The Hot Lava Edge of Cultural Flows: Global Social Inequality and the Anthropology of Uncertainty, Contingency and Future Orientation

"The Hot Lava Edge of Cultural Flows: Global Social Inequality and the Anthropology of Uncertainty, Contingency and Future Orientation" was coordinated by the Department of Social Anthropology, NTNU, with active participants from Chr. Michelsen Institute, University of Tromsø, University of Oslo, and University of Wisconsin-Madison. The project was initiated January 2013 and ended in December 2017. The project was directed by Liv Haram (Project Coordinator until August 2016), Anne Kathrine Larsen and Harald Aspen (Project Coordinator since September 2016). The project came into being as a result of our collective pondering about what common denominator we could identify in our diverse ethnographic material. Our entry point was something we saw as a challenge, due to the specificity of our discipline: the micro-sociology of our community level ethnographic approach, and an urgent desire to analytically connect the lives of our interlocutors with the global political, economic and cultural forces that encompass all of us who inhabit the world today. Another challenge related to our disciplinary methodology is the temporal limitations of our studies ? an ethnographic fieldwork usually covers not only a limited space but is also synchronic in scope. As a result, we searched in empirical studies cases which could illuminate the impact of global forces on local communities as they unfolded in the daily lives of people. We thought of the global forces as lava streams ? sometimes fast and hot and unpredictable, sometimes slow and cool and with a foreseeable path, but always inevitable and transformative. The basis of the project has been the participants? various ethnographic data which in some or other way addressed the core theme of global social insecurity, as described above. The coordinating institution (NTNU) was responsible for annual workshops, research support and administration. During the first part of the project period, the Department of social anthropology at NTNU also hosted three adjunct professors from USA and Canada (Michael Hertzfeld, Rosemary Coombe and Sharon Hutchinson), all of whom were actively engaged in designing the project, and they also participated in the first workshops. Hutchinson was also formally included as a member of the project group. Most of the project members participated in the annual workshops (Trondheim, April 2013; Røros, October 2014; Trondheim, April 2016). The workshops generally focused on how to develop the participants? publications in progress in a common framework addressing the overall theme, first focusing on individual papers (contributions to annual conferences of the Norwegian Anthropological Association and to a number of international conferences and publications), later focusing on one of the major results ? the anthology Edges of global transformation: Ethnographies of uncertainty, edited by Håkon Fyhn, Harald Aspen and Anne Kathrine Larsen. The book has eight chapters authored by twelve scholars, in addition to an epilogue by professor Nigel Rapport (University of St Andrews). Professor em. Bawa Yamba (Diakonhjemmet University College) participated in the last annual workshop and was instrumental in establishing the mould for the anthology. In addition to the dissemination of academic texts, the project had a special eye on ethnographic film and visual anthropology, scholars from the Visual Cultural Studies, UiT/Arctic University of Norway being central members of the project. The film by Trond Waage (2015, 60 min), ?LES MAIRUUWAS? (The Masters of Water), is about young male migrants to Cameroon and their dreams of succeeding in the city. The final editing of the film has been a part of the project, and it has played an important role as an outreach channel. Since 2015 it has been screened at film festivals, conferences and workshops in Europe, Africa and Asia, and it has also been showed on NRK2. In May 2017, an international workshop was organized in Tromsø as a part of the current project (?Visual Anthropology, Ethnographic Film and Anthropological Knowledge?. In sum, paraphrasing Nigel Rapport?s epilogue to Edges of global transformation, what is characteristic of the contributions to this project is that it has made the different scales that must be managed in any description and analysis apparent. The project has shown that the global penetration of neo-liberal practices and policies necessitates an appreciation of the interconnections between individual lives and familial, communitarian, regional, national and international contexts. The project has also been successful in bringing together a number of Norwegian and international scholars, all with ripe and deep ethnographies, in a common endeavor, across institutional boundaries, addressing the puzzles of how global forces could be likened with lava streams ??inevitable and transformative? (introduction to Edges of global transformation).

The «hot lava edge of cultural flows» alludes to the forceful transformative power of hegemonic and powerful streams that flow over the world - often destructive, but also sources of creativity and novelty, when the directions and nature of the flows are altered by active resistance and contrariety, or by opportunities that open up for entrepreneurship. The project explores the edges of these flows; what new forms of social and individual realities are formed where global forces meet with local agency. Th ese meetings may spur creativity and improvisation, but also apathy and inability. By studying the «hot lava edges» we ask how social inequality at a global scale is created, recreated and solidified, or, alternatively, how it may take new and surprising turns, resulting in altered forms of inequalities. We claim that the lava flow represents uncertainty and contingency, and as such, it affects how the future can be acted upon, if at all. A major question is if the present has changed to such an extent th at the past gives no directions, can then the future guide planned action? The project is composed of a number of ethnographic studies from different local communities and societies around the world, which form the case studies of how the «hot lava edge» affects i.a. identity, health, economy and citizenship. They also form a common basis for testing out some analytical tools and concepts to explore if they can enable us to critically theorize new understandings of social inequality. Our aim is to arrive at a higher level of generalization in our statements about local processes of power and inequality and to infer from the local to the global. The project is headed by NTNU and the participants are from NTNU, CMI, UiT and UiO. The project builds on existi ng ethnographic material, and the main activity will be annual workshops, resulting in two anthologies, in addition to an ethnographic film and a review article.