Séminaire Gellner

Daniel Fisher (UC Berkeley) donnera une conférence dans le cadre du séminaire Gellner co-organisé par l’Association tchèque d’Anthropologie sociale (CASA– Česká Asociace pro Sociální Antropologii) et la Société tchèque de Sociologie, en coopération avec l’Institut d’Ethnologie de l’Académie des Sciences de République tchèque et le CEFRES.

Date et horaire : 5 février 2019, à partir de 16h30
Lieu : Bibliothèque du CEFRES, Na Florenci 3, Prague 1
Langue : anglais

Résumé (EN)

Spun Dry: Mobility, Morbidity, and Jurisdiction in Northern Australia

This paper pursues an ethnographic account of intra-Indigenous relations and jurisdictional contest in urban northern Australia. Its narrative explores the relationship between Aboriginal community policing and emergent forms and figures of urban mobility and morbidity in Darwin, capital of Australia’s Northern Territory. While Darwin’s Indigenous patrols have no police powers, they do have some authority and status vested in them by the traditional owners of the country on which they patrol. Their Aboriginal-directed efforts thus entail both an assertion of Indigenous jurisdiction, and an accompanying reflexivity about the substance and limits of its reach — limits informed by settler colonial oversight, by the diversity of Indigenous claims to urban space, and by poetic figures and mediatized narratives that trope the volatility of Aboriginal dispersal and displacement. The paper explores the ways patrols negotiate their authority and reckon its limits, extending a local poetics jurisdiction and movement to illuminate the new urban worlds they traverse. This provides ground for considering the mobility and multiplicity of law and the distribution of sovereign power at the margins of the settler colony.

Daniel Fisher is associate professor of anthropology at UC Berkeley. He is author of The Voice and its Doubles (Duke, 2016) and co-editor of Radio Fields: Anthropology and Wireless Sound in the 21^stCentury (NYU, 2012). His work has appeared in American Ethnologist,Cultural Anthropology and collections including Aural Cultures and Keywords in Sound. He is currently completing a monograph on new Indigenous urban worlds in Australia’s Northern Territory, while pursuing a second project on the political life of Aboriginal musical celebrity.

Gellner Seminar

Tatjana Thelen (Professor in the Department for Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Vienna) donnera une conférence dans le cadre du séminaire Gellner co-organisé par l’Association tchèque d’Anthropologie sociale (CASA– Česká Asociace pro Sociální Antropologii) et la Société tchèque de Sociologie, en coopération avec le Département d’anthropologie générale (FHS UK) et le CEFRES.

Date et horaire : 14 novembre 2019, à partir de 17h30
Lieu : bibliothèque du CEFRES (Na Florenci 3, Prague 1)
Langue : anglais

Résumé (EN)

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).