Archives

Microhistories from a Polish–Jewish town: 1918 – 1956

A lecture by Agnieszka Wierzcholska (Free University of Berlin) in the frame of the seminar on Modern Jewish History of the Institute of Contemporary History (AV ČR) and CEFRES in partnership with the Masaryk Institute (AV ČR).

Where: CEFRES library, Na Florenci 3, 110 00 Prague 1
When: from 5:30 pm to 7:00 pm
Language: English

Abstract

Tarnów in southern Poland has been a Polish-Jewish town for centuries. Prior to the Second World War almost 50% of the town’s inhabitants were Jewish and the remaining half were Catholics. Relations between Jews and non-Jews were a normal part of everyday life among neighbors, schoolmates, and in local politics. During the Shoah the murder of the town’s Jews took place on the streets of the town, right before the eyes of the non-Jewish neighbors. Of the 25,000 Jews who lived in Tarnów in 1939, only a mere thousand returned, and only a few hundred stayed.

What happens to a town where the German occupier destroyed the Polish-Jewish Lebenswelt? The social fabric changed dramatically since 1939 and the local community became an occupied society. The antisemitism that arose in the town in the late 1930s intertwined with German anti-Jewish policies in many ways. Due to the proximity of violence, non-Jewish Poles were implicated in the Shoah. On the other hand, we must also ask which local networks proved to be resilient, what friendships turned out to be lifesaving, and what contacts proved to be dangerous? Finally, what happened to the town when the German occupier left in January 1945 and half of its population – the Jewish part – was gone?

This talk retraces the everyday life of a Polish Jewish town, bridging the caesuras of World War Two in order to retrace the continuities within the upheavals and to reiterate individual life stories.

Book Presentation: Pre-textual Ethnographies

Pre-textual Ethnographies. Challenging the phenomenological level of anthropological knowledge-making by Tomasz Rakowski & Helena Patzer

When & Where: 30 November 2018, 4 pm, CEFRES, Na Florenci 3, Prague 1 (Upper Hall)
Organizers: Institute of Ethnology of the Czech Academy of Sciences, CEFRES
Language: English

Editors

Tomasz Rakowski (Assistant Professor at the Institute of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology, University of Warsaw)
Helena Patzer (Post-Doctoral Researcher at the Institute of Ethnology, Czech Academy of Sciences, Prague)

Discussants

Ewa Klekot (University of Warsaw/Poznan School of Form)
Daniel Sosna (University of West Bohemia, Pilsen)

Moderated by Luděk Brož (Institute of Ethnology, Czech Academy of Sciences, in Prague)

Abstract

Anthropologists often have fieldwork experiences that are not explicitly analysed in their writings, though they nevertheless contribute to and shape their ethnographic understandings, and can resonate throughout their work for many years . The task of this volume is precisely to uncover these layers of anthropological knowledge-making. Contributors take on the challenge of reconstructing the ways in which they originally entered the worlds of research subjects – their anthropological Others – by focusing on pretextual and deeply phenomenological processes of perceiving, noting, listening and sensing. Drawing on a wide range of research experiences – with the Dogon in Mali, immigrant football players in Spain, the Inuit of the Far North, Filipino transnational families, miners in Poland and students in Scotland – this book goes beyond an exploration of the development of increased ethnographic sensitivity towards words or actions. It also commences the foundational project of developing a new language for building anthropological works, one stemming from recurring acts of participation, and rooted primarily in the pre-textual worlds of the tacit, often non-visible, and intense experiences that exceed the limitations of conventional textual accounts.

“These edifying essays lay the groundwork for an
anthropology that not only overcomes old antinomies
of body-mind, text-context, representation-reality, but
encourages us to see how participatory method, social
attentiveness, and new forms of ethnographic writing can
enhance our understanding of the affective, intersubjective,
and conceptual complexities of life as lived,” Michael Jackson, Distinguished Professor of World Religions, Harvard University.

Power of the Powerless in the 21st Century: Non-Violent Protests in CEE

Roundtable

When : 20 November 2018, from 10 am to 12 pm
Where : CEFRES Library
Organizers : IMS FSV UK, CEFRES and Prague Civil Society Centre
Language : English

Speakers
  • Jérôme Heurtaux (Director of CEFRES)
  • Igor Blaževič (Programme Director of the Prague Civil Society Centre)
  • Valeria Korablyova (Senior Fellow at the Department of Russian and East-European Studies at IMS FSV, political scientist, regional specialization – Ukraine)
  • Jiří Kocián (Researcher at the Department of Russia and East European Studies, regional specialization – Romania)

Moderated by Kateřina Králová  (Head of Department of Russia and East European Studies)

Recent mass protests in Armenia, which ousted the long-standing head of the country, were dubbed a “Velvet Revolution”. Did the moniker refer to the Central European events 30 years back? And, if so, what is their legacy in the 21st century? Is “power of the powerless” still a viable recipe for social and political transformations? Another crucial question here is whether non-violent protests are capable to deliver their agenda in a longrun, or is it just a momentum followed with “business as usual”? And, finally, what are convergences and divergences between popular movements across space and time?

The roundtable discussion brings together the cases of mass protests in Poland, Ukraine, and Romania to expose their peculiarity but also to compare them with the recent wave of protests in Germany, the U.S., and elsewhere. The main question it aims to tackle is the prospects of political transformations based on “the power of the powerless”, as well as broader reverberations of local mass protests in the globalized world.

See the official poster of the event here

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.

Translating the Romanticism in Italy

Third session of IMS / CEFRES epistemological seminar of this semester led by

Ivana Piptová (FF UK)
Topic: Translating the Romanticism in Italy

Where: CEFRES Library – Na Florenci 3, Prague 1
When: Wednesday 14 November 2018 from 4:30 pm to 6 pm
Language: English

Texts:

  • Andras Önnerfors: „Translating discourses of the Enlightenment: transcultural language skills and cross-references in Swedisch and German eighteenth-century learned journals“, in: (ed. S. Stockhorst) Cultural Transfer through translation. The Circulation of Enlightened thought in Europe by means of translation, Amsterdam – New York, NY 2010:209-230