 Hello, my name is Safit Haji-Muhamedovic. Welcome to the SOS, University of London Festival of Ideas. And welcome to our panel, Encounters and Border Crossings Towards a Post-Lockdown Anthropology. We're very much looking forward to presenting some snippets of our work to you and then having quite a bit of time for a conversation with you. So this little panel started really from our shared current experiences of reduced social proximity, recognizing really that in different ways, all of us, all the panelists have been doing an anthropology of lockdown and encounter in our work before the pandemic. So the somewhat experimental brief for this panel was to build on a single image and offer a short rumination on encounters and border crossings in our own work and through our own ethnographies. So we will have a succession of 10-minute presentations. Again, as I said, each relying on a single image. And I have presentations on encounters over dinner, over sports, across species, over time and across borders. Please also check our ZENIA series. It's a new series of seminars in anthropology of travel, tourism and pilgrimage to find out more about this series and register for some events that speak about some of the topics that we also consider today. Please visit zeniaseries.com. Zenia is spelled X-E-N-I-A. So we will, after the presentations, have a good hour or so for the Q&A. Please do use the Q&A function rather than the chat. Apparently this will help us record all of your questions and keep better track of them. And we invite you to explore together with us the multiple effective and political registers of encounters. So our little intervention really is a call to unpack the notions of proximity and distance through ethnographic research and consider what novel orientations might come about after this sort of global and shared moment of disorientation. As the first speaker, I would like to invite Jeff DeVito, who will tell us something about encounters over dinner. Good morning. Thank you, Sofit. And thank you all for joining us. Hi, Mom. Hi, Dad. Tuning in today. I am an anthropologist by training and over the last 15 years, I have spent more days on cruise ships than I have on land. By its very nature, a cruise ship is something that passes through borders, spends a lot of time at sea and gets people from all over the world who have come from all over the world together to travel. The one thing that people have in common on a cruise ship are passengers that they have all bought into the idea of taking a trip together that goes to multiple destinations. At last count, there's somewhere between 310 and 340 depending on how you classify them cruise ships sailing around the world with a combined capacity of just under 540,000. That means that this table that we're looking at right now is one of approximately 125,000 tables. That up until the lockdown was occupied on a daily basis and was the source of great revelry three times a day, sometimes four. I've been researching and working in the cruise industry for a long time. And one of the roles that I've had as I've been on ship sailing around the world is to go to dinner. And that sounds like a pretty interesting job. And as an anthropologist, I've been able to collect stories and find similarities because I've done something called hosting a dinner over 300 times. And that means that I walk into a dining room and have dinner with anywhere from four to 10 possible strangers, possible people I've met earlier in the cruise ship. And I sit down and I host a dinner. What I wanna talk to you about today is the arc of these dinners. And with these over 300 dinners, I've found some similarities. As an anthropologist, we often tell people about worlds that they're unfamiliar with or in this case is dinner. We've all had dinner before. So this is something you're familiar with but we're gonna look at it a little bit differently. I walk into the dining room as part of my job and I meet the seating hostess. The seating hostess will direct me to a table very similar to the one that you see here. And I'll be advised to stand up and wait until my other guests have joined me. I won't know much about these guests usually but I'll look around and there'll be little cards that'll be on the side of each person's plate similar to a wedding or some other extravagant festival. I'll wonder who these folks will be or wonder where they're from and I'll wonder most of all what our encounters are going to be like over dinner. Will we talk about politics? Will we talk about wealth? We talk about the destinations and our view of the world that we have seen that day, the days before. Will we talk about our anticipation about our upcoming cruise ports that we'll go into? Slowly people will start to arrive and I'll shake hands in this lockdown economy that we're in now. It's hard to imagine shaking hands. The idea terrifies me at the moment. It was such a part of my regular life for so many years. As they walk in and shake hands and introduce each other, the guests at the table casually size each other up and size me up as well. The irony in all this is that I'm the host and they're honored to come eat dinner with me because of my role on the cruise ship. But were I to join them at any other point in life, any other point in their business, any other social situation, I very unlikely would be welcome because I'm not in their economic class, I'm not in their social class. The one thing that I have is a status on board this floating container. Eventually everyone will arrive, they'll sit down and I'll sit down and we'll look at each other and wonder what we're going to talk about. And that's where I become a conductor of this culinary carnival that's about to take place. A waiter will come very quickly and pour everybody some wine. What an interesting thing that is. People will talk about the wine. This is an opportunity for people to size each other up as far as their familiarity with wines around the world. Most often people will comment that this wine is delicious. I, for one, am in charge of tasting this wine. My palate knows nothing of the finer things of vintage culture. But as with always, I'll say it's acceptable and lovely and encourage the others to take part in this gathering and this compliment. The waiter that comes over to serve this wine is a very interesting role here because while I and the waiter have very much in common, at that moment I'm isolated from this waiter and become part of the social structure of the table. The waiter becomes mere scenery for a moment. Maybe someone will ask a question. Where are you from? What country do you live in? What did you do today? The waiter and I offer each other glances as if to say, we're in this together. We're gonna get through this and I offer a glance that apologizes for the fact that I'm being served at a moment and that makes me feel very uncomfortable. The menus come, people look over this and they make choices about what they're going to dine with. This is not different than a usual restaurant. However, this is where the conversation starts to occur between folks. They'll look, they'll choose something. Someone will start complimenting about what they are commenting on what they had the night before, what they're looking forward to having the following day. There's a tension that exists because we haven't quite gotten into the conversations. I dread the moment that someone asked me a question about my personal life. I asked me a question about who I am outside of this environment where I'm momentarily special to them. I'll tell a story that I've told hundreds of times before as if on autopilot and I'll look at their faces wondering if they're judging me or if I am fact and the one that is doing the judging. Very simply after that, I'll lead a conversation and ask people in a circular manner about how their day was. Why are they here? What do they do? And in this whole small talk of performance, we're trying to assess that what we'll talk about after the next course arrives. Gosh forbid somebody orders a vegetarian option on the menu, which will cause others carnivores to judge and ask, why are you eating that? What's going on with you? Why did you make that choice? As the second course comes and pleasantries move into somewhat more substantial conversation, I'll ask people about how their day was and what they saw in the various destinations. At this point, the people from different countries, maybe Australia, maybe France, maybe the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, South Africa start to discuss their days with a little bit of confidence but also some uneasiness, wondering how their day stacked up to the ones around them. Had they seen the same things? Had they enjoyed the same moments? And what did they think about these countries that they visited, these ports, these destinations in relationship to the places that they're from? At this point, the conversation can lead to strong opinions, let's just say, perspectives about destinations versus residents. If we're in a destination where there's a particular impoverished angle, perhaps people will discuss how they felt about that. How did you feel about this poverty there? How does this compare to the poverty in your neighborhoods back home? Often heavy judgment is put down about the cultures that folks had only had the opportunity to be tourists in for a few moments but at the dinner table, they're all experts on everything that they've seen and everything that they've experienced. The third course will come, the main course. And at this point, we're now right into it. The wine has been flowing, maybe a couple of whiskeys have happened between a few gentlemen or women around the table and I dread what's about to happen. Someone will ask me as an American, how do I feel about politics? Politics is a no-no at the dinner table, no matter where you are, especially now. But in this environment where I oftentimes do not share the political views of those that I'm dining with but yet have a job to perform, an illusion to perpetuate, I choose my words carefully. Usually the words about politics when asked how do you feel about the United States president goes something like this. Jeff, how do you feel about your president? This dessert looks delicious, I respond. After the desserts are cleared, we linger at the table, sizing up how long we actually wanna be together as strangers. Did we make connections that are meaningful? Are we now friends or are we excited to go somewhere else far away from each other but have that casual nod when we meet in the hallways throughout the rest of our voyage? The hotel director will come by at some point and ask people how they were doing. And sometimes rather than ask them how their dinner was, they'll say words like, wasn't that a wonderful experience you had over dinner tonight? We use positives to reinforce what we're selling and what we're selling is fantasy. We're not necessarily selling meaningful conversation between parties, but we're selling an illusion. And through that illusion, we find that we actually do create meaning and that's special. The chef will come by posing for pictures and others will compliment him on what a fantastic dinner his team has made. Now these tables are empty. They're inhabited by the few crew members that are able to be successful enough to stay on these ships right now. They'll dine at these tables only to find out in a few months after the lockdown when cruising returns, but these are areas that they're forbidden from encountering again. Thank you. Thank you so much, Jeff. And what fantastic timing. It's 10 minutes and 20 seconds. I would now like to invite Linda Covenson to tell us about encounters over sports. Just trying to find out how to share my screen. Just click on the button at the bottom of the screen. Yes. That's it. Where is it gone? Can you see anything? Oh, no, we did. That's it. OK, encounters over sport. The UK has a relationship with sport that is so much part of the cultural heritage of the nation that even the daily news broadcast feature items from the sports desk and the written press devote the back pages to sport. The television broadband and satellite providers have whole subscriber packages with separate channels for individual sports. The UK government recognises this combination in having a department of digital culture, media and sport. All the sports outlined in the image, courtesy of Al Jazeera, are the big players in terms of broadcast revenue and the commercial sustainability of these particular sports leagues or competitions is codependent and rely on the participation of the sportsmen and sportswomen and the spectating public. But what happens when this commercial sustainability itself encounters a dramatic challenge such as the COVID-19 global pandemic of 2020? In the UK, how the virus spread has been linked to sport, to large gatherings, super spreader events at the beginning of the pandemic. Economic pressures to maintain normality saw Liverpool FC versus Atlético Madrid play their Champions League match on the 11th of March with 52,000 fans, including 3,000 from Madrid when Spain was already in partial lockdown. Several deaths from COVID-19 have been attributed to this match. The Guardian reported that cases began to climb in the week following the match in Liverpool. At the same time, on the 10th of March, the four-day horse racing Cheltenham Festival began with just over a quarter of a million spectators overall, including 68,000 racegoers at the track for the Cheltenham Gold Cup. This event attracted 20,000 visitors from Ireland and was allowed by the government to go ahead, as was Rugby at Twickenham and Murrayfield in Scotland. Subsequent COVID-19 cases and deaths that were diagnosed in the weeks after tracked back to the travel that took place by the spectators attending these events. Contact tracing and tracking of cases and quarantine had by this point been only for returning travellers from already infected areas abroad, namely China, Italy and France. And testing was soon to only be available for those needing hospital admission. Total lockdown in the UK, declared on March the 23rd, prevented all but essential travel for the population, requiring all retail businesses to close, except for food and chemists. All sporting events at this point came under this pandemic jurisdiction and ceased. Not only in the UK, but as COVID-19 outbreaks escalated in other countries, international competition was prevented by a global shutdown of air transport and travel restrictions. Sport, like any other business operation, had an unprecedented cessation of trading brought about by the declaration of the pandemic. There was an immediate assessment of who in the industry this would affect. Behind sport, there is a structure that not only includes the athlete participants, but the official spectators, broadcast and print media, social media, business corporations as sponsors, working with sports governing bodies at all levels. And of course, people on low incomes employed on sessional work at sports venues. Would they qualify for furlough payments from the government? What would happen to sports events? Post-foment, cancellation, completion of leagues or rescheduling. Crisis planning could impact on results, rankings, positions, prizes, if wrong decisions were made. Here in the UK, the government set out guidelines to follow and of course, the key factor was to prevent the spread of the virus and keep people safe. Operational changes had to be considered in becoming COVID-19 secure and travel and quarantine arrangements had to be established to sports teams from other countries. For example, players from the West Indies and the Pakistan cricket teams and their English opponents quarantine together in hotels and training facilities linked to just two venues in Southampton and Manchester, allowing for the different forms of cricket matches to take place. No spectators were permitted and press and broadcast media personnel were included in this quarantine bubble. Subsequently, the model was used so that other sports could resume safely with officials and trainers, et cetera, included in each team's secure bubble. 2020 should have been the 32nd Olympic Games in Tokyo. The mega sports event of the year with the cost of cancelling estimated at $6 billion, it was postponed after protocol changes. COVID-19 started in the Northern Hemisphere in China in January 2020 with the global spread initially to Western Europe where it was winter going into spring and summer. Most sport played in these countries during this period had competitions that usually climax as the seasons change. In the lead up to the Olympics, this is the time that individual athletes have to meet qualifying standards to compete through international and national championships. For some athletes, next year will be too late and their training schedules have been put on hold. How will their fitness be maintained during the total lockdown with an individual's right to exercise different in every country or region and dictated by the government? Daily news bulletins still kept their sport teams, sport items relating to the progress being made with different sports to start competing again. Some poll voters managed to organise a virtual competition from their own gardens shared on video conferencing. Others reporting on how the sportsmen and women were adapting to different ways of participating without spectators and how training recommenced that included a team bonding video game playing competition whilst in quarantine. Sports fans also had access to countless replayed matches from the past archives. Those disinterested in sport may ask, why is so much focus being placed on the return of sport? After all, what does sport bring to the economy? Well, the answer is that the big money is on sports multi-billion dollar worldwide industry involving sponsorship, media and broadcast rights, grants and subsidies, huge professional player salaries and large transfer fees through player agents. It is for the survival of the non-league sports teams with non-salaried or part-time players that are the big fish, elite sports and the minnows and the financial support of the fan spectator base whether by in-person attendance at a match event or in the consumption of sport via the subscription media or internet channels. Advertising or marketing a branded kit. Chris Gratton in Global Economics of Sport explored how sport has been transformed into financially rewarding business. It was calculated that the potential revenue loss was in total $1.3 billion for the English Premier League as you can see in the image to the season's end and was the individual sport league likely to suffer the most? This was based on the impact of COVID-19 in the season 2019 to 20. But of course, at that time there was no indication of how long it would take to return to normal. League matches were halted in March when lockdown occurred. The industry then worked on plans to recommence and complete the season to determine the league winner and the teams to be relegated. The biggest prize in football is the guaranteed income from the promotion into the Premier League. Research from Deloitte in June 2019 estimated at £170 million, the playoff final is known as the richest game in football with parachute payments over the following two years. It was won this year eventually by Leeds United. I want to use the football team that I support as an example. As the pandemic began, Crystal Palace were mid-table in the English Premier League. As the COVID-19 lockdown ended, sport was allowed to start again on the 1st of June. The players returned to the training grounds awaiting a behind closed doors fixture list for the postponed matches. The Premier League worked with the broadcasters, their main revenue source, made a rule change that allowed live broadcast of matches, including on terrestrial TV. In fact, Crystal Palace had the honour of hosting the first Premier League match to be shown live on BBC TV since 1988. The match against Bournemouth was watched by an audience of 3.9 million and Palace won two goals to nil. All Premier League matches were shown live utilizing the satellite cable and internet app channels and the subscription fees were waived for these broadcasts. The experience of watching matches on TV with no crowds present was as strange for the fans as was for the players having a virtually silent stadium. Fan chants and songs have long been recorded as matches are played and are used in the gaming industry for virtual reality soccer games as background soundtrack. As matches were screened, these recordings were made available to enhance the reality for the fans being home ground specific. You could clearly hear our song glad all over when Palace were playing at home. Empty seats were used for advertising for the team sponsors and also to support the massive Black Lives Matter campaign that had occurred during the lockdown period as well as each club's thanks to the National Health Service. Televised football became a vehicle to promote the players' participation in the Black Lives Matter protests by them taking the knee at the start of every match. Some clubs used enlarged photos of individual fans placed on each of the lower tier seats and the PA system played team entry music even though there was no crowd. Part of the routine though for the players, there was an option to watch the matches without the crowd noise overlay and then you could actually hear the players shouts to each other. This continued until the Premier League season was completed with teams playing twice a week through the summer closed season. For football fans this was a partial return to their passion and it was possible to watch up to four matches back to back if you had the channels. Live match coverage is normally only provided by Sky or BT Sport and never for a 3pm kickoff historically as most matches start at that time and fans might watch on TV rather than attend a ground. TV and sponsored money will to some extent more than mitigate for the loss of matchday income which for many clubs in the Premier League is their smallest revenue earner overall. McGuire wrote in the i newspaper. However, lower league and non-league clubs don't benefit in the same way and rely on spectators through the turnstiles. The Premier League is a wealthy organisation and made some contribution to sport some of those teams to prevent bankruptcy. Palace moved up the table with another win in their match, their next match, however their great restart didn't continue and they ended up safe but mid-table. The spectator experience changed but some things remained the same with club social media feeds, virtual programmes, notification team news, fantasy leagues and in the very short closed season the dealings in the transfer market. Returning fans to watch live sport in COVID-19 secure environments and plans for 1000 fans to go to watch in family groups, spaced out to meet social distancing was due to move forward from just a few test grounds on the 1st of October. But rising COVID-19 cases and local COVID-19 alert levels have put that on hold. We can't predict yet what the normal return of sport will be post lockdown. Thank you for listening. Thank you so much Linda and from the world of sports we're moving to inter-species encounters and I would like to invite Julie Scott to join us and share her image. Hey, thank you. Thank you Safit. Yes, my name's Julie Scott and I'm a social anthropologist and for the past 30 years I've been working on questions to do with travel and tourism and intangible cultural heritage. And but the encounter that I'm going to talk about this afternoon is from not really from that sort of professional area but from something else that I've been involved in over the past five years and this is an encounter across species. So I'm going to share my picture with you and let's see let's see how that works. Hopefully, hopefully you can see that. Okay. So I bought my first beehive when I moved to village in rural Kent about five years ago along with a nucleus of bees that's a small box that contains a queen and her retinue of worker bees and they said about expanding the population and filling up the hive. At the same time, I was introduced to a whole new human world of beekeeping. The Thriving Local Beekeepers Association holds monthly meetings throughout the year. In summer, we sit on plastic chairs in a field next to the Association's April and we discuss bees whilst consuming tea and cake, swapping the Association's library books which are all about bees and holding raffles. In winter, we do the same in a village hall. Honey competitions, classes and exams related to all things bee, national and international conferences, bee safaris involving visits to apiaries in Britain and abroad, all of these form the staples of a human world of beekeeping that's almost as absorbing as that of the bees themselves. With the onset of COVID, all of these activities were abruptly suspended although some of them have reconfigured themselves online. And the beekeeper has been thrown back on that essential core relationship with their bees. I suppose my initial decision to embark on beekeeping was at least partly motivated by species guilt. We all know that bees are having a hard time of it and that human activity is at the root of their difficulties. Pesticide use, the destruction of wildflower meadow habitats, the industrialized pollination of monocrops such as Californian almonds, I could go on. So it was with a warm glow of altruism that I set about establishing a small apiary of two hives at the bottom of the garden. But something happened to the bees over the first couple of years. In the second year, they seem to develop a vicious streak embarking on search and destroy missions to sting not only anyone who came into our garden but also our neighbors in their gardens. My reaction to bee stings became progressively more severe ending in an incident of near anaphylactic shock requiring treatment by paramedics. My GP issued me with two epi-pens and a warning either to give up bees or to undergo a course of immunotherapy to desensitize me to their venom. This has involved a three year routine of visits to the allergy department at Guy's Hospital in London where I have received shots of bee venom in increasing doses and spent the one hour recovery time under observation in the clinic discussing where the scores of other beekeepers who are undergoing the same treatment what is happening to the bees and the madness of carrying gnome with them. The image I've chosen here shows me after a battering by bees but this was not the incident that introduced me to the local ambulance service. This particular encounter occurred several weeks later and I've noticed that in relating it I've always been quick to point out that it was not my bees that did it, God forbid but that it happened when I visited a friend's bees and carelessly left an opening in my protective veil. Clearly, I'm suggesting the existence of a bond between me and my university commerce bees. A relationship of reciprocity. I care for the bees. I provide them with shelter. I monitor and treat any diseases or might infestations. I top up their food stocks so that they don't starve over the winter and I protect them from the predations of badgers, woodpeckers, mice and wasps. In return, I take some of their honey in early and late spring and make candles and ointments out of their old and excess wax. Or at least what I consider to be excess. Of course, the bees haven't agreed to any of this. Essentially, I steal their precious honey, topping it up with an inferior inverted sugar syrup or sugar solution and creating more work for them to turn it into stores. Every time I open up the hive for inspection I risk causing damage, injuring or losing the queen or inadvertently killing individual bees who get squashed between the boxes of the hive as I restack them. Personal guilt piled on top of the weight of species guilt. If this is a relationship of reciprocity it's clearly an uneasy one. Despite my attempts to domesticate the bees by weaving a web of reciprocity, empathy and affection around my relations with them they remain resolutely feral and irreducibly other. At the height of the summer a hive may contain 50 to 60,000 bees. Each summer bee lives for about six weeks and the winter bees for about six months. So although the colony and hopefully the queen remains constant there is a perpetual turnover of its membership. I've come to see beekeeping essentially as a game of chess with the hive mind. I read the frames and try to interpret the bees comings and goings in an attempt to anticipate and head off swarming which can drastically reduce the size and strength of the colony. Beekeepers usually do this either by deceiving the bees into thinking that they have already swarmed or by destroying new queen cells that appear as a prelude to swarming. Caring for the bees has turned me into a killer. Sometimes this is collateral damage at other times I kill in cold blood as I pick off one by one the hordes of wasps who try to overwhelm the bees in later summer and rob them of their stores. I do see the irony of this. I after all, I'm also helping myself to the bees honey and furthermore, I'm not allergic to wasp venom. So that seems a bit ungrateful but perhaps I'm also channeling some of the ruthless characteristics of the worker bees who will kill off their queen once she starts to fail and in late summer throw out all of the male drones to fend for themselves as they prepare the colony to survive the winter. Three historic rock and cave paintings of bees, honeycomb and honey hunting expeditions indicate an association between human beings and bees going back many millennia which humans have worked into their mythologies, art, music, folklore and in the language of the UNESCO convention on intangible cultural heritage their understanding of nature and the cosmos. Bees have become symbols of industry and qualities of hard work and organization. Telling the bees, sharing news of births, marriages and deaths was a long-standing tradition of beekeepers in Europe and New England in America and traditionally on the death of a beekeeper their hives will be dressed in black. Yet human attempts to anthropomorphise and co-opt bees into the human world of meaning never fully succeed. My encounter with bees forced me to rethink my ideas of reciprocity across the species boundary which human beings have a tendency to interpret on their terms and in their favour. It gave me a new appreciation of the otherness that resists attempts to domesticate and make familiar of how human beings situate themselves in relation to other species and the planet under the need to listen to what the bees are telling us. Thank you. Thank you so much, Julie, for that wonderful talk. And I guess now it's time for me to share my screen and my image. So my name is Safit Hajmohamedovic. I currently work with the Cambridge Interfaith Program based in the Faculty of Divinity of the University of Cambridge but also I'm one of the co-conveners together with Jeff, Linda, Tom, Sania, and Reza of the summer school in the Anthropology of Travel Tourism and Pilgrimage at SAAS. I'm an anthropologist of sacred landscapes and syncretism and time. Time is what I will be talking about today. And most of my long-term research as anthropologists like to say was conducted in Southeastern Bosnia in the Daeneric Highlands. And this is what I will be sharing with you or a snippet of this I'll be sharing with you today. Now let me just see, play from current slide and that's it. So in this image, what you can see are the people of Agatsko in the Southeastern Bosnian Highlands on Elijah's Day, the 2nd of August in 2012. They're in front of Sopot, a natural spring rushing from limestone, very close to the Kula Mosque. So sort of the central mosque in a village around which a lot of hamlets are located. Most of these people and people who are not in the picture thousands of people who have arrived on this day, they actually live in exile and in various diasporas. They come back to Gatsko and to this place for a single day for Saint Elijah's Day to briefly dive into the homely temporal and spatial frames of the communal encounters from which they were exiled. Now repeatedly voiced this year by people under COVID-19 lockdowns is one form or another of temporal disorientation. I have certainly succumbed to this myself on more occasions than I care to admit, I have even asked my Google assistant speaker, okay Google, what day of the week is it? It's certainly not for the lack of work. Today is Thursday. And you see my Google assistant is responding that it's Thursday. But it's certainly not for the lack of work but often quite the opposite. In the absence of habitual temporal patterns, we may find ourselves working longer hours over the weekends, falling into the vortex of non-time. One of my colleagues, actually one of our panelists today, I want to reveal which one said on Monday when we met over Zoom, time means nothing. Is this a peculiar thing to say? Time means nothing. I find it somewhat less surprising because it confirms some of my hypotheses based on research in Bosnia. We are often frightened of artificial narratives about people's lives. I had nightmares even to admit to you whilst writing my book on waiting in Southeastern Bosnian Highlands, asking myself, granted, this is a story I craft, but is it anyone's else's story really? These are real fears, as they should be, of speaking over others or speaking oneself over others. Uneasiness, and perhaps even nightmares, I would suggest, are important in our quest to decolonize knowledge, a quest celebrated by us and this festival. So it was quite important for me to find out that not only do ethnographies and other ruminations about the space, time, discontinuum after cataclysmic events share some of my findings, but also that the current lockdown suggests that we need to take the questions of time and temporality much more seriously. People without time, without time of specific structure, of specific quality. The initial confusion, perhaps even helplessness, may be replaced with attempts to establish different patterns of our life worlds imbued with temporariness of existing in the meantime. I need not remind us that individuals, groups and entire landscapes around the world have been and continue to be this temporalized in different and often much more violent ways. Think of the work of Ruba Salih from SOS on Palestinian refugee camps. She considers the temporariness and precarity that became a permanent transgenerational horizon. Salih thinks about the political qualities of such persistent temporariness in the struggle against the normalization of the occupation of Palestine. Palestinians frequently hang on their walls, the keys of the houses from which they were exiled. The keys are orientational, just like a person incarcerated in a solitary cell might count the days and the weeks by scratching tally marks into the wall. Time is never absolute, Einstein thought us. It depends on the object's speed and acceleration. The so-called proper time describes the clock moving in the same frame of reference as the observer. And anthropologists could reply to the physicists by making the same statement about the perception of time. Indeed, time is never absolute. It is determined by the motion relative to the frames of reference. When we lose these frames or are exiled from them, the coffee get-togethers with the neighbor, the rhythms of going to the market, plowing the field, celebrating a feast or visiting a local library, what happens then? Following this orientation, we often become conscious of the habitual frames of reference. When Steph Janssen, an anthropologist from the University of Manchester, wrote about the temporal entrapments and the meantime of the Sarajevo suburb of Dobrinja, he noticed that people still waited for the public buses to arrive on time, continually complaining about the disorganized post-war state and desiring the supposedly punctual Yugoslav bus arrivals. Yet, when the meantime is protracted, it starts to solidify its own habitual temporal structures. These time spaces may continue or become longed for, even after the meantime is formally set to have ended. I can't tell you how many times I've heard nostalgic narratives about the spirit of cultural events in the besieged Sarajevo of the 90s or how people developed rituals of proximity huddled in the basements of their buildings during the bombardments during the siege. And I think of images of the London Underground stations during the Second World War, people lying next to one another on top of each other certainly frightened the stale sense of humidity permeating their nostrils, the nervous murmur of conversations ominously punctured by thunderous convulsions above ground. Here's a historical fact, deep down in Highgate Station, very close to my apartment, the American TV host Jerry Springer, whom you may know, was born in 1944 as many members of his family were killed in Nazi concentration camps across Europe. I wonder what does time look like in the London Underground in 1944? Does it exist? Where is time of our right now in the Yemenite city of Sana'a right now? Do clocks move there? During my field work in the Southeastern Bosnian Highlands, I have noticed that the few refugees who had supposedly returned spatially to their homes have however not also returned temporarily. It wasn't home. That place could not be home because space is temporarily inflected. Home was in the past, possibly also the future, but not in the present. Regained spatial coordinates could not make up for the fact that the rhythms and temporal orientations of communal life had been pulled apart. The frame of reference could not be completed simply with, for example, a reconstructed house. Something else was needed. The first temporal piece of heritage that these returnees restored was the day of Elijah, the harvest feast in August. Elijah's day used to be the biggest occasion for get-togethers, flirtation, singing, athletic competition, food, dance, drinks, and even fistfights. It released all the energy accumulated during the long winter and the difficult summer labor in the field. It was also a feast shared by the local Muslims and Christians who would end up divided by a violent nationalist program of ethnic cleansing. Elijah's day was every kind of encounter. It was time as such. When one Elijah's day ended, time itself was recalibrated and oriented anew towards the next Elijah's day. After the 1990s war, Elijah's day became the only day when the exiled people from all over the world would come back, as you see in this image. Time seemed to be, if for a moment, regained. After they're leaving, the few people who remained scattered around the Gatsko villages would retreat into the time space of home. Their narratives were saturated with the past of the landscape. They seldom spoke about the war, almost as if that period of their lives lacked language. In the absence of habitual relations, how can one speak time? Their toolbox for time reckoning was not really equipped to deal with the unwanted absence of community. And when the war was mentioned, it somehow always came back to the encounters with the old landscape. Puzzled as we are by the notion of time, the familiar stranger, we have tried in many ways to grapple with some definition. In his fourth century confessions, St. Augustine of Hippo remarked, for what is time? Who can easily and briefly explain it? But what in speaking do we refer to more familiarly and knowingly than time? And certainly we understand when we speak of it. We understand also when we hear it spoken off by another. What then is time? If no one asks me, I know. If I wish to explain to him who asks, I know not. I wonder what St. Augustine would have of my reply. Time, I suggest based on all my observations thus far, is one's position relative to encounter. How else would we judge time's measure of proximity? That something is fast-paced or prolonged, that something is behind or in front of us? Often or never, eternal or perishable. Whether it's encounter with one's aging skin, with a changing landscape, a coffee with a friend, the punctuality of nomadic people on the horizon, the rhythms of the state apparatus, or an encounter with the weather, the waiting for an exuberant feast, the nervous stillness in the meantime of a pandemic, a loneliness faced with a clock ticking loudly. We sometimes think of the arrow or the tunnel of time, regressing and progressing inevitably away from us. But that is only because the past and the future appear as increasingly devoid of encounter for our bodies. A chronic lack of intimacy results in temporal distance. As we've learned from Eric Wolff and Johannes Fabian and others, anthropologists have done the same to exotic faraway places. They denied their dynamic time, arrested them in some imagined spatio-cultural stillness. The early anthropological volumes speak volumes about the deficiency of encounter. Precisely because it is a dynamic, time is not a continuum for the people of Gadsko. It warps and creates past futures, skipping over the encounterless present, where time means nothing or at least nothing worth attuning one's body to. This is a glimpse into what I would hope a post-lockdown anthropology could learn, building as it were on this phenomenological exercise without planning of the lockdown and its temporal disorientation. That the possibility of speaking time is a matter of that which is encountered a limit of our dynamic horizons of social touch. Thank you very much for listening to me and I would now like to stop sharing my screen and invite Professor Tom Selvin to join us and tell us about encounters over borders. Thank you, Safed, very much for your wonderful talk. And I'm going to try to share my screen, which is not working too well. Our screen sharing is stopped as the shared window is closed. Yes, perhaps you can restart sharing your screen and then if it's, is it a PowerPoint? It's a PowerPoint with one image. Yes, so when you start sharing your screen I think the PowerPoint will already be there, most probably. Yes, and now can you move it back and forth to the image? Just go back, I think, one slide. So if you can share the same PowerPoint again. How was that? Could you try sharing the same PowerPoint again because you've stopped sharing right now. Oh, I can actually see it, but maybe you can't. No, we cannot yet. So try again, share screen. Yes, click on the PowerPoint. If you see it, do you see it? No. I think you can try and find it. So you should have a number of... Whiteboard iPhone, iPhone, it says. Optimize screen share for video clip. So you have nothing. Perhaps if you just click on sharing your desktop and then you can share with us your desktop and now open the PowerPoint. Yes, it's right there. Would you like me to share my screen? Oh, there it is. So just share that slide. Perfect. Okay, so I'm going to read it. And we might as well keep the image there. So I'm going to start. I'm an anthropologist that I've been specializing in travel, tourism and pilgrimage in the past few years. And I work also at the University of Bethlehem in Palestine. And it is about Palestinian initiatives that I'm going to talk about today. So our SOAS Festival of Ideas comes at a time when throughout large areas of the global north and south there is a growing movement towards the decolonization of the higher education curriculum. One aspect of this movement involves the promotion of encounters between neighbors in different localities be they in villages, cities, states or other kinds of groupings. And the development of cross-border regional, political and cultural systems in which all citizens of a region can enjoy equal rights freely to live, work and travel. The aim of this talk is to describe work that is going along on these lines in one of SOAS's partners in the Eastern Mediterranean, the University of Bethlehem, Palestine. We will do this by considering how the work of faculty and students completing their master's degree in the anthropology of travel tourism and pilgrimage at Bethlehem reflect and refract the inspiration deriving from a regional initiative composed by specialists in tourism and pilgrimage from the countries of the fertile crescent including Palestine itself. Together with academics from Harvard University to reconstruct the routes taken by the patriarch Abraham and his family from what we now know as the Persian Gulf to Canaan in the form of a walking and hiking trail known as Abraham's path, Masaa Ibrahim. As noted, founded in 2006 by scholar activists from Palestine and Harvard amongst other places. The aim at the beginning was to make a contribution to regional coexistence by stressing the social and cultural linkages in the area symbolized by the life and travels of a patriarch revered by all. Put briefly, the aim of the trail was and remains to encourage walkers and hikers to move through a region comprising modern Iraq, Turkey, Syria, Palestine, Israel and Egypt presently much of it be set by multiple conflicts. The organization and operation of the trail is arguably flourishing most effectively in contemporary Palestine and it is the Palestinian leg of the trail that forms the background to the present talk. Issues of cross-border encounters in Palestine need obviously enough to be placed within the frame of the occupation of Palestine by the state of Israel. Efforts to consider the organization of the hospitality industry, the preservation and advancement of cultural heritage, the strengthening of Palestinian identity, the role of tourism and pilgrimage in economic development and all the other things travel and tourism professionals discuss is not possible without considering the facts and consequences of the occupation. The effect of settlements, bypass roads, complex systems of identity cards, targeted assassinations, house demolitions, multiple checkpoints and the physical and symbolic violence of the wall as it careers and crashes through the villages and towns of the country from north to south, multiplied in Bethlehem itself with all the subsidiary walls surrounding the tomb of the matriarch Rachel and so on. Jacobson's 213 account of the occupation as a prime example of the role of humiliation in international conflict is wholly convincing. How can Masa Ibrahim and related work possibly have any effect in such a situation is the question. There have been a number of studies of the Masa, the most comprehensive being that by Patricia Selick in her paper last year, 2019, called Boots on the Ground, Walking in Occupied Palestinian Territory, a very fine title. Having walked the 330 kilometers long trail from north to south with groups of fellow hikers, she concludes to quote her, this social non-movement connects places along the trail and beyond. Walkers to each other and the people they encounter and plural narratives of effective solidarity. These findings unsettled the idea of securitized territorial solutions and invite the possibility of continuous open geographies. The present paper operates in a slightly different but complimentary way by first looking at Abraham himself and his family and then considering work that we are doing at Bethlehem University. So we start with Abraham and his family. He traveled, as is well known from the book of Genesis, 700 miles from his birthplace to the borders of present day Iraq, another 700 miles into Syria, another 800 down to Egypt and then back into Kenan. And that's the journey that we are having in the front of our minds at the moment. He was born and raised in the city of Ur in the Kaldi region of the mountains and valleys of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in what we now know as the Persian Gulf. He spoke at least four languages and was a relatively well-to-do trader who would have had routine relationships with comparable traders in Eastern West Asia, including the subcontinent from which came spices, copper and rice and so on and the coast of the Eastern Mediterranean including what is now Lebanon from which came wood for construction. Ur, his birthplace was a large Babylonian city containing palaces, temples, law courts, statues and shrines, gardens and with an effectively organized civil structure. 500 different gods at least in goddesses were worshiped there. The Bible tells us that Abraham and his family worshiped one. City dwellers at the time all had nomadic roots and kinship relations and Abraham was no exception. At an advanced age, some say 75, he felt obliged following what he perceived to be a divine commandment to leave Ur and travel on the east side of the river which involved crossing the Euphrates as Ur was built on the west side with his wife and family, several hundred kilometers north to Padan Aram, the city where his father and brother lived. The first city on his journey was Babylon where the Tower of Ziggurat known as the Tower of Babel associated as this is with a generation of many different languages from the supposedly single global language said to have been spoken at the time of Noah. Along the way of his journey we see therefore cities with multiple gods, exotic palaces with imported luxuries from east and west, markets, different language groups in Mesopotamia, Arcadians, Elamites, Amorites, Turians, et cetera and all the cities that he passed through cosmopolitan. Clearly hospitality was a feature of all these cities and it was of the countryside around. And Stephanie Daly's archeological ethnographies of the cities of Maori and Korana show to quote her, the ancient Mesopotamians recognize that the pleasures of the table are sure indicators of sophistication. The region is renowned for delicious dishes, spicy meats and aromatic confections with an emphasis on the variety of small tempting preparations and pleasing the old factory senses by flavoring with clever combinations of herbs and spices. To invite guests is to make an opportunity to display wealth and good taste and to give hospitality as a mark of duty, generosity, pleasure and power. Which reminds us of Jeff's talk earlier. And drinking habits included the drinking of beer and wines, lots of vineyards around of many varieties. Feasts and festivals were commonplace and people dressed up and people of all ages were there enjoying themselves, there were lots of games of skill in archery and running and so on. Abraham had three wives, Sarah is first, Hagar supposedly in Egyptian quotes slave or concubine and Catura, who's not very well known but does appear in the Bible, who is said by some commentators to have been Ethiopian and his most famous children of course are Isaac from Sarah and Ishmael from Hagar and several from Catura. This pattern of multi-union partnerships was a feature of other biblical patriarchs, Abraham's grandson Jacob for example, husband of Abraham's great great granddaughter Rachel whose tomb is walled up in Bethlehem, had four wives, Leah, Bilpa, Zilpa and Rachel herself. The family moved on through the cities of the region, staying in Haram for some time before moving southwards to Kenan and then further on to Egypt and then back to Kenan where he bought a tomb for himself and his family from a Hittite landowner. All of that is interesting and there are lots of things that we can take from it but as we do, we can move on to the work that we are doing at Bethlehem and see how that complements what we've learned from the journeys of Abraham in Masai Abraham. First of all, he was a trader with very wide regional interests and contacts throughout a very large region as I've said from South Asia to the Mediterranean beyond and we have one student of ours who is doing work on this inter-regional trade. Secondly, all the towns and cities were cosmopolitan and largely welcoming and hospitable and there is quite a lot of work that we do about the nature of hospitality and its importance in a town like Bethlehem, Hebron, Nablus and elsewhere, which are the main points of Palestinian tourism and pilgrimage. Thirdly, there is a lot of aspects of the Masai which speaks of networks of cooperating villages and this too forms a subject for work by one student in our group. I've mentioned hospitality and that goes along with festivals and feasts and winemaking and we were fortunate enough to have lectures and discussions with Sari Hurri who is quite a well-known or very well-known Palestinian winemaker whose wine is really excellent and competes successfully with the best French wine and of course, at number eight, we can see the coexistence of faiths and deities all along the way and as far as Bethlehem is concerned, one of these aspects of coexistence is her attachment to her father's family gods and godly which indicates the coexistence of single gods and multiple gods relating to the importance of families. There are references of course in the cities through which he went about gardens and we have a very interesting analysis and description of a possible garden project in Solomon's pools near Bethlehem and we can imagine all sorts of flowers coming from all along the Rift Valley right from East Africa, right up to Turkey. Work we do on the environment and the beauty of the landscape as Abraham himself talks about in the Bible. The multilingual and multi-aspect of identities in Palestine in the way that Amin Malouf talked about is something else that we're studying as we are studying statues, shrines, palaces, music and the arts and of course Palestinian cinema for example is a very fine example along with other artistic aspects that we also know about like painting which is definitely promotes cross-border cooperation and all of these aspects are with huge contemporary relevance for decolonizing projects in the region including the decolonization of the curriculum. So finally this is the last paragraph the stories of the biblical and Quranic patriarchs and matriarchs and I should mention that we have a study of the Quranic explorations of Abraham and the place of Abraham in the Quran in Islam. These stories led by the life and travels of Abraham speak of to use Selek's term an open geography of the fertile crescent region of the centrality of hospitality and the centrality of festivals and food that go with it of cosmopolitan layered histories and intellectual artistic traditions coming from far and wide of gardens and strong and well worked out ideas of urban and rural beauty and above all the primacy of attachment to regions and cross-border encounters within them. As such, we could end this talk by concluding that the celebration of all these by the Masa Ibrahim and as well as the creative and simultaneously decisively practical work by postgraduate students in the field of tourism and pilgrimage at Bethlehem University is a compelling response to the violence of the walls and intricate technologies of the occupation and its Orientalist and colonial foundations. Thank you. Thank you very much, Tom for that wonderful and important talk. Now I would like if you could stop sharing your screen and if all the panelists could turn on their videos not the microphones as well just yet but their videos, that would be fantastic. Tom, could you just stop sharing your screen? Perfect, wonderful. So we are all here. Unfortunately, we cannot also see all the attendees but some of you have introduced yourselves in the chat box and some of you have posed questions either in the chat box or the Q&A facility which you see on your screen please do type questions as we go along as well. We have a few questions and I think perhaps, and you can raise your hand if you would like to reply to the question and I'll try to moderate a little bit. Perhaps you can try with a question that Subhankar Dutta has posed for all of us really and that relates very much to the topic of this panel. Subhankar says, my question is in relation to the general idea of ethnography. Do we need to redefine and rethink the idea of ethnography mostly the one that involves travel to communities and distant people in the post COVID time? The idea of space, touch, bodily presence and being their dimension of ethnography has been challenged due to COVID. How to find an alternative in matter of field visits and participatory ethnography? This is such an important question. Tom, would you like to, and then Jeff or? Okay, so what I would say really is that I think it's a very, very good point. I think that one of the ways in which we are moving in our anthropological work is as we have talked about quite a lot in this group and in other groups towards slightly auto ethnographic attempts to understand what we as people think and feel in the situations in which we find ourselves. I think that in that case, whatever we do really and I mean Linda's activities with Crystal Palace are a very good example of this and Jeff's activities on his cruise ship are very fine and we actually can mobilize our anthropological insights but also place them very centrally in our own beings, so to speak, in order to come out with interesting analyses. So, and I think that Subanka is absolutely right. I do think we have to rethink and I think that there are all sorts of aspects of traditional anthropology which are really being transcended, one of them being the idea that anthropologists study discrete groups of people whether they're in villages or whether in so-called tribes or within islands or whatever like this and somehow or the other we are there to describe the whole social and cultural, political and economic structure. I think all that is gone and really I think that we therefore need to approach our subject from quite different point of view as I said, perhaps focusing slightly more on what we feel and think ourselves. Sorry, Jeff? Yeah, I think Tom, I mean, obviously nailed that one. That's right. What I wanted to add was that I think that this would have been existential crisis for anthropologists 30 years ago if they were suddenly without the technology and without the ability to do much. We anthropology over the past 30 years has certainly been training for this moment by pushing the envelope, so to speak on how research is done, whether that's been with more modern approaches, digital research. As Tom said, the idea of studying a new people as offensive as that term may be now that so drove early on the apology but we also have the opportunity to revisit a lot of our work that we've done in the past and reevaluate it because I think that every bit of ethnographic research is incomplete and that's what it is. So for me, it's an opportunity to go back and to look at classical texts and reframe them as well as some of the research that I've done and say, okay, now I can view that in a different perspective than I did when I originally did that research. And so I think that the foundational work that we've all done continues as we reexamine it and I think that we are able to collect more data now than we had been before to support any type of ethnographic presentations that we hope to achieve. I don't know how you feel about that. I think that right now it's actually been a tremendous blessing to reevaluate the type of research and the importance of this because we've been able to be suspended in time in some ways. We're also through Zoom and through other video conferencing we're able to meet with people that at a far lesser expense than what had happened before and it allows people to conduct research without grants, without the need for funding in some ways. We certainly need some more grants, but that's what I think. I think this is an opportunity that anthropology has been training for for years just by the fact that now there's a discipline of the anthropology of travel and tourism, anthropology of food, anthropology of medicine. All of these things mean that we're ready for a new approach but the important thing through this is to collaborate with other social sciences as well during this time to have a more holistic ethnographic approach in findings, I think. Julie, please. Yeah, thanks. I mean, I think I was struck by what you were saying, what Safed was saying in his presentation about rituals of distance and rituals of proximity and relations of distance and relations of proximity. And I think one of the things that this COVID crisis has done is really brought home the differences between the two and to start to really conceptualise them. We find ourselves in an era of distance in many ways and that of course has implications for our embodied presence and our embodied relations with other people. And I think, you know, so I take Tom's point and Jess's point about the, you know, in a way reinvesting that kind of, you know, that attention to the researcher as actually the research instruments in a way because it changes the sort of nature of participant's observation and, you know, with the sort of barometers of distance and disembodiedness in a way rather than proximity and contact. So, you know, that is the context in which we find ourselves. And I think we have to kind of see where it takes us. And on the other hand, I was very struck by the fact that, well, I can't really see my beekeeper friends that much at the moment, but I can get as, well, I can get as close as I want to my bees. That may not be very close, my dear, I may not want to be that close to them, but, and I have protective clothing and so on on me when I visit my bees. But, you know, I can spend as much time as I want to, as closely as I want to with the bees, you know, and that's what kind of got me really thinking about my relationship with them. So maybe this will also focus our attention on other kinds of relationship and other kinds of worlds, which I think will be extremely valuable in a post-COVID era, you know, when we have all this talk about, well, what's the new normal and how does this link to climate crisis and the environment and, you know, extinction and all of these things, I think, as Jess said, we're really due for a shake-up and maybe this will kind of help. Thank you, Tom. Yes, I wanted to say that the COVID crisis brings death very close and we think about death every day. But I think we also need, we are forced in a sense because death is so close to think about what life could be. And I think we are thinking more also about what life actually means. And there are several people who, I think, Paul Nurse, who's the head of the Institute in Houston next to the British Library, has brought out a book called, I think, The Meaning of Life. And I think that these things are quite important. In fact, absolutely extremely important. And just another point is it seems to me that Julie is absolutely right in saying that, of course, the COVID makes us spatially distant from one another, but it also makes us spatially close, actually. And the closeness of cross-border cooperation in regions like West Asia and Palestine, Israel and so on is quite clear. I mean, we talk about the lost villages of Palestinians and Suffolk mentioned the key that people have there. And we also have the contribution by an Israeli organization called Zohrot who is actually preparing for the return of Palestinian refugees to the region. And they are reachable by contemporary technologies in a way that in former times they perhaps weren't. And of course, the whole of the wall looks even more ridiculous because you can actually call up somebody on the other side of the wall and make contact with them. So several of the old technological ways of keeping people separate are also being challenged with our new technologies in interesting ways. And I think we can go quite a long way with them. Thanks. So the way I see it, yes, of course, these technologies that we've already used many of us in different ways. And I don't know if anybody remembers Skype anymore, but they are opening up new ways and we're thinking imaginatively of using them. But there's also a danger there, I think, in sort of thinking that they can replace the kind of sort of prolonged proximity that we have nurtured as anthropologists in terms of kind of knowledge making and the responsibility that this face to face encounter and prolonged face to face encounter contains in terms of responsibility to the communities, but also to the individuals who we meet during our fieldwork. And sure, it's changing a lot of stuff for us as researchers, but it's also changing dramatically the kinds of situations that we have engaged with. It's certainly, if we think about cruise ships, this was a big topic for COVID-19. It's dramatically changing that context. It's dramatically changing things for refugees and returnees and so on. So I think focusing on perhaps on how it changes these life worlds of our interlocutors will be important. And then we anyway have to negotiate access. We have already always, sometimes it's very difficult to negotiate access. And now it's even more difficult with this kind of fear of people who may infect you. But it's a kind of process that we have to go through to kind of gain the rapport and to gain the confidence. And now it might involve testing. And it wouldn't be the first time anthropologists have to fear of transferring a disease. We know that this was kind of a big problem with measles and lots of things that killed people before. So we have to be careful to kind of think about how the ethical access to communities and our interlocutors, I would say. Shall I go on with some other questions? So we have a couple of questions here for Linda. I will read the first one from our pet. Linda, can you also see the questions that are posed? You can unmute yourself, perhaps. Yes, I can see the questions. Perfect, so I'll just read out loud the first one and then you can perhaps relate to the second one, which is a bit longer. And it includes a quote, which I won't be reading so you can either engage with it or however you like comment upon it. The first one is from our pet. Is it not time to reduce the pay for sports players and managers and think about the poorer countries who cannot even afford food? Never mind a bowl. All right, thank you. The answer to that, I've been thinking about that and in order to get my session down to the 10 minutes I had to leave out a section that I had originally put into the discussion. And that was to talk about the impact of Marcus Rashford Marcus Rashford, who is a premiership player for Manchester United, world famous, he's in the England team, who came from a very poor background needing to have free school meals. And as he was growing up and often not knowing where food was coming from and yet he is earning millions as a football player. Now he has campaigned and he's getting political and entering the political debate about the provision for vulnerable children and those children having school meals through the holidays and during the lockdown when they couldn't have access to perhaps their one secure meal a day. I think that the professional footballer I mean personally, I think they're paid a ridiculous sum of money. Their careers are short. They make a lot of money out of moving over into the media, the crossover into the media to further their careers and their lifetimes. And they have a certain amount of celebrity status but they're also in a very strong position to make political statements as they did with, as I talked about with the Black Lives Matter that all erupted. So they are very conscious as to what is happening and there's always a degree of respect. There's always a minute of applause if they want to celebrate somebody's life who's died. They were very thankful for the NHS and it was very genuinely meant. But it is an industry. And it's an industry. Yes, it involves people who are highly paid but we could look at any of the other big multinational corporations that aren't involved in sport. They are also making money and would they be being asked to support poverty in other countries? So I think we have to look at it and detach the fact that they are sports and personalities from the fact that it's actually the corporation, it's big corporations that should be being called upon to support the countries which are less... Oh, I've lost the word. Less successful have got a lot of poverty. Now, what comes to mind though is that the power of sport is there at a level where kids will kick around anything they can. This notion of kicking a ball or throwing a ball, even if they haven't got a proper ball, they will construct one so that they can play the game. And a lot of this is linked back to colonialism and the countries, you look at the countries that provide the greatest cricketers in the world, the Indian Premier League that's taking place at the moment is keeping the nation together because sport is such an inherent part of everyday life. And it is what occupies people when they've got whether they're hungry or not, the children particularly will go out and play and will compete against each other. So, I think that in terms of providing for it, it's something that is far wider than that. I mean, if we look at a corporation like Bill Gates provisions and the charitable work that a lot of these organizations do, the funding that's going to be put forward for the vaccinations once the vaccine's been found for COVID. I mean, all of those sorts of things are contributions to this debate. And as to the second question, I'm not sure where this quote comes from. I don't know where I think that there is a political move. It leads on from that previous point about children and an inherent love of sport and kicking balls around that you have large proportions of the population are interested in competition. They want to see competition and it fills that void in their lives. It's part of the culture of the countries in either in spectator and following football teams or sports teams or it's in the... Oh, I've lost where I'm going with this. Dear. So, we go to the next... Oh, yes, so the government realizes that sport, because sport plays such an important part in everyday life, that they want to actually make sure that that is possible. And of course, it was very evident during the pandemic that different governments in different countries put restrictions on the amount of exercise and participation in things. And in some countries, they still aren't yet back to any form of normality in terms of being allowed to go out. And so I think that there is that feeling that it's something, it's a little bit of sugar to encourage people to return to normality, to some form of normality, that they can actually watch something which doesn't... Although it's not the same as it was before, the game itself, the game of football, the match is the same. And it's a match between two teams of players. Kevin has just told us that the court is from 1984. Yes. So it's... I thought, when I read it, I thought it might have been, but then I couldn't recognise the bit about the Plains of Argentina in it. So that's what threw me. So thank you, Kevin. Thank you. So, Julie, perhaps you remember your question for Jeff that you typed in. Do you want to share it with us or do you want me to read it myself? Yeah, now I was trying to ask him because it reminded me of one cruise that I did as a lecturer and hosting tables and all those kind of tensions. And it also, funnily enough, reminded me of another kind of table where I spent some time doing research, which is a blackjack table because I spent a whole period of field work, actually, basically playing blackjack in casinos. And that is another table that is fraught with all kinds of undercurrents and tensions and, you know, prickliness. But there, the conflict is much nearer the surface. Do you know, it's sort of, and it comes out, it kind of... There is not that same requirement, I suppose, to be nice and polite and, you know, it's a much more kind of agonistic kind of a setup. And I wondered, in Jeff's experience, I mean, all those tables, there must have been occasions when things just kind of erupted. And, you know, what I just wanted to know about was there conflict, outright kind of conflicts. And so how would you manage it at the same time as maintaining this kind of, you know, polytests, you know, kind of atmosphere? I was hoping you'd ask me about my policy on splitting eights if we're going to talk about sitting around a blackjack table. But which I have spent a lot of time around blackjack tables and I've oftentimes made that comparison between the hosted dinner table and blackjack, where in a blackjack table, you have a common enemy, which is the dealer. And so people are hyper-inflating notions of wealth and risk and confidence and pain around that table. So around a blackjack table, as you know, and you've written about, you see the whole scope of human emotion from joy to despair to success to defeat to sometimes very much damaging. And there, people are able to come and go as they like. In this particular table set up, it's considered very bad form if you leave before the dealer has dealt his final meal. Much of the conflict comes to, that happens. And I'd say that maybe to be generous, I'd say there's a conflict 90 to 95% of the meals. There's an undercurrent. There's oftentimes conflict between domestic partners that then the rest of the table have to evaluate. What that is, for instance, it's not uncommon to have one partner speak over the other partner. Oftentimes, if it's a woman speaking over a man in this situation, that is a different level of combativeness from the rest of the group than if it's a man speaking over a woman. There's very oftentimes very disparaging things that are said about the nationalities that people come from. I have always tried to bring up issues of wealth and equality at these tables, especially when it's related to visiting destinations that have a higher poverty quotient, so to speak, than others. And that can create a lot of conflict. I remember after leaving Brazil once, after leaving Rio, we were talking about poverty and a woman said to me, how can I help, how can I help alleviate this poverty? And I said, you can do exactly what you do to help the poor people in your home, the way that you help there. And that started an eruption because obviously she had not done anything to care about the poor people in her own area. And that started conflict. I am very happy not to be on a cruise ship right now in US election season. You see both sides of a political question and you see people being very mean towards each other. Probably the most significant source of tension at these tables is about racism. When somebody says something that is absolutely important and how do you manage that and how do others respond to that? And I oftentimes have taken a different approach than I would in my personal life and I listen and I let it play out because I wanna learn about some of these opinions that are there and eventually you just have to, someone has to excuse themselves and leave. But yeah, there's a lot of conflict. It's about my role in that situation is about trying to diffuse the conflict before it gets bad, before it gets worse. So yes, I've seen every level of conflict possible at these tables. But also great joy, also great joy, also tremendous joy. There are two quotes about dinner that I've always loved. One of them was in my high school above the dining room and it said, let us strive mightily but eat and drink as friends. And the other is an old Italian saying that translates into at the table, one never grows old. And so I try to start with one and finish with the other at these dinners. I would perhaps like to reshape this question that Julie asked and asked something of Julie. So Jeff mentioned that this small talk over dinner and small talk is a particular kind of art, it seems to me. Then I very much enjoy and it's very often class related. I would say especially in the UK, you see it constantly especially kind of these remnants of aristocracy who have to master the small talk that they have to constantly engage with and they sort of, it confirms certain class. So I really appreciate these moments of the awkward moments. But it also tells us that there are constantly these structures that aim to control encounter and to shape encounter, how encounter happens. And then Julie's image was so striking because it's kind of encounter beyond human control. And there is this constant control of other species in kind of encounter between humans and others and non-humans. So I guess my question is, how do we, can we ever kind of get away from this sort of habitual sort of, it's not just desire, but it's kind of an impulse to control other species. Can we sort of reconfigure ourselves as humans so as not to approach others only through constant control? Well, thanks for that question, Zafir. I mean, this is the thing that I'm kind of struggling with at the moment in a way because I see this desire, I see this desire, human desire to control as being the root cause of all our problems really. And it's something that, as I said at the end of my presentation, about sort of thinking, resituating ourselves in relation to other species and the planet rather than being at the top in control. Territively, human beings have referred to themselves as the stewards of the planet. But I mean, what is stewardship and it is about control, it is about making decisions on behalf of other species in the interests of our species. And we have been a sort of super successful species, but it's had an enormous cost. And so I think that it demands a really radical rethink where we think of ourselves as part of nature rather than above nature. And a species like others rather than a super species because we are ultimately affected by the fate of other species also impact on us too. I mean, in beekeeping, it's very interesting because you have a whole range of approaches to this from large commercial kinds of beekeepers who, you know, in many ways, and I mentioned in the presentation, you know, the sort of industrialized pollination in the Oldman fields and, you know, adulteration of honey in commercial beekeeping and so on. I mean, there's terrible practices that kind of go on. And from there, you go through these kind of different kinds of approaches to bees and our relationship with bees, which goes through the, you know, hobby beekeepers that go, some of them are maybe very kind of hands-on and very keen to intervene and manipulate right up to at the other end, you know, natural beekeepers who are very sort of minimized their intervention. There was a brilliant film that was nominated for an Oscar called Honey Land, which you may have seen, yes, which is very much about that relationship with, you know, a wild beekeeper and a neighbor who kind of takes all the honey, you know. I mean, and this is the thing. In many ways, we are so heavily compromised so that even in my motivation to keep bees, you make yourself kind of complicit in some of the practices of control and damage, you know, and beekeeping itself, the globalized trading in queen rearing and so on, you know. I mean, that has risen in response to not only commercial but also kind of hobby beekeeping. So I think we're in a very interesting time now because I think, you know, we are more and more people are becoming aware of this, you know, range of different kinds of responses. And I think things like extinction rebellion and so on, you know, kind of putting that sort of issue much more to the forefront. But when I look at the amount of weed killers that are being used in my neighbor's gardens and I'm not so sure, but yeah. Honey Land is a fantastic example, I think, of how this sort of insatiable capitalism enters a very intimate interspecies relationship. It's a Macedonian film I warmly suggested for all thanks for mentioning it. I think it's a perfect sort of, it can contribute a lot to our conversations and encounters. I think, well, I had a brief question from Kevin Webb with a couple of quotes from Einstein. And I guess the question is whether he got it right, that the distinction between the past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion. And the only reason for time is so that everything doesn't happen at once. I don't know, these are grand statements. I mean, I sometimes like to play with a few sort of quotable grand statements and then when you have a longer text, that's very easy to kind of give caveat after caveat because of course none of this works across the board and certainly not even for two people and certainly not across different kinds of social contexts to qualify what time is. And I really start my research with this question that Roy Wagner posed and I repeated it so many times. It's whether time is something that is as such that we can talk about as such or whether we have to think about the qualitatively different kinds of time of what we might call time. And there are certainly many words in the area where I worked about time or that specify qualitatively different kinds of time. So in speaking of time, I was trying to think about specific relations that it expresses with these different words and in different situations rather than to say something about time as such. And I think perhaps in that sense we are quite different from physicists. Tom, would you perhaps like to wrap this up a little bit with some of your... Well, I think maybe we can all do it. Let's do it one by one. I'll start and then I'll ask everybody else to do it also. And we had a very interesting question which was what are our favorite films? And just to get that one done first, I would say my three favorite films are Casablanca, Three Angry Men's Third Man. But to summarize our discussions, I think that we might think about the question of what constitutes and what is the context of a good society? What does a good society actually consist of? What does it mean? And what kind of thoughts can we have about that in relation to some of the questions and issues that were raised by everybody? So in the first place, I would say to Jeff who argued that his encounters on the dining table were a question of selling fantasies. And I absolutely right. And the question would be, is this as it were okay? Is it okay to sell fantasies? Is it okay to sell myths? And if it is, why is it? And if it isn't, why is it not? And I suppose that the answer must be yes and no because we do need fantasies and myths. There's no question about that. But on the other hand, I do know from talking to people in your industry that people who go on cruises have a great deal of political power actually. And their fantasies do influence real people in real spaces and in real times. And therefore, it is not wholly okay to keep on as it were the fantasy path. There comes a time when fantasies have to end and people have to be faced with something else. I suppose, I mean, in the sense that's a question. Linda's question that comes out of thinking about what she was talking about and what a good society is, is what role exactly is she asked? What role does sport have in making a good society? And Julie and Jeff are experts in Blackjack. Some time ago, I did quite a lot of research in the Greyhound Racing Stadium in Haringey. And that, I can tell you, was one of the most sociable sporting occasions I've ever engaged in, quite surprising actually. And it was a great tragedy that this stadium in Haringey was replaced by a supermarket. As far as Julie's cross-species talk is concerned, I mean, I can only recommend the, as I said, the head of the Francis Crick Institute. I mean, the meaning of life and so on is really interesting as far as that is concerned. And he absolutely talks about control and other words that we could use like colonialism, orientalism and all the rest of it as being actually suicidal as far as cross-species relations are concerned. And the question that I always have for Suffolk and I think it's an important and very, very difficult question actually is I've heard him say with profound seriousness that it is absolutely necessary to understand both the coming together and the driving apart of groups of people in Bosnia and to understand what we might call, you know, the nationalist impulse or something like this. So again, the issue is, how do we get from those questions to the issue of good society and where might we find? What spaces might we find the good society and what times might we find? And how does this issue that was brought up in the chat about the past, present and future is terribly important because obviously the future must contain the past as well. So these are the kind of things that I think that maybe we have talked about. Thank you, Tom. I mean, this question of, you know, a fantasy in relation to the good society is it relates to a lot of what we are trying to sort of problematize or decolonize in terms of kind of this knowledge production in anthropology and other disciplines, this kind of imagination that's very often produced as a matter of fact, you know, for other societies or it's kind of a fantasy of the other that's then kind of produced as knowledge. And so the question is, you know, at once how to kind of not only resist this fantasy which very much continues, I would say in terms of, and this relates to our first question that Rabia, I think, asked. And so, but it also, you know, how to allow ourselves, how to allow others to continue, you know, kind of their lives without our interventions, without the constant needs to make everything known and make everything visible and control it in a way then. And so in a sense, it also suggests that this kind of encounter that the anthropologists, you know, desire that want with constantly, you know, with something unknown to find out, encounter that elucidates others is also quite problematic. And, you know, sometimes, you know, kind of, some, you know, we should allow others to decide whether they would like something to be known or not. And ethnographies kind of produce knowledge almost as if, you know, it's accepted across the board that it's something that everybody wants. And I know certainly in my ethnography that, you know, some things that I know my interlocutors didn't want to be revealed about their lives, about the number of returnees to the villages in Gatsko which the state could use to control them. And so on, I sort of didn't speak about. And this was, you know, so it's constantly kind of an engagement with really the life words, life worlds of our interlocutors, I would say. Jeff. No, I think that brings us to the end of our time today. And I think that those questions that you asked there at the end, Tom and Savit are going to provide us with future opportunities to discuss these in our Xenia series that we do that will actually have a very special speaker and book launch next week. And I encourage everybody to look at xeniaseries.com. The link is in the chat. I think that we have some things to discuss and to look deeper in here. I know that life for me has always been about weaving a blanket with some threads of fantasy and some threads of reality and seeing where they can clothe us in wonderful warmth of experience. But yeah, thank you guys for doing this today. Thank you all for being here and for watching us. This was a lot of fun today. I'm honored to be with my friends here talking about these wonderful things on what is a beautiful morning still in New Hampshire. And thank you very much, Dani and Stephanie also for all your support in making this panel happen. And to all the attendees, I think this will close in a few seconds. Wonderful to see the panelists. Hopefully next time we'll also see some of the questioners. Thanks. Bye. Bye. Bye, thank you. Thank you, Julie. Thank you. Thank you, Linda.