Paper short abstract:

Development studies uncovering mechanisms of fragmented yet interdependent networks challenge area studies. I will consider how moving between various posts facilitates research crossing traditional fields' boundaries: linking Poland and Sudan, Nauru and Russia, NGOs and international institutions.

Paper long abstract:

The studies of development aiming to uncover mechanisms governing strongly fragmented, yet tightly interdependent networks of development actors, provides a challenge to traditional area studies in anthropology. Moreover, such study, which combines data from various forms of social assemblages and geographical regions, does not fit into traditional topical and regional organization of academic departments. In this paper, based on my own ethnography of Polish development apparatus I will consider how I deal with such a challenge. I will consider how my own maneuvering between British, Polish and Irish universities, academic, NGO or Governmental posts allowed me to conduct research which transcends traditional fields' boundaries and juxtaposition material in often surprising configurations: linking Poland and South Sudan, Nauru and Russia, small NGO and strong international institution. While such combinations might seem unorthodox, I am confident, that in the current highly globalised and interconnected world they hold growing meanings.

Paper short abstract:

This paper introduces an Anglo-Japanese collaborative project to study the transpacific encounters of Russian Old Believer emigres and their post-Soviet emulators. We ask to what extent one scene of transnational collaborative encounter (academic) might render another (Russian religious) knowable.

Paper long abstract:

Old Belief is a tradition of Orthodox Christianity that since the 17th century has rejected the authority of the state-aligned Russian Orthodox Church. Old Believers' dissenter status led them to occupy the peripheries of the Russian Empire: at the end of the 19th Century they were among the first groups of Russian colonizers to populate the Far Eastern territory. One revolution (Russian) followed by another (Chinese) provoked their flight from Eurasia to the most distant corners of the Pacific Ocean: Alaska and Australia. The end of socialism in Russia has given these communities the chance to return to their spiritual homeland in the Russian Far East, where, meanwhile, an Old Believer religious revival has been started by young Russians who seek an authentically Russian spiritual life, which they see embodied in these emigre Old Believer communities.

This paper outlines a collaborative project to study the encounter between the Old Believer emigration and its post-Soviet revival. The mapping of this multi-dimensional interaction depends on an analogous encounter in the realm of knowledge production: between an anthropologist who has researched extensively the history and development of the Old Believer emigration, and one who has conducted fieldwork amongst the post-Soviet revival. Far Eastern Old Belief is an transnational anthropological object/location that cannot be studied within a narrow area-based or single disciplinary paradigm. Instead in this paper we will enquire whether and how a collaborative encounter across academic borders might replicate more faithfully the disjunctive synthesis of this post-Cold War, pan-Pacific religious assemblage.

Paper short abstract:

In research among EU elites positionality and autoethnography provide a tool to depict overlapping cultural orders and to reveal how actors maneuver within the complex EU-space. These concepts however contradict the principle of scientific “objectivity” and undermine the “applicability” of findings.

Paper long abstract:

The political process of the so called "European integration" has lead to the establishment of a cultural microcosm in Brussels that I call the EU-space where different political actors are involved in decision making process. Within this assemblage of political, national, social, legal, economical representations, there's a constant struggle over political issues and it is played out in cultural terms where different capitals are applied. Struggles within the EU-space have led to the stiffening of the boundaries between inner and outer world and this dense political environment guards its cultural secrets vehemently. However, it is the ways and means of this guarding with which an ethnographer is confronted that provide thick ethnographical material. Navigating and maneuvering in this bureaucratic and political assemblage, learning the political, social and cultural intimacies and taking distance from them, approaching and transgressing the limits within and of the EU-space are becoming epistemological resources for the ethnographic knowledge production. Applying such concepts as positionality and autoethnography in this paper I present some examples from this complex research field. Subsequently I problematize the tension such concepts evoke in current state of the art in academia, where "objectivity" and "applicability" of research findings are becoming not only a standard but also a prerequisite for further funding of intense ethnographic research.

Paper short abstract:

This paper discusses the employment situation for non-Japanese anthropologists working in Japan. It traces the author’s decision to focus fieldwork outside of Japan in Jamaica and highlights the challenges, triumphs and hopes that underlie this move.

Paper long abstract:

Anthropology in Japan maintains a close historical connection with folkloristics (minzokugaku); an area studies paradigm rooted in the study of local tales, traditions and rituals in Japan or its former colonies. Moreover, for reasons largely related language and location, the majority of foreign anthropologists working in Japanese universities have focused their pre-employment research on Japan. By and large, they usually continue this trajectory once employed in Japan. While this situation sometimes creates frictions over contested anthropological interpretations regarding the host country, it often buttresses many tacit and normative agreements in regard to the production of domestic, or better domesticated ethnographic knowledge. Nevertheless, from Japan to Jamaica neo-liberal free-trade practices such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership shape the lives of agriculturalists. In short, farmers the world over have many common concerns. However, within the confines of domestic anthropological practice in Japan, one is ever-pressured to focus on the 'uniqueness' of Japanese experience over the trans-national and universal experiences of particular agriculturalists. This paper is an auto-ethnographic account of what happens when a foreign anthropologist opts out of the Japan-centric discourse and decides to focus on cosmopolitan themes and not location.