Paper short abstract:

During the post-Soviet era, Cuba has endured an unparalleled political and economic crisis and rapid large-scale transformations. This calls for attention to the ways in which ordinary people negotiate the on-going political and economic uncertainties in their everyday lives.

Paper long abstract:

Losing its closest socialist ally, the Soviet Union, launched Cuba into a severe economic and political crisis that forced the state to make several concessions to its earlier ideals. State services and contributions to the population were severely cut, the country was opened to international tourism and day-to-day life became increasingly monetised, favouring some whilst marginalising others. The expectation was on the crisis to create widespread popular resistance to the state. In scholarly discussion, socialist state politics has often been approached via the concept of paternalism, whereby state power is conceptualised as oppressive in regards to citizens who reject such interference in their lives. Approached by such terms as late-socialism, recent research on Cuba has highlighted the forthcoming demise of the island's revolutionary rule.

Drawing on ethnographic evidence from amongst lower income, racially mixed Cubans, this paper explores how individuals relate to Cuba's contemporary state discourse in the context of on-going economic and political precarity. Instead of paternalism, the dynamics between large-scale developments and individuals' everyday lives are better approached via the notion of dialectics of care, which resonates with local understandings of the intertwining of material exchanges and social relations. This complicates and questions the idea of state involvement in individual lives as unambiguously rejected by Cubans, highlighting instead the multifaceted relationships that people maintain with state institutions in distinct situations, whilst simultaneously finding inventive ways to negotiate the continuing political and economic crisis.

Paper short abstract:

By addressing three cases the paper discuss on the many ways in which (being in) crisis is construct in Argentina. I will show how the notion of uncertainty, social, political, and economic insecurity can only be understood within an historical perspective and in terms of group and class anchors.

Paper long abstract:

In recent years discourses on global crisis has been gaining importance as a given reality. In Argentina the economic and social indices however have moved out another way. In the last decade unemployment, inequality, and poverty rates have decline for example have declined significantly and social security have grown considerably. Despite this, and with the persistence of major social and economic problems, Argentina is, for many, seen as a society in crisis. By addressing investigate three cases (Middle classes and its relation with the U.S. dollar, the experience of people living on the informal waste collection, and the ambulant vendors in the city of Buenos Aires) this work aims to contribute to understanding on how the crisis is lived, imagined, and created in relation to national, group and class imaginaries that cannot be understood without focusing on imaginary around a model of a Country and the idea of a way of living, without inquiring into the individual and collective trajectories, and focusing on power struggles among different social groups in which the State plays a key role. Thus, this paper seeks to contribute from an anthropological perspective on the understanding of the complexity of current social processes at the national level (Argentina) but also in a Global level by showing the framework of discourse and action that build the current (idea) of (world) crisis.

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Paper short abstract:

This paper aims to address the varying relationships between migrants and cities that are differently positioned within the crises-ridden processes of the current neoliberal globalization.

Paper long abstract:

On the basis of ethnographic data on three European cities, which were once industrial centers, this paper explores the varied processes of urban restructuring and analyse the dynamics unleashed by the crises and the place of migrants in these processes. This paper argues that the crisis and the reconfiguration of power hierarchies might be changing the opportunities available in cities of different scale (in this case in disempowered cities) with consequences to the ways migrants are inserted into the social, political, economic and cultural landscapes and imaginaries of cities. By focusing on former industrial cities, which went through massive deindustrialization and are now trying to follow the path of culture-led urban regeneration (especially through the European Capital of Culture title), this paper develops the concept of "displacement" to unpack the category of "migrant" and the location of "the crisis" in time. The concept of displacement enables us to capture the impact of different forms and regimes of labor (including forced labor) and their histories in the city making process that include but are not limited to those framed by the nation-state; to approach mobility as spatial but also as social displacement of people (including their dispossession); to reflect on how the sources, remedies, uncertainties, and the responsibilities as well as the legitimation of the crises are acted out.

This paper concludes by arguing that disempowered cities might provide new insights into the dynamics and fault lines of processes of repositioning, emplacement, and displacements.

Paper short abstract:

This paper traces the ways citizens of Kiruna, Sweden, negotiate the future of their society in light of ecological destruction, risk, and uncertainty due to damage to the city caused by iron mining by a state-owned company, LKAB, necessitating a massive relocation of citizens beginning in 2012.

Paper long abstract:

Since the rise of industrialization in the West, social-economic prosperity and stability has increasingly been characterized by uncertainty and precarity. Culturally-bound concepts of risk - for example, financial risk - permeate governance and decision-making at multiple scales ranging from the local to the national. The aim of this paper is two fold: First, to describe how risk (specifically, "operational risk", as the relocation of the city of Kiruna today is classed by LKAB), is conceptualized and managed through the company-led program of "social transformation", a process characterized both by economic development as top priority and expert-led social engineering. Echoing a tradition of social engineering as a cornerstone of the developing Swedish welfare state throughout the 20th century, I argue that the relocation of Kiruna marks a significant turning point in the relationship between citizens and the state in Sweden, as local actors contest the Swedish state's absence from negotiating equitable compensation and addressing social and ethical uncertainties in this relocation for thousands of soon to be displaced residents, in favor of corporate-led solutions which overwhelmingly prioritize facilitating continued extraction and profit for one of Sweden's most valuable national assets. Secondly, I analyze some of the ways in which citizens of Kiruna, as a spatially-bound place simultaneously "dependent" and physically damaged by mining, apprehend, express, and negotiate agency through conditions of deep uncertainty — as the moving of the city is expected to last, according to company officials, as long as the ore-body is extractable - 100 years or more.

Paper short abstract:

Despite unprecedented economic growth, many people in northern Sierra Leone perceive their lives in constant risk and crisis. Discerning a culprit for their suffering in insecurity, people rather scapegoat their close ones than an elusive ‘chief enemy’, enviously hindering their social mobility.

Paper long abstract:

More than ten years after the end of the civil war, the outcome of a 'crisis of youth' or/and 'of the (patrimonial) state', Sierra Leone's national economy grows in an unprecedented manner. While ordinary people in northern Sierra Leone experience the 'new developments', more often they feel themselves being excluded from their benefits. People acknowledge the local impacts of global financial or food crisis, or of 'bad governance'. In everyday discussions and performances to overcome the stalemate, though, they rather discern and scapegoat 'immediate enemies' for their actual failure to keep up with the speed of development and to participate in obvious improvements. It is their fellow citizens' jealousy, their 'bad at' ('bad heart'), which is responsible for them being stuck in precarity and continuous suffering. Envious practices to destroy other people with 'local practices' recurring to 'wicked forces' and to bemire their reputation with rumors and malicious gossip (bad mot) due to 'bad heart' are generally seen as the social and personal ill hampering the country's progress. Confined in local cosmological work and restricted access to resources, people though recur to the same register of practices to remedy other's envious practices. This leads to a spiral of mutual scapegoating and restricting social mobility, perpetuating the crisis and postponing others' and their own wellbeing. This contribution aims at portraying moments and localities in which people discern and ascribe the reasons for personal suffering and at portraying the sometimes risky practices to escape others' envious seizure and overcome the crisis.

Paper short abstract:

In this paper, I examine how minorities try to find and create secure places to live after political crisis. The case of ethnic minorities in Fiji, a multi-ethnic society in Oceania is presented.

Paper long abstract:

Fiji is a multi-ethnic island nation located in Oceania. This island has been suffering from a succession of political crises to this day: two coups in 1987, one civilian coup in 2000 and another coup in 2006. One of the many factors in play behind these political crises is grievance and fear among indigenous Fijians that they have been and will be politically and economically marginalized by other ethnic group especially Indo-Fijians who are mostly descendants of indentured laborers who arrived in the 19th century. To placate these feelings, certain kinds of pro-indigenous Fijian policies have been implemented after each coup sometimes at the cost of other ethnic groups' interests. From the viewpoint of non-indigenous people, instability and policy changes thereafter threaten their status in Fiji and arouse fear about the safety of living. In this presentation, I would like to focus on how ethnic minorities such as Solomon islanders, Ni-Vanuatu and Banabans, try to cope with and even accommodate the continuing crisis in their own way. I wish to show and analyze various strategies they take; from claiming their locality and appealing to their high level of intermarriage with indigenous Fijians, to expecting and sometimes seeking direct or indirect help from their former country or neighboring big countries such as Australia and New Zealand.

Paper short abstract:

This paper considers religiously-informed pluralist initiatives in Israel and Palestine that seek to bypass the state and typical sovereignty-focused components of the peace process. These groups believe that the national narrative promises an unrealistic ideal of “peace” free of vulnerability.

Paper long abstract:

The Israeli state has been in crisis-mode since 1948. Domestically, the state is widely understood as a nation at risk, surrounded by enemies who wish its people harm. Until recently, major peace initiatives have concentrated their efforts at the level of state politics. These have tried to bring Palestinians and Israelis together to discuss the division of land, rights to water sources, militarization, etc. The state has always been central to imagining coexistence. Common sense generally tells people there needs to be an agreement between states in order for "peace" to appear. Recently, non-liberal religious initiatives have been questioning the centrality of the state to coexistence. These groups have suggested that the secular Realpolitik state is chasing a false sense of security. They claim the national vision naively seeks to create a utopian situation that eliminates all vulnerability, something inherent to social interaction. National narratives position the state as the solution to the historical problems of a people. Nowhere is this more the case than Israel, where the state offers itself as the solution to the historic oppression of the Jewish people. Realizing the impossibility of eliminating vulnerability from human interaction, some Jewish Israelis and Palestinians have begun to bypass typical components of the peace process such as land negotiations, claiming that the land belongs to God alone, and focusing on coexistence unrelated to questions of sovereignty. This paper will explore these efforts and consider what they can suggest to our own understandings of politics on different scales.

Paper short abstract:

This paper analyses how labour precarity and Japan’s unique recruitment system affect Japanese fashion designers’ school-to-work transition. It illustrates their balancing act between being “cool creatives” and the institutional structures of the fashion school, labour market, and society at large.

Paper long abstract:

In most post-industrial societies, regular employment has been gradually replaced by labour precarity (insecurity, irregularity, and flexibility), which not only affects today's working-class youth, but also its middle-class counterparts. Paradoxically, work has become the principal definer of selfhood. In Japan, the increased dominance of temporary part-time jobs (arubaito) prevents young people from reproducing socio-economic structures based on the post-WWII ideals of "family and company." Many choose a career in Japan's popular culture industry, a booming field of substantial international visibility. Yet, despite its economic importance, holders of "cool" but precarious jobs have difficulties gaining recognition as productive members of society.

One future-determining period, the institutionalized transition from school to work, has become a problematic juncture for young Japanese. Japan's unique recruitment and job allocation system (shushoku katsudo), designed as a response to labour shortage during the bubble economy, doesn't match the needs of today's precarious job market. It impedes transition from arubaito to regular employment and restricts inventiveness in companies as well as personal career development.

This paper, based on ethnographic research at Japan's most prestigious fashion school, analyses the way in which Japan's "lost generation" searches for alternative life paths and a new sense of self by focusing on the transition from fashion academy to creative work. It illustrates how, in uncertain times, creative middle-class Japanese navigate between on the one hand their desire for freedom and "cool" selfhood, and on the other hand the institutional structures of the fashion school, Japan's recruitment system, and society's expectations at large.

Paper short abstract:

This paper offers a critique of the assumption shared by many Western scholars that the whole world has gone left after the crisis of 2008. It contextualises the perspective of Polish authorities 25 years after the transition while based on research on the legitimacy of a sports mega-event in Poznan.

Paper long abstract:

When conducting research among the city authorities on the 2012 UEFA (European) Championship in Poznan, Poland, I was struck by the image of Poland which they all seemed to share: that is, of a 'green island' which not only survived, but indeed took advantage of the global economic crisis. Neoliberalism retains its hegemonic position in the Polish public discourse. Despite the growing discontent with governmental politics both at the local and national level, the authorities still believe that 'a rising tide lifts all boats', and that the potential of the country's strength lies in GDP growth and its supposed attractiveness for foreign investors.

Surprisingly, whereas on the one hand the country's position is seen as improving in the global competition and the process of 'scaling' (Brenner, Çağlar and Glick Schiller), on the other hand, one can get an impression that its officials act as if it was a secluded island unaware of the new challenges and changes happening elsewhere in the world.

This paper examines the background of these convictions while using the perspective of 'historical realism' (Gavin Smith) and drawing from Michel Foucault's discussion on power and truth, as well as from Michel Callon's concept of the 'performativity of economics'. It is based on longitudinal fieldwork among Poznan's city authorities ('studying up') and is part of a project on the significance of sports mega-events for neoliberal hegemony.

Paper short abstract:

This paper addresses an epistemic repercussion of contemporary crises: the loss of the future as a domain to think in. Based on research in Germany’s fastest shrinking city, it shifts temporal scales and proposes a presentist approach to the future in order to allow us to think beyond “the crisis”.

Paper long abstract:

One of the many repercussions of contemporary crises is an epistemic defiance: the loss of the future as a domain to think in. This is true for the academy at large as much as for many people worldwide, who endure general insecurities. How is anthropology to overcome its own 'evacuation of the future', and how are we to conceptualise the future as an important dimension of human life? This paper proposes a presentist approach to time and the future, shifting temporal scales in order to allow us to think beyond "the crisis". It is based on research in Germany's fastest shrinking city, the former socialist model city of Hoyerswerda, which has faced a combination of crises throughout the last 25 years. Post-socialist transformation and sudden de-industrialisation have prompted an unforeseen outmigration of younger generations, which, in turn, has led to a loss of half of the population and a doubling of the city's age average. Subsequently, life in Hoyerswerda has been precarious, haunted by notions of 'no hope' and 'no future'. However, the inhabitants of this post-industrial city have managed to reclaim their local futures - and thereby think beyond their particular crisis. This epistemic re-appropriation allows us to reflect upon our own knowledge practices, which at least in Europe and North America remain based in both: so-called Western modernity and its global neoliberal reformulations. A presentist approach, I argue, can overcome false hopes of linear progress and constant change, and focus more clearly on the present issues at hand.

Paper short abstract:

The paper will explore some epistemological and technocratic uses (and abuses) of the concept of crisis by sketching a virtual, investigative tour in a multiplicity of fields and sites. Finally, the paper will argue for the abandonment of the concept altogether.

Paper long abstract:

The paper will explore some epistemological and technocratic uses (and abuses) of the concept of crisis by sketching a virtual, investigative tour in a multiplicity of fields and sites. Starting off with the insertion of the failure of crisis as an analytical concept in recent ethnographic accounts, the paper will ask why and how "crisis works" in other domains of academic production and in selected fields of international action. Based on ethnographic research among global experts of peace making and crisis prevention in the Middle East, but also on critical inquiry in various neighboring fields of international action, such as natural disaster management and prediction of violent outbursts, the paper will analyze how the concept operates today as a catch-all phrase that seeks to define our common humanity in particular ways. This operation generates detrimental effects on populations and spaces, enables unequal and exclusionary forms of knowledge and power and disables critique. Faced with the paradox of the ubiquity of crisis amidst constant failure to advance critique, the paper will argue for the abandonment of the concept altogether.