Introduction: Ethnographies of escalation

ABSTRACT

This introduction presents the concept of escalation as referring to a quantitative acceleration (of prices, violence, policies, images, concerns etc.) that leads to qualitative changes (in, for example, group compositions, imaginaries, practices or concepts). If ‘acceleration’ designates exponential growth, ‘escalation’ refers to a change in or rupture to the linearity of this growth, that is, to a change of scale. The concept of escalation thus proposes that non-linearity is an important aspect of accelerations and that quantity should be taken into account when looking at qualitative change. By suggesting a new theoretical framework for exploring accelerations/escalations (based on a previous co-authored article), it is the aim of this special issue to draw attention to – and to group together – specific accelerations/escalations as ethnographic objects of inquiry and to explore the comparative potential of aligning different ethnographies through this framework.

KEYWORDS:

• Escalation
• acceleration
• quantity
• quality
• change
• scale

What happens when something accelerates and leaves a world forever changed? Might a price acceleration suddenly alter the very nature of farming life in India? Can such a scenario be likened to an indigenous act of violence that develops into a national crisis and transforms the notion of ‘indigeneity’ in Ecuador? In this special issue we wish to explore and compare different ethnographies of a particular kind of historical change that we have previously termed ‘escalations’ (Højer et al. 2018).¹ The concept of escalation refers to a quantitative acceleration (of prices, violence, policies, images, concerns etc.) that leads to qualitative changes (in, for example, group compositions, imaginaries, practices or concepts). In escalations, a sudden accelerating change involves not only a change in speed but also qualitative changes to the way that change itself is understood when measured by new scales. If ‘acceleration’ thus designates (exponential) growth, ‘escalation’ refers to a change in or rupture to the linearity of this growth, that is, to a change of scale. As such, the concept refers to a rapid historical development that recursively – and often repeatedly – leads to a change in the way in which this (now different) historical trajectory is conceived.

By using this concept of escalation as the prism for a special issue, our aim is to align ethnographic studies that are not usually grouped together in order to explore the relation between speed and size, on the one hand, and qualitative change on the other. We have previously proposed that the concept of escalation has the potential ‘to gather a range of “miscellaneous facts” (Mauss 1973) – sudden accelerating changes – which may potentially be compared […] across […] different thematic domains’ (politics, economy, religion) (Højer et al. 2018, 16). In this special issue, we take up this comparative challenge and ask: Does the concept enable new insights in specific ethnographies, and may specific ethnographies in turn point to the possibilities and limits of the concept of escalation itself?

Defining escalations

Our notion of escalations was born from an interest in comparing a number of contemporary processes initiated by decisive yet often unremarkable events such as the self-immolation of a Tunisian street vendor prompting the Arab Spring, a housing bubble bursting in the US catalysing a global financial crisis and the publication of cartoons in a Danish newspaper triggering controversies within and between countries (Højer et al. 2018). How did such escalations begin? How did they grow? And what effects did they have? Our initial hunch was that these processes had something in common. They all came, at least to some extent, ‘out of nowhere’ and could not easily have been predicted; they were events or reconfigurations of reality that managed to ignite a new moment(um) and a new historical trajectory. And this new movement, apparently, could grow, even accelerate; it fuelled itself in a process where one imitation would always lead to more imitations or re-actions.

This growth, however, also meant that such developments generated a number of unintended and unpredictable effects and merged with many other processes. The publication of cartoons in a Danish newspaper, for example, became entangled in group dynamics among Muslims in Denmark, Danish politics, international relations, global religious divides, securitization and enlightenment discourse. Yet, they did more than that. The accelerating movements themselves also tended to change in the process and turn into something else; they became escalations in our definition of the word. While the Arab Spring, Danish Cartoon Controversy and 2008 global financial crisis may be read through such a prism, so can less well-known examples such as the political purges carried out by the Mongolian socialist state in the 1930s where violent forces also transmuted as they were unleashed: ‘[The violence] took a life of its own, became embedded in local life’, writes Manduhai Buyandelger,

and transformed into a self-perpetuating, uncontrollable force. Purges and local denunciations were used as a tool for settling accounts from previous struggles during revolution and collectivization and turned into a chance for have-nots to take revenge on their former dominators. (Buyandelger 2013, 72–73)

More recently, the COVID-19 pandemic, a viral acceleration that led to an acceleration in preventive measures across most of the globe, has also come to ignite other accelerations – of state intervention and surveillance, anti-globalization and xenophobia, apocalyptic awareness (also in relation to climate), corona research funding etc. – through which the pandemic is now also recursively read.²

When looking at such processes, the suggestion, then, is to study how they accelerate through, for example, schismogenetic processes³ (Bateson 1935, 1958, 2000) and to explore how these processes escalate, that is, to reveal how change itself is changing through accelerations. Accelerations, we argue, thrive on intensely experienced differences that fractally and virally manage to reproduce themselves.⁴ Such intensification of difference may, for example, arise from the defacement of sacred things (manifesting in blasphemous acts of depiction, the denigration of religious objects, the burning of flags), from events and emergent narratives that stage and give prominence to particular kinds of differences (alleged genocides,⁵ terrorist attacks, US elections, French revolutions) or from sudden ‘discoveries’ of the difference between the current market value of an asset and its perceived future value. Or they may emerge from the looming prospects of a radically different future in times of pandemic. Such temporal differences create anticipation – ‘an affective imminence of the future’ – in the sense of ‘pulling the future’ toward – and hence radically reorienting – a now liminal present (Bryant and Knight 2019, 28–36) where action and momentum are induced. Speaking of the conspiracy theories emerging in the wake of a violent event in Odessa in the aftermath of the 2014 Ukranian revolution, for example, Carey explains that

the proliferation of such extreme explanations of those events forced people to assume positions from which it seemed almost inconceivable to re-establish a peaceful modus vivendi, compelling people who had previously foregrounded their identity as Odessans to align themselves with either the pro-Russians or the pro-Ukranians in new and uncompromising ways. This sense of irrevocability was further reinforced by the utter collapse of trust on all sides. (Carey 2017, 90)

In an imitative process, past happenings and explanations ignite anticipations that, in turn, pull imagined future divides into the present. Apart from Bateson’s well-known notion of schismogenesis, this systemic model of positive feedback has appeared in many different theoretical guises over the years. The ‘broken windows theory’ from criminology (Wilson and Kelling 1982), for example – stating that minor disorders in a neighbourhood can lead to a process that feeds itself (one broken window resulting in more broken windows and ultimately in serious crimes) – was implemented in reverse to counter high crime rates in New York in the 1990s (Gladwell 2000, 141–146).⁶ Similar thoughts are found in both sociological and popular notions such as herd behaviour, internet echo chambers, crowd psychology, bandwagon effects, information cascades, mass hysteria, spirals of silence, and Matthew effects, where difference gains further momentum from the sheer increase in numbers (from few to many attacks/burned flags/revolutions); the rise, so to speak, gives rise to further rise. The shortcoming of most of this literature, however, is its often straight-line approach to change; something always leads to more of the same (or the opposite) – and if not, this is often due to factors external to the processes themselves (see for example Bateson 1935, 1958, 2000). While a different, yet comparable, strand of literature addresses the scaling up or scaling down of conflicts through concepts such as ‘segmentary lineages’ (Evans-Pritchard 1940) and ‘transvaluation’ (Tambiah 1996; see also Dulin 2017 for a recent take on this term), it still tends to work within a framework of ‘more or less’ of the same thing or, alternatively, to concentrate on a fractal-like repetition at different orders of magnitude (for example Højer 2013). In other words, the political processes studied are often modelled on fixed scales, where conflicts move up or down the ‘ladder’ or ‘escalator’, as it were, but where the scales themselves never undergo significant change. Our notion of the term escalation tries to address this problem by stressing the non-linear and genuinely disruptive aspects of such dynamics. If accelerations, to put things in the most abstract of terms, thrive on intense difference and lead to more of the same (or the opposite) and involve moving ‘up’ or ‘down’ in terms of pre-established scales (local, regional versus global; Christians versus Muslims; socialist state versus state enemies for example), then escalation refers to a change – as things accelerate – in the kind of differences that drive forward (and retrospectively re-signify) accelerations. It involves a change of scale.

This change of the terms of change, however, is not only an effect of accelerations. It may also be a precondition for initiating accelerations in the first place. Thus understood, accelerations are not only ignited by accumulated factual tensions (as in a Marxian scheme of class conflicts) or by ‘specters of violence’ (Good 2015), but are also provoked by reconfigurations, that is, by external or unexpected happenings such as bombs (Rao 2007), gas wars (Risør, this issue), price increases (Puri, this issue), extraordinary killings (Krøijer and Kublitz, this issue), odd visitors (Elliot, this issue), a (perceived) provocation (Dulin, this issue), or the introduction of gambling (Pickles, this issue). In other words, they are initiated by the invention of new and significantly different – and often materialized and non-negligible – scales for measuring difference that get things moving by framing the world in novel ways. Examples of such new scales could include a ‘war against terror’ or, more generally, the naming of new enemies (‘counterrevolutionaries’, ‘elites’, ‘banks’, ‘radicals’) or the introduction of discourses (on securitization, for example; see Kublitz, this issue). Such new scales might intentionally or unintentionally bring about a change or even a revolution. In so doing, they may give rise to a newly emerging structure or momentum that is, at least partly, irreducible to what came before it. If actual and pre-existing class frictions might give rise to revolutions, then so too might the introduction of the very notion and imaginary of ‘class’ as a scale for categorizing and measuring produce a similar effect (cf. Bourdieu 1998). The concept of escalations is meant to stress this entanglement of materiality and imagination (class and ‘class’, before and after), by giving weight to both discourse and labelling,⁷ on the one hand, and the materiality of violence, investments, information infrastructures, real income distributions and ‘the concrete imitative acts of a growing number of interconnected people’ on the other (Højer et al. 2018, 53). It would indeed be difficult to imagine a rupture that does not draw its energy both from existing potentials and from possible futures and leaps of the imagination (giving rise to what only now turned out to be potential differences). However, what the notion of escalation does – most importantly – is to recognize the importance of new framings, imaginings and scales as both instigators and effects of accelerations. The concept thus highlights not a continuity in time – a repetition of a rhythm of booms and busts, for example, or a release of objective tensions – but newly emerging structures, instigated by a reframing of things that reassemble past, present and future in a way that pushes the direction of things off course – or at least sets them on a different course.

If the litmus test of any valuable concept is that it allows you to perceive things that you would not otherwise have seen, the notion of ‘escalation’ thus aims to draw attention to two principal aspects of accelerating dynamics. First, it not only addresses the specific dynamics of rapid growth but also, and more importantly, pays attention to non-linear aspects, that is, to change and novelty as strong inherent features of such processes. As such, the concept prompts several ethnographic questions: Which new framing or scale made this momentum possible? In which sense are accelerating processes not just a replay of old and/or deep structures? How does something gain momentum and grow, and what happens within the process of growth? How can escalation be traced ethnographically? What irreversible changes occur in the process and which new scales emerge? How do new scales reconfigure accelerations? Second, in attending to acceleration (as a precondition for escalations), the analytical proposition offered here is also to take the issue of quantity into account. Which numbers have grown, even accelerated? How does the material size of a phenomenon impinge on people’s lives and perceptions? How do we identify an acceleration? For whom do the numbers matter, and how do they come to exist? And not least, how does quantitative increase relate to qualitative change?

Proposing escalations

This admittedly theoretical starting point has elicited a number of critiques and specific ethnographic questions from our academic interlocutors: Which empirical phenomena do we have in mind when referring to escalations? ‘What are the units of comparison?’ (Candea 2019, 35). Where do we find the escalations or accelerations that we are trying to compare? What does it take for something to be considered a proper escalation? Asking such questions is not off the mark, as we have – all along – struggled to find paradigmatic exemplars (Kuhn 1970) when thinking through the concept. While the Cartoon Crisis ended up being the preferred archetype, other contenders included the [2008] financial crisis, a [1994–1997] gold rush in Borneo and North America (Tsing 2000), and not least the international outrage caused by the [2014] killing of a giraffe in Copenhagen Zoo. So, has this struggle with empirical reality been the blind spot of our largely theoretical endeavour? Have we been too concerned with abstract speculation, as a critic might point out, and drawn on superficial examples to make our points? And has our seemingly deductive – or unfashionable ‘lateral’ (Candea 2016, 2019) – approach not led us to hypostatize and apotheosize an idea that has become more important than the ethnography it was meant to explore? In short, have we committed the original sin of contemporary anthropology by not taking difference and the multiplicity of ethnographic worlds seriously? Have we disregarded the alterity of the ‘other’ – that which is always, it seems – positioned outside anthropology and anthropological theorizing?

Such allegations should obviously not be dismissed out of hand, and indeed, exploring the ethnographic possibilities and limitations of the concept was the main reason for proposing this special issue in the first place. Our conceptual starting point (if that is what it is) and comparative proposal, however, may not so easily be discarded simply by referring to ethnography. One obvious reason for this is that claiming to take ethnographic otherness seriously does not necessarily amount to actually doing so. More often than not one comes across studies of radical alterity that draw heavily on not-so-other theory. The question of taking otherness, ‘reality’ and ethnography seriously, then, is an intrinsically complex question that is not solved with easy accusations of being too entrenched in one’s own theoretical constructs or being too far removed from (the other’s alternative) reality, nor with anthropological mantras of diversity and ‘taking others seriously’. Such refrains and accusations tend to reinstate the easy dichotomies that one often intends to dissolve. A second reason is that anthropology sometimes tends to downplay the work with alterity (or ‘the otherwise’) that also takes place in our own thinking and conceptual work. Doing conceptual work, then, is an admission that alterity is as much within us as it is out there and that ‘alterity’ takes place within a relationship. What we have tried to do through the concept, in other words, is not to look for ethnographic exemplars that were simply instantiations of identical escalating processes. Instead, our aim has been to experiment with aligning processes (or aspects of processes) through a theoretical (and maybe counter-intuitive) proposal which has allowed us to compare the intuitively incomparable: neighbour disputes with global financial crises, rapidly decreasing crime rates in New York in the 1990s with the escalating war of words between Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un, the Ukraine conflict with epidemics of witchcraft accusations or global pandemics, and accelerating You Tube downloads with the Arab Spring. The question then becomes: How far can such comparisons-as-alignments go and can ethnographies possibly enrich each other through this concept? Rather than strictly theorizing – with the goal of reaching a fixed conclusion – the notion of escalation should thus be seen as a bold theorizing proposal, and not as a vertical movement where real-life cases ‘down there’ are meant to fit into an archetypical escalation ‘up here’. Nor should it be seen as a deliberate attempt to initiate what Latour calls a sudden acceleration in description (Latour 2005, 22), where escalation – like neoliberalism or indeed ‘the social’ – suddenly becomes the black box for understanding the world in its entirety. Rather than including everything or a specifically defined number of things, the concept is meant as a more tempered proposal to explore and propose generality and the limits of generality by pointing ‘to a series of (new) resemblances by way of analogy’ (Højer and Bandak 2015) and hence to carve out a – hopefully – productive trajectory of thinking. In Candea’s words, it is – at least partly – a lateral ‘collective enterprise’ of comparison that is ‘forever tweaking and testing the boundaries and broader extension of ethnographic insights’ (2016, 102). One may see this – and, in principle, any proposal of a concept – as an attempt in itself to initiate a minor acceleration, to create an epidemic of thought, albeit one that may also reach its limits, lose its momentum and, indeed, change along the way.

Exploring escalation in relation to other similar concepts

The aim of this special issue is to take the concept of escalation as it relates to other similar concepts and to use it as both inspiration for ethnographic analysis and a prism for exploring analogies between different kinds of ethnographic data. We started by asking contributors to think through accelerations (as growing structures) and escalations (as changing growths), with the ambition of then returning to ethnographic accounts to see how they resonate with and can be brought to bear on our conceptual apparatus.

At first sight, it should not prove very difficult to find affinities in pre-existing ethnographic analysis or in other theories concerned with the notions of acceleration and escalation. The concept touches on many, if not all classics; Marx on revolution, Durkheim on collective effervescence, and Tarde on social products that seek to project themselves in ‘thousands and millions of copies everywhere’ (Tarde 2012 [1895], 60). Tarde may have been distinct in making the notion of social epidemic (and hence, acceleration) a key cosmogenetic principle, but ‘classical sociological analyses of modernity’, says Rosa (2013, 299–300), ‘can always be constructed as diagnoses of acceleration’. Indeed, ‘modernization’, another (if not the) key concept for social theory, is often said to be ‘practically equivalent to the experience of acceleration’ (Rosa 2013, 299; see also Conrad 1999, 9; Eriksen 2001, 159, 2016). Koselleck, for example, speaks of acceleration as the way in which modern time is experienced and measured, the railroad being the symbolic vehicle for making such conceptualizations possible in a world where people ‘begin to live more quickly and intensively’ (Koselleck 2009, 119) and ‘where progress [measured in relation to previous centuries] [is] setting in ever more quickly’ (Koselleck 2009, 131). Even when moving far beyond the classics, however, acceleration and related concepts figure prominently in anthropological and sociological theory. In studies of globalization, it has long been a truism that ‘[a]nthropologists are increasingly interested in the escalating pace and intensity of social change’ (Heyman and Campbell 2009, 131), while more recent studies of capitalism more often than not make acceleration, booms and busts, speed and temporality key aspects of their analysis (Harvey 1990) when identifying the specifics of a new era such as modernity, globalization, or capitalism. Tomlinson speaks of acceleration as ‘the constant leitmotiv of cultural modernity’, and even claims that ‘a genuine and significant shift in temporality’ has occurred and accelerated ‘specifically in modern societies’ (Tomlinson 2007, 1). Other strands of literature focus on the manufacturing of new political regimes through rupture and revolution (Thomassen 2012; Haugbolle and Bandak 2017; Holbraad, Kapferer, and Sauma 2019) and yet others concentrate on the cosmologies of sweeping millenarian movements that strive to bring about a new world (Worsley 1968), the importance of rupture in historical change (Robbins 2004, 2007) or the permanence of transition (Højer and Pedersen 2019). It is impossible to cover even a fraction of the literature in the space of this short introduction.

While drawing on such corpuses of literature is inevitable and necessary, we also intend to tackle the questions of acceleration and escalation in a manner that differs from many of these approaches in some important ways. First, studies of modernity and capitalism may rightly suggest that speed – and bursts of speed – have changed in nature, scope and frequency in recent times, yet our concern is not with a (modern) ‘era’ as a distinct epistemic and temporal whole characterized, for example, by a current ‘sense of rupture’ or ‘a world experienced as turmoil’ (Holbraad, Kapferer, and Sauma 2019, 1, 11), by uncertainty, indeterminacy and instability (Appadurai 1998) or by the metaphorical ‘overheating’ that constitutes unpredictable ‘postmodern’ accelerating growth (Eriksen 2016). Rather than reducing accelerating processes to the outcome of general epochal deep structures or sweeping all-encompassing historical changes (such as the French revolution or the commodification of labour), our initial concern, then, is with accelerations as specific trajectories (which may – or may not – have become more prevalent in recent times). Such accelerations are characterized by their ability to gather momentum and to draw in other ‘materials’ and processes, but they are never all-encompassing global or epochal processes; they appear in a world of other contemporary processes also.

Second, compared to concepts such as revolution, the notion of escalation is less tainted by implicit normative assumptions and does not automatically entail either romantic images of improved worlds or dystopian narratives of destruction. Thus, by introducing escalations we are trying to suggest a less loaded and more analytical and detached term that does not presuppose the desirability or undesirability of such processes from the outset. While escalations do happen, they are not necessarily the wanted or the unwanted outcomes of distinct political or religious projects. Like the current COVID-19 pandemic, they may come out of nowhere (even if the politics of aetiology soon gives rise to a number of ‘somewheres’).

Third, in proposing a less burdened and tainted concept, we also hope to have introduced a term that – while inspired by more thematic writings on politics (revolution), cosmology (millenarianism) and finance (crisis) – is able to cut across established thematic distinctions by not solely focusing on political mobilization, cosmological eschatology or economic speculation. The minimalistic definition of escalation as a sudden specific exponential growth that is generative of – and generated by – qualitative shifts is what allows us to make such comparisons. In this spirit, the special issue contains contributions on conflict and violence (Spyer, Dulin, Krøijer, Risør), political discourse (Kublitz, Risør, Krøijer), hospitality (Elliot), religion (Dulin, Spyer), and economy and finance (Pickles, Puri), and it comprises ethnographies covering both long-term historical and regional change (Pickles) and the minutiae of everyday life interactions in a single household (Elliot).

Fourth, there are a number of more specific reasons why escalation diverges from notions such as ‘event’ or ‘rupture’. While escalations are emerging processes that entail genuine change, events – at least in some theoretical approaches – are seen as essentially pre-structured. They may thus be spoken of as a resolution of previous contradictions (following Hegel and Marx), ‘shaped by particular conditions’ (Sewell 1996, 862–865) or as a ‘structure of the conjuncture’ (Sahlins 1981; 1985), that is, explained with reference to past forms. On the other hand, they may indeed – in line with our concept of escalation – be spoken of as ‘generic moments’ revealing ‘new potentials’ (Kapferer 2015, 2)⁸, as signifying ‘something new and surprising’ (Sewell 1996, 861), as ‘incipient moment[s]’ (Wagner-Pacifici 2017, 2), as singular ruptures or ‘ontological switch[es]’ where contingency is embraced (Humphrey 2008), or as critical cuts that at once implies destruction and creation (Holbraad, Kapferer, and Sauma 2019). While many of the latter perspectives bear resemblance to our focus on genuine change, such studies also differ in at least two ways. They tend to focus solely on (the outcome of) conflicts (of a political nature) where total ‘societal’ change, or a whole ‘world’ (Das 2006), is involved (Gluckman 1963; Sewell 1996; Kapferer 2015) – where ‘the course of [a single region’s/regime’s?] history’ has changed (Sewell 1996, 842) and a rupture in a total socio-political structure has taken place – or on events as they pertain to subjects and singular moments and decisions (Humphrey 2008; see also Badiou 2001). In other words, they concentrate on ‘decision events’ occasioned by individual subjects (Humphrey 2008) or on a single geographically limited (political) society with a particular history (Sewell 1996). Escalations, on the contrary, may in principle be unlimited; they are obviously not individual, and they are not necessarily restricted to defined socio-political entities or to limited geographical spaces; indeed, they may be said to invent such entities and spaces as they emerge.

Even more important, however, is a different, more fine-grained, yet also more significant distinction between the concept of escalations and the way in which such studies of events conceive of innovation in relation to structure and process. If event-oriented approaches tend to focus on critical events such as disruptive moments capable of changing structures – thus presupposing a decisive distinction between rupture and structure, before and after – the concept of escalation draws attention both to newness as that which sets ‘structures’ in motion and to the new momentous movement itself being a (growing) ‘structure’ that leads to novelty. In pointing to this more intimate relation between novelty and structure – by thinking of novelty as emerging structure and structural growth as inducing novelty – the concept of escalation not only involves innovation at both ends of the process, but, in principle, all along it too (see for example contributions by Krøijer and Spyer). Apart from asking us to attend to specific trajectories of growth and momentum, then, escalation points not only to disruptions and newness but also to an evolving reciprocal and intimate relation between change and continuity inherent in accelerating change.

Finally, an aspect that clearly sets the escalation approach apart from other studies of critical transformation is its insistence that ‘size’ matters. In stressing the qualitative, anthropology has more often than not downplayed the importance of quantity, numbers and material growth (of debt, violence, transactions, discourse, intensity) (however, see for example Guyer 2010; Nelson 2010). Our approach maintains that the issue of quantity should be addressed and that the relation between quantity and quality – and the importance of this relation in provoking change – requires exploration.

Ethnographic contributions

With these admittedly short reflections in mind, I will now turn to this collection’s ethnographies and the way in which they each address the question of quantity and the relation between quantitative growth and qualitative change. How may we, in other words, think of the individual contributions in relation to the overall project of introducing escalation as a concept?

An acceleration – a change of the speed of growth – requires that we identify some ‘thing’ that may be measured, if not in fact then at least in principle (higher prices, more gambling, rising violence, increased intensity). Stressing that the number of incidences or the size or intensity of something actually matter involves counting and an attention to the ‘materiality’ of quantity. All contributions to this issue thus pay attention to rising numbers: Kublitz identifies the radicalization business in Denmark through a focus on media coverage, policies, legislation and not least funding; Pickles traces the acceleration of gambling incidences and gambling relationships in Papua New Guinea over almost a century; Puri’s ethnography revolves around the material and immaterial effects of a price acceleration of agricultural products in India; Spyer draws attention to the relation between a rise in violence and a potent gathering of a growing number of artefacts in a museum collection on the Malukan islands in Indonesia; Risør’s description centres on accelerating protest and violence in El Alto in relation to the Gas War in Bolivia; Dulin discusses an episode of rising tension and open hostility between Christians and Muslims in Gondar, Ethiopia, caused by ‘value-indexical density’ and a perceived symbolic attack on a holy replica of the Arc of Covenant; Krøijer attends to accelerating inter-household conflicts and killings between indigenous groups in the Ecuadorian Amazon and the public debate that gathered speed from this conflict and came to draw in an increased number of scales; and even Elliot, if not explicitly concerned with quantity, describes ‘an explosive moment of hospitality’, an acceleration in the intensity of a confrontation, in relation to a trickster’s household visit in Morocco.

More importantly, all the contributions also address the relation between quantity and quality, and they do so in at least two ways. First, it is quite clear that for anything to emerge as quantity, as a measurable number of incidences, it requires a scale to register it, and, as such, quantity and quality are each other’s preconditions. In Krøijer’s case, for example, killings between indigenous groups had to be registered as killings that were not solely ‘cultural’ for them to count in wider debates and cause a moral outcry. In Kublitz’ ethnography, ‘radicalization’ had to be identified as a scalar measurement before it could be counted and targeted: only then does radicalization become a material reality that political regimes can attend to. In this sense, quantity and quality, the material and the immaterial, are intertwined from the outset in processes of accelerating growth. Even if accelerations in violence, investments and newsfeeds are tangible and have very real material and physical effects that may even be counted, they can only take place within qualitative terrains of imagination where certain deaths come to matter (see for example Nelson 2010),⁹ where repugnant others and enemy groups are identified before they can be attacked in numbers, and where investment frenzy, measured in graphs, is only possible because profit has been ‘imagined before it can be extracted’ (Tsing 2000, 118); ‘the problem of scale eludes any hope of unadorned description’ and ‘must rely on rethoric’ (Carr and Lempert 2016, 2) and things can only be made quantifiable by the inherently comparative ‘act of scaling’ (Carr and Lempert 2016, 17). The truism current in social studies of finance that economic models and numbers also create the economic realities (and uncertainties) that they purport to represent (see for example Callon 1998; Zaloom 2003, 2009; Mackenzie, Muniesa, and Siu 2007) thus also applies to escalations. Yet, while counting and imagining are thus two sides of the same coin, it is also important to stress that imagination and rhetoric alone do not control the numbers; in studies of escalation, materiality and quantity do not solely matter as ‘discursive constructions’; they impinge on reality, sometimes irrespective of previously existing cultural imaginaries.¹⁰

A more pressing concern for this special issue, however, is the way in which quantitative rises often involve qualitative, irreversible shifts. All of this issue’s contributors identify such shifts or scale changes within accelerating processes. Puri shows how a surge in guar prices among Indian farmers has changed farming from being a ‘repetitive event tied to seasonal weather changes’ to an activity tied to temporalities of accelerating change and future potentialities. While the guar price acceleration led to new forms of trade and increased speculation in agricultural products among farming communities, it also meant that farmers’ attention had to become attuned to ‘quick money’ and to a different kind of time characterized by speed and urgency as farmers themselves became increasingly aware of the possibility for prosperous futures and sudden social mobility.

In his study of gambling in Papua New Guinea, Pickles demonstrates how an acceleration in gambling also leads to an acceleration in ‘the quanta of transactions people experience’. In other words, if gambling produces new kinds of relationships dealing with novel forms of imported wealth, it also results in an inflation of transactions, connections and relationships across Papua New Guinea. This, in turn, brings about a ‘common language of gambling’ and ‘a national sense of transactional interconnectedness’ in a country otherwise characterized by diversity. In Pickles case, then, we also see an often-noted connection between speed and capitalism when he identifies the quantitative increase in transactions as in itself being a qualitative change; here, the acceleration, so to speak, is the escalation.

While Dulin’s contribution describes how a subtle, quiet antipathy between Christians and Muslims in Gondar, Ethiopia, turns into open hostility, it also shows that this is not merely a straightforward, linear process where existing potential religious differences simply lead to actual hostility. By drawing on value-theory, he argues that the multiplication of value-dense indexes (the notion of value-dense itself being a quantitative term) outside their typical domain in churches or mosques enables not only other multiplications (of violence, for example) but also a ‘novel articulation’ of different value-domains that leads to escalations. So, even if Dulin stresses the importance of pre-existing values in understanding future conflicts, he also demonstrates how such novel articulations can change the course of change. On the one hand, the constant creation of new contexts throughout the period of conflict in Gondar implied that little could be predicted and that ‘new horizons of transformation’ were constantly emerging, while on the other, Muslim–Christian relations in Gondar could never again be the same, much like the value of guar, in Puri’s case, had forever changed for Indian farmers after the price acceleration. Both cases show how a new kind of awareness and a caution towards the future had emerged.

Kublitz, in her contribution, argues that a scale shift is both a requirement for and an effect of the accelerating anti-radicalization business in Denmark. Occluding knowledge of specific incidences and persons, such as Omar who is known to have committed a terrorist attack in Copenhagen in 2015, is a precondition for jumping from a focus on ‘immigrant youth in deprived neighbourhoods’ or ‘criminal Danish citizens' to an accelerating concern with ‘Islamic foreign fighters’ and ‘radicalization’, both empty signifiers that easily travel and multiply due to their vagueness. This acceleration, in turn, further occludes other possible forms of knowledge, such as awareness of the relation between ‘the radicalization business’ and a gang war acceleration in Copenhagen.

In Krøijer’s article, an accelerating inter-household conflict sparked by a spear killing in the Ecuadorian Amazon comes to involve an increasing number of scales – including local culture, resource extraction and human rights – as the conflict came to the public’s attention. In other words, the initial acceleration not only involved a move from spear to shotgun and hence the use of a new scale-producing artefact (the shotgun could kill in larger numbers and was not considered indigenous), it also came to initiate an acceleration of the number of scales that were entangled in the process. Yet, this is less an example of interscalar assemblages (Carr and Lempert 2016, 14) or of interscalability – of how different scales reinforce each other (Philips 2016; Carr and Lempert 2016, 14) – than of a proliferation of difference. Krøijer thus draws attention to the intimate relation between a growth in numbers (more and more attention to the revenge killing) and a growth in difference, namely the number of different scales used to understand and measure this incident. Interestingly, she also shows that the growth in numbers of scales itself occasions a further acceleration of public controversies and misunderstandings and that the involvement of new scales drew the Huaorani into new forms of citizenship and – maybe – changed their relation to the Ecuadorian state irreversibly.¹¹

The notion of scale as artefact, and technology more generally, is also a key issue in Spyer’s contribution. Addressing the complex trajectory of an iconoclastic attack – itself part of a spiralling inter-religious conflict – on an Indonesian museum dedicated to Seram Island’s traditional headhunting culture, she shows how a collection may be animating and animated. The museum itself contains a potent collection of artefacts, a ‘volatile crowding’ of previously dispersed headhunters in the form of statues and portraits in the museum attic. Spyer shows how the museum’s technological and material set-up ultimately made the collection prone to ‘coming to life’ and thus becoming part of an acceleration. The life size representations of Seram’s ancestral warlords in the museum not only invited spirits to inhabit them but also attracted the protestant attacker’s deathly gaze (two aspects that may amount to the same thing). Additionally, the cinematic technologies deployed at the museum invested the past with the property of movement and thus intimated both the liberatory potentials and the potentially disruptive forces contained within an image archive. In terms of escalation, a complex constellation of scales and trajectories, including the museum collection itself (a ‘holding station’ for explosive potentiality), brutally animated – and was animated by – a wider acceleration of violence. The ordered collection of artefacts in the museum gave way to (and already potentially contained) a loss of coordinates and also led to irreversible changes in the form of, for example, a post-conflict proposal to reduce the size/scale of ancestral warlord renditions. Spyer’s contribution draws attention to non-linearity, instability and liveliness – a past that may always exceed itself – and thus also points to the temporal complexities and the intricate constellation of forces, materialities and instabilities involved in any acceleration or escalation. If ‘every archive hides another archive’, as Spyer aptly puts it, an escalation is what forcefully – but never predictably – brings this out.

Risør’s contribution also concerns the excess of the past. She chronicles the Gas War acceleration in Bolivia and shows that while it may be described as a particular trajectory that grew out of everyday reality in El Alto, the process – itself often lacking a unified agenda but (as in Krøijer’s case) increasingly drawing in new scales as the conflict grew in size – also exceeded or ‘overflowed’ itself. She thus aligns the indigenous concept of ‘overflow’ with the notion of escalation to show that a new reality in the form of the ‘urban indigenous’ as a new political subject transpired through the Gas War acceleration. Yet, she complicates this picture by showing how the new also folds into reversible patterns, because the Bolivian popular indigenous subject is also considered an a-temporal revolutionary figure that can always ‘return in recurrent moments of escalating overflow’ and restore ‘the historical injustice and violence committed against the indigenous subject’.

The final contribution by Elliot takes us from large-scale violence to the minutiae of everyday life. She describes a Moroccan household visit that escalates when the hosts are being tricked by a self-proclaimed journalist. While Elliot, like all other contributors, draws attention to the intimate relation between acceleration (of intensity, in her case) and scale changes, her fine-grained and detailed ethnography of everyday interactions also powerfully reveals what may better be termed ‘scale connection’ (money and hospitality are suddenly related) or scale confusion as an intrinsic aspect of escalations. The terms of the household visit clearly change during the ‘confrontation’: here, slipperiness and ambiguity are part and parcel of the process (like the excess, vagueness and unpredictability mentioned in other contributions, albeit on a smaller scale). Although an irreversible change has taken place in relation to this particular interaction, Elliot does not seem to be describing a lasting irreversible change for the people involved. Like Dulin and other contributors, she draws attention to the importance of both shared ground, in the shape of structure or ethos (even if this structure is characterized by ‘scalar slipperiness’), and to the importance of containment as a possible reaction to threatening escalations (cf. Shryock and Smail 2018). Elliot’s contribution also shows how trickster individuals play with and manipulate scales – moving from money to humanity – in order to gain profit. This perspective of deliberately activating or containing escalations is almost absent in all other contributions and in the concept of escalation itself due to our emphasis on larger movements and changes that individuals are caught up in.

All contributions are thus concerned with the relation between quantity (the importance of ‘more or less’) and quality (imagination, the question of more or less of what), and they engage with, give depth to and complicate the idea of genuine change as both instigator and effect of accelerations. They thus also push the series of resemblances provoked by the concept in slightly new directions. First, and maybe most importantly, they achieve this by further introducing the temporal complexities often involved in escalations. When referring to an acceleration and identifying specific irreversible changes, the concept of escalation may in itself be said to emerge in contrast to – and hence to implicitly presuppose – the unity, neatness and linearity of one-directional accelerations; in order for a process to change irreversibly, the unchangeable process has to be assumed. This implicit (if only heuristically intended) neatness is complicated by some of the issue’s ethnographic contributions. While no contributions explicitly discuss the fact that people may hold different and sometimes contradictory ‘time-maps’ (Bear 2014) or temporal conceptions at the same time (Stewart 2016, 83; Palmié and Stewart 2016) – for example that people, even in the midst of perceived accelerations, go on with living their everyday life and carrying out their usual tasks (Robbins 2011) – they do discuss the complex intertwinement of different temporal modellings by pointing to the importance of repetition in change (Dulin, Elliot), by stressing the complex intertwinement of potentiality and actuality (Spyer, Risør), and by showing how escalations may also be seen as part of wider structures of financialization, capitalism, colonialism and religion that go far beyond the individual escalations described (Pickles, Puri, Dulin, Risør, Spyer). This obviously also involves an attention to the (often unrecognized) relation between different accelerations (Kublitz) or the way in which contemporary accelerations may be read through past ones (and vice versa) and thus recursively fold into other accelerations (Dulin, Puri, Risør).

Second, some contributions underline the importance of materiality, technology and infrastructure in relation to accelerating and escalating processes. In line with numerous studies on new ‘technologies of circulation’ (Wagner-Pacifici 2017, 29), viral events and ‘information ecosystems’ (Nahon and Hemsley 2013; see also Tomlinson 2008), Puri points to the importance of communication devices – and tractors – in speeding up speculative processes and time while Pickles draws attention to new exchange technologies in accelerating connections, and Dulin highlights the importance of the density of antithetical values in urban contexts. Yet, other contributions show how technologies and infrastructures not only catalyse the speeding up or slowing down of developments but may themselves figure as scaling processes, for example, through the size of statues, cinematic techniques, weapons and bureaucratic numbers (Spyer, Krøijer, Kublitz). In other words, scale itself is materialized.

Third, and corresponding with the previous point, some contributions provoke more classical anthropological and reflective questions about different models of history (cf. Stewart 2016; Palmié and Stewart 2016) and time (Robbins 2007). At least two contributions (Risør, Krøijer) raise the question of how our own analytical model of time – escalation itself, maybe, based on a ‘modern notion’ of ‘sequential irreversibility’ (Palmié and Stewart 2016, 215) – relates to alternative conceptualizations (cf. Holbraad and Pedersen 2017) or other ‘intimations of the past’ (Palmié and Stewart 2016, 226), for example, the time of shot guns or the mythical time of the indigenous revolutionary subject.

Fourth, Elliot raises important new questions about the deliberate activation of escalations and strategies for their containment. If escalations may spell unpredictability and uncertainty, ‘containers [or recognized forms]’ may ‘serve to isolate their content from temporal processes’ (Shryock and Smail 2018, 2) and thus be an indispensable partner, an ‘anti-entropy machine’ (Shryock and Smail 2018, 3), sometimes intentionally put to use, in any turbulent dynamic.

And finally, while all contributions concern the relation between quantity and quality, they also point to some new aspects of this relation by showing not only how scale changes may initiate accelerations, or accelerations may lead to scale changes, but also how an acceleration may itself be an escalation (Pickles) and how – particularly in Krøijer’s and to some extent in Risør’s and Spyer’s contributions – an acceleration in terms of numbers may also come to involve an acceleration of the imaginaries involved. Taken together these contributions thus add important new ways of conceptualizing the relation between quality and quantity in relation to change.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Independent Research Fund Denmark | Humanities [grant number DFF-4001-00223].

Notes

1 I would like to thank Ghassan Hage, Martin Holbraad, Joel Robbins, Andreas Bandak, David Henig and contributors to this special issue for their constructive engagement with the concept of escalations. Also, I would like to extend my gratitude to Independent Research Fund Denmark | Humanities for funding this project on ‘Escalations’ (DFF-4001-00223).

2 The recent acceleration of protests following the death of George Floyd only emerged at the very final stage of revising this introduction.

3 Schismogenesis can be defined as a positive feedback loop, i.e. a vicious cycle, where initial (role) differences are increasingly reinforced and strengthened. This may be likened to, for example, the positive feed-back mechanisms and spiralling effects of gossip and curses (Højer 2004, 2019; Swancutt 2012)

4 While I acknowledge that our approach could productively be coupled with a detailed tracing of accelerations through networks, for example when things ‘go viral’ (Nahon and Hemsley 2013) or reach ‘tipping points’ (Gladwell 2000), this is beyond the scope of the present study.

5 Sell’s disturbing account of the genocide in Bosnia shows how unfounded charges of genocide against Serbs in Kosovo ‘became a signal to start a genocide’ against Muslims in Bosnia (1996, 66).

6 This theory was popularized by Gladwell but later much criticized for flawed causal claims and racial and class discrimination.

7 Some authors tend to foreground the discursive aspects of events or crises. Roitman (2014), for example, focuses on the naming of ‘crises’, and Wagner-Pacifici (2017) sees events as language-based semiotic systems. ‘Events’, she writes, ‘are mobilized by and constituted of speech acts’ (Wagner-Pacifici 2017, 20).

8 It could be argued that Kapferer overemphasises the event as a ‘novel potentiality of a becoming that is always not yet’. While we, in using the concept of escalations, also emphasise this not-yet-ness, we also focus on emergence as structured.

9 Numbers, writes Nelson, ‘are an essential part of the fraught struggle to make experiences and people ‘count’ in the sense of to matter, to have importance’ (2010, 88). She also draws attention to the intimate relation between counting, accounting, accountability, reckoning and politics (cf. Guyer 2010).

10 Carr and Lempert have written a fine introduction to the problem of scale, but they tend to defend a more language-based constructivist approach when stating, for example, that scales ‘are not given but made’, that ‘people use language to scale the worlds around them’ and that ‘even the greatness of whales must be discursively forged out of comparisons and distinctions’ (2016:3).

11 In a great article on the ’transvaluation’ of an Orthodox Christian and Muslim divide in Ethiopia, Dulin (2017) draws attention to how a variety of reframings or rescalings of a certain event may resonate differently with one another and hence not only lead to accelerating conflicts. They may equally work to calm down such conflicts.