Different repetitions: Anthropological engagements with figures of return, recurrence and redundancy

ABSTRACT

It is a central contention of this special issue that an anthropological engagement with repetition has the capacity to open up fertile fields of comparative ethnographic and historical work. In this introduction, we link our approach to past anthropological and philosophical works, connecting for instance to discussions of historiography, rhythm, scale, and the characterization of experience. We move on to consider the present and future uses of the concept of repetition, providing five ‘dimensions’ that we consider helpful in exploring its nuances as well as its potentialities. These dimensions we designate as matters of production, medium, anticipation, consequence and scale. Each might be recognized within the discourse of informants or ethnographers or both. What they are intended to do is to provide an operational framework through which to anatomize processes of repetition as observable in whichever ‘field’ we are investigating.

KEYWORDS:

• Repetition
• temporality
• experience
• ethnography
• comparison

Acknowledgements

This special issue grew out of a series of initial conversations between the two editors and then the conversations amongst the people represented in the contributions. Thanks are due to all panelists at the original panel at the annual meetings of the American Anthropological Association in Washington DC in 2014: Alice Elliot, Maya Mayblin, Matt Tomlinson, and Morten Pedersen as well as our chair Jon Bialecki and our engaged discussant Ghassan Hage. We would also like to thank the editor, David Henig, for expert advice on this text and the special issue as such. Similarly, we would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their productive readings and suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.