Crisis,urgency and the problem of discernment

Crises proliferate. Not just as labels but as the actual state of affairs, of impasse, ruination and breakdown. As an anthropologist working on Syria with extensive fieldwork inside the country before the uprising of 2011, and later with ongoing fieldwork in Lebanon, Jordan and with exiled Syrians in Europe, I find it safe to say that crisis is polyvalent. Crisis is slow and urgent as it moves with Syrians in time and across locations. This piece argues that we need urgent engagement with slow forms of crisis and slow engagement with calls to urgency. This calls for an exercise in discernment, which takes urgency and claims it as a diagnostic for ethnographic exploration.