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- Convenors:
-
Ellen Judd
(University of Manitoba)
Andrew 'Mugsy' Spiegel (University of Cape Town)
- Discussant:
-
Subhadra Channa
(Delhi University)
- Stream:
- Worlds in motion: Worlds, Hopes and Futures/Mondes en mouvement: Mondes, espoirs et futurs
- Location:
- FSS 4004
- Start time:
- 3 May, 2017 at
Time zone: America/New_York
- Session slots:
- 3
Short Abstract:
This panel challenges global structures of inequality and exclusion by exploring modes of movement from marginalization to mutuality. It problematises practices of inequality and marginalization that shift lines and veil barriers, and explores routes to mutuality.
Long Abstract:
This panel challenges global structures and discourses of inequality and exclusion by exploring emergent discourses and modes of movement from marginalization to mutuality. We view this as critical to furthering anthropological resources for the critique of contemporary permutations in global inequality. The panel will depart from both the resurgence and present danger of movements that literally, figuratively, and violently exclude persons and collectivities, and from the movement of people and peoples across boundaries of nations and constructed social spaces as immigrants, indigenous persons and peoples, persons of all genders, ethnicities and identities, and persons and communities of diverse religions and commitments.
This panel will examine the reconfiguration of relations that are necessarily contested and re-made through these movements of people and ideas. The panel will problematise those pervasive, misleading and subtle enactments of inequality that take the form of marginalization, that is, those that appear to achieve or welcome moves toward equality, while instead shifting lines and veiling barriers. The panel will examine resources and practices that instead open routes toward relations of mutuality, arguing that it is fundamentally through the refiguring of social relations that inequality can be deprived of ground to exist.
The panel will span three sessions. The first will critically engage international work in anthropology on mutuality. The second will ethnographically explore diverse social and discursive structures of inequality and marginalization. The third will engage with practices to move anthropology toward decentred, innovative and socially grounded enactments of mutuality.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Michal Buchowski (Adam Mickiewicz University)
Paper short abstract:
Fear against ‘aliens’ in the period of ‘refugee crisis’ in Poland is interpreted in anthropological terms. A figure of ‘distant Others’ is seen a tool for creating exclusive ideological unity of the ‘true patriots’ who condemn ‘internal Others’, as well as masking class differences and inequalities.
Paper long abstract:
Various historical experiences with Muslims in Europe, and especially a recent wave of immigrants and refugees from Middle East and Africa, influenced contemporary Islamophobia in the West. Today's attitudes towards the Muslim Other in several postcommunist countries result from the most recent history marked by the spread of nationalisms, existence of relatively ethnically homogenous states, as well as post-September 11, 2001 fear of 'Islamic terrorism'. In the last years such panic, marked by 'migrant crisis', has been bolstered by media coverage about refugees flooding Europe. In the case of Poland (and similarly in Czechia and Slovakia), it is a phantom Islamophobia, because the number of Muslims in the country is minimal, while refugees are virtually absent. Intolerance towards them results from the image of ethnically and religiously homogeneous society, which appears as the 'natural' and positively valued form of the polity's organization. Created as culturally 'distant Others' Muslims pose threat to the integrity of the nation. These phenomena are interpreted in anthropological terms of cultural apartheid and fundamentalism. A figure of 'distant Others' is considered as a rhetorical device which helps to create exclusive moral unity of the 'true patriots' opposed to 'internal Others', i.e. 'pinkos/left wingers', 'gender ideologists', and 'cosmopolitans'. Such ideological divisions map the political but cross-cut class differences and veil social inequalities.
Bartholomew Dean (University of Kansas)
Paper short abstract:
My paper is an ethnographic study of the manifold assemblages of mobility, inequity & marginalization among indigenous communities in Peruvian Amazonia.
Paper long abstract:
My paper is an ethnographic study of the manifold assemblages of mobility, inequity and marginalization among indigenous communities in Peruvian Amazonia. Deconstructing competing localized and translocal imaginaries of movement in Amazonia reveals glocalized jurisdictions often punctuated by social strife, rather than a community of intimates. To wit, I relocate Amazonian peoples' constructs of mobility and mutuality as reflective of contemporary epistemes of autonomy and freedom associated with the florescence of the contemporary indigenous rights movement. Scarcity may be a foundation of market economics, but life itself, as Georges Bataille notes, is usually lived in excess one way or another--and it always finds nodes of expressive, performative enunciation. Rather than re-rehearsing the well-documented multiplicities of indigenous Amazonian cosmologies and moral worlds demonstrating Bataille's principle, my paper destabilizes the association of freedom of mobility associated with individual secularism and a Eurocentric derived sense of modernity. In particular, it is offered to provoke a reconfiguration of our understanding of patterns of movement in ways that consider how trans-local epistemologies and ontologies have simultaneously exacerbated the disruptive impacts of migration, rapid urbanization and national belonging, which typically characterize much of the global South.
Junji Koizumi (NIHU and Osaka University)
Paper short abstract:
A relation between the rise of populist racism and social disorientation is suggested. The sense of the loss of orientation, comparable to the age of French Revolution and of the New States, may underlie the rise of extremist ideologies at present.
Paper long abstract:
In view of the present advancement of populist racism, this paper suggests an inherent relation between the rise of extremist ideologies and the sense of social disorientation generated by migrational movements. Ideologies tend to proliferate when general social orientations are felt to be lost and a chaotic situation is approaching near. Such a situation was typically found during French Revolution, "the greatest incubator of extremist ideologies," when the central organizing principle of political life was destroyed. The same pervasive sense of disorientation appeared in the mid-twentieth century among the New States when they were propelled into the midst of a precarious international order (C. Geertz). A comparable situation seems to obtain at present, particularly in and around Europe, where the influx of refugees escaping from inhumane tragedy are putting the host societies into such a strain. Extremist ideologies abound, which are attributable not only to so-called political, economic and religious factors but also to social stress and disorientation experienced both by those who suffer and move and those who must receive them. The European case can be contrasted with the situation at the opposite side of the globe, Japan, which receives an equally large number of migrants, though different kind, while maintaining the firm structure and orientation of the present without showing any sign of ideological transformation despite its extreme nationalist past. Ethnographic enquiry of the mutual relations on the concrete empirical level, where ideologies are born, is necessary for understanding reality and what we can hope for.
Andrew 'Mugsy' Spiegel (University of Cape Town)
Paper short abstract:
How and why has South Africa failed to realise its immediate post-apartheid reconciliatory goals of mutuality and what has given rise to a new essentialism in the country? How has that influenced contemporary South African anthropology?
Paper long abstract:
Two decades ago, South Africa was hailed as the 'rainbow nation' that had broken the essentialist paradigm that underpinned apartheid ideology and policy. The country and its people were understood to be on the road to reconciliation and to developing a substantive mutuality that would accommodate all. Yet about a decade later, xenophobia, in relation especially to African immigrants and refugees, revealed a deep-seated persistence of an 'othering' impulse that manifested (and continues to manifest) in violent attacks - some leading to deaths. More recently, in the context of the post-apartheid state having permitted inequality to grow beyond what it was during the late apartheid era (or having been unable to prevent that from occurring), and with a new generation of post-apartheid 'free-borners' clamouring to have their constitutionally promised rights realised, that same impulse is manifesting in strident expressions of a kind of Black nationalism that reflects, as in so many other parts of the contemporary world, a return to essentialist thinking and exclusivist practices that would appear to permit only some to enjoy convivial relations. The paper documents the context of that rise of a new essentialism; it provides examples of how it manifests; and it considers how it is influencing and being reflected in contemporary anthropology in the country - an anthropology where there is also a new emphasis on conviviality that is understood to encourage substantive mutuality.
Ellen Judd (University of Manitoba)
Paper short abstract:
Through exploring how China’s marginalized internal migrants live and provide care in circumstances of normalized and often extreme precarity, insight may be gained into what is required to move through limited measures for inclusion to a potential mutuality.
Paper long abstract:
China's global rise has been built with the labour of hundreds of millions of internal migrants moving from the countryside to coastal and urban locations where their work fuels the global economy. At the same time, most remain defined as rural migrants who are formally or effectively excluded from adequate access to the benefits of their labour. The precarity of their lives comes most immediately to the foreground when they face serious illness or injury for themselves or their family members. This paper draws on narrative ethnographies of 177 instances of migrant and translocal health care, exploring how people strive to care from locations of marginality in public programs for health care, very meagre resources in the market and mobile dispersal of family. Fragments of eroding rural communities and of past or renewed cooperative health care evoke and interrogate what familiar models of mutual aid can offer. Families strive to be filial in giving care and members in declining to accept care--both in a mutuality of being to the extent that family is able to persist. Through exploring how people live and provide care in circumstances of normalized and often extreme precarity, insight may be gained into what is required to move through limited measures for inclusion to a potential mutuality.
Kathleen Buddle (University of Manitoba)
Paper short abstract:
Canadian austerity measures have sought to calibrate risk and to “responsibilize” non-profit organizations. Growing transparency requirements are having a deleterious impact on the provision of programs and services by non-profits which offer youth outreach programming.
Paper long abstract:
The Wahkohtowin Strengthening Families Program is a five-year community-based collaborative research partnership between an applied anthropologist and four non-profit community agencies serving Winnipeg's central and north end communities. Wahkotowin-SFP is a curriculum-based family outreach program that engages youth aged 11 to 17 years, who are facing systemic challenges and barriers, and who hail from Indigenous, new immigrant, refugee and/or economically impoverished communities. In addition to illuminating an understanding of the boundary work that is in play when the constructs of "at-risk youth," "resilience," and "recovery" are filtered through a number of disciplined discursive configurations, the paper is concerned with the transfer from family, to super-parental or "bio-political," responsibility for youth welfare. In it, I explore the biopolitical orientation of family services, and investigate the logic behind new forms of public management, such as the shipping, receiving and warehousing of youths in Winnipeg hotels. I am concerned with the ways this logic contributes to risk, destabilizing the already precarious positionality of marginal subjects.
Chandana Mathur (National University of Ireland, Maynooth)
Paper short abstract:
In an age of rising majoritarianism and xenophobia, are anthropology's empathetic methods powerless to fathom such sentiments? Or is anthropological fieldwork itself part of the movement towards mutuality? Can the very process of anthropological research play a role in dissolving hate?
Paper long abstract:
Electoral politics has rewarded hate-mongering and majoritarianism in recent times -- as in the election of Narendra Modi as India's Prime Minister in 2014, and the Brexit vote and the Trump victory in 2016, to name a few of the most alarming instances. The xenophobia and anti-minority sentiment that underlies these developments is profoundly at odds with an anthropological sensibility, which exults in difference and enthusiastically seeks out the unfamiliar. Given this bleak landscape, anthropologists are now having to investigate hate-filled and often paranoid majority populations. It is a necessary first step that precedes the movement towards mutuality. But are our empathetic methods of research well suited to this endeavour? Can ethnography enable us to understand those with whom we fundamentally disagree? Or is the very process of this kind of anthropological research itself part of the movement towards mutuality? By taking unsavoury ideas seriously, can anthropological fieldwork play a role in dissolving them?
Stephanie Stobbe (Menno Simons College at the University of Winnipeg)
Paper short abstract:
Canada has a history of resettling refugees.This paper examines the struggles refugees face in learning new rules of social interaction, meeting cultural expectations that could be marginalizing, and addressing conflicts in ways that build collaborations toward mutuality in very different social systems.
Paper long abstract:
Canada is known as a humanitarian and compassionate country that has a successful history of resettling refugees and asylum seekers. Today, approximately 36,393 Syrian refugees have been resettled since November 2015 as part of Canada's commitment to assist in alleviating the current refugee crisis (CIC, 2016). In 1979-1980, Canada resettled a historic 60,000 Southeast Asian refugees from Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. Today, these groups have become strong contributors to their communities in Canada - economically,politically, and socially. However, their introductions to Canadian culture and way of life were not easy, and many struggled in adapting to their new surroundings. Peaceful relationships require the building of positive social relations amongst different groups and communities. This paper examines the struggles refugees often face in learning new rules of social interaction, meeting cultural expectations that could be marginalizing, and addressing conflicts in ways that build collaborations toward mutuality in very different social systems.
Nataša Visočnik (University of Ljubljana)
Paper short abstract:
This paper will present the organisation and reveal multiple meanings of Higashi-kujo Madang festival and find out how different ethnic groups of people work together to make their society a mutual and globalized community.
Paper long abstract:
Kyoto prides itself as a "city of festivals," and matsuri events in the city are quite common—some sort of matsuri could be found on any given week. One of festival that occurs every year in Kyoto since 1993 is Higashi-kujo Madang that in the light of Japan being recognised as a multicultural state developed in an event that creates the counter space of identity in Kyoto. Although it is not a "common festival" it still an event that opens up to a public sphere on a public street and show an alternative to everyday life as this is now supplied by the state organised by a neighbourhood association (chounaikai). As a festival it creates a space of festivity, with various entertainments, artistry, drama, games, food, music, dance: a whole repertoire of festival practices on display. However, as organised by Korean minority living in a district of Higashi Kujo, it is also a social movement of marginalised voices and as such commonly described by its organizers as a tabunka matsuri ("multicultural festival"), where Japanese themselves also participate and thus creating mutual society. This paper will thus present the organisation and reveal multiple meanings of Higashi-kujo Madang festival and find out how different groups of people work together to make their society a multicultural and a mutual globalized community.