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Neformální setkání s Claire Zalc

Neformální setkání s Claire Zalc o jejím výzkumu 

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Diskutující: Pavel Baloun (FHS UK/přidružený k CEFRESu), Florence Vychytil-Baudoux (EHESS/přidružený k CEFRESu), Francesca Rolandi (Masarykův ústav AV ČR)
Seminář bude veden Jérômem Heurtaux

Místo: Knihovna CEFRESu (Na Florenci 3, Praha 1)
Čas: 18. listopadu 2019, 14:00-16:00
Organizátor: CEFRES
Jazyk: angličtina

Claire Zalc (CNRS) je francouzská inovativní historička se specializací na imigrační otázky, židovská studia a ekonomické dějiny. Publikovala několik knih, z nichž některé byly přeloženy do angličtiny, například Microhistories of the Holocaust (dir., with Bruttmann), New York, Berghahn Books, 2016 a Quantitative Methods in the Humanities. An Introduction (with Claire Lemercier), Virginia Press, 2019. Je také Principal Investigator ERC Consolidator grantu LUBARTWORLD « Migration and Holocaust : Transnational Trajectories of Lubartow Jews Across the World (1920s-1950s) ».

State, Kinship, Care: Towards a relational Approach

Gellnerovský seminář

Přednáška Tatjany Thelen (Professor in the Department for Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Vienna) v rámci Gellnerovského semináře organizovaného Českou asociací pro sociální antropologii (CASA) spolu s Českou sociologickou společností a ve spolupráci s Katedrou obecné antropologie (FHS UK) a CEFRES.

Kdy: 14. listopadu 2019, 17:30
Kde: Knihovna CEFRESu (Na Florenci 3, Praha 1)
Jazyk: angličtina

Abstrakt (EN)

State, Kinship, Care: Towards a relational Approach

In October of this year (2019), the first two so-called ISIS-children arrived in Austria. Their mother was separated from her children, had disappeared during the war. Nothing is known about the father. Lacking birth certificates, citizenship was granted based on a DNA-test that established the kinship with their Austrian mother. The Kurdish self-government then gave them over to the Austrian state representatives at the Syrian border. Meanwhile, custody has been transferred to their maternal grandmother. This is only one recent example of the deep entanglement between kinship, state and care. Despite and constant co-production, kinship and state are still often dealt with conceptually separately, or even contrasting domains, which creates unhelpful blind spots. In my talk I will propose a relational approach that uses care as an entry road into ethnographically researching their intricate relationship. The aim is to show how kinship is not only influenced by the state but also shapes political structures. Ultimately, I argue that overcoming the stereotypical divide and myth of the “modern” family as functionless in politics, can be an important contribution of anthropology in public debates. 

Tatjana Thelen is Professor in the Department for Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Vienna. She has carried out fieldwork in Hungary, Romania, Serbia, and eastern Germany on questions of property reform, care, kinship and the state. The epistemic foundations and significance of boundary work between kinship and state formations increasingly form the focus of her research. This was at the heart of the interdisciplinary research group on Kinship and Politics, which she co-led at the Center for Interdisciplinary research in Bielefeld (ZIF). Recently, she co-edited Reconnecting State and Kinship (University of Pennsylvania Press 2018) and Stategraphy: Toward a Relational Anthropology of the State (Berghahn 2017).

Medicine, Value, and Knowledge Across the Species Line:  Contemporary U.S. Veterinary Medicine as Cultural Practice

Gellnerovský seminář

Přednáška Jane Desmond (University of Illinois) v rámci Gellnerovského semináře organizovaného Českou asociací pro sociální antropologii (CASA) spolu s Českou sociologickou společností  a ve spolupráci s Etnologickým ústavem AV ČR a CEFRES.

Kdy: 16. května 2019, 16:30
Kde: Etnologický ústav, konferenční místnost v 5. patře (Na Florenci 3, Praha 1)
Jazyk: angličtina

Abstrakt (EN)

Although the anthropological study of human medicine is a well developed field, research by anthropologists and sociologists on the structures and practice of medicine for animals around the world is a nascent field of inquiry.  Yet, whether caring for cherished pets or working to contain the spread of zoonoses, or monitoring a nation’s food supply, veterinarians play a central role in most countries.  In this presentation, based on preliminary fieldwork in two U.S. colleges of veterinary medicine, I map the relationships between client, patient, doctor, and technology, and the intersections of affect, species, money, scientific knowledge and cultural value when the patient is a dog… or a horse, or a cow, or even a snake. I conclude by raising questions about how the medical humanities and social sciences will have to expand to accommodate new notions of subjectivity, agency, narrativity, and ethnography in analyzing a more-than-human medicine.

Jane Desmond is Professor of Anthropology and of Gender and Women’s Studies, and Co-founder and Executive Director of the International Forum for U.S. Studies: a Center for the Transnational Study of the United States, at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, U.S.A.

Her primary areas of interest focus on issues of embodiment, display, and social identity, as well as transnational U.S. Studies. Her areas of expertise include performance studies, visual culture, the analysis of the U.S. in global perspectives, and the political economy of human/animal relations.  She is the Founding Resident Director of the international Summer Institute in Animal Studies at UIUC, and Founding Editor of the _Animal LIves_ Book Series at the University of Chicago Press.  In addition to academic publications, she has written about human-animal relations for a number of public venues such as CNN.com, The Washington Post.com, and the Huffington Post. The author or editor of five scholarly books,  she holds a Ph.D. in American Studies from Yale, and most recently published the monograph _Displaying Death and Animating Life:  Human-Animal Relations in Art, Science, and Everyday Life_ (University of Chicago Press, 2016).  Her current book project is called Medicine Across the Species Line:  Cultural Dimensions of Veterinary Medicine.

Čeští a jihoafričtí komunisté

Gellnerovský seminář
Profesor Tom Lodge (University of Limerick) v rámci Gellnerovského semináře organizovaného Českou asociací pro sociální antropologii (CASA) spolu s Českou sociologickou společností  a ve spolupráci s Etnologickým ústavem AV ČR a CEFRES.

Kdy: 14. května 2019, 16:30
Kde: Ústavu české literatury, konferenční místnost (Na Florenci 3, Praha 1)
Jazyk: angličtina

Abstrakt (EN)

Documented Encounters between South African and Czech communists were sporadic and accidental in the early history of both Communist parties. Many years later the pioneering South African trade unionist, Ray Alexander, recalled meeting Klement Gottwald at a clandestine training school in her native Latvia shortly before her migration to Cape Town in 1930.  The Czech crisis of 1939 prompted the resignation of a senior personality in the South African party.  Young South African Communists visited Prague just after the Second World War and were later active in the Communist-affiliated international student movement based in the Czech capital.  The Czech government maintained a diplomatic presence in South Africa until 1962, the last communist administration to so and Czech officials were urged by South African communists to support trade sanctions.  By the 1960s contact between the “fraternal” parties was more institutionalized.  At this stage, the Czech army was beginning to supply training to Communist recruits in the insurgent force led by Nelson Mandela, Umkhonto we Sizwe.  The South Africa Communist Party, in exile from 1965, held a key party meeting hosted by Czech communists in Prague that year.  For the next two decades the South African Party would be locally represented in Prague on the editorial board of the World Marxist Review. The South African Communists were divided internally by the events of the Prague Spring though in public they professed their support for “normalization”.  This lecture will explore the background to these contacts and encounters.  The Czech “people’s democracy” of the 1950s was a key source of inspiration for the development of the South African notion of a “national democratic” revolution.  Czech support for this programme in the 1960s and 1970s was both a source of confidence and fragility, though.  The lecture will consider South African-Czech connections and linkages against the backdrop of the broader strategic concerns that informed and shaped Soviet and East European support for the South African liberatory politics.

Tom Lodge is a professor of Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Limerick.

With a mother and father born respectively in Calcutta and Brno, Tom Lodge was educated in Nigeria, Borneo and Britain.  He has a D. Phil from York in Southern African Studies and he is a member of the Royal Irish Academy.  After working as a research assistant at the University of York’s Centre for Southern African Studies he began teaching in the Politics Department at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg in 1978. He remained at Wits University until 2005, leading its politics department through the 1990’s.  In 2005 he moved to the University of Limerick as Professor of Peace and Conflict Studies.  He visits South Africa two or three times a year and is a board member of the Electoral Institute, a Johannesburg-based NGO. He has published extensively on South African political history. His books include Nelson Mandela: A Critical Life (Oxford University Press, 2005) and Sharpeville: An Apartheid Massacre and its Consequences (Oxford University Press, 2017).  He has almost completed a book about the history of the South African Communist Party from its origins in the syndicalist politics of the white labour movement in South Africa in the 1900’s to its present-day development as a mass party.  He is about to begin a book commissioned by Routledge entitled “Political Corruption in Africa”.

Přírodní náboženství? Antropologie posvátných artefaktů a cyborgských bohů v afro-brazilských náboženstvích

Gellnerovský seminář

Přednáška Giovanny Capponi (CEFRES – FSV UK) v rámci Gellnerovského semináře organizovaného Českou asociací pro sociální antropologii (CASA) spolu s Českou sociologickou společností  a ve spolupráci s Etnologickým ústavem AV ČR a CEFRES.

Datum a čas: pondělí 1. dubna 2019, od 16:30
Místo: Knihovna CEFRES (Na Florenci 3, Praha 1)
Jazyk: angličtina

Abstrakt (EN)

Přírodní náboženství? Antropologie posvátných artefaktů a cyborgských bohů v afro-brazilských náboženstvích

Afro-Brazilian Candomblé, the worship of the West African deities which spread around Brazil as a consequence of the Atlantic Slave Trade, is often described by its followers and by the anthropologists who studied it as a “religion of nature”. Indeed, Candomblé deities (called orixás) are closely associated with natural elements in the landscape; but they are also associated with human temperaments and with different stages of life and matter. In the attempt to problematize and understand what kind of “nature” is implied in this context, I will analyse the sacred artefacts that constitute a central part of the ritual practice, the so called assentamentos.

The rules of fabrication of these mysterious factishes, using Latour’s neologism, are often surrounded by secrecy and sacredness as they constitute the physical “bodies” and “mouths” of the orixás where sacrifices and offerings are performed. Involving animal blood, vegetable substances, and other materials like wood, iron or copper in the making, the assentamentos are made by humans as a means of condensing and manipulating axé, the sacred force that is infused in natural elements. Trying to escape the colonial narrative that long described these practices as “fetishism”, I would argue that these artefacts can be understood as powerful “technological” devices and channels of communication between the visible and the invisible world. Moreover, these receptacles mirror both the deity and the heads of the novices who undergo the initiation ritual, which starts a lifelong bond between the orixá, the artefact, and the human.

Using Haraway’s metaphor of the cyborg, I analyse how these artefacts transcend and challenge the dichotomies of Western thought. Being it at the same time alive and inert, natural and technological, human and animal, infused with life force and mere vessel, the assentamento subverts these categories and sheds a light on the ways in which humans, gods, animals and elements of the landscape are made and perceived.

Spun Dry: Mobility, Morbidity, and Jurisdiction in Northern Australia

Gellnerovský seminář

Přednáška Daniela Fishera (UC Berkeley) v rámci Gellnerovského semináře organizovaného Českou asociací pro sociální antropologii (CASA) spolu s Českou sociologickou společností  a ve spolupráci s Etnologickým ústavem AV ČR a CEFRES.

Datum a čas: úterý 5. února 2019, od 16:30
Místo: Knihovna CEFRES (Na Florenci 3, Praha 1)
Jazyk: angličtina

Abstrakt (EN)

Spun Dry: Mobility, Morbidity, and Jurisdiction in Northern Australia

This paper pursues an ethnographic account of intra-Indigenous relations and jurisdictional contest in urban northern Australia. Its narrative explores the relationship between Aboriginal community policing and emergent forms and figures of urban mobility and morbidity in Darwin, capital of Australia’s Northern Territory. While Darwin’s Indigenous patrols have no police powers, they do have some authority and status vested in them by the traditional owners of the country on which they patrol. Their Aboriginal-directed efforts thus entail both an assertion of Indigenous jurisdiction, and an accompanying reflexivity about the substance and limits of its reach — limits informed by settler colonial oversight, by the diversity of Indigenous claims to urban space, and by poetic figures and mediatized narratives that trope the volatility of Aboriginal dispersal and displacement. The paper explores the ways patrols negotiate their authority and reckon its limits, extending a local poetics jurisdiction and movement to illuminate the new urban worlds they traverse. This provides ground for considering the mobility and multiplicity of law and the distribution of sovereign power at the margins of the settler colony.

Daniel Fisher is associate professor of anthropology at UC Berkeley. He is author of The Voice and its Doubles (Duke, 2016) and co-editor of Radio Fields: Anthropology and Wireless Sound in the 21stCentury (NYU, 2012). His work has appeared in American Ethnologist,Cultural Anthropology and collections including Aural Cultures and Keywords in Sound. He is currently completing a monograph on new Indigenous urban worlds in Australia’s Northern Territory, while pursuing a second project on the political life of Aboriginal musical celebrity.