Paper Short Abstract:

Cognitive approaches to religion(s) often engage in generalised explanations about its/their nature and features, overlooking historical and cultural differences. The aim of this paper is to challenge these approaches, offering a more nuanced and context-based analysis of religious phenomena.

Paper Abstract:

Due to the lack of an agreed and conclusive definition of the concept of religion(s), different disciplines explore and engage in debates regarding its/their nature and features.

In the realms of anthropology, religious studies, and folklore studies, the topic of religion(s) is approached through different ethnographic instances, with limited attention to universal features of the religious experiences attested historically and geographically. Conversely, other approaches based on cognitive studies and related disciplines tend to focus on the universality and evolutionary origins of religion(s), attempting to provide explanations for the similarities and scopes of religious experiences.

Cognitive approaches to religion(s) are successful in the framework of hard sciences, due to their reliance or association to familiar scientific paradigms, such as evolutionary theory. These approaches can also rely on ethnographic data and valid arguments, showing nonetheless theoretical limits. Specifically, cognitive approaches offer a too generalised and fundamentally essentialised view on religion as a cross-cultural byproduct of human cognition (Guthrie 1993, Boyer 1994).

The aim of this paper is to challenge the limits of cognitive approaches, offering a more nuanced and context-based analysis of the concept of religion(s). I argue that the concept of religion(s) itself needs to be critically discussed and engaged, before being understood in the different cultural and historical contexts where the so-called religious phenomena are found.

In this regard, historical and ethnographic cases (specifically from Northeast India and Bhutan) will be explored and integrated in the theoretical discussions and debates about religion(s).

Paper Short Abstract:

This paper explores how marriage practices among Kosovo Albanians in Switzerland reshape kinship and ethnic identities. Based on fieldwork, it examines how marital choices renegotiate cultural norms, challenge static notions of identity, and reveal the fluidity of belonging in a transnational context.

Paper Abstract:

This paper examines how marriage practices among Kosovo Albanians in Switzerland engage with the dynamic processes of "unwriting" kinship and ethnic identities. Drawing from my ongoing PhD research, including four months of intensive fieldwork in the canton of Zurich, I analyze how marriages serve as a space where traditional understandings of kinship could be renegotiated, ethnic identities redefined, and social boundaries reimagined or alternatively, where these dimensions risk being completely disrupted.

By focusing on the lived experiences and narratives of individuals within this diaspora community, the study explores how marital choices challenge rigid cultural frameworks and disrupt static notions of identity—particularly when individuals choose partners outside their ethnic group. Such decisions often navigate competing social and cultural expectations, which can simultaneously weaken connections to kinship ties in both the homeland and host country.

Through an ethnographic approach that integrates in-depth interviews and participant observation, this paper engages with the broader theme of "unwriting" by questioning established paradigms of kinship and identity in the anthropology of migration and diaspora studies. It demonstrates that marriage, as a deeply personal yet profoundly social act, is a powerful lens through which to examine the fluidity and complexity of belonging, cultural continuity, and adaptation in transnational contexts.

This contribution offers a fresh perspective on the intersection of kinship, ethnicity, and migration. By rethinking conventional narratives, it enriches our understanding of identity formation and the evolving dynamics of kinship in diasporic communities.

Paper Short Abstract:

Drawing from the analysis of oral histories on the intergenerational mediation of memories of Stalinist repression in Finland, this paper aims to unwrite the dominant trauma narrative within memory studies and asks how violent pasts could be studied beyond it.

Paper Abstract:

Recent critiques within the field of cultural memory studies have challenged the dominant focus on the study of difficult and traumatic pasts, by pointing to the urgency of studying also joyful and positive memories (Sindbæk Andersen & Ortner 2019). Taking this discussion as the starting point yet arguing for the need to continue studying difficult pasts, this paper aims to unwrite the dominant trauma narrative and asks how violent pasts could be studied beyond it. Drawing on the analysis of oral history interviews, recorded and archived in the Memories of the Stalinist repression -project (2021−2022) by Finnish Literature Society, my case study focuses on the intergenerational mediation of memories relating to Stalinist repression in Finland. Memory, here, is understood as the interactive and selective process of reconstructing the past, wherein individual and cultural memory are always mutually constitutive. Memories of Soviet terror have been transmitted within families as stories and silences, in many ways speaking of the painful legacies of violent pasts. However, as my tentative analysis suggests, meanings that these events gain are more diverse. Memories of Stalinist repression can also function as a site for constructing and negotiating one’s identity and belonging in relation to and in contrast with (trans)national memory cultures. I argue that a close reading of how the interlocutors position themselves vis-à-vis the dominant discourses on ethnic or national identities and categories of victimhood or perpetratorship, is key to understanding the diverse repercussions of these events for individuals as well as societies at large.

Paper Short Abstract:

Based on fieldwork conducted in Poland, this paper discusses my attempt to 'rewrite' the story of guerrilla gardening from a more-than-human perspective and using an experimental, interdisciplinary methodology. It presents the advantages, limitations, and questions opened by such rewriting.

Paper Abstract:

This paper discusses a methodological challenge I encountered in 2022-2024 during my research on guerrilla gardening, a grassroots urban activity that involves interacting with plants without the consent of 'their' landowners (Tracey, 2006). Existing scholarship discussing its political, yet human-centred potential fails to acknowledge the human-plant entanglements that create and sustain 'guerrilla' assemblages. Thus unwriting – or retelling – their stories from a new, more-than-human perspective became one of my aims. A small 'guerrilla plot' on the outskirts of Łódź (central Poland) became my field; two women who planted and cared for the 'unofficial' greenery became my research partners. With exploratory walks and in-depth interviews as initial research methods, my methodology grew as I followed the gardeners and their attentiveness (Tsing 2013). Together, we attuned our perceptions to the local more-than-human world, which revealed entangled histories, current social practices and imagined futures. Combining this with my previous encounters with philosophers and anthropologists, as well as the concepts and practices of botanists, I wrote down two 'retold' stories of guerrilla assemblages. Categories such as different temporalities, spatiality, flourishing, unruliness and their politics served as the basis for them. In addition to presenting my experimental methodology and proposed research outcomes as textual stories, I also aim to articulate some questions. How can anthropology benefit from rewriting stories in a more-than-humanly inspired way? Can research with an indeterminate and interdisciplinary methodology contribute to attempts to overcome climate crisis narratives of stagnation and mourning? What are its limitations?

Paper Short Abstract:

The project aims to unwrite narratives on modernity by proposing alternative frameworks of reference and identification. The decolonial methodology is a basis for the analysis of parallel social transformations in two distant cultural contexts—post-socialist Poland and post-colonial Vietnam.

Paper Abstract:

The research project “Towards Decolonial Modernity: A Comparative Study on the Transformation in 1990s Poland and the Đổi Mới Renovation period in Vietnam” applies postcolonial theory and decolonial methodologies to comparative analysis of processes of modernisation, which happened parallelly in distant semi-peripheral contexts with emphasis on their effects for cultural identity and artistic articulations. As such it aims to unwrite narratives on modernisation by multiplying objects of identification and constructing alternative frames of reference.

Modernity as an element constructing historical subjectivity is a factor conditioning the experience of the self. Today’s hegemonic concept of human (Sylvia Wynter, 2015) creates a heterogeneous space of unequal distribution of modernity in time and space. This inequality, rooted in the concept of world history (T. Tibebu, 2011), translates into the materiality of the global organization of bodies and legal effects (D. Ferreira da Silva, 2007).

From this perspective, modernity is gradable and refers to the scale of symbolic, ethical, and ontological judgments, which cause social, economic, legal, and cultural effects. The experience of sudden and accelerated modernization characterizes areas peripheral to modernity. The transformations in Poland and Vietnam in the 1990s are recent examples.

The novelty of the project lies in combining the experience of modernisation occurring parallelly in two culturally distant contexts (post-socialist European and post-colonial Asian) and focusing on their cultural effects.

The main hypothesis of the project is that decolonial methodology based on changing reference framework for the discussion of modernity can indicate paths for strengthening intercultural solidarity in contemporary culture.