Browsing Conference Contributions /KS GPS by Issue Date

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Balkan Anthropology: A Response to Aleksandar Bošković

Povrzanovic Frykman, Maja
Journal article in Anthropology Today (2005) ARTICLE

English abstract: This is a debate article, reacting to an article published in the same journal.

Power, Citizenship and Individual Development Plans. Poster presented...

Vallberg Roth, Ann-Christine; Stoltz, Pauline (2007) conference
PAPER

Migrants and objects: Material practices of being and belonging in tr...
Povrzanovic Frykman, Maja Conference paper in Challenging Integration: Culture Research and the European Context, International conference marking the 60th anniversary of the Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Research, Zagreb, 2-4 October 2008 : Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Research, Zagreb (2008)	conference PAPER

English abstract:

A common way of reasoning about migrants and objects would be that objects signal who they are, and are good to remember with. This paper pursues an interest in how objects constitute the world that migrants experience in its materiality, and how they enable them to be embedded in transnational social fields of their own making. Recognising “the synthetic capability of actual material forms (rather than the interpretive tropes that have arisen around them) to combine perspectives and domains of knowledge” (Geismar and Horst 2004: 6), I suggests one of the possible directions of research in the field of migration that might not only enrich our ethnographic insights, but hopefully lead to new understandings. The impetus for this paper lies in my fieldwork-based insights into the predicaments of the “ethnic lens” which – if forced upon what we can see in the field – limits the possibilities of understanding. Along with researchers, migrants, too, engage in discourses in which ethnicity and national origin loom large – either of “good immigrants” within the multicultural institutions, or of, e.g., “good Croats” within the homeland politics encompassing diasporas. But they also engage in a number of practices that have little or nothing to do with their ethnicity. Whatever people do is sustained by or inscribed in a particular materiality. In order to give those practices an equal chance in our constructions of the field, more attention should be devoted to what people actually do – here with respect to their efforts to keep vital connections among different locations encompassed by their activities. Writing about migrants without relying on the concepts of ethnicity and identity? My effort to step beyond the presumption about ethnicity as a necessary element (often even a basis) of explanations of migrants’ behaviour, convenes with Jean-Pierre Warnier’s claim that material culture is “not only good to think with, to categorize, to signify, to communicate, or to produce identity, but also to move and act upon, against, together, or with” material objects (Warnier 2001: 6). I propose that empirical interest should be directed to objects the migrants acquire and use in different locations of their lives.

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Language, History and Cultural Identities in the Caucasus. Abstracts.
Vamling, Karina; Malmö University. Faculty of Culture and Society : Malmö University, School of International Migration and Ethnic Relations (IMER) (2005) Language, History and Cultural Identities in the Caucasus, 17-20 June 2005, Sweden	other

Balkan Anthropology: A Response to Aleksandar Bošković
Povrzanovic Frykman, Maja Journal article in Anthropology Today (2005)	ARTICLE

English abstract:	This is a debate article, reacting to an article published in the same journal.

Prospects for Peace in Chechnya?
Magnusson, Märta-Lisa Conference paper in "Searching for Peace in Chechnya- Swiss Initiatives and Experiences". Swisspeace Conference Paper.;No. 1, 2006 : Swisspeace (2006) Swisspeace Foundation Annual Conference November 8, 2005	conference PAPER