My engagement with the ideas and practices of fieldwork stems from my interest in anthropology and the classification of human “types” through the “science” of anthropometry in the mid-nineteenth century, which began when I was a photography undergraduate student. “Field Work” (2010) was my attempt to address visual ethnographic practice from the position of a contemporary photographic practitioner. As a photographer I have always been concerned with issues around race, identity, and representation, and the award of the AOA1 commission provided the opportunity to question specific perceptions of boundaries and region in the United Kingdom, and how these relate to identification with a particular community. The commissioners wanted “an image-maker who can have agency as a British citizen, meditate and reflect on being a ‘stranger,’ but also move to a place that can be seen as his home domain and look out towards ‘his’ England.”
Continue reading
All posts by Focaal Web Editor
Ida Susser: From the underground resistance under Franco to Podemos, with Vicente Navarro
Vicente Navarro is a leading analyst of the history and origins of the financial crisis in Spain (and Europe in general) and an economic adviser to Podemos. His book There Are Alternatives (Hay Alternativas: Propuestas para Crear Empleo y Bienestar Social en España), written with economists Juan Torres and Alberto Garzón, became an inspiration to the Indignados movement. Asked by Podemos, Navarro and Torres developed a new economic policy outlining the challenges of the current era and economic strategies that serve the people rather than the corporations. Podemos distributed this publication under the title An Economic Project for the People (Un Proyecto Económico para la Gente). Presented by Pablo Iglesias and the authors, the project became a major media event, denounced by banks and corporate representatives all over Europe and acclaimed by many throughout Spain.
Continue reading
David Cooney: The Montréal student protests
Vers un Automne Érable?1
Whenever threatened, the first thing power restricts is the ability to linger or assemble in the street.
—Henri Lefebvre2
In September of 2014, I arrived in Montréal to study the students’ strike that had erupted throughout the province of Québec three years earlier. I was particularly interested in learning more about the evolution of the movement itself and the networks it had forged with related movements: the Chilean student protests, Occupy Wall Street, and 15M.
Continue reading
Theodoros Rakopoulos: Of direct and default democracy: The debt referendum in Greece
Thessaloniki, 4–5 July 2015
Default has a twofold meaning: it means both “taken for granted,” or the known path, and an economic halt on someone’s debts. Greece has recently oscillated between these two meanings. On the one hand, the Left government’s choice to go to the ballot for a referendum should have been a default choice of any democratic polity. It has faced fierce opposition, but eventually its advice to the electorate (“vote a decisive NO”) had huge influence among many—and triumphed, with an unprecedented landslide victory, at 61.5 percent. On the other, this choice has coincided with a default on the country’s debt to the IMF. There are threats it might lead, given Greece’s lenders’ pressure, to a generalized default situation and indeed an ousting out of the euro due to the lenders’ self-righteous policies. Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras announced the referendum on 26 June, at 1:50 a.m. EET, to be held nine days after, on 5 July. The question would be whether the Greek citizens would accept the conditions for a bailout proposed by the troika (the EU Commission, the European Central Bank, and the IMF). The negotiations between the Eurogroup and the Greek government had ended up in a cul-de-sac.
Continue reading
Sharryn Kasmir: Mondragón coops and the anthropological imagination
In 2013, Fagor Electrodomésticos, the home appliance division of the world-renowned Mondragón cooperative group, declared bankruptcy. The announcement disheartened coop advocates who consider Mondragón the most successful worker-owned enterprise in the world.
Continue reading
Manissa Maharawal: Shut it down: Notes on the #blacklivesmatter protests – Part 2
Part 2. Breaking windows and broken windows policing:
“Do we have the same level of outrage when a young black person gets killed as we do when a window gets broken? And if not, then why is that?”
—Alicia Garza, co-founder of #blacklivesmatter
Trader Joe’s
In Berkeley, California, on a warm night in mid-December 2014, I stood in stalled traffic and watched as protestors smashed the windows of the Trader Joe’s grocery store on University Avenue—part of the ongoing protests in the aftermath of the NYPD’s murder of Eric Garner and the non-indictment of Darren Wilson, the officer who killed Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri.
Continue reading
Marieke Brandt: The hidden realities behind Saudi Arabia’s Operation Decisive Storm in Yemen
In recent weeks, as part of Operation Decisive Storm, a military coalition of ten predominantly Sunni states led by Saudi Arabia has been shelling military installations, arms stockpiles, airports, streets, bridges, and infrastructure throughout Yemen. The collateral damage is estimated as one thousand deaths and a multiple of injured. These were mainly attributable to the bad habit of Yemen’s leaders to bunker vast quantities of weapons in the midst of the cities or in their immediate vicinities. Pictures of powerful explosions and grievously mutilated victims flooded social networks. On April 20 a gigantic explosion on the nearby mountain Faj Attan shook Sana’a, which was probably caused by the direct hit of a bunker-busting bomb on a stockpile of missiles. Several died, many were injured, houses were destroyed, and windows throughout large parts of the capital city were shattered; people’s nerves were on edge. When amid heavy air raids Saudi Arabia announced the end of Operation Decisive Storm on April 21—without ceasing the bombing for even a minute—a Yemeni television newscaster collapsed in front of the camera from a hysteric fit of laughter. Despite the official end of the operation, the nightly air strikes continue.
Andrea Luka Zimmerman: Estates of being: Thoughts on the place of living and working
“Between the experience of living a normal life at this moment on the planet and the public narratives being offered to give a sense of that life, the empty space, the gap, is enormous.” —John Berger
Estate: a reverie
Estate: one’s home and money
Estate: a mansion or a plantation
Estate: order or class of a political community
Estate: landed property, especially in the countryside
Estate: property development, especially of new houses
Estate: property or possessions, especially of the deceased
Estate: state, period or position in life, especially with regard to wealth or social standing
Martin Webb: Contemporary Indian anti-corruption movements and political aesthetics
To appreciate the role of aesthetics in politics, we might look to the recent resurgence of popular anti-corruption movements in India. In 2011 and 2012, mass protests by supporters of the India Against Corruption (IAC) movement focused around spectacular fasts by the social activist Anna Hazare. Hazare’s projection of moral authority draws upon a well-established Indian idiom of non-party “saintly politics” (Morris-Jones 1963). The ascetic aesthetic of this approach, in Hazare’s case, is projected through the adoption of simple, hand-woven khadi cotton clothes and practices of abstinence (Pinney 2014; Webb 2014). More recently, a new political formation, the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), or the Common Man Party, headed by Hazare’s erstwhile IAC colleague Arvind Kejriwal has been promoting an ethical and anti-corruption alternative in electoral politics.
Continue reading
Massimiliano Mollona: Ethnographic filmmaking and the political imagination: A review of “Desert People” by Ian Dunlop (1967)
In the opening sequences of Desert People (1967, 49 minutes, Australian National Film Board), we read, “This is a film on two families of the western Australian desert.” But in fact the film’s real subject is the wonderful Gibson Desert—whose textural surface is magically rendered by black and white 35mm film—and the relationship with “its” people as they constantly move across it, stopping only for short moments of rest. This relationship is marked by material scarcity and hard labor. We see boys and men restlessly digging the hard surface of the desert with spears and wooden tools. We see their bodies slowly disappearing inside it, to reappear with handfuls of water, small lizards, and rats. We see women making food out of wild grass. We see families gathering to eat, forced into a momentary standstill by the heat of the sun at midday.
Continue reading