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- Convenors:
-
Victoria Goddard
(Goldsmiths, University of London)
Susana Narotzky (Universitat de Barcelona)
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- Discussant:
-
Frances Pine
(Goldsmiths College, University of London)
- Format:
- Workshops
- Location:
- R1A
- Sessions:
- Wednesday 27 August, -, -, -
Time zone: Europe/Ljubljana
Short Abstract:
The panel focuses on different ways in which political action, protest and commemoration form and are informed by urban public spaces, and how the witnessing of past and present events creates particular kinds of engagement, understanding and indeed historicity.
Long Abstract:
This panel is an exploration of ways in which action, sentiment and discourse shape and are shaped by urban public spaces. The discussion will address the relationships between emotions and action, focusing in particular on activities such as political protest and the creation or production of monuments and their elaboration thorough acts of commemoration. What is the effect of public action on urban space and how does urban space condition/inform public action? Do cities or urban spaces provide particular kinds of 'spaces of communication'? How is public space regulated during different governmental regimes (fascism, Stalinism, neoliberalism etc)?
Recent anthropological and historical research has emphasised the significance of the 'witness' to history. What different kinds of witness emerge in the wake of brutal or repressive acts, at times of revolution, or during periods of reconciliation? In other words, how does the witnessing of history (in the sense of both time and space) form, and reform, the present with reference to the past? In the current era of what often seems to be almost compulsive or mandatory witnessing to incredibly well documented events, how are some acts and spaces in the public sphere given salience while others are silenced or ignored.
We invite papers from anthropologists and others working on political protest, commemoration and/or the public sphere. We are particularly interested in the ethnography of urban places, but we recognise the impossibility of considering the urban to be an isolated place and therefore will welcome studies from a wider perspective.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Wednesday 27 August, 2008, -Paper short abstract:
Youth groups in Abidjan (Côte d'Ivoire) have been repositioning themselves in society by reshaping public and semi-public sites. This paper asks whether these can best be seen as constituting a 'transitional public sphere' or as leading to novel socialities through enclavation or rescaling.
Paper long abstract:
Throughout the low intensity civil war which started in 2002, a rhetoric of youth affirmation and nationalist 'patriotic' defiance has invaded the Ivorian public sphere at least in urban centres such as Abidjan. The immensely popular people's parliaments are the most conspicuous sites where this rhetoric is flourishing. These self-styled 'spaces of free expression' partly replace and/or extend the conventional democratic infrastructure of political parties, national parliament, as well as the media. As such they constitute operational bases for gaining access to the regular civil and political society. In most of the current literature on this subject, people's parliaments are seen as part of a 'transitional public sphere' (Shukra) that connects subaltern and mainstream forms of activism.
This paper explores in what sense an approach in terms of 'spaces of transition' also applies to other newly emerging heterotopias in the Abidjanais public sphere. The ongoing conflict has seen patriotic youth groups of different sorts — ranging from cultural associations to armed militias — also occupying and transforming other public and semi-public sites such as hotels and cafés, schools, and even army camps. This paper tries to grasp what has been happening in these spaces by looking at how some of these youth organisations have given shape to them. While being based on ethnographic research in Abidjan since 2003, this paper analytically ties in with current research on (a) public sphere and civil society after the spatial turn and (b) non-state forms of governance and governmentality.
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores the construction of Romanian public sphere after the break of communism. It aims at analyzing the ways in which the symbolic use of urban space and the appropriation of public squares did play a significant role in the emergence of a common political and social intentionality of the people.
Paper long abstract:
One of the particularities of Romanian communism was that in the appropriation of communist ideology, Ceausescu's totalitarian regime made use of a major deformation of the public-private split for ideological purpuses, i.e., for the proliferation of its power. Therefore, a lack of a coherent theoretical and practical approach of the public-private split is noticeable (and, in a certain way, explainable) in Romania even after 1989.
At any rate, the lack of a public sphere could explain people's need to symbolically takeover of real public squares during the 1989 Romanian Revolution and afterwards. At the beginning of the 90s, the routes traversed by the masses during the Romanian Revolution in December 1989 have gained a symbolic role and have been ritually iterated, more or less spontaneously, but regularly, by the protestant masses.
These public spaces and squares play the role of an agora, of an open, real, public space, claiming no conditions for attending and participating to the public sphere.
By bringing into discussion two case studies, one regarding the use of public square in seeking official recognition and in recreating religious identity in the Transylvanian city of Cluj starting with 1990, and the other regarding the Romanian political opposition's symbolic use of space in Piata Universitătii in June 1990, the purpose of this paper is to analyze the role of urban public squares in generating discourses, redefining social interaction (Sam Beck) and for the formation of organic, natural and visible Romanian civil society after the fall of communist regime in 1989.
Paper short abstract:
This paper will analyze the way women over 60 years old talk about their childhood to women could be their granddaughters. The paper will look at the temporality of the narratives to show their "errant" granddaughters what it really means to be a daughter of the republic.
Paper long abstract:
The issue of the role of emotions in constructing national identity will be discussed in this paper through a study of the life stories of twenty women who at the time of the interview were about sixty years old. Drawing on these interviews, I shall concentrate on the issue of temporality and show how a binary time structure, then and now, serves to differentiate between authentic sentiments and false ones. I shall argue that it is usually through such simple temporal structures that sentiment can become public and therefore part of the process of politics.
Paper short abstract:
This paper will focus on the commemoration parades (i.e. the Orange parades) in the city of Belfast and their visual and symbolic displays, which are present in the entire spectrum of public space, and which contribute to the symbolic construction of the Protestant community. Accordingly, I will show how their ‘claim of tradition’ regarding the parading culture was justified by political approval and by police violence strategies, which enabled them a multilayered usage of public urban space and how this fact contributes to reassertion of their position and of their power of one community over another.
Paper long abstract:
The Orange parade in Northern Ireland is a public holiday. The Orange Institution organizes this event in order to celebrate the battle of Boyne in 1690. The city of Belfast has had an interesting history of these parades, which have been determined by specific roads and streets and by specific visual material displays along the entire route. Belfast was for the Protestant community a place of imagination, which could only ever really be realized in the act of movement (de Certeau 1984). Commemorating such an event is of extreme importance to Protestant community, as it derives from the desire for orientation in time, for integrating oneself in one's past by appropriating that past and by confirming one's identity by way of one's group identity (Frijda 1997).
My paper will examine the contemporary situation of Belfast parades and will show upon the connection between ritual changes and the uses of urban space. Namely, after a period of economic prosperity, Catholic community dispersed and moved into areas of former Protestant settlement. This contributed to several issues, because the 'traditional' route of the parade, which has remained a means of asserting collective identities and claiming political dominance over territory, was contested as being a symbolic violent act to express domination over Catholic community. Their demand for re-routing the parades applied to entire parading manifestation culture. For example even the kerbstones, lamp posts and road signs are painted in the same Union colours that serve as a constant reminder of which part town one is in (Bryan 2000).
Paper short abstract:
This paper deals with sexual diversity and the use of space and how political action, protest and commemoration form, and are informed by, the urban public spaces. The starting points of our analysis are the territorialization and articulation of the gay scene in urban settings and the dynamics in the use of space to commemorate Gay Pride.
Paper long abstract:
Parting from the analysis of the Gay Pride Parades in Spain and the analysis of the relationship between territorialization, identities and political activism, we will analyse the mechanisms used for entitlement and how the public space has been resignified by sexual dissidents as a space for vindication and visibilization.
The use of the public space for entitlement and commemoration has only been possible in Spain after the restoration of democracy. We consider that the Gay Pride Parade, and other uses of the space related to sexual diversity, can be read, not only as an occupation of the street in order to celebrate entitlement and commemoration, but also as an affirmation of distinctive identities. Such commemorative venues constitute a privileged field for the analysis of the mechanisms through which sexual dissidents express the social and subjective identities by means of the re-presentation of an embodied public act. These identities are intertwined with discourses and counterdiscourses of sexual diversity which defend assimilationist / revolutionary positions. Such discourses and counterdiscourses can be traced through the strategies of re-presentation /absence from the event.
The most important Gay Parade in Spain takes place in Madrid around the 28th June to commemorate the Stonewall Riots in New York (1969), which gave rise to modern gay activism. With the years and the different political contexts, the march has changed in structure and itinerary, eventually occupying more central parts of the city. That is why we think public space can be important to understand how sexual diversities are managed and negotiated.
Paper short abstract:
My paper focuses on a peripheral city, Gliwice (Poland). I investigate remembrance initiatives that relate to the German-Polish-Soviet past. I trace how the reclaiming of the commemorative space for the local – multilayered and multiethnic – war memories has altered the urban landscape in Gliwice in the last decade and what kind of functions have been assigned by the municipal authorities to the newly created/relegated/destroyed memory space during the democratic and economic transformations experienced by the city and the region.
Paper long abstract:
This paper aims to explore the role of the self-governing and recently revived East European municipality in composing narratives of historical past and in reconfiguring the urban memory landscape. The post-1989 municipal commemorative practices primarily focused on dissociation from those imposed by the communist regimes' scheme of history and on the representation of the national historical narratives of the newly liberated nation-states. This re-composing of the past was achieved by the renaming of public space, by the removal and production of monuments and by revising the list of collectively commemorated anniversaries. However, the focus of the commemorative practices has increasingly been shifting and the specificity of the urban landscape, the distinctive population make-up and the mass memory of the inhabitants of the municipality has become central to cities' remembering. This paper explores this important shift in East European public remembering.
My case study focuses on a peripheral city, Gliwice, located in Upper Silesia, the historical western borderland of Poland. My investigations concentrate on the local remembrance initiatives that relate to the German-Polish-Soviet past and, more specifically, to the wartime conduct of the Red Army soldiers. I trace how the reclaiming of the commemorative space for the local - multilayered and multiethnic - war memories has altered the urban landscape in Gliwice in the last decade and what kind of functions have been assigned by the municipal authorities to the newly created/relegated/destroyed memory space during the democratic and economic transformations experienced by the city and the region.
Paper short abstract:
This paper focuses on the post-socialist politics of commemoration performed in the ethnically mixed town of Nové Zámky in Slovakia. I examine the impact of democratisation on the practice of monument-building.
Paper long abstract:
In this paper I aim to look into the mechanisms of post-socialist monument-building policy in the town of Nové Zámky in South-Western Slovakia. In the book The Political Lives of Dead Bodies Katherine Verdery (1999) argues that political changes induce manipulations with statues and corpses of famous persons. She pointed to the intensity of these processes after the collapse of communism in East-Central Europe and explained them through the acute need to replace the symbols of the old regime.
Within the recent 20 years, the inhabitants of the territory of present-day Slovakia experienced double political change: the collapse of the communist regime in 1989, and the split-up of Czechoslovakia in 1993. After 1989 the public spaces of Nové Zámky has been exposed to extensive monument-manipulations. Nonetheless, the still ongoing monument-building obscures the connection of this practice with the political changes occurring nearly two decades ago. The prevalence of installations over removals does not fit the simple logic of the strong wish to eliminate unwanted symbols either. In my paper, I explain the post-socialist monument-building policy in Nové Zámky as a result of two driving forces: (1) the efforts of the local political authorities to compensate the lost historical appearance of the city - enabled by the democratisation of decision-making procedures; (2) the struggles over classificatory schemes, induced by the re-emergence of inter-ethnic competition between Slovak and Hungarian inhabitants.
Paper short abstract:
The image of Valentin Vodnik (1758-1819) as 'the first Slovenian poet' played an important role during the process of Slovenian 'national awakening' that took place after 1848. In this process', the celebration of the centeniary of his birth in 1858 and especially the unveiling of his monument were the milestones of great importance.
Paper long abstract:
Each generation it its own way weighs up and measures the past according to contemporary outlooks, in order to give shape to the future. This is why, the views of the past, and of the future, are contantly changing, being from generation to generation rectified, supplemented and adjusted. It is, therefore, inevitable that the roles played by certain icons take on ever new characteristics. Thus, over the past two centuries, the image of Valentin Vodnik has also undergone radical changes. With the changing political circumstances, not just his public image but also the interpretations of his poetical writings were altering.