Click the star to add/remove an item to/from your individual schedule.
You need to be logged in to avail of this functionality.
Log in
- Convenors:
-
João Leal
(Universidade Nova de Lisboa -Center for Research in Anthropology (CRIA))
Jean-Yves Durand (CRIA-UMinho)
Send message to Convenors
- Format:
- Workshops
- Location:
- 15
- Sessions:
- Wednesday 27 August, -, -
Time zone: Europe/Ljubljana
Short Abstract:
This workshop explores the possible interplays between current research in globalisation and the critical reassessment of some of the major categories of diffusionist theory, examining the ways in which its accomplishments and shortcomings are relevant for current agendas of anthropological debate.
Long Abstract:
Globalisation has become a major topic of contemporary anthropology. Such an interest has stimulated numerous researches about processes of restructuration and circulation of cultures around the globe, in which concepts such as hybridisation and creolisation have played an important part. The issues addressed by this growing body of literature are mostly viewed as new developments in anthropological research. Yet, it can be argued that this new interest in cultural globalisation is in some ways a return to an old topic of anthropological research: diffusion.
Having played an important role in the development of USA anthropology and European ethnology, diffusionism and its contributions to anthropological thought have been widely overlooked. The main objective of this panel is thus to critically re-assess diffusionism in the context of current anthropological researches on cultural globalisation. What can we learn from classical approaches of processes of cultural diffusion? What were their shortcomings and their accomplishments? How can we engage a critical dialogue with diffusionism? Which of its aspects can be useful today in order to study phenomena taking place on a reduced scale and which do not necessarily pertain to global dynamics?
These and other similar questions can be answered through a) critical analysis of the canonical texts of diffusionism and b) ethnographical case studies interested in a critical dialogue with the categories developed by diffusionist theory. In both cases, this panel is intended as a contribution to the ongoing calls for a critical dialogue between contemporary anthropology and the classical texts on culture.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Wednesday 27 August, 2008, -Paper short abstract:
Holy Ghost festivals have played an important role in communities of Azoren descent in North America and Brazil. This paper seeks to address the interplay between claims of Azorean authenticiy and processes of ritual differentiation in two different contexts: Santa Catarina (Brazil) and New England (USA).
Paper long abstract:
Holy Ghost festivals can be characterized as a travelling ritual, whose diffusion in Europe and the Americas was strongly connected to processes of globalization of cultural forms liked to Portuguese colonization and immigration. Having originated in 13th century continental Portugal they have reached the Azores in the 15th century and from both the Azores and continental Portugal they travelled to Brazil from the 16th century onwards. Later, between 1870 and 1930 and between 1960 and 1980 they were recreated by Azorean immigrants in the USA and Canada.
This paper uses evidence related to Holy Ghost festivals in Santa Catarina (southern Brazil) and the USA, where the origin of the festivals is linked to Azorean immigration, in order to discuss the possibility of reconstituting the mechanisms of ritual differentiation of the festivals. The paper begins by pointing out the importance of narratives of Azorean descent of the festivals in both contexts, and the role played in these narratives by an ideology of sponteaneous diffusionism. Contrasting these narratives with available historical and ethnographical data, I critically explore the possibility of building a more complex assessment of the processes of historical differentiation of the festivals in both contexts, in which contemporary discussions on cultural globalization can critically dialogue with some of the concepts developed by diffusionist theorists.
Paper short abstract:
All year round, the Helsinki samba school lumps together Finnish people for the city carnival. While a small minority of Brazilian people takes part in this collective experience, the Rio de Janeiro Carnival and samba enredo patterns fulfill local needs of sociability and cultural expression.
Paper long abstract:
With the development of the world music market, few new musical practices inspired by foreign and distant traditions appeared massively in Europe since the 1980s. Our study is in continuity of a thesis research about batucadas, blocos, or " samba schools ", groups of musicians and dancers fascinated by afro-Brazilian "cultures", groups in whom the Brazilian community is very minority. This European batucadas establish, according to us, a new object for the anthropology which questions interfaces between musics, territories and cultural identities. With in common the borrowing of Brazilian musics, these collective initiatives use methods of reproduction, imitation, even a kind of orthodoxy, and sometimes take the shape of hybrid objects by the appropriation and the indigenisation of these musics with others. The diffusion of Brazilian musical patterns in Europe, with an imitative practice, indeed allows the birth of new local "styles", expressing the "amateurs"'s capacities of adaptation and innovation. This communication suggests studying the case of a samba school in Helsinki during its preparation for the "carnival" of the city, which is also a competition between all Finnish samba schools. This contemporary and European example will allow us to clarify the possible forms of appropriation and hybridization in the practices and the representations of the Brazilian cultures in Finland. So, we shall try to contribute to an update of the classic theories which underestimated the part of innovation and creativity in the processes of diffusion.
Paper short abstract:
The presentation evaluates Export Processing Zones, one of the most widespread forms of late capitalist economic policies in the global South, as a testing ground for a comparative evaluation of theories of diffusion, imperialism and globalism.
Paper long abstract:
The world's first Export Processing Zone, founded in Puerto Rico in 1947, triggered the dominant model for southern countries export-led development and industrialisation. For 2007 the International Labour Organisation listed more than 3500 EPZs or EPZ like zones worldwide employing more than 60 million workers. Whereas in the 1970s, when EPZs were comparatively analysed in Fröbels theory of the New International Division of Labour, their number, the amount of employment and therefore the impact of these zones on the capitalist world economy was still limited, today their impact is much more substantial. At the same time, zones in Taiwan, Ireland and other places exist for more than thirty years and thus, particular zones have particular histories.
The paper analyses EPZs as a global institution central to the project of modernisation. Applying theories of diffusion, imperialism and globalisation to the histories of zones in Mauritius, Mexico, and China, it is suggested that EPZs offer an entry point for an archaeology of 20th century global capitalism. Secondly, as investors, workers, ideas and imaginations of relations of production have moved between the zones and institutions such as the World Export Processing Zones Association have been actively engaged in spreading information and technologies, a picture emerges that validates the concept of informal imperialism as a form of diffusion of innovation beyond cultural centres but within a system of unequal distribution of power in the capitalist world economy.
Paper short abstract:
Globalisation became an ubiquitous topic in anthropology though detailed studies of diffusion processes are rare. At the example of the dissemination of associations in the Cross River region this paper investigates some of the assumptions of diffusionism, diffusion theory and globalisation studies.
Paper long abstract:
The global diffusion of commodities, ideas, techniques, or institutions are the concern of both diffusionism and globalisation studies. Both approaches also have in common that they rarely studied actual processes of diffusion and the people involved in them. They rather used the topic to illustrate related ideas and concerns. Since issues of globalisation are often overshadowed by relations of dominance, it will be beneficial to examine processes of diffusion with the help of a case study at a side venue of the global. In the Cross River region of Southwest Cameroon and Southeast Nigeria, men's and women's associations have been disseminated in the context of the emergence of the trans-Atlantic trade in the seventeenth century. Associations have not originated at one place or by one author but are unique improvements which combine ancient and new (at times global) cultural elements. The village elites acquired them by purchasing the rights in intellectual property and performance. Less imporant associations have also diffused by imitation. Their adoption across large parts of the region has created translocal, transethnic and translingual networks but each village has adapted new associations according to its own preferences. Thus, the process did not lead to a homogenization of Cross River cultures, much in the same way as the studies of the appropriation of global goods have proclaimed. The diffusion of associations in the Cross River region will serve as the point of departure for discussing some of the assumptions of diffusionism, diffusion theory and globalisation studies.
Paper short abstract:
This paper considers the different approaches taken by the Russian Orthodox Church and secular NGOs to the HIV/AIDS crisis in Russia. In particular it focuses on the transnational aspect of the moral discourses that underlie these approaches from the perspective of diffusionism.
Paper long abstract:
Russia now has one of the fastest growing HIV rates in the world. While NGOs have been active in the country since the mid-1990s, other institutions, such as the Russian government and the Russian Orthodox Church, are just now beginning to actively respond to the growing crisis. One reason why these institutions have begun to do so is that HIV infections are beginning to spread to the general working population and women, thus adding a significant threat to the already worrying "demographic crisis."
This paper considers the different approaches taken by the Russian Orthodox Church and secular NGOs to the HIV/AIDS crisis in Russia. In particular it focuses on the transnational aspect of the moral discourses that underlie these approaches from the perspective of diffusionism. In considering the way in which the concept of human rights is utilized by each of these institutions, I will explicate the transnational influences of HIV prevention in Russia and how these influences are co-opted and integrated into Russian and Orthodox Christian understandings of the moral person. Additionally, because the majority of the funding received by these institutions comes from international funding agencies and other non-Russian sources, I will pay particular attention to how the moral discourse and practices of these institutions shift as does the source of their funding. This paper, then, is an attempt to explicate from a diffusionist perspective the transnational flow of morality as it finds expression in NGO and Russian Orthodox HIV prevention programs in St. Petersburg.