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- Convenors:
-
Karel Šima
(Charles University in Prague)
Petr Gibas (Institute of Sociology of the Czech Academy of Sciences)
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- Formats:
- Panels
- Sessions:
- Thursday 23 July, -, -
Time zone: Europe/Lisbon
Short Abstract:
The panel focuses comparatively on the material culture of Do-It-Yourself (DIY) and what it can tell us about the changes societies in Europe has been undergoing since the 1980s characterised by the beginnings of profound transformations to both state socialism and capitalism.
Long Abstract:
The panel focuses on the material culture of Do-It-Yourself (DIY) and what it can tell us about the changes societies in Europe has been undergoing since the 1980s characterised by the beginnings of profound transformations to both state socialism and capitalism the outcomes of which reverberate at present. Although DIY has been studied from various viewpoints, anthropological concern with material culture as a prism to understand both everyday experience and societal transformation represent an approach not fully exploited with respect to DIY. The panel seeks contributions that concentrate on the materiality of DIY and follow the things created, altered and used in DIY activities, explore practices and emotions in which they are immersed, and use these in order to generate novel understanding of the profound changes and transformations of contemporary societies. We understand DIY as encompassing complex self-led manual projects as well as minor work and repairs which are carried out in one´s free time, but which comprise also extended networks of people, eg. families, groups of neighbours, hobbyists or activists. We want to ask how these relations enter material ecologies of things and how they shape politics of private, semi-public and public space. On this ground, we want to explore and compare the divides between the East and the West shaped by the legacies of the Iron Curtain as well as the divides between the North and the South informed by the last economic crisis and ensuing austerity policies.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Thursday 23 July, 2020, -Paper short abstract:
I would like to use Janos Kornai's term "shortage economy" to analyze institutional strategies and DIY practices dealing with reproduction of sound. I will focus on the routines of the sound engineers in the Polish Radio, as well as on the vernacular DIY practices of the subcultures members.
Paper long abstract:
In my paper I would like to use Janos Kornai's term "shortage economy" (concerning the centrally-planned economies of the communist states of the Eastern Bloc) to analyze institutional strategies and DIY practices of everyday life dealing with recording and reproduction of sound. My analysis will focus on the routines of the sound engineers in the Polish Radio Experimental Studio in their daily struggle against material adveristies (shortage of magnetic tape, broken mixers and tape recorders), as well as on the vernacular DIY practices of the various subcultures members (including home made sound systems, instruments and recordings). I will discuss the analog media (especially tape and compact cassettes) as the main vehicles for the cultural change and the development of the counter-culture in the Polish People's Republic. They produced the growth of vernacular DIY tactics of recording, reproducing and sharing the music, literary works, political speeches and religious texts (so-called "third circulation of information"). In consequence Polish society in 1980. became more liberal and a civil society idea started to develop. The tapes become part of the contemporary discourse on cultural memory, individual identity and power relations, evoking senses both symbolic and metaphorical, such as recording, registering or preserving (sound history), copying (testimonies and evidence), deleting and erasing (memory), and acting frequently as "proof" and "witness". This issue should be approached with regard to three principal contexts: economic, technological and social, while the conclusions ought to raise some questions related to the anthropology of communication.
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores how the making of domestic textiles intersects with a range of dilemma around materiality, value, personhood & belonging in the context of complex social transformations and changing everyday lives in rural Romania.
Paper long abstract:
Textile making and repair, performed predominantly in households, continue to be one of the most ubiquitous forms of DIY across Eastern Europe. Under socialism, textile material cultures were embedded in diverse and conflicting discourses, practices and values (Crowley and Reid 2000, Bartlett 2010). This paper asks what the changing domestic textile production can tell us about the shifting notions of personhood and belonging in post-socialist contexts.
Based on ethnographic fieldwork with home-based textile makers in rural Romania, this paper situates the materiality and practice of textile projects in the wider processes of negotiation, adaptation and DIY entrepreneurialism. Firstly, textile making will be situated in a historical context of dramatic post-war & post-1989 transformations of the Romanian countryside. Secondly, textile projects will be discussed as forms of performance, making do, economising, strategizing and exchanging textiles that can shed light on the significance of material culture as a reflection of changing notions of labour and private & public life. Thirdly, textile-making will be explored in the light of significant shifts in forms of kinship and community, as well as the constitution of personhood and belonging. Finally, the paper will reflect on how notions of subjectivity and community, work and skill (or lacking skill) are embedded in wider material ecologies and diverging everyday lives in a Romanian village.
References:
Bartlett, D. (2010). FashionEast: the spectre that haunted socialism. MIT press.
Crowley, D., & Reid, S. E. (Eds.). (2010). Pleasures in Socialism: leisure and luxury in the Eastern Bloc. Northwestern University Press.
Paper short abstract:
Novel strategies of coping with loss created new forms of communities in northeastern Russia. Focusing on improvised designs that make creative use of available objects of a contiguous world, the paper explores the materiality and artefactual strategies of belonging in a remote post-socialist world.
Paper long abstract:
The coastal population of northeastern Russia (Chukotka) was subjected to a twofold loss in the twentieth century: the large-scale, state induced and enforced closures of many native villages, the subsequent, resettlement of the population to centralized villages, and the following collapse of the Soviet economy and infrastructure. Revitalization of traditional hunting technologies and the resettlement of formerly abandoned native villages is only one aspect of the current realities that gave rise to new forms of habitation in the ruins of a volatile past.
Yet, extraordinary resilience as well as novel strategies of coping with loss and industrial collapse created new forms of maritime communities, where the self-led reuse and rebuilding of previously abandoned village sites play a paramount role. The architecture of these new camps, characterized by the creative re-usage of artefacts and building materials from the formerly destroyed villages, represents a case in point for the widespread use of "proximal design", a phenomenon of creative, local adaptation of imported technologies in the constraining environment of the North. Marine debris, abandoned shipping containers, and salvaged materials thus find their way into the contemporary coastal architecture. Focusing on improvised designs that make creative use of available objects of a contiguous world, the paper explores the materiality and artefactual strategies of belonging in a remote post-socialist world.
Paper short abstract:
This participation explores biodynamic wine-crafting in Switzerland as low-tech, DIY and enacting a specific "sentient ecology". Initially supported by esoteric views, biodynamic wine-crafting illustrates how spiritual references and DIY cultures intersect and "popularizes" in post-secular Europe.
Paper long abstract:
For over twenty years, an esoterically-driven and practitioner-based agronomy has known increased interest in the Swiss vineyards. Following the overall guidelines of the "organic" farming movements (Barton 2018), a professional segment of the wine-crafting population - often most renowned ones - are also experimenting with agronomical practices and know-hows initially inspired by Rudolf Steiner's virtuosi cosmology (Cf. Anthroposophy). Being overall distant from the anthroposophical stakeholders of biodynamics, Swiss wine-crafters nonetheless engage as to "care" over their soils and plants with alchemical preparations, local herbal teas and holistic apprehensions of "nature" as a self-resilient and self-helping entity. In this participation, out of a three years ethnographic fieldwork (2017-2019), I argue that one of the numerous explanations of the expansion of this esoterically-inspired agronomy does not imply a so-called "religious/spiritual revival" among the Swiss wine-crafting population. On the contrary, more embedded analyses over what practising biodynamics pragmatically imply for wine-crafters are to be thought-over. Considering biodynamic wine-crafting as a low-tech, do-it-yourself and enacting a specific "sentient ecology" (Ingold 2000 : 5), this participation explores how Swiss wine-crafters contrasts secular, high-tech and expert-based approaches to "conventional" wine-crafting. I then link it theoretically to "post-secular" theories (Habermas 2008) conceiving how in Western Europe, religious/spiritual dimensions tend not to oppose secular ones anymore, but are rather conceived as blending into "popular cultures" (Knoblauch 2008). Marked by wine-crafters' call over "self-expression" and "authenticity" (Lindholm 2013), the case-study of biodynamic wine-crafting illustrates profound socio-cultural transformations at stake in western European so-called "advanced industrial societies" (Beckford 2003).
Paper short abstract:
The article studies the role of the material in four Prague-based zines. The analysis is theoretically embedded in the model of the discursive-material knot, and is contextualized by a reflection on post-digital culture, which allows revalidating the role of the material within current zine scenes.
Paper long abstract:
This paper studies the role of the material in four Prague-based zines. The analysis is theoretically embedded in the model of the discursive-material knot, which is a nonhierarchical articulation of the discursive and the material, and it is contextualized by a reflection on post-digital culture, which allows revalidating the role of the material in zine production and distribution more. The case study combines the analysis of personal interviews and zine content with an ethnography of the production and distribution processes, including zine fairs. This analysis shows how the alternative media discourse, with its focus on particular aesthetics and amateurism, intersects with networks of bodies, spaces, paper and related objects, many different machines and scarce capitals. This allows arguing that the material is omnipresent in zine production and distribution, also in intermaterial and transmaterial ways, but also that zines then use the particularity of this material component to signify their cultural specificity.
Paper short abstract:
The paper discusses DIY as a particular form of material culture. Drawing on a research of DIY in the Czech Republic, we explore how DIY as a localised and context-dependent socio-material phenomenon can become a productive field of anthropological engagement with contemporary societal changes.
Paper long abstract:
The aim of this paper is to discuss conceptual frameworks for the study of DIY as material culture and to contextualize both DIY as a socio-material phenomenon and topic of anthropological research in a wider European context. We begin by reviewing principal streams of research literature and relate them to expert discourses that have been established around DIY in recent decades. Then, we discuss the legacy of DIY in post-socialist Europe. Using examples from our ongoing research into DIY practices in the contemporary Czech Republic, we show how socio-material practices of DIY have been impacted by the fall of socialism and altered by the ensuing post-socialist transformation and further (post-transformation) developments in what is now the Czech Republic. By looking at diverse practices of DIY, emotions into which these and the things created as part of self-led DIY projects are embedded, and narratives explicating the motivations and inspirations for doing-it-yourself, we place the (Czech) DIY in a particular socio-cultural, political and economic context and link it to contemporary studies of DIY. This allows us to suggest the ways in which DIY as a localised and context-dependent socio-material phenomenon can help us as anthropologists to generate novel, productive understanding of contemporary societal changes.