Paper short abstract:

This paper reconsiders anthropological approaches to time through a series of specific ethnographic encounters using a collaborative and cross-discplinary methodology. In conversation with mathematicians, this paper proffers a view of time as fractal.

Paper long abstract:

Fractality as an analytical tool in anthropology has often relied on the modeling of fractals to make sense of various socio-cultural phenomenon. Roy Wagner (2001) has used Indra's net, drawn from Chinese Buddhism. Ron Eglash (1999) has used the Koch Snowflake developed by mathematician Helge von Koch, and Marilyn Strathern (1991) has drawn from the Cantor Dust or the Cantor Set introduced by mathematician Georg Cantor. Consulting these models has aided anthropologists in mapping a variety of concepts from perspective to material culture to the ontological nature of human relationships. Drawing on fractal mathematics, this paper presents a fractal orientation for anthropological notions of time shifting towards a view of time that is infinite, irreducible, and recursive; an infinite complexity across any scale. What implications does this view have for an anthropology that analyses utopian futures and global challenges?

This paper presents as its ethnographic material the sustained intellectual meetings and engagements between a group of anthropologists and several groups of mathematicians from undergraduate students to professors of fractal mathematics. In these meetings the mathematicians described to the anthropologists various fractal models, and the anthropologists presented both ethnographic material and anthropological theories of time. Discussions about the perceived linearity of time in conjunction with a deeper reading of fractal modeling and mathematics invites a robust cross-disciplinary engagement as well as a prospective new methodology, and a unique ethnographic moment. Through this collaborative approach, ideas about the contributions of fractal mathematics to an anthropology of time emerge.

Paper short abstract:

A fractal orientation to time enables an alternative exploration of fractured, distorted and fragmentary temporalities, in addition to recursive and self-similar time. This paper considers temporalities of heroin addiction as fractal, applying an interdisciplinary perspective.

Paper long abstract:

Drawing on both mathematical and anthropological understandings of fractality, this paper explores alternative perspectives of time as it relates to heroin addiction in Scotland. Following a collaborative project with both mathematicians and anthropologists, this paper attempts to ethnographically illustrate temporalities which confound typical conceptualisations of linearity, and which can be better understood as fractal. Senses of linear time are disrupted for heroin users through intensive poly-substance use, an increasing trend in Scotland, as both time and memory become fragmented beyond coherence or re-assemblage. Distortedness and complexity being common descriptors applied to mathematical fractals, time shattered into uncountable and un-interpretable fragments similarly connotes fracture, dissonance and distortion. This paper applies the fractal model of Cantor's Dust in an analysis of infinitely small and complex 'particles' of time arising through some forms of intoxication. Wider temporal experiences of heroin users, furthermore, echo concepts of fractal recursion, in which an image recurs infinitely inside of itself. For those pursuing recovery through abstinence, for instance, as fieldwork conversations with some suggested, imaginings of the future are tempered by past experiences of returning to heroin. Embedded, therefore, within idealised fantasies of futures absent of substance use - and all else that recovery could entail - were memories of past frustrated attempts, a pattern which often further disrupted abstinence. Fractals therefore comprise an alternative lens with which to explore complex, fractious, distorted and self-similar temporalities.

Paper short abstract:

The embodied figure of Anthropos as well as quasi-human living entities appear to have become the materialization of various biotechnological utopias.Using concepts of utopia and fractal embodiments as time-space continua, the paper analyzes networks and relations in the biochemical laboratory.

Paper long abstract:

The embodied figure of Anthropos as well as quasi-human living entities and embodiments appear to have become the materialization of various biotechnological utopias. These utopias are embodied within multiple realities in which potential futures redesign "life-as-it-could-be". The paper is based on the ethnographic study I conducted in a biochemical laboratory focusing on DNA repair and recombination in the Czech Republic between 2017 and 2019. DNA recombination is understood here as the exchange of DNA strands to produce and design new nucleotide sequence arrangements to heal or enhance future bodies. Using concepts of utopia and fractal embodiments as a specific kind of time-space continua, I would like to analyze networks and relations in the laboratory. The bodies of scientists themselves and their visions of future life as well as their desire for healthy/immortal bodies will be analyzed. Specifically, the paper focuses on technologies that deal with "bioinformatics life models", "immortal cell lines", "genes as tools", and "edited DNA sequences". The views, emotions, and attitudes of scientists and laboratory technicians are also analyzed and presented with special regard for the symmetry (nonlinearity) of relations and embodied entities. These could be independent complexities and fractalities (Scott), or bodies/persons that are neither singular nor plural (Haraway, Strathern), or potential, becoming, virtual bodies without organs (Deleuze&Guattari). The paper concentrates mainly on the following questions: How are issues of future life, embodiments, and biotechnological forms of life in the lab tackled? How are biotechnologized utopias designed?

Paper short abstract:

This paper seeks to examine the role of sound as experienced by the self through fractality. Through ethnographic analysis of studio discourse and audio examples, this paper will consider how temporalities of a sonic persona are negotiated in the interfacing between digital and hardware.

Paper long abstract:

In studio discourse, creative praxis is framed in terms of simultaneous holdings within multiple time scales captured by locators in a digital software grid. These movements involve recalling past sonic objects and their iterations in smaller and more specific phrases. As these sections are looping, memories of the original and concurrent parts are held and improvised on by drawing on associational listening alongside frequency decisions, in addition to interactions with non-human actants and technical dimensions of analog hardware.

Layered into these micro-decisions and processes are reflections on the piece as a whole, as its reflection of the artist/composer at that particular point in time/trajectory, and positioning in a macro/canon presentation of sonic persona.

Imagined and projected futures of an idealised sonic persona, as represented through sonic signature and textural markers, are enacted through spatio-temporal fractality in compositional rendering as minor clusters of midi refract larger phrases in the piece. Sonic objects are crafted as representative of artistic self by association and repetition across time scales as these are marked and deployed through arrangement in the technologically textured life world of the studio environment.

The aim of these modalities of self-making in creative practice are underlined by engaging thematically with analog hardware to render digital imaginings fleshed out and concrete. By physically drawing digital signal through distortive hardware there is a sense of physicality attained by the artist. This paper will illustrate spatio-temporal fractality through analysis and the presentation of sound clips to afford the listener an acoustic facet of engagement.

Paper short abstract:

In this paper I examine temporalities of self-fashioning focusing on photographic studio practices of young Bamileke women in Yaounde, Cameroon. I argue that the temporalities of studio performances help young women maintain hope in achieving utopian futures.

Paper long abstract:

Young Bamileke women living in Yaounde, Cameroon, like their contemporaries across the continent are stuck in waithood (Honwana 2012), unable to attain valued forms of social adulthood. As their repetitive attempts to get by fail at times they venture for excursions to photographic studios where they engage in star-like photographic performances in front of camera lens. These performances, I argue, solicit "as if" attitude which is achieved through studio's relationship to time. Studios halt time and as such disturb rather than feed into production of linear time as modernist narratives about camera would have it. Studio is the time of possibility as young women transcendent waithood and pose as economically and socially successful celebrities and stars. Thus, studio "disrupts" personal biographies as chains of successive events and failures; in the performances "the temporal boundaries are dissolved, temporalities reversed, and temporal loops permitted that may capture not only what has been lost" (Behrend 2017) but also what has not been, echoing "nostalgia for the future" (Piot 2010). The fractal time was materialised in the photograph and as such the effects of what happens in the studio lingered into the quotidian life: taken "as if", studio portraits hanging on the walls were saturated with the temporality of the "not yet" (Strassler 2010) but also of "this should have been". As such I argue temporalities of studio excursions created possibilities for reverie despite the opposite experience of the postcolonial subject in the everyday (Mbembe 2001, Tonda 2005).

Paper short abstract:

This paper considers fractal time in the digital world of social media, experienced by users as a continual series of instantaneous overlapping presents. How this impacts on the wellbeing of users and why this form of time is at the root of the addictive nature of online worlds will be explored.

Paper long abstract:

This paper will consider how time can be conceptualised as fractal in the digital landscape, by drawing on ethnographic research conducted with the social media platform Instagram. Building on Dilley's (2014:2-3) notion of chronologies, and the associated variety of presents experienced in historic letter writing, this paper will reassess how notions of time and the present can be understood in a digital age. I will suggest that the multiple presents experienced in the digital landscape can be conceptualised as one infinite kaleidoscopic simultaneous set of presents. This cyclical yet amorphous sensation of temporality experienced by users of social media will form the basis for a discussion of self making, temporal manipulation and imagined spaces. The digital landscape is a place where all these potentialities are occurring simultaneously, and this paper will question what affect fractal time has on the wellbeing of its users. This will draw on Miller's (2011:78) notion of "time suck". Finally this paper will question whether our increasingly digitized modernity is a developing utopia, or more akin to Haraway's (1986:8) "apocalyptic telos" as time becomes fractal and the offline become increasingly enmeshed with the online.

References: Dilley, R. (2014). Nearly Native, Barely Civilized: Henri Gaden's Journey through Colonial French West Africa (1894-1939). Leiden: Brill. Haraway, D. (1984). A Cyborg Manifesto. Macat Library. Miller, D. (2011). Tales from Facebook. Cambridge: Polity.

Paper short abstract:

Throughout the Brexit process Scottish Nationalists have begun re-imagining Scotland's future as an independent country, offering a utopian vision of a European nation. These visions of the future often appear in multiple contesting forms, various temporal lines coexisting simultaneously.

Paper long abstract:

Caught up in the chaotic Brexit negotiations playing out in the UK, Scotland is having to re-negotiate its political positioning in an uncertain and ever-changing landscape, forcing it to re-orientate itself simultaneously to a number of possible political futures. As the Scottish National Party prepare to call a new independence referendum, the UK's uncertain political landscape fuels the imagination of contesting narratives of the country's future 'post-Brexit'. These imaginations of potential futures permeate present political rhetoric and campaigning, influencing both activists and voters alike into multiple and unexpected political orientations.

In this paper I explore the multiple utopian imaginations of Scotland's post-Brexit future by the Scottish National Party, and the teleological implications these imaginations have on Scottish nationalists. These imagined narratives of Scotland's future independence present a utopian vision of Scotland and permeate the everyday lives of Scottish nationalists. Following months of ethnographic work with the Scottish National Party I show how the Brexit referendum, coupled with the futural orientations of Scottish nationalists is allowing various possible futural timelines to emerge simultaneously, working alongside each other, allowing contesting temporalities to coexists in the imaginations of SNP activists. Insight into these utopian imaginations of Scotland as an independent country in the future allow us to better understand how seemingly irrational or disparate positions taken up by SNP activists are resolved in the present, and the teleological implications these various temporalities have.

Paper short abstract:

This paper aims to explore the intersection between whiteness and time in (post)-apartheid Namibia. I will frame my argument within the multiple temporalities that constituted, and constitute, the experience of whiteness from the colonial and postcolonial moment.

Paper long abstract:

In what ways is the experience of whiteness shaped by different temporalities? How does it shape the (post)-apartheid condition? What does it mean to refuse time? In this paper I will address these questions by looking at the complex intersection between whiteness and time in (post)-apartheid Namibia. In building on the idea that conventional propositions of linear time should be overthrown, I will explore the ways in which whiteness in the (post)-apartheid is mediated by the embodied and existential experience of time, in particular of apartheid and its multiple temporalities, spaces and geographies. Here I take cue from William Kentridge's 'The Refusal of Time'. In it Kentridge argues that the experiences of colonialism, race and labour in his native South Africa, and more widely in Africa, should be framed within a concept of time that is disjointed, in and out of sync, reversed and forwarded, fastened and slowed down. In this sense, his work speaks of and to a time that cannot be set right, a time that is and remains out of joint. Here I argue that this conceptualisation of time can help our understanding of whiteness in the (post)-apartheid as both a lived and embodied experience mediated by multiple temporalities, as both in and out of time. In arguing for the need of a new orthography to describe the (post)-apartheid condition I will present this paper through a series of punctum/a, moments which punctuates the (post)-apartheid and in which whiteness and its historical blackmail emerge with clarity.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the fractality of imagined successes for students at the University of Goroka, Papua New Guinea. Students see education as a path to success and linear development, but because of relational obligations they are required to repeat past rituals and events when they are successful.

Paper long abstract:

Education is viewed as the gateway to success and development for students and staff at the University of Goroka. This message is directed at individuals who can gain wealth and status, communities who receive benefits back from their "investment" in students, and the nation which can develop and Westernise, but also decolonise. Staff and students imagine futures and successes for themselves and for Papua New Guinea and these imagined futures exist in a tension between Melanesian states of being and aspirations towards Western styles of governance. Importantly, students and staff exist in relationships with their communities through the wantok system: a system of networks and familial obligations which informs interactions, obligations, and daily living. The wantok system functions at every level of relationship in Papua New Guinea: in families, businesses, and government. The wantoks of students fund university fees and daily needs with the expectation that if students prosper in jobs or status once they graduate, they will give back to their communities. While this system is crucial to communities and ensures reciprocity and relationships, students and staff perceive wantok system as a problem for their imagined success and development, especially for goals based on Western systems of governance.

I draw on three months of fieldwork and interviews with students and staff at the University of Goroka to explore how the wantok system and its consequences are perceived in fractals at different levels, and I explore how a linear understanding of time affects the imagined success of students.