Paper Short Abstract:

In this paper I will focus on the stories told by members of the informal communities living in Intramuros. Their make-shift houses are nothing close to the supposed grandeur of the Old City, yet they are the places where life is lived and memories are created, spaces with a connection to the past and the future, through the bodies of the generations inhabiting them. If the informal communities cease to exist, all the traces of life will be removed from the Old City, leaving a landscape full of the forgotten dead, erased heritage, freshly-reconstructed old buildings, and a bright new future bereft of the past.

Paper Abstract:

It would take several volumes to write about the memory games in Intramuros, yet in this paper I will focus on the stories told to me by members of the informal communities living there. Their make-shift houses are nothing close to the supposed grandeur of the Old City, yet they are the places where life is lived and memories are created, spaces with a connection to the past and the future, through the bodies of the generations inhabiting them. Even if disconnected from the pre-war and war-time history of the quarter, they are the bearers of meaning and of life in the city, the ones inhabiting the historical streets, operating the service sector, providing food to visitors.

That the memory of these communities is being undermined, and even erased, can be seen in the fact that the administration has a plan to get rid of them. The hovering relocations offer a constant threat to the communities and cause instability in their lives. The reasoning behind this idea is connected with traces – these communities are supposedly way too visible and too noisy in the heritage space. This was mentioned in almost all of my conversations about Intramuros, but no one thought of documenting the local memories. If the informal communities cease to exist, all the traces of life will be removed from the Old City, leaving a landscape full of the forgotten dead, erased heritage, freshly-reconstructed old buildings, and a bright new future bereft of the past.

Paper Short Abstract:

The aim of this presentation is to narrate the process of popular urbanization in Guayaquil-Ecuador, based on the reconstruction of the neighborhood memory of Bastión Popular and Nigeria, through the memories of their residents and journalistic archives. I start from the idea that the Latin American popular neighborhood specifies urban socio-spatial boundaries that possess particular social, economic, and cultural characteristics, as well as unique historical trajectories. Thus, this proposal is interested in the ways in which popular inhabitants attribute meaning to the memory of the neighborhood space from its origins as informal settlements. Through the first year of the research project it was concluded that the configuration of the individual and collective identities of the inhabitants of these sectors positions the social memory of their territory with a preponderant role in their discourses. Ethnographic research was conducted between May 2022 and November 2023. The main results of the research allow us to visualize how despite having shared origins marked by marginalization, segregation, and invisibility; their configuration and current situation in terms of space meaning-making were very different, also taking into account the current socio-political and economic crisis that Ecuador is undergoing.

Paper Abstract:

The aim of this presentation is to narrate the process of popular urbanization in Guayaquil-Ecuador, based on the reconstruction of the neighborhood memory of Bastión Popular and Nigeria, through the memories of their residents and journalistic archives. I start from the idea that the Latin American popular neighborhood specifies urban socio-spatial boundaries that possess particular social, economic, and cultural characteristics, as well as unique historical trajectories. Thus, this proposal is interested in the ways in which popular inhabitants attribute meaning to the memory of the neighborhood space from its origins as informal settlements. Through the first year of the research project it was concluded that the configuration of the individual and collective identities of the inhabitants of these sectors positions the social memory of their territory with a preponderant role in their discourses. Ethnographic research was conducted between May 2022 and November 2023. The main results of the research allow us to visualize how despite having shared origins marked by marginalization, segregation, and invisibility; their configuration and current situation in terms of space meaning-making were very different, also taking into account the current socio-political and economic crisis that Ecuador is undergoing.

Paper Short Abstract:

Centered on Cape Verdean institutional records, individual testimonies, and cyclical famines’ imaginary, this ethnography addresses how social memory deconstructs unilateral visions of history whilst broadening the scope of ethnographic research.

Paper Abstract:

Cyclical, famines are a symbolic element of Cape Verdean culture, a phenomenon that belongs to both collective and individual memory. Famines are an object of artistic sublimation and regarded as an identity symbol. Located in the Central Atlantic, the archipelago was colonially exploited by the Portuguese for over four centuries, a historical process that, alongside the country’s climatic and geographic constraints, can be identified as one of the major drivers for the famine's cyclicality. Part of the country’s history, great famines and the tales surrounding them indicate that the poor administration of such events, the lack of natural resources and the oppression of the regime led to the assimilation of such phenomena as inevitable and directly associated with Cape Verdean identity and daily life on the islands.

This analysis is centered on three different dimensions in which “historicizing hunger” takes place: the collective, the individual and the institutional. Resulting from two years of ethnographic research in Santiago, each dimension was addressed through multiple methodologies ranging from fieldwork to interviews and archival research. By comparing these many testimonies and documents, some major issues will be discussed: what do the disparities indicate regarding official history and its refutation? Considering the gaps between versions, what impact does research on social memory has on potential rewritings of colonial histories?

This attempt in bridging collective memory, official records and individual experiences will also address the treatment of such data, methodological dilemmas and the ways in which local memory changed my ethnographic experience.

Paper Short Abstract:

This paper focuses on Manfredonia, Italy, where the legacy of the petrochemical industry is divisive. The closure of the plant in the 1990s, partly as a result of protests and the outcome of the trial of the plant's managers, led to a conflict between workers and activists, mistakenly called 'environmentalists'. This rupture was reiterated through the selection of memories and actors that produced heroes and villains in the public arena, whose social and moral complexity anthropology seeks to explore.

Paper Abstract:

This paper illustrates the case of a town in southern Italy, Manfredonia, where the ENI petrochemical industrial past is far from being a source of pride. It is a cumbersome, divisive and still present legacy, considering the clean-up still underway since the factory accelerated its shutdown and dismantling in the mid-1990s, also as a result of the strong popular protest. Since then, in Manfredonia, which did not cultivate an environmentalist sensitivity, the fracture between the petrochemical plant employees and those who mobilised for its closure has widened. Indeed, the final break came with the acceptance of the compensation offered by ENI to all workers and families who had participated in the lawsuit against the managers for negligence, with the exception of a single widow. The workers and families who had defended their jobs at the end of the 1980s were later stigmatised as the 'villains' of the city, who were monetising their dignity, their own health and that of the entire population. In response, a grassroots youth movement emerged that patrimonialised the figure of the 'heroic' worker claiming justice. The recent social research carried out in Manfredonia contributed to the marginalisation of the former workers on the public stage. In this way, the news of anthropological research on industrialisation has become an opportunity for them to redeem their memory. The research is an attempt to bring out the complexity of the social and moral nuances of the events that are attempted to be stitched together in the polyphonic ethnographic process.

Paper Short Abstract:

The paper discusses methodological issues of a three-decade long ethnographic fieldwork and archival research on war traumas of the Hungarian population of a multi-ethnic region in Transylvania/Romania in 1944, buried in individual memory and incompatible with the official memory policy of the state.

Paper Abstract:

The presenter has been conducting systematic ethnographic-anthropological fieldwork in Kalotaszeg, a Hungarian minority region of Transylvania, Romania for three decades. In Northern Transylvania the dual change of rule during the Second World War, between 1940 and 1944, caused serious conflicts in Hungarian-Romanian relationship. The region under study, which lies on the border between wartime Hungary and Romania, was particularly exposed to atrocities, and the aftermath of the conflicts still lingered beneath the surface in the decades following the war. The historical experience of the atrocities and looting in the autumn of 1944 was an unspeakable trauma for the Hungarian population of the region. Deeply embedded in individual memory, and even obscured from generational family memory, the experience was not only incompatible with the official Romanian memory policy of the socialist period, but until recently there was no public opportunity for communal remembrance and community-level remediation of the pain. The subject was a sensitive taboo that only slowly came to light after several encounters, after gaining trust, in in-depth conversations where audio recording was almost impossible. I collated the narratives of the conflicts, collected in the field using oral history methods, with a group of written source materials that I was fortunate enough to find. In my presentation, I will discuss methodological issues in ethnographic fieldwork on war trauma, the validation of soft data collected in the field and a self-reflexive evaluation of my position as a researcher.

Paper Short Abstract:

This presentation explores the ethical challenges of researching Roma community memories in Vilnius, focusing on police violence and rewriting dominant narratives while ensuring safety of research participants.

Paper Abstract:

Public discourse on the Roma community in Lithuania, particularly regarding the former Roma settlement of Parubanka in Vilnius, that was demolished in 2020, has been mostly framed as a space of crime, deviance, and social disorder. This dominant narrative contrasts sharply with the memories and experiences of the community, who remember and experience Parubanka differently.

In this presentation, I will discuss my ongoing doctoral research exploring the interactions between Roma and Lithuanian law enforcement, focusing on inclusion/exclusion practices and the ethical challenges of representing these experiences. Having researched and worked with the Vilnius Roma community, particularly from Parubanka, for nearly a decade, I have established trust and rapport with community members, enabling me to gather and amplify their often-unheard voices. However, this research has become more ethically complex. While the public perceives Parubanka through a lens of danger and fear, my research participants share local memories of police violence, humiliation and human rights violations. The challenge lies in how to communicate these findings in a way that rewrites the dominant narratives and offers counter-narratives to the dominating dehumanizing and stigmatizing imaginary of the place and its people, without compromising the safety and confidentiality of the research participants. Reflecting on the ethical dilemmas I face, I aim to discuss how to tell these stories and local memories in ways that open space for justice and dialogue, rather than perpetuating mistrust and further harm.

Paper Short Abstract:

This presentation discusses the kinds of stories and identities that dominated in the Vilnius Region among local people during the Interwar period, the Soviet times and exist nowadays. The methodological problems that arose during the anthropological fieldwork will be discussed as well. 

Paper Abstract:

During the 20th century, the Vilnius Region belonged to the Russian empire, Poland, SSRS and Lithuania. All these countries conducted very different policies towards local inhabitants. Sometimes they manifested as discrimination on a daily basis against a certain group of people. They were subjected to brutal repressions (such as the extermination of local Jews, collectivisation, deportation to Siberia or forced repatriation to PLR after World War II). Local people were voiceless and powerless against these states and forces. 

Under such circumstances, many people avoided clearly expressing their identity and instead identified themselves as “locals” (pol. tutejszy) and created stories about themselves as locals. 

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, under new cultural and political circumstances, people (especially the young generation, born after 1990) again, began to unwrite their identity and stories about themselves. 

During my presentation using social memory (Assmann 2006) and identity theories, I would like to discuss the kind of stories and identities that dominated in the Vilnius Region during the Interwar period, during Soviet times and exist nowadays. I will also include methodological problems during my fieldwork.

The data I will present was collected during my anthropological fieldwork in rural areas of the Vilnius region (from 2017 - 2019 and again in 2024), focusing on biographical interviews, observation, and participant observation among the young people I studied.

This project has received funding from the Research Council of Lithuania (LMTLT), agreement No S-PD-24-572024-01-22 (Identities of National Minority Youths: From Regional to Supranational (the Case of Šalcininkai District)).

Paper Short Abstract:

In the context of the study of the local Holocaust memory in Hungary, I analyse research participants’ narratives of ignorance, mistrust, and refusal to speak about the subject, as well as protest memory strategies that go against the canon of official Hungarian memory politics.

Paper Abstract:

With the support of the Visegrad Fund, I conducted research using qualitative social science methods to explore meanings of the Holocaust memory in Hungary. The novelty of the research was the application of a socio-cultural anthropological methods and fieldwork to the analysis of the memory of the Shoah in various localities in Hungary. In this presentation and subsequent paper, I will analyse narratives related to the Holocaust memory in Hungary from a methodological perspective. While during my fieldwork, most of my interlocutors refused to participate in a recorded interview, the narratives analyzed in this paper are such that my research participants had have not shared before with anyone outside their family and private circles. The narratives that these interlocutors repeatedly used in relation to the research topic are those of ignorance, mistrust and fear related to the memory of the Shoah. Other than interpreting these, I will also explore the narratives in which my research participants explained why they did not want to participate in the interview, as well as protest memory strategies that go against the canon of official Hungarian memory politics and the shifting of historical-social responsibility for the Holocaust. Inextricably linked to these, I will examine the social context and patterns of the identity politics that characterise and shape the atmosphere of Holocaust remembrance in contemporary Hungary. Finally, I will reflect upon the methodological and ethical dilemmas of my research, arising from my position as a researcher and my relations to the research subject and participants.

Paper Short Abstract:

This study explores how Sephardic Jews from Tangier and Cuba reinterpret "Sephardic" as something dynamically enacted rather than merely inherited from the past. Through memory and practices, they challenge static frameworks, showing how Sefarad is actively shaped in their present realities

Paper Abstract:

The term "Sephardic" is often treated as a static designation tied to historical legacies of Spain and the Jewish diaspora. This research challenges such interpretations, showing how being "Sephardic" is actively constructed and reinterpreted in the present by individuals and communities. Focusing on the experiences of Sephardic Jews from Tangier and Cuba, this study examines how their connections to heritage are reshaped in the context of migration, as the vast majority left these locations during the second half of the 20th century due to shifting political, social, and economic circumstances.

Rather than being a fixed or inherited category, "Sephardic" serves as a framework through which individuals articulate their connections to what they perceive as Hispanic traditions. This includes the selective incorporation of elements from their surrounding cultures, such as gift-giving during Epiphany or culinary practices like Iberian ham. These practices are reframed as markers of their Hispano-Sephardic belonging, despite not being inherently "Hispanic" or traditionally Jewish. Such reinterpretations highlight how individuals use memory and heritage to navigate complex social realities and affirm a sense of continuity.

This study reveals how untold personal narratives and overlooked perspectives expose the evolving and performative nature of what it means to be Sephardic. By tracing these processes in a migratory framework, the research sheds light on the politics of memory and the ongoing reconfiguration of cultural belonging in response to present-day challenges.

Paper Short Abstract:

The crisis unfolding in Cuba is a silent and underrepresented one. Women’s embodied and emplaced memories and experiences of crisis speak of the decline and transformations of the revolutionary project, in stark contrast with official narratives of continuity put forward by the Cuban government.

Paper Abstract:

In post-Covid Cuba, memories of the Special Period, the name given by Fidel Castro to the period of economic hardships that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union, Cuba’s main trade partner, became a barometer for measuring the scale of ongoing predicaments. Currently, the multiple crises that affect the country, the agonizing decline of the Cuban Revolution, and an acutely perceived sense of rupture permeate the life stories of ordinary Cubans on the island and abroad. For Cubans who stayed on the island, memories of the Special Period trigger both a sense of nostalgia and a reluctant acceptance of worsening living conditions. For those who decided to leave, they became a catalyst, even when they were too young to remember the early 90s.

For Cuban women, the ongoing crisis governing economic and social life results in overwork, lack of security, and a life lived in constant tension and exhaustion, facing physical and mental health problems aggravated by the chronicized scarcity that the island had been confronted with over the past decades.

In this paper I address women’s private, intimate, embodied memories and experiences of crisis as a counterpoint to the collectivist symbolism and the government’s reaffirmation of the country’s strong attachment to revolutionary project, which relied upon an ultra-virile sense of national identity and centered male, heterosexual bodies in the construction of the Cuban nation-state.