Comparative Anthropologies of Revolutionary Politics
CARP’s opening workshop
Daryll Forde Seminar Room, UCL Anthropology
Monday December 15th – Project presentation day
09.00 – 09.30
Tea & Coffee
09.30 – 10.15
Welcome and introduction to CARP
Martin Holbraad (UCL, CARP)
10:15 – 11.00
I: Appearance, reality and secrecy in revolutions
Igor Cherstich (UCL, CARP)
Timothy Mitchell (Columbia)
11.00 – 11.15
Tea & Coffee
11.15 – 12.00
II: Mediated agencies – autonomy and heteronomy in revolution
Martin Holbraad (UCL, CARP)
Mike Rowlands (UCL)
12.00 – 12.45
III: Asceticism and the formation of revolutionary selves
Martin Holbraad (UCL, CARP)
Rane Willerslev (Aarhus)
12.45 – 13.45
Lunch
13.45 – 14.30
IV: Utopia, heterotopia and heterochronia
Charlotte Loris-Rodionoff (UCL, CARP)
Caroline Humphrey (Cambridge)
14.30 – 15.15
V: Visual and imaginative landscapes of revolution
Myriam Lamrani (UCL, CARP)
David Burrows (UCL, Slade School of Art)
15.15 – 15.30
Tea & Coffee
15.30 – 16.15
VI: Indigenous revolutionary horizons
Nico Tassi (UCL, CARP)
Eduardo Viveiros de Castro (Rio de Janeiro)
16.15 – 17.00
VII: Scaling revolution – grand schemes and everyday textures
Alice Elliot (UCL, CARP/Leverhulme)
Morten Axel Pedersen (Copenhagen)
17.00 – 18.00
Drinks
19.30
Workshop participants’ dinner
Comparative Anthropologies of Revolutionary Politics
Tuesday December 16th – Methodology and ethics day
09.00 – 09.30
Tea & Coffee
09.30 –11.00
Roundtable I (Chair: Igor Cherstich)
Research heuristics: revolutionary politics and religious practice
Martin Holbraad (UCL, CARP)
Lucia Michelutti (UCL Anthropology)
Nicola Miller (UCL History)
Bruce Kapferer (Bergen)
11.00 – 11.15
Tea & Coffee
11.15 – 12.45
Roundtable II (Chair: Alice Elliot)
Security and ethics: fieldwork, violence, surveillance
Timothy Mitchell (Columbia)
Caroline Humphrey (Cambridge)
Mike Rowlands (UCL Anthropology)
Lucia Michelutti (UCL Anthropology)
12.45 – 13.45
Lunch
14.00 – 15.30
Roundtable III (Chair: Nico Tassi)
Comparative anthropologies: connecting the fields
Bruce Kapferer (Bergen)
Nicola Miller (UCL History)
David Burrows (UCL, Slade)
Eduardo Viveiros de Castro (Rio de Janeiro)
15.30 – 15.45
Tea & Coffee
15.45 – 17.00
Summing up and reflections
Martin Holbraad & all
17.00 – late
Drinks!
Comparative Anthropologies of Revolutionary Politics
SESSION ABSTRACTS
Day 1: the petals
I: Appearance, reality and secrecy in revolutionary contexts
Often Revolutions are presented as attempts to make the invisible visible. The
revolutionary effort is described as a desire to reveal what lies behind the veneer of
appearance (hidden forms of exploitation, inequality disguised as social convention)
in order to establish a new regime of truth. In the Marxist tradition this aspect of the
revolutionary process has been analysed through the dichotomy Ideology/ Reality,
and by offering different ways to unpack the relationship between the two. In this
session (and more broadly in CARP), we reflect on these dynamics, but we also
look at ways in which revolutions create multi-layered and ever-changing
understandings of what counts as ‘appearance’ or ‘reality’. We ask ourselves what
kind of demands does this economy of appearance and reality make on the
revolutionary subject, how does it contribute to his/her articulation. We also consider
the apparent paradoxes that characterise this phenomenon: how revolutionary
governments created around notions of truthfulness and clarity make use of secret
services, concealment and mystery. In doing so we deal with complex phenomena
like propaganda, but we also look at secrecy both as a way to conceal reality and as
tool to monitor (and therefore to disclose) reality.
II: Mediated Agencies - Autonomy and Heteronomy in Revolution
The force of revolution, as a mighty current that takes hold of its actors carrying
them in its wake, appears to contradict the notion of a modern revolutionary subject
as a self-bounded agent who is the author of its own deeds. This session focuses
on notions of extraneous agency and the modes of mediation that accommodate
their intervention on the individual subject. By looking at those zones of
indiscernibility between the self and other, human and divine or citizen and the state,
we question certain assumptions about the notion of self-bounded agency and the
practices in which the distinction between particular forms of heteronomous and
Comparative Anthropologies of Revolutionary Politics
autonomous agency come to close proximity to one another. To this end the
session will focus on the implications of particular conceptualisation of power and
agency as seen in certain religious practices and the modes of social action they
arouse.
III: Asceticism and the formation of revolutionary selves
This session focuses on the ascetic demands that revolutions place upon the
subjects that are involved in them. Its premise is that, at least in its canonically
modern form, revolution is par excellence a political project invested in the formation
of particular kinds of selves – the idea of the New Man, the notion that changing
society must involve changing people’s political ‘consciousness’, the notion of
revolutionary ‘vanguards’ or ‘cadres’ as particular kinds of people, and so on.
Inasmuch as CARP is focused specifically on the ‘anthropologies’ that revolutionary
politics entail, this focus on self-making goes to the heart of the project. Indeed, the
original theological sense of the term – i.e. anthropology as the study of humans’
position in relation to God – is particularly suggestive. To the extent that revolutions
involve a strong element of so-called ‘political theology’, examining analogies,
contrasts and complex relationships between revolutionary and religious forms of
self-making may tell us a lot about what is most deeply at stake in revolution as a
distinctive manner of political action.
IV: Utopia, Heterotopia, Heterochronia
How do revolutions create alternative temporalities and spaces? Revolutions are
often perceived as utopia or as generating utopic discourses, but they can also
remodel space and time creating heterotopias and heterochronias. By recasting
time and space, revolutionary politics on the one hand transform a territory and its
history, i.e. the coordinates of any political entity, and on the other hand, they
intimately reshape selves, for time and space can be seen as the inner coordinates
of the self. Revolutions thus emerge from and in specific spaces (Tahrir square, la
Commune, Kafranbel), and engender novel understandings of temporal horizons
sometimes defined as a rupture with the pre-revolutionary past, a sacrifice of the
present and a march towards a better future or following alternative revolutionary
Comparative Anthropologies of Revolutionary Politics
temporalities. This panel aims to question the importance of utopia, heterotopia and
heterochronia in revolutionary projects: how does the reshaping of time and space
challenge both politics and self-making?
V: Imaginative Landscapes of (Post-)Revolution
This session explores the visual and dreamlike representations that arise in (post)revolutionary contexts. In a close dialogue with visual culture, be it through things
or through dreams, we explore how landscapes of imagination are generated and
how they interact with socio-political reality. What happens when the perceived
reality takes the form of an imagined utopia or dystopia? By opening a space to
think about visual and spiritual imaginative landscapes, this session looks into the
'stuff' that (post)-revolutionary imaginaries and visions 'are made of'.
VI: Indigenous revolutionary horizons
The session explores how indigenous cosmological forms and ideas act as devices
shaping revolutionary horizons and spaces, temporalities and transformations. From
a modernist perspective, revolution has been imagined as a progressive transition
to a new society with increasing freedom and/or equality and radically severed from
a traditional order. In recent years, revolutions have been associated with political
immaturity or as a localised resistance to transnational phenomena (i.e. global
neoliberal policies). What we attempt to foreground here are indigenous
conceptualizations of transformation/invention, political logics, but also proactive
processes of continuity and appropriation in the definition of revolutionary politics. In
other words, what happens to an eminently modern concept such as revolution
when we think it through an indigenous order of things?
VII: Grand schemes and everyday textures: scaling revolution
At what scale should an ethnographic study of revolution take place? What scales
of existence does revolution inflect, affect and (de)generate? And what
ethnographic texture does revolution acquire at different scales of social and
intimate life? In this session, we address the scale(s) of revolution. We focus in
Comparative Anthropologies of Revolutionary Politics
particular on revolution’s peculiar quality of permeating fundamentally different –
qualitative and quantitative – scales at once, fastening them into complex relational
constellations: the scale of the self and that of history, the scale of intimacy and that
of political imagination, the scale of ordinary routines and of cosmological orders. In
addressing the scales of revolution and their ethnographic textures, we reflect on
how best to conceive of the shapes revolution acquires in people’s lives and in
anthropological thought.
Day 2: The roundtables
I: Research heuristics – revolutionary politics and religious practice
CARP focuses on revolutionary ‘anthropologies’ in the original theological sense of
the term, charting revolutionary politics in relation to varying conceptions of what it
is to be human, and of how the horizons of people’s lives are to be understood in
relation to divine orders of different kinds. The connection between revolutions and
religious phenomena is particularly important here, and provides the project’s prime
heuristic and comparative focus. To get to the heart of revolution as a project of
self-formation, we suggest, involves examining how revolutionary politics sits
alongside religious practices of self-making (asceticism, initiation, sacrifice, ritual
and moral strictures etc.). How do revolutions in turns compete with religious forms,
presenting themselves as alternative projects of self-formation, or join forces with
religious practice in all sorts of complex and qualified ways? The purpose of this
panel is to adumbrate the methodological and analytical implications of this
approach to revolutions. How do we link revolution and religion heuristically in the
context of broader arguments about the relationship between political and religious
forms as objects of anthropological inquiry? What do we gain and what might we
lose in framing our project in terms of these connections and analogies? And what
implications does this have for our ethnographic inquiries in the field?
Comparative Anthropologies of Revolutionary Politics
II: Security and ethics – fieldwork, violence, surveillance
Doing field-work in countries that have experienced (or are experiencing) a
revolution forces the anthropologist to face specific ethical and methodological
issues. In this section we want to discuss the practice of keeping a field-diary and
the strategies of accessing the field. In particular, we want to ask the question: what
kind of concerns should inform the anthropologist in carrying out these practices in
a revolutionary context? How can the anthropologist grasp the unpredictable
effervescence of revolution and at the same time guarantee the safety of his/her
informants? And what about the anthropologist’s own safety? In trying to find
possible answers to these questions we want to discuss issues of anonymity in
ethnographic writing, the ethical dimension of writing about violence, and research
strategies in contexts of surveillance and monitoring. The Anthropology of
Revolution also forces the anthropologist to ask whether he/she is allowed to take
sides, and how to deal with the tension between the researcher’s understanding of
revolution and the informants’.
III: Comparative anthropologies – connecting the fields
Over the last decades an unprecedented geopolitical reconfiguration has affected
traditional forms of hegemony and shaped new alliances transversal to the
conventional political ‘axes’. The emergence of China as a world power has
produced a process of geopolitical decentralization where the logic of politicoeconomic blocs with their annexed spheres of influence appears to have been
superseded by a configuration of multipolar alliances and regional agreements in
peripheral areas. In terms of CARP, this induces us to think of revolutionary politics
as defined by the convergence of specific local issues and translocal alliances or
temporalities (i.e. the Arab spring(s) or the New Left(s) in Latin America).
Conventional political scholarship has often focused either on local issues or on
translocal alliances, rarely concentrating on this overlap. How do we go about
researching this convergence and overlap and how can we make sense of it? And
ultimately, how does this affect the way we do comparative anthropology?
Comparative Anthropologies of Revolutionary Politics
IGOR
CHERSTICH
Libya:
Sufism and
state
MARTIN
HOLBRAAD
ALICE
ELLIOT
Caribbean:
Afro divination
appearance,
reality,
secrecy
Tunisia:
migration
and
crisis
agency and
mediation
scaling
revolutions
POLITICAL
RELIGIOUS
the shapes
of relations
NICO
TASSI
Bolivia:
cosmologies
of
transformation
indigenous
horizons
PERSONAL
visual and
imaginative
landscapes
MYRIAM
LAMRANI
Mexico:
popular saint
worship
MARTIN
HOLBRAAD
SOCIAL
asceticism and
the self
Cuba:
intellectuals
and reading
utopia,
heterotopia,
heterochronia
Syrians in Turkey:
revolutionary
councils
CHARLOTTE
LORIS-RODIONOFF
CARP’s core structure: the ‘flower’