Paper short abstract:

The Jerusalem-Hebron Road in Palestine and Israel can only be fully traversed by a non-citizen of either. Though the road has an obvious ancient past, this paper uses ethnographic engagement with its users in the contemporary age to paint an ethnographic portrait of a road with a complicated story.

Paper long abstract:

This paper would explore one road in particular, the Jerusalem-Hebron Road (JHR) that connects from the contested capital of both Palestine and Israel, Jerusalem, through the Palestinian city of Bethlehem in the Occupied Palestinian West Bank, and south to the occupied Palestinian city of Hebron. The JHR serves its Israeli citizens in Jerusalem by resembling a multi-lane inner city traffic artery. Since 2005, the road ends for Israeli citizens at the entrance to Bethlehem city, where it is dissected by a checkpoint separating Bethlehemites from Jerusalem. The road then traverses Bethlehem city and eventually south to Hebron, now occupied by a settler minority.

Residents of the region remember a time when the road's traffic was not so bifurcated, when settlers and Israeli military vehicles too passed through Bethlehem, a time of division and occupation yet often remembered fondly as one of mixing and a less segregated past than the post-Oslo years have embodied.

Though the JHR has an obvious ancient past, this paper focuses on ethnographic engagement with its different users in the contemporary age. Ranging from parts of the two countries inaccessible to its differing citizens and occupied subjects, a journey along the full length of the JHR can only be undertaken by a non-citizen of either. This paper tells the stories of three road users; Israeli, Palestinian, and ethnographer, weaving these three narratives together to create one full ethnographic snapshot. An oral presentation of these narratives will be accompanied by background video footage of the road.

Paper short abstract:

This performance-paper narrates the experience of a street art walking tour in Belfast's Cathedral Quarter. It examines the ways in which layers of affective meaning accrue to urban streetscapes, and suggests that these artistic presentations of the city might be understood as 'post-post-conflict'.

Paper long abstract:

Belfast's 'Cathedral Quarter' is known for its heritage buildings, both standing and long-destroyed; its artistic denizens, past and present; and, in recent years, its vibrant, world-class street art. These temporary artistic works, created by both local and international artists, are layered visually on top of the neighbourhood's built environment, and symbolically on top of its living memories of violent conflict. Increasingly, these works are also presented in dialogue with, and often as a protest against, developer agendas for the area, which are seen as destroying the neighbourhood's unique local identity.

This paper examines this literal and figurative layering of meanings within the context of the Cathedral Quarter's popular 'street art walking tours'. Using performative practices of collage, it presents the voices, stories, and symbols that populate these tours, and in so doing examines the ways in which affective meanings accrue and are ascribed to places within urban streetscapes. It argues that pedestrian practices, such as walking tours, play a unique role in facilitating these affective encounters.

This paper argues, moreover, for a new understanding of contemporary constructions of Belfast's identity, which are well exemplified by the Cathedral Quarter. It suggests that these street art walking tours work to present Belfast as something other than a post-conflict city: as a place that has moved, or is attempting to move, beyond the category of 'post-conflict', into what I will argue might be helpfully described as the 'post-post-conflict'.

Paper short abstract:

In post-war Sukhum, Abkhazia, strolling along the Black Sea waterfront has come to hold symbolic and political value for the inhabitants of the city, being considered proof of their capacity to be able to reconstruct a normal everyday life, despite the country's unfavourable political status.

Paper long abstract:

For the inhabitants of Sukhum, Abkhazia, the Black Sea shore stands for a border with the wider world which does not recognize the country, bringing forth a sense of isolation and a constant awareness of the uncertainty of its future. The Sukhum waterfront consists of an eclectic mix of buildings still bearing signs of the war and of the post-war neglect standing next to recently opened shops and cafes affordable only for a minority of its strollers. However, strolling along the waterfront, while participating in gossiping and casual conversations, is considered a popular leisure activity undertaken by almost everybody, irrespective of social status, age and gender, and the quintessential sense of achievement of a normal everyday life in post-war Abkhazia.

By engaging in a leisure activity on the backdrop of the rich symbolism of the waterfront people that I worked with are engaged in attributing new political meanings to their everyday leisure practices: that despite being left out by the wider world or even by their own politicians, they have managed to enjoy their lives on their own terms. Focusing on leisure practices and the ordinary flow in the everyday is part of a continuous struggle to counter the internalized negative view through which Abkhazians/Sukhumians feel they are perceived by outsiders: as a dangerous place whose inhabitants are passive receivers of geopolitical events.

Paper short abstract:

The history of Craiova includes stories of ethnicities and old professions. The pictures and paintings of the time present the life of the main streets of Craiova, the cultural relations of the past and social practices. Today, new aesthetic valuations of the trade center are needed.

Paper long abstract:

The old history of Craiova includes stories from various ethnicities and old professions visible in the public space: Greek merchants, Jewish people, Macedonians, Serbs, Bulgarians, Romanians, shops, jewelry, silk, pharmacies, and restaurants. The pictures and paintings of those days present the life of the main streets of the city, the social-cultural relations of the past, social practices and symbolic representations of the past. Today, new aesthetic valorizations of the houses - historical monuments are necessary. In this context, an analysis of the current aesthetic discourse will be carried out.

The present study will have as its essential component the archiving of documents of oral history that highlight the narratives of urban public spaces, as well as an investigation of the social networks that promote the image of the old city and the current memories, conversations, answers among the citizens.

The study responds to the need to carry out contemporary research on the figurative representation of historic monuments in the communist and post-communist periods, following local, regional, national and international articulations, identifying the contemporary functionalities of the houses, the cultural importance of some the streets of the city, the aspects of identity that it has in the current period.

The unusual aspects of historic monument houses will be investigated as representing an identity nucleus, a new type of social cohesion. It will be analyzed the capacity of these material heritage elements to reveal collective socio-cultural and symbolical representations as well as the anthropological aspects of gazing to these restructured urban spaces.

Paper short abstract:

On the background of the emerging cosmopolitan street food scene of Bucharest, foodies' quests for novelty and authenticity restructure the city's foodscape by bringing peripheral venues and tastes to the fore.

Paper long abstract:

Considering the emerging cosmopolitan street food scene of Bucharest as context, I explore how foodies restructure Bucharest's urban foodscape as a result of their newly acquired taste for peripheral, popular foods such as 'mici', typically affordable, working class patties of grilled minced meat, sold particularly around open-air markets or bus terminals. The foodie quest to exercise flexible cultural competences has extended the universe of consumption venues towards the cultural and geographical periphery of Bucharest, providing a terrain for the public articulation of taste whilst subtly reshaping the city's geography, temporality and eating out practices. Through these actions, the foodie's position in Bucharest's urban foodscape can be assimilated to that of an urban flaneur: focused on the aesthetics of the city, on the sensorial experience, the gastro-flaneur experiences the city with a sense of detachment, as spectator of its many facets, as a means to acquire and perform culinary capital. The street food gastronomic experiences 'collected' acquire meaning as part of a system that joins the many registers of consumption. Through their consumption choices involving an engagement with street food, the gastro-flaneurs become actors involved in the politics of urban space by appropriating places and tastes. The paper is based on an ethnography of the street food venues of a now-iconic open-air market in a working class district, which has become, together with its 'mici' stalls, a destination for urban explorations and safaris.

Paper short abstract:

Drawing on my fieldwork, I will explore possible links between the increased obesity prevalence among the Mongolian population and the changing street food environment on Peace Avenue in Ulaanbaatar.

Paper long abstract:

Modernisation and the globalisation of the food supply have influenced the food consumption of people across the world (Ulijaszek, 2017), and advances in food processing have resulted in greater availability, affordability, and marketing of fulfilling and tempting processed food on the streets. Ice cream vendors often outnumber vendors that sell water bottles on Peace Avenue, the main thoroughfare in Ulaanbaatar during the summer. Street foods meet the growing demand for fast, convenient, and affordable processed food in Ulaanbaatar, where about half of the Mongolian population lives today. Despite the greater availability of processed, high-calorie foods, minimally processed, fresh and nutritious foods are often not available on the street. The prevalence of overweight and obesity in Mongolia has increased distinctly between 2005 and 2013 among all age groups (Chimeddamba et al., 2016), even though the relationship between the rapidly changing urban foodscapes and the increased rates of obesity in the country is not well recognised. Drawing on my fieldwork in Mongolia, I will explore possible links between the increased obesity prevalence among the Mongolian population and the changing street food environment on Peace Avenue in Ulaanbaatar.

Paper short abstract:

This paper argues that the dynamic of a street in relationship to a set of wheels that traverse it allows a peculiar understanding of not just the street but also of people as set apart in the way they perceive one another.

Paper long abstract:

A wooden bus made by hand, snakes its way down winding hills from the village to the city early in the morning and back by afternoon once all chores are done. These buses locally known as bazaar buses are "stinky" and "unsafe" and "crowded" for the people of the city while the people in the bus - all from the villages, tensely look out the window in anticipation to reach the city and buy their provisions which could vary from a match box to socks to tin sheets. Most often the driver and the conductor buy everything that people ask for. The people in the bus do not trust the city and the people of the city never ride the bus.

This paper in the form of a written paper and an image/text installation draws from more than a year's ethnographic research on these buses to comment on how does one research perception and how researching perception allows for an understanding of the street to emerge in terms of a distinct dynamic that sets apart a set of people emotionally while bringing them into a transactional exchange materially. This paper explores this peculiar affective cohesion and collision that gets played out when you think of a street through a distinct set of wheels that traverse it - the wheels of wooden bazaar buses in the hills of North-Eastern India.

Paper short abstract:

Patience, I tell myself yet again. Someone will eventually stop... they usually do, right? 'Cause this is a waiting game. A game in which to wait, where all the travellers trust fate. This is a waiting game. And I might be waiting long, but I won't be without song. No I'll not, be without song.

Paper long abstract:

As a social statement that applauds randomness and adventure, an activity which is effectively an instantiation of pure trusting, hitchhiking inverts the logic of succumbing to the cultures of fear, individualism and neoliberalism. It stands as a retro survivor to the counter-culture movements of the 1960s and 70s. As such a residue, it should carry on questioning the status quo, maintaining its critical, marginal, liminal edges by continuing to challenge social dogmas.

Anthropology is perhaps one of the better places from which to examine hitchhiking for a number of methodological and conceptual reasons. Indeed, this discipline has traditionally been concerned with societies and behaviours that are not just eccentric, but which are often heading towards extinction, or a radical transformation that effectively signifies the end of their authenticity as unique topics worthy of investigation for their own sake. If one of our tasks has been to rescue some cultural meaning from activities, events, peoples and practices that are disappearing, then it is certainly time for a concerted anthropology of hitchhiking to manifest itself in more than student projects. It is quite fascinating to note that there have been dozens of English language BA and MA dissertations on this practice and yet still few completed doctorates. Such a sustained project has consistently been shun by researchers, supervisors, institutions and funding bodies. The present paper provides some reasons as to why this has been the case.

Keywords: auto-stop/hitchhiking, waiting, auto-ethnography, placelessness.

Paper short abstract:

This paper highlights the linguistic and social practices of indigenous street market women in the Peruvian altiplano, who through their multilingual proficiencies build affective bonds and reinforce ethnolinguistic boundaries between clients, vendors, and fellow colleagues.

Paper long abstract:

Like most of the Andes, market life in the Peruvian altiplano has largely been the domain of urban-based indigenous women known as cholitas. Cholitas traditionally work as vendors of different types of goods, ranging from food items to clothes to contraband electronics. The market spaces that they occupy are open air street markets, where the presence of cholitas add to the visible and aural landscape of towns and small cities within the altiplano. This paper will focus specifically on the aural landscape that cholitas have created and occupy within Puno, the regional capital located at the heart of the Peruvian altiplano. In addition to presenting ethnographic data on the geographic distributions of cholita market activity throughout Puno and throughout the region as a whole, this paper will specifically focus on the multilingual proficiencies of the cholitas of the region, a characteristic unique to indigenous market region from Puno and the altiplano that differentiates them from other market women elsewhere in the Andes. Through an ethnographic analysis of the types of multilingual practices and interactions that these market women engage in, I will show how the strategic deployment of linguistic boundary crossing practices builds affective bonds between cholitas of different ethnolinguistic backgrounds and, simultaneously, reinforces the bonds of solidarity between market women of the same ethnolinguistic heritage.

Paper short abstract:

Two nurses reminiscing at the hospital. One's an anthropologist but that fades to background as the past becomes uncannily present. Place prompts stories, emotions welter up. But a technical hitch puts Hastings Donnan's theory to the text; are story and place as integrally bound as he asserts?

Paper long abstract:

Two nurses walking around the hospital grounds reminiscing. Public places where patients, visitors and staff mingle, and back streets which house the stores, sewing room and morgue. Stories gush forth as place taps into a welter of emotions, to a sense of belonging, and an identity that ceased formally long ago but which never left either of us. We laugh, empathise and learn about each other. One of us is an anthropologist but, somehow, that fades into the background as the past becomes uncannily present in this place and we both become nurses again. This storywalk is different, exciting, because this time I'm a storyteller too. What will that reveal when I listen to the sounds again? The delicious prospect of analysis as adventure. But wait… oh no! I didn't record the event. That sickening fieldwork dread that all is lost but I can't admit to my stupidity. According to Hastings Donnan story and place are integrally bound and you have to know about both to find your way around. So I put that to the test, recreate the storywalk on my own. Does this old building or that street sign evoke the same emotions, the same memories this time? I need to call on others to help; De Certeau, Casey and Basso on place. And that story about the Theatre Sister… which part of it was Geraldine's and which part was my imagination? Elizabeth Tonkin squares the circle through conceptual integration of the cognitive and emotional.

Paper short abstract:

This talk presents the project '12 Hours', visually exploring spatial and temporal movement in the streets of Prague. The project took the form of a twelve-hour investigation, a scripted walk that blurred categories of 'game', 'research', 'photographic documentation' and art'.

Paper long abstract:

On a hot summer day in July 2018, Maruška Svašek and Milah van Zuilen headed to Old Town Square in Prague and rolled a dice. It was 7am. The result, an uneven number, directed them to a street to the right, and for the next twelve-hours they took consecutive turns, walking left-right-left-right through the streets of the Czech capital. Prior to the walk, they had set themselves tasks to be performed in each street, thus blurring the categories of 'game', 'research', and 'photographic documentation'. So far, the resulting materials have led to one 'art' installation, an intervention in the Museum of Cultural History in Oslo. The presentation offers a textual and visual account of the project, asking the following questions: (1) How did the rules of the game create opportunities for ethnographic engagement? (2) What kind of knowledge, affects, and modes of creativity did the method produce? (3) At specific moments during the walk, how did concrete spatial and material settings afford specific interactions with the street environment, resulting in particular visual outcomes?