QUB Anthropology Seminar Series 2014-15

Anthropology & Ethnomusicology

R e s e a r c h S e m i n a r S e r i e s

Semester One

2014-2015

S c h o o l o f H i s t o r y & A n t h r o p o l o g y

C o n t a c t :

[email protected]

[email protected]

Programme at a g lance

(All seminars except Weeks 2 &12 held in the Performance Room, G06, 13 UQ at 4.15pm)

Week 2: Friday 10 October Smadar Lavie (University of Berkeley)

‘Mizrahi Mothers, Wrapped in the Flag: Ultra-Nationalism, Apartheid, and the Divinity of Bureau-

cracy in Israel’- This seminar will be held in the Old Staff Common Room, Lanyon Building

Week 3: Tuesday 14 October Siún Carden (QUB)

‘Reading the Aran Jumper’

Week 4: Tuesday 21 October David Murphy (Involve/Travellers’Voice Magazine)

‘Auto-ethnography, Voice and the Development of Traveller Media.’

Week 5: Tuesday 28 October Barbara Karatsioli (ISCTSJ, QUB)

‘Genetics of Conflict: Self-determination, Sovereignty and Kinship in Cyprus’

Week 6: Tuesday 4 November Jane Cowan (University of Sussex)

‘Reflections on Recommendations: Quantifying Human Rights Improvement in the Universal Pe-

riodic Review’

Week 7: Tuesday 11 November No Seminar (Reading Week)

Week 8: Tuesday 18 November Dimitris Dalakoglou (University of Sussex)

‘Towards a Critical Anthropology of Material Infrastructures: infrastructural politics and poetics

of the Greek expansion to the Balkans and the Greek Debt Crisis’

Week 9: Tuesday 25 November David Robertson (University of Edinburgh)

‘Whitley Strieber's Dreamland: Alien Abduction, Conspiracy Theories and Gnosis’

Week 10: Tuesday 2 December Merav Amir (Queens University Belfast)

‘When activism fails: an ethnography of the anti-occupation movement in Israel/Palestine .’

Week 11: Tuesday 9 December Estelle Murphy (NUI Maynooth)

‘The Performance and Transcendence of Female Masculinity in Death Metal’

Week 12: Saturday 13 December Ethnomusicology Concert (Harty Room, School of Music)

A n t h r o p o l o g y R e s e a r c h S e m i n a r S e r i e s

Week Two Friday 10 October 4.15-6pm, Old Staff Common Room

Smadar Lavie

University of Berkeley

Mizrahi Mothers, Wrapped in the Flag:

Ultra-Nationalism, Apartheid, and the

Divinity of Bureaucracy in Israel

Prof. Lavie's new book, Wrapped in the Flag of Israel (Berghahn Books, 2014) posits a model of state bureaucracy that operates by theological decree. In this system, the categories of religion, gender, and race become the ironclad rubric used to sort citizens into binaries: Jews versus Goyim, rich versus poor, Men versus Women, White versus Black. In so doing, Lavie explores the relationship between social protest movements in the State of Israel, vio-lence in Gaza, protest movements in the surrounding Islamic World, and the possibility of a third intifada or a nuclear conflict between Israel and Iran. Wrapped in the Flag of Israel details Smadar Lavie’s life as a welfare mother and her leadership in Ahoti, Israel’s first Feminist of Color movement. It also exposes the structural apartheid between Jews from the Muslim and Arab World, or Mizrahim ―Israel’s majority citizenry―and the state’s European Jewish ruling minority. Through the lens of the 2003 Single Mothers’ March led by welfare mother Vicky Knafo and the “Tel Aviv-Tahrir” mass demonstrations of 2011, Lavie reveals how bureaucratic entanglements lead directly to pain, or what arguably can be seen as torture. Lavie uncovers the conundrum of loving and staying loyal to a state that uses its bureaucratic system to repeatedly inflict pain on its non-European majority who, despite this pain, is willing to sacrifice their lives for what they con-ceive of as the state’s security.


Week Th ree Tuesday 14 October 4.15-6pm, Performance Room (G06,

13UQ)

Siún Carden Queen’s University Belfast

Reading the Aran Jumper

The Aran jumper emerged as a recognisable symbol of ‘Brand Ireland’ in the latter half of the 20th century, propelled through international markets by its own origin myth. This paper examines the resilience of the story of a fisherman lost at sea, whose corpse is identified by the design stitched into his clothing, in light of the twin flows of migration

and tourism. The materiality of the Aran jumper provides an ornate backdrop on which to project ideas about Irishness: its stitch patterns have been ‘read’ as ID documents, family trees, representations of the

landscape, and references to Christian and even pre-Christian spirituali-ty. Behind the garment’s cosy kitsch lies a transatlantic story of craft,

capitalism and kinship.


Week Fou r Tuesday 21 October 4.15-6pm, Performance Room (G06, 13UQ)

David Murphy

INVOLVE / Travellers’ Voice Magazine

Auto-ethnography, Voice and

the Development of Traveller

Media

Over the past few years there has been an increased interest in Irish Traveller culture. However the predominant narrative has served to both ridicule and codify genres of behaviour that are portrayed as authentic Traveller culture. This paper aims to address negative representations and the commodification of Traveller life by highlighting Traveller au-thored ceremonies and auto ethnographic representations of Irish Traveller life.


Week F i ve Tuesday 28 October 4-6pm, Performance Room (G06, 13UQ)

Barbara Karatsioli ISCTSJ, Queen’s University Belfast

Genetics of Conflict: Self-

determination, Sovereignty

and Kinship in Cyprus

“How preposterous for a politician to encourage marriage between members of his community and that community’s enemies,” one of my Greek Cypriot in-formants said to me, clearly outraged. “We have struggled so much for our inde-pendence, freedom, occupation; you can’t mix your blood with that of the ene-my’s.” Claims for self-determination and sovereignty are often supported by a biologi-cal determinist model in which the uni-nomy of the endogamic rule and conflict are related. But as conflict transforms, the intimacy of kinship becomes mobi-lised in political discourses supporting peace and rapprochement. This presenta-tion will focus on the fears of a new genetics, the “natural birth of the Cypriot” as a new modality for political self-determination and sovereignty. What social practices do Greek and Turkish Cypriots deploy to constrain or enable the “birth of the Cypriot”?


Week S i x Tuesday 4 November 4-6pm, Performance Room (G06, 13UQ)

Jane Cowan

University of Sussex

Reflections on Recommendations: Quanti-

fying Human Rights Improvement in the

Universal Periodic Review

Recent work on the increasing use of indicators in human rights monitoring processes has revealed the

tensions between the perceived need to measure human rights compliance/violation against a universal

standard and the difficulties of doing so, given diverse understandings of rights as well as the subjective

character of experiences of violation. In this article, I look at the drive toward quantification, comparison

and ranking not as manifested in indicators, but rather in the preoccupation with ‘recommendations’ in

the context of a recently introduced human rights monitoring mechanism of the reformed Human Rights

Council in Geneva: the Universal Periodic Review (UPR). In this state-driven peer review, a state’s human

rights situation is scrutinised by all other UN member states, who are invited to formulate and orally offer

recommendations which aim to help the State under Review to improve. Recommendations constitute a

central political technology in the construction of a new, ‘cooperative’ approach to human rights monitor-

ing: it not only demands the self-monitoring of the State under Review, but it also requires that the collec-

tivity of states takes up a new role of other-monitoring of fellow UN member states, thus assuming a role

heretofore allocated exclusively to human rights ‘experts’. Recommendations, moreover, have become a

preoccupation of civil society, and particularly of the NGO established to ‘monitor the monitors’: upr-

info.org. Whereas ‘indicators’ measure degrees of compliance, ‘recommendations’ are seen to measure

the commitment to improvement—not only on the part of the State under Review, but arguably even

more, on the part of the collectivity (and the individual states who constitute it) who holds that state to

account. In this article, I look at how recommendations are being formulated, counted, parsed, compared,

rated (on the scale ranging from ‘no action’ to ‘significant action’, also known informally as ‘soft’ vs. ‘hard’),

fed into a database, presented on a website, then drawn upon to inform analysis, lobbying strategies and

further recommendations. Myriad quantification exercises are arising out of these processes of counting

and ranking recommendations, and out of these, narratives of human rights virtue and vice are being con-

structed.


Week E igh t Tuesday 18 November 4.15-6pm, Performance Room (G06, 13UQ)

Dimitris Dalakoglou

University of Sussex

Towards a Critical Anthropology of Ma-

terial Infrastructures: infrastructural poli-

tics and poetics of the Greek expansion

to the Balkans and the Greek Debt Crisis

Dimitris Dalakoglou is Senior Lecturer in Anthropology at Sussex University, which he joined in January 2009 as Lecturer. Before that appointment he was teaching anthropology at UCL for two years. His focus is anthropology of infra-structures and urban public spaces and since 2012 holds an ESRC-Future Re-search Leaders grant for the project The City at a time of Crisis (crisis-scape.net). He is the co-editor of Roads and Anthropology, (2014, 2012) of Revolt and Crisis in Greece (2011) and Crisis-scapes: Athens and Beyond (2014). Ηe is the author of various articles and book chapters e.g. neo-Nazism and neoliberalism, the cri-sis before the crisis, Beyond Spontaneity or the Road from capitalism to capital-ism, Migrating-remitting-’building’-dwelling and the Road. He has co-produced the documentaries Future Suspended, the Politics of Knives, and Landscapes of Emergency,


Week N ine Tuesday 25 November 4.15-6pm, Performance Room (G06, 13UQ)

David Robertson

University of Edinburgh

Whitley Strieber's Dreamland: Alien

Abduction, Conspiracy Theories and

Gnosis

This paper presents ethnographic research from the 2012 Dreamland Festival in Nashville, Tennessee, an annual gathering/conference organised by Whitley Strieber, author of Communion (1987). The book became emblematic of the emergent Contactee movement, which filtered into popular culture, most obvi-ously with the cultural impact of the X-Files in the mid 1990s. Since then, UFOs would seem to have fallen out of favour with the counter-cultural zeitgeist, but my data suggests that interest in UFOs/ETs is still intertwined with spiritual con-cerns in the diffuse contemporary Anglophone spiritual milieu. Indeed, spiritual and/or supernatural experiences like ET abduction may be of considerable sig-nificance in our conceptualisation of the categories religion and spirituality. I fur-ther consider the frequent presence of conspiratorial narratives about elite ET-hybrid bloodlines and state-sponsored genocide, a little-explored aspect of this milieu. What kinds of people are drawn to combine the conspiratorial with the metaphysical, and why?


Week Ten Tuesday 2 December 4.15-6pm, Performance Room (G06, 13UQ)

Merav Amir

Queen’s University Belfast

When activism fails: an ethnography of

the anti-occupation movement in Israel/

Palestine The Israeli 'peace camp' suffered a major blow in October 2000, following the collapse of the Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations and the outburst of the Second Intifada. Some claim that it all but disappeared, yet, a more accurate de-scription would portray this break as a shift from two modes of political engage-ment. While the earlier forms of involvement were more ideologically guided and were based on existing social movements, the new modes of activism are action-based initiatives, formed towards coalition-building and are more geared towards the achievement of particular aims. Based on ten years of field work with different grass-root initiatives, this talk will aim to shed light on the ways in which the identities of the activists play into anti-occupation activism, by focus-ing on the more interesting ways in which actions falls short of achieving their stated goals, rather than on successes and breakthroughs, and by examining some of the unintended consequences of these interactions.


Week E l even Tuesday 9 December 4.15-6pm, Performance Room (G06, 13UQ)

Estelle Murphy

NUI Maynooth

The Performance and Transcendence

of Female Masculinity in Death Metal

In recent years, the male-dominated heavy-metal subgenre of Death Metal has been subject to an influx of female performers. These women are primarily vo-calists and have mastered the once exclusively male technique of extreme guttural vocals, known as the ‘death growl’. In a manner similar to Laurie Anderson’s intentional vocal deception through the use of a vocoder, the female growler plays with the listener’s gen-dered aural comprehension of the voice; her voice is gendered as masculine. Thus, through the appropriation of the masculine voice, the female growler ma-nipulates and exposes a system of masculine filtration, whereby the listener is mislead by the performer’s mask or ‘audio drag’. However, such performances of female masculinity (Halberstam, 2010) raise questions about performative in-tention and of the masculinity performed by male death-growl vocalists. What does it mean when a female performer subverts the exclusivity of the masculine voice in this way? Does the performance of female aural masculinity result in a transcendence of masculinity and thereby a transcendence of gen-der? Can the female growler escape the gaze? This paper will address these and other questions in relation to the performance of female masculinity in Death Metal.


The School of History & Anthropology and

The School of Creative Arts present:

WINTER ETHNOMUSICOLOGY

SHOWCASE

Including music from:

Brazil, Greece, Ireland, Nigeria, South Africa

and (possibly) more!

Saturday 13 December 2014 at 6 pm

in the Harty Room (School of Music)

Everyone Welcome!

QUB Anthropology Seminar Series 2014-15

Documents

Transcript of QUB Anthropology Seminar Series 2014-15