Perceptions and politics of wild boar management in Central Italy

Research Project: Bewildering Boar

Contact: giovanna.capponi(@)cefres.cz

Giovanna is trained as a social anthropologist with a particular interest in human-environment relation, human-animal studies, cultural and historical ecology and ‘natureculture’. During her PhD at the University of Roehampton (London), she conducted an extensive multi-sited fieldwork looking at animal sacrificial practices and perception of the environment in Afro-Brazilian Candomblé, developing her own perspectives in the fields of anthropology of ritual, material culture and human-animal studies. She worked within the AHRC-funded “Cultural and Scientific Perception of Human Chicken Interaction” interdisciplinary project, which brought together researchers in different fields to study the significance of fowls in human cultures through history and in the present days.

At CEFRES she is starting a second fieldwork within the TANDEM “Bewildering Boar” project, focusing on the management of wild boars in the Central Appenine in Italy.

Project: Perceptions and politics of wild boar management in Central Italy

This project aims at drawing perspectives on human-environment relations and on the sociology of science, especially in how ‘scientific’ notions regarding the environment intertwine and are constructed together with cultural practices and discourses. In particular, it will focus on the management of wild boars and wild fauna in National Parks in Central Italy (Parco Nazionale delle Foreste Casentinesi and Parco Nazionale dei Monti Sibillini) and in the surrounding rural areas.  By analysing the conflicts between local farmers, hunting associations, forestry managers, conservationsist and ecologists, this research is meant to provide an Italian ethnographic study on the entanglements between ‘nature’ and society in Europe within the TANDEM Bewildering Boar project.

CV

Education

2018: PhD in Social Anthropology (University of Roehampton)

2013: MA in Cultural Anthropology and Ethnology (Università di Bologna)

2011: MA in Migration and Diaspora Studies (SOAS)

2009: BA in Anthropological Sciences (Università di Bologna)

Awards

2017: Radcliffe Brown Trust Fund / Sutasome Award – Royal Anthropological Institute (London)

2014: RAI Horniman Museum Collecting Initiative – Royal Anthropological Institute, Horniman Museum and Gardens (London)

Publications

Peer reviewed chapters and papers

• in preparation – 2020 Chaos in the Street, Order in the Kitchen:Practices of Consumption and Redistribution Amongst Squatters in London. in Food, Culture & Society, Eds. K. Graf & E. Mescoli
• 2019 The garden and the market: human-environment relations and collective imaginary in Afro-Brazilian Candomblé between Italy and Brazil,in Latin American Religions and Religiosities, Studia Religiologica, Eds. J. Bahia & R. Siuda-Ambroziak. Jagiellonian University of Krakow: Krakow
• 2019 Sobre a importância das palavras: breve apologia do termo “sacrifício”, in Araújo P.C., Candomblé sem sangue. Appris Editora: Curitiba.
• 2018 Skipping, in The Global Encyclopedia of Informality vol. 2. A. Ledeneva UCL Press: London, pp. 41-44
• 2014 Chaos in the Street, Order in the Kitchen: Pratica gastro-politiche di consumo e ridistribuzione tra gli squatters di Londra, in Pop Food, il cibo dell’etnografia. Z. A. Franceschi & V. Peveri, Odoya Editore: Bologna, pp. 53-80

Selected conference papers

• 2017 Deuses ou ciborgues? Uma análise multiespécies do conceito de assentamento no candomblé, in Anais da VI Reunião de Antropologia da Ciência e Tecnologia. vol. 3, n. 3. USP: São Paulo
• 2015 “Eu me declaro”: diálogo sobre transformações, autodefinições e reivindicações políticas nos cultos afro brasileiros, In. II Simpósio Sudeste ABHR: Gênero e religião: Violência, fundamentalismos e política, PUC/SP: São Paulo, with Patrício Carneiro Araú

Piggers, Pig-Dogs, Feral Pigs, and Other Pig-Related Actors: More-than-human relations emerging through the hunt in Australia

Research Project: Bewildering Boar
Research Area 2: Norms and Transgressions

Contact: paul.keil[at]cefres.cz

Academia: https://mq.academia.edu/PaulKeil

Keil is trained in social anthropology, his research guided by theories that understand cognition, action, and culture as socio-ecological achievements emerging from organism-environment interactions. From 2007-2011, as part of an interdisciplinary cognitive science team, Keil conducted work on collaborative remembering with older couples, examining how memory is distributed across social and material relations. In 2010, Keil conducted ethnographic research on sheepdog herding competitions, examining how human and dog complemented the other, their respective species-specific capacities integrated into an interspecies distributed cognitive system.  Postgraduate research was a multispecies ethnography and social anthropology of human-elephant relationships in Assam, northeast India, fieldwork funded by the Prime Minister’s Australia-Asia Endeavour Award. The broad objective was to examine how people’s environments, worldviews, and practices emerged in coordination with the lives of elephants, and to conceptualise forms of human-elephant sociality beyond the oft-typified dynamic of conflict, competition, and domination. Keil was awarded his PhD from Macquarie University, Australia, and is also a honorary postdoctoral fellow at Macquarie.

PROJECT: Piggers, Pig-Dogs, Feral Pigs, and Other Pig-Related Actors: More-than-human relations emerging through the hunt in Australia

Working as part of the TANDEM research project Bewildering Boars, Keil is conducting an anthropological study of recreational pig-hunting with dogs in Australia. The project is entitled: Piggers, Pig-Dogs, Feral Pigs, and Other Pig-Related Actors: More-than-human relations emerging through the hunt in Australia. It will examine the interspecies relationships constituting pig-dogging culture, and the broader historical, social, and environmental factors structuring those relations. The project has three objectives. First, to critique the construction of pigs as feral, invasive and hence ‘killable’, and to explore the link between pig-hunting and the animal’s disruption of postcolonial, ecological projects. Second, an ethnography of the mutually affecting interactions of human, pig and dog in hunting-related activities; analysing, for example, how hunters read and coordinate with nonhuman agents, and how gender and class identity is enacted through this mode of interspecies engagement. Finally, working with epidemiologists, identify the socio-ecological conditions for zoonotic transmission in pig-hunts. Anthropology can inform disease management strategies and grasp how disease is reconfiguring human-dog-pig relations.

CV

Education

2017: PhD, Anthropology. Macquarie University
Thesis Title – Living in Elephant Worlds: Human-elephant relations on the fringe of forest and village in Assam, Northeast India

2010: Bachelor of Arts Honours, Anthropology. Macquarie University

2009: Bachelor of Arts, Psychology. Macquarie University

2001: Bachelor of Design Honours, Visual communication. University of Technology, Sydney

Publications

Selected articles in peer reviewed journals

• Keil, P.G. (2017). Unusual human-elephant encounters in North-East India. Journal of Religious and Political Practice, 3(3), 196-211
• Keil, P.G. (2015). Human-Sheepdog Distributed Cognitive Systems: An analysis of interspecies scaffolding at a sheepdog trial. Journal of Cognition and Culture, 15(5), 508-529
• Harris, C.B., Keil, P.G., Barnier, A. J., & Sutton, J. (2011). We Remember, We Forget: Collaborative Remembering in Older Couples. Discourse Processes, 46(4), 267-303
• Sutton, J., Harris, C.B., Keil, P.G., & Barnier, A. J. (2010). The psychology of memory, extended mind and socially distributed remembering. Phenomenology of Cognitive Science, 9(4), 521-560

Book Chapters

• Keil, P.G. (2016). Elephant-Human Dandi: How Humans and Elephants Move Through the Fringes of Forest and Village in Assam. In P. Locke & J. Buckingham (eds.), Rethinking Human-Elephant Relation in South Asia (pp. 197-223). New Delhi: Oxford University Press 

Book reviews

• Keil, P.G. (2016). Y. Musharbash & G. Henning Presterudstuen, 2014. Monster Anthropology in Australasia and Beyond. The Australian Journal of Anthropology, 27(3), 415-417.

 Online essays

• Keil. P. G. (2018, February). Death of a hungry god. SAPIENS, photo essay. Retrieved from: https://www.sapiens.org/culture/elephants-india-religion/
• Locke, P. & Keil, P.G. (2015, October). Multispecies methodologies and human-elephant relations. Engagement- A blog published by the Anthropology and Environment Society. Retrieved from: https://aesengagement.wordpress.com/ 2015/ 10/27/multispecies-methodologies-and-human-elephant-relations/
• Keil, P.G. & Downey, G. (2012, June). Man-Sheep-Dog. Interspecies social skills. Neuroanthropology, PLOS blogs. Retrieved from http://blogs.plos.org/neuroanthropology/2012/06/25/man-sheep-dog-inter-species-social-skills/

Selected Conference Presentations

• Locke, P. & Keil. P.G. (2018). Beyond the Disciplinary Silo- Human-Elephant Interactions and The Imperative for Interdisciplinary Collaboration. American Anthropological Association, San Jose, California
• Keil, P.G. (2018). Humans and elephants, co-creating worlds in Assam. Locating northeast India: Human mobility, resource flows, and spatial linkages. Tezpur University, Assam
• Keil, P.G. (2016). Hidden elephants and the problem of the wild in multispecies ethnography. Anthropological Society Conference, University of Sydney
• Keil, P.G. (2016). Colonising in the footsteps of elephants. School of Oriental and African Studies Elephant Conference, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore
• Keil, P.G. (2015). Uncanny human-elephant entanglements in Northeast India. Australian Anthropological Society Conference, University of Melbourne
• Keil, P.G. (2015). Feeding a living god. New Zealand Asian Studies Society Conference, Canterbury University

Culture, Urban Society, and Representation of Territories. The Architecture of Public Theaters in the Eastern Lands of the Habsburg Monarchy (1770-1812)

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

Contact: raluca.muresan@cefres.cz (from 1st September 2018)

My research seeks to understand the mechanisms behind the rise of public theater buildings in various towns in the Eastern lands of the Habsburg Monarchy between 1770 and 1812. It therefore looks into their architectural specificities and into their impact on the representation of the scales of urbanity of these towns. I use the geographical term “Eastern” that refers to the countries to the East of the Holy Roman Germanic Empire border: the Hungarian Kingdom, including the lands of Saint Stephen, and the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria. Continue reading Raluca Muresan: Research & CV →

National belonging, transnational localities and ideologies of language: Discursive practices at the Greek-Albanian borderlands

Research Area 3 – Objects, Traces, Mapping: Everyday Experience of Spaces

Contact: ekaterina.zheltova@cefres.cz (from 1st September 2018)

In my PhD project I explore how people living in the Albanian-Greek borderland region imagine and narrate their lives on the border, their relations with the nation-state(s), and their linguistic experience in this contested space.

The border region of the Albanian-Greek frontier is one of the vivid examples of a space existing in a dichotomy of controversial national narratives, different languages spoken sometimes by the closest neighbors, long-existing conflicts, often economic or political but usually interpreted in ethnic terms, that coexist with the “mixed” marriages, friendships and businesses. Continue reading Ekaterina Zheltova: Research & CV →

Rise of a Merchant Nation: An Ethnography of Vietnamese Bazaar Economy in Central Europe

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

Contact: felipe.fernandes@cefres.cz

As a third-year PhD student in Anthropology at Ehess and a Phd fellow at Cefres, I conduct a participant observation of Sapa marketplace, situated in the suburbs of Prague. My aim is to analyze traders’ ways of thinking, working and living in this market in an attempt to characterize its role and its importance to the Vietnamese migration in Central Eastern Europe. Therefore, my thesis studies the pathways of specific Vietnamese traders who came from North Vietnam in the 60s,70s and 80s, the rise of the merchant networks and the bazaar economy nowadays in Eurasia. In this sense, my research highlights the capacity of the bazaar economy (Geertz, 1979) to federate, considering several levels: countries, cities and urban territories. Continue reading Felipe Kaiser Fernandes: Research & CV →