Different repetitions: Anthropological engagements with figures of return,recurrence and redundancy

ABSTRACT

It is a central contention of this special issue that an anthropological engagement with repetition has the capacity to open up fertile fields of comparative ethnographic and historical work. In this introduction, we link our approach to past anthropological and philosophical works, connecting for instance to discussions of historiography, rhythm, scale, and the characterization of experience. We move on to consider the present and future uses of the concept of repetition, providing five ‘dimensions’ that we consider helpful in exploring its nuances as well as its potentialities. These dimensions we designate as matters of production, medium, anticipation, consequence and scale. Each might be recognized within the discourse of informants or ethnographers or both. What they are intended to do is to provide an operational framework through which to anatomize processes of repetition as observable in whichever ‘field’ we are investigating.     

Repetition and uncanny temporalities: Armenians and the recurrence of genocide in the Levant

ABSTRACT

This paper presents a meditation on how memory and repetition are played out when experienced as both a historical event and an ongoing and returning possibility. Amongst the Armenian community in Lebanon repetition takes on a particular salience in the form of a haunting from the foundational genocide of 1915, a genocide that in recent years has been brought back with the events in Syria where family and kin have faced severe hardships, random killings, and destruction of entire villages. In this paper I over various fieldworks in Lebanon return to the incident of the cleansing of Kessab, an important Armenian village in Syria, and how such an event in today’s Syria points to past, present, and future forms of haunting but also the reconfiguration of affect. The same event draws different landscapes of the imagination, landscapes of fear, haunting, return, but also of resilience and responsibility in the meeting with the time to come.     

Mānasollāsa 5,560-623: Ein Bisher Unbeachtet Gebliebener Text Zum Indischen Schachspiel, übersetzt,Kommentiert und Interpretiert

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

Geographies of relational coordination in venture capital firms

ABSTRACT

Venture capital (VC) firms are crucial actors in entrepreneurial ecosystems. Through the development towards a digital economy, they have gained further relevance, which caused the VC industry to diversify in terms of business models. This article offers a new heuristic to study the VC industry by developing a classification of VC firms. By drawing on a framework of different dimensions of relational distance in investment relations, different types of relational coordination are identified by comparing VC firms in Germany. The types of VC business models are found to produce relational geographies of investing as they relate with their portfolio startups in different ways. A relational perspective on VC thus provides the opportunity to step beyond pure territorial approaches on VC.     

Osteopathological findings in mummified baboons from ancient Egypt

We present the pathological findings in a historic population of 82 baboon mummies recovered from the animal sanctuary of Tuna-el-Gebel in Egypt, in which we were able to demonstrate a high prevalence of disease. In almost 20 per cent of the baboons, signs were present of chronic malnutrition causing bowing and shortening of the long bones. A further 15 per cent of the animals revealed features of chronic joint or vertebral deformities suggesting poor living conditions in their cages. There were three cases of post-traumatic fractures, three of haematogenous osteomyelitis, one individual showed osteoporosis and one hyperostosis of the scapula of uncertain origin. Additionally, we found one tumour of the pelvic bones with features, which might be attributable to an aggressive osteoblastoma or an osteosarcoma. Our findings clearly demonstrate the high rate of bone abnormalities and the wide spectrum of diseases encountered in Egyptian baboon mummies. These observations contribute significantly to our understanding of the life of ancient Egyptian baboons and particularly to their living conditions.     

EUROPEAN INTEGRATION AND THE TERRITORIAL‐ADMINISTRATIVE COMPLEX

Detractors of European integration and many of its protagonists invoke state territoriality where the social and the spatial come together in a “Territorial‐Administrative Complex”. Like the military‐industrial complex claiming once to procure security, protagonists claim to guarantee democratic legitimacy. At the same time, the interests of the territorial constituencies prevail over others. The underlying notion of space is absolute and of territory that of a container. Costs and benefits are calculated in terms pertaining to it. The underlying “meta‐geography” is one of boxes‐in‐boxes, but rather than viewing space as a container, based on academic literature in the matter, planners now pursue soft planning for soft spaces. In the face of the apparently incontestable claim of the Territorial‐Administrative Complex to a monopoly on the production of democratic legitimacy, the article points out, albeit rare examples of constitutional theorists challenge this monopoly. Voting in territorial constituencies, they claim, has never been properly argued for, making it an arbitrary institution.     

“GREEN FIX” AS CRISIS MANAGEMENT. OR,IN WHICH WORLD IS MALMÖ THE WORLD'S GREENEST CITY?

As economic and ecological crises evolve in combination, some policy strategies might aim at killing the two birds with one stone. One recent example can be found in Malmö, Sweden, where crisis management has operated, we propose, as a green fix. The district of Västra hamnen (Western Harbour) is at the centre of the reinvention of the city: once the home of a world‐leading shipyard, it is now a no less prominent neighbourhood of ecological virtues. Through outlining the history of Malmö in general and the Western Harbour in particular, we identify how the municipality and local capital in concert increasingly used “green” strategies in the urban policies that started as crisis management in the 1990s. Today Malmö is reckoned to be among the world's greenest cities, and we reflect on the importance of this international recognition for the city. Finally, we develop a critique of the green fix as concealing crucial factors of scale, and hence running the risk of myopia.