The Unfamiliar (E-Journal)
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"Walking Threads, Threading Walk": Weaving and Entangling Deleuze and Ingold with Threads
Get PDFIn this paper, I explore theoretical discussions that have emrged through the Walking Threads exercise, correspondences with Lembo, philosophical treatises by Deleuze and Guattari, and anthropological works by Ingold. The subsequent theoretical exploration has been an attempt in weaving together all these different correspondences by walking in the theoretical imaginations of Ingold and Deleuze. Walking Threads, I conclude, can be considered as an exercise or way of incorporating theory into practice
Mountains as actors in the Bolivian Andes: The interrelationship between politics and ritual in the Kallawaya ayllus
Get PDFAbstract: This essay will examine the way that a Bolivian Andean people, the Kallawayas, incorporate mountains—seen as beings with agency in their own right—into their structure of kinship and politics. The Kallawayas interpret mountains as inhabited by ancestral spirits, who are incorporated into the local political structure as authorities. This understanding of the mountains denies the Western separation of politics and nature. I follow de la Cadena (2014) in positing mountain spirits, known as machulas, and humans, known as runa, as mutually constituting one another within the socio-territorial space of the ayllu. In this space nature and politics are not divided but intertwined. However, the political organisation of the Kallawaya communities has undergone profound changes in recent decades that have affected the ritual relationship between the Kallawayas and the mountain spirits. The manner in which Kallawayas incorporate their ancestors as authorities therefore provides evidence for the propensity of ritual to reflect social structure
An Intuitive Walk – a thread to play along
Get PDFA commentary reading on the Walking Thread Initiative, subsequent to the Sourcing Within workshop under the Knowing From The Inside project (KFI), Department of Anthropology, University of Aberdeen
Anthropological Renga
Get PDFI am investigating performance training as an exploratory mode of inquiry. In conjunction with this I ask how may performative enquiry together with anthropological ways of working lead to sustainable forms of academic knowledge production. The underlying aim of my project is to find ways to decolonise academic scholarship that transcend the apparent complacency that cultural critique has proffered (Escobar and Restrepo 2005). An anthropology otherwise, in resonance with Escobar and Restrepo’s manifesto, in which I am exploring a recrafting of what anthropologists make. This needs to include who they make it for, in other words who anthropologists are accountable to, as well as the expected ‘products’ of their scholarly endeavours. This paper is an afterthought on the Walking Threads and how the event can further our understanding in collaborative work
Designing an Illusion of India’s Future Superpowerdom
Get PDFThe article dissects current utopian visions of future Indian superpowerdom and traces them to underlying convergences between right wing political Hindu nationalism and philanthrocapitalism. By looking at how utopian visions are materialized in the elitist aesthetics of ‘royal chic’ parading on New Delhi’s fashion ramps and in the aesthetics of hypermodern smart cities of the future, the article explores the aesthetic and affective convergence of an imagined economy and (re-)invented traditions. In the problematic terrain of philanthrocapitalism, the ‘factish’ of GDP and the doxa of Indianness have come to form the core of current populist myths. In so doing they produce an illusion of future India that nobody really believes in, yet structures reality and is passionately embraced by many. The article suggests that the problem with such utopian myths is not that they are myths, but rather it is the direction they are pushing in and their consequences which require questioning. The article provides preliminary analysis of, and answers around, this problematic of resonant versus dissonant futures and their imaginaries
Stillness as a Form of Imaginative Labour
Get PDFThis essay connects the practice of stillness to David Graeber\u27s concepts of imaginative labour and immanent imagination. It makes the proposition that stillness should not be evaluated as lack of activity or movement, but rather attended to in its pragmatic and productive dimensions. The essay thus explores stillness as a potential mode of production of imagination and means of political transformation: in order for it to be meaningful, we need to reconfigure our relationship to stillness as one of imagination, resistance, thinking, and writing
“I was at Home!” The Dream of Representation in the Representation of a Dream.
Get PDFThis creative essay uses a dream the author had during fieldwork as the starting point for a discussion of the conundrums of representation. The dream epitomises the alterations that observation causes on the portions of reality that the ethnographer selects and concentrates upon. The rest of the essay tells of how the author attempted to find his own personal solution to the problem of representation thanks to inspiration found in a photo exhibition and the letter of a friend and mentor. Such interpenetration of oneiric, photographic, and epistolary materials works as a pretext to discuss the importance of remaining faithful to the anthropological mission of making people visible and not being hindered by the methodological impossibility of representation
Between Heaven and a Hard Place: Inhabiting the Space Between an Enchanted Past and a Utopian Future
Get PDFThis essay looks at how devotees of Krishna in Mayapur, West Bengal experience the space between an ideal past and a prophesied future. Through an affective and imaginative engagement with Vaishnav cultural history, devotees learn to relocate themselves in a particular temporal flow, within which both the past and future become constitutive horizons of the ethical imagination. I will focus on how the tradition of katha (storytelling) facilitates a convergence of temporalities, within which devotees are encouraged to routinely participate in the past. Such engagement with an enchanted past, I will argue, in turn informs devotees’ imaginings of and aspirations for the ongoing development of an ‘Ideal Vedic City’