My laptop, I swear, is staring back at me. It’s challenging my gaze - which is edging on the stink-eye that I’m famous for - to a duel. The question is who will blink first. Will my page disappear as the screen dims, reminding me of the time that has lapsed since my fingers last stroked the keyboard? Or will I tame the points I’m gathering, and the constellations I’m drawing between them, finally be able to herd these bits and pieces into a clear beginning and ending?
In two days I’ll fly to Barcelona, and, in three, the European Association of Social Anthropologists will kick off its eighteenth biennial conference: Doing and Undoing with Anthropology. The theme is loose - a riff on “how do we live together?” It takes an inventory of the multiple emergencies and threats that define contemporary life - from climate change and supply shortages to mass migration and political polarization. Emergencies that force individuals and communities to think on their toes about what can be “done” alongside what needs to be “un/done”. But also about how academic disciplines - Anthropology in the case of this conference - produce and reproduce themselves.
The last year of my undergraduate degree I took a seminar with Charmaine Nelson - the first tenured Black professor of Art History in Canada. “Every project you ever work on,” she told us, “does two things at once.” The first, we learned, is that it advances your research, whatever subject your essay spotlights and studies. The second is that it shapes your field. It confirms, or challenges, the baggage your academic discipline carries and that with which it continues.
Is a clue obvious? You already know that my paper is not yet drafted. And now you know that I’m not an anthropologist. Art History led me to Cultural History, and now I research eating and ecology, restaurants and representation, how human appetites shape worlds, and the futures they story.
The “with” in the conference theme captured my attention. It softens its aim, creating a safe space for anthropology. Although it critically reflects on the discipline’s state, which, as an outsider, it is not my place to comment on, it also enrolls Anthropology as an accomplice at large. “Doing and undoing with Anthropology”, rather than “Doing and undoing Anthropology”.
The panel I’m participating in moves this question from land to water. A colleague and collaborator, Karin Ahlberg, together with Jasmine Iozzelli and Emma Cyr, has convened the two part lecture “Claiming the Sea, Seaing Anthropology: more-than-human mobilities, fluid laws, and ocean grabs”. It asks: what does “a view from the sea with a focus on the major movements unfolding in our oceans” - human and non-human mobility, sea grabs, and their concomitant regulations - teach “about sedentary, capitalist and colonial legacies and logics in anthropology and beyond”.
This question rocks back and forth in my mind as I write, as I draft, as I delete, as I rewrite.
I know that I’ve made it sound like I’m afraid of a blank page. For the record, I’m not. I’m a wordy writer, so wordy that I edge on flamboyant (never precious though, at least I hope not), and I consider nothing sexier than someone with a vocabulary as lush as velvet (mine is rather thin, so I need to dress it up with punctuation and rhythm, with repetition and other similar tricks). This is to say that with me editors often complain about excess, rather than drought. They shear my texts, asking me to add words only for clarity, never for bulk.
But here I am still collecting notes for the paper I’ll present in Barcelona, a paper titled “Tuna Troubles”. I’ve rehearsed the content twice before. And, yet, each context has been different; so I’m back to measuring the dimensions of this new frame, draping and stretching my notes.
This is nothing new. Instead, the script that I’m following is rather standard: you promise to present a paper, but then you don’t write it. You put it off, attending to bigger fires, deadlier deadlines. But you think about it. Constantly. The paper, or the promise of it, becomes the kind of beep, or hum, or buzz. Faint enough to tolerate, but loud enough to notice, like a dishwasher that whirring, or a taxi that treads up and down the street searching for an address.
A proposal is essentially a promise. “Do you have a deadline?” I once asked a roommate when I walked in on her polishing her sneakers with a toothbrush. “Tomorrow,” she replied. Perhaps this is why academics joke about the club of scholars, composed largely professors with the immunity of tenure, who draft papers while on planes. Of senior academics who try to stuff 60 slides into 15 minutes and then fake surprise when they run out of time.
This is the promise that I made when I submitted my conference application: “Tuna Troubles” will present a view from a ranch, which is another way to say a cage, located off the coast of Malta. This “sea view” will take a deep breath to bob above and then snorkel below the water’s surface, to swim clockwise in the company of Atlantic bluefin, to hitch a ride on what feels like an underwater merry-go-round that rewrites the song “Hotel California” for the Anthropocene. The lyrics jumble. Instead of “pink champagne on ice”, there is tuna frozen in such a flash that it still counts as fresh, but the same doubts remain: what is heaven versus hell? Steely knives. The master’s chambers. Checking out without being able to leave. Doubts become questions about the multiple meanings of more-than-human mobilities and how profit-driven practices, for example, tuna ranching, try to tether bluefin to one place while conservation-conscious regulations, that follow the meridian 45° west, attempt to adhere to a line that fish and currents and water alike all ignore. In dialogue with how the logics of capture that fuel contemporary ocean grabs adapt colonialism’s script to water, “Tuna Troubles” weaves together an intimate study of what the poet Pablo Neruda calls a “torpedo from the ocean depths, a missile that swam” with scholarship about how regulations make, and unmake, do and undo fish and their relationships with water.
The distance between a proposal and a paper is long.
Conferences breed connections, yes, but they also facilitate the transactions that both obey and seek to dismantle the hierarchies that rule academia. To do and undo and then do again...
In the playwright and television writer Julia Cho’s love letter to conferences she calls them her “secret to creative rejuvenation”. She likes to fall under a conference’s spell and how it gifts her space to reimagine routine, an escape from the “overwhelm and numbness” of everyday commitments. “A conference has a singular focus,” she writes, which grants her the permission to do the same. Time is measured differently for the two or three days she spends at a conference: “[i]t’s structured but expansive.” Conferences, Cho argues, build a “space outside of time.”
Whether or not Cho leaves her writing to the last minute, she does not disclose. But she does recall one conference where Anne Lamott said of writers and writing, “[s]top not doing it.”
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The image that illustrates this piece is from the project: Unknown City Beneath the Mist. New images from Barcelona’s peripheries. The exhibition on show at MACBA, Barcelona is a critical and civil inquiry that sees photography as a counter-discourse to advertising. The project includes thirteen commissioned works, some of a transversal character spanning different neighborhoods, and others constructed as field studies of a more specific nature. Their focus is also varied, with some purely topographic, while others address social issues.
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- IMAGE CREDITS
Cover: Carmen Secanella, Paseo por la marina, 2023.
