Editorial proofs 25(2)

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Journal Code O C A

Article ID Dispatch: 14.03.17 1 2 4 1 7 No. of Pages: 3

CE: ME:

Editorial

If mobilities was the moniker of our last issue, various different aspects of time shape several of the papers in this one. We begin with a revised version of Laura Bear’s Firth Lecture, originally delivered at the ASA’s annual conference in Durham in July 2016. She draws on Raymond Firth’s insistence that anthropology should be an ‘uncomfortable social science’ to develop a critical analysis of the political economy of capitalist time, particularly the more recent version that focuses on debt and financialisation. From the Hooghly River in India, a waterway recently clogged up (literally) as a result of its being saddled with unexpected and unrepayable debt, to the restructuring of UK higher education, in which the same logic of debt and financialisation is reshaping every aspect of the temporal logic of academic work, Bear argues that contemporary time is now twisted out of shape. Her bold leading piece even suggests some ‘utopian’ alternatives. Astrid Stensrud’s article on the selling of mobile phone calls in Cusco, Peru tells a different story of contemporary capitalist time. This is time on sale, because phone calls are sold by the minute; the sellers travel the streets of Cusco with mobile phones offering calls to the public. They are often living as precariously as their customers, who usually have mobile phones of their own, but rarely have enough money for additional call minutes, so use their devices only to receive calls. Stensrud describes the heavy reliance on kin that such small phone call businesses depend upon, showing the variety of forms of precarity involved. Şule Can’s paper on the effects of the Syrian civil war for the city of Antakya, located on the Turkish border with Syria, provides a powerful ethnographic account of the ambivalences and ambiguities involved in such conflicts. Antakya has a large Alawite population which, she argues, blended into the cosmopolitan, urban and largely secular city until recent years. The sectarian splits that emerged in Syria, involving an initially pro-democracy but later Islamist resistance against the Assad regime, were met with an increasingly non-secular and nationalist Turkish politics. The result according to Can is that the Alawite population felt caught in the crossfire. Assad is Alawite, and so she suggests that the sectarian history of the modern Turkish state, which claimed Antakya from Syria on nationalist grounds, was rekindled owing to the battles across the border as well as the sudden arrival of many Syrian refugees in Antakya. This resulted in a renewed sectarian response from the Alawite minority. The strength of this account is twofold. It shows how new social and cultural realities can emerge out of old ones. It equally reveals the ways in which this often depends on how neighbours behave as much as it does on the responses of one’s own government or people. Angel Aedo and Paulina Faba offer a timely demonstration of how anthropology has been involved in exploring the longevity for establishing conceptions of truth Q3 and value. In such renditions, genuine forms of knowledge productions are temporally a lot longer than the current media obsession with ‘fake news’ that has accompanied the Trump administration. They provide an account of ritual acts involved in deep understandings amongst the Huichol of Mexico. In the course of this study, Aedo and Faba note the indeterminacy of the known and the knowable: the ways in which

Social Anthropology (2017) 0, 0 1–3. © 2017 European Association of Social Anthropologists. doi:10.1111/1469-8676.12417

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EDITORIAL

things, concepts and acts come together to generate certain kinds of knowing. If the pun can be forgiven, such a type of anthropological knowledge – that is, the study of how people know and distinguish knowledge from something else – is clearly an important topic just now. Sonià Fereira and Sonià Almeida’s retrospective ethnography of urban political action carries on this issue’s temporal theme. They do so both in looking at a longue durée form of ethnographic research (which they term ‘retrospective’) and in considering what they term ‘the heterodoxies of time’ involved ‘in the human encounter between the anthropologists and their interlocutors’. Here, the focus is not, as in Bear’s article, on the way capitalist time manipulates and constrains how people can live and work. Rather, Fereira and Almeida are concerned with how anthropologists, in engaging with their interlocutors, create accounts that are saturated by diverse times as well as the way that the past is re-written in the context of its recollection. A different kind of temporality appears in the Debate section of this issue. This takes a distinctive look at one of the more notable conceptual debates to have emerged in recent years amongst anthropologists based in European anthropology departments: the ‘ontological turn’. Ashley Lebner introduces the debate by analysing a dream reported by Marilyn Strathern, as a means to argue that the latter’s approach runs counter to the underlying logic of the ontological turn. Lebner’s view clearly contests an assumption in the work of many advocates of that turn, who often draw on Strathern’s ideas. Three short responses accompany this polemical piece. They are written by Paolo Heywood, who has previously published a critique of the ontological turn; Sarah Franklin, who regularly draws on Strathern’s work, particularly in relation to gender; and Morten Pedersen, who is closely associated with the ‘OT’. Together, Q4 these short interventions provide a multi-dimensional way to approach this debate. In our next issue, we will be carrying a review of Martin Holbraad and Morten Axel Pedersen’s recently published book, called, appropriately enough, The Ontological Turn (CUP 2017), which should bring that debate full circle, as it were. Finally, in line with our editorial team’s policy of poking a stick at what might constitute ‘European’ anthropology, Jamie Coates has written a detailed account of publications within Europe-based anthropology journals of 2016. His mission, so to say, was to see if he could discern any patterns. Using the trope of ‘edges’ and ‘edginess’, Coates argues that there has been a politicisation of anthropology emerging out of these journals (including our own Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale). While celebrating that idea, Coates warns of an overly cosy re-emergence of Euro-centrism, noting that the last time that happened, the outcome was not so good, intellectually or politically. Indeed so, though it is important to note that there is a slightly tricky issue of location here. There is a difference between ‘Europe-focused’ anthropology and concepts that have emanated from scholars recently working within European institutions/research environments. Of course, there have been warnings about reliance on Eurocentric concepts for decades (which have often been taken to be synonymous with ‘ethnocentric’ concepts); the interesting question for us here is to ask where the concepts currently being debated by anthropologists in European universities have come from. And one could take the ontological turn as an example. Erratum – it is especially fitting to end with a mention of Coates’ review article at this point, because we need to sincerely apologise to him for the unfortunate error of omitting his name as the co-guest editor of the Mobilities Special Issue in our last © 2017 European Association of Social Anthropologists.

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EDITORIAL

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number of SA/AS. This slipped through what is normally a rigorous production process, possibly the result of the stringent anonymisation of manuscripts until the very last moment. This mistake has been corrected online but for those still bound to paper, this is our chance to say sorry again. Oops! On a more positive note, you’ll have read by now on EASA’s website/newsletter that the association has a new Executive Committee. After what was an exceptionally high turnout of membership votes in January, we’d also like to extend our welcome to Marcus Banks, Georgeta Stoica and Sabine Strasser.

SARAH GREEN University of Helsinki

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& PATRICK LAVIOLETTE Tallinn University

© 2017 European Association of Social Anthropologists.

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Author Query Form Journal: Social Anthropology Article: soca_12417 Dear Author, During the copyediting of your paper, the following queries arose. Please respond to these by annotating your proofs with the necessary changes/additions. • If you intend to annotate your proof electronically, please refer to the E-annotation guidelines. • If you intend to annotate your proof by means of hard-copy mark-up, please use the standard proofing marks. If manually writing corrections on your proof and returning it by fax, do not write too close to the edge of the paper. Please remember that illegible mark-ups may delay publication. Whether you opt for hard-copy or electronic annotation of your proofs, we recommend that you provide additional clarification of answers to queries by entering your answers on the query sheet, in addition to the text mark-up.

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Query

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AUTHOR: Please verify that the linked ORCID identifiers are correct for each author.

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AQ: Is there an affiliation for Patrick Laviolette?

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AQ: Is the sense of ‘in exploring the longevity for establishing’ OK?

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AQ: Replace OT with ontological turn or define OT?

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