During the past 10 years, protests timed to coincide with international summits have become a recurrent phenomenon in Europe. The present article describes the protests of left radical activists during NATO's sixtieth anniversary summit in Strasbourg in 2009, paying attention to the particular relationship between form, body, and time. The article establishes a dialogue between the performative theory of Victor Turner, Viveiros de Castro's theorization of Amerindian perspectivism, and newer theories of time and the body. It is argued that during confrontations between activists and the police, a moment of bodily synchronicity emerges among activists. A skillful performance makes a temporal bodily perspective appear that overcomes the antinomies between immanence and transcendence, between the present and the future, that characterize much thought on social change.
This article is concerned with the idea of societal 'spaciousness' and its relationship to individual and collective autonomy. These issues are analyzed in the context of the eviction of a self-managed social center of left-radical activists in Copenhagen and the protests and public debate that followed. The authors find that societal spaciousness in Denmark is metaphorically associated with a house or a limited physical space. People should limit themselves in public space, as in a house, to 'make room' for all. Because youngsters are not conceived of as fully fledged political subjects who are able to conduct themselves appropriately in public space, they become a group of special concern. The authors argue that space should be conceived as a dimension of social relations, and that sociality relies on a temporal assemblage of people, things, and imaginaries with space.
The chapter by Krøijer considers the devastating consequences of the penetration of the extractive frontier into indigenous territories in Ecuador. She examines the strategies followed by the Sieko-pai for dealing with the transformations to their world caused by decades of oil exploitation. Instead of assuming essences, Krøijer pursues the analytical implications of specific ontological enquiries about oil flows, and how indigenous communities make their lives in a world saturated by extractivism. Documenting the Sieko-pai’s similar considerations about the incorrect treatment of both oil and blood as potential disruptions of positive ‘flows’ between their territory‚ body‚ and powerful ‘others,’ she contributes to current debates around the ontological analogy between oil and the so-called blood of subterranean spirits. Krøijer describes how living with oil extraction hinges on and expresses the Sieko-pai’s flexible ability to deal with transformations and the leaky reality of resource enclaves.
In anthropology, examples have always been an integral part of the investigation of the social life of people. Sometimes they simply work as a poor illustration of an author's general or existing theoretical ideas, but on other occasions they are conducive to setting new thoughts in motion. This paper explores the role of the example among left radical activists in the context of the Climate Summit (COP 15) protests in Copenhagen and a trip to forage for discarded food in a supermarket container in order to feed activists. I argue that examples make up a theory of change that evades problematic distinctions between the particular and universal, and set new actions in motion on a horizontal plane without relying on a predefined plan or end‐point. The paper points to the ways this may inform the use of examples within the anthropological discipline.
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