In Mourning: Sociocultural Anthropology in 2020

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis year‐in‐review article places 2020 sociocultural works within the portal formed by pandemic loss. Moving in the mode of Black feminist praxis, the article stays with wake work (Sharpe) as an analytic to consider articles and born digital media for how they were moved by the situated practices and affects produced through dying from normality and the horizons they summon and grieve. Specifically, Sharpe's formulation of wake work as a labor of vigilant attendance is upheld as a method for how anthropology might mourn the dead while reckoning with Black being in modernity. Prevalent keywords from popular discourse in 2020 organize the article conceptually, putting the force of public debates around “preexisting conditions,” “law and order,” “staying at home,” and being “all in this together” to bear on anthropological analyses of patriarchy, settler colonialism, and racial capitalism. Overwhelmingly, the feelings that shape and are shaped by the violent delineations that make human and nonhuman forms of life more or less risky in capitalist modernity were persistently resurrected across these virtual dialogues. The inability to do anthropology as usual afforded an important moment for pause to consider more deeply the political and material investments at the core of the discipline's raison d’être in 2020. Rather than rush toward a return to normality, the article propounds staying in the wake. Such a labor demands that anthropology feel for how to be relevant to coalitions in the making, not as experts but as fellow processioners through a threshold still becoming. In this mode, the future may be gleaned not only by what we are ready to fight for but also for whom and how we mourn. [sociocultural anthropology, wake work, uprisings, care, pandemic, portal]