

By exploring a series of encounters and disputes between magician Harry Houdini and spiritualist medium Mina Crandon, this paper develops an anthropological historiography of theorising the relationship between magical performance, fakery and exposure.

Paper long abstract:

A pertinent ethnographic question is the persistence of the anthropological category of magic in an increasingly secularised world, as well as the persistence of magical beliefs even after certain magicians and magical performances have been exposed as fake. A series of encounters and disputes between the famous magician Harry Houdini and spiritualist medium Mina Crandon provide apt material for developing an anthropological historiography of theorising the relationship between magical performance, fakery and exposure. By using the Houdini-Crandon case as a point of departure, we draw attention to incidents of exposure as capable of providing trajectories through which relations between magic, truth and fakery are fostered and proliferate. Through an exploration of the ethnographic archive, we showcase how exposure is used by magicians as means of deploying their performative capacity to establish power and authority over their audience. Nevertheless, unlike ethnographic accounts which attribute the persistence of magic, even after it has been exposed as fake, to elements of "theatricality" (Asad, 2003: 46), we proceed to instead analyse the unknowability and opacity which permeates incidents of exposure and, more broadly, sociality. We conclude by offering some comment on how ethnographic theorisation of magic within modernity can act as a gateway into better understanding the social space fakery occupies in contemporary societies.

Paper short abstract:

This paper analyses the commodification of the 'image' of rapid success in the Nigerian music industry. It ties the performance of success to notions of agency in a context where the reflexive management of appearances is seen as a path to participation in 'global' culture and economic networks.

Paper long abstract:

The neoliberal conception of agency calls for a reconfiguration of subjectivity supported by positive psychology. Optimism and confidence are extolled as means to achieve success that the neoliberal subject chooses to strategically deploy by working on her emotions. Shifting the focus from the cultivation of the self to the performative possibilities of such discourse, this paper suggests that for aspiring Nigerian artists the image of upward mobility has itself become a commodity to be cultivated. Under the coded terms 'confidence', 'pride', or 'happiness' ubiquitous in the booming Nigerian music industry, everyone understands that a particular narrative is expected. In the words of a 17-year-old rapper from Lagos, 'if you walk proudly in your slippers in Bariga [an overcrowded Lagos neighbourhood], there's no way'. Artists thus 'fake' rapid success and perform emotional labour, aware of the materialistic value system in which injunctions to positivity are embedded. Using ethnographic observations from Lagos as well as digital ethnography, this paper shows that the reflexive management of appearances is seen as a path to full participation in 'global' culture and economic networks. At every echelon of the Lagos music industry one can hear a neoliberal discourse postulating that the fashioned, enterprising, and commodified self can performatively transform its circumstances and contribute to changing Nigeria's—and Africa's—'place-in-the-world'. Thus, performing success and presenting oneself as 'confidently African' in the face of dire circumstances are ways of restoring a sense of agency that was robbed by failed development along evolutionary lines and the humanitarian discourse that followed.

Paper short abstract:

This paper ethnographically explores Hungarian liberals' coexistent registers of reality and falsity that converge around the figure of George Soros and expose the gradually accepted frame of conspiracy theories, on one hand, and the simultaneous yearning of "reality" as rationalist, on the other.

Paper long abstract:

In Hungary, a society polarized along numerous axes, declarations of reality and falsity become politically loaded zero-sum manifestations, revealing a distressed longing for rationality which nevertheless unfolds comfortably on par with conspiracy theories. Relying on ethnographic fieldwork among liberal intelligentsia in Budapest, I take the figure of the Hungarian-born investor and philanthropist George Soros and his "shadow empire" as a starting point to show the reality/falsity-dichotomy becomes complicated. Since years, the Fidesz-government of Hungary has engaged in an aggressive propaganda campaign addressing the so-called "Soros Plan", referring to Soros' alleged struggle to destroy European nation-states by bringing millions of muslim refugees to Europe. This campaign reaches Hungarians via large roadside posters, TV advertisements, news, and leaflets distributed to households. While at first the public at large denounced the campaign as a preposterous conspiracy theory insulting to the rational mind, over the years questions relating to Soros and his "plan" have become gradually accepted as the very frame within which questions of right and wrong are negotiated. I show how present-day discussions in Budapest simultaneously unfold on supposedly contradictory registers that expose the flexibility of reality: debates over the identity of the "the real" executors of the Soros plan run comfortably next to desperate cries for the return of "reality". When a falsity is repeated, it first begins to shape reality, and then becomes real. When past and present are negotiated against the backdrop of this "new" reality, the question arises: what was real, or false, in the first place?

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores performances of stateness amidst welfare retraction in Xanthi, a crisis-afflicted town of Northern Greece.

Paper long abstract:

This paper focuses on alternative healthcare provisioning amidst prolonged austerity. I argue that the domain of grass-roots healthcare provisioning involves performances of state, stateness, and statecraft. The object of my ethnographic analysis is the Social Medical Practice of Xanthi, Northern Greece. Overseen by the Diocese of Xanthi and operated by volunteering doctors, the Practice provides primary healthcare to the destitute and the uninsured. While a product of determined and intimate self-organisation, the Social Medical Practice is contingent on statutory frameworks and processes of vertical encompassment. I trace the Social Medical Practice's regulations, protocols, and documenting devices to suggest that they constitute a reversed bureaucracy that inverts statutory rejection and exclusion and turns it into entitlement and inclusion. In this configuration, the documents that no longer serve as proof of statutory membership, comprise entry tickets for the Social Medical Practice. In this sense, amidst welfare retraction, the Social Medical Practice hosts continuations of the state healthcare provisioning practices. Crucially however, inasmuch as these performative and affective continuations alleviate suffering, they also capitalise on governmental technologies and sovereign enactments. As such, the state emerges triumphant in its absence and tangible in its abstraction, to offer hope and engender despair.

Paper short abstract:

My paper looks at the tactics of identity refusal among West African nationals in face of the German migration/asylum/deportation regime that forces them into the asylum system and predestines them for rejection and thus for immediate deportation as soon as they have the necessary travel documents.

Paper long abstract:

One of the characteristics of the modern-colonial nation-state is the appropriation and monopolization of legitimate means of movement in form of passports and other documents regulating citizens and non-citizens mobility (Torpey 2000). My paper looks at the comparatively vicious control exercised by the German state towards non-citizens within the asylum system, and the strategies, or rather, tactics of non-citizens to evade control and reclaim some of their mobility rights. Drawing from interviews done during my field work with West African asylum seekers in Germany, related to my ongoing PhD-research, I look at the non-passport, asylum fraud and identity refusal as exemplary tactics of faking in order to survive in face of deportation or other state violence, and to open a possible access to social rights. Following recent scholarship in legal anthropology (Abarca / Coutin 2018; Horton 2015), I seek to understand these as rational options to act in face of seemingly arbitrary state obstruction of (legal) entry and stay, in the context of a mobility segregation within the EU and its externalised "border zones", ever deepening with the management of the "refugee crisis" since 2015. These tactics appear as faking only so far as the state has also monopolized the means of producing truth, often expressed in the language of legality.

Paper short abstract:

The paper focuses on the practices of camouflaging, 'staging' and pretending carried out by the industrial company in Serbia to cover up the negative aspects of industrial production.

Paper long abstract:

The paper captures the moment when the state-run copper-processing company in Serbia, which used to be a prosperous socialist industrial "giant", after decades of decline during the 1990s and 2000s, promoted another 'revival' (of the company and the town) due to rise of copper price on the global market and due to the local political interventions. The paper illustrates three ethnographic examples when the industrial company (anchored in the town's social, economic and political life) camouflaged the negative aspects of industrial production. In particular, the paper focuses on the practices of disguising pollution, providing 'cleaner' image of the miners and mining landscapes and representing dilapidated town as a flourishing one. It argues that such practices of camouflaging, 'staging', and pretending served for carrying out back-door privatization of the company. The paper further argues that, in the post-socialist context, the state economic projects relied on such practices to achieve 'successful' outcomes.

Paper short abstract:

The paper will discuss the problem of online presence of protest rallies and the acceptance of their fabrication or falsification in social media.

Paper long abstract:

On the International Women's Day in 2017 the press and the users of social networks were engaged in the discussion of an action performed by a group Moscow feminist activists who have presumably demonstrated their slogan on a Kremlin tower. The refutations were published by the activists on the next day: this part of action was falsified using Photoshop. Yet in the social media the action was 'real' in the sense that it was perceived as such and led to lengthy discussions.

In the contemporary world where social media became one of the key sources of information, a rally can be performed without leaving the safety of one's home. The important topic of discussion in this situation is the problem of «authenticity» of a political action in virtual space. The users reflect on the question if the action which was only long enough to take a snapshot and post it on Facebook is a «valid» political statement. In other words, they try to establish the borderline between the «real» and the «fake», the «original» and «falsification» in terms of Erving Goffman. In our presentation we will discuss the semiotic mechanisms which enable the users of social media, political activists and the state authorities to frame and reframe offline and online protest in these terms.