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- Convenors:
-
Karl Swinehart
(University of Louisville)
Elina Hartikainen (University of Oslo)
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- Discussants:
-
Erin Debenport
(University of California, Los Angeles)
Rihan Yeh (University of California, San Diego)
- Formats:
- Panel
- Stream:
- Resistance
- Sessions:
- Tuesday 22 June, -
Time zone: Europe/Helsinki
Short Abstract:
This panel examines social practices that transgress competing regimes of authority within shared social spaces to illuminate processes involved in the typification of social practices as alternately legal/illegal, obligatory/forbidden, sacred/profane across social boundaries.
Long Abstract:
This panel examines social practices that transgress competing regimes of authority within shared social spaces. Laws are often associated with states, yet communities of practice operating at scales both larger and smaller than state formations operate with their own rules which bring them into varying degrees of evasion, friction, or open conflict with states' legal frameworks. This panel illuminates the processes involved in the contested typifications of social practices as alternately legal / illegal, obligatory / forbidden, sacred / profane across social boundaries. For practices that have been stigmatized by the mark of illegality, how has stigma been contested, embraced, or transformed by practitioners? How have acts of contestation reconfigured transgressive practices themselves? What actors - whether human or non-human - come to mediate across these social boundaries? We are particularly interested in dynamics of religious practice, public performance, and the state, but welcome all papers that examine social practices which bring conflicting regimes of authority into degrees of dialogue and/or conflict across social boundaries.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Tuesday 22 June, 2021, -Paper short abstract:
The paper explores Finno-Karelian ritual specialists' use of rhetoric justification in communicative incantations. The different uses of justification with non-human agents function as register-specific emblems and show that different registers work inside the incantation genre.
Paper long abstract:
Communicative incantations form a prominent genre in Kalevala-metric poetry, a Finnic poetic system of various linguistic groups. The paper explores how Finno-Karelian ritual specialists performing communicative incantations use rhetoric strategy called justification when addressing non-human agents. I analyse three types of justification and their connection with differently aligned non-human agents. The paper introduces the role of justification as a register-based feature within the incantation genre and shows that types of justification directed to differently evaluated agents work as register-emblematic feature. The results propose that the genre of Kalevala-metric communicative incantations includes different registers of communication.
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Paper short abstract:
This paper traces the rise of folk music during Japan’s medieval period. Hitherto dominant court music, with its emphasis on order and cosmological orientation, encountered the unscripted and multidirectional social trajectories of folk music, producing hybrid forms and new discourses on music.
Paper long abstract:
The culture of classical Japan emphasized etiquette, political order, and cosmological coordination above all else. Everyday court life was dominated by systems of rules that mediated sociality and structured hierarchies. Success as a courtier depended on learning how to negotiate these rules, which specified everything from the color of one’s robes, to seasonally appropriate words to use in poems, to geomantically prohibited directions for travel. Music and performance were similarly systematized and integrated into the yearly calendar, aiding the imperial endeavor to coordinate court and cosmos and thereby consolidate power. But as the bureaucratic state entered into a phase of dysfunction, new forms of culture entered from beyond the court. Folk music and performance can be found in the earliest Japanese texts, but often in naturalized forms that made it legible to courtiers. It is not until the early medieval period (ca. 11th through 14th centuries) that stories and records of direct encounters appear in significant numbers. These texts, written by educated courtiers and members of the Buddhist clergy, typically cast folk music and performance as noisy, unconstrained, and unintelligible, but also novel, entertaining, and liberating. Noise hence signified both disorder and freedom, an ambiguity that contributed to folk music’s transgressive capacity. This paper examines folk music’s increasingly frequent passage from the external world to the inner aristocratic ear, and the new forms of identification that proliferated as a result.
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines the legacy of Madame Satã (1900-1976), the drag persona of João Francisco dos Santos, a black gay man who rose to prominence in 1930s Rio de Janeiro and was legendary as a capoeira streetfighter.
Paper long abstract:
This paper examines the legacy of Madame Satã (1900-1976), the drag persona of João Francisco dos Santos, a black gay man who rose to prominence in 1930s Rio de Janeiro and was legendary as a capoeira streetfighter. Born to former slaves, he fathered seven children, spent decades in prison for murders, and became known both for doing drag shows in the bohemian neighborhood of Lapa as well as battling the police forces there in hand-to-hand combat. Santos became a folkhero within his own lifetime, but his story also inspired comic books, a film, and pop culture references. This paper examines the myth-making surrounding this mercurial figure and looks at the complicated interplay of queerness, trans-ness, and blackness in Brazil. It argues that one of the legacies of Madam Satã is a growth in trans resistance movements in Rio such as Casa Nem, a collective of transgender and travesti squatters begun steps away from Satã’s home in Lapa, which is run by a militant trans activist who, like Madam Satã, is becoming famous for no-holds-barred tactics against the state.
Paper short abstract:
In this paper, I am going to discuss the fluidity of rules in football and the playfulness of contacts between the police and supporters.
Paper long abstract:
Football is based on play, not only on the pitch, but also on the terraces. The interactions between the audience and police are tense, especially in the active, confrontational standing sections. It is not only about a conflict though. Fans and police have to be able to ‘play’ together to function in this specific context. They depend on each other to perform their roles through micro-rituals and they rely on mutual understanding on what behavior makes sense and what does not. While presenting several examples from fieldwork among supporters in Sweden I shall use Susan Stewart’s concepts of sense and nonsense –making (1989).
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines the reporting of 2 well-known journalists, critical of the Israeli state, and their rapport with Palestinians, to produce an anti-colonial account of events in Israel/Palestine. It thus examines the authority produced in countering official narratives in anti-colonial journalism.
Paper long abstract:
How can journalists who are critical of the colonial project of the Israeli state challenge its accounts in the complex public arena of the North Atlantic? This paper is based on both ethnographic fieldwork and digital research into Israeli English-language journalism. Since the late 90s, as Israeli news organizations went online, they also began to experiment with English-language versions. Today they are read and cited by journalists throughout the North Atlantic, and they are now indispensable sources for debates about Israel/Palestine. They are indispensable, that is, to what I call the “imperial public” that debates the future of sovereignty and use of force in Israel/Palestine.
This paper will look at two well-known critical journalists, Jonathan Cook and Amira Hass, who seek to challenge official accounts of the Israeli state, and bring to light the oppression of Palestinians under its colonial regime. In interesting ways, both understand their long-term rapports with Palestinians to enable their epistemic and anti-colonial stance in their journalism. Jonathan Cook, who went to the country while still writing for The Guardian, considers his links to a Nazareth-based community essential, while Amira Hass, a longtime reporter of the well-known Ha’aretz, points to her long term residence and connections in Gaza and the occupied West Bank. In examining their journalism, I will also consider how new communicative technologies, like social media, play a role in the conflicting regimes of authority, where official and anti-colonial reporting struggle for visibility.