Paper short abstract:

In this paper, the need of rethinking anthropological means of presenting constantly re-forming social constellations will be asserted through discussions of two social networks. Possible directions in solving the problem of (in)flexible presentations offered by pragmatic approach will be examined.

Paper long abstract:

During the last two years I have been researching two phenomena: the Erased of Slovenia, a marginalized and deprived administrative category of the Slovenian population, and the organization of (il)legal migrants i European cities. Both cases show rhizomatic properties and are thus not adequately explainable with the traditional concepts of bounded groups and categories. In the ever-changing contexts of their appearance in different realms these proactive and dynamic networks are constantly expanding and recoiling their aims and forms according to the opportunities and obstacles they encounter. They are conjoining with similar constellations in order to share experiences, obtain support, and concord future steps.

Being theoreticaly orientated towards linguistic anthropology, I have found the pragmatic approach especially useful for dealing with such research problems. First of all, it challenges very fondations of the concept of concepts, a large part of which has been shown to be context sensitive, that is, exactly what the concepts were meant to avoid. Further, it shows that bounderies of concepts are volatile and by doing so, it overreaches logical distinctions between concepts and metaphors.

In this paper, the need of rethinking anthropological means of presenting social constellations will be asserted through the display of concrete research material about two social networks. Possible directions in solving the problem of (in)flexible presentations offered by pragmatic approach will be examined.

Paper short abstract:

The paper investigates the frequent but frail encounters between homeless people in St. Petersburg, Russia.

Paper long abstract:

The paper investigates the frequent but frail encounters within an heterogeneous and shifty category of people whose main common factor is that they are excluded from the social contexts that usually render some sort of permanence to human lives: official administrative structures, conventional jobs, neighbourhoods, and, in particular, networks of family and friends. Being, in their own words, "needed by nobody", they instead survive in makeshift social environments, where ambiguous relationships are forged for the time being only to be dissolved once they have served their temporary purpose. Physical survival as well as the experience of human warmth are thus facilitated by arbitrary encounters that are at the same time inescapable and repelling, generous and exploiting, and as ubiquitous as they are fleeting and casual. Displacement as such fuels this shiftiness, but crucial is also a nearly universal stigmatization of "uprooted" social categories that homeless people encompass to the same extent as anyone else. The transience and unpredictability of their social existence is thus largely an effect of mutual distrust and disdain, and the fact that while in reality being "rhizomatic" to say the least, this togetherness of sorts is perpetually juxtaposed to an imagined ideal of "real" human beings as firmly rooted and cultivated in a familiar "social soil".

Paper short abstract:

In this paper I consider the landscape of labor brokers on the Indonesian island of Lombok and take their temporary, strategic, and geographically dispersed relationships as a starting point for analysis. More broadly, shifting attention away from stable networks to contingent relationships among labor brokers offers an entry-point from which to begin reconceptualizing post-authoritarian Indonesia.

Paper long abstract:

During the last few years there has been an increasing formalization of migration from Indonesia to Saudi Arabia and Malaysia, in particular, where over a million Indonesians work on palm oil plantations, construction sites, and as domestic servants. This process of formalization has led to a dramatic drop in undocumented migration and the rapid growth of Indonesian labor recruitment companies that send migrants abroad. These companies are, however, dependant on large numbers of informal petugas lapangan, or "field operatives," who are responsible for the actual recruitment of migrants in villages across Indonesia. In this paper I consider the landscape of petugas lapangan on the Indonesian island of Lombok and take their temporary, strategic, and geographically dispersed relationships as a starting point for analysis. More broadly, shifting attention away from stable networks to contingent relationships among labor brokers offers an entry-point from which to begin reconceptualizing post-authoritarian Indonesia.

Paper short abstract:

In this presentation I reflect on what methods and representational strategies might allow anthropologists to do justice to the radically plural and decentered quality of recent militant activism in Europe with its metaphors of a webs, multitudes and rhizomes.

Paper long abstract:

From 2000 to 2006, I conducted fieldwork with radical activists, primarily self-declared anarchists, in Zagreb, Croatia. Most of these activists strongly identified with, and some participated in, the wave of protests at international summits that the media dubbed the "antiglobalization movement." Activists, on the other hand, while trying to maintain some sense of common struggle, attempted in various ways to articulate the plural and decentered nature of that in which they participated. This tension is captured in many self-designations: "movement of movements," "network of networks," "one no and a thousand yeses," "a world where many worlds fit," and the "multitude." Metaphors of networks, webs, and rhizomes were particularly prevalent. The senses of identity implied by these new metaphors of social collectivity are fundamentally at odds with the arborescent metaphors of the nationalist imagination—unified, primordial, and organic—that were at the heart of claims to state sovereignty invoked during the wars of the former Yugoslavia and against which these activists vehemently contrasted their own political subjectivities. I reflect here on the interplay between these self-designations and my own ethnographic efforts to attend to the fluid, shifting and rhizomatic qualities of this activism. How, I ask, are ethnographers to do justice, both in our methods and our writing styles, to social and political practices that are so at odds with the traditional anthropological preoccupations with stability, structure and systematicity? Does engagement with practices opposed to organic unity help us to confront the lingering place of the culture concept in our ethnography?

Paper short abstract:

Against the backdrop of a discussion of the more stable networks of diasporic Hadhrami Arabs in peripheral Indonesia this paper explores their contingent and temporary connections transcending kin and ethnicity.

Paper long abstract:

Based on field research in Indonesia - in peripheral Central and North Sulawesi between August 2007 and July 2008 - the paper explores and compares temporary relations and stable social networks of Indonesians of Arab descent. Being part of a diaspora originating from the Hadhramaut (Yemen), these Arab Indonesians can rely on a network of relatively stable social relations based on kinship and ethnicity, due to prevalent endogamy and strict patrilineal reckoning of descent, but also further fostered by their modern religious organisations. Thanks to these networks as well as their trading skills, their diaspora could expand to relatively remote places in eastern Indonesia. This paper is particularly concerned with another side of their diasporic social networking, much less discussed in the literature, namely the obvious fact that diasporas do not only consist of relatively stable networks but also of contingent and temporary connections. These fluid ties can be observed most easily when people are on the move and when relationships regularly transcend kin and ethnicity. Importantly, social networks and contingent relations do not necessarily contradict each other, as vast networks leave enough room for contingency and temporality within. The paper will argue, in the case of diaspora societies such as the Hadhrami Arabs in Indonesia, that the reliability of networks often preconditions temporary relations. Which strategies did the Hadhramis as a minority group develop in the diaspora in order to connect, especially to local society, and manage their manifold relations?