Otherwise

Abstract

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)

Anti-Blackness and Moral Repair

“…lies in the eradication of [those] forces that work against the solidarity of the human race." Engaging with the Christian thought of liberation theologians and Francis alike as a form of critical social theory provides an opening for anthropology to think past the hegemonic dictates of secular liberal modernity and to imagine worlds otherwise (Meek and Morales Fontanilla 2022) through a nonsecular, transnational African approach to decolonizing anthropology.…”

“…It would also necessitate a reconsideration of social organization and the distribution of life chances based neither on narrow genres of the human (Wynter 2003) nor on the exclusionary, territorializing logics of nationalism, but rather on the recognition of our shared kinship across continents, all of us the descendants of Noah, and the mutual relations of connection, care, and provision this shared kinship demands. It would recognize that, as the Ghanaian Methodist theologian and founder of the Circle of Concerned African Women Theologians, Mercy Amba Oduyoye (1982, 179), reminds us, “the real problem … lies in the eradication of [those] forces that work against the solidarity of the human race.” Engaging with the Christian thought of liberation theologians and Francis alike as a form of critical social theory provides an opening for anthropology to think past the hegemonic dictates of secular liberal modernity and to imagine worlds otherwise (Meek and Morales Fontanilla 2022) through a nonsecular, transnational African approach to decolonizing anthropology.…”

Explosiveness: Territories of war and technoscientific practices in Colombia

“…Fractured and polysemic, these narrations realign and reorient our empirical and conceptual sensibilities (Meek and Morales Fontanilla, 2022). We have come to understand these fragmented stories as retazos , which we translate as snippets , aware that the Spanish word has a material component the English translation does not and, conversely, that snippet conveys a narrative disposition the term retazo does not necessarily carry.…”

Bureaucratizing like a girl: Objectivity and the reinforcement of patriarchy at an Israeli government committee

“…According to some perspectives, primarily those critiquing second‐wave feminism for advocating such ethnically delimited feminist visions, this should disqualify this case study from demonstrating any form of feminist alternative for patriarchal bureaucracy (Lavie, 2011). However, sites and situations of potentiality for change are oftentimes incoherent and limited in the scope of the envisioned change (Meek and Morales Fontanilla, 2022; Raschig, 2016). Perhaps, then, we can consider the Sal Committee staff as such a site of limited potentiality: a site that at once presents a possibility for a‐hierarchal organizational relations while preserving this option only for members of the hegemonic group that can reach these positions to begin with.…”