Archives

Staging Plays from the Terezin Ghetto Today: Incorporating Historical Context into the Performance

A lecture by Lisa Peschel (University of York) 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: March 27, 2018
Language: English

Abstract

During the 40-month project Performing the Jewish Archive, we experimented with type of performance, which we called co-textual performance, to try to generate more intense audience engagement. That is, when we attempt to re-stage scripts written by Jewish authors during World War II, the historical context is one of the most important aspects of the plays. We argued that present-day spectators would be more engaged if they knew the historical background, but how to best present it? We proposed that performed scenes regarding the history, which would be presented as ‘co-texts’ – that is, incorporated into, and just as important as, the script itself – would be more effective than more traditional pre-show talks or program notes that treat the historical information as context. In this talk I describe how we created co-textual performances and how we tested their effect on the audience.

State, Kinship, Care: Towards a relational Approach

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).

Stereotypical Representations of Roma and Jews in Photographs

International Workshop

When: 15 October 2018
Where: French Institute in Prague (Štěpánská 35, Prague 1)
Organizers: Prague Forum for Romani Histories (Institute of Contemporary History, Czech Academy of Sciences), Seminar of Romani Studies (Faculty of Arts, Charles University), CEFRES and French Institute in Prague
Language: English (simultaneous translation into Czech will be available)

PROGRAMME

16:30-18:00
HISTORICAL SURVEY
Ilsen About (National Centre for Scientific Research in Paris and member of the Centre Georg Simmel, École des hautes études en sciences sociales, Paris)
Counter-Image and Self-Image
Roma and Sinti in the History of the Photographic Medium

How Roma and Sinti have been represented through the lens of photography interrogates the making of stereotypical iconographies and the functions of such iconography in political processes of stigmatisation, exclusion or repression. It also questions the ambivalence of negotiated and self-constructed images, the professionalization of modelling and of a specialised production of specific photographic motives. Behind the screen made by objectified bodies and faces, individuals and social groups have also used and contributed to make other types of photographic images: some are testifying of social life and territorial implementation, other have played significant roles in emancipation strategies, acting as major shifts in political visibility.

Karolina Szymaniak (Department of Jewish Studies of the University of Wroclaw, and research fellow at the Jewish Historical Institute, Warsaw)
In and Out of the Shtetl
Photography and (De)Constructions  of the Eastern European Jewish Difference

In both Jewish and non-Jewish discourses and visual practices, the shtetl came to epitomize the Eastern European Jewish culture, constructed as radically different from the neighboring cultures. In these constructions, photography played a crucial role. The presentation will look at the history of photographing Jews in Eastern Europe and Jews photographing back, both reproducing and reconstructing stereotypical images. It will discuss different modalities and uses of photography, and their political ramifications. Finally, it will briefly point out to the meanings and uses of the pre-Holocaust photography both in the post-Holocaust era and in the late 20th-century context of the so-called Jewish revival in Eastern Europe.

18:00-18:30
Break with refreshments

18:30-20:00
CURRENT REPRESENTATIONS
Sabin Badžo (Photographer and Artist)
Irene Stehli (Photographer and Artist) – TBC
Comments of Ilsen About and Karolina Szymaniak

Studying the State through the Scandal: On the Epistemic Value of Transgression

A session led by Jana Vargovčíková

‘In olden days a glimpse of stocking was looked on as something shocking. Now, heaven knows, anything goes.’ (Cole Porter).

Far from being anomalies or mere accidents, transgressions are conditioned and given meaning by norms. Subsequently, norms repeatedly reaffirm their legitimacy and meaning in contrast to transgressions. What is considered as transgression and when transgression gains the potential of being turned into a scandal varies in time and space, as the quote suggests. That is why, given the imbrication of norms and transgressions, social scientists and philosophers have turned to cases of transgression in order to understand order, social norms and institutions, as well as to comprehend the nature of the distinction between the two (e.g. Foucault, Becker, Hughes, Goffman). Leaving normative preconceptions aside, then, a sociologist or political scientist can learn from an anthropologist and treat transgressions in the political realm as indicators of the (symbolic, but not exclusively so) structure of the state. Political scandals as narratives of events labelled as transgressive represent precisely such means of enquiry into how a political body organizes the limits of its norms (De Blic & Lemieux) and into how citizens relate to the political order (Gupta).

Readings:

  • Damien de Blic & Cyril Lemieux. ‘Le scandale comme épreuve.’ Politix 71 (3): 9–38, 2005.
  • Akhil Gupta. ‘Blurred Boundaries: The Discourse of Corruption, the Culture of Politics, and the Imagined State.’ American Ethnologist 22 (2): 375–402, 1995.
  • Chris Jenkins. ‘Transgression: The Concept.’ Architectural Design 83 (6): 20, 2013.

Subversive Conformism? Youth Culture, Jews and Rock’n’roll in 1960s‘ Poland

A lecture by Marcos Silber (University in Haifa) 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

March 1968 was a short but important period in recent Polish history. That year, it seemed, almost the whole world was experiencing a cultural revolution provoked by the youth. Unlike most of the historical research on Poland in March 1968, which has tended to focus on political power struggles and rising antisemitism, this paper explores connections between post-war Polish-Jewish youth subculture, a group sidelined because of its ethnicity and age, and the anti-Jewish campaign of March 1968 which led to the emigration of thousands of Polish Jews.

Suicide as a crise from the example of volonteer dead of the greek conscripts

Angeliki Drongiti, Cresppa-CSU

will be taking part in the seminar called Current Issues. Reflection on Crises organised by CEFRES.

Date: Wednesday, March 24th 2021, 12h30 à 13h50
Where: Online on Zoom.
Organisators:  Maria Kokkinou (post-doc at CEFRES / Charles University), Jérôme Heurtaux (CEFRES)
Language: French

Link to join the seminar : https://us02web.zoom.us/j/84097191940 

For more information about the programme and the seminar,  see the website: http://cefres.cz/fr/seminaires/penser-les-crises.