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Consequences of Ethnography: Knowing Violence via the Self and Its Aftermath

Organizers: Michal Šípoš and Luděk Brož (Institute of Ethnology, The Czech Academy of Sciences)
with the support of  Strategy AV21, programme: Global Con icts and Local Interactions: Cultural and Social Challenges
Venue: Villa Lana, Prague
Click here to register to the workshop!
See the pdf of the event Consequences of Ethnography_colloquium.

Outline

As Sherry Ortner famously argued, ethnography in its minimal de nition is “the attempt to understand another life world using the self—as much of it as possible—as the instrument of knowing.” It is hardly surprising that conducting ethnographic research among/with survivors of violence—be it military, community, domestic, sexual, self-in icted or another form of violence— has a strong impact on the researcher. That impact, given the nature of ethnography, then directly translates into issues that are simultaneously personal and epistemological. Implications for the ethnographically knowing subject stretch well beyond feelings of empathy with research participants, as well as beyond the space-time of the eldwork. In this colloquium, we want to address methodological questions connected to knowing violence ethnographically, such as—but not limited to—the following:

  • When conducting ethnographic eldwork, researchers are often confronted with survivors’ silence or with an urgent need to tell what survivors witnessed and endured. Does that translate into an equally polarised reaction on the side of the researcher?
    In other words, can we see increased academic productivity in some cases among ethnographers, but inhibition of speaking-writing in other cases?
  • How can we speak of trauma of research without inappropriately shifting attention from research subjects to the researcher him- or herself?
  • The needs of research subjects may significantly shape a researcher’s own trajectory in the eld. Should the researcher let research subjects take control over the project?
  • Some ethnographers who publicly voice their research agendas are targeted by various actors, including authorities, hate groups or even the perpetrators behind the violence sufered by their research subjects. How can we methodologically conceptualise such encounters as part of ethnographic endeavour? What is the epistemic role of fear in such cases?

Program

9:20 Registration

9:50 Welcome address

10:00-11:00—Keynote speech no. 1
Veena Das (Johns Hopkins University): The Character of the Possible: Modality and Mood in the Genre of Ethnography

11:00-12:00—Keynote speech no. 2
David Mosse (SOAS, University of London): Trauma and Ethical Self-Making after Suicide: The Existential Imperative to Respond

12:00-13:00 Lunch break

13:00-14:00—Keynote speech no. 3
Jonathan Stillo (Wayne State University): “No One Leaves This Place Except the Dead”: Tuberculosis as a Socially Incurable Disease

14:00-14:15 Coffee break

14:15-16:15—Roundtable discussion
with: Petra Ezzeddine (Charles University), Jaroslav Klepal, Michal Šípoš and Václav Walach (The Czech Academy of Sciences)

Conference: New Approaches to the History of the Jews under Communism

European Association of Jewish Studies Conference, Prague

Date & Place: from 23 to 25 May 2017, Villa Lanna, Prague
Language: English
Organizers: Kateřina Čapková (Institute of Contemporary History, Czech Academy of Sciences), Kamil Kijek (Department of Jewish Studies, University of Wrocław), Stephan Stach (Institute of Contemporary History, Czech Academy of Sciences)

Program

23 May 2017 

20.00 –20.30 Oleg Zhidkov (Jerusalem): The Jewish Movement in the USSR: New Sources and Perspectives (Video Testimonies)

24 May 2017 

9.00 Welcome

9.15–11.00 Panel I – Jewish Life, Religious Practise and Folklore under Soviet Communism (I)

Chair: Ilana Miller (Chicago/Prague)

  • Valery Dymshits (St Petersburg), The Boundaries of Illegal: Religious Practices and Shadow Economy in Soviet Jewish Life
  • Victoria Gerasimova (Omsk), The Jewish Community of Omsk under the Soviets, from 1940 to the 1960s: Between Tradition and Survival
  • Diana Dumitru (Chişinău), ‘It is Better to Live in Romania Than in the Soviet Union’: How Bessarabian Jews Tried and Frequently Failed to Become Soviet Citizens during Late Stalinism

11.00–11.15 Coffee break

11.15–13.00 Panel II – Literature and Jewish Identity

Chair: Joanna Nalewajko-Kulikov (Warsaw)

  • Daria Vakhrushova (Düsseldorf), The Utopia of Yiddish Literature after the Revolution
  • Magdalena Ruta (Krakow), Nusekh Poyln and the ‘New Jewish Man’: The Image of the Jewish Communist in Yiddish Literature of Post-war Poland
  • Gennady Estraikh (New York), Soviet Yiddish Cultural Diplomacy, from the 1950s to 1991

13.00–14.00 Lunch

14.00–15.45 Panel III – Paths of Integration/Disintegration into the Communist Political System and Society

Chair: Michal Kopeček (Prague)

  • Galina Zelenina (Moscow), ‘Po Kurskoi, Kazanskoi zheleznoi doroge’: Jewish Private Life in the Moscow Oblast between Leisure, Underground Religion, and National Revival
  • Agata Maksimowska (Warsaw), Being Jewish in Soviet Birobidzhan
  • Kateřina Čapková (Prague), Centre and Periphery: Jewish Experience in Communist Czechoslovakia

15.45–16.15 Coffee break

16.15–18.00 Round table: The Diversity of Jewish Experiences under Communism

Chair: Marcos Silber (Haifa)

  • Zvi Gitelman (Ann Arbor)
  • Joanna Nalewajko-Kulikov (Warsaw)
  • Bożena Szaynok (Wrocław)
  • Andrea Pető (Budapest)
25 May 2017 

9.00–10.45 Panel IV – Jewish Identities and Ways of Life under Communism

Chair: Stephan Stach (Prague)

  • Anna Shternshis (Toronto), ‘I was not like everyone else’: Soviet Jewish Doctors Remember the Doctors’ Plot of 1953
  • Anna Koch (Southampton), ‘After Auschwitz you must take your origin seriously’: Perceptions of Jewishness among Communists of Jewish Origin in the Emerging German Democratic Republic
  • Kata Bohus (Frankfurt am Main), The Opposition of the Opposition: New Jewish Identities in the Samizdat of Late Communist Hungary

10.45–11.15 Coffee break

11.15–13.00 Panel V – Jewish Religious Life and Folklore under Soviet Communism II

Chair: Raphael Utz (Jena)

  • Ella Stiniguță (Cluj-Napoca), Mountain Jews and the Challenges of Ritual Life in the Soviet Caucasus
  • Mikhail Mitsel (New York), Jewish Religious Communities in Ukraine, 1945–81
  • Karīna Barkane (Riga), Beyond Assimilation: Jewish Religious Communities in the Latvian SSR

13.00–14.30 Lunch

14.30–15.45 Panel VI Jewish Transnational Encounters

Chair: Katrin Steffen (Hamburg)

  • David Shneer (Boulder), East Germany’s Jews, Their Transnational Networks, and East German Anti-Fascism
  • Eliyana R. Adler (State College/Warsaw), Strange Bedfellows: The Soviet Red Cross, Polish Jewish Refugees, and the American Joint Distribution Committee

15.45–16.15 Coffee break

16.15–17.45 Concluding Round Table

Chair: Kamil Kijek (Wrocław/Prague)

  • Audrey Kichelewski (Strasbourg)
  • Elissa Bemporad (New York)
  • Arkadi Zeltser (Jerusalem)

The experience of the Jews under the Communist régimes of east-central and eastern Europe has been a hotly debated topic of historiography since the 1950s. Until the 1980s, Cold War propaganda exerted a powerful influence on most interpretations presented in articles and books published on both sides of the ‘Iron Curtain’. Moreover, most works focused both on the relationship between the régime and the Jews living under it and on the role of the Jews in the Communist/Socialist movements and the political events connected with the rise of antisemitism and emigration.

Continue reading Conference: New Approaches to the History of the Jews under Communism →

Conférence-débat: Transformation, dégradation, perte des objets scientifiques

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Centre d’histoire et de théorie de la sociologie et le CEFRES vous invitent à la conférence-débat

Transformation, dégradation, perte des objets scientifiques

La conférence principale « De la disparition des objet de science » sera prononcée par le Professeur Olivier Clain (Université Laval à Québec).

Depuis près d’un demi-siècle, l’histoire des sciences s’est affranchie du schème d’un progrès linéaire qui mènerait les hommes de science de découverte en découverte. Ainsi, au moment de leur introduction dans le discours scientifique, les concepts de paradigme et de révolution scientifique, tout comme celui d’épistémè, par exemple, ont témoigné de la nouvelle attention portée aux ruptures qui affectent l’histoire des savoirs. Or, à l’encontre des « inventions », des « constructions » ou des « généalogies » qui figurent aujourd’hui encore au cœur de la plupart des travaux, et donc contre la préférence ainsi manifestée pour le versant « constructif » de l’histoire, nous souhaitons attirer l’attention sur un phénomène moins abordé, pour ne pas dire négligé, celui des « disparitions ».

Disparition n’est pas absence. Autrement dit on peut poser un certain nombre de questions relatives à la disparition des objets de savoir qui se manifestent dans l’histoire des disciplines : comment le savoir abandonne-t-il ses objets et que devient « le site » qui leur donnait consistance, à savoir les solutions aux problèmes et les questions dont ils étaient les témoins? Quelles traces les objets scientifiques eux-mêmes laissent-ils et quels retours opèrent-ils éventuellement? Existe-t-il une logique de la disparition qui renvoie à la structure du réel lui-même? Ces questions revêtent peut-être une importance particulière pour des disciplines dans lesquelles les grandes ruptures et les révolutions scientifiques sont difficiles à repérer, comme c’est le cas pour les sciences sociales.

Langue : français.

Lieu : CEFRES, Štěpánská 35, 5e étage.

Pour tout renseignement, contacter Jan Maršálek: jan.marsalek@fsv.cuni.cz

Conference | Transnationalism, Activism and Solidarity

Romani Racialization Beyond Majority-Minority Narratives

When: 21–23 May 2025
Where: Vila Lanna, Institute of Czech Literature, CEFRES

CEFRES is hosting the closing round table on the 23rd of June.

Convenors: Tina MAGAZZINI and Martin FOTTA (Institute of Ethnology, Czech Academy of Sciences)

The conference is open to the public, but registration is required due to limited capacity.

📝 Register here: https://forms.office.com/e/HGQ7SNK2Rq
📄 The full programme is available for download as a PDF here. Continue reading Conference | Transnationalism, Activism and Solidarity →

Conference | Central Europe and Francophone Africa in the aftermath of the Second World War: Crossroads

To mark the 80th anniversary of the end of the Second World War, the Centre universitaire francophone of the University of Szeged, in partnership with the Regional Centre of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and the Department of Modern History and Mediterranean Studies of the University of Szeged, is organising a conference entitled ‘Central Europe and Francophone Africa in the aftermath of the Second World War: crossroads’.

This event has been created in partnership with the French Research Center in Humanities and Social Sciences – Prague (CEFRES) and the French Institute in Hungary.

When: May 19 and 20, 2025
Where: Regional Centre of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Szeged

READ THE FULL PROGRAM HERE

Argumentary

This conference aims to interrogate post-history in two distinct regions that, at first glance, appear to share little in common, maintaining only distant relationships. However, when the fighting ended, both regions—considered peripherical—and their respective nations and populations experienced, simultaneously, an ambiguous and debatable liberation. With this paradox in mind, the conference seeks to highlight the inherent issues present in both regions within the broader perspective of the post–World War recomposition of the world, from which neither the European nor the African continent was exempt. The year 1945 marked the end of the dominance of traditional European powers and laid the foundations of the bipolar world order. These transformations had numerous repercussions for these regions, situated at the center of the superpowers’ geopolitical chessboard.

Taking a comparative approach, this conference positions itself as an open window into exploring the inherent or shared dynamics between Central Europe and Francophone Africa from the very end of hostilities onward. It also aims to describe the profound transformations, without losing sight of the fact that, although the year 1946 marked a rupture and a new beginning, it also belonged to the continuity of the old world.

Hence, the conference seeks to offer a space for reflection and dialogue between specialists of both regions—PhD students, early-career researchers, lecturers, and established scholars alike—to better understand the impact of the end of the Second World War on the contemporary history of Francophone Africa and Central Europe. The key perspectives proposed for discussion include:

  • Central Europe at the end of the Second World War
  • France and Central Europe from 1940 to 1950
  • Francophone Africa in 1945
  • The decolonization movements
  • Gaullism and Africa