Anger in Belarus, Cross Perspectives on an Unexpected Unrest

International Seminar/Webinar

Venue: CEFRES (Na Florenci 3, Prague 1) 
Date: September 16th 2020, 5-7pm
Organizer: CEFRES
Language: English

The seminar will take place simultaneously in person and online. Due to sanitary constraints, it is necessary to register to participate in person at the following address: cefres@cefres.cz

It is also possible to participate online at the following address: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/85162249844

The seminar will also be broadcast live on our Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/cefres

Argumentary

Since June 2020, Belarus has been experiencing a series of popular mobilizations that threaten the authoritarian regime of Alexander Lukashenko, in power since 1994. This largely unexpected event raises important questions that will be examined during this seminar: on the genesis of this unprecedented unrest and the factors that made it possible; on the characteristics, modalities and significations of the mobilizations; on their ability to enlist or not enlist the majority of the Belarusian population, on the already perceptible effects of the protest on the relations between Belarus and Russia and on the possible role to be played by the European Union, etc. The seminar will bring together researchers and experts from different countries in order to compare their analyses and different possible scenarii.

Moderation : 

Jérôme Heurtaux, Director of CEFRES, author of Pologne 1989. Comment le communisme s’est effondré, Codex, 2019.

Speakers:

Ronan Hervouet, Associate Professor at Bordeaux University, author of A Taste for Oppression. A Political Ethnography of Everyday Life in Belarus, Berghahn Books, to be published in 2021.

Anaïs Marin, UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Belarus, Researcher at the Warsaw University (Centre de Civilisation Française et d’Études Francophones CCFEF), and Associate Fellow at the Chattam House Russia and Eurasia Program.

Alena Marková, Assistant Professor at the department of historical sociology of the Faculty of Humanities at Charles University (Prague) and Researcher on national processes in Central and Eastern Europe. Her PhD thesis focused on Belarus : ’The Belarusization Episode’ in the Process of Formation of the Belarusian Nation”.

Daniela Kolenovská, Head of the Department of Russian and East European Studies, Institute of International Studies, Faculty of Social Sciences, Charles University. She specialises in modern Russian history and foreign policy. In this context, she also deals with the anti-Soviet alternative of Belarusian national development in exile since 1917.

Detailed presentation of the speakers

Ronan Hervouet is Associate Professor at Bordeaux University and Researcher at the Centre Émile Durkheim. He previously taught economics and social sciences at the European Humanities University in Minsk from 1999 to 2001 and was the French director of the Franco-Belarusian Center of political Sciences and European Studies in Minsk from 2009 to 2012. He has previously published a book on Belarus, entitled Datcha blues. Existences ordinaires et dictature en Biélorussie (Belin, 2009). His second book on Belarus has just been published in French (Le goût des tyrans. Une ethnographie politique du quotidien en Biélorussie, Le Bord de l’eau, 2020) and will be published in English in March 2021 (A Taste for Oppression. A Political Ethnography of Everyday Life in Belarus, Berghahn Books, 2021).

Alena Marková is an Assistant Professor of the Department of Historical Sciences of the Faculty of Humanities, Charles University (Czech Republic). Her main research interests cover contemporary history of Eastern Europe, nationalism, nation-building, national identity, and post-socialist transformation. Dr Marková is a main grantee and a project coordinator of many Czech and international academic projects (4EU+ European Universities Alliance, GAČR, SVV CU, and others). She is an Associate Editor of The Journal of Belarusian Studies (Brill). Alena Marková’s latest book “The Road Toward Soviet Nation. Nationality Policy of Belarussization, 1924-1929” (“Šliach da savieckaj nacyji. Palityka bielarusizacyji, 1924-1929”, Minsk 2016) received the best historical monograph of the year 2016 award in Belarusian studies by the expert council of the International Congress of Belarusian Studies (Warsaw).

CEFRES 2016/17 Concluding Seminar

After a year spent at CEFRES, CEFRES 2016/17 PhD students will present to their fellow colleagues the outcomes of their research in a joint concluding seminar, and welcome the members of CEFRES team 2017/2018.

Place and time: Na Florenci 3, building C, conference room, 3rd floor, between 2 and 5:30 PM
Language: English

Program

2:00 Mátyás Erdélyi : Modernity, Capitalism, and Private-Clerks: The Philosophy of Money in Austria-Hungary

2:30 Filip Herza : Freak Shows and the Collective Body of Nation in Prague 1860s-1930s: The Concept of Disability and Nationalism Studies

3:00 Katalin Pataki : From Victims to Collaborators: the Dissolution Procedure of Mendicant Monasteries in the Hungarian Kingdom (1787-1793)

3:30 Coffee Break

4:00 Chiara Mengozzi (post-doctoral researcher): Literary Animals: Thinking Beyond Human, Reading Against Allegory

4:30 Magdalena Cabaj : From Hermaphrodite Writing to Intersex Writing

5:00 Lara Bonneau : Fall and Ascent: Reading Warburg with Binswanger

Architecture and Art as Historical Sources: On the Borders of Humanities and Social Sciences

A session led by Monika Brenišínová

In various theoretical discussions on architecture, we may notice that there is not a singular way of approaching it. From the classical perspective of the history of art classical art historical perspective, it is possible to identify at least three basic methods of inquiry: archaeological building survey („Bauforschung“, A. von Gerkan, in Czech “SHP”, D. Líbal); style-critical and style-historical analyses (H. Wölfflin, H. Focillon, M. Dvořák); semantic analysis (G. Passavant, E. Hubala). When we consider art in general, things however get even more complicated. If we take into account the fact that even among historians of art a consensus about the definition of art as such does not exist, what will happen when we will look at art from the perspective of another scientific discipline? When we conceive art as an historical source, traditional art historical categories such as the aesthetic point of view, the author’s fantasy, the styles or commonplaces (loci communes) quickly lose their significance. Moreover, historical work with visual sources is largely interpretative and requires a significantly critical approach. Thus we suddenly find ourselves on the borders of humanities and social sciences. And it is exactly such space, outside the frontiers of clearly defined disciplines, where the space and time change their shapes and where other disciplines – such as anthropology – can be brought into play.

Readings:

  • Clifford Geertz. ‘Art as Cultural System.’ MLN 91(6): 1473–1499, 1976.
  • George Kubler. ‘History: Or Anthropology: Of Art?’ Critical Inquiry, 1(4): 757-767, 1975.

Architecture and Art as Historical Sources: On the Borders of Humanities and Social Sciences

Session led by Monika Brenišínová.

Readings

  • Clifford Geertz. ‘Art as Cultural System.’ MLN 91(6): 1473–1499, 1976.
  • George Kubler. ‘History: Or Anthropology: Of Art?’ Critical Inquiry, 1(4): 757-767, 1975.

In various theoretical discussions on architecture, we may notice that there is not a singular way of approaching it. From the classical perspective of the history of art classical art historical perspective, it is possible to identify at least three basic methods of inquiry: archaeological building survey („Bauforschung“, A. von Gerkan, in Czech “SHP”, D. Líbal); style-critical and style-historical analyses (H. Wölfflin, H. Focillon, M. Dvořák); semantic analysis (G. Passavant, E. Hubala). When we consider art in general, things however get even more complicated. If we take into account the fact that even among historians of art a consensus about the definition of art as such does not exist, what will happen when we will look at art from the perspective of another scientific discipline? When we conceive art as an historical source, traditional art historical categories such as the aesthetic point of view, the author’s fantasy, the styles or commonplaces (loci communes) quickly lose their significance. Moreover, historical work with visual sources is largely interpretative and requires a significantly critical approach. Thus we suddenly find ourselves on the borders of humanities and social sciences. And it is exactly such space, outside the frontiers of clearly defined disciplines, where the space and time change their shapes and where other disciplines – such as anthropology – can be brought into play.

 

The Uses of Analogy in Human and Social Sciences

A session led by Lara Bonneau

It is possible to conceive transdisciplinarity as sharing of objects or methods by several disciplines. Besides objects and methods, it can also be – and this might be its first form – the sharing of a common lexicon. The tendency of certain human sciences – philosophy in particular – to use concepts elaborated by other disciplines in other contexts was sharply criticized by Alan Sokal in 1994, in what remains known as the Sokal Affair. The physicist tried to discredit the way certain philosophers were using concepts that belonged to the natural sciences, showing their ignorance about the real meaning of these concepts in their original field and thereby reducing their work to vain language games. Indeed, the use of analogy and metaphor in the human sciences can be put into question. During this session, I will try to show that, if it is not without danger, the use of analogy and metaphor is inherent to the scientific activity, which can moreover be both legitimate and fruitful. I will start with a concrete example: the way the art historian Aby Warburg uses analogy and metaphors from the natural sciences. I will then rely on a more reflexive text about the legitimacy of this method entitled Théorie de l’acte analogique in Simondon’s L’individuation à la lumière des notions de forme et d’information.

Readings:

  • Gilbert Simondon. L’individu et sa genèse physico-biologique. Paris: PUF, 1964, pp. 264-268.
  • Alan Sokal. ‘A Physicist Experiments with Cultural Studies.’ Lingua Franca May/June 1996, available at: http://linguafranca.mirror.theinfo.org/9605/sokal.html
  • Aby Warburg. Miroirs de faille, A Rome avec Giordano Bruno et Edouard Manet. Paris: Presses du réel/L’écarquillé, 2011, pp. 62, 64.

Studying the State through the Scandal: On the Epistemic Value of Transgression

A session led by Jana Vargovčíková

‘In olden days a glimpse of stocking was looked on as something shocking. Now, heaven knows, anything goes.’ (Cole Porter).

Far from being anomalies or mere accidents, transgressions are conditioned and given meaning by norms. Subsequently, norms repeatedly reaffirm their legitimacy and meaning in contrast to transgressions. What is considered as transgression and when transgression gains the potential of being turned into a scandal varies in time and space, as the quote suggests. That is why, given the imbrication of norms and transgressions, social scientists and philosophers have turned to cases of transgression in order to understand order, social norms and institutions, as well as to comprehend the nature of the distinction between the two (e.g. Foucault, Becker, Hughes, Goffman). Leaving normative preconceptions aside, then, a sociologist or political scientist can learn from an anthropologist and treat transgressions in the political realm as indicators of the (symbolic, but not exclusively so) structure of the state. Political scandals as narratives of events labelled as transgressive represent precisely such means of enquiry into how a political body organizes the limits of its norms (De Blic & Lemieux) and into how citizens relate to the political order (Gupta).

Readings:

  • Damien de Blic & Cyril Lemieux. ‘Le scandale comme épreuve.’ Politix 71 (3): 9–38, 2005.
  • Akhil Gupta. ‘Blurred Boundaries: The Discourse of Corruption, the Culture of Politics, and the Imagined State.’ American Ethnologist 22 (2): 375–402, 1995.
  • Chris Jenkins. ‘Transgression: The Concept.’ Architectural Design 83 (6): 20, 2013.