By Katy Lindquist

Emergent Conversation 22

This essay is part of the series The Politics of Crisis, PoLAR Online Emergent Conversation 22

“No future.” 2013, Athens, Exarcheia, Greece. Artist: Scarr One. Photo by Julia Tulke. CC BY NC SA 2.0.

The first two decades of the twenty-first century have been marked by a growing sense of uncertainty, crisis, and collapse. The global war on terror, the 2008 financial crisis, accelerating rates of climate change, massive wealth inequality, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the wars in Ukraine and Gaza have shattered what was left of the illusion of modernity’s progress narrative. While the precarity of tomorrow is by no means a new phenomenon for many in the world, now those who were promised a position in the prosperity of modernity are contending with the possibility that their tomorrow is far from secure. Uncertainty has become the “structure of feeling” (Williams 1978) of the time.

This Emergent Conversations series engages with the growing literature on the politics of crisis. What is crisis and how should anthropologists contend with crisis as an ever-present category of society in today’s world? The contributions to this series explore the politics of crisis and question the assumptions underlying crisis time.

While the concept of crisis has a long historical lineage in anthropology (e.g., Turner 1969), recent ethnography has provided a much-needed critical lens to theorize crisis as a contemporary phenomenon produced through historically specific relations of power. How are narratives of crisis constructed and who do they serve? How are global crises such as pandemics and climate change contextualized in different places and what does this tell us about relations of power? What are the alternative scripts that stand in the shadows of crisis narratives?

Each of these contributions show how crisis manifests in contextually specific ways in space; and all four highlight the temporal nature of claims to crisis. For example, Cooper shows how predictive models of a generation left behind have radically re-organized not just funding agendas in the present but also belief systems about what is possible for the future, while Hu demonstrates how solutions to present crises can become future crises. Claims to crisis act as temporal devices that orient both past and future around the need for urgent action in the present. In this way, crisis narratives are both history-makers and future-limiters. Part of the ethnographic project is to explore what histories are occluded in the making of crisis and which futures are foreclosed. An ethnographic approach to crisis, is thus also, a way of re-opening time-scapes that claims to crisis have closed.

In this collection, Elizabeth Cooper explores what some have termed the “global learning crisis.” The claim to crisis, heralded specifically by the World Bank in 2018, marks a discursive rupture in the “Education For All” agenda that organized global education funding for decades. Cooper traces the emergence of this claim to crisis in global education policy, showing how this claim has radically reorganized not just funding for education initiatives worldwide but also the underlying assumptions about the role of education in society. What is notable, Cooper writes, is that the claim to crisis is in many ways based on a futuristic hypothesis about how missed education outcomes portend future adversity. In other words, the crisis is not a crisis of today, but an expected crisis of tomorrow—one based on a set of predictive forecasts that are largely untested. The importance of the future in the present is a theme that runs throughout the contributions of this series and Cooper shows how representations of a future in crisis have an almost confounding potential to reorganize resources, power, and people in the present.

Cameron Hu explores the self-propelling nature of crisis claims. Building on Janet Roitman’s (2013) canonical work on crisis, Hu argues that not only do claims to crisis compel action, they also foretell the contours of future claims to crisis. Writing from the vantage point of west Texas, Hu traces how claims to climate crisis have historically produced solutions that in themselves produce the conditions for future claims to climate crisis. Starting in the 1990s, a much heralded solution to the “carbon dioxide crisis” was fracking for methane as an alternative fuel source. West Texas sat at the forefront of this solutions project, where methane was positioned as the “clean” alternative of the future. However, a recent satellite passing over West Texas found the largest flux of methane gas over any oil and gas zone in the Americas, providing the backdrop to what is now being termed, “the methane crisis.” Solutions to past crises became the drivers of crisis in the present. Now, fantastical geo-engineering projects such as carbon capture and solar radiation management are seen by eco-critics and defense specialists alike as the solution to the perils of the climate crisis to come. If the solution to crisis today is the bedrock of crisis tomorrow, it doesn’t take much speculation to see what possible futures are in store. Hu is careful to emphasize that it is possible, of course, to take seriously claims of climate crisis while also acknowledging that there is something not quite right about the solutions cycle we are in. What if, Hu proposes, the urgent thing to do now is to “do something about the compulsion to do something”?

While Cooper and Hu explore the ways in which claims to crisis shape debates about crisis solutions in the present and the future, Katy Lindquist looks instead at what happens when claims to crisis lack the narrative gravity to re-orient time and action in the present. In Kampala, the capital of Uganda, Lindquist explores how the prophetic political crisis on the country’s horizon failed to produce the solutions architecture that that Cooper and Hu outline in their accounts. Uganda’s current president, Yoweri Museveni, has just entered his thirty-eighth year in power. In a country that has never seen a peaceful transition of power, it is a commonly accepted that with the end of Museveni, a crisis of political violence likely looms in the future. However, Lindquist shows that this prophetic crisis has little impact on how young people living in Kampala think about their futures or organize their lives in the present. Instead Lindquist suggests that a different type of temporality is at work in Kampala, what she calls the “time of somehow.” This way of being in time expects crisis, but doesn’t hinge on it. Instead it rests on an implicit belief that the future finds a way of working out somehow. While this should not be confused with a romantic reading of resilience or a zealous belief in the progress narratives of modernity, this hope-inflected sense of time offers a way of imagining futures outside of the strict narrative form of crisis.

While Cooper, Hu, and Lindquist offer different critiques of claims to crisis, Constance Smith poses the question, What are the ethical consequences of not naming crisis? Smith situates this question within her research on high-rise housing disasters in Nairobi, the capital of Kenya. Smith traces the development of what many call an urgent housing crisis to both a fantastical promise of Nairobi as a future global city and the long colonial legacies of spatial authority and infrastructure violence in the governance of the city. In Nairobi’s informal settlements, the build upward has left many of Nairobi’s most precarious in single-room rentals in structurally unsound multi-story blocks. In the midst of regulatory inadequacy and an illicit construction industry, these buildings collapse at a rate of three or four a year leaving residents injured, house-less, or worse. This, to Smith’s interlocuters, is narrated and experienced as a crisis. Smith notes that significant and important literature has worked to disrupt readings of Africa—specifically urban Africa—as a landscape of crisis, offering alternative readings of time and space in Africa as “emergent” or “otherwise.” But, what are we to do when our interlocuters name their experience and lifeworld as one in crisis? Is there not, as Smith asks, an ethical imperative to take seriously the categories of our interlocuters? Smith suggests that rather than simply critiquing crisis as a category, we should instead follow what claims of crisis do in the world, with an openness to see new assemblages that don’t neatly fit into our now well-formed critiques of Africa in crisis.

Together this set of contributions illustrates a diverse set of approaches to understanding crisis as an ethnographic subject. Running through all of these contributions is a sense that claims to crisis do things in the world that can be ethnographically traced in both space and time. As Hu poetically states, “Crisis is for doers and for doings.” Part of the task at hand, as Smith suggests, is to develop an ethnographic approach to following crisis and the different registers, time-scapes, and contexts it moves through. Such an approach keeps crisis as a category always in a state of emergence, enabling anthropologists to not fall into the trappings of crisis time itself.

A tension running through all of these contributions is the difficulty of attending to crisis as both a narrative and an experience. Claims to crisis are often informed by lived experiences of precarity, violence, and dispossession. Crisis does not take narrative formation in a vacuum. How do we ethnographically account for crisis as a lived experience while also holding in tension its narrative trappings? Smith’s contribution addresses this most directly, but elements of it run through all of the contributions. How can we take seriously the lived experience of climate change, educational inequality, and autocracy without giving in to the limited narrative form of crisis itself?

Finally, these contributions raise the larger question about what exists outside of crisis narratives. If we do indeed live in a time where crisis and its related affect, uncertainty, are predominant signs of the times, how do we look for alternative scripts hidden in the shadows of crisis narratives? Lindquist addresses this question directly by exploring the time of somehow, a way of being in time that accounts for crisis, but doesn’t hinge on it. Her work suggests that the study of crisis requires an attention to affects and practices that co-exist despite crisis narratives. Affects such as hope, ambivalence, joy, and nostalgia and practices of aspiration, imagination, and reflection offer openings to understanding ways of being that are possible within and without crisis narratives.

We may live in a world narrated through crisis, but the job of ethnography is to look beyond the lens of crisis time in an effort to see what crisis does, what it occludes, and what is possible outside of its narrative gaze.

Katy Lindquist is a Klarman Fellow and Postdoctoral Associate in the Department of Anthropology at Cornell University. She received her PhD in Anthropology from Emory University. Her research explores the political subjectivities of young, middle-class professionals in urban Uganda and their role in the recent wave of social justice movements in the country.