Things That Come and Go: Ephemera and Atmospherics in Times of Crisis
Patricia Spyer, Geneva Graduate Institute
Notwithstanding the anthropological commitment to understanding everyday life in all its diversity, from banal to extraordinary circumstances, the discipline has tended to shy away from difficult to grasp if palpable phenomena like ambiance, climate, and atmospherics. Drawing on examples from my book, Orphaned Landscapes: Violence, Visuality, and Appearance in Indonesia (Fordham 2022), I explore how fugitive forces and forms suffused and oriented the actions and experiences of wartime, from Karl von Klausewitz’s “fog of war” to huge Christian billboards and murals that sprung up in the Muslim-Christian conflict in Ambon, Indonesia in the early 2000s. Such elusive, ephemeral aspects of social life—from street art to invisible if palpable atmospherics deserve our acute attention. For even as they come and go, such phenomena can have a lasting impact. Depositing their traces in an assortment of practices and forms they bring about novel formations of sociality and the sensible, altered landscapes of living and cohabitation, and subtly different ways of seeing, dwelling, and engaging the world.
