Cambridge Journal of Anthropology

This special issue of the Cambridge Journal of Anthropology entitled ‘Beyond Revolution: Reshaping Nationhood through Senses and Affects’ is guest edited by Myriam Lamrani.

Framing this special issue within a broader understanding of the concept of aesthetics as affective, sensory, and emotional entanglements, I start this introduction by grounding the present endeavour in the scholarship on revolution, senses, and affects. I then consider the ways in which this intertwining framework of multisensory and affective modalities proves to be particularly productive in exploring the idea of nationhood and politics after revolutions. Such a focus illuminates how specific dimensions of national narratives become only perceptible once one considers the aesthetical relationship between people's bodies and the body politic. As revolutions move back and forth from the nation to people's bodily sensorium, this collection uncovers the multiple facets of (post)revolutionary collective identities. This sustained attention to the perceptual, as a zone not only of ‘cultural intimacy’ but of national determinacy, I propose, also provides an occasion to reckon with politics beyond revolution itself.

The 2018 anti-government protests in Nicaragua generated a vast amount of photographic imagery, video documentation, and visual graphics. On the street and via social media, everyday citizens engaged with this material, activating a multisensory environment. The production of visual content was nonetheless accompanied by iconoclastic gestures; vandalism became a means of reclaiming Nicaragua's revolutionary past and its symbols, while deploying them towards the making of a yet to be imagined political future. Drawing on examples from Chile and Mexico, the article argues that acts of vandalism may be understood as symbolically reparative. The materiality of the protests, manifested through image, trace, gesture, and sound (slogans, chants, noise) becomes a means towards analysing, ethnographically, revolutionary imaginaries caught within the flux of an unsettled present.

The autumn of 2019 was characterised by an eruption of global protests, including Lebanon, Iraq, Ecuador, Chile, and Egypt. The velocity with which these protests emerged nurtured a sense that the Global South ‘was on the march’. At the same time as these events were rapidly unfolding, the world's premier mass art exhibition, the Venice Biennale, was in its final weeks. Harnessing discourse analysis, participant observation, and collaborative auto-ethnography, the authors draw together a comparative study of the Chilean and Egyptian pavilions and assess the impact of ongoing and suspended revolutionary histories of both nations. Approaching art as a form of ‘practical aesthetics’ (Bennett 2012) and focusing on humour as an aesthetic quality enmeshed in complex political temporalities, this article analyses the relationship between humour, contemporary art, and revolution, demonstrating how the laughter facilitated by these two pavilions negotiates understandings of national pasts, and uprisings in the present.

How do we understand the presence of the grotesque in negotiations of democratic life after a revolution? At the peak of procedural democratic consolidation, carnivalesque revelries in Tunisia became the object of public aporia and repugnance. The dissimilar interpretations of these revelries across generations evince an agonistic process of prizing open both the parameters of nationhood and democratic ideals within existing social relations. The concept of the ‘democratic grotesque’ captures the sensorial and affective ways Tunisian citizens negotiate the affordances and limitations of democracy in the post-revolutionary nation. The democratic grotesque has the double potential to revise intellectual and public understandings of democratic dispositions that emanate from liberal democracy and to blur the boundaries between revolution and democracy.

This article focuses on the reception of revolutionary oratory in what was once known as The People's Revolutionary Republic of Guinea. Sékou Touré, Guinea's first president, captivated the nation with fiery, unscripted speeches lasting four, five, or six hours. Guinean audiences were enthralled by his sublime revolutionary rhetoric. In a 2008 coup, Captain Moussa Dadis Camara declared himself president, attempting to recreate the fervour of Guinea's revolutionary days. Guinean citizens initially provided a willing revolutionary audience, though Camara's oratory fell far short of Touré's example. The article explores how the effects of shock and boredom that Ngai describes as ‘stuplimity’ (2005) emerged in reaction to Camara's performances. Stuplimity was a halfway point between Guineans’ initial ‘revolutionary’ suspension of disbelief regarding the junta's intentions and their subsequent rejection and anger, which led to the junta's collapse less than a year after it took power.

This article tells a story of the aftermath of the ‘failed revolution’ in Egypt through the prism of sound and gendered political prisoner bodies. It created embodied reactions among Cairene men—years after their lived prison experiences—in which depression, sorrow, stress, paranoia, rage, or painful body memories are prevalent. Affect theory shows how sonic vibrations—important stimuli within everyday experience, with a unique power to induce strong affective states—mediate consciousness, including heightened states of attention and anxiety. Sound, or the lack thereof, stimulates, disorients, transforms, and controls. The sound of life is transformed into the sound of death; the desire to disappear in order not to disappear again produces ‘ghost bodies’ alienated from the ‘new Egypt’, but from the family and the self too.

With reference to one man's remarkable struggle to rebuild his home in Havana following its partial collapse, this article contributes to the emerging anthropological literature on care by thematising the role of the state as carer-in-chief. Experiences such as that of Lázaro, the protagonist of the article, demonstrate the central paradox of care as a state project—one that receives its most extreme expression in the totalising project of revolutionary state socialism—namely, the contradiction between the particularistic, affective, and aesthetic character of care and the generalising and neutralising rational order of the state mechanisms charged with delivering it. Drawing on the ritual and cosmological template of Afro-Cuban espiritismo, Lázaro effectively solves this paradox by supplementing his relationship with state structures with an intricate, ever-evolving, and deeply personal relationship with spirits. The upshot is Lázaro's remarkable sense of inner conviction in the efficacy of state bureaucracy, underpinned by the aesthetics of care that spiritsit practice provides.

The sensory turn and the affective turn in contemporary scholarship both crystalised at roughly the same time but then diverged. This special issue reintegrates them. Conjointly, these twin approaches direct attention to the multiplicity, agency, and interactivity of the full spectrum of human faculties (i.e., how the senses and affects intersect with and may also disrupt the rule of reason) in addition to highlighting the extent to which ‘the perceptual is political.’ The resulting paradigm has precipitated a shift from the study of communities as ‘imagined’ to how they are sensed and/or felt, and from a focus on ‘the human condition’ to the intensive investigation of the multiple ‘national post-revolutionary conditions’ that define the current conjuncture. By foregrounding the aesthetics of politics, and tracking the eruption of dis-sensus (laughter, graffiti, dissent) within the con-sensus that states seek to foster in their citizenry, this special issue sounds a much-needed wake-up call.

In this article, we explore the ways in which a man with motor neurone disease, Gareth, and his wife and carer, Maggie, enact different temporal orientations, when the expected future, an early death, does not arrive. We attend to the tensions between everyday priorities and uncertain futures to discuss the ways Gareth and Maggie negotiate action to deal with problems that are yet to come, but, despite this, already matter. We argue that prognosis thrusts people towards multiple presents and futures; while the future is fixed in time through prognosis and repaired through present action, it is also unfixed as lived experience unfolds over time. What emerges is a dialogue between multiple futures, pre-determined and uncertain, and practices that aim to repair the future, even if they cannot do so.

Frédéric Keck. Avian Reservoirs: Virus Hunters and Birdwatchers in Chinese Sentinel Posts. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 245. 2020.

Lars Højer and Morten Axel Pedersen. Urban Hunters: Dealing and Dreaming in Times of Transition. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, pp. 270. 2019.