Lecture by Didier Fassin
Venue: Faculty of Arts of the Charles University, náměstí Jana Palacha, Prague 1, 2nd Floor, Room 200
Date: 31st October, 5 pm
Organizers: Institute of Ethnology (Faculty of Arts, Charles University) and 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).
The lecture is a part of “Ethnography and Theory” series organized by Institute of Ethnology, Faculty of Arts, Charles University
Second session of IMS / CEFRES epistemological seminar of this semester led by
Florence Vychytil-Baudoux (EHESS / CEFRES)
Categories of Identification and Representation of Self
Where: CEFRES Library – Na Florenci 3, Prague 1
When: Wednesday 24 October 2018 from 4:30 pm to 6 pm
Language: English
Texts:
- Brubaker Rogers, Frederic Cooper: „Beyond Identity“, Theory and Society, 29 (2000): 1-47.
- Traduction française: Brubaker Rogers, „Au-delà de ‘l’identité’“, Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, 139 (2001-4): 66-85.
The first introductive session will be hosted by Jérôme Heurtaux (CEFRES’ director), Chiara Mengozzi (FF UK, associate researcher at CEFRES) and Mitchell Young (IMS FSV UK).
Jerôme Heurtaux and Mitchell Young will introduce the seminar and present general remarks about concepts and their uses in humanities and social sciences.
Chiara Mengozzi will review the achievement of the epistemological seminar so far, propose some ideas for the present academic year and briefly introduce the question of “migration” of concepts and theories from one discipline or context to another.
To introduce this session, we shall base our discussion on the following texts:
- John Gerring, “What Makes a Concept Good? A Criterial Framework for Understanding Concept Formation in the Social Sciences”, Polity 31-3, 1999, p. 357-393.
- Bastien BOSA, „Des concepts et des faits. La double contradiction des sciences sociales“, Labyrinthe 37 2011-2, p. 121-147.
To get the texts, please write to Claire Madl (claire[at]cefres.cz)
During this session, the program of the winter semester will be set up.
A lecture by Marcin Wodziński (Wroclaw University) 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 pm
Language: English
Abstract
What is Hasidism? Why do we know so little about one of the most intensively- researched phenomena in Jewish history? Which historiographical presumptions hinder the development of our knowledge about Hasidism? How is it related to the basis of sources and methodological approaches? What would Hasidism look like if approached from a different, anti-elitist perspective, from a provincial shtibl and not a tsadik’s court?
These questions will build the core of the talk by Professor Wodziński, key expert on Hasidism, author of Hasidism. Key Questions (Oxford University Press, 2018) and editor of the Historical Atlas of Hasidism (Princeton University Press, 2017).
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.
A lecture by Karolina Szymaniak (Wroclaw University) 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 pm
Language: English
Abstract
When in 1988 poet Marcin Świetlicki formulated in the now famous poem his sharp criticism of the rhetorics of cultural opposition and its possession by history, he wrote: „Instead of saying: I have a toothache, I’m/ hungry, I’m lonely (…)/ they say quietly: Wanda/ Wasilewska, Cyprian Kamil Norwid,/ Józef Piłsudski, the Ukraine, Lithuania/ Thomas Mann, the Bible, and at the end a little something/ in Yiddish” (trans. W. Martin). As Eugenia Prokop-Janiec has shown, in the 1980s Yiddish came to be treated as a part of the code of independent culture, and investment with it became a form of resistance. But what was this undefined „little something” and what tradition was underlying its presence in the Polish discourse? What meaning and content was it endowed with? How does this tradition bear on contemporary representations of the Jewish Polish past and the way we write the history of culture in Poland?
The talk is a discussion of existing and possible approaches to the study of Yiddish Polish cultural contacts in the 20th century, their limits, and ramifications. It is a working presentation of an on-going project. By turning to the history of Yiddish Polish cultural relations and their discourse, and interpreting them through a different lens of cultural studies, the study also seeks to think other ways of conceptualizing history of culture in Poland. An approach that includes the minority perspectives and respects their independence, and create a space where the „little something” turns into a complex polyphonic phenomenon in its own rights.
