Fragments of Life, Death, Harm, and Care
Automated graves in Japan. The contested funeral rites of trans-women in Turkey. Decolonising migration studies, and disentangling racism and migratism. The meanings of conflict, violence and peace. Whether humans are ‘natural warriors’. Critiques of the name and date of the Anthropocene. Uranium isotopes and mining in Gabon. Banana-boring beetles and the body as a unit of analysis and site of (inter- and intra-) action.
That’s a whistle-stop of last week in my studies of Anthropology (and Peace Studies).
I was telling a classmate about these Fieldnotes for the Future, telling them that while my intention is for this writing to weave together what I’m learning, I’m at a loss as to how to do that this week.
But as we chatted further, I realised that maybe the fragmentary nature of this week is not only okay, but might be part of the point of what I’m studying.
Anthropology, after all, is in many respects a discipline of critique and deconstruction.
What has perhaps struck me most in this last week is how much of the world I accept at face value. And how exhausting it is learning to look more closely and get curious about the everyday realities that shape my life without me noticing.
It’s almost like learning to be a six-year-old again. Why? But why? But why?! And who, and how, and where, and when.
Except there isn’t just one answer to those questions. As one of my embodiment teachers likes to joke, there are only two answers to any question and one is “it depends” (the other is practice, if you’re interested).
It depends on time, on space, on the qualities of the material you’re examining. It depends on your own positionality and relationships to what you’re observing.
It’s as if I’ve been handed loose threads from many different looms. I can’t yet see the pattern they belong to, but perhaps the task right now is simply to hold them, to notice their textures, and to wait until the weave becomes clearer.
Donna Haraway invites us to learn how to stay with the trouble. To resist the pull toward tidy conclusions and instead stay with the fragments, the uncertainty, the slow composting of ideas that might one day nourish a more livable world.
Haraway’s work reminds me that my impulse to fix, transcend or move past the mess might be more than a personal experience. Western, neo-liberal approaches are full of solutions and salvation narratives. These approaches, as I discovered last week thinking about the origins of sustainable development as a concept, often exacerbate and reinforce the very challenges they claim to be solving.
Haraway, like Vanessa Machado de Oliveira, invites us into presence with complexity, grief and the entanglements of life and death, harm and care, ruin and renewal.
Knowing and unknowing.
Learning to live with fragments. To let them whisper their own logic before I rush to make meaning. Perhaps that’s what this discipline is teaching me: that understanding isn’t the end point but the ongoing act of staying open to what might yet emerge.
