Paper short abstract:

For most of the Venetian Jews the ghetto is not a place to live but a place where one returns. They claim the sens of belonging to the ancient enclave by reactivating the past and by persistant practices in the emblematic urban space of the ghetto.

Paper long abstract:

The presentation aims at demonstrating how the different actors appropriate the Venice Ghetto by making contrasted or dissonant usages of the space and of the place's past to claim their belonging to the place through discursive or material resources. Starting in the 1990s, a new Jewish Hassidic community coming from the United States established itself in the Venice ghetto, an ancient institutionnalized encalve created in 1516. This event marks a rupture with the ghetto of "before" in the sense that it brings to the foreground a questioning about the usage of the ghetto in the present, and the relationships between "established" and "newly arrived" in a same place. Because of the significant difference linked to the two jewish communities conditions and mode of implantation in the ghetto which entail very diverse temporalities and historical moments, these two groups do not entertain the same relationship to this space in the present and to its dense historical past.

The feeling of belonging that the established Jews have with the ghetto is not defined by their residential implantation in the place but by the permanent reactivation and affirmation of their genealogical link to this space. .

If the modes of appropriation of the ghetto space are thus very varied, the collective practices like an old one locally called the "last trip of the deceased," which takes place when a Venetian Jewish community member disappears enable the local community members to mark their ghetto belonging and to allow their visibility to persist within the public space.

Paper short abstract:

This research seeks to expose and analyze everday practices -widely known, but increasingly less common- that allow us to extend the lifespan of domestic objects. Especial attention is given to practices of resignification, such as maintenance, protection, repair, reuse and storage.

Paper long abstract:

While the literature is clear in warning about the prevalence of disposable goods and the shortening lifespan of those things we consume, less attention has been given to those things that remain and defy wear and programmed obsolescence. These are objects of diverse value, whose owners, moved by different motivations, manage to keep them for a longer period of time. Home appliances, ornaments, furniture, clothing, tableware, cooking utensils, plants, cleaning supplies, etc., can vary considerably in their time of permanence at home depending on who is responsible or takes care of them.

Through an ethnographic work in several homes in Santiago, Chile, this research seeks to expose and analyze several practices -widely known, but increasingly less common- that allow us to extend the life of everyday objects. Especial attention is given to everyday domestic practices of maintenance, protection, repair, reuse, storage and ownership change; which contribute to the permanence of objects at home through their resignification. Additionally, this research aims to discuss on the motivations that lead to the investment of time and other resources in objects.

Paper short abstract:

This paper considers what has remained in the aftermath of the 2008 Icelandic banking collapse and subsequent government collapse. The paper demonstrates how these events are remembered and analyses protest slogans to map the assemblages that have cohered around economic and political instability.

Paper long abstract:

This paper considers what stays and remains in the aftermath of economic and government collapse. Drawing on recent ethnographic research in Reykjavík, Iceland I explore the ways the 2008 Icelandic banking collapse and subsequent government collapse have been understood and remembered by individuals over the last decade. By enquiring into the lived experience of these events, I outline the factors that have come to influence individual Icelander's understanding of their contemporary social world and highlight larger public and social themes that continue to linger and re-emerge today (Boylorn 2012). This includes feelings among the public of an 'impending crisis' on account of perceived government instability and, more recently, concern over the sustainability of the current tourism boom. Turning then to reflect on the proliferation of public protest in Iceland over the last decade, I show how common slogans are persistently used by Icelanders living in the capital to censure the behaviour of the political and decision-making class. In doing so, I map out the assemblages that continue to cohere around the collapse of Iceland's economy and government (Latour 2005) and question why particular types of discourse persist in Icelandic protest culture today.

Paper short abstract:

I will show through ethnographic examples from Moldova and Romania how in contexts of rapid and radical change elements of permanence are invisible to the external and often also the internal observer or could be obscured on purpose, when an ideology of change is accompanying the transformations.

Paper long abstract:

Thirty years ago Johannes Fabian reproached anthropology its focus on societal permanences (traditions, social structures, values), which were leaving the Other out of time (1983). Anthropology has moved forward since and the focus on complex societies and on the globalisation process in general prompted its attention to change, mobility and the unsettledness and anxiety that accompany them. This is all the more so as in contexts of rapid and radical change elements of permanence are invisible to the external and often also the internal observer or could be obscured on purpose, when an ideology of change is accompanying the transformations. It is very much the spirit of the postsocialist period, where the debate between change and continuity with the socialist period has taken on open political forms. Despite that, my fieldwork in rural areas of the post-Soviet Republic of Moldova and of post-socialist Romania, conducted in a context of great out-migration and rapid social change, has revealed some social elements to which communities cling in order to continue to exist. In this paper, I will show through ethnographic examples from two villages: 1) how people refocus on customs and traditions and reinvent their centrality in order to ensure the continuity of their community; 2) how in periods of turmoil and change of values, they privilege community cohesion over moral judgments, truth or judgments of justice; 3) how they adopt indirect strategies to value permanence when at the level of the whole society change is considered the utmost value.

Paper short abstract:

Through ethnographic description and theoretical reflexion, this paper will explore the permanence of Scripture through transmission among newly converts to Judaism in conflictual, subaltern and inter-faith context in the margins of India.

Paper long abstract:

Through thick description of an ethnographic case, this paper will provide new insights to think the permanence of the Scripture through religious conversion in conflictual, subaltern and inter-faith contexts.

The Bnei Menashe Community of Mizoram (Christian State in North-East India) were born in the 80's, its members were all Christian who underwent informal religious conversion and considered themselves descendants of the Menashe Tribe. The community got in the rye of a messianic Israeli organization (Shavei Israel) searching for Lost Tribes to be brought back to Israel.

Bibles constitute structural components to these social dynamics and to the consequential reshaping of the ethnic and religious landscapes of Mizoram and Israel.

In this context not only are Bibles tools (instrumentalist approach) but it can also be considered as actant (Latour), producing in its historicity social effects on individuals and religious communities. Implications of this argument are twofold : non humans can have agency, weight and intensity in interactions flow (1); by inscribing Religious texts in their hermeneutical historicity (Gadamer 1965), the history of transmission and its effects can be traced (a); the original reference is maintained beyond contexts and times highlighting the causal relation between a context and a fundamental Biblical text (b); a social situation is not to be understood by causal factors only but also by the verticality of transmission, a process of permanence (c).

I will explain this argument, its theoretical and empirical consequences with the concept of dialectic of tradition as developed by Georg-Hans Gadamer.

Paper short abstract:

I investigate rice fields in Chinese rural-urban migration. Focusing on this permanent resource and the related embodied skills, which migrants conserve as 'tactile memory' and which connect them with their left-behind family members, sheds light on migration patterns and migrant-home relationships.

Paper long abstract:

This paper speaks to the field of 'materialities of migration' from a skill perspective through the example a particular resource which stays behind in Chinese rural-urban migration: paddy fields and related knowledge and skills. Chinese rice farmers are confronted with a particular predicament: the pressure to migrate to the cities, and the simultaneous need to continuously cultivate their paddy fields in order to preserve them as a safety net resource. I argue that looking at this permanent material resource and related skills tells us a great deal about farmers' decision making, migration patterns and migrant-home relationships.

I show that in order to preserve their fields despite the lacking the skilled labour that has migrated, staying and migrating farmers draw on a whole repertoire of knowledge, which comprises not only new technologies such as mechanisation, but notably also older techniques that have survived transgenerationally, despite never having been practiced by current farmers.

Drawing on Lave and Wenger's 'community of practice' (1991), I propose to rethink Basu and Coleman's 'migrant worlds' (2008) as a 'community of practice worlds' that comprises both the people who migrate and those who stay. In the quest of preserving their fields, they stay connected through their farming skills which continue to reside in peoples' bodies as 'tactile memory' (Harries 2017) even after they have migrated.

Paper short abstract:

The irrigation infrastructure of Sri Lanka stands as an enduring material permanence that connects and grounds an ontological configuration which has continued to persist through time. This infrastructure offers up an poignant ethnographic lens to interrogate the multivariate notions of permanency.

Paper long abstract:

Irrigation infrastructure has long been a potent material symbol. Beyond irrigation infrastructure's ability to store and distribute water, its symbolic potential and its enduring materiality offers up a poignant ethnographic vantage point for exploring 'what stays'. In Sri Lanka such infrastructure continues to endure, symbolising a way of living. For the majority Sinhala-Buddhist ethno-religious group the irrigation system connects three culturally central metaphors: the water tank (wewa), the temple (dagoba) and the rice paddy (yaya). The convergence of these metaphors, articulated by the most humble farmer, is generative of a specific and reified ontology. Acting as the nexus and material grounding for this ontological configuration, the irrigation infrastructure of Polonnaruwa district of Sri Lanka offers up an anthropological lens for exploring an impulse toward permanency in spite of change. One such change, the collapse of the first two pre-modern hydraulic polities in the early medieval period is seen by many modern Sinhalese as initiating an atrophy of the ontological configuration central to their identity. Seeking to revive the infrastructure and this ontological configuration, the Sri Lankan government, newly independent from colonial administration, initiated resettlement projects and irrigation repair which saw swathes of Sinhalese migrate to the sparsely populated North-Central Province. This return prompted other major irrigation and dam projects still being completed to this day. Against the volatility and flux of history, irrigation infrastructure provides a permanent mooring for ways of thinking and being and allows for an exploration of the deeper question of 'what stays?'

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores what happened when one family of musicians decided to remain in Pakistan when others were leaving and why, in the face of significant negative consequences, that decision has been repeated by each subsequent generation.

Paper long abstract:

In the years immediately following the Partition of the Indian subcontinent, many musicians chose to migrate from Pakistan to India for reasons neither political or religious. Faced with significant disruptions to classical traditions in the newly separate Pakistan, members of the gharana from which originated the so-called Balochi banjo chose, and continue to choose, to remain in the new nation. While migration between the two countries remained comparatively easy into the mid-1950s, as mobility between the countries was increasingly restricted in subsequent years, each new generation's reaffirmation to stay laid another brick in the road to the seemingly inevitable demise of the classical banjo, a distinct tradition barely a century old. Offering a preliminary account of this singular gharana, this paper explores the tensions and consequences that have followed the initial decision to remain in Pakistan and examines each subsequent generation's decision to stay in the face of increasing obscurity. Using techniques drawn from auto-ethnographic practice, the author will also discuss the role in which he has been (unwillingly) cast by his interlocutors in order to examine the contradictions inherent in contemporary ethnographic practice, the relationship between ethnographer and ethnographic subject, and the meaning of continuity in the face of change.

Paper short abstract:

Adopted people and donor offspring without access to information about their genetic origins and who speak of their lifelong in-beweenness, highlight the permanence of beliefs and ways of thinking about parenthood that remain in laws and practices alongside otherwise fluid contemporary kinship.

Paper long abstract:

This paper is based on practice as an adoption counsellor and on fieldwork as a social anthropologist which has explored aspects of anonymous semen donation as it was practised in the UK for over seventy years. During the time of the fieldwork the law on human reproduction was changed, but without retrospective effect, so that identifying information about semen, egg and embryo donors could be provided to their adult donor offspring. It appeared at first as a shifting ethnographic field, but the changes were of a particular kind and the resistance and ambivalence of the medical profession towards them were indicative of continuity and of enduring beliefs, particularly in respect of what is meant by 'father'.

The need to maintain closed adoption and donor records is based not on empirical evidence, but on deeply held ideas about kinship. Support for secrecy is based on beliefs about how kinship should be, on confidence that parent-child relationships will not be harmed by deceit, and that it is possible and correct to keep secrets from children even into adulthood. However for many adopted and donor-conceived people, the secrecy or lack of information is a cause of permanent liminality, feelings of belonging wholly to neither their social/nurturing nor their genetic kin.

Paper short abstract:

The paper will focus on permanent values that shape economic decisions of Syrian refugee families in Istanbul throughout their migration processes despite the new material opportunities and moral frameworks of the international labor market in the new locality.

Paper long abstract:

"Starting from zero" (in Arabic: ballash min al sifir) was a common phrase among Syrian refugees in Istanbul, mostly referring to their loss of status, property, job, and social networks and having to start everything all over again. Adapting their economic practices to the changing conditions in this time of crisis, economic practices of these families are dependent on material opportunities, moral frameworks of the market, and their personal interests (Narotzky & Besnier 2014). Yet amidst these changes, some of their habits and values rooted back in Syria also determine their decisions. Depending on the families' class backgrounds, household demography, or the members' commitment to traditional gender values in the family, the permanent values they brought with them shaped the economic decisions of the families as much as the new context they encounter. The families hold, either collectively or individually, differing regimes of values, for example, when it comes to deciding whether young female family members would continue to study in the Turkish education system. They calculate various regimes of value throughout their migration process: their traditional one, where they expect women would get married at their early ages; and that of their migration place, where women are expected to earn money for the family. Drawing on a yearlong ethnographic fieldwork conducted in 2016-2017 with Syrian refugee families in a neighborhood of Istanbul, the paper's focus on the permanence of values is an opportunity to contribute to debates on the reproduction of values even in times of crisis.