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.

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”.