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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

What is Hasidism?

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).

Revisiting Thing Theory. An Ethnography of Prison Worlds

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