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- Convenor:
-
Stephanie Bunn
(University of St Andrews)
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- Format:
- Panels
- Location:
- Ligertwood 111
- Sessions:
- Tuesday 12 December, -
Time zone: Australia/Adelaide
Short Abstract:
Moving communities may strengthen their creative practices under the influence of the state. More often their art is hybridised, appropriated or stopped. This panel explores how the dynamic nature of traditional creative practices reveals the balance between art and the state among moving people.
Long Abstract:
How does the state impact upon the creative practices of mobile communities, whether nomadic herders, hunter gatherers, migrant workers or refugees? The songs of Bangla Desh move with migrants as they travel between home and Europe, yet other forms of music from the Indian subcontinent hybridise in Europe to create new forms such as Bangra. Traditional Kazakh motifs are employed in new fashion collections emphasising national style, while the skills which formed these patterns may be forgotten. Aid workers from foreign states may teach new skills and techniques which may bring advances to old practices, or may damage them.
Contributors to this panel are invited to explore the changes in localised skills and creative practices that occur when moving groups with strong traditional forms come into contact with state influences, oppressive or not. Industrialisation may remove the need for 'traditional' practices such as hand-weaving in Pakistan. Changes of land use in Malaysia through rain forest degradation may affect the use of rattan in basketry. State influence may impact in many ways, and can affect both skills and imagery. Long-held abstract Turkmen carpet motifs may be transformed into more literal machine guns or heads of state leaders.
The panel asks: How can the dynamic nature of localised creative practices help reveal the balance between art and the state among moving people?
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Tuesday 12 December, 2017, -Paper short abstract:
This paper explores the creative practice of indie game developers through the journeys of those displaced, or driven to mobility by state forces. This discussion speaks to anthropological concerns regarding creativity, mobility, and identity.
Paper long abstract:
The experience of the creating a game, what it could be, and all the developer hopes it could be, predisposes all other concerns of game making. However this creativity in practice cannot persist in isolation, it is made of something and requires resources devoted to it. In this way, the creativity of indie developers is constantly, and forcefully, grinding hard against the constraints in which production occurs. In Australia, the State's engagement with this fledgling community is acutely tied to game development, and is highly consequential to the ways in which game developers collectively imagine their practice. This connection is especially poignant in how it pertains to the relationship between indie developers and the governments to which they seem thoroughly dependent. This paper explores the creative practice of indie game developers through the journeys of those displaced, or driven to mobility by state forces. These spurred developers may resemble a sort of nomad, pilgrim or refugee, and in doing so, intersect with anthropological concerns regarding creativity, mobility, and identity.
Paper short abstract:
The paper addresses the different kinds of transformation in textile imagery, form and technique in women's textile production across the Eurasian region during two different periods of state rule, socialism and post-socialism.
Paper long abstract:
Textile production in Eurasia, especially among nomadic people, was, in the past, largely women's work. Textile forms varied from weavings, embroidery, felt making, patchwork, appliqué, and many groups made all forms, while specialising in a few. The imagery of some forms, such as embroidery and weaving, lent themselves to transformations during the socialist period, evoking state ideals, heroes, and so on. Post-socialism brought different forms of economy, and affected women's textile work, its ethos and aesthetic, in different ways. In this era form and technique changed, while imagery was less dynamic, and the concern was reproduction.
The lecture explores how technique, form and image relate to ethos and economy to produce work of diverse qualities in Eurasia. Regions considered include Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan.