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Immanent Anthropology: A Comparative Study of 'Process' in Contemporary France

Hodges, Matt (2014) Immanent Anthropology: A Comparative Study of 'Process' in Contemporary France. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 20 (S1). pp. 33-51. ISSN 1359-0987. E-ISSN 1467-9655. (doi:10.1111/1467-9655.12092) (KAR id:45071)

Abstract

This paper presents a comparative critique of the ‘processual temporalities’ which infuse both social-scientific theorizing and selected Western cultural practices. Through study of a public-private partnership which emerged from a biotechnology project devised for producing ‘self-cloning’ maize for resource-poor farmers, I analyse how processual temporalities were central to re-gearing knowledge practices towards market-orientated solutions. In a study of characterizations of the ‘state of flux’ which affects life in a French peri-urban village, I explore how processualism is identified as a component of a metropolitan hegemony which villagers ‘resist’ through idealizing ‘enduring temporalities’ of cultural practice. Drawing on Arendt and Deleuze, I analyse processualism as a dominant contemporary chronotope, mediating and disciplining conflictive temporalities and practices, underwriting economic projects of deterritorialization and restructuring – whose idiom is also prominent in social-scientific paradigms. I substitute an ‘immanent anthropology’, which advocates a non-transcendental ontology of cultural practice and analysis – displacing anthropological analysis onto a polychronic temporal foundation.

Item Type: Article
DOI/Identification number: 10.1111/1467-9655.12092
Additional information: Special Issue: Doubt, Conflict, Mediation: The Anthropology of Modern Time. Edited by Laura Bear
Uncontrolled keywords: Process, Temporality, Immanence, Deleuze, Biotechnnology, France
Subjects: G Geography. Anthropology. Recreation > GN Anthropology
Divisions: Divisions > Division of Human and Social Sciences > School of Anthropology and Conservation
Depositing User: Matthew Hodges
Date Deposited: 20 Nov 2014 13:42 UTC
Last Modified: 09 Dec 2022 05:08 UTC
Resource URI: https://kar.kent.ac.uk/id/eprint/45071 (The current URI for this page, for reference purposes)

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