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- Convenor:
-
Radu Umbres
(Faculty of Political Sciences, SNSPA)
- Formats:
- Panels
- Stream:
- Morality
- Location:
- Examination Schools Room 9
- Start time:
- 21 September, 2018 at
Time zone: Europe/London
- Session slots:
- 1
Short Abstract:
This panel calls for papers looking at things as created in and constitutive of social relationships based on mistrust.
Long Abstract:
Things, places, natural or built environment mediate fundamental social relationships between people. Whether through mode of production, mode of transmission, property and exchange, the architecture of dwellings and public places, and in many other domains, the material world unites and divides people in various ways. Since at least Malinowski (1920), we have seen how things enter the trust relationships between people. However, they do it in many ways, since kula and gimwali objects follow different routes of social expectations, trust, long-term or short-term relationships (see Hart 1986 on money). Built environment is designed with an eye towards trust as we saw in Bourdieu's interpretation of whoe the material berber house divides world into kinds of social relationships and attitudes, from privacy and feelings to public exchange. The same Bakhtaman sacra provides either secret power or deceptive illusion depending upon the initiation stage (Barth 1975).
This panel calls for papers analysing the role of objects in representations and practices of trust between people. Following recent interests in the dark sides of trust (Carey 2017), what role do objects, sites and other tangible realities play in how people imagine the dangerous, polluting, unpredictable or aggressive intentions and behaviours of other people? How do things symbolically and practically divide between trust and mistrust? Why is material culture "good to think with" in matters of epistemic beliefs? Such questions kick off a conversation based on ethnographic or cross-cultural analyses focusing particularly on mistrust, deception, secrecy and other forms of epistemic uncertainty.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Vibha Joshi (University of Oxford)
Paper short abstract:
The paper investigates certain artefacts in the Pitt Rivers Museum collected from the Naga peoples of northeast India during colonial time which can be seen to embody 'social relationships based on mistrust'.
Paper long abstract:
The paper focuses on objects in the colonial ethnographic collections from erstwhile Naga Hills, northeast India which are in the display cases of the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford. The objects sometimes promise to harmonise but sometimes are the lines along which mistrust and conflict occur. The objects discussed comprise two roughly carved, four foot high wooden figures which are identified as 'a man of prominence and his wife' from an enemy village, which were kept in the youth- dormitory of a neighbouring village for the purpose of sympathetic magic to cause illness to the pair at an appropriate time in the near future. Other objects in a separate display case include a bundle of sticks and dry leaves which was sent as a warning and challenge to the British administrative officer and a pair of large tiger teeth over which oaths had been taken in disputes. The objects were made in the 1920s before Naga had converted in substantial numbers to Christianity, and warfare among Naga villages still predominated. The paper investigates the extent to which they embody past relationships between clans and between coloniser and colonized and remain relevant nowadays as symptoms of "dark mistrust" in the postcolonial politics of nationalism and the potentially violent internal competitiveness between Naga groups.
Radu Umbres (Faculty of Political Sciences, SNSPA)
Paper short abstract:
Based on ethnography in a Romanian village, this paper analyses the dual epistemic nature of households. I propose a mechanism explaining both the material culture of opacity and secrecy in everyday life and their conspicuously overt "good room" in the rituals of death.
Paper long abstract:
This paper analyses a puzzling feature of households in the Romanian village of Sateni. In everyday life, the domestic sphere is closely guarded against external interference, be it physical intrusion or inquisitive attention from people outside the family, relatives or friends. The epistemic protection involves doors, windows, gates, fences and house architecture designed to keep malevolent agency at bay. However, the occurrence of death turns topsy turvy the cultural structure of domestic protection. Doors open widely towards the exterior, mortuary symbols draw and everyone can come into the sacred part of the house - "the good room"- where the corpse lies in state for the three days of the wake. What explains this total reversal of attention and secrecy?
I will argue that the inside of the house plays a culturally-central communicative role. the interior life of a household contains the most moral social relationships of an individual and the security of the private sphere defines a family's social competence in protecting its members and their earthly possessions. As Bloch and Parry (1982) have argued, death raises a problem for the persistence of a social order. In Sateni, the conspicuous disclosure of inner material spaces confronts biological extinction with a ritualised enactment of domestic solidarity, of a reproduction of households and families despite individual disappearance. The visibility of death does not question the opacity of life, but offers a closely-monitored legitimation of fundamental moral principles of internal reciprocity and external autarchy in Sateni village society.
Anna Korovkina (Saint-Petersburg State University)
Paper short abstract:
The author analyses the phenomenon of magic practices in the Maghreb on the basis of a leading article of an everyday Algerian newspaper dedicated to a case of, well-known in Maghreb, cemetery sorcery and the material of her personal field research.
Paper long abstract:
The Quran prescribes Muslims to believe in the existence of jinn. The Prophet addressed them, as well as people, to deliver the holy message. Some jinn accepted Islam, but the other did not. It is the latter that serve the source of witchcraft and sorcery in the Muslim world.
According to the PEW Research Center survey, the number of people believing in witchcraft in the Middle East and North Africa varies from 89 to 16%. The data of the survey verify the wide-spread idea in the folk culture of the Arab World about the Maghreb as a place filled by jinn, magic, and sorcerers - as Tunisia and Morocco are on the top of the list.
The author analyses this phenomenon on the basis of a leading article of an everyday Algerian newspaper dedicated to a case of, well-known in Maghreb, cemetery sorcery and the material of her personal field research.
The results of the analysis allow drawing some conclusions. Among those: the definition of magic given by al-Qurtubi in the 12th century, as something that "everyone may learn and practice", is still accurate in the modern Maghreb. Strong belief in sorcery and its wide distribution remains one of the main cultural peculiarities of the Maghrebian society even in the conditions of living outside the original area.