*** Apologies for Cross Posting ***
115th Meeting of the American Anthropological
Association, “Evidence, Accident,
Discovery”, Nov 16-20, 2016
Minneapolis
Accidental Findings and New Evidence: Precarity
of/in Intimacies, Migration, and Tourism
Valerio Simoni (Graduate Institute, Geneva)
Susan Frohlick (University of British
Columbia, Okanagan)
Anthropologists have focused on how unstable
job markets and deskilling under neoliberalism have negatively affected
workers, that is, how precarious labor is related to precarious life (Allison
2012). Building on these insights, this panel shows the interest of adopting a
broader view of precarity as pertaining to material, social, and existential states
of insecurity, dis-belonging, and dis-connectedness related to mobility. More
particularly, our focus is on the role of family, kinship, relatedness, love,
sex, desire, erotics, and (non-)“normative intimacies” (Berlant 2007) as bound
up with border crossings for tourists, migrants, refugees, expatriates,
lifestyle migrants, and other mobile subjects, and on how precarities as
subjective and affective dimensions of life are emergent from these intimate
mobilities. Yet it is not only the “ethnographic truths” of precarity that are
of interest to this panel but also the means to grasp them.
Precarity,
in migration and tourism, is relevant to the methodologies that anthropologists
rely on to gain knowledge of intimate social worlds and life projects. Notions
of evidence shape “access” to immigrants whose privacy is already stretched by
immigration regimes and trajectories, as intimacies are a currency for
anthropological truth telling. Evidence, accident, and discovery appear, too,
in the sort of “truth-seeking” dynamics in which anthropologists’ participants
can get entangled or are confronted by in the precarious situations of crossing
over, or across, borders. Institutional bodies and border agencies scrutinize
and police relationships in search of deceit, looking for evidence, so to
speak. Finally, in traversing physical and moral boundaries, the protagonists
of such intimate relations are often themselves involved in processes of
discovering, ascertaining, and working over the precarity of their bonds and connections.
In all these cases and dimensions – from ethnographic endeavors, to
institutional instances of control, to those directly engaging in cross-border
intimacies—much effort seems to be spent on the necessity to delineate the kind
of relation one is having.
This
panel draws attention to what it is that comes to count as evidence of a type
of intimate or familial sociality, and what are the discoveries afforded by
different relational and intimate framings. The notion of discovery is also
critical for thinking through how intimacy holds potential to generate
“accidents” in the sense of accidental findings, which then provide new
evidence. Building on these premises, we encourage a view of ethnographic
approaches to intimacy and mobility that takes precarity not only as an
empirical reality or conceptual analytic, but also a methodological principle,
so that accidents enable us, and our research participants, to remain sensitive
and attuned to emerging nuances and processes of differentiation, and to
question and move beyond taken-for-granted, dominant views of intimacy and
relationships.
Valerio
Simoni, PhD.
- Research
Fellow (SNSF)
The Graduate
Institute
Geneva,
Switzerland
- Research
Associate
Centre for
Research in Anthropology (CRIA-IUL)
Lisbon, Portugal
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