Hi everyone,
we are looking for a couple of more contributors to our panel for the AAA.
Please feel free to circulate and do get in touch with me if you are
interested in participating.
The temporality of aftermath
Revolutions, wars, natural disasters: these ‘critical events’ (Das, 1995)
or ‘generative moments’ (Kapferer, 2015) bring about complex aftermaths. On
the one hand, eras marked by afterness spur radical opening and
acceleration. Fear barriers are smashed, hopes flourish, promises made and
broken; social relations, power structures and symbolic webs of meaning
reconfigured. And yet, for many people, aftermaths are likewise saturated
by a permeating sense of closure or stasis: infrastructural destruction,
economic stagnation, and political instability often stall the present and
make the everyday reproduction of material and social life difficult. Even
so, also when crisis seemingly becomes perpetual and dreams of the stable,
‘good life’ (Berlant, 2011) indefinitely suspended, people do cope, adjust
and make efforts to get by. At times, this is achieved by means of
re-appropriating and re-using the material and symbolic ‘debris’ (Stoler,
2008) or ‘rubble’ (Gordillo, 2014) that grand events leave in their wake.
In this panel, we focus on how events and what come thereafter influence
the experience of temporality. Presenting ethnographic case studies from
post-2011 Egypt, Nepal after the 2015 earthquake, and [to be added], the
panel interrogates how relationships between past-present-future are
altered or reimagined once the tumult of the grand event has passed (Scott
2014; Wool & Livingstone, 2017). Taking cues from Oliver Sacks suggestion
that speeding history tends to be accompanied by a slowing of time (2004),
we are especially interested in tracing how some strands of time speed up,
while others slow down or even come to a complete halt. These temporal
multiplicities are tied to socio-political dynamics, large and small. On
the one hand, sorrows and desires gear up with large-scale post-event shock
doctrines (Klein 2007) and centrifugal economic policies so as to create
accelerated fantasies of the future (Simpson 2013). On the other, the past
is vivisected and reassembled in the shape of heritage (Herzfeld 2010) or
the haunting discomfort of futures lost (Scott, 2014; Fisher, 2012). Amidst
the rubble, the everyday becomes a field for the declination of different
tenses as the notion of eventfulness – grand Events vs. minor quasi-event –
is re-evaluated (Povinelli 2011). This, we suggest, might allow people as
well as ethnographers to act *in* and also *on* time: a post-space for
‘time-tricking’ and ‘temporal agency’ (Morosanu & Ringel, 2016), in which
subjects, futures and worlds can be imagined anew.
All the best/Vänligen
Karin Ahlberg
PhD Candidate in Anthropology, School of Oriental and African Studies
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