The global pandemic has highlighted the fragility and volatility of global supply chains: seafarers stranded at sea, delayed shipping containers, empty store shelves, shortages of truck drivers in consumer networks, energy issues at production centers, and a boom of door-to-door deliveries handled by exploited workers. Understanding this development in its historical and cultural specificity across contexts and scales was the starting point for our panel - Logistical Transformations: Supply Chains and the Politics of Circulation - at the 17th Biannual EASA conference in Belfast. While theories of commodity exchange have long been central to anthropological knowledge production, this panel pushed toward the development of an anthropology of logistics that prioritizes understanding the transformative nature of logistics in response to multi-scaled 'crises.' In this way, the panel tried to make sense of the transformation and (re-)configuration of global capitalism today
A novel logistical configuration in and of itself, the 2022 EASA conference was a fully hybrid event with participants being able to attend both in person and digitally. This allowed two of the panel’s convenors to zoom in and for participants to gather from different time zones across the globe to engage in a productive and stimulating conversation on logistics from the comfort of their own homes or workplaces. Indeed, the hybrid nature of the conference already points to how the logistics of knowledge production and dissemination is subjected to formidable transformations in a COVID-19 landscape. Much to our delight, the panel ran smoothly and, perhaps somewhat of a rarity, with little to no technical difficulties.
The call for papers sparked responses by scholars from different institutions in Europe and the US, doing research in a wide variety of contexts. The panel was divided into two sessions over two days, with five speakers per session. Considering the centrality of ports and shipping in the global economy, it was no surprise that two of the participants presented work on logistics in the maritime sector. Nicholas Anderman showed how automation in the port of long beach both constrains and enables labor power in global value chains, highlighting how workers are able to respond to the increasing standardization and mechanization of logistics spaces. Turning to the actual ships traversing the high seas, Camila Mevik analyzed how seafarers experience the formalization of work regimes on an LNG tanker and how this relates to the configuration of racial capitalism at sea.
Several participants addressed how the logic of logistics intersects with the livelihoods of logistics workers in often detrimental ways. Christian Henrik Alexander Kuran showed how long haul-truckers in Europe become focal points in moral debates on public goods and explored their abilities to negotiate with or resist the forces of deregulation and technological change. Addressing the issue of chokepoints in global supply chains, Verena la Mela talked about how truckers in Kazachstan were made to wait hours and sometimes even days on end in and around a key logistics hub run by mostly private actors. In this way, she demonstrated how monopolization of logistics by political elites bears on the lives of logistics workers.
The question of the possibility for a more circular logistics was addressed by Elena Sischarenco and Madlen Kobi. As Kobi showed, reuse companies in Vienna seek to reconfigure the nature of market governed supply chains through the recycling of building materials, thereby attempting to move towards a circular form of the economy. That challenging the imperatives of the global economy is an exhaustive and difficult exercise became evident from Sischarenco’s analysis of the construction and manufacturing industry in Italy. In a context of scarcity induced by the war in Ukraine and the covid crisis, the push toward the reuse of machines is complicated by global energy politics and state policies.
A number of participants also analyzed logistics in unexpected areas beyond global trade routes and logistics hubs. Eloïse Maréchal analyzed how blood donation networks organize the circulation of donated blood in Belgium. Drawing on fieldwork with drivers who deliver blood to hospital, she showed how the logistics needs to always be viewed in relation to state biopolitics. Focusing on a different kind of viral matter, Violeta Argudo Portal presented on biobankers in Spain and the work that her interlocutors invest in demonstrating that biobanks are infrastructures for the “scientific common good.” In this way, she argues that a particular notion of logistics shapes the ways in which public goods are managed.
Finally, Bilge Firat and Tenn Joe Lim point out what kind future-oriented imaginaries logistics enables and how the promise of logistics often remains unfulfilled. In an analysis of the Southern Gas Corridor, Firat identifies various geopolitical agenda and scale-making projects this energy corridor is to facilitate and argues for anthropological approach to the study of geopolitics and logistical infrastructures that pays attention to the ways in which future-making efforts of elite actors intersect with cross-border governance, sovereignty, and statecraft. Turning to the question of unbuilt infrastructures, Tenn Joe Lim details how the Kra Canal failed to materialize as a concrete logistics corridor. The Kra Canal, when read as a shadow history, therefore considers how infrastructural vulnerability is intertwined with narratives of globalization and visions for nation building.
This rich collection of papers jumpstarted a fascinating discussion on what an anthropology of logistics might look like. Logistics has proven to be a difficult topic for anthropologists to tackle. Perhaps this is due to the nature of logistics vis-à-vis the anthropological toolkit. Anthropological methods remain predominantly geared towards long term embedded ethnographic research in specific locations. Whereas logistics spans different contexts, temporalities, and logics. The analytical work necessary to understand logistical transformation, then, requires the cross-cutting and jumping across scales and contexts in imaginative ways.