Ε/ 5th Circle of Educational Webinars “Ethnografein” (2024-2025)

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

Original film title: Words with Gods collective 2014

Photos: selection F. Tsibiridou

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 5th 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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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