Ethnoscripts
Not a member yet
194 research outputs found
Sort by
Your Dream Home Awaits You: Engaging with People and Place through Painting in an Australian Public Housing Precinct Undergoing Renewal
Full text linkThis article presents an example of how convergent art–anthropology methodologies provided insights into the concepts of house and home in a large public housing precinct scheduled for demolition. Drawing is discussed as both a means to experience embodied understandings of place, as well as a method for initial engagement with the residents of the housing precinct. A series of oil paintings are presented, along with an exegetical discussion of how the paintings elicited ongoing conversations and interviews. The research process demonstrates how the artworks produced became a point of discussion, around which entangled emotions of anxiety could be expressed, as people were relocated to replacement housing. The final paintings aim to offer the residents and broader community an alternative representation of the houses, as a platform to consider the issues of housing affordability, gentrification and homelessness in our cities
‘From Mangoes to Apples’: Exploring Belonging in New Tehri
Full text linkWhen the Tehri Dam in the Himalayan state of Uttarakhand submerged the town of Tehri, the locals found themselves turned into visthapit (the ‘displaced’). This new position, a consequence of dam induced displacement and relocation to new geographies, triggered recollections of their previous lives in Tehri. Often recalled as a local cultural centre for surrounding villages, the old town appears in daily conversations of its former residents. By discussing Tehri, the oustees return to a place they can now experience only tangentially. This article explores how displacement and belonging come to be expressed through a place that has no existing cartographic coordinates – a place living in memories. My ethnographic work in the town of New Tehri, a namesake built for the purpose of relocation, guides these arguments
German Postmemory and Ambivalent Home Desires: A Critical Reading of Nora Krug’s (2018) Graphic Novel Heimat: A German Family Album
Full text linkThis review analyses the aesthetic engagement with Nazi atrocities during WWII and belonging in post-war Germany as presented in Nora Krug’s graphic novel Heimat: A German Family Album. The authors employ Marianne Hirsch’s concept of ‘postmemory’ as an analytical tool that helps them locate the complex historical and emotional contexts from which this graphic novel receives its impulses. The concrete scenes from the novel are presented and subsequently related to the field of memory and postmemory scholarship. Wider critical debates on how aesthetic articulations of past atrocities influence the next generations of ‘victims’ and ‘perpetrators’ are examined, to ask: What does it mean to inhabit memories of ghostly narratives about perpetrators and how does it form a feeling of post-home
Pfeffers Bibelexegese: Nachtrag zu unserer Rezension von Georg Pfeffers Buch „Verwandtschaft als Verfassung“, Baden Baden: Nomos, 2016
Full text link-/
The Threads of Time in Bangladesh’s Garment Industry: Coercion, Exploitation and Resistance in a Global Workplace
Full text linkIn this paper I discuss the work in Bangladesh’s Ready-Made Garment industry by focussing on the work process itself, on the moralities surrounding it as well as the spatial and temporal structures framing it. My aim is to show how relations of authority, inequality, gender and class are made on the shop floors of the garment industry by managers, supervisors and the workers themselves and how this “making” is shaped by demands from global corporations, i.e. the ever faster and cheaper production of garments. These demands result in extraordinary intensive and long work-days and in the spatial arrangements allowing for the tight control of the workforce, which garment workers describe as “garment-time” and “garment-world”. I will argue that these notions of the industry’s distinct world and time indicates its distinctly non-local, global character
Following the Bear: the revival of Plough Monday traditions and the performance of rural identity in the East Anglian fenlands
Full text linkIn Whittlesey and Ramsey, two market towns in the East Anglian fenlands, farm labourers led a ‘Straw Bear’ through the streets; one of an array of Plough Monday customs marking the start of the agricultural year. The practice seems to have come to an end in the early 20th century, when it was forbidden by a police inspector as a form of begging. Yet what was had come to be seen as an unruly and unsavoury practice was renovated as a valued form of cultural heritage in 1980, in the wake of the wider folk ‘revival’ in the United Kingdom. The performance of Straw Bear festivities gives us a vantage point on the cultivation of rural identity in contemporary Britain, allowing us to ask what it means to live in, belong to, and act within a landscape completely transformed by mechanised arable farming. I follow Abner Cohen in attending to the relationship between symbolic potential and political power within the carnivalesque, tracing in particular the way that revived traditions become deployed and read in the context of contemporary ‘culture wars’. At the same time, I draw on Turner in his emphasis on the socially generative potential of misrule. In the revived Straw Bear celebrations, we see a striking invention of tradition in the context of changing social and economic norms in rural England. Yet alongside the apparent gentility of revived folk customs, as evening falls, folk musicians and their activities give way to the convergence of young people from the surrounding region for a night of drunken revelry around the town. This paper explores the different facets of this modern midwinter custom: as heritage and as night of joy in the cold of winter; as cultural spectacle and as people throwing up in the streets; as continuation and as invention
Georg Pfeffer (2016) Verwandtschaft als Verfassung: Unbürokratische Muster öffentlicher Ordnung. Baden Baden: Nomos
Full text linkBuchrezension
El calendari gastronòmic: culinary nationalism in Catalan festivals
Full text linkExpressions of Catalan identity have become increasingly significant following increased friction with the Spanish central government. Catalonia-specific foods and festivals are two such expressions that have been mobilised as national symbols, and which I will consider in this paper. I will discuss the role that food plays in festive occasions in the Catalan calendar, including secularised traditional holidays and Catholic feast days, newly created festivals and fairs centred on foods, and finally the three national days (23rd April, 24 June and 11th September). In doing so, I will also tease out other, related themes in Catalan cultural identity today, including the feelings of connectedness with a historic past, land and landscape, the championing of seasonality through culinary events, and Catalonia’s gastronomic calendar. Creating, adapting and performing festivities that are celebrations of national and culinary symbols are a means of celebrating Catalan identity itself. They are events when Catalans meet to discuss and reformulate their identity, and sources of claims to distinctiveness