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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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