Out of Conclusion: On Recurrence and Open-Endedness in Life and Analysis

Abstract

Based on long-term fieldwork in Northeast Brazil and the Republic of Georgia, this article explores how open-endedness can be incorporated into ethnographic analysis and writing, not as the empirical object, but as a basic condition for knowledge production. In the empirical contexts that we describe, daily life is marked by poor prospects and the absence of possibility, especially for young people. Rather than letting this guide our analyses, this article argues for the necessity of paying attention to the openness and potential of experienced moments of change. We propose that even relapses into former habits and predicaments present the potential for change on a subjective level. In the process of putting informants' stories into words and analysis, we revisit both field and text, constituting a hopeful practice similar to that of our informants.

Landscapes of hoping – urban expansion and emerging futures in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso

“…Shifting from hope as a subject to hoping as a practice affiliates our endeavour with “the practice turn in contemporary theory” (Schatzki et al., 2001), which brings together a range of theories that conceptualise and locate the “smallest units” of the social as situated in practices (Reckwitz, 2002: 245). Our concern with hope as practice thus aligns with recent research on hope (Dalsgaard and Demant Frederiksen, 2013; Jansen, 2014; Mattingly, 2010; Pedersen, 2012), but slightly alters its focus by conceptualising practices through the lens of material-semiotics (Law, 2009; Law and Mol, 2008; Mol, 2010). As practice, material-semiotics does not refer to a unified theory but is to be taken as a sensitising concept (Blumer, 1954).…”

“…Drawing to a large extent on philosophical and theological accounts of hope, anthropologists and scholars working on hope often conduct ethnographic fieldwork in contexts characterised by radical change and ontological insecurity. Topics such as severe illness (Eliott and Olver, 2007; Mattingly, 2010; Park, 2015; Soundy et al., 2013), displacement (Brun, 2015; Peteet, 2005; Turner, 2015), fleeing (Appadurai, 2015) and migration (Haines, 2011; Kleist and Thorsen, 2017; Mar, 2005; Pine, 2014), but also prolonged uncertainty in times of political and societal transformation and state building (Avramopoulou, 2017; Beyer, 2015; Jansen, 2014, 2015; Kornienko, 2014; Ross, 2010) with regard to the struggle for recognition (Appadurai, 2013b; Miyazaki, 2004) or simply ‘making a living’ (Dalsgaard and Demant Frederiksen, 2013; Miyazaki, 2006; Narotzky and Besnier, 2014; Pedersen, 2012; Stäheli, 2014; Zigon, 2009) are all prominent in this emerging field. Instead of narrowing hope down to a single entity, the notion is deployed to describe a wide range of everyday situations as well as to highlight people’s search for spaces of possibilities (Anderson and Fenton, 2008; Anderson and Holden, 2008; Head, 2016).…”

Stress and the ecology of urban experience: Migrant mental lives in central Shanghai

“…Even when stress is temporarily at bay, as when the migrant subject indulges in the cosiness of routines, its very absence becomes stressful, as opposed to the entrepreneurial subjectivity to which these young people aspire (see also Rofel, 2016). Although the open-endedness of such stories should prevent us from jumping to foreclosed conclusions (Dalsgaard & Frederiksen, 2013), the stresses encountered rarely seem to mount as an inner crisis. They are endured for the present through small-scale practices of dwelling and related sociality.…”

Time Will Tell: Temporalities of Debt in an Urban Neighbourhood in Northeast Brazil

“…During these periods of fieldwork I have worked and lived in this same neighbourhood, located on the outskirts of the metropolitan area of Recife (3.5 million inhabitants) in the Northeastern state of Pernambuco (see also Dalsgaard 2004;Dalsgaard & Frederiksen 2013). In Recife more than half of the working population is employed in the informal sector, almost 40% of the inhabitants live in favelas (informal settlements), the income gap between rich and poor is conspicuous, and the violence and homicide rates are among the highest in the country (Nuijten 2013;Waiselfisz 2011).…”