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- Convenors:
-
Magdalena Buchczyk
(Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin)
Regina Römhild (Institute for European Ethnology, Humboldt Universität zu Berlin)
Damani Partridge (University of Michigan)
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- Chair:
-
Maribel Casas-Cortés
(Universidad de Zaragoza)
- Format:
- Panel
- Location:
- Lanyon Building (LAN), 01/052
- Sessions:
- Thursday 28 July, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
How could decolonial knowledgescapes help reimagine the anthropology of Europe? What, if any, common ground could such a transformation establish? How could it contribute to a globally entangled reflexive network of anthropologies?
Long Abstract:
In the context of the current making and unmaking of Europe, this panel works to reinvigorate anthropology's critical exploration of Europeanization processes by focusing on their colonial legacies and their hidden colonial persistence. The present business of bordering Europe demonstrates that algorithmic computation, biopolitics, and racist policies and decision-making processes draw new boundaries using old epistemic repertoires of colonialism, patriarchy and racist capitalism within and beyond the boundaries of Europe. Scholars, activists and artists address the European as continuously defined by dominating institutions perpetuating structural inequalities and asymmetries of East-West or South-North, and the patronising imaginaries of (epistemic) hinterlands. Additionally, the renewed struggles about colonial legacies in cities , museums, public monuments and educational institutions show that public understandings of the difficult European pasts and their ongoing presences are themselves becoming new fields of critically challenging and building Europe 'from below', across and outside.
How do we, in response to these everyday processes of Europeanization, create and uncover decolonial knowledgescapes about Europe and the European in research? What horizons for an anthropological commons would such transformation enable? In what ways would it allow us to reimagine an anthropology of Europe in the context of globally entangled reflexive networks? Could the transformed discipline establish any common ground as geographies and imaginaries become contested, transformed and changed? The panel invites critical, research-based and creative papers offering approaches towards a decolonial anthropology of and in Europe as well as approaches to the possibility of a new commons of anthropological knowledge.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Thursday 28 July, 2022, -Paper short abstract:
In my presentation I draw attention to the importance of provincializing the normative binary gender order for a reimagination of european decolonial anthropology by presemting negotiations of intersectional realities of trans* lifes and bodies.
Paper long abstract:
Naturalizing the normative binary gender order is deeply interwoven with racialisation of gender and sexuality in colonial practices (Lugones 2007) and as thus forms part of processes of europeanization. However still in anthropological approaches of decolonizing knowledge and practices, the normative binary gender order is not taken into account as an important field of action. On the contrary it is reaffirmed and trans* and inter* studies are not taken for granted. But gendering processes and discourses about gender diverse lifes and bodies play a crucial role in questions of belonging, time and space and are always the scene of intersectional negotiations about normalisation and othering within the normative binary gender order.
Therefore I consider a critical trans* studies approach as an important perspective in reimagining european decolonial anthropology. In my presentation I offer a perspective - based on my (auto)ethnographic research on trans* lifes in Germany - on how trans* bodies on the one hand are pathologized and instrumentalized, but how on the other hand the normative binary gender order can be provincialized (Chakrabarty 2000) through narrations of the intersectional realities of trans* lifes and trans* bodies.
Paper short abstract:
Beyond stories of enlargement and accession, Europeanization is premised on violence, the reproduction of symbolic geographies and gradients of Europeanness. Heritage is such a bordering practice through which borders are reworked, based on proximity to an ideal of Western European history.
Paper long abstract:
Europeanization is routinely described as a process by which borders are displaced and transformed through various rounds of enlargement and accession. However, this march of Europeanization is premised on violence, the reproduction of symbolic geographies, and gradients of Europeanness. In remaking borders and places, Europeanization also actively excludes and adversely incorporates ethnicities, histories, and places. As such, a decolonial anthropology of Europe has to complicate the sanitized story of the EU as a liberal, benevolent post-war project, and to center the epistemic, symbolic and material violence of Europeanization processes. Heritage is such a bordering practice. European heritage-making is intrinsically racialized, classed and gendered, and that it leads to the reproduction of what I call ‘multicultural monoculturalism’: particular ethnicities, histories and places are valorized and marked as (almost)‘European’, depending on their proximity to an ideal of Western European heritage and history, while others are excluded from those narratives. I interrogate the ways in which urban forms and built environments become heritage in EU-supported cultural interventions in the East and South of Europe, more particularly in Sibiu, Romania and Cordoba, Spain. In order to reinscribe Europeanness in EU cultural interventions, both Sibiu and Cordoba put forward a multicultural, multiethnic and peaceful history of the city – narratives that evacuated historical violence and erasure of these ethnicities, while downplaying their contemporary contributions and erasures. Europeanization does not unfold solely as expansion and inclusion, but through the epistemic and material violence of monoculturalism and through multicultural fantasies that evacuate(d) the violence of these processes.
Paper short abstract:
My situated filmic ethnographic research at the crossroads of mobilities in Greece is an attempt to practice a decolonial anthropology and searches for non-imperial geopolitical categories and imaginaries. Can perspectives beyond the dichotomous distinction between "self" and "other" be gained?
Paper long abstract:
My situated filmic ethnographic research at the crossroads of mobilities in Greece is an attempt to practice a decolonial anthropology of Europe following the research program "Decentering Europe”. Greece is considered both "center" and “periphery". The categorisation of mobile subjects is linked to this distinction between "self" and “other". I followed the established tourist itinerary to Greece with the intention of reflexively reversing the perspective on Europe. I conducted research at the former Hotel Xenia near Thermopylae and around the Statue of Liberty on Lesbos. At Thermopylae which tourists visit because it is said that Europe got defended against the “other”/ the “east”, the former Hotel Xenia became a temporary shelter for newcomers from Syria and Iraq. In Lesbos where newcomers are also facing the racist EU-borderregime a statue of Liberty became a place for bathing and socialising. Both research sites are located in proximity to a monument that spans a "we"-narrative in space and which is meant to serve the demarcation of Europe against the "other". I listened to the narratives of the people on the ground: What if those who are present are not meant? To what extent are the grand narratives about Europe crossed and challenged? What hopes and wishes are raised? Can perspectives beyond the dichotomous distinction between "self" and "other" be gained? And: What potential does artistic and filmic practice have as a method to bring forth non-imperial geopolitical categories and imaginaries?
Hotel Xenia:
https://vimeo.com/412500105
Password: 4PreviewHotel10enia
Extract:
https://vimeo.com/621736299
Password: 4HOTELXENIA