Deleuze and the Anthropology of Becoming

“On the creative potentials of trauma and memory, see also Antze and Lambek (1996), Avelar (1999), Benjamin (1986), Caruth (1996), Das et al. (2001), Edkins (2004), Richard (2004), Sebald (2003), and Winter and Sivan (1999).”

“In this regard the time of anthropological knowing runs counter to that of political and economic rationalities, to the reason of policy and governance, which makes people the objects of technical fixes with specific, temporally limited stages of progress and evaluation (Greenhouse 1996).”

“This orientation, it should be noted, departs from influential ways that anthropologists have engaged with philosophies of multiplicity (see Biehl and Locke 2010; Deleuze 1994, 2005).”

“Blitz, Brad 2006 Statelessness and the Social (De)Construction of Citizenship: Political Restructuring and Ethnic Discrimination in Slovenia.”

“Today, such notions often serve as an implicit companion to expectations of and hopes for continued change (Biehl and Locke 2010).”

“…relating to ‘our receptivity to others … the voices to which we listen and the experiences we account for – and in how we craft our explanations: whether our analytics remain attuned to the intricacy, openness, and unpredictability of individual and collective lives’ (Biehl and Locke 2010: 318).”

“As such, popular economic practices – as illustrated above – may connect residents in an unnamed, unrecognized collectivity; they are a tissue of shared relations woven by a shared experience of a ‘loaded’ temporality, an interregnum between destruction and renewal (Biehl and Locke, 2010).”

“Anthropologists can render publicly intelligible the value of what people, amid new rational-technical and politico-economic machineries, are left to resolve alone (Biehl & Locke 2010).”

“6 Of course, “incompleteness” may be seen as an inevitable way of living in and theorizing about the world, even a way of doing so that opens new political potential (Deleuze 1995, 1997; Biehl and Locke 2010).”

“…themes of particular significance’ in the American Anthropologist sociocultural anthropology year in review list (Hamilton and Placas 2011; see also Biehl and Locke 2010) makes the coin embossed with the name ‘Deleuze’ seem so common that one cannot but help suspect that its metal is being…”

“Although precarious, they significantly inform governance and the ways of living that people take up vis-à-vis ailing public institutions (Abélès 2009, Anand 2011, Biehl 2007, Biehl and Locke 2010, Fassin and Pandolfi 2010, Feldman and Ticktin 2010, McKay 2012, Nguyen 2010).”

“…us to analytically address how experiences of violence across a range of social spaces inform each other in intricate patterns of flux and flow (Biehl and Locke, 2010; Henriksen and Miller, 2012; Søndergaard, 2013)—making distinctions between being a victim, a perpetrator, or a witness is a…”

“Modes of embodiment arise within a “milieu,” a “world” that is “at once social, symbolic, and material, infused with the ‘affects’ and ‘intensities’ of . . . subjectivities” (Biehl & Locke, 2010, p. 323).”

“…anorexia (Bray and Colebrook, 1998), the heterosexual matrix (Renold and Ringrose, 2008), mothers’ political protest (Baydar and İvegen, 2006), selfhood (Sermijn et al., 2008), social identity (Brown and Lunt, 2002), responses to suicide (Isaac, 2007), and wartime losses (Biehl and Locke, 2010).”

“However, in presenting black feminist hashtags as becoming, I do notmean to suggest that rupturing is an inherently heroic, transformative, or even liberating process,(13) since black feminist hashtags alsopoint to competing solidarities that can exclude on the basis of shared rage and marginalization.(14) In what fol…”

“Tracking back and forth across the numb, ‘safe,’ space inside the illness has thereby offered a ‘micro-analysis’ (Deleuze 2007), bringing into view ‘the immanent fields that people, in all their ambiguity, invent and live by’ (Biehl & Locke, 2010: 317).”

“…it more useful to view dealing and crime among street entrenched young men as “regimes of living” (Collier & Lakoff, 2005) that have emerged out of shared experiences of social suffering across time and place—but also, importantly, a shared desire for things to be otherwise (Biehl & Locke, 2010).”

“Noting that large-scale processes are not “abstract machines overde-termining the whole social field,” Biehl and Locke (2010:335) have addressed the “buried becomings and alternative futures” within psycho-social worlds in Razil and Sarajevo.”

“” Biehl and Locke (2010, 318) The choices that are made by powerful actors in an assemblage are hugely signi fi cant and may de fi ne for a community what is regarded as a “ desirable future ” ; hence, there are many attempts to ensure that planning processes, for example, are made more equitable…”

“(Biehl & Locke, 2010, p. 320) We have already suggested in the book that the work we have done is unfinished and tentative, we hope, opening a space for others to pursue our ideas further.”

“In largely building on a critical philosophy concerned with questions of life, futurity, and becoming (Biehl and Locke 2010; Anderson 2006; Miyazaki 2006), analysts engaged in these questions also seek to move beyond what Jim Ferguson (2009:166) has aptly called a ‘‘politics of the antis’’: that…”

“Biehl and Locke (2010) employ a Deleuzian approach to unpacking the biopolitics of the poor and institutional psychiatry by speaking of such an approach as having the ‘potential to become a mobilizing force in this world’ (2010, 337).”

““Becoming is not always heroic” (Biehl and Locke 2010 :336).”

“Becoming then signals a transformative potential inherent to the components of an assemblage (Biehl and Locke 2010, 317).”

“In our ethnographic project, we rely on methods for conducting fieldwork and writing descriptive accounts that decenter the individual human subject (Biehl & Locke, 2010; Tobin & Davidson, 1990) and offer in its place a fluid model of disabled and non-disabled subjects and the subjectivities of…”

“This then raises the potential of what can be termed a ‘social death’ (e.g. Jackson 2002; Biehl & Locke 2010) in the sense that shame holds the capacity to rob a person of all sense of having the strength-power to act on their world.”

“In applied contexts, we must directly confront the irony that we often critique and intervene on structural vulnerability by recommending further structural dependency (Biehl and Locke 2010).”

“Through these narratives, a desire for care (Biehl and Locke, 2010) is articulated, a desire for affective relationships that come into being through unmeasurable caring practices.”

“The interviews that were built into our ethnographic research were carried out at local community centres and they provided a space for multiple and often contradictory voices resonating with an ethnographic spirit of capturing ‘ambivalence, ambiguity, and openness’ (Biehl and Locke 2010, 321).”