Anthropology

The Living and the Dead examines the boundaries between the worlds of life and death.

The text draws upon philosophy, ethnography, literature and natural science to suggest that life and death are best understood not in opposition, but as continuous tendencies acting upon one another in relationships where neither are passive.

Austin Locke argues that failure to give nuanced consideration to the relationship between the living and nonliving devalues both life and death. In doing so, he suggests that our ability to respond to the challenges of environmental degradation, technological advancement, and the dominance of economic logic depends on more fluid understandings of the relationships between life and death.

This Teaching Tools post offers some ways to explore Cultural Anthropology's 'Theorising Refusal' collection, edited by Carole McGranahan, while also examining how it is that refusal might be understood as a distinctly ethnographic concept. It is intended for use in upper-level undergraduate or graduate courses.

Presented at ASA18, University of Oxford, part of panel 'Diagrams of revolution: an experiment with social and material morphologies'

In 2014 a group of activists obtained a rent-free lease on an abandoned and derelict building in South East London. Following the roaming explorations of the New Cross Commoners, the aim was to experiment with political and economic models of commoning in order to create a self-organised neighbourhood resource. The process unfolded as a physically, emotionally and intellectually intense questioning of the possibility of imagining and creating a common world independent to the hegemonic structures of state and capital.

As part of this process, a large number of visual materials were collectively produced—diagrams, drawings, maps and scribblings. This paper will use some of these materials in order to ask how these diagrams function in the imagining and construction of common worlds, and how those common worlds emerge through diagrammatic operations. These visual materials will be taken as one component of broader diagrammatic processes which seek possible cartographies of the future.

Drawing on the diagrammatic practices of Félix Guattari, a thinker who was very influential on several members of the collective and the subject of a number of workshops, the visual materials will be thought about not as representations, but rather as sites of creation and production. The 'relational reductions' these materials enacted are the counterpoint of an expansive and exploratory gesture that sought to open up new horizons of possibilities through what Guattari termed 'metamodelling'. The diagram thus becomes part of a machine for decoding contemporary political impasses, with a corresponding exploration of the possibilities for self-organised recoding, or 'singularisation'.

Presented at RAI18, the British Museum, to panel Art (and anthropology) beyond materiality and representation

It has been proposed that developments in art practice towards dematerialisation were partly paralleled in ethnographic practice through textualisations of culture by the writing culture perspective (Ssorin-Chaikov 2013). Alongside this proposal the approach of 'ethnographic conceptualism' has been put forward as a means of moving beyond these tendencies to open new forms of relationships between anthropological and art practices. Such methods would engage in active participation in the construction of the realities that they study.

This paper draws on participatory fieldwork conducted in London, based in an attempt to construct a common social centre in an abandoned building, to examine components of the proposal of ethnographic conceptualism. The anthropological and commoning practices of the research emerged as inextricably entangled, revealing them as possible forms of such ethnographic conceptualism. Paralleling proposals for situational art practice (Oliver and Badham 2013), the ethnographic method of this project had no commons to be studied; but the study was the common(ing).

Such 'commoning anthropologically' engages in experimental and interventionist practices which focus on the encounter of difference and uncertainty in an effort to explore new possible social aggregates and common worlds. Understanding the commons as sites for the experimental encounter of difference allows us to see its overlaps with anthropology, as well as proposing forms of praxis decoupled from models of politics which function through friend-enemy distinctions and idioms of war.