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- Convenors:
-
Ana Ivasiuc
Agnes Gagyi (University of Gothenburg)
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- Discussant:
-
Soumhya Venkatesan
(University of Manchester)
- Formats:
- Panel
- Stream:
- Resistance
- Sessions:
- Wednesday 23 June, -
Time zone: Europe/Helsinki
Short Abstract:
Our panel interrogates the moralities of social movements' claims and actions for change. Which rules are worth breaking and (re)making for different social movements, and how does the examination of their moral positioning contribute to a political moral anthropology of the contemporary crisis?
Long Abstract:
Themselves products of a crisis of the social world, social movements call for breaking or remaking social rules according to particular visions of the past, present, and dreaded or envisaged futures. As collective action, activism does not only propose new rules of being together: it is also forged through their ongoing negotiation. While recently scholars have argued that moral anthropology has been so far a sort of anti-politics machine (Kapferer and Gold 2018), we conceive of the making of morals in social movements as the tissue of change being built in the middle of social crisis. In a moment where the ethics of being together in the greatest historical crisis of humankind is becoming a most burning open question, we invite a discussion on how ethnographic accounts of concrete social movements' negotiations of transgressions, change and enforcement of rules can inform our orientation within the crisis.
We seek ethnographic accounts about the making and breaking of rules in contemporary social movements of all kinds - progressive or regressive. In analyzing the negotiations that various social movements stimulate around social rules, we aim to get at how the morality that these movements uphold is shaped historically, and how that morality - explicit and implicit rules and ideas about right and wrong, just and unjust, legitimate and illegitimate - informs movements' own capacity and trajectories.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Wednesday 23 June, 2021, -Petra Andits (Ca'Foscari University of Venice) Ori Katz (Ben Gurion University of the Negev)
Paper short abstract:
The paper examines the Israeli participants’ avoidance of throwing stones at Palestinian protests. We illustrate the complexity of their unique position and examine issues of privilege, risk, and latent nationalism.
Paper long abstract:
Ever since Israel has begun to construct the West Bank Separation Wall in 2002, weekly Palestinian demonstrations take place in various villages along its length. The demonstrations are organized by Palestinians, to whom a small group of Israeli activists, often referred to as "Anarchists Against the Wall", joins. These activists declare their participation under the Palestinian committees' rules and highlight their commitment and full solidarity with the Palestinians struggle. However, throwing stones at Israeli army soldiers remains solely a Palestinian practice and hence constitutes the place where Israeli solidarity becomes only partial. Based on ethnographic research in demonstrations between 2015 and 2017, this study seeks to examine the boundary work, the identity construction process, and the justifications used by Israeli demonstrators around stone-throwing practices during the demonstrations.
We show how the joining of Israeli Jews to demonstrations in Palestinian villages is often presented as crossing a border that places them against the Zionist oppressor. T the same time, stone-throwing during the demonstrations challenges this process, and framed as a taboo, a red line that stops the continuing process of crossing lines. The acquiescence to the Israeli activists' avoidance of stone-throwing is an active commission of doing a non-throwing, rather than a passive omission of not throwing stones (Scott 2018). It is part of the Israeli-Jewish activism, that illustrates the complexity of their unique position, and sheds light on the issues of privilege, risk, and latent nationalism.
Maria Runkel Cardoso
Paper short abstract:
Following left wing brazilian activists in Lisbon, organized in contestation groups, for 7 months, after the election of Bolsonaro, lets us understand the importante of public space as a place of speech and resistance. At the same time, it challenges the city of Lisbon in its heart, the streets.
Paper long abstract:
Starting from Brazilian activist groups in Lisbon, we tried to understand how public space is used in times of contestation and its relationship with a transnational political sphere.
The occupation of public space is addressed, in this case - Praça Luís de Camões - through the importance it demonstrates to the group, the central role in the idea of resistance and how it becomes a moment of connection between the participants, helping to create a sense of belonging among all those who occupy the public space. The relationship between Lisbon and Brazil is exposed in the various actions and discourses, with the objective of claiming a place for Brazilian issues on the Portuguese political agenda. This way, it was possible to understand the use of public space as a place for contestation and the transnational political sphere as a necessary field for the group’s existence.
This presentation, based on a master dissertation, with extensive fieldwork, starts from an anthropological work done in a migratory context, with an empirical basis in the urban environment, where the discussions of the interlocutors are not only focused on the migratory process, but also on a general problem; belonging to a global citizenship. This belonging goes beyond the street and the individual struggles to position itself in an international project to defend democracy.
Corina Tulbure (West University of Timișoara - GRECS, University of Barcelona)
Paper short abstract:
How can a cross-border political community be created against a repressive migration regime, a community which transgresses conventional citizenship? What is the meaning of a political solidarity with the protests of the illegalized people instead of a moral solidarity?
Paper long abstract:
Since 2019, hundreds of people from Tunisia have been trapped in a migrant centre in Melilla. During the pandemic, beginning in March 2020, when Spain closed its borders, the people inside have been subject to a deportation procedure. In response, they have organized hunger strikes and protests demanding their way out to Spain. Dozens have been arrested after the last protest in August. At the same time, demonstrations have been organized in Tunisia in front of the Spanish Embassy calling for freedom and the migrants’ release. While protests were being organized in Melilla and in Tunisia, the Spanish authorities have been negotiating with Tunisia an agreement for the forced return of the people.
During these months, protesters documented impunity and abuses in the centre of Melilla almost on a daily basis. Centred on remote ethnographic notes during quarantine and interviews with people inside the centre in Melilla, activists in Tunisia and politicians in Spain, the question raised is how can a political community be formed without the framework of the conventional citizenship. How a new political subjectivity can resist a “migration apparatus” (Feldman, 2011) with totalitarian traits? Opposed to a moral solidarity, what is the meaning of a political solidarity as a form of resistance, a political solidarity which requires a new political subjectivity that transgresses the symbolic imagery of the nation-state?
Gabriela Manley (Durham University)
Paper short abstract:
Scottish National Party activists envision an independent Scotland as a utopian nation in which new community-oriented moral rules flourish. By performatively acting out these utopian imaginations in their everyday lives activists seek to assert the civic nature of the Scottish independence movement
Paper long abstract:
The Scottish National Party (SNP) has historically presented itself as a civic nationalist party, concerned with the political – rather than ethnic – arguments for Scottish independence. Since their rise to power in 2011 they have taken great care in framing their pro-independence discourse around a progressive vision of a caring, community-orientated future Scotland. This community-oriented focus is one that runs deeply through its membership, with SNP activists envisioning an independent Scotland as a utopian nation sustained by the positive civic engagement of its people at a local level. From family care for the elderly to collective beach clean-ups and locally-based economic models, activists imagine an independent future ruled by moral principles centred around ideas of fairness and community care. Yet this utopian vision of independence does not remain confined to the speculative future. Rather, it is approximated into the present by SNP activists who, following the often-cited slogan “Live as if you were in the early days of an independent nation”, performatively act out these visions of a civic future in their everyday lives. Following 15 months of ethnographic fieldwork amongst SNP activist in Edinburgh, this paper will explore the ways in which these performative acts delineated the new moral rules an independent Scotland would offer by showcasing what a better tomorrow might look like. Further, it will show how the enactment of these promised futures helped assert the civic and progressive nature of the movement, informing the movement’s political trajectory as it campaigns for Scottish independence.
Agata Hummel (University of Warsaw) Paula Escribano (University of Barcelona)
Paper short abstract:
The paper focuses on the event of farm pig slaughter performed by the neo-peasants. We interpret this event as a practice through which the peasant lifestyle is revindicated as a solution to the broadly defined social, economic and environmental crisis.
Paper long abstract:
The present paper focuses on the event of farm pig slaughter performed by the representatives of the neo-peasant movement. The neo-peasant movement in Catalonia emerged to resist productivist and neoproductivist models of agriculture by proposing a peasant way of life through its discourse, peasant-like agricultural practices and social networks. We analyse farm pig slaughter as a practice through which the peasant lifestyle is revindicated as a solution to the broadly defined social, economic and environmental crisis. We describe the practical and symbolic dimensions of this phenomenon. Elsewhere we have presented neo-peasants as social movement organized through networks of mutual exchange and support, and around the idea of a peasant reflecting a desirable lifestyle. In this sense practicing peasant lifestyle acts as a prefiguration of a better future. At the same time the peasant is as a key figure around which the movement's identity is built. Here we show how all these previously analysed aspects are performed in one event of farm pig-slaughter that, for the analytical purposes, can be treated as a lens that condensates crucial cultural practices and meanings. We also emphasize the significance of the pig slaughter as an infrapolitical practice of the neo-peasant movement, and as the performance of "negativity", a "creation" of alternative and prefiguration of the better future.