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- Convenors:
-
Katrine Gotfredsen
(Malmö University)
Nina Gren (Lund University)
Maria Padron Hernandez (Lund University)
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- Formats:
- Panel
- Mode:
- Face-to-face
- Sessions:
- Tuesday 23 July, -, -
Time zone: Europe/Madrid
Short Abstract:
This panel explores the doing and undoing of kinship in contexts of military occupation. What happens to practices of doing kinship and family, when strategies and means to control an occupied population and territory continuously undo the everyday and fundamentally upset ‘normal’ routines and life?
Long Abstract:
This panel will explore the doing and undoing of kinship in contexts of military occupation. Family and kinship tend to be the foundation of what is considered ‘normal life’ in diverse cultural contexts. Breadwinning, domestic work, providing protection, participation in daily life and life cycle rituals are all examples of practices that make and do kinship.
But what happens to kinship in contexts of military occupation, when strategies to control occupied populations and territories undo the everyday and upset ‘normal life’? Contemporary military occupations reveal themselves as evolving processes of dominance, relying on the creation of physical, bureaucratic and symbolic restrictions. This affects people’s possibilities to form and maintain family relations and obligations, including living arrangements and care, honouring dead relatives, fulfilling marriage ideals and reproductive normalcy. Kinship is connected to a sense of social continuity between generations and over time. When the normal flow of life is shaken, new ways of understanding and being in the present as well as remembering the past and re-imagining the future might occur.
With this panel, we ask how hybrid strategies of dominance by occupying powers undo ‘normal’ lives, and create new conditions for, and forms of, interpersonal relations. How is kinship performed and lived under these circumstances? Which counter-strategies are employed? How is social continuity disrupted and re-established? We invite papers exploring these and related questions, and aim to engage in a comparative discussion of efforts to do kinship and family in contexts where these are affected, or undone, by military rule.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Tuesday 23 July, 2024, -Nina Gren (Lund University)
Paper short abstract:
This paper discusses Palestinian practices to do and undo family under the Israeli apartheid-like legal system. The focus is on families with members holding different ID cards, which impact their possibilities to meet, socialize and live together with relatives.
Paper long abstract:
This paper discusses constraints on family relationships under Israeli occupation and its apartheid-like legal system. An intricate ID-card regime informs the possibilities a Palestinian has to move, work and live in areas under Israeli control, either in Israel or in the West Bank and Gaza. In particular, families whose members hold different legal statuses find it difficult to maintain a life together. For instance, if relocating to Israel, the spouse from the occupied territories lacks health insurance and risk criminal prosecution if found by the police. The choice is often to either split the family in two households or to relocate to the occupied territories. A third alternative is to move the family to legally ambivalent areas within Jerusalem but on the West Bank side of checkpoints. The constraints on marriages during the bureaucratic process to obtain the same ID cards are huge. Some end up getting divorced. In the quest for a family life, by obtaining or keeping a legal status, people might also be pushed to cut with some relatives. Others, on the other hand, put their lives in danger to be able to attend important family events such as funerals.
Kinship is socially constructed even in societies such as the Palestinian, where blood relations are discursively underlined. As we learn from recent anthropological kinship studies, family relations need to be constantly maintained. In the case I present, the process of doing family seemed to be double-sided, since doing is intertwined with undoing.
Neslihan Yaklav (Queen's University Belfast)
Paper short abstract:
This paper will present how sucide attack becomes a legitimate form of action for PKK members as a response to necropolitical practices of the Turkish state. It will show how their identities are fused from local to extended and the symbolic nature of violence contribute to this action.
Paper long abstract:
In order to understand the extent to which the Turkish state’s continuous military occupation have contributed to a rise in suicide attacks by members of the PKK, my study employs both qualitative and quantitative research, with a primary focus on obtaining direct testimony from members of the PKK.
Different forms of violence are one of the key contributions to identity fusion among members of the Kurdish Youth, from both direct and indirect experience in North Kurdistan. All this violence experience drive some of them to sacrifice themselves for their kinship and for their national kinship. When they join to the movement and been in the active war, they witness violence perpetrated against family members and friends which push them to change violence forms as a resistance against colonization. For them, suicide attack is the one most prestigious “honored death” to show their comrades.
To understand how this identity fusion occurs, Mbembe’s concept of necropolitics is utilised. Within this, Mbembe shows how colonial parts exercise and uniform control and acted upon dead bodies in order to control the living population. In doing, so they reinforce an identity between the living and the dead, which concurrently creates a sense of unified identity among the living. This paper reveals how this concept emerges in the data collected for this study.
Maria Padron Hernandez (Lund University)
Paper short abstract:
The Moroccan occupation of Western Sahara has had a profound impact on Sahrawi families. This paper will explore how the division of the Sahrawi population during the 1975-1991 war with Morocco undid milk kinship – a Sahrawi form of kinship founded not in “blood” but in breastfeeding.
Paper long abstract:
Sahrawi families have had to relate various forms of colonialism, domination and national borders throughout modern history. Specific events such as Spanish colonialism, the establishment of independent Algeria and Mauretania, Moroccan invasion and occupation, the division of the country in an occupied zone and a “liberated” zone, and a second war since 2020 as well as new technologies have all, in different ways, affected the ways in which Sahrawi families have been able to do kinship.
For about 15 years, between the Moroccan invasion in 1975 and the ceasefire in 1991, the Sahrawi population was divided between refugee camps in Algeria and the Moroccan-controlled/occupied areas of Western Sahara. During these years, contact with people on the other side of the border was at an absolute minimum, to the point where people did not know if relatives had passed away during the invasion or were still alive. Kinship was, in many ways, ruptured.
This paper will look at one of the ways in which this total division impacted on Sahrawi families’ ability to do kinship. More specifically, it will explore how the division undid milk kinship – a Sahrawi form of kinship founded not in “blood” but in breastfeeding and requiring knowledge of complex kinship structures to be done in the correct way.
Vera Skvirskaja (University of Copenhagen)
Paper short abstract:
After the occupation of Crimea by Russia, the situation for many Ukrainian, Russian and Crimean Tatars families has been challenging, problematizing ideas about national belonging and self-identification. The paper discuss the impact of the annexation on kinship, belonging and new mobilities.
Paper long abstract:
After the military occupation and annexation of Crimea by the Russian Federation, the situation for many Ukrainian, Russian and Crimean Tatars families in the region has been challenging. For some Russian settlers in Crimea, those who moved there in the late Soviet period, Russia’s taking over the peninsular was not particularly dramatic or was even a welcomed development. For many Ukrainian, Crimean Tatars and mixed families Russian occupation has problematized ideas about national collective belonging and individual self-identification. The paper discuss the impact of the annexation of Crimea on familial networks, negotiations of belonging and new mobilities. It also inquires about the ways in which new mobilities tend to undermine or strengthen kinship networks in the long run.
Mariam Tskhovrebashvili
Paper short abstract:
In 1992-1993 the war in Abkhazia brought heavy consequences, especially for those people for whom Abkhazia was homeland. Georgian-Abkhazian mixed families are often seen as a resource and an opportunity to maintain kinship ties, which can be seen as a kind of bridge between two societies.
Paper long abstract:
Georgian-Abkhazian marriages were not uncommon in Abkhazia, which created mixed families. For such families, it was even more tragic to live in the conditions of armed conflict and to deal with the consequences that this conflict brought. For them, the front line also passed inside the family. For women members of mixed families, war primarily meant confronting their own family members and, in many cases, standing on opposite sides of their husbands or brothers with weapons in their hands. The war put these women in front of a choice, although this choice was even absurd at first glance, they had to choose between their national identity and their family. The word "choice" in this case refers to a decision dictated by an inevitable situation, not a decision made in a free will.
The term "mixed families" did not exist before the war, because it was the war that brought the discussion about national and ethnic affiliation not only in the public space, but also within families. The pre-war rhetoric made the family members think that they were actually from different ethnic groups and that this fact might lead them to some kind of disagreement.
Despite the post-war difficulties, women from mixed families managed to move between territorial dividing lines. 30 years have passed since the armed conflict, and women from mixed families have managed to maintain kinship ties to this day, although it turns out that this is not always a peace resource.
Astamur Jikhashvili
Paper short abstract:
This paper analyses the strategies used by the new generation of non-Abkhazian residents of Georgia's breakaway region to accommodate their conflicting identities and to coexist in an environment where their group identity is subordinated.
Paper long abstract:
"There are as many Megrelian surnames as there are Abkhazian surnames," one of my grandmothers, herself the daughter of a Megrelian father and an Abkhazian mother, used to tell me. Decades after the defeat of the Georgian side in the war over Abkhazia, this phrase seems to reveal some identity-building strategies among the young Megrelian inhabitants of the breakaway region: Abkhazia, whose independence is backed by Russian military presence, has since been seen as the exclusive domain of Abkhazian nationalism, meaning that other nationalisms - especially Georgian - do not belong here. This restriction, however, poses a challenge to those who do not already belong to the dominant group, but who stayed or returned home after the violent conflict, forcing them either to dig deep into the (invented) past to find Abkhazian roots, or to use the local Megrelian language instead of Georgian - in both cases forcing them to cut themselves off from Georgianness - the suppressed identity in Abkhazia - and thus from their own Georgian kin on the other side of the conflict zone. This paper therefore analyses the strategies used by the new generation of non-Abkhazian residents to accommodate their conflicting identities and to coexist in an environment where their group identity is subordinated.
Katrine Gotfredsen (Malmö University)
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores how Russian occupation of South Ossetia disrupts local practices related to death and the afterlife. I show that the undoing of social and spatial links between the living and the dead threatens social continuity, but also how it fosters resistance and attempts at re-making it.
Paper long abstract:
This paper explores how the Russian occupation of the Georgian territory of South Ossetia disrupts local practices pertaining to death, burial and good afterlives.
The 2008 Russo-Georgian war and its aftermath caused the long-term displacement of thousands of ethnic Georgians from South Ossetia as well as highly precarious living conditions in the borderlands between Russian and Georgian controlled areas. Over the past decade, the construction of a hard, militarised “border” between the territories restricts movement and hinders displaced families and local village communities from accessing native places and people. This is not only so in terms of the concrete territories and contemporaries of “this world”, but also pertains to the territories and beings in “the other world”.
The paper will show how Russian rule is undoing the social and spatial connections between the world of the living and the world of the dead, by leaving ancestors and dead kin uncomfortably out of place: Families are prevented from visiting family graves, pay their respect, and fulfil obligations to their deceased kin. The dead must be buried in the wrong soil away from where they would naturally belong. Close relatives are prevented from reunification in the afterlife, etc.
By preventing proper relations between the world of the living and the world of the dead, the dominance exercised by occupation extends itself to the afterlife and threatens to undo senses of social continuity. However, it also fosters resistance and creative attempts at re-making it.