Oral Presentation Session

Reviewed by: Association for Political and Legal Anthropology

Of interest to: Practicing and Applied Anthropologists, Teachers of Anthropology in Community Colleges, Students

Primary Theme: The Political

Secondary Theme: Materiality

(5-0985) Collective Futures: An Anthropology of Preparation

This panel collects presentations that examine how governments and non-governmental actors (including NGOs, community organizations, entrepreneurs and corporations) prepare spaces for their version of a collective future. On a theoretical level, the motivating idea is to observe and compare the political interface between potentiality and actuality; the interface between what groups propose as a collective possibility and what eventually comes about as a collective reality. Our presenters consider topics such as how Québécois municipalities compete to attract industrial investment through the preparation of technical infrastructure; how the new Telangana State prototypes surveillance apparatuses through state sponsored ‘hackathon’ events; how mining corporations attempt to ‘grow’ their ideal workforce in Nunavut, Canada; how fiscal possibilities are created and obstructed in peri-urban areas of Cochabamba, Bolivia; and how parallel conceptions of citizenship are fostered and negotiated by Aymara merchants in the Chilean and Bolivian Andes. We hope that bringing these cases together will help us to examine the relationship between what Agamben calls constituting and constituted power (1998) thereby allowing us to consider how the potential and actual are conceptualized by sovereign states and how non-state organizations try and prepare different visions of their own future. Drawing on Simondon (1989; 1959), these presentations help us understand how tinkering techniques often make up an important part of the preparation of new collective spaces. We try to show how management plans, infrastructures, blueprints, fiscal projects, and digital prototypes – as complete or incomplete technical objects – shape collective futures by projecting intentions, while highlighting unpredictabilities. An anthropological consideration of preparation will, in sum, consider how diverse groups explicitly, tacitly and politically address the unavoidable uncertainty of the future with the tools, techniques and institutions at their disposal.

Organizer(s)

• Philippe Messier

  McGill University

Presenter(s)

• Philippe Messier

  McGill University

Organizer(s)

• Joshua Friesen

  McGill University

Presenter(s)

• Joshua Friesen

  McGill University

• Miranda Sheild Johansson

  Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow
  University College London

• Jorge Montesinos

  University of California, Riverside

Chair(s)

• Katherine Sinclair

  Assistant Professor
  MacEwan University

Presenter(s)

• Katherine Sinclair

  Assistant Professor
  MacEwan University

Discussant(s)

• Moyukh Chatterjee

  Azim Premji University

Presentations:

• 4:15 PM - 4:30 PM

  Prototyping a Safe New State: Hyderabad Hackathons and Digital Technologies of Surveillance in Telangana (India).
  Philippe Messier – McGill University
• 4:30 PM - 4:45 PM

  Spaces for Technology; Preparing Different Types of Industrial Future in Québec's Regions
  Joshua Jet Friesen – McGill University
• 4:45 PM - 5:00 PM

  Fiscal Visions and Bureaucratic Barriers in Peri-Urban Bolivia
  Miranda Sheild Johansson – University College London
• 5:00 PM - 5:15 PM

  From the Parallel Economy to Parallel Citizenship: Aymara Perspectives on Social Mobility in Bolivia and Chile.
  Jorge Roberto Montesinos – University of California, Riverside
• 5:15 PM - 5:30 PM

  Preparing Place, Preparing People: Inuit Employment at a North Baffin Mine
  Katherine Sinclair – MacEwan University
• 5:30 PM - 5:45 PM

  Discussion
  Moyukh Chatterjee – Azim Premji University