Panel Organisers: Barbora Bírová and Michal Lehečka
Department of General Anthropology, Faculty of Humanities, Charles University in Prague
Discussants: Jan Horský and Marek Halbich
Department of General Anthropology, Faculty of Humanities, Charles University in Prague
The panel is focused on current approaches to and conceptualizations of power across anthropological subdisciplines. The aim of the panel organisers is to provoke discussion which can lead to interdisciplinary view on the issue of power, from both theoretical and empirical perspective. The main purpose of the panel is to explore and articulate the bindings that connect the different approaches together and put them in an interdisciplinary framework. In two half-day sessions participants will have the opportunity of intense contact with each other. The panel is designed mainly for students of social, cultural, historical, philosophical, cognitive anthropology and also of human ethology.
Generally we focus on two main discourses (dimensions) of Power. The first, ethical discourse highlights the importance of reflecting the position of the researcher and his/her relations to other social actors. In other words it focuses on power aspects of field research. The second discourse is rather theoretical. Views on Power vary within each anthropological discipline. In contemporary social theories the issue of power is frequently connected with topics of governmentality, gender, ethnicity, post-colonialism, migration, disciplination, marginality, adaptation etc. Participants will have the opportunity to present their perspective on the issues presented above. This could be theoretical and methodological approaches, various empirical details, possibilities and limits of specific research methods and individual experience with an emphasis on characteristics of the field research.
Programme
Saturday September 13, 2014
ROOM A
14:00-18:00 Networks of Power: The possibility of interdisciplinary approaches to the current research in the context of post-socialism
Part I
Chair: Michal Lehečka
14:00-14:05 Introduction
14:05-14:25 Jan Horský: „Power“ – Ontic Quality or Researcher‘s Assumption?
14:25-14:45 Martin Charvát: Power, Identity and Minority
14:45-15:05 Martin Tharp: „Knowledge, Experience, Ethics: Nationality and Power in Research on the Recent Communist Past“
15:05-15:30 Jan Horský and Marek Halbich: Discussion
15:30-16:00 Coffee Break
Part II
Chair: Barbora Bírová
16:00-16:20 Pavla Burgos Tejrovská: The Social Actor and Symbolic Power: Discursive and Performative Dimensions of Power in Applied Anthropology.
16:20-16:40 Magdaléna Myslivcová: „Strategy of Religious Subjects During the Occupation of the Public Space of the Town Písek after the Year 1989“
16:40-17:00 Markéta Slavková: Bread and “Games” in Contemporary Foodscapes
17:00-17:20 Tomáš Samec: Narrative accounts of the Financial crisis and the home making process
17:20-18:00 Marek Halbich and Jan Horský: Discussion
1.
„Power“ – Ontic Quality or Researcher‘s Assumption?
Jan Horský
(Department of General Anthropology, Faculty of Humanities, Charles University in Prague)
The paper follows the concept of power as ability to control another person’s actions and it deals with Weberian differentiation between „ties“ and „estates“. It discusses the problem of „empirical undetectability“ of power. The aim of the paper is to elaborate the tension between the scholarly necessity to assume the existence of various fields of power and the individual experience (claimed from phenomenological or religious point of view) of the possibility to „escape“ the field of power, i.e., the tension between methodological and ontological concept of power.
2.
Power, Identity and Minority
Martin Charvát
(Department of Electronic Culture and Semiotics, Faculty of Humanities, Charles University in Prague)
Apart from the proposed philosophical themes the book called Anti-Oedipus written by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari is also considered as a very specific and important contribution to the anthropological field; especially to the conception of identity which is the result of the micro-politics of power. Deleuze and Guattari show (also in their A Thousand Plateuas) how is our subjectivity constructed by certain social arrangement based on the circulation of power and its distribution (in a way which is in many aspects similar to Louis Althusser’s thoughts). The primary aim of Deleuze and Guattari is therefore to show the possibility of „fleeing out“ from any stable power-structure, from any kind of stratification which constructs our subjectivity. Here plays the main role the concept of „minority“ or „marginality“ which involves specific usage of language to abrupt the bond between the social power formation and subjects in order to unbound potential revolutionary force which can change given social arrangement; from minority to destruction of the identity.
3.
„Knowledge, Experience, Ethics: Nationality and Power in Research on the Recent Communist Past“
Martin Tharp
(Department of Historical Sociology, Faculty of Humanities, Charles University in Prague)
The contribution seeks to raise questions about the relationship between observation and participation in dealing with issues of the recent totalitarian past in currently “post-totalitarian” societies. It attempts an examination of the social processes (public and personal issues of coming to terms with the historical facts of totalitarian power) and the social actors (former dissidents and former supporters of the system, scholars from within post-totalitarian societies, scholars from abroad, and the unusually equivocal position of scholars from abroad currently working in the region) to pose the question: what exactly are the power relationships in this situation, and what are the responsibilities between the participants? The assumption to be tested – based on extensive personal experience of interviews and interactions with both ex-dissidents and international scholarly circles – is that a subtle process of power-hierarchisation is at play in the relationships of observer to observed, and that epistemological self-questioning on the part of scholars can often serve to reinforce hierarchies of observation rather than genuinely shedding light on them.
4.
The Social Actor and Symbolic Power: Discursive and Performative Dimensions of Power in Applied Anthropology.
Pavla Burgos Tejrovská
(Department of General Anthropology, Faculty of Humanities, Charles University in Prague)
As described by Bourdieu [1991, 2003], the social reality creates a structure of the distribution of different forms of capital; meaning that the social space is transformed into the distribution of symbolic power. The accumulation of various capitals allows individuals to transmit, reproduce and maintain the social order and values of the community. Symbolic power and its redistribution between the researcher and the subject of investigation are an everyday part of ethnographic work. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the discursive and performative dimensions of this redistribution. By discursive dimension, I refer to the oral or textual representation that anthropologists relate to the negotiation of their relationship with social actors in applied practice. Performativity refers to the implications, process of shaping differences and recreating of reality which this negotiation of symbolic power brings in applied practice. These dimensions will be analyzed on the example of applied research in the context of long-term unemployment.
5.
Strategy of Religious Subjects During the Occupation of the Public Space of the Town Písek after the Year 1989
Magdaléna Myslivcová
(Department of General Anthropology, Faculty of Humanities, Charles University in Prague)
Czech society in the post-communist era has been going through the transformation of all areas of social life including the religious sphere. After all restrictions were lifted in 1989 the original well-established churches along with the newly arriving churches and religious groups try to hastily fill in the void and install subjectively the most promising tools to strengthen their position and influence or power in the society building on their traditional roles or starting from scratch. During the first years it is the hunger of the seemingly atheistic majority to fill the vacuum of spiritual values that plays into their hands. However, only a part of them manage to make use of the opportunity. As the religious scene diversifies intensively and there is a growing interest in „outside the church“, noncommittal and optional religiousness, there is also a massive increase in new entities offering alternative religiousness or spirituality often on a commercial basis and a powerful market of religious opportunities starts emerging. In my paper I will introduce a case study on the transformation of the religious landscape of the South Bohemian town of Písek after the year 1989.
6.
Bread and “Games” in Contemporary Foodscapes
Markéta Slavková
(Department of General Anthropology, Faculty of Humanities, Charles University in Prague)
Roman satirical poet Juvenal had written that: ’Everything, now restrains itself and anxiously hopes for just two things: bread and circuses (panem et circenses)’ (Juvenal, Satires 10.81). Nowadays, Juvenal’s statement is still useful for understanding certain trends in contemporary consumerist food politics in a sense that the “bread” represents the overfilled shelves of supermarkets and “games” the valorisation of entertainment. Precisely these conditions open up a space for spreading of a qualitatively different relationship between an individual, society and the “daily bread”. In many world’s regions private agricultural growth by traditional means has been diminishing, whereas the amount of industrially produced food obtained through shopping is on the rise. The shift towards the model of “more economically developed country“ (MEDC) inevitably has lead to the industrialisation and mechanisation of agriculture that employs about 2% of country’s population. Not only this results in the loss of traditional knowledge, but as I suggest in this presentation contemporary food politics that is put into motion by capitalism can be analysed as a site of Foucaultian “bio-power” (Dreyfus and Rabinow, 1982).
7.
Narrative accounts of the Financial crisis and the home making process
Tomáš Samec
(Institute of Sociological Studies, Faculty of Social Sciencies, Charles University in Prague)
This text deals with the Financial crises from the perspective of everyday lived experience. It presents the analysis of narrative accounts of lay people who were active on the Czech housing market during or after the Crises. Theoretically rooted in the in the framework of narrative analysis, the text widens the mainstream economical perceptions of Crises bringing the concepts of emotions, ethos and symbolic boundaries into account. On the behalf of the narratives of Crises, the narratives of the process of social construction of home proved to be significant for the narrator’s identity construction and presentation. Text presents three main findings a) Crises is trope, which is used as such in the narratives b) moral evaluation, which might be coined as the bourgeois morality ethos prove their significance in the narratives c) housing choices being based both on „rational“ and „irrational“ factors i. e. emotions, moral evaluations. The main interpretation of the narrative accounts suggests the crucial importance of the narratives of social construction of home for the expression of being independent, capable, responsible and thus successful person. The ability to express the capability of securing what is culturally regarded as “good and ideal housing“ to the family, represents ones ability to succeed in the complex globalized, post-socialist reality. It also suggests the immanent importance of the category of (individual) success in the contemporary capitalist and post-socialist societies.