Dear anthropologists of the Middle East,
We look forward to your paper submissions for our ASA 2016 panel titled "Evolution, Revolution, Chaos: The meaning of time in everyday practice, governance, and fieldwork trajectories in the Middle East" - please find the abstract and link below - and will be very excited to meet you all in Durham this summer.
Short Abstract
This panel complicates understandings of the contemporary Middle East through an attention to articulations of time and politics in individual lives, agendas of governance, and anthropologists' fieldwork trajectories. It pushes for a productive interrogation of "chaos."
Long Abstract
Time has saturated concerns on the Middle East: from an orientialist view of the region as in a state of permanent stasis, to modernist queries about the progressive incorporation of the region into the technological, secularizing, and liberalizing fold, to the celebratory lauding of the interruptive uprisings of 2011. Stubbornly clinging to time asymmetries between the region and the world, scholarship has qualified the recent regional developments of war, the re-appearance of states of emergency, and the refugee crisis as either circular backtracking or descent into chaos. For anthropology, however, chaos is neither a negative nor unmanageable lens through which to comprehend the Middle East. Chaos suggests not only a power vacuum, with its risks and potentials, but also a suspension of hegemonic order (political, classed, gendered). Chaos turns unpredictability, interruption, and loss into opportunities for reflection that can be identity shaping and potentially world-making. Drawing on the opinions and practices of our interlocutors and our own engagement, in this panel we probe the relation between time and politics by asking questions about how time is hindered, shifted, or liberated. To what extent do discourses of 'crisis' - not knowing what to do next - serve in equal parts power structures and diverse actors' intentions heretofore sidelined? What becomes of time in personal life-stories, practices of piety, instances of martyrdom, theories of reincarnation, experience of occupation, displacement, and struggle? Which intellectual trajectories help us explore "how times plays out" as well as "how one plays with time" (Hammoudi 2012)?
http://www.nomadit.co.uk/asa/asa2016/panels.php5?PanelID=xxxx/
* Please email us if you have any trouble submitting your proposal. Thank you!
Kind Regards,
Charis Boutieri (King's College London) & Maria Kastrinou (Brunel University)
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