To join on-line via MS Teams
We are pleased to invite you to a 225th Gellner Seminar with Yasmin Gunaratnam (King’s College London). The seminar will be held on on Thursday, April 23d, 2026, at 5:30 p.m. in the seminary room B1 at Kampus Hybernská (Hybernská 4, Prague 1).
Creative and Theatre Methods as Affective and Epistemic Mutual Aid in Feminist Anticolonial Research
This talk invited you to help me think through how creative and theatre methods might be both an affective and epistemic resource in feminist anticolonial research. I will share examples from a range of participatory arts-based projects—including work in the UK with hospice art therapists, Sri Lankan tea plantation workers and trade union leaders and street-based sex-workers in Cape Town —to show these methods in practice.
Creative and theatre methods have the capacity to hold and convey experiences that exceed language and rationality: the somatic, the unspoken, the withdrawn. They can work with opacity rather than against it, refusing demands for transparent legibility and complicating ableist assumptions about presence. Yet these methods are not only about different forms of representation. They also gather us together. I will suggest that the communality of creative practice—bodies together, the shared risks of making and playing, the distributed work of un/meaning-making—enact forms of epistemic collectivity that challenge extractive research logics. Creative and theatre methods do this in their capacities to minnow. That is, to flash mob around the shape of our unknowing. At a time of intensifying hostility towards progressive politics and care, I suggest that these communal aspects of creative methods carry particular significance and potential. They prefigure the worlds feminist anticolonial research seeks to build, modelling what I call epistemic mutual aid: research as solidarity and collective capacity-building rather than a privatised, neoliberal individual achievement.
Bio:
Yasmin Gunaratnam is a sociologist at King’s College (London) with a particular interest in feminist and anti-racist methodologies, migration and diaspora, disability, care and critical pedagogies. She is interested in how different types of dispossession are produced, lived with and remade and how these processes create new forms of local and global life.
To join on-line via MS Teams
We are pleased to invite you to a 224th Gellner Seminar with Vinicius Ferreira (Rio de Janeiro State University ). The seminar will be held on on Thursday, March 3d, 2026, at 5:30 p.m. in the seminar room 247 of the Faculty of Arts (Celetná 20, Prague 1).
Radical Alterity and Epistemic Confinement: Authority and Difference in Anthropology
This lecture revisits debates on alterity and scholarly subjectivation in light of contemporary configurations of knowledge production in social sciences. Bringing together long-term ethnographic research on Indian social scientists working in European academic institutions and collaborative research on the politics of epistemic location, the talk examines how theoretical authority is differentially distributed within the discipline when it comes to international division of intellectual labour.
Drawing on ethnographic work and interviews with Indian and Brazilian researchers based in European universities, I show how inclusion of Global South scholars in international academic spaces often entails specific expectations regarding objects of study, scales of analysis, and modes of theoretical articulation. Scholars “from the South” are frequently recognized for their empirical familiarity, positional specificity, or representational value, while their capacity to move theoretically is more tightly constrained.
The lecture argues that these dynamics are reinforced, rather than dismantled, by certain strands of contemporary decolonial discourse. While decolonial studies have been crucial in exposing epistemic hierarchies and colonial legacies within anthropology, their institutionalized uptake has at times contributed to the re-essentialization of epistemic positions. In this context, alterity risks becoming an expected performance or an asset rather than a space for critical positionalities. The lecture proposes the concept of epistemic confinement to describe the ordinary mechanisms through which anthropology manages difference while limiting theoretical mobility.
Bio:
Vinicius Ferreira is an Associate Professor at the Department of Anthropology at Rio de Janeiro State University (UERJ) and an Associate Researcher at the Laboratoire d’Anthropologie Politique de l’École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. He is the co-editor of Vibrant (Virtual Brazilian Anthropology), a journal of the Brazilian Anthropological Association. He currently serves as the Co-Chair of the IUAES Commission on Migration and Coordinator of the South-South Exchange Programme for Research on the History of Development (SEPHIS). His research interests include academic circulations, history of anthropology, and political anthropology of knowledge.
Na Valném shromáždění CASA, které proběhlo 30. ledna 2026, byly vyhlášeny výsledky soutěže o cenu CASA za rok 2025. Celkem se do 10. ročníku soutěže přihlásilo 20 prací, z toho 12 bakalářských a 8 magisterských. Předsednictvo děkuje porotě ve složení: Kristina Alda (CTS), Eva Ferrarová (FF UK), Alena Glajchová (ETF UK), Alžběta Wolfová (CTS), Varvara Borisova (SOÚ AV ČR).
V bakalářské kategorii zvítězila Anna Váchová (FSS MUNI) s prací Ableismus a konstrukce znevýhodnění v univerzitním prostředí (vedoucí práce Eva Kotašková a Kateřina Čanigová).
V magisterské kategorii zvítězila Sára Hájková (FHS UK) s prací „My už dobré sousedy máme.“ Vícedruhová etnografie záměru výstavby gigafactory v Dolní Lutyni (vedoucí práce Bohuslav Kuřík).
Porota dále udělila čestné uznání Julii Ertin (FHS UK) s prací Transform(n)ations: Belonging and Citizenship of Syrian ‘Freedom Fighters’ Living in Türkiye (vedoucí práce Jaroslav Klepal). Gratulujeme!
We are happy to announce the speakers for the upcoming Gellner Seminars. For further details, please follow our website and Facebook page.
To join on-line via MS Teams
We are pleased to invite you to a 223rd Gellner Seminar with Zoltan Pall (Faculty of Law, Charles University). The seminar will be held on on Thursday, February 12th, 2026, at 5:30 p.m. in seminar room B1, Kampus Hybernská (Hybernská 4, Praha 1).
The Reemergence of Ambiguity: Salafism and Muslim Moral Worlds in Cambodia
This presentation critically engages with Thomas Bauer’s argument on the decline of ambiguity in modern Islam by examining its paradoxical reemergence within Salafism among Cambodia’s Muslim minority. While Salafism aspires to remove uncertainty from Islamic belief and practice through a literalist and universalist framework, its implementation in Cambodia has revealed tensions with local social realities and clashes with Cham cosmologies rooted in pluralism and ritual fluidity. Drawing on ethnographic case studies, I show how educated, middle-class Muslims from Salafi backgrounds increasingly confront contradictions between doctrinal rigidity and lived experience. Many develop practices of selective accommodation and epistemic openness that amount to a renewed tolerance of ambiguity. This process marks a departure from earlier analyses of moral ambivalence, pointing instead to a deeper reconsideration of religious authority, truth, and certainty. Situated within Cambodia’s post-conflict transformation, the rise of a Muslim middle class, and renewed engagement with national culture, the case suggests that Salafism, in failing to suppress ambiguity, may paradoxically function as a catalyst for its return.
Bio:
Zoltan Pall (PhD, Utrecht University) is a senior researcher at the Institute for the Interregional Study of Constitutionalism, Charles University. He is the author of Salafism in Lebanon: Local and Transnational Movements (Cambridge University Press, 2018). He has conducted extensive fieldwork in Lebanon, Kuwait, and Cambodia, as well as in Egypt, Thailand, the Philippines, Indonesia, and Malaysia. His current research focuses on everyday experiences of constitutionalism in authoritarian contexts in the Middle East and on the dynamics of Muslim transnational networks in Southeast Asia.
presents
LADISLAV HOLY LECTURE 2026
by
Bob Simpson
Durham University, UK
REFLECTIONS ON THE TEACHING OF KINSHIP IN THE 21ST CENTURY
30 January 2026 from 5 pm
The lecture will be held in the seminar room of the Lusatian seminary
(U Lužického semináře 90/13, Prague)
You can attend the lecture via MS Teams.
Abstract
It is thirty years since Ladislav Holy’s Anthropological Perspectives on Kinship was first published. In this lecture I reflect on the development of kinship over this time and how changes in focus, contexts and definitions have impacted upon the way in which this most important ingredient in the anthropological mix is delivered to our students.
I reflect on anthropological pedagogy in general and three major challenges in the teaching of kinship. These are: the vocabulary of kinship, diagrammatic representation and the nature and limits of reflexive sensibility when it comes to understanding the relational worlds of others. I discuss an exercise used to elicit each student’s experience of their own kinship, that is, of family, parentage, care, ritual, and so forth. The exercise is borrowed from family therapy and entails the construction of a genogram as a starting point for the exploration of perceptions, ideas, and assumptions about others’ relational worlds: the essential transaction of kinship teaching.
I conclude the lecture with some speculative thoughts on the relationship between recognition and empathy, not only in the teaching of kinship, but as capacities that, in more general terms, seem to be deficient in the world in which we live today.
Bio
Bob Simpson is an Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at Durham University, UK. He has carried out a wide range of research in both the UK and South Asia. Sri Lanka has been the main focus of his research since 1978. He has also worked on numerous projects in the UK. Most significant in this respect was his work on divorce and family. From 2000 onwards he worked on a range of topics concerning the cultural assimilation of new reproductive and genetic technologies into Sri Lanka exploring the encounter between challenging technological developments and local systems of values and beliefs concerning bodies, gametes, blood, organs and tissues.
Vážené členstvo,
srdečně Vás zveme na Valné shromáždění České asociace pro sociální antropologii konané v pátek 30. 1. 2026 od 13:00 v Lužickém semináři (U Lužického semináře 90/13, Praha) a online na platformě MS Teams.
V případě, že Valné shromáždění nebude usnášeníschopné, uskuteční se 30. 1. 2026 od 13:05 na stejném místě Náhradní valné shromáždění. Po Valném shromáždění bude od 17:00 hod. následovat Ladislav Holý Lecture 2026, kterou přednese Bob Simpson (Durham University).
Program Valného shromáždění je ke stažení zde.
***
Dear members,
We cordially invite you to the General Assembly of the Czech Association for Social Anthropology on Friday 30. 1. 2026 at 13:00 at the Lusatian seminary (U Lužického semináře 90/13, Praha) and on-line via MS Teams.
If the General Assembly is not quorate, a Substitute General Assembly will be held on 30 January 2026 at 13:05 at the same location. At 17:00, the General Assembly will be followed by Ladislav Holý Lecture 2026, presented by Bob Simpson (Durham University).
The agenda of the General Assembly is available here.
Katedra sociologie, andragogiky a kulturní antropologie Univerzity Palackého v Olomouci se i letos zapojuje do Evropského dne antropologie, který již tradičně připadá na třetí čtvrtek v únoru. Letošní ročník tematicky navazuje na hlavní téma konference EASA Anthropology: Possibilities in a Polarised World, která se bude konat v červenci 2026 v Poznani.
Pojem polarizace dnes rezonuje napříč společností i vědními obory. Ekologie, migrace, politika – to jsou jen některá z témat, která bývají označována jako polarizující či již polarizovaná. Jak ale polarizace vzniká a jak se projevuje v každodenním životě? Co si pod tímto pojmem vlastně představujeme? A především – jak (pře)žít v polarizované společnosti? Zveme Vás k zapojení do diskuse a inspirativnímu setkání u příležitosti oslav antropologie.
Pro více informací se prosím obracejte na martin.latal@upol.cz.
Kdy: 19. 2. 2026, 13:00
Kde: Velká Aula (1.49), tř. Svobody 26, Olomouc
Akce se koná za podpory České asociace pro sociální antropologii.
Photo: CEFRES
Ernest (Ernst, Arnošt) Gellner grew up in Prague, where he also died. In between was the life of a brilliant intellectual, arguably the most influential social scientist of the second half of the 20th century. He became an ‚enfant terrible‘ by his critique of linguistic philosophy, but also showed his talent by the examination of psychoanalysis, populism, kinship and Islam. His fieldwork among the Moroccan Berbers made him a social anthropologist whose methodical reviews in The Times Literary Supplement were often witty reading for intellectuals outside anthropology. Gellner’s critical view of Marxism and Soviet-type communism led him to develop a systematic interest in Soviet and Eastern European affairs, primarily anthropological. His compassionate writing produced a long series of books, monographs, and collections, which will remain a key to his great mind and a reference for generations of his successors. Perhaps unwittingly, his most impressive works pertained to nationalism. His most read book was Nations and Nationalism (1983), translated into dozens of languages. Even though he spent most of his active time employed by the London School of Economics and Political Science, Gellner’s career reached its apogee as a professor of social anthropology at the University of Cambridge. Finally, upon his retirement, he accepted the directorship of the Centre for the Study of Nationalism at the Central European University’s Prague branch. Recently, a representative collection of essays entitled Ernest Gellner’s Legacy and Social Theory Today (2022) evaluated Gellner’s comprehensive contribution to knowledge.
Text by Petr Skalník
To join on-line via MS Teams
We are pleased to invite you to a 222nd Gellner Seminar with Karolina Kania (Faculty of Business Administration, Prague University of Economics and Business & Centre for the Study of Social Movements). The seminar will be held on Monday, December 15th at 5:30 p.m. in the seminar room B1, Kampus Hybernská (Hybernská 4, Praha 1).
Negotiating Development: Customary Law, Colonial Legacies, and Tourism on Indigenous Land in New Caledonia
What happens when a global travel and tourism company aims to create a luxury resort on a small Pacific island where Indigenous authority over land challenges capitalist investment logics and private ownership regimes? This talk examines tourism development on Kanak customary land in New Caledonia as a site where colonial legacies, Indigenous claims to sovereignty, and global tourism imaginaries intersect. After situating New Caledonia as a French settler colony, I introduce Kanak customary law as a political framework governing land, authority, and social interactions. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and archival research, I analyze two contrasting trajectories on the Isle of Pines: the failed establishment of a Club Méditerranée resort in the 1970s and the subsequent emergence of Indigenous-led tourism projects. I argue that Kanak engagements with tourism involve neither passive acceptance nor unconditional refusal, but the negotiation of political authority over land and resources. At the same time, I show that tourism on customary land remains a field of ongoing contestation, marked by frictions between customary norms, (colonial) governance, and the interests of diverse stakeholders.
Bio:
Karolina Kania is a Polish anthropologist and Assistant Professor at the Prague University of Economics and Business. She holds a PhD from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris. Her research focuses on the socio-political dimensions of tourism development in New Caledonia (French overseas territory in the South Pacific), with particular attention to Indigenous land governance, colonial legacies, and conflicts over resources. Karolina is a member of the Horizon Europe-funded REMAKING project team, where she applies ethnographic methods to examine remote work and everyday life under conditions of enforced migration caused by the war in Ukraine. Over the past five years, she has worked at the intersection of academia, business, and civil society, developing practice-based research projects that connect students with NGOs, startups, and public institutions. She teaches courses in UX Research and Design Anthropology, emphasizing ethnographic methods in applied research and innovation contexts.
To join on-line via MS Teams
We are pleased to invite you to the 221st Gellner Seminar with Leonardo Schiocchet (Charles University). The seminar will be held on November 27 at 17:30 in the seminar room C321 at the Faculty of Arts, Charles University (Celetná 20).
INHABITING HOME IN EXILE: PALESTINIANNESS AS A SUBJUNCTIVE MORAL DESTINATION
In this talk, I propose to explore the polyvocal and inherently contested arena of Palestinianness as a moral place of belonging, for which I suggest the term „home“ as an anthropological category that denotes privileged social belonging compasses. This minimalist definition aims to be a heuristic site that allows us to explore ways of inhabiting a moral destination. The ways in which Palestinianness is conceived and negotiated among refugees and other Palestinian communities outside of Palestine are therefore understood as processes of constructing a „home.“ In this regard, I consider the definition of a „homeland“ in relation to Palestinian experiences and expressions of displacement and discuss the extent to which the terms diaspora and exile characterize Palestinian dispersion. I suggest that these experiences and expressions highlight the importance of studying affect and problematize an adequate „subjunctive“ definition of home as an anthropological category.
Bio:
Leonardo Schiocchet is Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Ethnology at Charles University (Prague) and Senior Researcher, Oriental Institute, Czech Academy of Sciences. He is co-editor of Social Anthropology/Anthropologie sociale, and co-chair of the IUAES Commission on Migration. He is also an External Supervisor at the Institute for Social and Cultural Anthropology (IKSA) of the University of Vienna; and Research Associate at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies (NEOM) at the Fluminense Federal University, Rio de Janeiro and at the International Migrations Research Centre (CEMI), Unicamp, São Paulo. Schiocchet holds a PhD in anthropology (Boston University, 2011) and a Habilitation (venia docendi) in Social Anthropology (University of Vienna, 2021). His latest books include:Living in refuge (transcript Publishing, 2022); and Processes of Belonging and Social Organization among Arab Forced Migrants: Theoretical-Methodological Contributions (ABA Publicações e Editora Fi, 2024).
We are pleased to share the final programme for the 8th CASA Biennial Conference – Ageing of Anthropology, Ageing in Anthropology. You can download the PDF of the programme here.
We look forward to welcoming you in Pardubice! Please read the practical information and useful tips prior to your trip here. If you have any questions, please reach out to the organizing committee at info@casaonline.cz.
Česká asociace pro sociální antropologii (CASA) vyhlašuje desátý ročník soutěže o nejlepší bakalářskou a magisterskou práci v oblasti sociální antropologie. Deadline pro doručení materiálů na e-mailovou adresu asociace (info@casaonline.cz) je 10. 11. 2025.
Podmínky soutěže:
Vítěz*ka soutěže získá možnost prezentovat svoji práci v rámci Gellnerovského semináře, roční členství v CASA a finanční ocenění.
Link pro on-line účast skrze Zoom
We are pleased to invite you to a 220th Gellner Seminar with Salla Sariola (University of Helsinki). The seminar will be held next Thursday, on October 2 at 4 p.m. in the seminar room 207, Institute of Sociology of the Czech Academy of Sciences (Jilská 1, Prague 1).
How and why study microbes in social sciences?
Abstract: Human-microbial relations are becoming a subject of interest to social scientists. This has followed novel findings from within microbiology about the abundance of microbes in and on humans and discoveries suggesting that microbes are crucial for planetary flourishing across different scales. This talk will describe the nascent field of social study of microbes and the challenges that studying microbes pose for social sciences.
The Centre for the Social Study of Microbes (CSSM) at the University of Helsinki, Finland, has developed methods and theories to study these miniscule yet ubiquitous, short-lived yet ancient beings. During the talk CSSM Director Salla Sariola will describe the methodological and theoretical work of CSSM to discuss why study microbes and what is at stake in this line of research.
Bio:
Salla Sariola is a Professor of Sociology at the University of Helsinki. Her current research interests include antimicrobial resistance and fermentation. She is developing more-than-human theory of fermentation based on fieldwork in Assam, India, which she is in the process of writing a book about (Bristol University Press). She is also leading a large interdisciplinary research programme on antimicrobial resistance research in Benin and Indonesia.
Her past research between sciences and various publics interfacing around international collaborative research and global health programmes has taken her to India, Sri Lanka, Kenya and West Africa. She is the author of four books: With Microbes (with Brives and Rest, Mattering Press 2021); Ethics and Politics of Community Engagement in Global Health Research (with Reynolds 2022); Research as Development: Clinical trials, international collaboration and bioethics in Sri Lanka (with Simpson, Cornell University Press) and Gender and Sexuality: Selling sex in Chennai (Routledge 2009, 2012).
Link pro on-line účast skrze Zoom
Sabina Vassileva, FSV UK & SOÚ AV ČR
Abstrakt: Platformová práce je diskurzivně rámována jako flexibilní forma zaměstnání poskytující pracujícím větší míru autonomie. Empirické poznatky z etnografického výzkumu v prostředí české donáškové služby však tyto přísliby problematizují. Příspěvek se zaměří na to, jak algoritmické řízení a temporalita právě-na-čas prohlubují pracovní nejistotu a genderové nerovnosti na trhu práce, zároveň popíše praktiky lidsko-algoritmické komunikace zpochybňující techno optimistický narativ neutrálních a férových algoritmů.
Bio:
Sabina Vassileva je doktorandka sociologie na FSV UK a juniorní výzkumnice na Sociologickém Ústavu AV ČR. Působí ve výzkumných projektech Technokultury rozšířeného metabolismu, Strategie AV21: Umělá inteligence pro vědu a společnost a Platformoví pracující na českém trhu práce. Výzkumně se věnuje medicínské antropologii, antropologii práce a technologií a gender a queer teorii.
Daniel Trlifaj, University of Cambridge
Abstrakt: Sarajevo se dlouhodobě potýká se znečištěním ovzduší. Zimní inverze blokuje proudění vzduchu a zadržuje toxické látky z decentralizovaných zdrojů, dusí obyvatele města a je příčinou každého pátého předčasného úmrtí. V příspěvku se zaměřuji na politické působení znečištění nad rámec statistické imaginace. Tvrdím, že znečištění lze chápat jako atmosferické environmentální médium – propojující bezprostřední zkušenost dýchání s širší představou o stavu města – a zároveň vytváří negativní zpětnovazební smyčku, jež působí disfigurativně – omezuje politickou imaginaci za hranice statu quo. Na tomto základě nastíním možnosti, jak uvažovat o politice environmentálních entit, jejich možnostech a sympatiích.
Bio:
Daniel většinu času pobíhá po Praze nebo sedí v Klementinu. Ukončil bakalářské studium teoretické informatiky na MFF a humanitní vzdělanosti na FHS UK; v současnosti dokončuje MPhil v sociální antropologii na Univerzitě v Cambridge. Ve volném času ho najdete stavět kola v Bike Kitchen Praha nebo vařit jídlo s Food not Bombs.
To help you prepare for the 8th CASA Biennial Conference, we have gathered key practical details regarding payment, the conference venue, and accommodation. Please find the essential information below.
PAYMENT:
Payment in CZK:
37030561/0100
IBAN: CZ2901000000000037030561
Variable symbol: 1016125002
Subject: CASA2025 the first name and the last name of the registered person
Payment in EUR:
19-2522710287/0100
IBAN: CZ1401000000192522710287
SWIFT: KOMBCZPPXXX
Subject: CASA2025 the first name and the last name of the registered person
Bank and its address: Komerční banka, a.s., Na Příkopě 33, čp. 969, Praha/Prague 1, 114 07, Česká republika/Czech Republic
Recipient: Univerzita Pardubice/University of Pardubice, Studentská 95, 532 10 Pardubice, VAT id: CZ00216275
CONFERENCE FEE
Members of the CASA and other national anthropological organizations which are members of the WCAA: 500 CZK / 20 Euro
QR Code payment (500 CZK)
Non-members: 1 200 CZK / 48 Euro
QR Code payment (1 200 CZK)
Undergraduate and graduate students: Free of charge
ACCOMODATION:
While conference participants are asked to arrange their own hotel accommodations, we are happy to provide recommendations for lodging options that we believe may suit your preferences. The recommended accommodation facilities are situated near public transportation hubs and are within a maximum 20-minute walking distance from the conference venues: EB Building, University Campus (Studentská, 530 09 Pardubice II) and Gočárova galerie (Automatické mlýny 1961, 530 02 Pardubice).
We trust that these options will contribute to a convenient and enjoyable stay during the conference. In case of further queries regarding special accommodation requirements, please get in touch with the conference organizers.
TRANSPORT:
Maps of Pardubice and Campus:
How to get to Pardubice from Prague:
Getting to Pardubice from Prague is quick and easy. The best public transportation option is to board a train at the Prague Main Railway Station, which takes you to the Pardubice Main Railway Station. The trains bound for Pardubice leave at intervals ranging from 30 minutes to one hour. The trip takes approximately one hour. The tickets can be purchased on the website from the following train operators:
Public transport from/to the Václav Havel Airport to/from the Main Railway Station (Praha Hlavní nádraží) in Prague:
Passengers have the option to buy tickets on the bus (AE bus line only, using cash or credit cards) or at the Prague Public Transit company counters located in Terminal 1. It is important to remember that you can only board the bus in front of the arrival hall at Terminal 1.
How to get to the venue at the University of Pardubice
The entire conference takes place at the University of Pardubice, Faculty of Arts and Philosophy at the EB building: Studentská 84, Pardubice. The trip from the Pardubice Main Railway Station takes approximately ten minutes.
By bus, trackless trolley
Multiple bus lines connect the Pardubice Main Railway Station to the university campus. The following stops are conveniently situated within a brief walking distance of the conference venue:
Tickets can be purchased:
Transport Company of the City of Pardubice: https://www.dpmp.cz/zastavkove-jizdni-rady.html?active-tab=transportSearch
By car
Parking for visitors is available at the university campus next to the University of Pardubice Rectorate building.
By taxi
Taxis are available in front of the terminal at daytime. You also have the option to arrange a taxi pick-up through the services offered by the following taxi operators:
By bike
Another option how to explore the Pardubice area is to take advantage of the bike sharing service: https://www.nextbikeczech.com/en/mesto/pardubice-en/.