Paper short abstract:

Short Summary Through ethnographic data, press articles and accounts of Greek Catholic intellectuals, this ethnographic case study examines how a conflict, localized in a neighbouring country, can affect the peaceful coexistence of two confessional communities in two small Greek islands.

Paper long abstract:

Abstract

What makes the specificity of the Greek islands of Tinos and Syros, is the large community of Catholics (a quarter or a half of the local population, according to different estimations and point of view) who claim a Greek origin. Their coexistence with the Orthodox community has been peaceful, with only one period of crisis in the end of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th, during the period that the Greeks started the War of Independence against the Ottoman Empire. But during the Balkan wars in the 1990s and the conflict between Serbians and Croats, the crisis also affected the relations between these two confessional communities: violence was only verbal however, not physical. The Greek Catholic community was attacked in the media by a large segment of the Greek Orthodox majority. The cause for these (ecclesiastic as well as political) attacks was the supposed intervention of the Vatican in favour of the dismemberment of Yugoslavia. During this troubled period, the traditional "anti-Catholic syndrome" that characterizes some conservative and older segments of Greek society found opportunities to re-emerge. My aim is to present how a conflict, localized in a neighbouring country, can affect the peaceful coexistence of two confessional communities in two small islands. I will also analyze, through ethnographic data, press articles and accounts of Greek Catholic intellectuals, how members of these local communities managed to conciliate the opposite parties and to re-establish harmony inside the community.

Paper short abstract:

In this paper, I want to highlight the transformation from coexistence to the emergence of hatred and violence in three communities in Southern Thailand. In all three communities, Buddhists and Muslims live side by side in neighbouring villages for hundred of years.

Paper long abstract:

In numerous communities of Southern Thailand, peaceful coexistence was transformed into hatred and violence in only a couple of years of even months. The outbreak of hostility and violence requires answers to the relation of

Buddhists and Muslims in the respective localities and the factors of change. In this paper, I like to explain that the local cosmology and ritual system served as a encompassing value-idea in which Buddhism and Islam could be incorporated and localized. This value-idea enabled neighbourhood and exchanges between Buddhists and Muslims at different levels, most important

marriage. However, the intrusion of the Thai state, the military and police and the emergence of Malay insurgent groups changed the hierarchical

relationship between local and national/Global systems and brought exchange to a dead end. The state was involved in a systematic program of Thaiization in

which it was impossible to be Melayu. The Buddhist sangha began to replace local institutions with centralized Sangha institutions. On the other hand, Dawa missionary movements established a new presence and

visibility in the Muslim communities. Finally, young angry insurgents begin to kill Buddhists and Muslims who do not support their struggle. Competition of resources threatens the encompassing system of ancestor veneration, based on Buddhist-Muslim kinship systems. Comparing three case-studies, and distinguishing integration, mere coexistence and hostility, the paper examines the transformation from peace to violence and the willingness of villagers to defend social institutions inside the communities in the face of sweeping transformations from outside.

Paper short abstract:

This paper will examine the past and present relations between Greek Orthodox and Turkish Muslim communities with the local populations of their "original homelands" until and after 1923 (date of the exchange of population between Greece and Turkey).

Paper long abstract:

Greek and Turkish authorities agreed after the Greek Turkish war that the Greek-orthodox populations of Turkey and the Muslim populations of Greece have to be integrally exchanged between 1923 and 1925, with the only exceptions of the Greek-orthodox inhabitants of Istanbul and the Muslim residents of Western Thrace. Have the eligible populations, who were compelled to follow this decision, willingly accepted it? How did these communities experience the gradual transition from coexistence to defiance, or resentment and hatred in various cases, to a final complete rupture of their relationships?

The now-days reconciliation initiatives between the refugees of both countries have dramatically developed since the 1980's. A comparative approach of the reconciliation process undertaken by the descendants of refugees informs us retrospectively on the different ways the communities may have experienced the Greek-Turkish conflicts. For instance, the Greek-orthodox populations originating from Cappadocia, and more precisely from Gelveri (today Güzelyurt) have undertaken a wide range of ambitious initiatives with the local populations of their "hometown". As they have not directly experienced the horrors of war and as they could leave relatively quietly from Anatolia in 1924, the Greek-orthodox Cappadocians experienced the troubled period of the war rather differently from the Greek-orthodox populations located on the Aegean coasts of Anatolia. This specific situation led to a paradox: Muslim native populations of Gelveri, affected by the departure of their Christian counterparts, rejected for more than 50 years the Muslim exchanged populations from Greek Macedonia, who had been reinstalled in the deserted neighborhoods of Gelveri.

Paper short abstract:

The research focuses on the reconfiguration of the religious field in post-Soeharto Indonesia, where religious antagonisms have become more pronounced, more political, and more important as primary loci of social identification. I concentrate on the various strategies with which local people in Western Flores follow these trends and how they stage religious difference.

Paper long abstract:

The common characterization of the island of Flores as the Catholic enclave of Indonesia, ignores the minority of local Muslims and Muslim migrants who have been living peacefully with their Christian neighbours for a long time. Flores stands "on the margins of conflicts" and has not been affected by the vast eruption of so-called "religious" and "ethnic" violence, the country suffered after the fall of the President Soeharto in 1998. Presently, political discourse in the Indonesian public sphere is conducted on moral-religious terms, and the politics of decentralization causes the re-negotiation of political and religious authority on a local scale. Religious motivated violence is mediated through images, narratives and conspiracy theories, which are circulating through various, formal and informal, channels such as different media, religious movements, and networks of religious activists. The question I'm primarily concerned with is, how rural mixed Christian-Muslim societies in Western Flores are maintaining cohesive forces that are challenged by influences from outside. The situation is ambivalent: On the one hand, local Catholics and Muslims are bonded together closely through a system of kinship and marriage alliances as well as the shared adat, a complex system of cultural traditions. These bonds have averted and overcome religious differences. On the other hand, local people have started to stress their religious identification and thereby have given rise to a shift of hierarchy amongst collective identity references. These new dynamics of religious othering create a distance between the religious groups, and frequently result in mutual distrust, uncertainty, and fear.

Paper short abstract:

The paper presents several Mosque drawings the ethnographer collected in an attempt to visually define a site of fantasy. The questions arrising are the following: To what extent does this field method incorporate verbal arguments? What are the available theoretical tools anthropologists could use in order to make sense of visual data?

Paper long abstract:

This paper draws on an account of a highly mediated debate over the establishment of a Muslim complex in the Greek capital city. This was a governmental initiative which never materialized in fear of strong reactions such a project might trigger in the small suburban town of P where the mosque and its cultural center were supposed to be built. But was there really such a possibility? For some of the locals, a mosque in P would stand as a symbol of peaceful future coexistence and true European integration, while others thought of it as a possible shelter for terrorists and a painful reminiscent of Greece's Ottoman past. In an attempt to visually define the mosque as an uneasy site of fantasy at the level of ethnographic praxis, some of the informants are asked to draw one. This activity which mainly took place in bars, cafes and restaurants was generally considered bizarre, yet joyful enough enabling people to manifest their artistic dispositions. Nevertheless, for the ethnographer documenting the drawing process and its outcome, the material collected not only offers a semiology of illustrated arguments but also suggests that such a research method could well bring to the level of consciousness deep interconnections of romantic orientalism, nationalism, and male anatomy.

Paper short abstract:

The paper focuses on the definition and transformation of communal relations in the Kei Islands of Eastern Indonesia since the mid-19th century onwards. Late-colonial and recent attempts to contain violence and manage disputes are compared in order to outline the ontological and political constructs of insecurity which underlie government interventions and local agency during such events.

Paper long abstract:

The potential interpretations and consequences of social violence revolve around the question of its scale. In their attempts to maintain security, state machineries tend to focus on conflicts as local events and to project social order as an outcome of global values. The idea of security as something guaranteed by state order is constructed upon global images of insecurity and categories which define an encompassing mechanism for their control. The paper discusses the long-term effects of such categorizations on inter-group relations and government interventions in East Indonesia, beginning from effective colonization from the 1860's onwards. Whereas the political management of security has emphasized the boundaries of political communities and institutional domains, local security concerns tend to be focused on politically unpredictable events such as sorcery accusations, marriage disputes and conflicts over land rights and ritual prestige. The sense in which violence and mediation are framed as operating inside the community rather than in inter-group relations conjures up different images of insecurity and order than those used to rationalize police actions and state control. The interpretation of violent events in terms of different ontological perspectives raises the question of how, in what conditions, and at what scale, specific ontological concerns over security become politicized as broader ideological issues.

Paper short abstract:

Conflict and propaganda go together, but how does one approach propaganda analytically and ethnographically? This paper looks at those kinds of propganda that are based on forgery and mimicry, and suggest that they entail a lot of empathy.

Paper long abstract:

This paper is a dip into what might become an anthropology of propaganda. It looks at a special kind of instigation, namely the fake pamphlets and counterfeit letters that often appear in the context of communal violence. These pamphlets and letters provoke to violent attacks by revealing a hidden conspiracy or devilish machination of the part of 'the communal other', in the process constructing the symbolic contours of this other. Based on an analysis of a series of fake letters that appeared in the lead-up to violent conflict in Indonesia, I explore the dynamics of empathy and intimacy that are necessary for the production and validation of fake documents and letters during conflict, and suggest that these fakes reveal how empathy may be closely associated with the eruption of violence. This suggestion goes against received wisdom in accepted theories of violence, which holds that empathy and violence are opposed, even antithetical. It also points towards the possibility of exploring empathy ethnographically as a political and historical phenomenon.