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- Convenors:
-
Anishka Gheewala
(LSE)
Candace Lukasik
Send message to Convenors
- Formats:
- Panel
- Mode:
- Face-to-face
- Location:
- Facultat de Filologia Aula 3.2
- Sessions:
- Tuesday 23 July, -, -
Time zone: Europe/Madrid
Short Abstract:
The language of ‘rootedness’ is widely used to describe connections to a place, but economic and forced migration, as well as exclusionary political discourses, push people to question and rethink rooted attachments. In this panel, we engage, but also critique the language of roots and rootedness.
Long Abstract:
The language of ‘rootedness’ is widely used around the world to describe connections to a place, evoking the peoples, languages, memories, and landscapes associated with it. But the term can be misleading and is often employed in the service of exclusionary ideologies by states and nations, as well as individuals and families. Experiences of economic and forced migration also push people to question and rethink rooted attachments. In this panel, we engage, but also critique the language of roots and rootedness. Papers interrogate the terms themselves, explore the modes through which discourses of rootedness are articulated, mediated, and contested, and highlight alternative idioms for describing place-based forms of belonging – idioms which range from the disruptive to the emancipatory.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Tuesday 23 July, 2024, -Paper Short Abstract:
Based on fieldwork conducted in the German-speaking Swiss Alps, this paper looks at the ambiguous power of tourism, as a simultaneously rooting and uprooting force, allowing locals to lead a dignified life in their valley while perpetually threatening their well-being and heritage.
Paper Abstract:
The German-speaking Alps present long histories of obsession with rootedness. A rich intellectual tradition of Romantic and existentialist thinkers saw the Alps as the last resort for an alienated, uprooted Mankind, corrupted by the processes of industrialization transforming Europe. Inhabited by those they described as last rooted autochthons of the continent, the Alps recalled irretrievable times of harmony and authenticity. Over the last centuries, it is paradoxically thanks to intense tourism development and global connection that many Alpine dwellers have been able to stay put in their home valleys, in mountains regions that are generally prone to outmigration. Based on fieldwork conducted in the German-speaking Swiss Alps, this paper looks at the ambiguous power of tourism, as a simultaneously rooting and dislocating force, allowing locals to lead a dignified life in their valley as Alpine ‘natives’ while perpetually threatening their well-being and heritage. Focusing on the experiences of Alpine dwellers I met between 2017 and 2023, I discuss how locals reasoned along scenarios of up-/rootedness as they both yearned for a ‘purer’ past and were involved in a disorientating race forward, to attract more guest and compete with rival touristic destinations. I thereby combine Marxist and existentialist scholarships on alienation to reveal their imbrication in the current globalized-yet-nativist global context.
Paper Short Abstract:
Transnational migration involves mobilization of ‘roots’ as an ‘inscription’ into (home)lands and shared pasts. How such an ‘inscription’ is reproducible, reclaimable or un-done by different generations of Lithuanian migrants in the USA, Kazakhstan and Russia due to conditions in their homeland.
Paper Abstract:
Transnational migration involves enactment of human agency in mobilization of ‘roots’ as an ‘inscription’ into particular connections to (home)lands and shared pasts.
I will deal with three cases of how such an ‘inscription’ is reproducible, reclaimable or un-done by different generations of both forced and voluntary Lithuanian migrants who are resident in the USA, Kazakhstan and Russia due to the social conditions created by communism and post-communism in eastern Europe. Firstly, I will explore the experiences of the first generation’s up-rootedness from their homeland. Secondly, I will consider re-rootedness of the subsequent generations in the host lands through the heritagization of diasporic memories and pasts. Individuals in the descending generations often become interested in their families or their own ancestral roots deriving from overseas and manifested for politics of subjectivity (Collier 1997). Thus the diasporic obligation to be a ‘link in the chain’, in which heritage culture must be retained, is intricately linked with the ways in which ‘roots’ are individually re-done, re-invented or shaped as ‘cosmopolitanism with roots’ or used for ‘roots tourism’. In the third case, the mobilization of ‘roots’ reveals itself in the diasporic form of homeland nationalism (Glick Shiller 2005) that was used in rebuilding nation states in the post-communist Europe of the 1990s. Currently this process is changing into a moral economy of remitting social capital and social norms by (re)migrants transferring social remittances (Ciubrinskas et al. 2023) as one of their reciprocal obligations to those "left behind' in homelands.
Paper Short Abstract:
My paper explores practices of rooting as a political, spiritual and personal doing in Khenana, a shack settlement in Durban/South Africa which emerged from an occupation by landless activists. In an extremely violent climate, the local dwellers find ways to (re-)create their place of belonging.
Paper Abstract:
Most shack dwellers in Durban have moved to the city from rural areas in search of education and job opportunities. Having left their rural homes and thus the places of their ancestors, they often only find underserviced and overcrowded shack settlements as their only affordable housing option in the city. For many, these are initially temporary makeshift solutions that are to be overcome either through municipal interventions or personal economic advancement. However, given the political ignorance towards the marginalised, many shack dwellers remain stuck for generations in (often informal) settlements without proper access to electricity and water. In this paper, I explore the rooting practices of Khenana, a community that has built itself up as a socialist commune in the notorious township of Mayville. Having cleared and occupied unused land, they became a "branch" of the social movement Abahlali baseMjondolo which organizes urban shack dwellers in a grassroots democratic way. Since Khenana's foundation in 2018, the local dwellers have been exposed to extreme violence. After three of their leaders were murdered by hitmen in 2022, the vulnerable community has taken even deeper political, spiritual and personal roots in the soil soaked with the blood of their fallen comrades, who are considered as ancestors of their movement. Based on my ethnographic research, I think through rooting as an entangled practice that negotiates tensions and asynchronicities to (re-)create a place of belonging in the midst of a brutal environment.
Paper Short Abstract:
Drawing from different cases of multiple migrations, this paper seeks to explore and understand the complexities underlying the migration patterns and dislocation(s), in relation to the (in)voluntariness and (im)mobility exercised and experienced by the Afghans migrants.
Paper Abstract:
Afghanistan has, for decades, remained one of the leading countries of origin of refugees and asylum seekers, starting from the first major wave of emigration following the Russian invasion in 1979. Afghanistan has also witnessed one of the largest refugee returns, particularly in early 2000s. However, the Taliban coming to power in August 2021 led to another significant outward flow. More than 600,000 individuals migrated to Pakistan alone. These included not only the first-time arrivals but also those who had already lived as refugees in Pakistan almost two decades ago. Furthermore, this also included Afghans who lived as refugees in Iran and after repatriating to Afghanistan, found themselves in a situation where they decided to undertake migration, but this time to Pakistan. In many of these cases, Pakistan (despite being the first country of asylum) was not intended to be the (final) destination. Caught up in bureaucratic struggle and uncertainty, some of them chose to return to Afghanistan while others succeeded in travelling to the Europe or America. However, their countries of entry in Europe or America also did not become the countries of permanent residence for many. Drawing from different cases of multiple migrations, this paper seeks to explore and understand the complexities underlying migration patterns and dislocation(s), in relation to the (in)voluntariness and (im)mobility exercised and experienced by the Afghans. This study is based on the ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Pakistan between March 2022 and May 2023, complemented by the mediated (online) communications, carried out afterward.
Paper Short Abstract:
The paper argues that while rootedness in postsocialist East Central Europe very often creates exclusion and intolerance to otherness, the post-socialist development in winemaking and valuation of wine also shows how market and globalisation serve for the inclusive ‘emancipation via rootedness’.
Paper Abstract:
This paper proposes to look at the experiences and social conditions of rootedness under post-socialist transformations of East Central Europe among amateur and professional wine makers. The empirical focus is on wine value and wine rituals in Slovakia, the post-socialist country where the category of people defined as post-peasants, nominally urban employees of factories and dependents of bureaucratic institutions, prevail in the society and very much value the country. Three rituals related to rootedness -- the regional exhibition of hobby wine makers, the celebration of village wines, and the international wine competition -- pave the way for an argument about how global transformation emancipates the people by rooting them in the country. The paper argues that while rootedness in East Central Europe very often creates exclusion and intolerance to otherness, the post-socialist development in winemaking and valuation of wine also shows how market and globalisation serve for the inclusive ‘emancipation via rootedness’.
Paper Short Abstract:
This paper argues that among the minority Muslim Tatar community in Poland roots are discursively called upon to connect individuals and stabilize group identity formations, while also serving as an affectively dense form of resistance and disruption of exclusionary national narratives of belonging.
Paper Abstract:
The rhizome has become an enduring metaphor of the modern age as identity is often analysed by social scientists as a fragmented, mercurial process of becoming (Deleuze and Guattari 1980). In this paper I call for a return to the arborescent imagery of tress and roots to understand how identity can both be experienced as a stable, enduring aspect of people’s lives and simultaneously contain the possibility of change and fluidity. This paper argues that among the Muslim Tatar community in the borderlands of Poland, roots are discursively called upon to connect individuals as members of a minority collective and stabilize identity formations, and yet these roots disrupt deeply held notions of belonging to the Polish nation at large. Roots of place-belonging describe the group’s historical ties to the region of Podlasie and thus integration to the Polish nation, while family trees bind kin with past and present ties both within Poland and across national borders. I argue that these roots serve to discursively hold members together in a time in which the future of the group is seen by participants as increasingly uncertain, threatened by emigration to the West and exogamous marriage practices. This process of root-ing produces affectively dense resonances, as shame of difference during the socialist past has been transformed into current expressions of pride in alterity. These roots of place and kin serve as a sort of resistance to the dislocations of modernity, disrupting exclusionary national narratives of belonging.
Paper Short Abstract:
I study the legal recognition of religious minorities and how secularism transforms religious life through recognition. I will discuss how the Alevi recognition in Europe triggered a debate on the definition and roots of Alevism in their attempts for recognition and thus to get rooted in Europe.
Paper Abstract:
My research focuses on the Alevi recognition in Germany, France, and Turkey. Departing from the conventional legal and sociological definition of secularism as the separation of state and religion, I explore how secularism, through the agency of the state, becomes integral to the self-conceptions, practices, institutions, and ideals of religious life; and how in this process, the religious life gets transformed with the participation of the believers. I argue that liberal states ultimately decide what counts as religion (Asad 2003), and investigate how the actions of the state reconfigure religious life following a secular conceptual order.
Alevi recognition, which started in 2012 in Germany and Switzerland, gave Turkish Alevism the same legal status as Sunni Islam for the first time. Currently, Alevism is also recognized in Austria, the UK, Sweden, Switzerland, and Denmark. Based on my preliminary ethnographic fieldwork at the Alevi organizations in Paris and Berlin, I demonstrate how this process triggered an intensified debate within the Alevi community in Europe and Turkey on the definition and practices of Alevism – while their major question is where to situate Alevism, in Islam or outside of Islam. These debates in the circles gravitate quickly towards the question of roots -- against which the authenticity of the practices is tested or claimed. In my talk, I will discuss how the question of tradition, belonging and connectedness to Turkey (and Islam) becomes an important topic for Alevis in their struggle for legal recognition and the very attempt to get rooted in Europe.
Paper Short Abstract:
Through ethnographic material collected in the Pergamon World Heritage Site, this paper conceptualizes the notion of world heritage as a practice of rooting into the earth that reflects both the extractivist ways to relate to the world as well as communities’ attempts to cultivate earthly belonging.
Paper Abstract:
This paper conceptualizes world heritage as a practice of rooting into earth that reflects both the multilayered violence that national and international heritage regimes impose, as well as communities attempts to undo given discursive frameworks. The notion of World Heritage promoted by UNESCO suggests a type of earthly belonging by turning selected locations into world property. This process includes multilayered processes of uprooting these locations from their existing local and national property regimes in order to manufacture a heritage site that supposedly belongs to everybody. In this sense, breaking the chain of inheritance the making of the world heritage embodies extractivist practices.
The heritage regimes that has shaped Pergamon has been formed at the intersection of German, Ottoman and Turkish cultural politics as well as the UNESCO conventions. Through archival and ethnographic material collected in Bergama (today’s Turkey) during 2023, the paper examines different local, national and international attempts of rooting into ancient history. Firstly, it examines how uprooting and rerooting of Pergamon has been discursively and materially constructed by multiple national and international heritage regimes. Secondly it analyzes how local, national and international communities’ attempt to claim Pergamon as a way to root into earth beyond the extractivist heritage regimes. It argues that the notion of world heritage reflects practices of rooting into the earth in extractivist terms while simultaneously generate communities seeking to cultivate earthly belonging by undoing the given frameworks of meaning and history making.