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Ethnografein
Critical dialogues, epistemological challenges, field experiences, creative texts

Original film title: Words with Gods collective 2014

Photos: selection F. Tsibiridou

“‘Religion’ in the ethnographic condition”

 (Western ontology, ecologies of knowledge, gendered bodies that suffer, healing performances, sacred spaces, power relations, identity politics, subjects)

Since its launch, in the spring of 2021, ‘ETHNOGRAFEIN’ circle of webinars seeks to contribute to a critical and interdisciplinary debate on the theory and practice of ethnography, the epistemology of research, the importance of embodied experience, and the ways of disseminating the anthropological knowledge to the academic and non-academic public. It is required that anthropological study, as a research practice and as a writing policy, should involve critical appraisal, empathy, reflection and self-reflexivity, and highlight the importance of multimodal analysis of the local for understanding the general.

Organization and coordination
Fotini Tsibiridou – Ioannis Manos – Eleni Sideri

Organization and coordination of the 5^th Circle
Fotini Tsibiridou – (in collaboration with Dimitris Kataiftsis)

The 5th cycle of “Ethnografein” webinars, starting in October 2024, entitled “’Religion’ in the ethnographic condition” (Western ontology, ecologies of knowledge, gendered suffering bodies, healing performances, sacred spaces, power relations, identity politics, subjects), includes 7 panels. It explores the religious phenomenon, opening the debate on how the question of religion needs to be deconstructed through the ethnographic condition and decolonized from the ontologies of the Western epistemological paradigm. The colonialities of modern citizenship and of nation/state sociality not only use religion instrumentally, both at the collective and personal level, but also crystallize the concept of religion spiritually and in one-dimensional terms, both beyond its materialities and narrowly in its anthropocentric character. Monotheism (in its Judeo-Christian and Muslim versions), colonialism and Western epistemology have systematically led to successive rationalizations of the concept of “religion”, as well as to its separation from the world of “magic”. This path leads to a Christian missionary ontology of knowledge in the context of Western colonialism, which creates deviations from the inclusive knowledge ecologies of the “noble savages” (see indigenous cults). The fact that anthropology and its related disciplines (see folklore studies) has pointed out the above very early on, has not prevented it in its colonial phase from reproducing Western-centric distinctions in their analysis. Earlier, since the time of Crusades, “religion” had begun to be conceptualized in a Western-centric way, as a synonym for “culture”, in an orientalist distinction of the Western Christian European world from the culturally Muslim Others of the East, while the Age of Discovery coincided with the Christian crystallization as segregation of religions in the European world (cf. Reconquista, persecution of Jewish populations, female witch-hunting). 

The seminars aim to highlight how religion and the religious phenomenon need not only to be deconstructed but also decolonized in research and analysis. In terms of political economy and seeking ecologies of knowledge, the webinars highlight practices for gendered bodies that suffer, are at risk and demand healing and comfort, in places and communities which sometimes use religious discourse inclusively with the afterlife, the non-human world and the environment, sometimes and/or instrumentally for identity politics in the contemporary world. All of these are examined in situ, within networks of power relations and hegemonies from above or from outside, and require systematic documentation inside ethnography and epistemological revision in terms of decolonizing knowledge. In these ways, the deconstruction of stereotypes and demonization is achieved, but also the understanding of religious experience and interreligious expression, both: as process of enchantment and re-enchantment of an often mundane and harsh everyday life, and as potential constituent element of the constitution of the self/subject in the complex contemporary world.

The 5th cycle of the Ethnografein webinars includes approaches and ethnographic case studies that focus on the religious phenomenon and beyond, re-examining in the heavy shadow of Western epistemological, cultural and political hegemony the issues of shamanism, spirituality, transreligiosity, and more broadly worldview construction, in Africa, Asia, the Balkans and Anatolia, the European north, the Mediterranean and Latin America worlds. By focusing on the practices of social actors, their representations, expectations and desires, the boundaries and meanings of religious expression from within and from below, in the long term and in the geopolitical context, beyond the hypostatized stereotypical naming and representations of the Other, the alien, the heterodox and the strange, are unfolded.

 The webinars are held on Mondays from 16:00-18:00

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Seminar Platform: ZOOM
https://zoom.us/j/8364531775?pwd=OVg3YVZlbmVCYWs3S0JYcEFGYlV1QT09

Program

1^st panel. 21/10/2024 4-6 μμ: Spiritualism, Sufism and missionary Churches in post-colonial Africa

Makris, G. (Η οδός των πνευμάτων, Σουφισμός κ πνευματοληψία στο Σουδάν)και Κυριακάκης, Γ. (Εκκλησίες, πίστη, θεραπεία στη Γκάνα)

2^nd panel 11/11/2024 4-6 μμ : Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and Popular Islam in the Pomak villages. Modernity, colonialities and rationalizations 

Kourgiotis, P. (Αδελφοί Μουσουλμάνοι, αποικιοκρατία, νεωτερικότητα  στην Αίγυπτο –  Tsibiridou, F. (Λαϊκό Ισλάμ και μειονοτική συνθήκη στα Πομακοχώρια)

3^rd panel 13/1/2025 4-6 μμ: Shared Sacred Places in the Balkans and Anatolia

Dionigi Albera (κοινά προσκυνήματα σε Βαλκάνια-Ανατολία) – Gilles de Rapper (Βακούφια και Πελασγοί στην Αλβανία).

4^rth panel 17/2/25 4-6 μμ: Τransreligiosity, rituals, bodies, subjects in the old and the new world

Panagiotopoulos, Α. (για Afrocuban τελετουργίες) καιRoussou, Ε. (για το κακό μάτι στην Ελλάδα)

5^th panel 17/3/25 4-6 μμ: Shamanism in Nepal and Anastenaria in the Balkans

Riboli D. (σαμανισμός στο Νεπάλ και Άπω Ανατολή) – Terzopoulou, Μ. (γυναίκες και μάνες στα Αναστενάρια)

6^th panel 28/4/25 4-6 μμ: Pilgrimage faith and ethnic identities, from the Balkans to the Mediterranean world

Yiakoumaki, V. (υπάρχουν εβραίοι στα Χανιά;) και  Katiƈ, M. (εθνικοποίηση της θρησκείας στη Βοσνία-Ερζεγοβίνη και τα Δυτικά Βαλκάνια)

7^th panel 19/5/2025 4-6 μμ: New-shamanism in the European North and geo-mythology in contemporary Greece

Barmpalexis. Α. (νέο-σαμανισμός στη Σκωτία)και Ευγενία Φωτίου (γεωμυθολογία στην Ελλάδα)

Short CV’s

Fotini Tsibiridou, (Dr. of Ethnology-Social Anthropology, EHESS-Paris 1990), is    professor of social anthropology in the department of Balkan, Slavic and Oriental Studies, and director of the Culture-Borders-Gender/Lab at the University of Macedonia (cbg-lab.uom.gr). She carried out ethnographic research in a refugee village of 1922, among Pomak populations and minorities in Greek Thrace, in villages in Macedonia, the Peloponnese, in Istanbul, in the Sultanate of Oman and more broadly in the Middle East and the Balkans. As of 2018 and in the context of postcolonial and feminist criticism, she explores the genre of religiosity, statehood, and gendered subjectivity in post-Ottoman topologies and geographies. Since 2020, as a founding member of the dëcolonıze hellàş initiative (https://decolonizehellas.org/), she has been dealing with issues of coloniality, postcolonial archives and cultural heritage, the decolonization of religion and gender as well as the defacement of patriarchy.

Dimitris Kataiftsis is Dr. in Cultural Studies (University of Paris-IV Sorbonne 2014) and external collaborator, teaching anthropology courses at the Department of Balkan, Slavic and Oriental Studies of University of Macedonia. Since 2010 he has been conducting field research in communities of returnees from the former USSR, in Greece and abroad, mostly focusing on gender and economic reproduction. During his last postdoctoral research he studied transnational networking, ethnic and cultural economies in the context of the Russian-speaking world and return migration, publishing articles in international journals and volumes and participating in international conferences. Finally, he actively participates in the scientific and editorial team of the journal EIRINI/Studies of Young Scholars on Gender, and in numerous activities of the Laboratory/Culture-Border-Gender (cbg-lab.uom.gr), at the University of Macedonia, as a regular member.

Ο Γεράσιμος Μακρής είναι καθηγητής Κοινωνικής Ανθρωπολογίας στο Πάντειο Πανεπιστήμιο, Αθήνα. Έχει διδακτορικό δίπλωμα στην Κοινωνική Ανθρωπολογία από το London School of Economics. Τα κύρια ερευνητικά του ενδιαφέροντα είναι η ανθρωπολογία των ισλαμικών κοινωνιών, η ανθρωπολογία του χριστιανισμού, η ελληνική διασπορά στη Μέση Ανατολή και η ανθρωπολογική μελέτη της θρησκείας. Βιβλία στην αγγλική γλώσσα: The Sudanese Zār Ṭumbura Cult: Slaves, Armies, Spirits and History. Λονδίνο: Routledge, 2023. Islam in the Middle East: Α Living Tradition. Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2007. Changing Masters: Spirit Possession and Identity Construction among Slave Descendants and Other Subordinates in the Sudan. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2000. Βιβλία στην ελληνική γλώσσα: Ο Δρόμος των Πνευμάτων: Αθήνα: Σουφισμός, Πνευματοληψία και Μαγεία στο Σουδάν: Αθήνα, Πατάκης, 2016. Ισλαμ: Πεποιθήσεις, Πρακτικές και Τάσεις. Αθήνα, Πατάκης, 2014.

Ioannis Kyriakakis was born in Athens-Greece. He studied Political Science in Athens (Panteion University) and holds a pHD in Social Anthropology in London (UCL). He conducted fieldwork in England, in Ghana and Greece. He teaches in the Hellenic Open University. Ηis main interests revolve around methodology, religion/cosmology, global inequalities, economy and the anthropology of capitalism. In July 2020 his ethnography The Witchcraft of Capitalism-How Academy supports the global class system, was published. In 2023 his book Economic Anthropology and Capitalism and in 2024 his e-book Colonizing the Mind- The Witchcraft of the global class system (Syneditions) were published.

Panos Kourgiotis (Dr. of the Department of Political Sciences of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki since 2013), is Assistant Professor at the Department of Balkan, Slavic and Oriental Studies, since 2024, specializing in the field of Area Studies (Middle East) and contemporary Islam. He speaks Arabic and Hebrew. Part of his PhD thesis has been published (in Greek) under the title The first youth of Islamism; discovering the Muslim Brotherhood and the world surrounding it, which is the first historical study devoted to the Muslim Brothers in the Greek bibliography. Between 2004-2007 he studied the Arabic language in both Tunisia and Syria, while in the latter he conducted field research which was published (in Greek) under the title ‘‘Inheriting the Umayyads? Globalization, resistance and coexistence in Bashar al-Asad’s Syria’’ in the collective volume Ethnography and Daily Life in ‘‘Our Near East’’ (2020). He has published in highly influential academic journals, such as The British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, The Maghreb Review and Religions.

Dionigi Albera Dionigi Albera is an anthropologist and senior research fellow at the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS). He is based at the IDEAS (Institute of Ethnology and Social Anthropology, Aix-Marseille University). His research focuses on Europe and the Mediterranean, and his interests include migration, kinship and family, pilgrimage and interfaith mixing. He published Sharing Sacred Spaces in the Mediterranean: Christians, Muslims and Jews at Shrines and Sanctuaries (Indiana University Press, 2012), co-edited with Maria Couroucli, He is one of the curators of the touring exhibition Shared Sacred Sites held at the Museum of Mediterranean and European Civilizations in Marseille (Mucem, 2015), the Bardo Museum in Tunis (2016), the Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art and the National Museum of Photography in Thessaloniki (2017), the National Museum of the History of Immigration in Paris (2017–2018) and the Museum of Confluences-Dar el-Bacha in Marrakesh (2018).

Gilles de Rapper is an anthropologist, currently Director of Modern and Contemporary Studies at the École française d’Athènes. He holds a PhD in Ethnology and comparative sociology (University of Paris X Nanterre, 1998) and a Habilitation à diriger des recherches in Anthropology (University of Toulouse Jean Jaurès, 2019). Since 1994, he has conducted numerous fieldworks in Albania and the Balkans. His work has focused on the coexistence of Christians and Muslims in southern Albania, on cross-border relations between Greece and Albania and on the effects of Albanian migration to Greece. More recently, he has been interested in the trajectory of photographs produced during the communist period in Albania and their role in the current perception of the communist past. Finally, he is interested in the history of theories on the origin of Albanians through the revitalization, since the 1990s, of the nineteenth century ideas making Pelasgians the ancestors of modern Albanians.

Anastasios Panagiotopoulos (PhD 2011, Department of Social Anthropology, University of Edinburgh, UK), has conducted research on Afro-Cuban religiosity, divination, spirit possession, and mediumship in Cuba and Spain. More recently, his research interests have been directed towards contemporary religiosity and spirituality, alternative therapy,metaphysical views, and secularism in Europe, especially in Spain and Greece. He has been a postdoctoral and, subsequently, a senior researcher at the Centro em Rede de Investigação em Antropología (CRIA) and FCSH-Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal. Since May 2023 he is a distinguished researcher at the Department of Social Anthropology of the University of Seville, Spain.

Eugenia Roussou, (PhD in sociocultural anthropologist UCL, University of London, 2010), is a senior researcher at the Centre for Research in Anthropology (CRIA-Iscte), Lisbon, Portugal, and the Principal Investigator of the project ReSpell: Religion, Spirituality and Wellbeing: a Comparative Approach of Transreligiosity and Crisis in Southern Europe (https://respell.cria.org.pt), funded by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT) and hosted by CRIA. She is the author of Orthodox Christianity, New Age Spirituality and Vernacular Religion: the Evil Eye in Greece. London: Bloomsbury (2021). She has edited collective volumes and special issues and has written extensively on the themes of religion and spirituality, vernacular and lived religion, religious pluralism, ritual healing practices, Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM), transreligiosity and spiritual elasticity, among others, with comparative ethnographic reference to Greece and Portugal.

Diana Riboli (PhD in Ethno-anthropological Sciences (University of Rome “La Sapienza”, 1996), is a professor at the Department of Social Anthropology of the Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences. From 1992 to date, she has conducted over twenty ethnographic studies in South and Southeast Asia (Nepal and Peninsular Malaysia), with a particular focus on the therapeutic, political and spiritual functions of ethno-medical systems among marginalized indigenous communities. Since 2019, she has been directing a research project examining the ecocosmological perceptions of minority and marginalized groups in the context of the recent rapid spread of Christianity and the significant increase in environmental disasters in Nepal. He has authored and co-authored over forty publications on a range of topics, including indigenous ethno-medical systems, concepts and responses to violence in egalitarian societies, cultural resistance of indigenous cultures, disaster anthropology, concepts of person and personhood in the philosophies of indigenous groups, and anthropological research methods.

Miranda Terzopoulou, Ethnologist/Folklorist, is a former researcher at the Greek Folklore Research Center of the Academy of Athens. She carried out many field investigations inside and outside Greece by traveling, experiencing and recording ethnographically. She has studied many aspects and patterns of popular culture and especially traditional music and folk rituals, working with various ethnic, linguistic, religious groups, minorities, women. She records and films, compiling an important archive of rare audio-visual material, while at the same time she publishes studies, drawing on its relevant topics.

Vassiliki Yiakoumaki (PhD, New School for Social Research, 2003) is Assistant Professor of Social Anthropology at the Department of History-Archaeology-Social Anthropology, University of Thessaly (Volos). Her research interests focus on ethnic groups and minorities, multiculturalist policies, religion/s, and Jewish identities.  Her teaching focuses on matters of religion and the public sphere, Jewish identities in Greece and Europe, and “Middle Eastern” societies.  Her current research area is contemporary Israeli society, and “Greek identity” among citizens of Israel with “Greek” origin.

Mario Katic (Associate Professor, Department of Ethnology and Anthropology, University of Zadar). makatic@unizd.hr. My areas of expertise concern pilgrimage, oral traditions, historical anthropology, and heritage. I am doing extensive ethnographic research in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, and Montenegro. I co-edited several books: Approaching Pilgrimage: Methodological Issues Involved in Researching Routes, Sites, and Practices (Routledge, 2023); Military Pilgrimage and Battlefield Tourism: Commemorating the Dead (Routledge, 2018); Pilgrimage, Politics and Place Making in Eastern Europe (Routledge 2014), Pilgrimage and Sacred Places in Southeastern Europe: History, Religious Tourism and Contemporary Trends (Lit Verlag, 2014).

Athanasios Barmpalexis (Ph.D. in Ethnology (and Folklore) Εphinstone Institute, University of Aberdeen, United Kingdom). His doctoral thesis was on “western” folk healers practicing contemporary shamanisms in the wider area of North-East Scotland. He currently is a postdoctoral researcher at the sector of Byzantine Literature and Folklore Studies at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens,. He is also an Honorary Research Fellow and a Visiting Lecturer at the Elphinstone Institute, University of Aberdeen. His research interests are Scottish/Irish myths and legends, folk music in contemporary extreme metal music, oral traditions of resistance, and folk medicine, vernacular healing, and traditional witchcraft.

Η Ευγενία Φωτίου (Δρ. Πολιτισμικής Ανθρωπολογίας, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2010) είναι 

Evgenia Fotiou (Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2010), is Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Crete, since 2023.. Her research has focused mainly on indigenous religions and healing traditions, especially their transnational aspects, as well as on the role of tourism, focusing geographically on Latin America and contemporary Greece. She has contributed to the ethnography of contemporary shamanic practices globally by analyzing the multiple aspects of the shamanic tourism phenomenon. More recently, her research addresses the critical interdisciplinary issues of knowledge systems, comparative epistemology, otherness, and cross-cultural translation. She specializes in ethnomedicine, the anthropology of religion, tourism, and gender and has taught courses on these topics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Luther College, and Kent State University in the United States.

References

Albera, D. and M. Couroucli, eds. (2012) Sharing Sacred Spaces in the Mediterranean: Christians, Muslims, and Jews at Shrines and Sanctuaries. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press.

Asad, T. (1993) Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam. London: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Asad, T. (2003) Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press.

Barmpalexis, Α. (2020) The Birth of The New Urban Shaman’s Oracle: The Creation and the Crafting Process of a Contemporary Tarot Card Deck for Personal and Community Healing and Transformation Εθνολογία on line 10(2) · Ethnologhia on line 10(2) ΕΛΛΗΝΙΚΗ ΕΤΑΙΡΕΙΑ ΕΘΝΟΛΟΓΙΑΣ (GREEK SOCIETY FOR ETHNOLOGY) ISSN: 1792-9628 19 https://www.societyforethnology.gr/images/volume-10-2/Vol_10(2)_2020_whole.pdf

Danforth, M. L. (1995) Tα αναστενάρια της Αγίας Ελένης. Πυροβασία και θρησκευτική θεραπεία. Αθήνα: Πλέθρον.

Fotiou, E. “Transreligiosity and Religious Revitalization in Modern Greece: Bridging Religion and Science through Geomythology”. Religions 2023, 14, 754. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel14060754

Geertz, C.  (1973) “Religion As a Cultural System.”  in The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays, pp. 87-125.   New York: Basic Books.

Federici, S. (2019) Το κυνήγι μαγισσών χθες και σήμερα. Θεσσαλονίκη: Εκδ. των ξένων.

Hayden, R.M., Katić, M. (2021). Religiously Nationalizing the Landscape in Bosnia and Herzegovina. In: Bădescu, G., Baillie, B., Mazzucchelli, F. (eds) Transforming Heritage in the Former Yugoslavia. Palgrave Studies in Cultural Heritage and Conflict. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76401-2_9

Kenna, M. E. (2015) «Rituals of Forgiveness and Structures of Remembrance: Memorial Services and Bone Depositories on the Island of Anafi, Greece», History of Religions, Vol. 54, No. 3 (February 2015), pp. 225-259 Published by: The University of Chicago Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/678993 .

Κυριακάκης Γ. (2012) “Υγεία, Πίστη και Μεθοδολογία: μια εθνογραφική μαρτυρία από την Δυτική Αφρική”, στον τόμο Ανθρωπολογικές και κοινωνιολογικές προσεγγίσεις της υγείας.

Σπυριδάκης M.-Οικονόμου, X. (επιμ.) Αθήνα: Εκδόσεις Σιδέρη. Σελ. 361-379.

Κουργιώτης, Π. (2016) Η πρώτη νιότη του ισλαμισμού. Ανακαλύπτοντας τη μουσουλμανική αδελφότητα και τον κόσμο της (1928-1948). Θεσσαλονίκη: Ζήτρος

Μακρής, Γ. (2024) Η οδός των πνευμάτων: Σουφισμός, πνευματοληψία και μαγεία στο Σουδάν. Αθήνα: Πατάκης

Nye, M. (2019) “Decolonizing the Study of Religion”, Open Library of Humanities 5(1), 43. doi: https://doi.org/10.16995/olh.421

Obadia, L. (2008) Ανθρωπολογία των θρησκειών. Αθήνα: Πολύτροπον.

Panagiotopoulos, A (2017) A secular religion within an atheist state: The case of Afro-Cuban religiosity and the Cuban state. In: Mapril J, Blanes R, Wilson E, Giumbelli E (eds) Secularisms in a Postsecular Age? Religiosities and Subjectivities in Comparative Perspective. London; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp.39–65.

Panagiotopoulos, A., & Roussou, E. (2022) «We have always been transreligious: An introduction to transreligiosity». Social Compass, 69(4), 614-630. https://doi.org/10.1177/00377686221103713

Pénicaud Manoël (video για τον τεκέ στα Φάρσαλα) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9viJwlDkoP0&t=2s).

De Rapper, G. (2012) «Τhe Vakëf: Sharing Religious Space in Albania», in Dionigi Albera, Maria Couroucli (eds) Sharing Sacred Spaces in the Mediterranean. Bloomington and Indianapolis, Indiana University Press, pp. 29-50.

Riboli, D. (2008) Tunsuriban, Ανθρωπολογική μελέτη του σαμανισμού των Chepang του νοτίου και Κεντρικού Νεπάλ. Aθήνα:εκδ. Παπαζήση

Roussou, E (2021) Orthodox Christianity, New Age Spirituality and Vernacular Religion: The Evil Eye in Greece. London: Bloomsbury.

Σερεμετάκη, Ν. (2017) Η τελευταία λέξη στης Ευρώπης τα άκρα. Δι-αίσθηση, Θάνατος, Γυναίκες. Εκδοτικός Οίκος Α Α Λιβάνη.

Santos, B. de Sousa (2014) “Ecologies of Knowledge,” pp. 185-211 in Bonaventura de Sousa Santos, Epistemologies of the South: Justice Against Epistemicide. New York: Rutledge.

Τερζοπούλου, Μ.(2023) «Όσο κρατάει ένας στεναγμός. Ανασύροντας από το έρεβος την κακή μάνα» (149-174) στο Θέατρο-Τραύμα-Θεραπεία, Ι. Βιβιλάκης (επιμ.) Αθήνα: εκδ. Αρμός.

Tsibiridou, F. (2015) «Beyond the politics of religion: Rationalizing Popular Islam among the Slavonic-Speaking Muslims in Greece”, in Balkan Heritages. Negotiating History and Culture, edited by Maria Couroucli and Tchavdar Marinov. Surrey: Asghate 2015: 209-228. https://www.academia.edu/36171007/Beyond_the_politics_of_religion_Rationalizing_popular_Islam_among_the_Slavonic_speaking_Muslims_in_Greece_pdf

Turner, E. and V. Turner (2011) Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture (Revised Edition). New York: Columbia University Press.

Turner, V. (2017) Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. Routledge, 2017.

Van Gennep, A. (2019) The Rites of Passage. Second Edition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press

Yiakoumaki, V. (2009) “Υπάρχουν Εβραίοι στα Χανιά; Περί απουσίας, παρουσίας, και επίκτητης εμπειρίας της ετερότητας” [=“Are There Jews in Chania? On Absence, Presence, and the Acquired Experience of ‘Difference’”]. In F. Tsibiridou (ed) Μειονοτικές και μεταναστευτικές εμπειρίες: Βιώνοντας την “κουλτούρα του κράτους” [=Minority and Immigration Experiences: Εxperiencing the ‘Culture of the State’]. Athens: Kritiki, pp. 255-28

ETHNOGRAFEIN
Critical dialogues, epistemological challenges, 
field experiences, creative texts

“Borders and boundaries revisited: 
Anthropological perspectives and public engagement”

“Borders and boundaries revisited: 
Anthropological perspectives and public engagement”

The 4th period of the ETHNOGRAFEIN online seminars, starting in October 2023 with the title “Borders and boundaries revisited: Anthropological perspectives and public engagement“, sets the study of geopolitical borders as its point of departure to examine the diverse phenomena and processes that abound in the contemporary state border regions and have multilevel consequences for the border populations. 

By definition, studying borders and boundaries involves exploring the relationship between the ‘inside’ and the ‘outside’, or the “Self” and the “Other”. However, this is not a study of clear-cut dichotomies but an analysis of the interplay of multiple, multilevel, coexisting, but not necessarily interconnected processes. Boundaries are configured and take shape within a historically determined frame. They are subject to transformations in socio-political and economic contexts and are characterised by institutionally organised asymmetrical power relations. The complex making of borders and boundaries often emerges as a continuous interaction between mobility and enclosure, communication, coexistence, exchange, interaction, sameness and otherness, separation, exclusion, segmentation, connection and disconnection.

The anthropological study of geopolitical borders and their populations by anthropology was systematised in the mid-1990s. It was initially based on two paradigms: the study of the USA-Mexico and European borders. Nowadays, analysing social phenomena and cultural processes concerning borders and boundaries transcends disciplinary boundaries. Novel approaches such as the crοsslocations framework and the current discussion on decolonising methods and epistemologies have expanded the analytical and conceptual significance of the concepts of border and boundary. New methodological and interpretative tools have been created to study politics, trans-border mobility, materiality, transnationalism, topologies and genealogies of migration and refugeeness, border economics, and nation-state policies concerning spatial and cultural diversity, minority rights, and performative culture. 

Based on detailed explorations of ethnographic research and anthropological insights, the 4th cycle of the ETHNOGRAFEIN online seminars critically examines the theoretical, epistemological and methodological complexities surrounding the study of geopolitical borders and their imposed dichotomies. Moreover, it discusses anthropology’s potential to bring forth the subtleties of human voices often overshadowed by macro narratives and create an inclusive, comprehensive dialogue in the public sphere that demonstrates the multiplicity of lived experiences.

22 April 2024

“Actions from below and exit from the Cypriot liminality” 

Pafsanias Karathanasis 
PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of the Aegean

22/4/2024

Pafsanias Karathanasis : Actions from below and exit from the Cypriot liminality
The presentation draws on my ongoing research experience in the divided Cypriot capital, which aspires to add a piece to our understanding of the otherwise complex Cyprus Problem. Focusing on the Cypriot division, and on the boundaries that it creates, it examines the ways in which social subjects attempt to cope with the official restrictions. These can be social, political or geographical, but they are also expressed as restrictions to the development of the imagination for a different future. Following contemporary anthropological approaches to the concept of liminality, the analysis begins from the old town of Nicosia, a liminal urban space – next to the Green Line – and attempts to place the processes taking place there in a broader context of analysis of Cypriot society within the conditions created by the controlled reconnection of the two sides after 2003. Drawing on a spatial analysis of political and cultural activities situated in the geographical and symbolic in-between, it attempts to approach the continuation of Cypriot division as the maintenance of an uncertain and precarious in-between state and proposes an interpretation of these activities as examples of efforts aimed at exiting the prolonged Cypriot liminality; efforts, that is, aimed at ‘life in Cyprus without the Cyprus Problem’, even if its official solution never comes.

Pafsanias Karathanasis holds a PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of the Aegean. His research interests include the anthropology of space and cities, visual culture, and political anthropology. Specifically, he is concerned with urban cultures and contested spaces in cities and border areas. He has conducted research on urban practices such as street art, public art, and activism, and has conducted participant observation with political and artistic groups active in Athens, and in the borderscapes of Mytilene and Nicosia. His articles have been published in academic journals and edited volumes, and he has participated in international conferences in Greece and abroad, and in the organization and scientific curation of panel discussions at conferences and festivals. He has collaborated as a postdoctoral researcher with the University of the Aegean, Panteion University, and the University of Amsterdam, as a lecturer with the University of Macedonia, as a coordinator of academic and educational activities with the Athens Ethnographic Film Festival-Ethnofest and he is a member of the Board of Directors of the Association of Social Anthropologists of Greece-SKAE.

Only those participants who wish to receive certificates of attendance register in the following form: https://forms.gle/GgfLbkfST5jBbkUN7

The registration form will receive answers one week before the seminar, that is from 15/4/2024 to 22/4/2024.

 The seminars are held on Mondays from 16:00-18:00

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Seminar Platform: ZOOM

Link  https://zoom.us/j/8364531775?pwd=OVg3YVZlbmVCYWs3S0JYcEFGYlV1QT09
Meeting ID: 836 453 1775     Passcode: KB2JKa

ETHNOGRAFEIN
Critical dialogues, epistemological challenges, 
field experiences, creative texts

“Borders and boundaries revisited: 
Anthropological perspectives and public engagement”

“Borders and boundaries revisited: 
Anthropological perspectives and public engagement”

The 4th period of the ETHNOGRAFEIN online seminars, starting in October 2023 with the title “Borders and boundaries revisited: Anthropological perspectives and public engagement“, sets the study of geopolitical borders as its point of departure to examine the diverse phenomena and processes that abound in the contemporary state border regions and have multilevel consequences for the border populations. 

By definition, studying borders and boundaries involves exploring the relationship between the ‘inside’ and the ‘outside’, or the “Self” and the “Other”. However, this is not a study of clear-cut dichotomies but an analysis of the interplay of multiple, multilevel, coexisting, but not necessarily interconnected processes. Boundaries are configured and take shape within a historically determined frame. They are subject to transformations in socio-political and economic contexts and are characterised by institutionally organised asymmetrical power relations. The complex making of borders and boundaries often emerges as a continuous interaction between mobility and enclosure, communication, coexistence, exchange, interaction, sameness and otherness, separation, exclusion, segmentation, connection and disconnection.

The anthropological study of geopolitical borders and their populations by anthropology was systematised in the mid-1990s. It was initially based on two paradigms: the study of the USA-Mexico and European borders. Nowadays, analysing social phenomena and cultural processes concerning borders and boundaries transcends disciplinary boundaries. Novel approaches such as the crοsslocations framework and the current discussion on decolonising methods and epistemologies have expanded the analytical and conceptual significance of the concepts of border and boundary. New methodological and interpretative tools have been created to study politics, trans-border mobility, materiality, transnationalism, topologies and genealogies of migration and refugeeness, border economics, and nation-state policies concerning spatial and cultural diversity, minority rights, and performative culture. 

Based on detailed explorations of ethnographic research and anthropological insights, the 4th cycle of the ETHNOGRAFEIN online seminars critically examines the theoretical, epistemological and methodological complexities surrounding the study of geopolitical borders and their imposed dichotomies. Moreover, it discusses anthropology’s potential to bring forth the subtleties of human voices often overshadowed by macro narratives and create an inclusive, comprehensive dialogue in the public sphere that demonstrates the multiplicity of lived experiences.

8 April 2024

“The Georgian-Russian Border: Perspectives from the Periphery”

Florian Muehlfried 
Professor of Social Anthropology at Ilia State University (Georgia)

8/4/2024

Florian Muehlfried:  The Georgian-Russian Border: Perspectives from the Periphery
In my presentation, I will trace the transformation of the border between Georgia and Russia from soft to hard based on the example of the Georgian highland region Tusheti. After the breakdown of the Soviet Union, the border region was managed flexibly and “from below”. This was followed by an internationalisation of border guarding and attempts to its spiritual fortification. These three phases of border guarding can be related to three different models of the state, and of being a citizen. 

Florian Mühlfried is a Professor of Social Anthropology at Ilia State University. His publications include the monographs Mistrust: A Global Perspective (2019) and Being a State and States of Being in Highland Georgia (2014), the edited volume Mistrust: Ethnographic Approximwations (2018), as well as the co-edited volumes Sacred Places, Emerging Spaces: Religious Pluralism in the Post-Soviet Caucasus (2018) and Exploring the Edge of Empire: Soviet Era Anthropology in the Caucasus and Central Asia (2011).

Only those participants who wish to receive certificates of attendance register in the following form: https://forms.gle/gk4SijYeUL4rj2NS9

The registration form will receive answers one week before the seminar, that is from 1/4/24 to 8/4/24.

 The seminars are held on Mondays from 16:00-18:00

————————————————————————–

Seminar Platform: ZOOM

Link  https://zoom.us/j/8364531775?pwd=OVg3YVZlbmVCYWs3S0JYcEFGYlV1QT09
Meeting ID: 836 453 1775     Passcode: KB2JKa