Punctuation and Flow

Manley, Gabriela and Noula, Evdokia and Piña, Gabriela and Sansone, Rosa and Sharma, Sarbani and Sopranzetti, Claudio and Souiah, Farida (2021) Punctuation and Flow. Allgra Lab.

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Abstract

The past two years have been marked by an ever-accelerating cascade of global “events”: once in a lifetime events, generational events, unexpected events, catastrophic events. From climate change to politics and the Covid-19 pandemic, each has been represented as a moment of radical rupture between past and present, often portrayed as having brought about a radically different “new normal”. It is upon this backdrop that we were spurred on to explore the political nature of “eventedness” at the Reflections on Political Engagement workshop and, later, as part of this collective writing process. Across our ethnographies, we witnessed a tension between what we term “punctuation”, on the one hand, and “flow”, on the other. Within the longue durée of socio-historical transformations, certain events that are part of the ever-developing timeline of political engagement acquire elevated status: they punctuate the flow of movements. As anthropologists, we are used to placing the focus on our interlocutors’ ordinary lives, their everyday forms of resistance, and their long-term struggles. We share with some political movements a drive to understand how a certain moment of “crisis” came to be, and yet we question the ways that times charged with heightened “eventedness” are seen (often retrospectively) to mark a “rupture”. Considering the socio-political implications of these labels, we asked ourselves: for whom is an event eventful? What are the temporal practices at play in making, sustaining, or claiming moments of heightened political engagement? Why do these become framed as “events”, while other circumstances do not? How to locate the beginnings and ends of political mobilisations through time? Here we illustrate some possible approaches to these questions through two sustained ethnographic cases: the struggle over the opening of a new mine in a mountain village in Northern Greece, and political violence and martyrdom in the Kashmir Valley.

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Manley, Gabriela and Noula, Evdokia and Piña, Gabriela and Sansone, Rosa and Sharma, Sarbani and Sopranzetti, Claudio and Souiah, Farida

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