In this article we offer the term otherwise as a keyword for feminist vocabulary. We consider how the otherwise is simultaneously a concept, an analytics, a method, and an ethico-onto-political commitment to the insistence of the possible against the pull of the probable. The otherwise conjures latent possibilities and potentialities held within a situation or formation-which we might only glimpse obliquely, yet which holds or opens to liberatory transformation. While a standard genealogy of the term might trace its theoretical lineage, we aim to enact the otherwise we write by decentering this genealogy. Our essay is situated in conversation with feminist Black studies, science and technology studies, and decolonial studies, seeking to potentiate the transformative possibilities of bringing together these literatures. We explore the world-making capacities of an otherwise anthropology through practices such as: attunement to the political in the mundane; speculative colaboring as a form of care; the fracturing of anthropological epistemologies; writing as a complex we; and not knowing. Finally, our collaborative essay is refracted through our respective experiences of social unrest and protests in Hong Kong and Colombia to enact an unruly and undisciplined genealogy of the otherwise, written from here, now.Keywords decolonial anthropology, epistemic unruliness, ethico-onto-politics, speculative colaboring, world-making "I smell the evasive whiff of the Otherwise. A promise of reconciliation."-Bayo Akomolafe (2017, xx)
La Serranía de la Macarena has been a crucial scenario in the Colombian war. In this region, the army and FARC‐EP guerrillas widely deployed aerial bombardment and improvised landmines to control the territory and contain their adversaries. This article is a collaborative ethnographic exploration of retazos—snippets of material‐discursive practices we collected in our fieldworks: a demining project and a state morgue. What can explosive military technologies and their aftermath tell us about the place of war in Colombia? Through two ethnographic retazos, we account of how forensic workers and mine‐removal experts engage with the material traces of explosives and produce bodies and landscapes as territories of war. We reflect on these topographies through the concept of explosiveness. Understood as a tendency, a condition, and a field of forces, explosiveness offers a distinct point of entry to reflect on the material and affective aftermath of landmines and bombs.
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