ASA2023, An Unwell World? Anthropology in a Speculative Mode  
SOAS, University of London, 11 - 14 April 2023

Call For Papers for Panel P055: https://nomadit.co.uk/conference/asa2023/p/12875 

Back to the Present: Urgency, Immediacy, and the Debris of Abstraction 

Convened by, 
Timothy Cooper (University of Cambridge) 
Michael Edwards (University of Cambridge)

Chair: Nikita Simpson (SOAS)

Has anthropology misplaced the present? Has it slipped through the gap between our orientation towards the future—aspiration, hope, speculation—and our focus on the past— history, memory, genealogy? This call to pay greater attention to the present might seem odd given the conventions that render the immediate anthropology’s hallmark temporal frame. But what happens if we locate the present beyond the anthropology of time and temporality?  

We might look to our epistemic tendency towards abstraction and the will to generate scalable and commensurable concepts when in the field and later, when returning to our desks. If abstraction is the removal of an object from its context, providing the distance from events to allow us to think in ideas, the present might be its first casualty. Concreteness, by contrast, is taken as the counter to abstraction, evoking intimacy, co-presence, and a sensual, submerged response.  

We invite papers that engage, theoretically, empirically, and methodologically, with the present in its immediacy. We might consider the present, for example, in digital economies of attention, or in the language of urgency surrounding the climate crisis. Or we might find the present in existing disciplinary tropes: from waiting and nostalgia, to rupture and the event. More than ethnographic re-description, returning to the present might require a consideration of what is shed through public, economic, and ethical abstractions. Perhaps, in these remains and debris, the present awaits rediscovery.

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Please do consider submitting an abstract or pass this call onto those you know who might be working in related areas. The inclusion of multimedia, film, audio, or other elements as part of the presentation would be most welcome. 

The Call for Papers is now open and closes at 23:59 GMT/WEST on 3 January 2023.

The conference will be held at SOAS University of London. SOAS is the leading Higher Education institution in the UK and Europe specialising in the study of Asia, Africa, the Near and Middle East and their diasporas.

Please do get in touch via the NomadIT platform if you have any questions.
Tim [log in to unmask] and Michael [log in to unmask] 

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