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Research Projects

Bewildering Boar: Changing Cosmopolitics of the Hunt in Europe and Beyond

Project within the TANDEM program of The Czech Academy of Sciences (CAS), Charles University and CEFRES/CNRS based on the CEFRES Platform’s cooperation and endeavour to excellency in social and human sciences.

Eurasian wild pigs (Sus scrofa) feature regularly in European public discourse, for their numbers have been rising spectacularly across the continent. While in some parts of Europe this by now synanthropic species generates sympathy, in other contexts humans have declared war on wild boars for causing extensive damage to landscapes, agriculture, transportation networks and so on. In this context, we are asking how the Eurasian wild pig has featured in human lives, and vice versa, in dynamically changing socio-environmental contexts. Our search for answers will take two routes.

First, we will focus on the wild pig in its own right and its multiple relations with humans. Especially the relation of predation will be an important case study for our research. Studies of hunting in non-European contexts (e.g., Africa, Amazonia, Siberia) have led to numerous theoretical and methodological innovations in the field of social anthropology, from the exploration of hunter-gatherer societies nested in the paradigm of the natural sciences to the recent phenomenological return to animism as an analytical category. However, topics such as European hunting and game management have been largely excluded from the corresponding bodies of literature, something that we would like to redress.

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CEFRES Team

Luděk Brož: Research & CV

Bewildering Boar: Changing Cosmopolitics of Hunt in Europe and Beyond

Research project: Bewildering boars

Contact: broz@eu.cas.cz

Luděk Brož is a researcher at the Institute of Ethnology, Czech Academy of Sciences. From February 2018, he is a partner in CEFRES Platform’s TANDEM program with a project entitled “Bewildering Boar: Changing Cosmopolitics of Hunt in Europe and Beyond”. After his undergraduate studies in ethnology at the Charles University in Prague, he obtained MPhil and PhD degrees in social anthropology at the University of Cambridge and held a postdoctoral position at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle.

In geographical terms, Luděk’s area of expertise and long-term interest has been Siberia, namely the Republic of Altai, where he has conducted extensive ethnographic fieldwork. He is fascinated by the predicament of living in – and off – land that is animated by numerous non-human agencies, but is simultaneously home to world-famous archaeological heritage and a fallout zone for second stages of Baikonur rockets. Drawing on science and technology studies, Ludek has traced how the contested negative externalities of both archaeological work and the space industry feature in local explanatory economy and identity politics.

Luděk has dedicated a great deal of ethnographic attention to what he, following Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s work, has coined “pastoral perspectivism” – that is, the realisation that in the Altaian context, the difference between hunting and herding is a matter of perspective, as wild animals are seen by native herders and hunters as the cattle of local spirit masters. In further exploring the delicate issues of hunting ethics, Luděk has focused on Altaian concepts of personhood and aetiology of death, which helped him in understanding why locals consider archaeological excavations to be a threat and brought him to an examination of the thorny issue of suicide in Altai. Realising and seeking to fill the knowledge gap in current scholarship, Luděk has been active in the ongoing establishment of anthropology of suicide as an integral part of the emerging field of critical suicidology.

CV

Education

2008   PhD in Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge, UK

2003   MPhil in Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge, UK

2002   MA in Ethnology, Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic

Selected publications

Peer-reviewed journal articles
  • Forthcoming ‘Ghost and the Other: Dangerous Commensalities and Twisted Becomings.’ Terrain. Anthropologie & sciences humaines 69
  • 2015 ‘Siberian Automobility Boom: From the Joy of Destination to the Joy of Driving There.’ Mobilities 10(4): 552-570. with Joachim Otto Habeck
  • 2015 ‘Introduction: Experience and Emotion in Northern Mobilities.’ Mobilities 10(4): 511-517. with Joachim Otto Habeck
  • 2015 ‘Přísliby a úskalí symetrie: sociální vědy v zemi za zrcadlem.’ Cargo – journal of socio-cultural anthropology 1,2: 5-33. with Tereza Stöckelová. (The Promises and Difficulties of Symmetry: Through the Looking-Glass and What the Social Sciences Found There.)
  • 2012 ‘When Good Luck is Bad Fortune: Between too Little and too Much Hunting Success in Siberia.’ Social Analysis – The International Journal of Social and Cultural Practice 56 (1-2): 73-89. with Rane Willerslev
  • 2009 ‘Substance, Conduct and History: “Altaian-ness” in the 21 Century’. Sibirica: Journal of Siberian Studies 8 (2): 43-70.
  • 2007  ‘Pastoral Perspectivism: A View from Altai’. Inner Asia (special issue – Perspectivism) 9 (2): 291-310.
Edited volumes
  • 2015 Suicide and Agency: Anthropological perspectives on self-destruction, personhood and power. Farnham: Ashgate. Edited with Daniel Münster.

Peer-reviewed chapters in edited volumes

  • 2015 The anthropology of suicide: Ethnography and the tension of agency. In Suicide and Agency: Anthropological perspectives on self-destruction, personhood and power. Eds L. Broz & D. Münster. Farnham: Ashgate, pp. 3-23, with Daniel Münster.
  • 2015 Four Funerals and a Wedding: Suicide, Sacrifice and (non-)Human Agency in a Siberian Village. In Suicide and Agency: Anthropological perspectives on self-destruction, personhood and power. Eds L. Broz & D. Münster. Farnham: Ashgate, pp. 85-102.
  • 2015 Vom Himmel gefallen: Auf dem Weg zu einer symmetrischen Anthropologie der Raumfahrtindustrie. In Lost in Things: Fragen an die Welt des Materiellen, ihre Funktionen und Bedeutungen. Eds P. W. Stockhammer & H. P. Hahn. Münster: Waxmann, pp. 81-103.
  • 2010 ‘Spirits, Genes and Walt Disney’s Deer: creativity in identity and archaeology disputes (Altai, Siberia)’. In The Archaeological Encounter: Anthropological Perspectives. Eds P. Fortis & I. Praet. St Andrews: CAS, pp. 263-297.
  • 2009 ‘Conversion to Religion? Negotiating Continuity and Discontinuity in Contemporary Altai’. In Conversion After Socialism: Disruptions, Modernities and the Technologies of Faith. Ed. M. Pelkmans. Oxford: Berghahn Books, pp. 17-37.

Reviews, reports, academic debates and interviews

  • 2015 ‘Symetrie je často stranická: rozhovor se Zdeňkem Konopáskem’ Cargo – journal of socio-cultural anthropology 1,2: 117-132. with Tereza Stöckelová. (Symmetry is Often Partial: An Interview with Zdenek Konopasek.)
  • 2015  ‘Druhý pohled na myslící lesy Eduardo Kohna’ Cargo – journal of socio-cultural anthropology 1,2: 158-161. (A Second Look at Eduardo Kohn’s thinking forests.)
  • 2015 ‘I, Too, Have a Dream … About Suicidology.’ Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 4 (7): 27-31.
  • 2014 ‘Morten A. Pedersen: Not Quite Shamans: Spirit Worlds and Political Lives in Northern Mongolia.’ Sociologický časopis / Czech Sociological Review 50 (2): 317-319.
  • 2010 ‘Antropologie Příbuzenství. Příbuzenství, manželství a rodina v kulturně antropologické perspektivě. Jaroslav Skupnik.’ Cargo – journal of socio-cultural anthropology 1,2: 195-8.
CEFRES Team

Marianna Szczygielska: Research & CV

Wild Pigs and Proud Elephants: Engendering Wildlife in Central Eastern Europe

Research Project: Bewildering Boar

Contact: szczygielska@cefres.cz

Marianna Szczygielska holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Gender Studies from the Central European University. She is a member of the Environmental Arts and Humanities Initiative (Central European University) and an affiliated researcher of “The Seed Box: Environmental Humanities Collaboratory” (Linköping University). She also co-chairs a strand at GEXcel International Collegium for Advanced Transdisciplinary Gender Studies. With a background in philosophy her research interests include environmental humanities, animal studies, queer theory, critical race studies, and feminist science and technology studies.

Marianna’s project is organized around two stages, each focused on a particular “wild species” in its various relations to wildlife management and further politics enacted in Europe through the practices of hunting and zookeeping. Starting with a comparative analysis of human-wild boar interspecies relations in Poland and the Czech Republic, and leading towards a study of the history and present politics of keeping elephants in captivity in Central Eastern Europe (CEE), this interdisciplinary project aims at problematizing the category of wilderness and wildlife conservation in a specific geographic setting of CEE. In this sense, through a comparison between endemic and exotic species Europe will be brought into perspective in its complex relations to global environmental politics, as well as issues of nationalism, imperialism, post-colonialism and post-socialism.

CV

Education

2011–2017: Ph.D. in Comparative Gender Studies, graduated with Distinction; Central European University, Budapest, Hungary. Thesis title: Queer(ing) Naturecultures. The Study of Zoo Animals. Supervisor: Hadley Z. Renkin.

2009–2010: M.A. in Gender Studies, graduated with Distinction; Central European University, Budapest, Hungary. Thesis title: Becoming (with) Animal Others: Is the Anthropological Machine Set up in the Zoo?

2004–2009: M.A. in Philosophy, graduated with Distinction; Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań, Poland. Thesis title: Ethics of Responsibility in the Face of Environmental Risks

Selected Publications

Peer Reviewed Journal articles
  • “Jedząc kebaba… Zwierzęta i zwierzęcość a islamofobia,” [“Eating a kebab… Animals/Animality and Islamophobia.”] Praktyka Teoretyczna, 4(26)/2017: 238-248.
  • “Hyenas and Hormones: Transpecies Encounters and the Traffic in HumAnimals,” in: Angelaki: Journal of Theoretical Humanities, Vol. 22 (2), April 2017: 61-84.
  • “Animals Off Display,” UnderCurrents: Journal of Critical Environmental Studies, Special issue “From Queer/Nature to Queer Ecologies: Celebrating twenty years of scholarship and creativity,” Vol.19/2015.
  • “Posthumanizm: dzień po rewolucji,” Czas Kultury 2015/1 (184), pp. 140-147.
  • “Transbiological Re-imaginings of the Modern Self and the Nonhuman: Zoo Animals as Transbiological Entities,” Identities: Journal for Politics, Gender and Culture, Vol. 10/2014.
  • “Technologically Assisted Life. Between Biopolitics and Thanatopolitics,” Annali di studi religiosi, Vol. 12/2011, Bologna.
Book Chapters in Edited Collections
  • (Forthcoming) “Pandas and the Reproduction of Race and Sexuality in the Zoo,” (eds.) McDonald, T. and Vandersommers, D., Zoo Studies and a New Humanities, McGill University Press, 2019.
  • “Zoos” (ed.) Salazar Parreñas, J., Gender: Animals Macmillan Interdisciplinary Handbooks. Farmington Hills: Macmillan Reference USA, 2017: pp. 247-262.
  • “The heroines of sustainable development. Gender and sustainable development in  a critical perspective”, in Proceedings from the international conference Equality, Growth & Sustainability. Do they mix?, (ed.) A. Fogelberg Eriksson, Linköping University, 2010:135-42.
Editorials
  • (In prep.) Cielemecka O. and Szczygielska, M. (eds.), “Plantarium: Human-Vegetal Ecologies.” Special issue of Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, and Technoscience, Fall 2019.
  • Steinbock, E., Szczygielska, M. & Wagner, A. (eds.), “Thinking Linking,” Special issue on “Tranimacies: Intimate Links between Affect, Animals, and Trans* Studies”; Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, Vol. 22(2), April 2017: 1-10.
  • Nitis, M., Szczygielska, M., & Stark, W. (eds.), “The Conditions of Praxis: Theory and Practice in Activism and Academia,” Graduate Journal of Social Science, Vol. 10 (3), September 2013.
Book reviews
  • Szczygielska, M., “Viewing the World Through the American Zoo,” a review of The Animal Game. Searching for Wildness at the American Zoo. by Daniel E. Bender in: Diplomatic History. Oxford University Press, September 2018, Vol. 42(4): 740–743.
  • “The Bittersweet Dimensions of Racial Mattering” a review of Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human. by Alexander G. Weheliye in Parallax, November 2015, Vol. 21(3).
  • “Cloning Wild Life. Zoos, Captivity, and the Future of Endangered Animals.” by Carrie Friese in Pulse: A History, Sociology, & Philosophy of Science Journal, September 2014, Vol. 2(1).
  • “The Queer Art of Failure.” by Judith Jack Halberstam in Graduate Journal of Social Science, July 2012, Vol. 9(2).
Outreach
CEFRES Team

Aníbal Arregui: Research & CV

Animating the Wild Pig: Bows and Arrows in European Ecopolitics

Research Project: Bewildering Boar

Contact: anibal.arregui@cefres.cz

His thematic focus is on Amazonian ethnology and the bodily responses to environmental, technological and economic transformations. Anibal has since 2006 conducted fieldwork in the lower Amazon region in ribeirinho and quilombola communities. In the frame of the “Bewildering Boar” project, he is currently opening a second field in Spain, where he follows the ongoing reconfigurations of “urban” wild boars- humans relationality.

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CEFRES Team

Thomas Clément Mercier: Research and CV

Derrida’s Europes: Deconstruction, Marxism, Democracy

Research Area 1: Displacements, “Dépaysements” and Discrepancies: People, Knowledge and Practices

Research project :  Archives and Interculturality 

Contact: thomas.mercier@cefres.cz

Thomas Clément Mercier was awarded a Doctor of Philosophy degree in Political Theory by King’s College London (War Studies Department) in May 2017. He specializes in the study of violence, democratic legitimacy, and political resistance, at the intersection between international political theory and deconstruction. His research interests include critical international studies, postcolonial and decolonial thought, deconstructive biopolitics, gender studies and queer theory, animal and environmental ethics.

His research at CEFRES deals with Jacques Derrida’s relationship to Central and Eastern Europe, with a focus on his travels to the so-called ‘Eastern Bloc’ before and after the end of the Cold War. Special attention is given to Derrida’s arrest in Prague in 1981 as he was participating in clandestine seminars in support of Czechoslovak dissidents—intellectuals, philosophers and professors—in the context of his political-institutional engagements as Vice President of the Jan Hus Association. 

Thomas Clément Mercier’s research heavily relies on archival documents, letters and unpublished seminars, and blends biographical, historical, and political-theoretical analyses in order to elucidate a series of problems concerning the nature of Derrida’s political-institutional engagements:

  1. The articulation between the deconstruction of philosophy and the practical transformation of socio-political institutions, starting with Derrida’s critique of the institution of philosophy and its potential complicity with political or ideological forces;
  2. Derrida’s critical engagements with Marxist thought and politics, such as displayed by numerous unpublished seminars, notes, and personal letters from the 1960s and 1970s. These unpublished notes prefigure Specters of Marx (1993), wherein Derrida reassessed Marxism as an unavoidable part of the European heritage and promise, while opposing the narrative presenting neoliberalism as the homogeneous teleological destiny of ‘Europe’ in the wake of Marx’s supposed ‘death’. In doing so, Derrida aimed to challenge the Cold War narrative of a strict opposition between Western and Eastern Europe, between liberal and Marxist traditions;
  3. Derrida’s deconstruction of the idea of Europe — or, rather, ‘Europes’ — understood both as a philosophical concept and as a political notion. In several pre- and post-1989 texts, Derrida questioned the homogeneity and unity of the European heritage, and pluralised its legacies in view of offering a deconstructive analysis of democracy-to-come — an idea of Europe more open to its own heterogeneity.

Through the analysis of archival materials, Thomas Clément Mercier wishes to shed new light on the relationship between deconstruction, democratic theory, and Marxist thought, and to emphasise the ethical-political implications of Derrida’s thought as they appear as early as the 1970s.

Three articles on the topic have been published, and four others are currently under review. A monograph is also in preparation.

CV

Education

2017: PhD — King’s College, London (War Studies Dpt.). Thesis title: ‘The Violence of Legitimacy: Democracy, Power, Antagonism’, under the supervision of Professor Vivienne Jabri and Professor Mervyn Frost.

2007: Master’s Degree – Sciences-Po Paris, Joint degree (double Master’s) in International Relations (Professional Degree) and Political Science (Research Degree). 

2005: Master’s Degree – Université Paris-III (Sorbonne Nouvelle), Literature and Linguistics.

Selected publications

Edited volumes
Book chapter
  • ‘Resisting Legitimacy’, in Contending Legitimacy in World Politics: The State, Civil Society and the International Sphere in the Twenty-First Century, edited by Bronwyn Winter and Lucia Sorbera (London and New York: Routledge, 2017).
Articles
Published translations
Reviews
CEFRES Team

CEFRES Team of Researchers 2017-2018

István Pál Ádám

Contact: istvan.adam@cefres.cz

is from January 2016 until December 2017 a post-doctoral researcher at CEFRES and at the Faculty of Humanities of Charles University, benefitting from the support of the Charles University in Prague. His research project is entitled The Spatial Control of Central European Concierges and contributes to CEFRES research area 3.

Chiara Mengozzi

Contact: chiara.mengozzi@cefres.cz

is from January 2016 until December 2017 a post-doctoral researcher at CEFRES and at the Faculty of Arts of Charles University, benefitting from the support of the Charles University in Prague. From January 2018 she is a CEFRES associated researcher. Her research project is entitled Animal Matters. Challenging the Anthropological Difference and Literary Norms and contributes to CEFRES’s research area 2.