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

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

Abstract

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.

A religion of nature? Anthropology of sacred artefacts and cyborg gods in Afro-Brazilian religions

Gellner Seminar

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

Abstract

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.

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

Gellner Seminar

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

Abstract
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.

Cooking Inner Darkness and Making Kin: Behind the staff only doors

Gellner Seminar

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

Abstract

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 Papacharalampous

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.

Transnational Media and the Politics of Fundraising in the Armenian Diaspora

Gellner Seminar

Rik Adriaans (Central European University, Budapest) 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: 15th November, at 5 pm
Where: CEFRES Library (Na Florenci 3, Prague 1)
Language: English

Abstract

Transnational Media and the Politics of Fundraising in the Armenian Diaspora
Fundraising spectacles such as gala dinners and concerts have long been central to the culture and institutions of the Armenian diaspora. Since the early 1990s, the conversion of money into ethnicity takes on increasingly mediatized and transnational forms. My talk examines the Armenia Fund Telethon, an annual pan-Armenian spectacle broadcast from Los Angeles that collects donations for infrastructure in the unrecognized Nagorno-Karabakh Republic on the de jure territory of Azerbaijan. Through the establishment of a transnational sphere of media rituals that links up Armenians across continents, the occupation of formerly Azerbaijani-occupied lands is turned into a diasporic celebration of humanitarian ethics and cultural heritage. At the same time, diaspora activists in Los Angeles are increasingly calling for a boycott of the annual telethon by organizing competing events that criticize it for serving the interests of post-Soviet oligarchs. The appeal of these activist initiatives is analyzed in relation to unpredictable eruptions of violence in the homeland.

Rik Adriaans

Rik Adriaans recently obtained his PhD in Sociology and Social Anthropology at the Central European University in Budapest. His doctoral thesis examines the interfaces between image production, technological mediation and diasporic recognition struggles in the transnational circuits that connect post-Soviet Armenia to the Armenian diaspora in Los Angeles. He also maintains an ongoing research interest in the politics of Armenian popular music. His articles have appeared in the journals Social Analysis, Nationalities Papers, Caucasus Survey and Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power.

Coffee Seminar with Didier Fassin

Informal meeting with Didier Fassin about his work and researchers of members and colleagues of CEFRES. Hosted by Jérôme Heurtaux, Luděk Brož, Virginie Vaté and Barbora Spálová.

Open to public.

Venue: CEFRES Library (Na Florenci 3, Prague 1)
Date: 31st October, 3-4.15 pm
Organizers: CEFRES
Language: English

Didier Fassin, James D. Wolfensohn Professor of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, Director of Studies in Political and Moral Anthropology at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris, is an anthropologist and a sociologist who has conducted fieldwork in Senegal, Ecuador, South Africa, and France. Trained as a physician in internal medicine and public health, he dedicated his early research to medical anthropology, focusing on the AIDS epidemic and global health. He later developed the field of critical moral anthropology, which explores the historical, social, and political signification of moral forms involved in everyday judgment and action as well as in the making of national policies and international relations. He recently conducted an ethnography of the state, through a study of urban policing and the prison system. His current work is on the theory of punishment, the politics of life, and the public presence of the social sciences, which he presented for the Tanner Lectures, the Adorno Lectures, and at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, respectively. He regularly contributes to newspapers and magazines. His recent books include Humanitarian Reason: A Moral History of the Present (2011), Enforcing Order: An Ethnography of Urban Policing (2013), At the Heart of the State: The Moral World of Institutions (2015), Prison Worlds: An Ethnography of the Carceral Condition (2016), The Will to Punish (2018), and Life: A Critical User’s Manual (2018).