The second session of the Epistemological seminar organized by CEFRES (Jérôme Heurtaux) and the Institute for International studies, Faculty of Social Sciences, Charles University (IMS FSV UK) (Tomáš Weiss and Mitchell Young) will be hosted by:
Pascal Schneider (PhD student at Paris-Sorbonne University, associated to CEFRES), who will introduce
The notion of “domination” under the Third Reich, taking the example of the annexed territories.
When: 16-18 September 2019
Where: Vila Lanna (V Sadech 1, Prague 6)
Organizers: Prague Forum for Romani Histories at the Institute of Contemporary History (Czech Academy of Sciences), Seminar on Romani Studies (Department of Central European Studies, Faculty of Arts, Charles University in Prague), Faculty of Social Sciences and Economics at University of Valle, Colombia, The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, CEFRES in Prague
Financial support: Strategy 21AV of the Czech Academy of Sciences, CEFRES in Prague and Bader Philanthropies
Language: English (simultaneous translation into Czech is offered for the whole of the conference program)
The conference will bring together scholars from across a variety of disciplines to present empirically grounded accounts of the multiple dimensions of Romani mobilities since 1945 in order to analyse connections between various forms of past mobilities and migrations and the most recent movements of various Romani groupings. The conference will be held in Prague on September 16-18, 2019.
Over the past decade, a growing number of research projects, publications, and media have focused on Romani migrations and mobilities. However, most of these studies have only rarely combined the study of historical continuities and social trajectories shaping the present-day migratory movements. Anthropological and sociological accounts have documented contemporary strategies of Romani migrants, the production of legal classifications, and explored the politics shaping Romani mobilities. Additionally, the trope of “nomadism” has continued to inform the discussions as a foundational concept (often as a simplified “straw man”) that researchers embrace or oppose to explain their arguments. We invite researchers to interrogate the utility and limitations of this binary and to move beyond it through conceptually innovative analyses of movement, circulation, migration and the concomitant social and existential mobilities they imply in the context of the post-World War II era, bearing in mind that a large part of local Romani communities have been part of the European sedentary population.
The conference also aims to contribute to the incipient field of comparative studies of Romani mobilities with a focus on the second half of 20th century and from intersectional perspectives. Whereas recent research has documented the suffering and persecution of Romani groups during World War Two, post-war developments have not received the same measure of attention. These include, for instance, Romani experiences of returning to destroyed homes, government attempts to resettle and disperse Romani populations by force, labor and other internal migrations in search of better lives enchanted by the opportunities available in more industrialised cities, or navigating through ‘compensation schemes’ introduced by various state and international agencies.
Many members of previously persecuted minorities, including Roma, hoped for a better future in the context of massive post-war projects to restructure European states. In Central, Eastern and South-Eastern Europe most of the local Roma aspired – together with others – to greater social mobility and full membership through socialist citizenship. Socialist projects to reach the ‘greater common good’ and societal equality, however, also entailed forced displacements and new regimes of disciplining the Romani bodies to cultivate working-class citizens out of Romani/Gypsy groupings. On the other hand, post-war aspirations and trajectories of (social) mobility of the Roma in the ‘West’ remain largely unexplored, as well as the participation of Roma in movements and navigations across the East-West divide (and beyond). Similarly, relatively few studies explore the social mobility of Roma linked with gendered changes and (re)negotiation of inter-community relations, as well as other mechanisms and dispositifs along which members of Romani communities renegotiated their (stigmatized) ‘Gypsyness’ in post-war times.
Thus, we invite various contributions to explore a wide range of mobilities and different intersections and/or entanglements between often contradictory developments, which can be understood as a condition for mobility, including physical movement and a change in social position. Additionally, the conference organisers welcome empirical and theoretical discussions of Romani mobilities as oscillating between modes of dispersal and containment, between forced mobilities and efforts to carve out autonomous movements and spaces.
Conference themes and areas of interest
The conference aims to bring together various empirically grounded and historically informed studies exploring different kinds of mobility and immobility in Europe and beyond. Locating these mobilities in the broader political, social, historical and cultural contexts and forces, contributors are invited to reflect on both voluntary and forced migration, patterns of seasonal mobility, and various forms of mobility (e.g. existential, physical, social) as a reaction to oppressive conditions as well as newly opened possibilities. We welcome in particular proposals that focus on one or more of the following areas:
The conference will include a panel highlighting research based on the archival holdings of the International Tracing Service (ITS). The ITS collections include more than 35 million multi-page Holocaust-era documents relating to the fates of more than 17 million people who were subject to incarceration, forced labor, and displacement during and after World War II. The ITS is located and accessible for research in Bad Arolsen, Germany, as well as in digital copy at seven other locations around the world, including the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC. The Archive included significant holdings on Romani victims and survivors, as well as documentation of Romani interactions with refugee resettlement agencies and compensation schemes. Proposals that feature ITS-based research are particularly welcome. As additional conference program a public session will be organized during which experts working on the ITS collections will introduce the research tools available to the interested public and assist Romani participants and visitors in searching for the documentation on their ancestors.
14:30 Opening of the conference
Helena Sadílková (Charles University) & Jan Grill (University of Valle): Introducing Trajectories of Romani Mobilities
15:00-17:00 Panel I
Displacement, Survival, and Migration in the Aftermath of World War II and the Holocaust: Romani Trajectories in the Arolsen Archives
Elizabeth Anthony, Visiting Scholar Programs, Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum
Using the Records of the International Tracing Service Digital Archive for Scholarly Research on Roma Victims of the Nazis
Ari Joskowicz, Vanderbilt University and 2013-14 Diane and Howard Wohl Fellow (USHMM)
Romani Refugees between National and International Migration Regimes (1945-1960)
Chair: Jo-Ellyn Decker, Holocaust Survivor and Victims Research Center, U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum
Discussant: Kateřina Čapková, Institute for Contemporary History, Czech Academy of Sciences
17 September 2019
9:30-11:00 Panel II
Manipulation of „Gypsy Nomadism“ in Post-War Europe
Huub van Baar, Institute of Political Science, Justus-Liebig University Giessen, Amsterdam Centre for Globalisation Studies, University of Amsterdam
The Ambiguous Politics of Protection in Post-War Europe: Irregularizing Citizenship of Roma through Mobile Governmentalities
Stefánia Toma – László Fosztó, Romanian Institute for Research on National Minorities in Cluj-Napoca
The mobility of the Roma as Resource and/or Obstacle for Social Integration in Romania
Filip Pospíšil, City University of New York, Anthropology Department of John Jay College of Criminal Justice
Nomads from the Neighboring Village – The Intrastate Mobility of the Unwanted
Chair: Yasar Abu Ghosh, Department of Anthropology, Faculty of Humanities Charles University
Discussant: Ari Joskowicz
11:00-11:30 Coffee break
11:30-13:00 Panel III
Negotiating Intrastate Policies During Socialism
Ana Chiritoiu, Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology, Central European University
‘Capable’, ‘Free’, and ‘Universal’: The Circulation of Roma Between Idioms of Resistance and Difference. A Case-Study from Southern Romania
Markéta Hajská, Seminar for Romani Studies, Department for Central European Studies, Faculty of Arts, Charles University
The Assimilation Policies of 1950s Czechoslovakia Towards Itinerant Groups as Viewed by Romani Witnesses: The Case of Žatec and Louny
Jan Ort, Seminar for Romani Studies, Department for Central European Studies, Faculty of Arts, Charles University
The Policy of “Controlled Dispersal” of the Roma in the 1960s in the Former Czechoslovakia. A Case Study of Humenné District
Chair: Helena Sadílková
Discussant: László Fosztó
13:00-14:00 Lunch
14:00-15:30 Panel IV
Challenging Borders and Closed Concepts
Licia Porcedda, École des hautes études en sciences sociales
The Trajectory of Croatian Roma in 1940s and 1950s Italy. Citizenship, Social Control and Inclusion Through the History of Rosa Raidich
Sabrina Steindl-Kopf – Sanda Üllen, Institute of Modern and Contemporary History at the Austrian Academy of Sciences
Intersections of Participatory Action and Migration Biographies of Romani Migrants in Vienna
Dušan Slačka, Museum of Romani Culture
Effects of Political and Administrational Situation on Territorial Movement and Life of the Roma in Moravian-Slovak Borderlands – Example of Districts of Hodonín and Senica till 1970s
Chair: Ilsen About, National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) in Paris
Discussant: Eszter Varsa, Leibniz Institute for East and Southeast European Studies, Regensburg
15:30-16:00 Coffee break
16:00-17:30 Discussion/Forum
Interrogating Analytical Categories: On Pitfalls and Hopefulness in the Emerging Research Field (‘Mobilities’, ‘Migrations’, ‘Trajectories’ and Beyond)
Introductory remarks by: Jan Grill (University of Valle), Yasar Abu Ghosh (Charles University), Helena Sadílková, (Charles University), Martin Fotta, Goethe University, Frankfurt
Chair: Krista Hegburg, U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum
18 September 2019
9:30-11:30 Panel V
Beyond the Binary of Nomadism and Settlement
Kamila Fiałkowska – Michał P. Garapich – Elżbieta Mirga-Wójtowicz, Centre of Migration Research, University of Warsaw
Migration Regimes, Kinship and Ethnic Boundaries Impact on Migration Strategies and Practices: Case Study of Roma Migrants from Poland to the UK
Judit Durst (University College London) – Zsanna Nyírő (Corvinus University of Budapest)
Interrupted Continuity: The Role of Kinship in Migration among (Trans)nationally Mobile Roma Factory Workers from Rural Hungary at the Global Assembly Line
Daniel Škobla (Slovak Academy of Sciences – Institute of Ethnology and Social Anhtropology) – Mario Rodriguéz Polo (Palacký University in Olomouc – Department of Sociology, Andragogy and Cultural Anthropology)
Escaping Ethnic Traps. Cyclical Migration from Slovakia to Austria as a Way to Escape Poverty and Oppression
Chair: Jan Grill
Discussant: Huub van Baar
Gellner Seminar
Jane Desmond ( University of Illinois ) will give a lecture within the Gellner seminar organized by the Czech Association for Social Anthropology (CASA– Česká Asociace pro Sociální Antropologii), the Czech Society of Sociology, in cooperation with the Institute of Ethnology of the Czech Academy of Sciences and CEFRES.
When: 16 May 2019, 4:30 pm
Where: Institute of Ethnology, conference room, 5th floor (Na Florenci 3, Prague 1)
Language: English
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.
Giovanna Capponi (CEFRES/FSV UK) will give a lecture within the Gellner seminar organized by the Czech Association for Social Anthropology (CASA– Česká Asociace pro Sociální Antropologii), the Czech Society of Sociology, in cooperation with the Institute of Ethnology of the Czech Academy of Sciences and CEFRES.
When: 1st April 2019, at 4:30 pm
Where: CEFRES Library (Na Florenci 3, Prague 1)
Language: English
A religion of nature? Anthropology of sacred artefacts and cyborg gods in Afro-Brazilian religions
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.
Daniel Fisher (UC Berkeley) will give a lecture within the Gellner seminar organized by the Czech Association for Social Anthropology (CASA– Česká Asociace pro Sociální Antropologii), the Czech Society of Sociology, in cooperation with the Institute of Ethnology of the Czech Academy of Sciences and CEFRES.
When: 5th February 2019, at 4:30 pm
Where: CEFRES Library (Na Florenci 3, Prague 1)
Language: English
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.
Nafsika Papacharalampous (School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, UK) will give a lecture within the Gellner seminar organized by the Czech Association for Social Anthropology (CASA– Česká Asociace pro Sociální Antropologii), the Czech Society of Sociology, in cooperation with the Institute of Ethnology of the Czech Academy of Sciences and CEFRES.
When: 19 November, at 5 pm
Where: CEFRES Library (Na Florenci 3, Prague 1)
Language: English
Cooking inner darkness and making kin: Behind the staff only doors
This paper follows the lives of the chefs and cooks within the boundaries of Athenian restaurant kitchens, offering an ethnographic sense of this professional context and environment of teamwork. Bringing Turner (1967a, 1995) and Goffman’s (1956) works together, this paper presents the often harsh realities of the cooks’ work settings and the chef’s behaviours.
The first part of the paper presents the division between the front and back of house in restaurants, engaging with Goffman’s work (1956) and situated in ethnographic narratives reveals the daily workings and lives of cooks. The second part of the paper observes and analyses the relationships of the cooks and the chef in the restaurant kitchen. Using Turner’s work on liminality (1967a, 1995) and Carsten (1995)’s work on kinship it explores the humiliation and abuse cooks experience from their chef, and the creation of communitas, and new formations and definitions of kinship. Within restaurant kitchens in Athens-in-crisis, the notion of teamwork comes to the fore and reveals how bonds are formed in a high-pressured environment.
References
Carsten, J., 1995. The Substance of Kinship and the Heat of the Hearth: Feeding, Personhood, and Relatedness among Malays in Pulau Langkawi. Am. Ethnol. 22, 223–241.
Goffman, E., 1956. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh.
Turner, V., 1995. The Ritual Process: Structure and anti-structure. Transaction Publishers.
Turner, V., 1967. The Forest of Symbols, Aspects of Ndembu Ritual. Cornell University Press, Ithaca and London.
Nafsika is currently a PhD candidate in Anthropology at the School of Oriental and African Studies. She is writing her dissertation on Greek traditional foods and markets, focusing on national identity, memory, terroir and heritage. Nafsika has a Master’s Degree in Anthropology of Food from SOAS and an MBA from the Athens University of Economics and Business. She has previously written a weekly column investigating the notion of Real Food for the London-based online food market Love Your Larder and has recently started cooking professionally for pop-up-restaurants in London. Nafsika is also the Recipe Editor for the SOAS Recipe Book and a food blogger at www.nafsikacooks.com, where she indulges her passion for both cooking and writing. She loves food history and has just started collecting old cookery books.
