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71076-01 - Forschungsseminar: Engagement and the Ethnographic Imagination (Anthropology Field School) (4 KP)
| Semester | Frühjahrsemester 2025 |
| Angebotsmuster | unregelmässig |
| Dozierende |
Selina Maya Bloch (selinamaya.bloch@unibas.ch)
George-Paul Meiu (gp.meiu@unibas.ch, BeurteilerIn) |
| Inhalt | Ethnographic research requires us to listen closely to what our interlocutors say and engage astutely with what they do in order to decenter ourselves jointly and transcend rigid boundaries between “them” and “us.” Organized by the Institute of Social Anthropology at the University of Basel, Switzerland, the Field School Series pursues the transformative potential of what Mwenda Ntarangwi calls “thick listening” and attunes us to alternative ways of perceiving and knowing. In collaboration with scholars, artists, activists, and members of the communities in which the school will be held, we will listen and write around and against dominant modes of constructing the world. We seek to interrupt (anthropological) boundaries between “home” and the “field”–indeed, pursue ways to “free our imaginations” (to borrow Binyavanga Wainaina’s phrase) by exercising a question-driven ethnographic attention to the world we collectively inhabit. The second edition of the Field School Series takes on the topic of Objects, Time,Transmission. It explores how artefacts—their materiality, surfaces, and substances, but also their investment with meaning, affect, and desire—shape ways of being in time. How do objects help us craft and anchor the temporalities of inheritance, genealogy, and attachment? And how are histories of social ruptures, failures, and discontinuities transmitted through objects? Over seven days in the Transylvanian village of Criț, Brașov county, Romania, MA students, researchers, and faculty from Switzerland and Romania, among other countries will be in conversation with local NGO workers, artists, activists, and community members. We will explore the transmission of objects as not merely ways to pass down property, rights, and status, but also as an important mode of subject formation that involves class, gender, ethnicity, and race as key modalities of belonging. Questions pertaining to how houses or land, cars or cattle, cloth or photographs are imagined and transmitted tie thus centrally to broader questions of time and temporality; memory, heritage, and commemoration; escapism and the crafting of alternative worlds, among other things. Since 2000, Transylvania, historically associated with a multicultural population, including the distinct Germanic culture of the so-called “Transylvanian Saxons” (German: Siebenbürgen Sachsen), Hungarians, Romanians, and Roma has emerged as a global tourist destination. Villages became UNESCO-registered heritage sites, prompting domestic and international tourists drawn by the romantic fantasy of a precommunist rural Saxon culture. In the late post-socialist context, a growing desire for the consumption of the material memories of a glorified pre-communist past has also generated new antagonisms and exclusions. Unemployed peasant youth who, since the early 2000s, have migrated seasonally to work in Germany, Italy, and Spain, return to their village to claim homes and property in ways that fuel conflicts with emerging elites invested in heritage preservation. The ensuing tensions have made objects—the way they are acquired, passed down, and deployed—central to emerging inequalities, with their distinct forms of sexualization and racialization. Attending to the directions and desires that drive objects is attending to how we reimagine the world. Speakers in the school will include both anthropologists who research locally and scholars specialized in these topics elsewhere. |
| Literatur | Anghel, Remus Gabriel. 2013. Romanians in Western Europe: Migration, Status Dilemmas, and Transnational Connections. Lanham: Lexington. Grama, Emanuela. 2019. Socialist Heritage: The Politics of Past and Place in Romania. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Kideckel, David A. 2008. Getting By in Postsocialist Romania: Labor, the Body, and Working-class Culture. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Pavelescu, Anca and Manuela Boatcǎ. 2022. Creolizing the Modern: Transylvania across Empires. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Verdery, Katherine. 1999. The Political Lives of Dead Bodies: Reburial and Postsocialist Change. New York: Columbia University Press. |
| Bemerkungen | For students, the stay in Criț (23.-29. June 2025) is preceded by 3 short mandatory preparatory meetings throughout Spring semester (February-May 2024), on selected Friday mornings (held in hybrid format in Basel and on Zoom). During these initial meetings, we will discuss readings that offer some background to the topics and the region as well as logistical issues related to travel. |
| Teilnahmevoraussetzungen | This is a field school research seminar that will take place in the village of Criț, Romania, between 23 - 29 June 2025. Students can register for this seminar only on the basis of application (following formal acceptance to the summer field school program). The seminar is only open to MA students with a very strong background in social anthropology. The Selection Committee will assign 5 spots to MA students from the University of Basel and 5 spots to MA students from universities in Romania. To apply, please submit (i) a short CV and (ii) a letter of intent (max. 1-2 pages, single-spaced), detailing your training in the concepts and methods of anthropology and other critical approaches as well as how the learning experience offered by the school might resonate with your own interests. You may also include embodied knowledge/experience and expertise. Applications are due 10 January 2025 to ethnologie@unibas.ch. Results will be announced within a week from the deadline. The Institute of Social Anthropology at the University of Basel will cover the travel costs and arrange lodging and meals for all students involved. |
| Anmeldung zur Lehrveranstaltung | Students can register for this seminar only on the basis of application (following formal acceptance to the summer field school program). To apply, please submit (i) a short CV and (ii) a letter of intent (max. 1-2 pages, single-spaced), detailing your training in the concepts and methods of anthropology and other critical approaches as well as how the learning experience offered by the school might resonate with your own interests. You may also include embodied knowledge/experience and expertise. Applications are due 10 January 2025 to ethnologie@unibas.ch. Results will be announced within a week from the deadline. |
| Unterrichtssprache | Englisch |
| Einsatz digitaler Medien | kein spezifischer Einsatz |
| Intervall | Wochentag | Zeit | Raum |
|---|
Keine Einzeltermine verfügbar, bitte informieren Sie sich direkt bei den Dozierenden.
| Module |
Modul: Theory and General Anthropology (Master Studienfach: Anthropology) |
| Prüfung | Lehrveranst.-begleitend |
| An-/Abmeldung zur Prüfung | Anmelden: Belegen; Abmelden: nicht erforderlich |
| Wiederholungsprüfung | keine Wiederholungsprüfung |
| Skala | Pass / Fail |
| Belegen bei Nichtbestehen | beliebig wiederholbar |
| Zuständige Fakultät | Philosophisch-Historische Fakultät, studadmin-philhist@unibas.ch |
| Anbietende Organisationseinheit | Fachbereich Ethnologie |