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Paper short abstract:

This essay has two parts. Part 1 presents an account of my amateur explorations of the history of the English language off and on for four decades. When the Germanic Franks became French, they switched to their version of Latin. English has a different history.

Paper long abstract:

The builders of Stonehenge 5,000 years ago were North African maritime herders and traders who had the run of Great Britain (Albion) and Little Britain (Ireland) for two millennia. Successive waves of migrants from Europe—first Celts, then Romans, Anglo-Saxons, Vikings, Danes and Normans—each left their mark on the language as separate registers. My research has focused on excavating the residue of these invasions in modern English. I have studied how Germanic, Latin French and latterly ancient Greek registers have taken on class connotations, and regional dialects are granted inferior social status to those of the dominant peoples occupying the rich agricultural lowlands of southeast England around London. This study of the origins of English is relevant to the current world crisis, when the West’s grip on the world is weakening, along with the dominant social form of the last century that I call “national capitalism”.In Part 2, I reveal my personal motives for this investigation. As an upwardly mobile Manchester youth, I began as a specialist in ancient languages. Then at Cambridge University I switched to social anthropology and found a ticket for world travel that way. One theme of my nomadic life is the role of Manchester, Lancashire, and northern England generally in forming me as a would-be world-citizen; this is linked to my take on English class divisions. A third is my abiding focus on economy, considered here through its rhetoric. Placing myself in the light of Part 1’s general linguistic investigation is thus the theme of Part 2.

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Paper short abstract:

The case study of a teachers’ training program for refugee education in Greece offers insights into anthropology’s potential to cultivate critical digital citizenship through reflective, open and collaborative online pedagogies.

Paper long abstract:

Drawing on the intercultural and intersectional orientation of a teachers’ training program (Teachers Capacity Building on Integration of Refugee and Migrant Children in Greece, implemented by the University of Athens, funded by UNICEF), the paper attempts to articulate a critique on the proliferating discourse around “digital skills” and offer a broad understanding of how online education may cultivate digital citizenship for a more open and diverse education and cohabitation.

Entangling pedagogy, anthropology and sociology, we attempt to reframe the recent concept of digital habitus in the field of affective and collaborative digital education, which strives for conditions of imagining and working towards a better world. Drawing on Bourdieu’s seminal work on the habitus as an intangible, embodied and permeating dimension of socialization, we argue that synchronous and asynchronous online training develops not only a set of practical skills but a whole array of perceptions, attitudes and behaviors around education and sociality in general. Grounded on the analysis of the participants’ reflective testimonies and online observation, the findings confirm that digital learning environments which encourage reflexivity, creativity, and intercultural understanding lead to a shift in positionality that enhances our critical understanding of contemporary cultural practices and of our habitual involvement with digital technologies. The approach of digital education as a relational process which perpetually transforms the habitus of the participants helps us better grasp and address the digital divide, and bridge the teachers’ habitus with the habitus of (refugee) students, thus promoting the creation of emancipatory learning spaces and digital sociality.

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Paper short abstract:

This paper focuses on innovative uses of new techniques and emerging technologies that synthesize the educative role of contemporary monastics of Mount Athos in relation to the 'self' and Others, the natural environment and 'Nature', and the educative role of the monasteries in the 'worldly world'.

Paper long abstract:

Since the turn of the millennium, the monastic institutions of Mount Athos go through rapid changes both in their internal everyday life and respective external vocations. New hardware and software technologies, social media, and increased secular interest to monastic living, have changed the missionary role of the monasteries while also impacting their internal daily life. This paper looks at how uses of emerging technologies evolve the character of monastic education regarding the technical cultivation of the ‘self’ via traditional techniques of the body (such as prayer and labour, hagiography and psalmody) beyond the geographical limits and traditional prohibitions associated with the place. The paper uses practical examples taken from the expanded monastic ‘field’ of two monasteries, which will briefly show the innovative uses of emerging techniques and technologies of the 'self' in teaching one’s symbiotic relation to the natural environment and to others as an alternative and healthy way of living. It further returns to Design, the idea that the World/Body is ‘nothing but a great Machine’ (Hume), as a way of liberating the ethos of anthropological education from moralizing and naturalizing concepts such as ‘Nature’ (Douglas) and the ‘Church’ (Durkheim): a stylistic and technical matter of performance in everyday life (Goffman, Mauss, Hart). The author argues that the anthropo-logical shift from Belief (sacred) to Design (technique) carries implications regarding the classic study of the 'anthropology of religion/Christianity', moving away from its ‘sacred nature’ inwards and outwards everyday practices (technique and technology) in connecting the 'self' to the 'world' (Hart).