Please consider submitting a paper abstract for our panel ‘Responsibility and Scripture’ at the forthcoming Conference of the Association of Social Anthropologists of the UK and the Commonwealth (ASA), which will take place at the University of St Andrews from 24 to 27 August 2020. The call for papers is now open and closes on 15 March 2020. For more information on how to submit an abstract, please visit: https://www.theasa.org/conferences/asa2020/cfp.shtml
Panel title: Responsibility and Scripture
Convenors:
Dr Safet HadziMuhamedovic (Faculty of Divinity, University of Cambridge),
Dr Daniel H. Weiss (Faculty of Divinity, University of Cambridge),
Dr Julia Snyder (Centre for Advanced Studies, University of Regensburg)
Short abstract:
How can we rethink the relationship between scriptures and violence in terms of responsibility? Can scriptures be responsible in and of themselves? Or, are they taken as an alibi for the interpretative act? What sorts of agency can we distinguish in the social lives of scriptures? Who (or what) is answerable and when?
Long abstract:
Scriptures are variously put into practice, to sanction morality, justify everyday actions, politics and momentous changes. Other people’s scriptures can be employed to impute violence to them, even distribute blame to entire communities of faith. So, how can we think responsibility through sacred texts and their political articulations? Who is entrusted with responsibility and when? What are the limits of responsibility? Does divine agency ever absolve human actions? And, if so, can the divine (text) ever be held responsible? Does responsibility lie with the author, the text or the reader? And, are communities of faith responsible for how the scriptures they hold sacred are employed by their members? Should they defend them? How is authority of interpretation re-appropriated and challenged? These are pressing questions in a world continuously shaped by acts in reference to divine authority, a world ripe with friction regarding the dispensation of responsibility for assumed scriptural stipulations. Contributions should contextualise the relation of responsibility and scripture, whether in terms of violence, community and interfaith relations, gender and sexuality, nonhumans, environmental degradation, text and embodiment, historical imagination, contemplations on the future and politics of identity, or otherwise. Inspired by the ‘Scripture and Violence’ project of the Cambridge Inter-Faith Programme at the University of Cambridge's Faculty of Divinity, this panel invites anthropological, historical, theological and critical discourse analyses of responsibility as related to scriptures.
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Panel title: Responsibility and Scripture
Convenors:
Dr Safet HadziMuhamedovic (Faculty of Divinity, University of Cambridge),
Dr Daniel H. Weiss (Faculty of Divinity, University of Cambridge),
Dr Julia Snyder (Centre for Advanced Studies, University of Regensburg)
Short abstract:
How can we rethink the relationship between scriptures and violence in terms of responsibility? Can scriptures be responsible in and of themselves? Or, are they taken as an alibi for the interpretative act? What sorts of agency can we distinguish in the social lives of scriptures? Who (or what) is answerable and when?
Long abstract:
Scriptures are variously put into practice, to sanction morality, justify everyday actions, politics and momentous changes. Other people’s scriptures can be employed to impute violence to them, even distribute blame to entire communities of faith. So, how can we think responsibility through sacred texts and their political articulations? Who is entrusted with responsibility and when? What are the limits of responsibility? Does divine agency ever absolve human actions? And, if so, can the divine (text) ever be held responsible? Does responsibility lie with the author, the text or the reader? And, are communities of faith responsible for how the scriptures they hold sacred are employed by their members? Should they defend them? How is authority of interpretation re-appropriated and challenged? These are pressing questions in a world continuously shaped by acts in reference to divine authority, a world ripe with friction regarding the dispensation of responsibility for assumed scriptural stipulations. Contributions should contextualise the relation of responsibility and scripture, whether in terms of violence, community and interfaith relations, gender and sexuality, nonhumans, environmental degradation, text and embodiment, historical imagination, contemplations on the future and politics of identity, or otherwise. Inspired by the ‘Scripture and Violence’ project of the Cambridge Inter-Faith Programme at the University of Cambridge's Faculty of Divinity, this panel invites anthropological, historical, theological and critical discourse analyses of responsibility as related to scriptures.
edit.
Please consider proposing a paper for our panel Thinking Like Tumbleweeds: Bodily Genres and the Vitality of Beings at Large. The panel is part of the Anthropology and Geography: Dialogues Past, Present and Future conference (London, 4-7 June 2020), organised by the British Academy, the British Museum, the Royal Anthropological Institute, the Royal Geographical Society and SOAS University of London. Paper proposals are due by 8 January 2020.
Panel title:
Thinking Like Tumbleweeds: Bodily Genres and the Vitality of Beings at Large
Short abstract:
We invite you to think about and with tumbleweeds, but also to think like tumbleweeds. How can we include tumbleweeds to revisit the work tumbling away from the hegemonic scripts of what it means to be (non)human? We welcome papers on bodies (of ‘people’, ‘matter’, ‘thought’…) as styled into genres, as well as on the roaming resilience of the otherwise.
Long abstract:
Nonhuman beings are at hand to craft a figure of speech or a visual trope, but they exist, nevertheless. As the silent cinematic extras, tumbleweeds usually entered the scene to designate someplace desolate, unhomely and uninhabited, a wilderness encroaching upon the order of home. In The Plainsmen (1936), a tumbleweed bursts into a home whilst Louisa Cody is cleaning (she kicks it out with her broom).
Tumbleweeds are the ‘Wild West’ (refusing to be tamed, settled), yet the ubiquitous tumbleweeds of the ‘Westerns’ had been brought from the Russian steppes in the nineteenth century (apparently piggybacking on grain imported to South Dakota). ‘Tumbleweed’ denotes the germination technique of several species from which the plant detaches from the root and diffuses the seeds as it is carried by the wind. Such untied dispersal units are known as diaspores. A tumbleweed has roots and a vascular system, yet the tissues die out to allow the seeds to escape. Tumbleweeds entangle each other, but also with the ‘humans’ and the ‘things’ they encounter.
Their agency is inseparable from the wind. They are a hindrance, ‘invasive’ and ‘noxious’ – an unhomely weed, freed from home. They are symbols of awkward silence, frontier areas and abandonment. Yet, they cross borders, connect disparate zones and signal strange, resistant, budding life. In Bob Nolan’s song from the 1930s, one is ‘lonely, but free’, to be found ‘drifting along with the tumbling tumbleweeds’. It reminds us of dérive, the Situationist International’s psychogeographic exercise of disorientation.
Papers may engage tumbleweeds as meaning-holders, extend their theoretical purchase, or disconnect from the root and tumble about wider plains. They can deal with mobility and flux, silence, subjectivity, kinship, nomads, frontiers, posthuman theories, natureculture, Actor-Network Theory, or something otherwise. We welcome ‘ethnographic’ and case-study engagements, as well as ventures of ‘pure’ imagination.
Keywords: tumbleweeds, mobility, knowledge, body, life, otherwise
Panel organisers:
Dr Gina Heathcote, SOAS University of London,
Dr Vanja Hamzić, SOAS University of London
Dr Emily Jones, University of Essex
Dr Safet HadžiMuhamedović, SOAS University of London
Proposing a paper:
The code for this panel is MV02 and you can submit your paper proposal at: https://nomadit.co.uk/conference/rai2020/p/8289
The deadline is 8 January 2020. Proposals should consist of a paper title, a (very) short abstract of <300 characters and an abstract of 250 words. On submission the proposal, the proposing author (but not any co-authors listed) will receive automated email confirming receipt. Other conference details are available at:
https://www.therai.org.uk/conferences/anthropology-and-geography
Panel title:
Thinking Like Tumbleweeds: Bodily Genres and the Vitality of Beings at Large
Short abstract:
We invite you to think about and with tumbleweeds, but also to think like tumbleweeds. How can we include tumbleweeds to revisit the work tumbling away from the hegemonic scripts of what it means to be (non)human? We welcome papers on bodies (of ‘people’, ‘matter’, ‘thought’…) as styled into genres, as well as on the roaming resilience of the otherwise.
Long abstract:
Nonhuman beings are at hand to craft a figure of speech or a visual trope, but they exist, nevertheless. As the silent cinematic extras, tumbleweeds usually entered the scene to designate someplace desolate, unhomely and uninhabited, a wilderness encroaching upon the order of home. In The Plainsmen (1936), a tumbleweed bursts into a home whilst Louisa Cody is cleaning (she kicks it out with her broom).
Tumbleweeds are the ‘Wild West’ (refusing to be tamed, settled), yet the ubiquitous tumbleweeds of the ‘Westerns’ had been brought from the Russian steppes in the nineteenth century (apparently piggybacking on grain imported to South Dakota). ‘Tumbleweed’ denotes the germination technique of several species from which the plant detaches from the root and diffuses the seeds as it is carried by the wind. Such untied dispersal units are known as diaspores. A tumbleweed has roots and a vascular system, yet the tissues die out to allow the seeds to escape. Tumbleweeds entangle each other, but also with the ‘humans’ and the ‘things’ they encounter.
Their agency is inseparable from the wind. They are a hindrance, ‘invasive’ and ‘noxious’ – an unhomely weed, freed from home. They are symbols of awkward silence, frontier areas and abandonment. Yet, they cross borders, connect disparate zones and signal strange, resistant, budding life. In Bob Nolan’s song from the 1930s, one is ‘lonely, but free’, to be found ‘drifting along with the tumbling tumbleweeds’. It reminds us of dérive, the Situationist International’s psychogeographic exercise of disorientation.
Papers may engage tumbleweeds as meaning-holders, extend their theoretical purchase, or disconnect from the root and tumble about wider plains. They can deal with mobility and flux, silence, subjectivity, kinship, nomads, frontiers, posthuman theories, natureculture, Actor-Network Theory, or something otherwise. We welcome ‘ethnographic’ and case-study engagements, as well as ventures of ‘pure’ imagination.
Keywords: tumbleweeds, mobility, knowledge, body, life, otherwise
Panel organisers:
Dr Gina Heathcote, SOAS University of London,
Dr Vanja Hamzić, SOAS University of London
Dr Emily Jones, University of Essex
Dr Safet HadžiMuhamedović, SOAS University of London
Proposing a paper:
The code for this panel is MV02 and you can submit your paper proposal at: https://nomadit.co.uk/conference/rai2020/p/8289
The deadline is 8 January 2020. Proposals should consist of a paper title, a (very) short abstract of <300 characters and an abstract of 250 words. On submission the proposal, the proposing author (but not any co-authors listed) will receive automated email confirming receipt. Other conference details are available at:
https://www.therai.org.uk/conferences/anthropology-and-geography
Call for papers
DISTEMPORALITIES:
Collisions, Insurrections and Reorientations in the Worlding of Time
panel
(On Time: The Biennial Conference of the Finnish Anthropological Society, Helsinki, 29–30 August 2019)
As an orientational aid, time seems to be a matter par excellenceof worlding: we sense time, we habituate and structure it, but it habituates and structures us just the same. Time suggests that we are in/past/against/toward something/someone/somewhere. As it worlds, time is (a referent) of positionality, subjectivity and sensation. It may make multifarious alliances with space, ideologies and bodily processes. Yet, ‘time’ is not necessarily something in and of itself. Delving into the plurality of time, anthropologists are increasingly recognising ‘time’ as a heuristic. So, if we accept that time and temporality are far from clear universals, then they can also be extrinsic to (temporal) worlds: they may come and operate from the outside of specific ontological bearings. The ‘external’ can restructure, reorient, unstructure, violate, merge with, or speak to existing ontological temporalities. It may insist on leaps from one time to another and on the obliteration of the ‘former’ time so that the ‘new’ could truly thrive.
Ideological projects seek to be constituted in the ontological – they map themselves into, or rather ontothe ‘world’. In so doing, they grapple with time. In this panel, we seek to understand what happens to time-as-worlding when ‘worlds’ are suddenly or slowly temporally reoriented. Do the structures and senses of time break, suspend, retreat, resist, merge with new temporal orders? Do different times strive to forget each other? Are they subversive of one another? Or, do they smooth out each other’s edges?
We think of distemporalisation as a project of denial of time – a denial of historicity, futurity, or change, which is a noticeable element of various constructions of Otherness. We also take distemporality to signify a refusal of, and intervention into, qualitatively-specific temporal worlds. Such projects usually include a demand for a retemporalisation into another ‘world’. Potential contributions could, for example, think revolution, statehood and nationalism, colonialism and Empire, archives and their temporal violence, distemporalisation of subjectivity, gender regimes and their alterities, or worlding of economies of time.
If you are interested in joining this panel, please send your name, affiliation and the abstract (max. 250 words) to vh1@soas.ac.uk, sh113@soas.ac.uk and timeFAS2019@gmail.com no later than 31 March 2019.
See you in Helsinki!
Dr Vanja Hamzić& Dr Safet HadžiMuhamedović
SOAS University of London
DISTEMPORALITIES:
Collisions, Insurrections and Reorientations in the Worlding of Time
panel
(On Time: The Biennial Conference of the Finnish Anthropological Society, Helsinki, 29–30 August 2019)
As an orientational aid, time seems to be a matter par excellenceof worlding: we sense time, we habituate and structure it, but it habituates and structures us just the same. Time suggests that we are in/past/against/toward something/someone/somewhere. As it worlds, time is (a referent) of positionality, subjectivity and sensation. It may make multifarious alliances with space, ideologies and bodily processes. Yet, ‘time’ is not necessarily something in and of itself. Delving into the plurality of time, anthropologists are increasingly recognising ‘time’ as a heuristic. So, if we accept that time and temporality are far from clear universals, then they can also be extrinsic to (temporal) worlds: they may come and operate from the outside of specific ontological bearings. The ‘external’ can restructure, reorient, unstructure, violate, merge with, or speak to existing ontological temporalities. It may insist on leaps from one time to another and on the obliteration of the ‘former’ time so that the ‘new’ could truly thrive.
Ideological projects seek to be constituted in the ontological – they map themselves into, or rather ontothe ‘world’. In so doing, they grapple with time. In this panel, we seek to understand what happens to time-as-worlding when ‘worlds’ are suddenly or slowly temporally reoriented. Do the structures and senses of time break, suspend, retreat, resist, merge with new temporal orders? Do different times strive to forget each other? Are they subversive of one another? Or, do they smooth out each other’s edges?
We think of distemporalisation as a project of denial of time – a denial of historicity, futurity, or change, which is a noticeable element of various constructions of Otherness. We also take distemporality to signify a refusal of, and intervention into, qualitatively-specific temporal worlds. Such projects usually include a demand for a retemporalisation into another ‘world’. Potential contributions could, for example, think revolution, statehood and nationalism, colonialism and Empire, archives and their temporal violence, distemporalisation of subjectivity, gender regimes and their alterities, or worlding of economies of time.
If you are interested in joining this panel, please send your name, affiliation and the abstract (max. 250 words) to vh1@soas.ac.uk, sh113@soas.ac.uk and timeFAS2019@gmail.com no later than 31 March 2019.
See you in Helsinki!
Dr Vanja Hamzić& Dr Safet HadžiMuhamedović
SOAS University of London
ASA 2018: Sociality, Matter, and the Imagination: Re-creating Anthropology
CHRONOTOPIC MATERIALITIES
Convenors: Dr Safet HadžiMuhamedović and Dr Magda Buchczyk
Call for papers (see flyer below)
Deadline for proposals: 20 April 2018
Short abstract
How do objects – their placements, textures, routes and traces – come to encapsulate the bonding of time and space? And, to what ends? What claims do they make and what novel directions do they indicate? What is the breadth of such objects’ sensorial potency? This panel is open to diverse ventures into the affective and material aspects of chronotopes.
Long abstract
Time, even in its most abstract conceptualisations, is a spatialised phenomenon. Its telling requires a bodily turn – a relation – towards another thing/body/… Space is, likewise, temporalised, imbued with cycles, durations and stoppages, coloured by epochs and speed, punctuated by intervals and rhythms. Some such relations congeal into timespaces. ‘Time’, as Bakhtin has famously told us, ‘thickens, takes on flesh’, and ‘space becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot and history’ (1981: 84). For Bakhtin, narratives are constructed within specific settings that intersect with temporalities, rendering certain spaces powerful materialisations of the past. Anthropologists have indicated the affective disclosure of chronotopes, for example through dreaming and historical consciousness in Greece (Stewart 2012) or the affective ruination in post-partition Cyprus (Navaro 2012). Buchczyk (2018) has shown how the Romanian town of Viștea is situated between contrasting chronotopes of folkloric past and utopian future, whilst HadžiMuhamedović (2018) has described the rift between two dominant timespaces – a schizochronotopia – in the Bosnian Field of Gacko, where the past (‘religiously plural and shared’) and the present (‘nationalist and ethnically cleansed’) of landscape have rendered each other unbidden.
This panel explores the affective resonances, directionalities and political deployments of chronotopes in material contexts and asks: How do objects make bodily impressions in the form of chronotopic claims? Or, what kinds of historicity and transformation in social life can objects signal? How are experiences of time and space mediated through material culture? What chronotopes might be revealed in traces or artefactual collections, archives and museums?
Apply here: https://nomadit.co.uk/asa/asa2018/conferencesuite.php/panels/6796
TIME AND RELIGION
Society for the Anthropology of Religion (SAR) Meeting Programme
New Orleans, 15-17 May 2017
POST-HOME(LAND): BEING AND BELONGING AFTER SPATIAL AND TEMPORAL ALIENATION
Convenors
Marija Grujić, Goethe University, Frankfurt a.M.
Safet HadžiMuhamedović, Goldsmiths, University of London
Abstract
What is home after home? Does the dwelling continue to dwell? How do we speak about home? How does home speak us? This panel discusses how awareness and articulations of ‘home’ might change after we come to inhabit spaces and times that are ‘not home’. We are also asking if ‘home’ is contingent on ‘not home’, as ‘I’ is performed through the ‘Other’. Moving away from the concept of ‘identity’ as something stable and unique in spatial, temporal or psychic spheres, we are especially interested in the socio-anthropological elaborations of the concepts of (un)canny, hybridity and affectivity of home, as the attempts to locate the ‘anthropos’ in the intersections of social and political realities of belonging.
Our proposal builds upon Yael Navarro Yashin’s (2012) discussion of ‘ruination’ and the ‘unhomely’, as well as Stuarts Hall’s concept of ‘articulation’ (Hall and Du Gay 1996). Our focus is on both the individual and the collective localities of being in various forms of ‘governing of the self’, such as: nationalities, ethnicities, races, genders, sexualities or religions, particularly as interpreted in regards to the feeling or becoming of/at ‘home’ and ‘unhomely’, as they appear after spatial and temporal alienation, or in the resistance to the dominant narratives of belonging.
We seek contributions that locate home and belonging as they appear in discursive (re)positioning, life stories, bodily movements and reflexes, materialities, dreams, silences, and dialectics arising from ‘new spaces’. We propose an analytical framework of ‘migration’ that includes a range of situations where ‘home’ may not be readily attainable and/or definable. Papers might consider, but should not necessarily be limited to, post-conflict landscapes, regimes of displacement and emplacement, transnational, transversal, and trans-gender/sexual habitations, as well as the roles of non-human agency, materiality and affect as they pertain to ‘post-home’ lives.
References
Hall, Stuart, and Paul Du Gay. (1996). Questions of Cultural Identity. London: Sage.
Navaro-Yashin, Yael. (2012). The Make-Believe Space: Affective Geography in a Postwar Polity. London: Duke University Press
Symposium: New Approaches to the History and Memory of War and Conflict
University of Brigton
7th Dec 2013 9:00am-5:30pm
M2 Boardroom, Grand Parade
In this year’s symposium, we intend to explore new approaches to the experiences of war and conflict as they are negotiated, remembered, mediated and lived. The focus of the symposium is not only to chart new lines for both theoretical and empirical analysis of the way in which violent conflicts are (and were) apprehended and articulated, but also the ways violent legacies shape and haunt processes of post-conflict transition.
Bringing together scholars with different yet overlapping backgrounds and research expertises, the symposium will reflect upon some of the issues at play in the ever-growing field of peace and conflict studies. Ranging from ethnographic and sociological approaches to more historical-based research, the speakers will deal with singular expressions of both contemporary and historical violence as it is articulated in a range of contrasting spatio-temporal contexts (Bosnia, Northern Ireland, Norway, Indonesia, Kenya, Afghanistan and England among them), thus tracing and offering solutions to common methodological and conceptual challenges from a transnational perspective.
Speakers include: Santanu Das (King’s College London); Emilie Pine (University College Dublin); Gabriel Koureas (Birkbeck, University of London); Kevin McSorely (University of Portsmouth); Mark McGovern (Edge Hill University); Lotte Hughes (The Open University); Stefanie Kappler (Liverpool Hope University); Safet HadžiMuhamedović (Goldsmiths, University of London), Sam Edwards (Manchester Metropolitan University) and Charlotte-Heath-Kelly (Warwick University).
I recently discovered Pilgrimography, a documentary blog by Kathryn Hampton. She recorded some 'lile', St Peter's Day bonfires in eastern Bosnia and compared them to the 'Orangeman's Day' traditions in Northern Ireland. Read more about this very interesting parallel.
Beyond the One-Size-Fits-All Model of ‘Transitional Justice’
(Bosnian Bones, Spanish Ghosts: Transitional Justice and the Legal Shaping of Memory after Two Modern Conflicts)
28-30 August 2013 - Universidad de Deusto, Bilbao, Euskadi, Spain
Location: Sala Garate; Time: 9:00 - 17:30
This conference is the official conclusion to the BBSG project and aims to open up our own four years of research between Spain and Bosnia and Herzegovina to a more comparative analysis. Bringing together academics and practitioners involved in ‘transitional justice’ initiatives in a wide variety of international settings, we aim to explore how historical, legal, ethnic, religious, racial, political and national sensibilities – those elements that frame both conflict and post-conflict transition - can be successfully addressed in moments when exigent interventions are required.
(Bosnian Bones, Spanish Ghosts: Transitional Justice and the Legal Shaping of Memory after Two Modern Conflicts)
28-30 August 2013 - Universidad de Deusto, Bilbao, Euskadi, Spain
Location: Sala Garate; Time: 9:00 - 17:30
This conference is the official conclusion to the BBSG project and aims to open up our own four years of research between Spain and Bosnia and Herzegovina to a more comparative analysis. Bringing together academics and practitioners involved in ‘transitional justice’ initiatives in a wide variety of international settings, we aim to explore how historical, legal, ethnic, religious, racial, political and national sensibilities – those elements that frame both conflict and post-conflict transition - can be successfully addressed in moments when exigent interventions are required.
LISTENING LANDSCAPES, SPEAKING MEMORIES
17th World Congress of the International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences
5 - 10 August 2013 - University of Manchester
Location: University Place 3.204 Date and Start Time: 08 Aug, 2013 at 11:00
What are the particular examples of listening and speaking landscapes and what do their memories convey? This panel invites ethnographic contributions to the research of landscapes as cultural processes important to the reflexive and shifting 'lives of memory'.
17th World Congress of the International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences
5 - 10 August 2013 - University of Manchester
Location: University Place 3.204 Date and Start Time: 08 Aug, 2013 at 11:00
What are the particular examples of listening and speaking landscapes and what do their memories convey? This panel invites ethnographic contributions to the research of landscapes as cultural processes important to the reflexive and shifting 'lives of memory'.
Thinking Memory Through Space: Materiality, Representation, & Imagination
11 - 12 July 2013
Goldsmiths College, University of London
What does it mean to remember through space? Why is it important, or indeed necessary, to analyze memory and space conjointly? Is it possible to remember without or outside of space? In this symposium, we will critically engage with the complex relationship between memory and space.
11 - 12 July 2013
Goldsmiths College, University of London
What does it mean to remember through space? Why is it important, or indeed necessary, to analyze memory and space conjointly? Is it possible to remember without or outside of space? In this symposium, we will critically engage with the complex relationship between memory and space.
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2013 © copyright Safet HadžiMuhamedović - Department of Anthropology, Goldsmiths, University of London
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2013 © copyright Safet HadžiMuhamedović - Department of Anthropology, Goldsmiths, University of London
