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Abstrakt

Attempts to apply actuarial methods in the field of criminal justice have been made for nearly 100 years. These methods, familiar to many people via the world of insurance, involve the mechanical combining of information for the purposes of classification, with the standard output being a probability figure relating to a certain outcome. More specifically, a company that provides car insurance may use information pertaining to a prospective policyholder (e.g. demographic characteristics such as age and gender) to determine the probability of that individual making an insurance claim within the terms/duration of their policy. Whereas the first actuarial/risk-management instruments designed for criminal justice settings were clunky and difficult to use, the advent of more compact instruments – involving fewer than ten items, in many cases – saw them become a part of standard decision-making procedures in the context of both bail and parole, as well as criminal profiling and multi-agency attempts to reduce urban violence. This paper explores the role of a specific actuarial instrument, the Gangs Violence Matrix (GVM), in attempts to reduce urban violence in England. The GVM scores and ranks ‘gang nominals’ based on intelligence connecting them with violent offences, weapons offences and/or access to weapons. Multi-agency plans are then designed and implemented for each nominal based on the probability of them carrying out and/or being the victim of a violent, gang-related attack. Here I ask and begin to answer a set of critical questions vis-à-vis the GVM and the actuarial approach to reducing urban violence, more broadly. These questions include: How is the ‘gang’ constituted as an object of actuarial knowledge? How do the limits of this knowledge (re)shape notions of the ‘gang’? What impact might gaps in the actuarial episteme – especially around ‘race’ and causality – have on GVM-based decision-making? And who is able to make authoritative actuarial statements about ‘gangs’?

Bio

Dr James Rosbrook-Thompson is Senior Lecturer in Criminology at City, University of London. Since 2018 he has carried out research in conjunction with various inner-London local authorities on issues including ‚gangs‘, serious youth violence, and disproportionality.

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Abstrakt

Mothering as a social phenomenon and everyday practice is loaded with normative expectations, multi-layered meanings, and everyday negotiations. Based on the analysis of contemporary scholarship on motherhood and mothering and recent biographical and narrative interviews of mothers from all over the world (several countries in western and eastern Europe, Iran/western Asia, Canada/North America, Australia and Kenya/East Africa), that have been conducted and analysed by fifteen authors, the editors of the book Lyudmila Nurse, Lisa Moran and Kateřina Sidoropulu-Janků put together a co-edited monograph Biographical Research and the Meanings of Mothering. Life Choices, Identities and Methods, which will be presented in this talk. The special focus will be put on the normativity and intersectionality of mothering as a platform where identity negotiations and life choices take place. The first part of the talk will present the normative layers and dynamics of mothering and demonstrate how mothering as a social phenomenon affects mothers, as well as non-mothers. Further, the analysis of narratives of mothers and non-mothers from all over the world will provide a multi-layered perspective on mothering as an everyday practice and platform for realised identities and life choices. The talk presents mothering as a vivid phenomenon that, when researched from an everyday perspective, has great potential for understanding the dynamics of social reproduction and meaning-making.

Bio

Kateřina Sidiropulu-Janků, Ph.D is a senior researcher at the Institute for Applied Research on Ageing, Carinthia University of Applied Sciences, Klagenfurt am Wörtersee, Austria. She studied sociology at the Masaryk University in Brno, specialising in ethnographic sociology, research ethics, and inter-ethnic relations. She is a member of the European Sociological Association’s Research Network 03 „Biographical Perspectives on European Societies“, and her research includes biographical interviews with people from ethnic minority backgrounds and with migration experience. Kateřina also focuses on PAR and interdisciplinary research. Her recent work includes interdisciplinary research on the development of public open spaces, ageing and health, and assistive technologies in the context of small cities and rural areas.

Na valném shromáždění byly vyhlášeny výsledky soutěže o cenu CASA za rok 2023. V bakalářské kategorii zvítězil Marek Hrubý (FF UPOL) s prací Affect Theory: Theorizing the Emotional and the Affective in Anthropology. V magisterské kategorii zvítězila Jolana Miličičová (FHS UK) s prací Ekologie zdí: Etnografie bělehradských murálů. Gratulujeme! Více informací o soutěži zde.

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Abstrakt

Multiple agents weave the fabric of temporality in a data-driven world, orchestrating futures and visions of (un)certainty and sparking promises to contain what is to come. The possibilities of modeling the world with algorithmic means are fundamentally changing perceptions of humans experiencing time and space – new publics, new socialities, new identities are emerging, and rules of coexistence must be negotiated with them. My interest is how phenomena come into being and how temporality operates as part of research processes within complex infrastructures, entangling humans and more-than-humans, hardware, software, and algorithms in a techno-scientific as well as posthuman world of many worlds.  This talk will address the above questions utilizing an “ethnographic rhythm analysis“. Analytic outcomes are based on data gathered during long-term qualitative research in algorithmic environments at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), the Supercomputing Centre in Jülich, and the experimental world of quantum optics of the University Vienna. I will look into the rhythms of “doing things” and the thingness’ agencies, with a focus on procedural models, material cuts, and ruptures which disturb and destabilize seemingly seamless infrastructures. This will allow me to draw preliminary sketches of what seems to be important to share from an anthropological view to critically (re)think present times future(s) to come from a theoretical and ethical perspective.

Bio

Anne Dippel is a freshly cultural anthropologist and historian with a passion for ethnographic inquiries of all kinds, researching and teaching at University of Jena (Germany). She studied in Berlin and London (PhD Humboldt-University Berlin 2013, Habilitation University Jena 2022) and became a specialist in physics and computers scientific cultures as well as German speaking societies. She held fellowships, taught, and researched in Germany and abroad, including at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the Cluster of Excellence “Image Knowledge Gestalt” (HU Berlin), the Institute for the Advanced Study of Media Cultures of Computer Simulation (MECS) at Lüneburg University and the Department for Ethnology at the University of Heidelberg. She did extensive ethnographic research in Vienna/Austria, Geneva/Switzerland and different physics laboratories and data centers in Europe and USA. For the purpose of her current research, she has been an associated member of the European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN).

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Abstrakt

Current climate crisis and the inadequacy of energy transition fuel a new impetus to transform a masculinist techno-literacy into alternative propositions of ‘deep energy literacy’ (Wilson 2022), or, within an emerging elemental turn, of activating the radiant potential of the sun for seeking out energy justice or ‘solarity’ (Szeman and Barney 2021). While such proposals appear removed from everyday realities, there is a lack of attention to what kind of energy subjects and literacies are already emerging that unsettle boundaries between the human and the environment, the body and technology. This presentation turns to fieldwork and participatory photography with Czech solar micro-producers, renewable industry representatives and those who live around large solar plantations in the Czech lands to trace  mixed and differential literacies (Haraway 1997) ‘where each new attainment of literacy introduces difference in what counts as literacy’ (Colebrook 2012). Encounters for these literacies and their attendant ethos include the surges of joy in being touched by readings of solar generated electricity on the solar monitoring app; the thermoception of ‘plantation heat’ or rising ambient temperature around the solar farm; and the unexpected and uncertain spectral flashes of nuclear radiation and electromagnetic interferences at home. Drawing on the frame of technoecologoies the analysis focuses not only what these visceral sensory engagements bring together, but also what is left out or disarticulated in specific encounters but can be seen as productive “limits” that entail immanent possibilities for rethinking proposals for community energy.

Bio

Dagmar Lorenz-Meyer is Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Humanities, Charles University where she teaches in the Graduate Programme in Gender Studies. Her research emerges at the intersection of corporeal feminisms, technoscience studies and new materialism, currently in relation to solar energy, corporeal solidarity, and Romani cooking. She recently co-edited the Special Issue ‘Climate Action: Transforming Infrastructures, Cultivating Attentiveness, Practicing Solidarity’ (Sociální studia/Social Studies 2022), and works on a Romani Cookbook for a Liveable Climate. She serves as section co-editor of the journal Matter: Journal of New Materialist Research.

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Abstrakt

This paper identifies and explores a tendency within multidisciplinary studies and popular discussions of plastic to downplay or ignore the role of workers at various stages of its value chain, from fossil fuel extraction and manufacturing, to recycling and waste disposal. It argues that the marginalisation of plastic labour takes place through four key mechanisms: aestheticization, fetichism, flexibilization, and wasting. Aestheticization refers to the way that plastics are focused on as aesthetic objects, not only when associated with design modernism and the household mundane, but also when used as symbols of ecological devastation and the Anthropocene (as with so-called ‘plastiglomerate’). The second process draws on Marx and Lukacs’ concept of commodity fetichism, where a perceived relationship between objects in a capitalist marketplace masks the human relationships and labour involved in production. Third, flexibilization refers to one of the ways in which the voice of organised labour in the plastics industry has been marginalised, a move complemented by the benefits offered to plastics sector workers to deter industrial unrest. Finally, the wasting of plastic refers not to the generation of plastic waste, which has been amply covered elsewhere, but to the way in which a focus on (consumer) plastic waste has crowded out the attention paid to plastics production. Finally, the paper turns to the way in which the new UN treaty on ending plastic pollution is, through a focus on ‘just transition’, finally shining a light on the plastic labour involved in the various oil, chemical, manufacturing, and recycling firms that together compose plastics supply chains.

Bio

Patrick O’Hare is a Senior Researcher and UKRI Future Leaders Fellow in the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of St Andrews. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts (FRSA) and a member of the editorial board of ‘Worldwide Waste: Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies’. Dr. O’Hare holds a Ph.D. in Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge (2017) and has held research positions at the Universities of Cambridge, Manchester, and Surrey. He has conducted research in Uruguay, Mexico, Argentina, and the UK on themes relating to labour, waste, cardboard publishing, and plastics.

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Abstrakt

Forty-five years ago, the interdisciplinary scholar James Clifford authored a brilliant essay in which he articulated a unique approach that he called “ethnobiography.” While it seems not to have garnered the praise or currency of his other writings, including The Predicament of Culture (1988) and Routes (1997), I have found it both prescient and transformative. In this talk, I will share my own take on Clifford’s notion of ethnobiography as approach and practice. I will do so in the context of my ongoing work on the life of D’Arcy McNickle (1904-1977), one of the twentieth-century’s most important American Indian writers, intellectuals, and political actors. At the heart of my own published and public-facing digital scholarship is McNickle’s diary, which extends from 1930 to 1971. I will demonstrate how I have put an ethnobiographical approach into practice and, in so doing, reimagined his remarkable life synchronically (in time) as well as diachronically (over time). What emerges is not a life rendered as a series of events but a window on what Clifford calls an “experiential world.”

Bio

Daniel M. Cobb is Professor of American Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he serves as Co-Chair of the Dean’s Working Group on Global Indigeneity, Coordinator of American Indian and Indigenous Studies, and Associate Chair. He has also served as Assistant Director of the D’Arcy McNickle Center for American Indian and Indigenous Studies at The Newberry Library in Chicago, Illinois (2003-2004), the Fulbright Bicentennial Distinguished Chair in American Studies at the University of Helsinki (2017-2018), and Visiting Researcher at the University of Tübingen (May-July 2019). An award-winning writer and teacher, his publications include Beyond Red Power (2007), Native Activism in Cold War America (2008), Say We Are Nations (2015), and numerous articles in peer-reviewed journals. His passion for public-facing scholarship can be found in his Great Courses devoted to Native North America, which was produced in partnership with the Teaching Company and the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American Indian History (2016), public programs and exhibitions devoted to American Indian activism, activists, and memory, and an ongoing digital project inspired by the diary of Flathead writer and intellectual D’Arcy McNickle.

Česká asociace pro sociální antropologii (CASA) vyhlašuje osmý ročník soutěže o nejlepší bakalářskou a magisterskou práci v oblasti sociální antropologie. Deadline pro doručení materiálů na emailovou adresu asociace info@casaonline.cz je 10. 11. 2023. Více informací o soutěži zde.

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Abstrakt

Since 2020 in the U.S., the twin impacts of the devastating Covid-19 pandemic and the power of the Black Lives Matter movement, especially in the wake of the murder of George Floyd, have highlighted the striking differentials in health care across US communities, marked by stark inequalities aligned with race and social class. In this talk, I extend questions of “access to care” to the veterinary profession to ask: What happens if we reframe these vet issues not primarily as economic problems but rather in a social justice framework? Most U.S. families have pets that they say are “part of the family.” Should this lead us to conceive of pet health care as a fundamental right, and/or obligation of the state or society—that is, as a “public good” under the One Health model? What sorts of shifts in veterinary practice, policies, and community relations might this require so that underserved populations can access care? Can the “social determinants of health” model from human medicine be useful in this reimagining?

Bio

Jane Desmond, Ph.D., is Professor of Anthropology, Affiliate Prof. in Veterinary Medicine, and Director of the Human-Animal Studies@Illinois campus-wide initiative at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA. She is the founding editor of the Animal Lives book series at the University of Chicago Press, and Residential Director of the International Interdisciplinary Summer Institute in Animal Studies for early career scholars held each July at UIUC. Her five books include Displaying Death and Animating Life: Human-Animal Relations in Art, Science and Everyday Life (Chicago, 2016). A former Fulbright Professor in Germany, she is currently a 2023 British Academy Research Fellow at the University of Nottingham, and a 2023–2024 Harvard Bioethics Fellow at the Harvard Medical School. Her current book project is Medicine Across the Species Line.

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Abstrakt

Na jubilejním, dvoustém Gellnerovském semináři vystoupí laureátky ceny CASA za nejlepší bakalářskou a magisterskou práci za rok 2022, a to:

Jana Gajić (FHS UK): Hood Elitism: Stylist Transgression of Dominant Cultural Meanings in the Music of the Serbian Artist Mimi Mercedes

&

Anna Vykoukalová (FHS UK): Hranice odpadu: Etnografie sběrného dvora

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Abstrakt

The onset of the Anthropocene challenges the very definition of education and its fundamental goals. Drawing on a multisited ethnographic project among schools and activist groups in India and South Africa, I explore what education might mean in the age of unprecedented environmental decay. I expose the depoliticizing effects of schooling and examine cross-generational knowledge transfer within and beyond formal education. I call for the bridging of schooling and environmental activism, to find answers to the global environmental crisis. For decades, environmental activist movements have wrestled with questions of responsibility and action in the face of environmental destruction; they inhabited the mental world of the Anthropocene before much of the rest of the world. My research highlights an innovative methodology of participatory observational filmmaking, describing how films made by children in the Indian and South African communities provide a window into the ways that young people make sense of the future of the Anthropocene. I argue that it is through their capacity to imagine the world differently that education can reinvent itself.

Bio

Peter Sutoris is an environmental anthropologist and Assistant Professor at the University of York, UK. Originally from (Czecho)slovakia, he studied at Dartmouth College and defended his doctorate at the University of Cambridge. He is the author of Visions of Development (Oxford University Press, 2016) and Educating for the Anthropocene (MIT Press, 2022).

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Abstrakt

Monuments and memorials to victims of mass atrocities, such as the Stalinist Terror in Moscow and the Holocaust against Jews in Novi Sad and partisan revenge against its perpetrators, tend to reveal history. They have an apophantic force of bringing the past to the surface. Surface itself forms a plane of history and implies that there is something beneath. The Solovetsky Stone in central Moscow is one of the first monuments to victims of political oppressions in Russia. Until recently it was a nexus of remembrance of the dead for relatives and descendants, activists of Memorial and Last Address, historians, human rights advocates, and strangers. In 2022, the construction of the monument to the victims of violence in Novi Sad (Serbia) was disrupted by protesters who glued to its surface the names of the dead that include names of people killed by Yugoslav partisans and names of several Hungarian war criminals and collaborators. The surface of monuments enables a mediation of history and refraction of justice, as is the case with the Solovetsky Stone. Conversely, it can absorb the past and accrue the menacing power of a casket that buries the past within. Michael Taussig has argued that history and sorcery are substantially the same as they reveal and conceal violent processes. The surface of the above monuments is where knowing the past or hiding it are at play, and names of the dead, like the sorcerer’s invisible darts, stake out possibilities of justice.

Bio

Galina Oustinova-Stjepanovic is a Social Anthropologist and a Lecturer in Social Anthropology and Sociology at the University of Glasgow. She specialises in anthropology of historicity, political anthropology, and anthropology of religion. Her monograph Monumental Names. Archival Aesthetics and the Conjuration of History in Moscow (Anthropology of History, Routledge, 2023) is available in open access from the publisher’s site.

Na valném shromáždění byly vyhlášeny výsledky soutěže o cenu CASA za rok 2022. V bakalářské kategorii zvítězila Jana Gajić (FHS UK) s prací Hood Elitism: Stylistic Transgression of Dominant Cultural Meanings in the Music of the Serbian Artist Mimi Mercedes. V magisterské kategorii zvítězila Anna Vykoukalová (FHS UK) s prací Hranice odpadu: etnografie sběrného dvora. Gratulujeme! Více informací zde.

IMPORTANT DATES
30 March 7 April
deadline for panel proposals

15 April – 15 June
call for papers open

30 June
Notification of applicants

SUBMISSION
casa2023.iss@fsv.cuni.cz

ORGANIZING COMMITTEE
Jakub Grygar
Markéta Zandlová
Barbora Stehlíková
Andrea Hrůzová Průchová
Ema Hrešanová
Alessandro Testa
Martin Fotta
Michal Lehečka

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Abstrakt

In recent years, conspiracy theories have been increasingly defined as a new social enemy, a threat to democracy. But scholars of conspiracy theories also point out that we have very little research that examines a direct link between conspiracy theories and political practice. We still know very little about the ways in which conspiratorial beliefs influence different forms of civic engagement and democratic participation. By examining Irish and Polish movements that endorse vaccination-related conspiracy theories, this article explores what relation they have to civil society. I argue that, in order to shed the negative label of conspiracy theories, such movements engage in the practices of mimesis and mimicry. According to Markus Hoehne, mimesis is a form of positive appraisal, an art of imitating wellestablished models of social and political organization. Mimicry, on the other hand, involves the deceptive imitation of such models in order to attain one’s own political agenda. What, then, are the Covid-19 era protests: masters of mimicry or masters of mimesis?

Bio

Elżbieta Drążkiewicz obtained PhD from the Cambridge University and then moved to Ireland where she held MarieCurie Fellowship and later a Lecturship. That period of her work resulted in the book Institutionalised Dreams: the art of managing foreign aid (2020). Currently she is a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Sociology (SAV). She was recently awarded ERC grant for the “Conspirations” project that examines conflicts over conspiracy theories in Europe. Drążkiewicz is also Principal Investigator in the CHASE project REDACT analysing how digitalisation shapes the form, content, and consequences of conspiracy theories. She is also leading the APPV project PanTruth analysing conspiratorial milieu in the Visegrad countries.

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Abstrakt

The aim of my presentation is to examine the phenomenon of multiple perceptions and ascriptions of identities amongst migrants from the former USSR in Germany. The main focus will be on Jews from Georgia, with a special emphasis on the formation of community after emigration. I discuss what new arrangements of belonging are formed among those affected and why; and consider how their experiences of living and growing up in diverse ethnic and religious settings influence the perception of one’s own belonging. To illustrate why certain configurations of belonging emerge, and in which contexts, I will analyse everyday relationships in one community in Osnabrück. While this community is officially known as “Georgian”, on closer inspection it becomes clear that the use of this term involves a much broader context of identification where its members have multiple affiliations.

Bio

Nino Aivazishvili-Gehne holds a PhD in social anthropology (Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg) and is a researcher at the Research Center for the History of Transformations (RECET) in Vienna. The project was funded by the Gerda-Henkel foundation. Simultaneously, Aivazishvili-Gehne was an associate Member at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle. Her current project (started in March 2021) The search for the “good life” in Germany (Osnabrück) examines the societal perceptions of migrants from the former USSR in Germany and its consequences as well as their own agendas and proactive practices. She has published on themes of citizenship, borders, ethnicity, public and religious ceremonies.

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Abstrakt

The debates and research on religious lives in Bosnia and Herzegovina have been dominated by the ethnonational identitarian theories and frameworks of inquiry. This has been in particular the case for the study of Islam and Muslim lives as is epitomised in the work of Ernest Gellner. Drawing on my long-term fieldwork, in this talk I will show the inadequacy of such identitarian frameworks that bear only partial resemblance with the concerns and lifeworlds of my interlocutors for they write off the experiences and the vast array of relations with God. How can we then write about religious lives that are ultimately about relations with the divine without reproducing these hegemonic identitarian frameworks of analysis? I will reflect on my recently published book Remaking Muslim Lives: Everyday Islam in Postwar Bosnia and Herzegovina to consider an alternative strategy. Specifically, this talk will zoom into three interlocking themes of the book, that of the everyday, ethics, and vital exchange.

Bio

David Henig, is Associate Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Utrecht University, Netherlands, specializing in Muslim politics, military waste and war ecologies, and conflict and coexistence. He has conducted research in West Asia and Europe, is author of Remaking Muslim Lives: Everyday Islam in Postwar Bosnia and Herzegovina (Illinois, 2020), and co-editor of Economies of Favour After Socialism (Oxford, 2017), and Where is the Good in the World? Ethical Life between Social Theory and Philosophy (Berghahn, 2022). He is currently working on “Deadly Environments: Living among Explosive War Remnants in former Yugoslavia”, a project funded by the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation.

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Abstrakt

While most of us feel that it is integrated and stable, the self relentlessly engages in a complex gymnastic. Not only does it oscillate between a plurality of facets, roles, ideas, values, emotions, sometimes contradictory, but it is also endowed with a relative elasticity. Certain immersive experiences constitute fascinating laboratories to explore such dynamics. Like actors, historical reenactors impersonate men and women of the past. Cosplayers embody comic book heroes whilst furry fans and puppy players pretend to be animals. Fiction writers invent literary alter egos for themselves, a fabrication of identity that resembles the creation of avatars in the cyberspace. Some anthropologists, too, are familiar with such experiences. In participant observation, the ethnographer self appears to be increasingly fragmented and malleable. I call these “exo-experiences.” Rooted in perspective-taking, empathy and imitation, they share a desire, that of having, as captured by Proust in La Prisonière, “other eyes, of seeing the universe with the eyes of another, of a hundred others, of seeing the hundred universes that they see.”

Bio

David Berliner, professor of anthropology and a book lover, ocasionally resurfaces as Derek Moses. His work touches on a number of objects and problematics, ranging from religion, memory and nostalgia to herrtage, sexuaiity and alterity. His most recent book Devenir autre (2022) will be the subject of his GS lecture.

Jako každý rok CASA vyhlašuje soutěž o nejlepší Bc. a Mgr. práce. Deadline doručení materiálů na e-mailovou adresu asociace info@casaonline.cz
je 7. 11. 2022.

Více informací o soutěži zde

VÝSLEDKY 7. ROČNÍKU SOUTĚŽE O CENU CASA (2022)

VÍTĚZ KATEGORIE BAKALÁŘSKÝCH PRACÍ

Jana Gajić – Hood Elitism: Stylistic Transgressions of Dominant Cultural Meanings in the Music of the Serbian Artist Mimi Mercedez (Fakulta humanitních studií UK, vedoucí práce: David Verbuč)

VÍTĚZ KATEGORIE MAGISTERSKÝCH PRACÍ

Anna Vykoukalová – Hranice odpadu: etnografie sběrného dvora (Fakulta humanitních studií UK, vedoucí práce: Bob Kuřík)

Soutěže se zúčastnilo 5 bakalářských a 3 práce magisterské.

Práce hodnotila porota ve složení: Tereza Hyánková (University of New York in Prague), Jaroslav Klepal (Fakulta humanitních studií UK), Zuzana Sekeráková-Búriková (Slovenská akadémia vied), Eva Šlesingerová (Fakulta sociálních studií MU) a Martin Tremčinský (Fakulta sociálních věd UK).

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Abstrakt

Common concerns anthropology is an experimental approach that identifies research questions not according to gaps in academic knowledge, but through understanding the concerns that people are grappling with in their everyday lives. The concerns include uncertainty, excessive competition, increasing pressure, and feelings of powerlessness. The concerns that reflect people’s subjective experience of objective social contradictions. As immediate, unarticulated perceptions, concerns demand new language and methods through which to analyse them.

Bio

Biao Xiang is Director of Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Germany since 2021, and Professor at the University of Oxford before that. Xiang has worked on various types of migration in China, India and other parts of Asia. He is the winner of the 2008 Anthony Leeds Prize for his book Global Bodyshopping and the 2012 William L. Holland Prize for his article ‘Predatory Princes’. His 2000 Chinese book Transcending Boundaries was reprinted in 2018 as a contemporary classic, and Self as Method (coauthored with Wu Qi) was ranked the Most Impactful Book 2020 in China. Through public-facing articles and interviews, Xiang’s ideas regularly generate wide discussions in China and beyond. His work has been translated into Japanese, French, Korean, Spanish, German and Italian.

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Příspěvky

Martin Dolský: Město na kousky – tři příběhy Libeňského ostrova

Libeň prochází v posledních letech zásadní proměnou. Dříve industriální předměstí Prahy se stává žádanou lokalitou a volné proluky jsou zastavovány novou rezidenční i administrativní výstavbou. Spolu s novou zástavbou se mění i ráz místní krajiny, a původní Hrabalova Libeň tak přetrvává už spíše v ozvěnách. Uzavřený rezidenční areál DOCK River Watch, dokončený v roce 2018, představuje jednu z těchto dramatických změn.

Jakého významu rezidence nabývá? Jde o první vlaštovku lepších zítřků, která pozvedá špinavý a nebezpečný brownfield, kultivuje okolní divokou přírodu a zkrášluje místní městskou krajinu? Nebo areál narušuje klidný charakter místa, přetrhává historickou kontinuitu a bere Libni její dřívější ráz? Je výstavba příslibem lepších časů a katalyzátorem ekonomické prosperity, nebo zdrojem nejistoty a strachu z vymístění?

Ve své prezentaci představím tři etnografické viněty, pomocí kterých se pokusím uchopit mnohovrstevnatý a značně ambivalentní význam uzavřeného rezidenčního areálu. Co stojí za různorodými, často až konfliktními narativy místa? Jaké mají východiska a v čem se liší? A jak situaci ovlivňují společenské, materiální, ekonomické a historické kontexty? Cílem bude představit kvalitativní dopady procesu gentrifikace a regenerace postindustriálních městských krajin na příkladu konkrétního místa.

Martin Dolský v současnosti studuje magisterský program Antropologických studií na Fakultě humanitních studií Univerzity Karlovy. Jeho hlavním zájmem je urbánní antropologie, které se věnuje už od bakalářského studia. Je mu blízké i téma materiální kultury a v posledních měsících ho fascinuje hravost ontologického obratu. Vedle studia se věnuje aplikovanému výzkumu a participaci v rámci městského plánování.

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Varvara Borisova: Apoteóza černých šatů: tvorba hodnoty použitého oblečení na cestě od second k vintage

Nakupování v „sekáčích“ bylo dlouhou dobu širokou veřejností vnímáno jako záležitost nonkonformistů, excentrických umělců nebo lidí s omezeným rozpočtem. Avšak konzumní filozofie tzv. rychlé módy a dopady módního průmyslu na životní prostředí i trh práce se staly pro spoustu zákaznic důvodem pro hledání ekologičtějšího i etičtějšího způsobu zásobování šatníku.

Zatímco někteří se nákupu věcí vzdali vůbec, guru módní obce obrátili pozornost k oblečení z druhé ruky: ze secondhandu se staly vintage butiky a použitým kouskům se začalo říkat „pre-loved“. Během svého životního cyklu pre-loved kousek může opakovaně vstupovat do oběhu, stávat se darem, být chycen do limba hrabárny nebo čekat na znovuobjevení v babiččině skříně.

Cílem přednášky je ukázat, jaké praktiky tyto přechody umožňují a jak provozovatelky vintage prodejen konstruují hodnoty použitého zboží. Zároveň bych ráda pootevřela zákulisí české vintage scény, která současně zažívá rozkvět. Po představení svého etnografického výzkumu se zaměřím na závěry, jež v době hybridizace ekonomiky mohou být analyticky přínosné pro ekonomicko-antropologické bádání. Za klíčové východisko považuji předpoklad, že vintage oblečení je hybridní kategorií, která v sobě spojuje prvky kapitalistické směny i ne-kapitalistických sociálních vztahů, a tedy překračuje ustálenou antropologickou dichotomii daru a komodity.

Varvara Borisova je absolventkou magisterského programu Antropologická studia na Fakultě humanitních studií UK a současně studuje doktorský obor Obecná antropologie. Během magisterského studia se věnovala otázkám teorie hodnoty, materiální kultury a antropologie spotřeby. Ve své disertační práci se zabývá tématy spojenými s medicínskou antropologií.

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Abstrakt

This talk considers some absurdities of governance in Los Angeles: an attempt to non-lethally manage coyotes, who eat pet cats and dogs; an attempt to care for community cats, who eat birds and other endangered species; and an attempt by an oil company to restore a wetlands belonging to Native Americans, so that the birds will come back. These absurdities take shape in the technopolitical tools of environmental governance: Environmental Impact Reports slow what people want to accelerate, and accelerate what people wish to slow; a dispersed social media public sphere summons cloud coyotes and astroturfs the grasslands; and sophisticated scientific models of hydrology, habituation, and cat reproduction disclose the truth but cannot find a space of appearance to be effective. Are these forms of resistance, and if so, to what? Is their absurd interconnection something that should be resisted, or is it just the revenge of multispecies entanglement in the ruins of representative democratic institutions? What do the animals say?

Bio

Christopher M. Kelty is professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. He has appointments in the Institute for Society and Genetics, the Department of Information Studies and the Department of Anthropology. Research interests center on social theory and technology, the cultural significance of information technology; the relationship of participation, technology, and the public sphere; and more recently, the role wild animals play in contemporary urban Los Angeles. He has written two books: The Participant: A Century of Participation in Four Stories (Chicago, 2019); and Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software (Duke, 2008). He has written articles on open source and free software, including its impact on education, nanotechnology, the life sciences, participation as a political concept, open access in the academy, piracy, the history of software, hackers and hacking, and many other inadvisably diverse topics.

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Abstract

Based on and expanding from my decade-long ethnographic and historical work on segregated urban areas variously stigmatized as „Gypsy areas“ across Europe, in this talk I offer some ethnographic and theoretical insights to reflect on the social sciences‘ public and critical roles in the early 2020s. I aim to establish a conversation between debates on English-language „global“ knowledge production, a number of ethnographic observations from my fieldworks, and streams of established critical thought. One of the main lines connecting these three poles concerns the role of nuance in assembling social sciences‘ analyses and especially syntheses, and the need to keep alive discussions about what nuance may be and what it may be for.

Bio

Giovanni Picker is assistant professor in the Sociology of Inequalities at the University of Glasgow. He received his Ph.D. in Sociology and Comparative Urban Studies from Milan-Bicocca University (2009). Prior to joining Glasgow University, he was Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Research Fellow in the Department of Social Policy, Sociology and Criminology at Birmingham University (2016–2018), and before that he received a number of research fellowships in Romania, Russia, Hungary and Germany (2010–2016). His main research interest is race as a principle of social organization, and the ways in which racism plays out at the crossings of everyday life and urban politics. His most comprehensive publication on this topic is the monograph Racial Cities: Governance and the Segregation of Romani People in Urban Europe [Routledge, 2017].

Na valném shromáždění byly vyhlášeny výsledky soutěže o cenu CASA za rok 2021. V bakalářské kategorii zvítězil Martin Dolský (FHS UK) s prací Město na kousky: produkce a konstrukce prostoru uzavřeného rezidenčního areálu. V magisterské kategorii zvítězila Varvara Borisova (FHS UK) s prací Pre-loved: vintage obchody jako alternativa rychlé módě. Gratulujeme! Více informací zde.

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Abstrakt

Přednáška se zaměří na exilovou historii, kolektivní identitu a pojetí domova u tzv. namibijských Čechů, původně 56 dětských válečných uprchlíků z Angoly, kteří byli v roce 1985 přijati československou vládou na výchovu a vzdělání. Edukační program namibijských dětí v Československu vykazoval prvky sociálního inženýrství. Děti prošly československým vzdělávacím systémem (s prvky namibijské vlastenecké výchovy), osvojily si český jazyk, socializovaly se a postupně kulturně asimilovaly. Jejich dospívání bylo přerušeno po roce 1989, kdy padla železná opona a Namibie získala nezávislost. Děti byly v roce 1991 nuceně relokovány do Namibie bez jakékoliv jazykové, či psychologické přípravy, navíc bez dokončeného základního vzdělání. Jejich socio-kulturní adaptace v Namibii byla spojena s nostalgickou idealizací domova v Československu, vytváření “ostrůvků domoviny”, udržováním českého jazyka a utužováním kolektivní paměti skrze ritualizaci vzpomínek. Zkušenost se životem ve dvou kulturně odlišných prostředích vedla u namibijských Čechů k uvědomění si vlastní jinakosti a postupnému utváření svébytné kolektivní identity se silným přináležením k češství. I po téměř třiceti letech se namibijští Češi v Namibii hrdě hlásí k České republice, kterou považují za svůj jediný a pravý domov.

Biografie

Mgr. Kateřina Mildnerová, PhD. je česká afrikanistka, socio-kulturní antropoložka, v současné době působící na Katedře sociologie, andragogiky a kulturní antropologie UPa v Olomouci. Je také předsedkyní České asociace afrických studií. K jejím dlouholetým vědecko- výzkumným zájmům patří oblast antropologie náboženství (magie, čarodějnictví, tradiční léčitelství a africké křesťanské nezávislé církve), dále africké umění, kulturní turismus, kolektivní paměť a identita migrantů. Autorka má za sebou řadu terénních výzkumů v Zambii, Beninu a Namibii. Je autorkou monografií Můj soused čaroděj (Jota, 2011), Pití fetišů – náboženství a umění Beninu (Malvern, 2012), From Where Does the Bad Wind Blow (Lit Verlag, 2015), Černí Sokoli (NLN, 2020) a Namibian Czechs (Lit Verlag, 2020).

presents

LADISLAV HOLY LECTURE 2022

by

NIKO BESNIER

University of Amsterdam, La Trobe University

The Sport Industries in the Neoliberal Age
and the Reconfiguration of Future in the Global South

19 February 2022 from 16.00

The lecture will be held in the auditorium of the Faculty of Humanities, Charles University (Pátkova 2137/5, Prague)
and online via ZOOM here.

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Abstract

Since the late 1980s, a constellation of social and political dynamics has placed the possibility of a professional career in sport front and center in how young men in the Global South see the future. In most world sports, the hope of a sport career invariably means migrating to the Global North, and migration to pursue a career in sport has emerged as the desirable alternative to migrating to escape poverty. However, the probability of success in this endeavor is infinitesimal: not only do many hopefuls fail to migrate at all, but if they do, they often end up in undesirable locations, where their presence may not be welcome and where they struggle to make ends meet, secure residence documents, and gain the talent recognition they seek. Young men are all too aware of the disproportionate imbalance between possibility and probability, and yet they persevere, raising the question of what motivates them to do so. The answer lies in large-scale structural dynamics that encourage a cruel optimism in the contemporary moment, particularly in the reconfiguration of the self through neoliberalism.

Bio

Niko Besnier is currently in Social and Cultural Anthropology, Faculty of Humanities, Charles University, and Professor of Cultural Anthropology at the University of Amsterdam and Research Fellow at La Trobe University Melbourne. He has been affiliated with numerous institutions in Europe, the United States, Australia, New Zealand, and Japan. His most recent publications are The Anthropology of Sport: Bodies, Borders, Biopolitics (coauthored, University of California Press 2017, also in Japanese, French, and Spanish) and Sport, Migration and Gender in the Neoliberal Age (co-edited, Routledge 2021). In 2015–19, he was Editor-in-Chief of American Ethnologist.

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Abstrakt

Kniha Původní obyvatelé a globalizace se zamýšlí nad současnou situací domorodých obyvatel pěti kontinentů. V pěti tematických blocích, z nichž každý představuje specifický úhel pohledu, kniha reflektuje dopady globálních procesů na původní obyvatele i složitou síť vzájemných vztahů, v nichž nemusejí figurovat pouze ve stereotypní roli pasivních obětí, ale jejichž podobu mohou i sami ovlivňovat. Kniha, určená českému a slovenskému čtenáři, poskytuje komplexní pohled na problematiku původních obyvatel v kontextu současného globalizujícího a glokalizujícího se světa.

Autorský tým tvoří

Lucia Bistárová (Národné osvetové centrum)
Tomáš Boukal (Katedra sociální a kulturní antropologie FF Univerzity Pardubice)
Monika Brenišínová (Středisko ibero-amerických studií FF Univerzity Karlovy)
Marek Halbich (Katedra sociální a kulturní antropologie FHS Univerzity Karlovy)
Martin Heřmanský (Katedra sociální a kulturní antropologie FHS Univerzity Karlovy)
Jana Jetmarová (Katedra filosofie FP Technické univerzity v Liberci)
Martin Soukup (Katedra sociální a kulturní antropologie FF Univerzity Pardubice)
Lívia Šavelková (Katedra sociální a kulturní antropologie FF Univerzity Pardubice)

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Abstrakt

Východiskem této přednášky je, že populární kultura sehrála důležitou roli ve formování veřejného povědomí o tom, co je demokracie a kapitalismus po roce 1989. Zaměří se tak na české, slovenské a polské filmové obrazy transformace z 90. let a ukáže, že komerční kinematografie může být relevantním historickým pramenem pro zkoumání představ, mýtů, stereotypů a kulturních praktik spojených s nástupem volného trhu a jeho doprovodnými společenskými fenomény, jako byly privatizace, soukromé podnikání, ale také hospodářská kriminalita, rozvoj kuplířství či trh s drogami. Přednáška ukáže, že zatímco se polská kinematografie soustředila na didaktické poselství o podnikavosti a osobní iniciativě v souladu s dobovým heslem „vzít věci do vlastních rukou“, česká kinematografie nabízela ambivalentnější obrazy, vypovídající o pocitech překvapení, bezmoci či neschopnosti při setkání s volným trhem; slovenská kinematografie pak představuje obraz někde mezi těmito dvěma póly. Abychom porozuměli těmto rozdílným zobrazením zkušeností a očekávání pojících se s transformací, musíme se podívat na delší hospodářské dějiny Československa a Polska a různé hodnotové asociace spojené se soukromým podnikáním za státního socialismu, jakož i na podmínky filmové produkce v těchto zemích. Popkulturní sdělení o náhlých změnách po roce 1989 jsou zakotvena v kulturních i ekonomických kontinuitách, které nám kinematografie tohoto období výmluvně ilustruje.

Biografie

Veronika Pehe působí jako vědecká pracovnice na Ústavu pro soudobé dějiny AV ČR, kde je držitelkou Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowship. Ve své práci se zaměřuje na kulturní dějiny střední Evropy, dějiny postsocialistických transformací, kulturní paměť a paměťovou politiku. Je autorkou knihy Velvet Retro: Postsocialist Nostalgia and the Politics of Heroism in Czech Popular Culture (Berghahn Books, 2020).

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Abstract

Current approaches to antimicrobial resistance (AMR) suffer from a reductionistic worldview; complex multilevel-multi-dimensional interconnected issues are reduced either to a problem of personal behavior (e.g. ill-informed practices or non-compliance) or structural factors (such as legislation or drug regulation). By tracing how the concerns over “inappropriate drug use” evolved in global policy discourses, this paper argues for a shift to a more nuanced “sociotechnical system” understanding of AMR situation. Viewed from such a system perspective, complex AMR problems can be better understood as attributable to a sociotechnical system of “therapeutic sociality,” in which various aspects of human social life has been medicalized and pharmaceuticalized. A system view is helpful to identify a set of interconnected problems inconceivable through reductionistic analysis which seeks to break down problems into their constitutive parts. Five key issues are proposed to draw attention away from seeking and blaming the bad parts to seeing more effective leverages to reshape system dynamics. These are (1) Human-centric bias in policy and technological activities; (2) Drug-oriented healthcare in which antibiotics ritualistically replace and define “care”; (3) Vulnerability through increased intensification of productivity; (4) Cognitive dissonance and the decremental disintegration of regulatory system; and (5) Geographic misconception of geo-social topological function. Viewing AMR problems through a fresh perspective of a sociotechnical system could bring about new possibilities on how the problems of AMR are framed and engaged.

Biography

Komatra Chuengsatiansup is Director of the Society and Health Institute (SHI) at the Ministry of Public Health, Thailand. He received his MD from Chulalongkorn University and his PhD in social anthropology from Harvard University in 1998. His work at the Society and Health Institute includes research programs on the history of medicine and public health; the philosophy of science and medicine; anthropology and community health; civil society and health systems reform; and indigenous healing systems in Thailand.

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Abstract

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 w ill 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 t hat overcoming the stereotypical divide and myth of the „modern“ family as functionless in politics, can be an important contribution of anthropology in public debates.

Biography

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 ( Recently, she co-edited Reconnecting State and Kinship (University of Pennsylvania Press 2018) and Stategraphy: Toward a Relational Anthropology of the State (Berghahn 2017).

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Abstract

The talk focuses on the changing professional field of conservation and heritage management in Lviv, Ukraine, tracing the transformation of the institutional landscape, key routes to power and legitimate knowledge, and the ideological terrain this transformation can be mapped onto. Based on over a year-long ethnography, this project assesses key developments in post-socialist urban development both in a regional context, and in the broader context of the changing role of the state in cities across Europe.

Biography

Diána Vonnák is a PhD candidate in social anthropology at Durham University, UK. She has worked as an applied researcher at the Metropolitan Research institute in Budapest since 2018, and was an external doctoral researcher at Vienna University between 2016–2019. She’s interested in urban anthropology, mostly adaptation and resilience to changing social, environmental and economic conditions, in ethnography as a method in complex institutional settings, and in the anthropology of the state.

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Abstract

Humor, joking and satire will not overcome political realities and directly affect forms of violence, but it can provide a powerful critique, a non-violent form of political protest and the space for restoration of human dignity. This lecture dedicated to the legacy of Ernest Gellner will present a new publication The Politics of Joking by Jana Kopelent-Rehak and Susanna Trnka. It is a collaborative attempt to show a new direction in anthropological engagements with humor as a political expression and also as a mirror held up to society. The essays in this volume, written by anthropologists working in diverse cultural contexts and geographical areas, discuss sense of humor, the practice of joking, comic attitudes, acts of play, and above all, the potential of humor as a political force. Collectively, the scholars show how humor is deployed across various cultures to evoke emotions of anger, fear and despair. They examine humor as it is constituted in political anxiety and absurdity, aggression and power, but also when humor becomes a tool to resist, repair, reconcile or make a moral claim.

Biography

Jana Kopelent-Rehak is a Czech American cultural anthropologist, photographer and filmmaker is currently a faculty and researcher at the University of Maryland. Her research embraces a range of issues such as coastal social ecology, urban space and aesthetics, aging, social inequality, political life, violence, social suffering and social justice. In the Czech Republic, she worked with ecological refugees from Chernobyl and published a book Recovering Face about Czech Political Prisoners, addressing issues of social justice, national identity, reconciliation and memory in the context of social processes in post-socialist Central Eastern Europe. Her urban anthropology work, since 1994, is based on an engagement with communities in Baltimore, addressing urban public art, development, housing, health and social and environmental inequality. From 2013 she has been exploring environmental and social changes on Smith Island in Maryland, with a focus on cultural heritage, life cycle and aging. The signature of her work is a visual representation of socio-cultural life. Her most recent, collaborative publication The Politics of Joking, is an attempt to make an original contribution to an anthropological study of humor and joking in political life.

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Abstract

Although the anthropological study of human medicine is a well-developed field, research by anthropologists and sociologists on the structures and practice of medicine for animals around the world is a nascent field of inquiry. Yet, whether caring for cherished pets or working to contain the spread of zoonoses, or monitoring a nation’s food supply, veterinarians play a central role in most countries. In this presentation, based on preliminary fieldwork in two U.S. colleges of veterinary medicine, I map the relationships between client, patient, doctor, and technology, and the intersections of affect, species, money, scientific knowledge and cultural value when the patient is a dog… or a horse, or a cow, or even a snake. I conclude by raising questions about how the medical humanities and social sciences will have to expand to accommodate new notions of subjectivity, agency, narrativity, and ethnography in analyzing a more-than-human medicine.

Biography

Jane Desmond is Professor of Anthropology and of Gender and Women’s Studies, and Co-founder and Executive Director of the International Forum for U.S. Studies: a Center for the Transnational Study of the United States, at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, U.S.A. (website: www.anthro.illinois.edu/people/desmondj).

Her primary areas of interest focus on issues of embodiment, display, and social identity, as well as transnational U.S. Studies. Her areas of expertise include performance studies, visual culture, the analysis of the U.S. in global perspectives, and the political economy of human/animal relations. She is the Founding Resident Director of the international Summer
Institute in Animal Studies at UIUC, and Founding Editor of the Animal Lives Book Series at the University of Chicago Press. In addition to academic publications, she has written about human-animal relations for a number of public venues such as CNN.com, The Washington Post.com, and the Huffington Post. The author or editor of five scholarly books,
she holds a Ph.D. in American Studies from Yale, and most recently published the monograph Displaying Death and Animating Life: Human-Animal Relations in Art, Science, and Everyday Life (University of Chicago Press, 2016). Her current book project is called Medicine Across the Species Line: Cultural Dimensions of Veterinary Medicine.

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Abstract

Documented Encounters between South African and Czech communists were sporadic and accidental in the early history of both Communist parties. Many years later the pioneering South African trade unionist, Ray Alexander, recalled meeting Klement Gottwald at a clandestine training school in her native Latvia shortly before her migration to Cape Town in 1930. The Czech crisis of 1939 prompted the resignation of a senior personality in the South African party. Young South African Communists visited Prague just after the Second World War and were later active in the Communist-affiliated international student movement based in the Czech capital. The Czech government maintained a diplomatic presence in South Africa until 1962, the last communist administration to so and Czech officials were urged by South African communists to support trade sanctions. By the 1960s contact between the “fraternal” parties was more institutionalized. At this stage, the Czech army was beginning to supply training to Communist recruits in the insurgent force led by Nelson Mandela, Umkhonto we Sizwe. The South Africa Communist Party, in exile from 1965, held a key party meeting hosted by Czech communists in Prague that year. For the next two decades the South African Party would be locally represented in Prague on the editorial board of the World Marxist Review. The South African Communists were divided internally by the events of the Prague Spring though in public they professed their support for “normalization”. In this paper I will explore the background to these contacts and encounters. The Czech “people’s democracy” of the 1950s was a key source of inspiration for the development of the South African notion of a “national democratic” revolution. Czech support for this programme in the 1960s and 1970s was both a source of confidence and fragility, though. The paper will consider South African-Czech connections and linkages against the backdrop of the broader strategic concerns that informed and shaped Soviet and East European support for the South African liberatory politics.

Biography

With a mother and father born respectively in Calcutta and Brno, Tom Lodge was educated in Nigeria, Borneo and Britain. He has a D. Phil from York in Southern African Studies and he is a member of the Royal Irish Academy. After working as a research assistant at the University of York’s Centre for Southern African Studies he began teaching in the Politics Department at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg in 1978. He remained at Wits University until 2005, leading its politics department through the 1990’s. In 2005 he moved to the University of Limerick as Professor of Peace and Conflict Studies. He visits South Africa two or three times a year and is a board member of the Electoral Institute, a Johannesburg-based NGO. He has published extensively on South African political history. His books include Nelson Mandela: A Critical Life (Oxford University Press, 2005) and Sharpeville: An Apartheid Massacre and its Consequences (Oxford University Press, 2017). He has almost completed a book about the history of the South African Communist Party from its origins in the syndicalist politics of the white labour movement in South Africa in the 1900’s to its present-day development as a mass party. He is about to begin a book commissioned by Routledge entitled “Political Corruption in Africa”.

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Abstract

This presentation gives a brief overview of history of Yukon First Nations starting from how the physical world was created and what events shaped life in that world until the coming of the Whiteman. This will be illustrated by a number of stories which will also make clearer how Yukon First Nations people saw the world. Some of the stories will be historical. The clan system is explained as well as how Yukon First Nations people function within that system.

A brief overview is given showing where Yukon First Nations people fit in relation to other North American Indigenous peoples and how environment dictated a certain semi-nomadic lifestyle. The presentation continues with the effects of colonization on Yukon First Nations people and tries to explain why Yukon First Nations were so easily colonized. The coming of disease and the Mission School policies as well and the takeover of all laws will be discussed. Finally a brief overview of Yukon First Nations present situation will conclude the presentation.

Biography

Ukjese van Kampen is working on a second PhD with University of Lapland in Rovaniemi, Finland. This PhD is in Art & Design. Van Kampen’s previous PhD was earned in 2012 from Leiden University in the Netherlands and is in Archaeology. Ukjese is an independent curator, artist, researcher and a freelance Flight Instructor. He has curated a number of exhibitions in the Yukon such as in the Champagne and Aishihik Da Ku Cultural Centre in Haines Junction, the Kwanlin Dun Cultural Centre and Yukon Arts Centre in Whitehorse. As an artist van Kampen has been involved in about 100 art exhibitions worldwide. This included an exhibition and performances at Divadlo 29 in Pardubice in May 2018. As a researcher van Kampen has been contracted by Kwanlin Dun to write various historical chapters in their planned upcoming book about their history and has been involved in a number of smaller projects. As a freelance flight instructor van Kampen has 5500 hours flying, about half instructing and the other half flying as a bush pilot into remote wilderness locations in the Yukon.

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Abstract

Afro-Brazilian Candomblé, the worship of the West African deities which spread around Brazil as a consequence of the Atlantic Slave Trade, is often described by its followers and by the anthropologists who studied it as a “religion of nature”. Indeed, Candomblé deities (called orixás) are closely associated with natural elements in the landscape; but they are also associated with human temperaments and with different stages of life and matter. In the attempt to problematize and understand what kind of “nature” is implied in this context, I will analyse the sacred artefacts that constitute a central part of the ritual practice, the so called assentamentos.

The rules of fabrication of these mysterious factishes, using Latour’s neologism, are often surrounded by secrecy and sacredness as they constitute the physical “bodies” and “mouths” of the orixás where sacrifices and offerings are performed. Involving animal blood, vegetable substances, and other materials like wood, iron or copper in the making, the assentamentos are made by humans as a means of condensing and manipulating axé, the sacred force that is infused in natural elements. Trying to escape the colonial narrative that long described these practices as “fetishism”, I would argue that these artefacts can be understood as powerful “technological” devices and channels of communication between the visible and the invisible world. Moreover, these receptacles mirror both the deity and the heads of the novices who undergo the initiation ritual, which starts a lifelong bond between the orixá, the artefact, and the human.

Using Haraway’s metaphor of the cyborg, I analyse how these artefacts transcend and challenge the dichotomies of Western thought. Being it at the same time alive and inert, natural and technological, human and animal, infused with life force and mere vessel, the assentamento subverts these categories and sheds a light on the ways in which humans, gods, animals and elements of the landscape are made and perceived.

Biography

Giovanna Capponi is trained as a social anthropologist with a particular interest in human-environment relation, human-animal studies, cultural and historical ecology and ‘natureculture’. During her PhD at the University of Roehampton (London), she conducted extensive multi-sited (Italy and Brazil) fieldwork looking at animal sacrificial practices and perception of the environment in Afro-Brazilian Candomblé, developing her own perspectives in the fields of anthropology of ritual, material culture and human-animal studies. She worked within the AHRC-funded “Cultural and Scientific Perception of Human-Chicken Interaction” interdisciplinary project, which brought together researchers in different fields to study the significance of fowls in human cultures through history and in the present days. In 2018, she passed her viva voce with no corrections. At CEFRES/Charles University (Prague) she is starting second fieldwork as a postdoctoral researcher within the TANDEM “Bewildering Boar” project, focusing on the management of wild boars in the Central Apennine in Italy.

[PDF ke stažení]

Abstract

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.

Biography

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 21stCentury (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.

presents

LADISLAV HOLY

LECTURE 2021

by

HANA ČERVINKOVÁ

Maynooth University

Predicaments of Cultural Intimacy:

The Little Czech vs. the Covid-19 Pandemic

4. November 2021 from 17.00

The lecture will be broadcast online via ZOOM.

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Abstract

The lecture is in part inspired by Ladislav Holy’s cultural analyses of the Czech national identity and its role in the Post-Communist Social Transformation (The Little Czech and the Great Czech Nation, 1996). While Holy asked about the role of national culture in and after the sociopolitical transformation of 1989, this lecture will focus on a more recent moment in Czech history – the Covid-19 pandemic. Drawing on Michael Herzfeld’s intriguing argument that „state ideologies and the intimacy of everyday social life are revealingly similar,“ (Cultural Intimacy, 2004), I will use anthropological lens to attempt to show how politics and poetics of everyday life interplayed in the production of an epidemiological disaster.

Bio

Hana Cervinkova is a Professor of Anthropology at Maynooth University (since 2019). In her early publications, she built on ethnographic research in the Czech military focusing on the cultural and political paradoxes of postsocialist transformation in the liminal period of intensive post-Cold War civil-military restructuring. Her current work highlights issues of nationalism, racism and memory as they emerge in the everyday educational and political discourses and practices in Central Europe. The politics of memory and history figure prominently in her educational and urban research and pedagogical practice, much of which she has dedicated to exploring and making public the silenced heritage of the formerly multicultural societies of Central Europe. Cervinkova also published on anthropology of post-socialism and postcolonialism and participatory and action research methodologies.

[PDF ke stažení]

Jako každý rok CASA vyhlašuje soutěž o nejlepší Bc. a Mgr. práce. Deadline doručení materiálů na e-mailovou adresu asociace info@casaonline.cz
je 7. 11. 2021.

Více informací o soutěži zde

VÝSLEDKY 6. ROČNÍKU SOUTĚŽE O CENU CASA (2021)

VÍTĚZ KATEGORIE BAKALÁŘSKÝCH PRACÍ

Martin Dolský – Město na kousky: produkce a konstrukce prostoru uzavřeného rezidenčního areálu (Fakulta humanitních studií UK, vedoucí práce: Markéta Zandlová)

VÍTĚZ KATEGORIE MAGISTERSKÝCH PRACÍ

Varvara Borisova – Pre-loved: vintage obchody jako alternativa rychlé módě (Fakulta humanitních studií UK, vedoucí práce: Yasar Abu Ghosh)

Komise dále vyslovila uznání všem soutěžícím za vypracování výborných kvalifikačních prací navzdory pandemii a pandemické situaci, které se zásadním způsobem promítly do jejich výzkumných projektů, studia a v neposlední řadě i osobních životů. Toto uznání patří Zdeňce Balíkové (Univerzita Palackého v Olomouci, Fakulta filozofická), Haně Drštičkové (Masarykova univerzita, Fakulta sociálních studií), Barboře Jiřičkové (Univerzita Karlova, Fakulta sociálních věd), Veronice Kučabové (Univerzita Karlova, Fakulta humanitních studií), Tereze Mottlové (Univerzita Karlova, Fakulta humanitních studií), Alexandře Snohové (Masarykova univerzita, Fakulta sociálních studií), Romanu Szórádovi (Univerzita Karlova, Fakulta sociálních věd), Natálii Trušině (Univerzita Karlova, Fakulta filozofická), Veronice Veselkové (Univerzita Palackého v Olomouci, Fakulta filozofická) a Karlu Vranovskému (Univerzita Palackého v Olomouci, Fakulta filozofická).

Soutěže se zúčastnilo 7 bakalářských a 5 magisterských prací.

Práce hodnotila porota ve složení: Adam Horálek (Fakulta filozofická UPCE), Jana Jetmarová (Fakulta přírodovědně-humanitní a pedagogická TUL), Jaroslav Klepal (Fakulta sociálních věd UK), Michal Pavlásek (Etnologický ústav AV ČR, Brno) a Barbora Stehlíková (Etnologický ústav AV ČR, Praha).

CALL FOR PAPERS for the 4th CEENASWE conference

OCCULTISM AND POLITICS IN EAST-CENTRAL EUROPE

27 – 29 September 2021, Prague

More info here

Na stránce konference CASA21 byl vyvěšen program a abstrakty.

Letošní konference Biografu se uskuteční v termínu 4.-6. června 2021 v Ekopenzionu Chaloupky v Kněžicích (Vysočina). Více informací zde: http://www.biograf.org/konference/

Nově je dostupný záznam z Ladislav Holý Lecture 2020 Martina Fotty „Princíp domácnosti a námedzná práca: O ekonomickej integrácii Calónov v Brazílii a o možnostiach komparatívnej analýzy“ na Youtube: zde

Jako každý rok CASA vyhlašuje soutěž o nejlepší Bc. a Mgr. práce. Deadline doručení materiálů na e-mailovou adresu asociace info@casaonline.cz
je 1. 11. 2020

Více informací o soutěži zde

• 

» Vyhlášení soutěže ve formátu PDF

VÝSLEDKY 5. ROČNÍKU SOUTĚŽE O CENU CASA (2020)

VÍTĚZ KATEGORIE BAKALÁŘSKÝCH PRACÍ

Jakub Kvizda – Střet hyperobjektů: plastové oceány vrací úder (Univerzita Karlova, Fakulta sociálních věd)

Komise dále vyslovila uznání za výbornou kvalitu bc. pracím Marharyty Golobrodské (Univerzita Karlova, Fakulta humanitních studií) a Michaely Rusové (Univerzita Karlova, Fakulta humanitních studií).

VÍTĚZ KATEGORIE MAGISTERSKÝCH PRACÍ

Lukáš Senft – Za plotem čeká vlk: mezidruhové soužití na Broumovsku v antropocénu (Univerzita Karlova, Fakulta humanitních studií)

Komise dále vyslovila uznání za výbornou kvalitu mgr. pracím Valentiny Podlesné (Univerzita Karlova, Fakulta humanitních studií) a Karolíny Žítkové (Západočeská univerzita, Fakulta filozofická).

Soutěže se zúčastnily 4 bakalářské a 7 magisterských prací.

Práce hodnotila porota ve složení: Nikola Balaš (Praha), Zdenka Sokolíčková (University of Oslo & Univerzita Hradec Králové), Daniel Sosna (Akademie věd ČR, Praha), Jaroslav Šotola (Palackého univerzita, Olomouc), Johana Wyss (Akademie věd ČR, Praha & Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle).

Pozvánka

Česká asociace pro sociální antropologii

a

Masarykova česká sociologická společnost

ve spolupráci s

Institutem sociologických studií Fakulty sociálních věd UK

Vás srdečně zvou na

163. GELLNEROVSKÝ SEMINÁŘ

Gellnerovský seminář založen Jiřím Musilem a Petrem Skalníkem v roce 1998

který se bude konat

v pondělí 2. října 2017 od 17:30 hod.

na Fakultě sociálních věd Univerzity Karlovy Praha 5, U Kříže 8, budova B, místnost 3019

Vystoupí

Jaroslav Šotola

a Mario Rodríguez Polo

Katedra sociologie, andragogiky a kulturní

antropologie Filozofické fakulty

Univerzity Palackého v Olomouci

na téma

Etnografie sociální mobility.

Etnicita, bariéry, dominance.

Zdeněk UHEREK,v.r., Martin HEĚMANSKÝ v.r., Alena MILTOVÁ,v.r.

[PDF ke stažení]

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Mgr. Jaroslav Šotola, Ph.D.

Jaroslav Šotola působí jako odborný asistent na Katedře sociologie, andragogiky a kulturní antropologie Filosofické fakulty Univerzity Palackého v Olomouci. V roce 2006 dokončil doktorské studium na Fakultě humanitních studií Univerzity Karlovy v Praze v oboru antropologie, se specializací historická antropologie. Od roku 2012 realizuje dlouholetý terénní výzkum zaměřený na analýzu kontextů romské mobility v prostředí východního Slovenska. S kolegou Rodríguezem Polo se zabýval výzkumem neformálních dobrovolnických iniciativ pomáhajících uprchlíkům na „balkánské trase“ a také se společně zaměřují na analýzu podob každodenního rasismu v české společnosti.

Mario Rodríguez Polo, Ph.D.

Mario Rodríguez Polo působí jako odborný asistent na Katedře sociologie, andragogiky a kulturní antropologie Filosofické fakulty Univerzity Palackého v Olomouci. V roce 2013 dokončil doktorské studium na Universidad Comlutense v Madridu v oboru indoevropská lingvistika a slovanská filologie. Od roku 2012 se podílel na mnoha výzkumných projektech zaměřených na slovenské romské lokality a jejich infrastrukturu. Mezi jeho další výzkumná témata náleží vztah mezi migrací a aktuálními sociálními hnutími. Společně s kolegou Šotolou realizoval terénní výzkum neformálních dobrovolnických iniciativ pomáhajících uprchlíkům na „balkánské trase“ a také se zaměřují na analýzu podob každodenního rasismu v české společnosti.

Etnografie sociální mobility.

Etnicita, bariéry, dominance

Cílem semináře je prezentovat výsledky tříletého terénního výzkumu skupiny kulturních antropologů z Univerzity Palackého v Olomouci, zaměřeného na fenomén historické i současné sociální mobility Romů na východním Slovensku. Empiricky je práce založena na etnografii čtyř slovenských vesnic na Spiši, jejichž romští obyvatelé nenaplňují běžné stereotypy o lidech žijících na okraji společnosti. Dílčí studie dokládají, že pokud jsou alespoň částečně potlačeny sociální bariéry omezující životní dráhy Romů (v případě zkoumaných lokalit se jednalo o potenciál otevřený hlavně migrací), mohou jednotlivé rodiny i celé lokální komunity dosáhnout životní úrovně, která se vyrovná sociálním standardům místních ne-Romů. Zájem o konkrétní podmínky sociální mobility části slovenských Romů vedl ale zároveň ke zjištění, že i když dotyční jedinci plní často po generace požadavky na vzájemné soužití, potýkají se ve svém životě nadále s bariérami a negativním tlakem ne-romské majority. Zvolené téma vertikální mobility tak zároveň umožnilo odkrýt a popsat systémové překážky, kterým Romové čelí.

Na základě komparace výsledků dílčích studií autoři formulují obecnější závěry, které mohou vést k celkovému posunu v konceptualizaci Romů jako předmětu výzkumu sociálních věd. Nelze je chápat jako skupinu „radikálně jiných“, „etnickou komunitu“, nebo „nositele romské kultury“. Jejich relativní homogenita je autory chápána jako důsledek dlouhodobých strukturálních tlaků ve společnosti, které jsou namnoze popírány nebo bagatelizovány. Tematizace těchto tlaků je přitom z vědeckého hlediska důležitější než fascinace údajnou romskou jinakostí. Problematika vertikální sociální mobility tak umožňuje odhalit systémovou povahu bariér v podobě mocenské dominance. Dochází tak k obrácení běžné perspektivy, na základě které se hledají kořeny „romského problému“ u etnicky vymezené skupiny samotné.

Petr Skalník, člen MČSS a CASA

Gellnerovské semináře (GS) se od roku 1998 konají jako akce sekce sociální antropologie Masarykovy české sociologické společnosti (MČSS) a po svém založení i České asociace pro sociální antropologii (CASA). V roce 2013 se konalo 11 seminářů, šest v původní řadě, které byly garantovány Petrem Skalníkem ve spolupráci s Alenou Miltovou a Zdeňkem Uherkem, pět o Střední Evropě, svolávaných Johannem Aransonem a Nicolasem Maslowskim. Zatímco původní řada představila i zahraniční referenty, středoevropská řada dala příležitost vystoupit s referáty tuzemským badatelům. V původní řadě Gellnerovských seminářů se uplatnily zejména referáty sociálně antropologické, i když hlavní událostí byl 130. GS, organizovaný 21.2. 2013 k nedožitým 85. narozeninám Jiřího Musila, iniciátora a spoluzakladatele Gellnerovských seminářů. Tento seminář, na němž promluvili zejména politický geograf Petr Dostál a sociologové Michal Illner,  Johann Arnason a Marek Skovajsa, byl hojně navštíven a diskuse byla opravdu živá. Jiří Musil je nadále inspirující osobností v české společenské vědě, což dokázal i 137. GS, na němž dne 31.10. 2013 vystoupil Marek Hrubec o Jiřím Musilovi jako sociologovi středoevropského města. Z antropologicky zaměřených GS se setkal s velkou odezvou 135. GS, na němž o svém novém výzkumném projektu, týkajícího se slovenských Romů v místní samosprávě, zasvěceně informoval David Zdeněk Scheffel z kanadské Thompson Rivers University. Diskuse pokračovala v nedaleké vinárně.

Vrátím se však popořadě k ostatním seminářům. 129. GS se konal 24.1.2013 a v středoevropské řadě vystoupil historik Jan Křen na téma Střední Evropa v dějepisectví a současné politice. 131. GS byl opět součástí středoevropské řady. Dne 7.3.2013 promluvila politoložka Vladimíra Dvořáková na aktuální téma Budování či rozkládání státu v postkomunistické Střední Evropě? Hned 14.3. 2013 o problematice občanské participace v jedné západoslovenské vesnici promluvila anglicky na 132. GS Yuko Kambara-Yamane z The University of Kitakyushu v Japonsku. Účastníci byli fascinováni výzkumem japonské badatelky, která se naučila slovensky, aby mohla kvalitně provést svůj výzkum. Aktivistický výzkum u chicagských nízkopříjmových Afroameričanů v neoliberální době přiblížila na 133. GS dne 11.3. 2013 Pauline Lipman, specialistka na vzdělávací politiku z University of Illinois at Chicago, USA. Další středoevropský seminář nabídla historička Eva Irmanová, která na 134. GS, jenž se konal 18.4. 2014, promluvila na ožehavé a stále jakoby aktuální téma Mad’arsko a Versailleský mírový systém. Poslední jarní setkání bylo s historikem Janem Rychlíkem, který  na 136. GS dne 16.5. 2013 posluchačům přiblížil tématiku Česko-slovenských vztahů ve středoevropském kontextu. K sociální antropologii příznivce seminářů vrátil dne 21.11.2013 Yasar Abu Ghosh svým výkladem o Konceptu peněz chudých: od primitivních peněz k teorie hodnoty. To byl již 138. GS. Posledním GS byl 139. dne 12.12. 2013, kdy promluvila maďarská Američanka, ekonomická socioložka Zsuzsa Gille z University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, která do jara 2014 působí jako hostující profesorka na Fakultě sociálních věd Univerzity Karlovy. Téma bylo zároveň velmi obecné a specifické a to pod názvem: Is there a Global Postsocialist Condition? The Case of the Hungarian New Right.

Gellnerovské semináře probíhaly i v roce 2013 v družné atmosféře, již podtrhovalo nabízené červené víno, tak charakteristické pro semináře Arnošta Gellnera. V roce 2013 skončil po více jak 15. letech jako svolavatel Petr Skalník a předal organizaci GS do rukou Aleny Miltové a Zdeňka Uherka. Nadále počítáme s organizačním příspěvkem Johanna Arnasona a Nicolase Maslowskiho co do středoevropských seminářů.

Petr Skalník, člen MČSS a CASA

V roce 2009 se stal Gellnerovský seminář společnou aktivitou MČSS a nově založené CASA (Česká asociace pro sociální antropologii). Svolavateli byli Jiří Musil za MČSS a Petr Skalník se Zdeňkem Uherkem za CASA. Seminář se sešel devětkrát a nadále zůstal důležitou platformou pro výměnu názorů zejména sociologů a sociálních antropologů, ale také historiků, etnologů, filozofů, přičemž je zvláštní pozornost věnována prezentacím doktorandů a dalších mladých kolegů. V referovaném roce jsme měli jistou převahu referátů, zajišťovaných ze strany CASA. Věříme, že v roce 2010 bude více prezentací nabídnuto členy MČSS. Rok 2009 byl také významný výrazným podílem zahraničních referujících.

V lednu se konal 96. seminář na téma Německá etnografie Čech a společenské konsekvence jejího praktikování. Referentem byl doc. Petr Lozoviuk, Ph.D., který ač odchovanec pražského Ustavu etnologie na FFUK působí již několik let na Institut für Sächsische Geschichte und Volkskunde Dresden. V únoru 2009 přijel do České republiky významný nizozemský sociální antropolog, který se specializuje na symbolickou antropologii, Prof. Dr. Jos. D.M. Platenkamp, který od 90. let minulého století je ředitelem institutu sociální antropologie na severoněmecké Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster. Jeho tématem byl jeden z výstupů jeho dlouhodobého výzkumu v Laosu: The canoe-racing ritual of Luang Prabang. Již po několikáté vystoupila na GS Mgr. Vendula Řezáčová, doktorandka v oboru sociální antropologie na katedře sociologie fakulty sociálních věd Univerzity Karlovy v Praze. V březnu 2009 hovořila anglicky na jedno téma ze své budoucí dizertace Negotiating manhoodin post-apartheid South Africa:Precarious transformations of Tshivenda-speaking labour migrants into religious leaders. Devadesátý devátý Gellnerovský seminář na téma Reemigrace a usídlování volyňských Čechů v interpretacích aktérů a odborné literatury zajistila dr. Jana Nosková, vědecká pracovnice – postdoktorand EÚ AV ČR. Posledním seminářem prvního půlroku 2009 byl jubilejní 100. GS na téma Navigating Human Terrain: On Anthropology and Counter-Insurgency in Afghanistan. Referentem byl hostující profesor na FHS UK prof. David B. Edwards, W. Van Alan Clark Professor of the Social Sciences,  Williams College, USA.

Po prázdninách v září 2009 byl dalším zahraničním referentem skvěle česky hovořící islandský sociolog Johann P. Arnason, emeritní profesor sociologie na La Trobe University v Melbourne; Austrálie, který od roku 2009 působí jako hostující  profesor na fakultě humanitních studií UK v Praze. Ten hovořil na vděčné téma Poznámky ke Gellnerově filozofii dějin. Prof. Arnason také zorganizoval spolu s FHS UK v listopadu speciální Gellnerovskou dílnu na téma „Ernest Gellner: Struktura dějin a teorie modernity,“ na níž vystoupila řada dřívějších přispěvatelů do Gellnerovských seminářů (Jiří Musil, Miroslav Hroch, Luboš Kropáček, Petr Skalník, Marek Skovajsa). V říjnu 2009 se konal 102. GS na zajímavé téma Recruiting Agencies: The Role of Recruitment Firms in Czech Healthcare Worker Migration. Šlo o nábor českých ošetřovatelek na práci v Saúdské Arábii. Přednášející byla doktorandka s českými předky Heidi Bludau z Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana, USA. V listopadu zavítal do České republiky další badatel s českými kořeny a to v USA narozený ekonomický historik Bill Freund, emeritní profesor na jihoafrické University of KwaZulu-Natal. Ten posluchače seznámil na 103. GS se svým nedávným výzkumem v Kongu, The African Middle Class of Kinshasa; A Gridlocked City in a ‚Fragile‘ State 1960-2010. Nakonec se 10.12.2009 konal 104. GS s referátem na téma Cizinecké komunity v městském prostředí: velká města v České republice, který přednesl dr. Zdeněk Uherek, ředitel Etnologického ústavu Akademie věd České republiky.

Pro rok 2010 počítáme s více referáty, zajištěnými ze strany MČSS a máme k tomu příslib pomoci dr. Aleny Miltové, která se tak stane čtvrtou svolavatelkou Gellnerovských seminářů. Věříme, že semináře budou nadále vyhledávanou příležitostí k prezentování probíhajících a završených výzkumů a vyzýváme tímto členy obou společností/asociací k zasílání návrhů témat referátů na elektronické adresy svolavatelů Gellnerovských seminářů: ceu.musil@volny.cz, petr.skalnik@upce.cz, uherek@eu.cas.cz a miltova@chello.cz.