Gellner Seminar

Tatjana Thelen (Professor in the Department for Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Vienna) 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 Department of General Anthropology (FHS UK) and CEFRES.

When: 14 November 2019, 5:30 pm
Where: CEFRES Library (Na Florenci 3, Prague 1)
Language: English

Abstract

State, Kinship, Care: Towards a relational Approach

In October of this year (2019), the first two so-called ISIS-children arrived in Austria. Their mother was separated from her children, had disappeared during the war. Nothing is known about the father. Lacking birth certificates, citizenship was granted based on a DNA-test that established the kinship with their Austrian mother. The Kurdish self-government then gave them over to the Austrian state representatives at the Syrian border. Meanwhile, custody has been transferred to their maternal grandmother. This is only one recent example of the deep entanglement between kinship, state and care. Despite and constant co-production, kinship and state are still often dealt with conceptually separately, or even contrasting domains, which creates unhelpful blind spots. In my talk I will propose a relational approach that uses care as an entry road into ethnographically researching their intricate relationship. The aim is to show how kinship is not only influenced by the state but also shapes political structures. Ultimately, I argue that overcoming the stereotypical divide and myth of the “modern” family as functionless in politics, can be an important contribution of anthropology in public debates.

Tatjana Thelen is Professor in the Department for Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Vienna. She has carried out fieldwork in Hungary, Romania, Serbia, and eastern Germany on questions of property reform, care, kinship and the state. The epistemic foundations and significance of boundary work between kinship and state formations increasingly form the focus of her research. This was at the heart of the interdisciplinary research group on Kinship and Politics, which she co-led at the Center for Interdisciplinary research in Bielefeld (ZIF). Recently, she co-edited Reconnecting State and Kinship (University of Pennsylvania Press 2018) and Stategraphy: Toward a Relational Anthropology of the State (Berghahn 2017).

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 21^stCentury (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.

Space(s) and Politics of Memory:
Roma Holocaust in the Czech Republic

A Proteus Webinar

When: December 10th, 2021, at 10 am
Where: en ligne on zoom ID 450 714 1898 code 681515
https://upr-si.zoom.us/j/4507141898?pwd=MnVqYmZPTzZqbldYUEFHODRSbXlldz09
Language: English

Speaker

Yasar ABU GHOSH, lecturer, Charles University, Faculty of Humanities

Discussants

• Alenka JANKO SPREIZER, associate professor, University of Primorska, Faculty of Humanities
• Nikola LUDLOVÁ, PhD candidate at Central European University and CEFRES

A Proteus webinar organized by

• Petra KAVRECIC, assistant professor, University of Primorska, Faculty of Humanities
• Felipe Kaiser FERNANDES, PhD candidates at IIAV EHESS, associated at CEFRES & Charles University

 Abstract

In anthropology, the relation of Roma to the past has been a central concern in conceptualizing Romani forms of attachment and belonging. These being enacted in the present, the past is seen as a “foreign country”. However, since 1980’s we have been witnessing a rising engagement of various European Roma and pro-Roma agents with struggles over the recognition of the memory of Holocaust and Romani victimhood. Be it in artistic expressions, in memoirs writings or in political participation, the shift towards historical framing signals a rather different attitude towards the past. The apparent contradiction has been highlighted in several contributions that sought to explain it by reference to new politics of identity, to ethnic emancipation and Europeanization, or by discerning the formation of a Romani elite as the bearer of an emerging political subjectivity.
In my presentation I will build on a dissection of a commemorative practice identified as name-reading, a practice that is constituted at the nexus of inclusive politics of commemoration and what is called the archival mode in Holocaust commemoration. Dissecting the practice should allow to raise questions that would connect a practice of commemoration with some of the cultural frames of memory identified by anthropologists of different Roma communities. I will be asking does name-reading serve what commemoration is supposed to do, that is actualize the past for the needs of the present?

Yasar Abu Ghosh is lecturer in sociocultural anthropology at the Department of Social and Cutlural Anthropology, Charles University, Prague and faculty member of NYU Prague. He specializes in topics related to Central European Roma, economic and political anthropology and ethnographic methodology. His latest research focuses on survival strategies of poor Roma in the Czech Republic, on politics of marginalization and the enduring effects of racialized regimes of state minority policies, as well as on the formation and logic of Romani subjectivity in response to processes of cultural dispossession. In 2016 he was a Fulbright scholar at the Department of Anthropology, University of California in Berkeley, he was also a visiting professor at CEU in Budapest, LMU in Munich, and at EHESS in Paris.  Currently he is working on a monograph drawing on a history of participant observation of memory-becoming in relation to Roma and non-Roma struggle over the recognition of suffering and historic memory in Czechia.