To join on-line via MS Teams

[PDF to download]

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

[PDF to download]

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:

• dodání PDF verze bakalářské nebo magisterské práce úspěšně obhájené během posledních tří let (2023-2025). Nelze přihlásit práci, která již soutěžila v minulém ročníku
• dodání PDF verze abstraktu (max. 250 slov) pro vystoupení v rámci Gellnerovského semináře
• tematika sociální antropologie

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

[PDF ke stažení]

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

[PDF ke stažení]

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.

1. Pierre hotel: https://www.pierrehotel.cz/

2. Euro hotel: https://www.hoteleuro.cz/

3. Arnošt hotel: https://hotel-arnost.cz/

4. Víno Hruška apartments: https://www.vinohruska.cz/ubytovani/vinoteka-a-penzion-hruska-v-pardubicich

5. University of Pardubice dormitories https://www.upce.cz/en/accommodation-of-guests (If you are interested in accommodation at the University of Pardubice dormitories, please contact the CASA organizing committee member  – Petra Ponocná  petra.ponocna@upce.cz)

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:

• https://www.cd.cz/en/
• https://regiojet.com
• https://www.leoexpress.com/en

Public transport from/to the Václav Havel Airport to/from the Main Railway Station (Praha Hlavní nádraží) in Prague: 

• Airport Express Bus (AE): Prague Airport – Prague Main Railway Station.The AE Express operates at 30-minute intervals between 5:30 AM and 10:00 PM.

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:

• Univerzita stop: 30, 16
• Stavařov stop: 3, 4, 16, 17, 30, 33 

Tickets can be purchased:

• at the railway station terminal (recommended),
• in the bus/trackless trolley at the vending machine (payment by credit card, it is necessary to terminate the ride by placing the credit card to the vending machine upon leaving),
• directly from the driver (payment in cash only).

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: 

• https://www.gptaxi.cz/en
• https://www.taxi-pardubice.cz/
• https://couriertaxi.cz/

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/.

Na valném shromáždění byly vyhlášeny výsledky soutěže o cenu CASA za rok 2024. V bakalářské kategorii zvítězil Daniel Trlifaj (FHS UK) s prací Fluid Pollution and Toxic Urban Ecologies: An Ethnography of Air in Sarajevo. V magisterské kategorii zvítězila Sabina Vassileva (FHS UK) s prací „Za shnilé banány můžete samozřejmě vy“: Etnografie prekérní práce v české donáškové službě. Gratulujeme! Více informací o soutěži zde.

Link pro on-line účast skrze Zoom

[PDF ke stažení]

Abstrakt

Drawing from ethnographic research on rare inherited metabolic disorders (IMDs) in Finland and Poland and document analysis, in this talk I attend to notions of the body and metabolism in informational materials for patients and their caregivers. Focusing on recent presentations, I examine how metaphor is used to understand the body and metabolism in people living with LC-FAODs (long-chain fatty acid oxidation disorders). This body is likened to a smartphone equipped with a “faulty battery” (Ultragenyx 2022). Following Landecker’s (2013) distinction between an industrial and post-industrial metabolism, I juxtapose previous informational materials that presented food as an energy source with more recent presentations in which food is depicted as a signal in the larger context of communication and regulation. I argue that this shift from understanding metabolism as a factory to the idea of metabolism as a regulatory zone is indicative of broader changes in the field of IMDs and rare diseases. The development of technologies such as newborn screening and better management of rare diseases has influenced patient mortality and morbidity. Furthermore, the growing importance of information systems and global companies within biomedicine has engendered new vocabularies that are no longer rooted in biology. Thus, this understanding of the body and metabolism as a smartphone and its battery resonates with children and adolescents. While more user friendly, the smartphone metaphor obscures the importance of infrastructures, materialities, and interrelatedness, which are crucial for the wellbeing of the LC-FAOD body with its faulty battery.

Bio

Małgorzata Rajtar is an anthropologist and sociologist. She is an associate professor and the Head of the Rare Disease Social Research Center at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences. Using ethnography she examines boundary objects, such as blood, minority religious groups, rare diseases, “small” data, feeding medical technologies, and ethical concerns regarding autonomy, care, and vulnerability. Her research sites have included Finland, Germany, and Poland. She published in “Anthropology & Medicine,” “Bioethics,” “Medical Anthropology,” and “Social Science and Medicine” among others.

Link pro on-line účast skrze Zoom

[PDF ke stažení]

Abstrakt

Drones, cans of Red Bull, and hand grenades: beginning with three emblematic war gifts circulating on Ukraine’s frontlines, this talk examines how a war economy emerges through acts of valuation and commensuration in the trenches. Drawing on research with Ukrainian combatants and military crowdfunding activists who channel various goods to the frontline, I explore how people in the orbit of war understand the transfers and sacrifices that sustain soldiers’ violent labour. Classical anthropology, responding to the upheavals of colonial and world wars, developed models of economic life centred on the order-making powers of exchange. Thus, both Mauss’ gift and Malinowski’s kula modelled the emergence of social contract through transactional obligations. My Ukrainian material illustrates a similar connection between gifts and political solidarity: donors and recipients in military crowdfunding networks routinely imagine themselves as contributors to an economy of national solidarity that reproduces their threatened polity. Yet, to the extent that this economy is directed toward the enemy’s destruction, it reframes exchange, consumption, production, and social reproduction as tools of organised political violence. Thinking with the Ukrainian gifts of war, I argue, helps us understand how enmity, violence, and destruction transform who and what is valuable, and what people owe each other, in moments of conflict and existential threat.

Bio

Dr. Taras Fedirko is a political and economic anthropologist studying war, media, and oligarchy in Ukraine. He serves as a Lecturer at the School of Social and Political Science at the University of Glasgow and is a Research Associate at LSE IDEAS. After obtaining his PhD from the University of Durham in 2017, he has held postdoctoral positions at Cambridge and St Andrews, and recently was a Visiting Fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences (IWM) in Vienna.

Link pro on-line účast skrze Zoom

[PDF ke stažení]

Abstrakt
Rifts in ecological processes are increasing the rate of viral transmission from bats to other species. Agricultural enterprises are denuding forested landscapes worldwide, presenting new challenges for insect eating bats as they seek food at night. Intense stress from multiple sources is disrupting the delicately balanced metabolism and immune system of bats. Sick bats are literally falling from the sky and shedding viruses. Enfeebled and flapping around on the ground, bats are becoming easy prey for cats and other predators. Drawing on extended ethnographic field research in Southeast Asia using multispecies methods this talk will engage with a number of questions: Where are coronaviruses actively circulating among people and animals? Is the focus on Wuhan as the epicenter of 2020 pandemic fundamentally misplaced? Did metabolic problems generated by sugar facilitate the emergence of COVID-19?
 
Bio
Eben Kirksey is a cultural anthropologist who is perhaps best known for his work in multispecies ethnography—a field that situates contemporary scholarship on animals, microbes, plants, and fungi within deeply rooted traditions of environmental anthropology, continental philosophy, and the sociology of science. Questions related to science and social justice animate his most recent book, The Mutant Project (2020), which offers an insiders account of the laboratory in China that created the world’s first children whose genes were edited with CRISPR-Cas9. Eben was a British Marshall Scholar at the University of Oxford, before he went on to earn his PhD at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He has taught at some of the most selective and innovative higher education institutions like Princeton University and Deep Springs College. He helped found one of the world’s first Environmental Humanities programs at UNSW Sydney in Australia.

Zajímají Vás současná témata sociokulturní antropologie? Chcete se zúčastnit debaty se zkušenými i začínajícími akademiky v tomto oboru? Přidejte se k nám 20. 2. 2025 od 13:15 na Dni antropologie, který pod záštitou České asociace pro sociální antropologii pořádá Katedra sociologie, andragogiky a kulturní antropologie FF UPOL. Přihlášky zasílejte na e-mail martin.latal02(at)upol.

[leták ve formátu PDF ke stažení]

Link pro on-line účast skrze Zoom

[PDF ke stažení]

Abstrakt
This talk will be a presentation of the recently published book Relative Strangers (University of Toronto Press, 2024). Examining how memory, intergenerational transmission, and kinship work together, Relative Strangers sheds light on Romani life in Palestine. Arpan Roy presents an ethnographic portrait of Dom Romani communities living between Palestine and Jordan, zooming in on everyday life in working-class neighborhoods, and under conditions of perpetual war and instability. The book focuses on how Doms are able to sustain ethnic difference through kinship, even when public performances of difference are no longer emphasized – a kind of alterity that is neither visible by obvious markers like race or religious difference, nor detected by the antennas of the state. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in Jerusalem, Ramallah, and Amman, Roy makes a case for such alterity for Romani people and other groups in the region. Analysing intimate ethnographic scenes through anthropological theories of kinship, psychoanalysis, social theory from the Global South, and more, the book reveals how alterity in the Middle East does not adhere to rigid identitarian categories. Ultimately, Relative Strangers demonstrates the inadequacy of transposing models of pluralism centred on European and American experiences of minoritization onto other contexts.
 
Bio
Arpan Roy is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient in Berlin. He is the co-editor of Naseej: Live-Weavings of Palestine (Pluto Press, 2025). He holds a PhD in Anthropology from Johns Hopkins University. His current research is on Christian missionary work in the Arab world.

presents

LADISLAV HOLY LECTURE 2025

by

Judith Bovensiepen

Austrian Academy of Sciences

Opening the land: Animist extractivism in Southeast Asia’s youngest nation

17 January 2025 from 6 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.

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Abstract

In the years after Timor-Leste regained independence from Indonesia, ‘oil fever’ took hold in the country – an intense contagious excitement about the prospect of oil wealth enabling a profound societal transformation and leading to full independence through resource sovereignty. This is when the government of Timor-Leste launched a plan for the implementation of the Tasi Mane project, a large oil development project aimed at transforming the thinly populated south coast into a futuristic, high-modernist, state-planned oil and gas infrastructure by 2020. Critics argued that the Tasi Mane project was economically and technically unviable and that it would have detrimental effects on local residents. So, to persuade affected communities to relinquish large stretches of land for the project, politicians and oil company employees mobilised customary practices traditionally associated with ritual authorities. Their ability to regulate ‘nature’ came to be seen as a sign of their legitimacy to implement this mega project. By doing so, they combined practices based on two seemingly incompatibly logics: animism and extractivism. This paper examines how these two seemingly opposed logics transformed each other in the making of the post-revolutionary state in Timor-Leste. The central argument is that animism and extractivism not only intersect as they were incorporated into modes of national governance, but that they were constituted in dialogical interaction.

Bio

Judith Bovensiepen is the Director of the Institute for Social Anthropology (ISA) at the Austrian Academy of Sciences and Honorary Professor at the Institute for Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Vienna, Austria. She has been carrying out fieldwork in Timor-Leste since 2005. Her research focuses on political and environmental anthropology, examining resource extraction and its impacts on rural populations. Bovensiepen’s previous work explored the dynamics of post-conflict recovery, investigating how people’s relations with the environment are transformed by violence and forced displacement. She is the author of multiple publications, including journal articles, special issues a monograph entitled The Land of Gold: Post-conflict Recovery and Cultural Revival in independent Timor-Leste (2015, Cornell University Press). For her research achievements, she received the Philip Leverhulme Prize in 2020.

[PDF ke stažení]