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- Convenors:
-
Michal Sipos
(Institute of Ethnology of the Czech Academy of Sciences)
Martina Wilsch (Institute of Ethnology and Social Anthropology Slovak Academy of Sciences)
Send message to Convenors
- Discussant:
-
Anna Witeska-Młynarczyk
(University of Marii Curie-Skłodowska)
- Format:
- Panel
- Stream:
- Mobilities
- Location:
- B2.52
- Sessions:
- Saturday 10 June, -, -
Time zone: Europe/Prague
Short Abstract:
How do witnesses of current critical events absorb disruptions into the ordinary when they simultaneously encounter gradual violations? How do institutions enter people's remaking of a world? This panel promotes ethnographic theory to compare societal consequences of experiencing multiple crises.
Long Abstract:
Over the past years, critical events such as the global health crisis and wars connected with significant movement of refugees have impacted many communities and individual lives. These types of massive disruptions intersect with numerous institutions and have been accompanied by the emergence of novel legal categories, biosecurity strategies, and migration control policies.
Communities and individuals nowadays face the task of integrating these disruptions into the ordinary. They strive to recover the everyday while encountering gradual violations. Phenomena such as prolonged economic insecurity, ever-increasing debt, and steady environmental changes have equal capacity to disrupt imaginary certainties and transform fundamental social components.
If an ability to secure the everyday after disruption is an achievement (Das, 2007), what does it mean to recover the everyday in an era of multiple crises? How do witnesses of critical events remake a world when they are simultaneously subjected to various forms of slow violence that continue to bring disruptive moments into their lives? How do institutions enter people's remaking of a world? What forms of life emerge from the recovery of the everyday?
The panel welcomes papers that describe lives in various contexts, including but not limited to people who contracted COVID-19, war refugees, migrant care workers whose transnational arrangements were affected by novel policies, and communities affected by natural disasters. We particularly welcome papers that promote ethnographic theory. The aim of the panel is to enable a comparison of the societal consequences of experiencing multiple crises at the individual, interpersonal, and local levels.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Saturday 10 June, 2023, -Oskar Lubinski (University of Warsaw)
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores the constant necessity to adapt and find new survival strategies in late socialist Cuba. It focuses on community projects as grassroots-led alternatives for community development that strive to survive in the face of economic crisis, the COVID-19 pandemic and other issues.
Paper long abstract:
The COVID-19 pandemic was only another layer of an ongoing crisis the country was facing. Lower numbers of tourists in the years preceding the pandemic and the inability to manage foreign debt that led to the provisioning crisis were daily reality that only got more complex due to the sanitary crisis.
Nonetheless, these problems were accompanied by opportunities related to limited political changes and the emergence of grassroots initiatives in the form of community projects. These initiatives struggled to establish themselves as autonomous actors who provided alternatives to community development fueling broader political debates on preserving and cultivating the professed values of Cuban socialism in the contemporary context.
This paper explores the constant necessity to adapt and find new strategies and solutions to ongoing crises as finding a way out of the existential stuckedness (Hage 2009), a feeling caused by living in a permanent crisis. Through navigating the complex institutional systems of the Cuban state, and dealing with incoherent attitudes and sometimes outwards animosity of state officials, leaders of the community projects constantly negotiate and reassess the means of pursuing community development.
The paper focuses primarily on the strategies for achieving food sovereignty, a long-term goal of the Cuban government and a way of finding common ground between community projects and state institutions. The promotion of urban agriculture and permaculture schemes become spaces for developing community resilience, as well as tools to establish common grounds between state institutions and grassroots initiatives.
Elena Hernandez (Johannes Gutenberg Universität Mainz)
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines a challenge faced by grassroots groups in balancing the need for urgent individual support (such as resisting eviction) with the goal of building a mass movement for systemic change. Collective care practices are employed as a means to overcome guilt and to offer new ways of engagement.
Paper long abstract:
This paper discusses a dilemma faced by a grassroots group in Lisbon. The goal is to build a mass movement to bring systemic change to the housing market, but the everyday life of activism involves accompanying individual cases. This ties up a lot of the activist's
time and emotional resources, and sometimes leads to frustration when people do not return after resolving their cases. Within the movement, there is a debate about whether limited resources should be used to build alliances with other organized groups, as
the legitimacy of the activist work may be lost if they stop working with those affected. Collective practices are being rethought by experienced activists to build insurgent subjectivities and to politicize those who are "affected" in the process of engagement.
This paper aims to provide insights into the moralities involved in balancing individual support in the acute housing crisis with strategic support for mass mobilization. The use of collective care practices seeks to counteract the hierarchy that exists between
experienced political activists and those who are affected, and to counteract the danger of social work, which is counter to the emancipatory ideal.
Sonia Abbasi (SOAS, University of London)
Paper short abstract:
This paper aims to explore how the history and spirituality in the interior Sindh coincide with colonialism, capitalism, feudalism, as well as the present modern state amidst climate crisis.
Paper long abstract:
Pakistan’s recent flash floods due to monsoon rains led to a climate catastrophe - one third of the country’s agricultural land has submerged, displacing millions of people, destroying their livelihood and killing nearly 2,000. Economic losses accrued to approximately $40 billion.
Pakistan contributes barely a 0.9 percent of the global carbon footprint, but is amongst the top ten countries affected by extreme weather events. Pakistan has called on rich countries to pay for climate reparations to the developing nations. In Geneva, this week, International institutions and several countries pledged more than $9 billion to help Pakistan rebuild from the climate disaster . Sindh province, with a population of 50 million, is the worst hit area.
This paper aims to explore the disruptions in the everyday life of people of Shukkur (Interior Sindh) along the banks of the Indus River due to climate change. Sukkur Barrage was built on the Indus River by the British Empire during the colonial era.
It intends to address how ordinary lives of people of Sukkur intersect with the big donor institutions (World Bank) , the state corruption and their policies to rebuild. An entry point to explore how history and spirituality in the interior Sindh coincide with colonialism, capitalism, feudalism, as well as the present modern state amidst climate crisis. This research paper is a piece of mini ethnography which derives its data from participant observation (visited Sukkur twice) secondary sources and interviewing.
Roman Urbanowicz (University of Helsinki)
Paper short abstract:
The presentation deals with the Belarusian refugee crisis 2021 as it was perceived by the Belarusian villagers dwelling next to the EU border, analysing the diversity of their attitudes, ranging from cynical affinity and joint criticism to competition for the scarce resource of care and empathy.
Paper long abstract:
The presentation addresses the Belarusian refugee crisis of 2021 as experienced by the borderland locals on the Belarusian side. It draws on ethnographic and personal experiences, as I both personally originate from one Belarusian rural setting next to the EU border, and I did ethnographic fieldwork research in another one in 2019-2020.
The response to the crisis was predicated on the political and emotional genealogies of the recent developments in Belarus. For many of the more ‘progressive’ and pro-European urban people, usually having anti-regime attitudes, the common reaction was moral judgement and adoption of the ‘fortress Europe’ moral narratives. While seeing refugees as an accessory to the regime’s nefarious devices, many were emotionally devastated by the political repressions in the country, and hence hardly having much empathy to spare. ‘Why should I care about them? No one ever cared about me’, as it was often said. Amongst the rural dwellers, however, the reactions were often different, expressing more of a cynical affinity to recognise similarities of experiences of marginalisation, while also using the disastrous event to criticise Belarusian political reality rather than the moral aspects of irregular migration.
Drawing on the literature on class, power, and Europeanness, I demonstrate how the structure of reactions was based on the class experience of political violence and interaction with various interfaces of the state (both Belarusian and the EU), while also emphasising the role these diverse narratives in moral reproduction, serving as devices to deal with the perduring reality of disenfranchisement and political repressions.
Dilara Inam (Indiana University)
Paper short abstract:
This paper will demonstrate how residents are impacted by ongoing urban transformation in Bahçelievler, a neighborhood in Ankara, Turkey through the memories of local places and past times by considering residents' attachments to their neighborhood.
Paper long abstract:
This paper, a small but keystone portion of my dissertation, is an exploration of memories of the place and of the past in a neighborhood, Bahçelievler, undergoing urban transformation. It was the first modern neighborhood built after Ankara was being designated as the capital of the newly formed nation of Turkey with modernization reforms in 1923. The residents' attachments to their neighborhood have been seen in three forms: the materiality of the place; social relations such as friendship and neighborliness; and early republican values emphasizing modernization. These attachments appearing in memories gained importance when urban transformation started in the 2000s in the neighborhood. Thereby, I aim, in the paper, to understand how urban transformation taking place in the neighborhood impacts residents' memories and their attachments. The research will also demonstrate how the discontent shared among residents about the urban changes in Bahçelievler echoes Turkey's social, political, and economic change a hundred years after its establishment. With this study, I introduce critical approaches, as well as an activist research approach, to folklore studies in Turkey, which still has the tendency to glamorize the nation. Secondly, this project brings the power of narrative and place-based methods into urban studies by using walking ethnography, interviews, and participant observation to bring community voice and perspectives.
Yiftah Levin (The Hebrew University)
Paper short abstract:
This presentation focuses on stories related to three houses and their Keys. Those houses have passed between Palestinians and Israelis in the last decades. The houses and the relations that were formed between their inhabitants, represent three ways in which the history of this land has developed.
Paper long abstract:
In my research I work on the theme of the Key in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The Key has become a significant symbol in this conflict, mostly within the Palestinian context, as many families have taken with them their house Keys when they had to leave their houses during the 1948 war, known as the Israeli independence war, or the Palestinian Nakba, a disaster. Hence, the Key became a significant symbol within Palestinian folklore, as an object of memory and of hope to return to the lost houses. My proposed presentation focuses on stories related to three houses and their Keys, located in different places in Israel/Palestine. Those houses have passed between Palestinians and Israelis in the last decades in different circumstances. As I see it, these houses, their narratives, and the relations that were formed between their changing inhabitants, represent and reflect three ways in which the history of this land has developed.