Impulse to Act

Description

What drives people to take to the streets in protest? What is their connection to other activists and how does that change over time? How do seemingly spontaneous activist movements emerge, endure, and evolve, especially when they lack a leader and concrete agenda? How does one analyze a changing political movement immersed in contingency? Impulse to Act addresses these questions incisively, examining a wide range of activist movements from the December 2008 protests in Greece to the recent chto delat in Russia. Contributors in the first section of this volume highlight the affective dimensions of political movements, charting the various ways in which participants coalesce around and belong to collectives of resistance. The potent agency of movements is highlighted in the second section, where scholars show how the emerging actions and critiques of protesters help disrupt authoritative political structures. Responding to the demands of the field today, the novel approaches to protest movements in Impulse to Act offer new ways to reengage with the traditional cornerstones of political anthropology.

Acknowledgments
Introduction: Resistance Reconsidered / Othon Alexandrakis
Part I: Affect as Political Condition
1. Being and Doing Politics: Moral Ontologies and Ethical Ways of Knowing at the End of the Cold War / Jessica Greenberg
2. The Affective Echoes of an Overwhelming Life: The Demand for Legal Recognition and the Vicious Cycle of Desire, in the Case of Queer Activism in Istanbul, Turkey / Eirine Avramopoulou
3. Emergenc(i)es in the Fields: Affective Composition and Counter-Camps Against the Exploitation of Migrant Farm Labor in Italy / Irene Peano
4. Cosmologicopolitics: Vitalistic Cosmology Meets Biopower / James D. Faubion
5. Surreal Capitalism and the Dialectical Economies of Precarity / Neni Panourgiá

Part II: Agency as Ethical Condition
6. Intolerants: Politics of the Ordinary in Karachi, Pakistan / Tania Ahmad
7. Negative Space: Unmovement and the Study of Activism When There is No Action / Cymene Howe
8. What Should be Done?: Art and Political Possibility in Russia / Petra Rethmann
9. The Multilinearity of Protest: Understanding New Social Movements Through Their Events, Trends, and Routines / John Postill
10. Whose Ethics?: Negotiating Ethics and Responsibility in the Field / Marianne Maeckelbergh
11. Within, Against, Beyond: The Radical Imagination in the Age of the Slow-Motion Apocalypse / Alex Khasnabish
Conclusion: On an Emergent Politics and Ethics of Resistance / Athená Athanasiou and Othon Alexandrakis
List of Contributors
Index

Sujets

• Political Science
• HISTORY
• Histoire
• Revolutions
• Revolutionary
• Protest
• Military
• Revolution
• Anthropology
• Europe

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 03 octobre 2016
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780253023261
• Langue: English

Extrait

IMPULSE TO ACT
IMPULSE TO ACT
A New Anthropology of Resistance and Social Justice
Edited by Othon Alexandrakis
Indiana University Press
Bloomington and Indianapolis
This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press
Office of Scholarly Publishing
Herman B Wells Library 350
1320 East 10th Street
Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA
iupress.indiana.edu
2016 by Othon Alexandrakis
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.
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Manufactured in the United States of America
Cataloging information is available from the Library of Congress.
ISBN 978-0-253-02278-3 (cloth)
ISBN 978-0-253-02311-7 (paperback)
ISBN 978-0-253-02326-1 (ebook)
1 2 3 4 5 21 20 19 18 17 16
For my colleagues and friends who have helped to make this volume possible .
Let those who heavy feel
The cupreous hand of fear
Under slavery s yoke live;
Mettle and virtue is what
Freedom wants.
She (and myth belies the mind of truth)
Gave wings to Icarus.
But he,
Still winged,
Even though he fell
And drowned
In the sea,
Fell from high heights
And thus died free.
And if you become
The slaughter of a tyrant
With no honor,
Do think the grave as a horror.
- Fourth Ode, To Samos Andreas Kalvos (translated by Neni Panourgi )
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Resistance Reconsidered Othon Alexandrakis
Part I. Affect as Political Condition
1 Being and Doing Politics: Moral Ontologies and Ethical Ways of Knowing at the End of the Cold War Jessica Greenberg
2 The Affective Echoes of an Overwhelming Life: The Demand for Legal Recognition and the Vicious Circle of Desire in the Case of Queer Activism in Istanbul Eirini Avramopoulou
3 Emergenc(i)es in the Fields: Affective Composition and Countercamps against the Exploitation of Migrant Farm Labor in Italy Irene Peano
4 Cosmologicopolitics: Vitalistic Cosmology Meets Biopower James D. Faubion
5 Surreal Capitalism and the Dialectical Economies of Precarity Neni Panourgi
Part II. Agency as Ethical Condition
6 Intolerants: Politics of the Ordinary in Karachi, Pakistan Tania Ahmad
7 Negative Space: Unmovement and the Study of Activism When There Is No Action Cymene Howe
8 What Should Be Done? Art and Political Possibility in Russia Petra Rethmann
9 The Multilinearity of Protest: Understanding New Social Movements through Their Events, Trends, and Routines John Postill
10 Whose Ethics? Negotiating Ethics and Responsibility in the Field Marianne Maeckelbergh
11 Within, Against, Beyond: The Radical Imagination in the Age of the Slow-Motion Apocalypse Alex Khasnabish
Conclusion: On an Emergent Politics and Ethics of Resistance Athena Athanasiou and Othon Alexandrakis
List of Contributors
Index
Acknowledgments
T HE IDEA FOR this book emerged from field research I conducted on citizenship and civic engagement in Athens, Greece, during the turbulent years of 2007 to 2010. I was a doctoral student at the time and, as I make clear in the introduction to this volume, found myself in the position of rethinking what I thought I knew about resistance and what I thought I knew about fieldwork. This rethinking of resistance and fieldwork stayed with me.
I wish to thank the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for their support of my research in Athens. I am also grateful to the Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies at Princeton University, where I was Hannah Seeger Davis Post-Doctoral Research Fellow between 2010 and 2011. This time at Princeton afforded me the opportunity to reflect with colleagues from various disciplines on the challenges of studying resistance action playing out on highly dynamic terrain. These conversations led to a workshop in 2013 at the International Center for Hellenic and Mediterranean Studies (CYA), Athens in Crisis : Reimagining Ethnographic Writing, and a roundtable later that year at the Modern Greek Studies Association Symposium, Greece in Transition: Reconsidering Anthropological Approaches to Crisis. I d like to thank Aimee Placas for co-organizing the workshop with me, and the participants in both the workshop and the roundtable for their insights and questions. I began work on this volume soon after these events.
Early drafts of this work inspired a plenary session at the 2014 annual meeting of the Canadian Anthropological Society, Unsettled Politics and Radical Potential: Figuring the Impulse to Act. A number of presenters in those sessions contributed chapters to this volume. I wish to thank Daphne Winland, Antonio Sorge, and Maya Shapiro for co-organizing the plenary with me, my colleagues Albert Schrauwers and Zulfikar Hirji for their work on the conference, and the paper presenters, discussants-especially John Borneman and David Nugent-and audience for their helpful comments and questions.
I am also very grateful to Gary Dunham, Rebecca Jane Tolen, Janice Frisch, and the anonymous reviewers at Indiana University Press. One anonymous reviewer in particular provided comments that inspired a comprehensive reorganization of this volume-to this individual I am truly grateful. I would also like to thank Christopher Kelty, Hannah Landecker, James Faubion, Nia Georges, and Stephen Tyler for inspiring and encouraging me to think critically and creatively about fieldwork and ethnography, and my friends and colleagues with whom I ve had numerous conversations about studying resistance over the years, especially Tina Palivos, Heath Cabot, and Neni Panourgi . A special thanks also to the participants in my PhD seminar in methodology at York University, and to Kathe Gray, Parinaz Adib, Janita Van Dyk, and Nadine Ryan for their help in preparing the manuscript for this volume and for their support and enthusiasm.
Finally, my deepest thanks go to my partner, Jordana, and to our little ones, Sofia and Theo, who-each in their own way-taught me to always follow my heart when on uncertain ground.
IMPULSE TO ACT
Introduction
Resistance Reconsidered
Othon Alexandrakis
I N RECENT YEARS the spread of conflict and war zones, the creep of neoliberalism and its economies of abandonment, the uncertainty of environmental change, and other ruinous trends and unsettling conditions have sparked responses of all description around the world. These responses regularly capture both headlines and the attention of academics, in part because they are often unexpected and intense, but also because they have-in recent years especially-varied considerably in form, content, and direction: whereas some scenes of unrest have appeared to be familiar (at least at first blush), many new formations of resistance have caused observers to question whether they were witnessing politics at all. These actions continue to push against engrained mythologies and orthodoxies of politics, to challenge us to question what we know about the political, and-critically-to challenge us to revisit how we know it.
This volume begins a conversation about rethinking resistance politics from the perspective of innovation in methodology. We will reconsider the political in terms of the challenge of new resistance actions, and related political forms, to ethnographic method. Affect and agency will be our two central concerns, as these recombine fieldwork and theory work in new ways and, together, highlight new analytical possibilities of political ethnography and engagement, and political ethnography as engagement.
What Is Really Happening, on the Ground?
The question of what is really happening, on the ground, marks an interdisciplinary contact zone. For one, this question locates as witness anthropologists, political scientists, sociologists, and other researchers who conduct ethnographic fieldwork-and especially long-term participant observation-in places where resistance actions defy expectations. This witnessing, Taussig (2011) explains, sees inside and outside, translates, but also has the power to up the provisional connection behind the question of what is really happening to a mode of participation itself. As Neni Panourgi and Alex Khasnabish so clearly argue in this volume, the capacity to connect diverse publics, and to build these connections to another order of more consequential engagement, is certainly one of the challenges and promises of the ethnography of resistance.
Of course, what is really happening? is also a question most researchers ask themselves at various junctures as we conduct research and write. Fieldwork-based ethnography, with its openness to various approaches and tools, also provides space to play, to figure things out (see Fortun 2009) in tune with fluctuations in our connections with and within field sites. In the context of unexpected, dynamic ground, in the midst of the kinds of resistance actions we consider here, recognizing new challenges and retooling in response to them is not only a matter of critical importance but also, as Marianne Maeckelbergh reminds us in this volume, a matter of ethical integrity. Taken together, the following chapters sketch an approach to understanding what is really happening based on