Anjana Bala
This flash essay explores the close relationship between responsibility and harm. I ask, what are the things that inspire us, that move us, and that stimulate our academic and creative sensibilities? Simultaneously, how might these experiences be complicit in larger harms, complicit in a global unhealth? I draw inspiration from anthropology’s predecessors—travelers’ accounts and fictional utopias—to explore this moral ambiguity. These reflections should not be read exclusively as auto-ethnography or self-reflection, but as a praxis of implication—an attempt to think critique not from the fantasy of the outside, but as a means of being within it, to interrogate complicit participation in global unhealth.
Juhu Beach, Mumbai, India
It is 5 a.m., at the crossroads of morning and night. Near the shore, the water is rough, the contours of the waves choppy. Yellow, orange, and white drown an older blue-green, and the grey sky is brighter than the ocean. As something rises from underneath, another object slides back into the depths, a constant exchange of an ever-evolving surface. I look further out, hopeful for silky blue, but am met with the glistening shades of forgotten objects, made and thrown perhaps continents away, ages ago. The ocean serves as a barter of time.
A man walks along the shore. He is throwing objects back into the sea—maybe lifeless debris or perhaps forms of pulsing life. I am too far away to tell, but I wonder which world may be kinder to them: the sea, their original home, one of plastic? Or the land, their new home, where they are out of breath?
Photo by Brian Hartley.
Grand Bazaar, Istanbul, Turkey
A flow of people circles around a maze of items. But the items make bigger circles around the maze of people: intricate rugs, pyramids of sweets, coffee and teas of vibrant tonalities. The footwork of the marketgoers is slow, then fast, linear then polyrhythmic, straight then in diagonals, back to slow. Movement zigzags, set to a warped velocity. Despite the oscillating paces, traffic remains controlled.
I suddenly feel overwhelmed by the ballet, the intensity of people, the volume of objects. But also, the heat, the pollution, the smoke, and the people’s rhythm that has no end, no bars to stop the pattern. Where will these items go? What will be their final destination? Who might find them another life—that is, if there could be another life? There are too many objects, no way out. The sweets look like tea, the tea like rugs, the rugs like sweets. I want to leave. We search for the exit; at first, it is non-apparent, hidden behind the massive stalls and sellers. We circle again, this time desperate to find it. I attempt to move more quickly but am held up by the dense air and a clouded mind.
We finally manage to leave, but the exit opens onto another market, rows, rows, rows, and rows of people, objects, sweat, pollution, humidity, moving together, moving apart, in an unsettling choreography. There are too many objects and no way out.
Skaftafell, Vatnajökull Glacier, Iceland
We forget the uneasy chill as our guide tells us the qualities of the glacier: it is a dynamic formation that moves and speaks; it might be like this today, but like that tomorrow. “It really is alive.” The ice-blue moraine is covered in carbon black volcanic ash. “New earth,” she proclaims. She tells us the ash is thousands of years old, risen from the bottom to the top through a process I can’t quite grasp. But I understand that the glacier is a moving archive, home to its own histories.
Behind us, the glacier extends for miles, but in front, it descends onto an ice lake. Here, the water is crystal clear, the blue is only blue, and the lake is brighter than the grey sky. There are no forgotten objects from continents away, only the glacier’s own past.
The guide gestures to a distant yellow bus marking the park’s entrance. Seven years prior, the glacier’s embrace reached that very spot. She explains that, in just three years, where we are standing will be no more. The weight of decline becomes palpable. My feet feel heavy. I turn to my friend, who is now also disturbed. We feel something, we feel responsible. We walk backwards slowly, echoing the archive’s gradual retreat. Perhaps our movements are a kind of goodbye.
As we descend back onto solid ground, I look up to see what has been left behind: an invisible footprint that will live on the carbon black ash. A footprint no different than someone’s forgotten object, oceans away.
Postscript Reflection
A few years after writing this flash ethnography essay, I remain concerned, perhaps even more so, with questions of complicit participation and forced consent within structures and histories much larger than ourselves: globalization, capitalism, and the environmental crisis—to be, in a phenomenological sense, truly thrown into the world. My concern with the praxis of implication persists, but I am now equally curious about possible responses to navigating life under contradiction. Inspired by decolonial thinkers and artists, I am drawn to exploring the cracks, gaps, and parasitic practices embedded within these overwhelming structures where there appears to be no outside, no way out. I would approach a rewrite of this piece from this affective stance—one of reaching toward the unknown and what this generates despite its impossibility—rather than a retreat into speculative inaction.
Anjana Bala is a dance artist and anthropologist working across madness, ecology, and art/creativity.
This essay is part of the series “Flashes of Responsibility: Craft, Ethics, and Impact in Global Health Ethnography,” co-edited by Liana Chase,* Marlee Tichenor,* and Sienna Craig.
*Chase and Tichenor are co-first editors of the series.