CREOLE Intensive Program (IP) 2018

ETHNOGRAPHIC NARRATIVES:
STORIES, BIOGRAPHIES, AND PLOTS


16-20 July 2018
Institute of Social Anthropology, University of Bern, Switzerland

We are delighted to host this year’s Creole Intensive Program at the University of Bern. It will provide students with a great opportunity to discuss and deepen their knowledge about ethnographic narratives and narrative-based research methods.

Narratives constitute and shape the ways in which a person articulates, interprets, and makes sense of her/his personal, social and environmental lives. The very act of storytelling - in which notions of memory, desires, hopes, fiction and human connection converge in the intersection between the personal and political - acknowledges that we attribute meaning to the world through constructing a narrative of it. Recent approaches such as Feld (2012), Rapport (1994, 2017), Stoller (2014) and Jackson (2002, 2013, 2013a) refer to storytelling as valuable approach to understanding the affects and uncertainties of people’s daily life.

But narrative is more than storytelling and the ascription of meaning: it is also an anthropological concept based on the attempt to understand social life in general and moral life in particular. In also ascribing a communal and pluralistic dimension to narrative beyond the personal, we invite participants in the 2018 IP meeting to also consider the importance of action in the public realm and highlight the ethical consequences of storytelling. Thus, narrative understood as an analytical category – and particularly so in anthropological analyses – often goes beyond mere storytelling and encompasses all sorts of verbal and nonverbal forms of communication and interactions.

While the compilation and interpretation of interlocutors’ narratives might have traditionally been restricted to biographies, vignettes, micro-histories, and/or oral interview material, anthropologists today face a multitude of newly generated source materials and means of communication and self-representation, ranging from WhatsApp- and Facebook groups, to Snapchat and videos shot by our interlocutors themselves. Does the array and mass of narratives produced and distributed via social media change the way we, as anthropologists, go about collecting and interpreting these narratives? Does this, in consequence, necessitate new ways of re-assembling and coherently re-presenting our fieldwork data? Can or should we even trigger alternative narratives, for example, through practices of re-enactment?

We ask participants to engage with the ethics and politics of ethnographic narrative and storytelling (Jackson, Michael 2013: The Politics of Storytelling) and we also aim at investigating analytic approaches to narrative beyond discourse analysis. This may include performative, sensory and/or experiential practices and methodologies.

Video made by Saskya Tschebann
Timetable
 Day 1
Monday 16 July 2018
9:00-10:00 Welcome
Welcome and general information about the IP in Bern
10:00-10:30 Teghan Marie Oswald Allowed to Remember: Politics of Memory and Familial Histories of Descendants of Displaced Germans
10:30-11:00
Break
 
11:00-11:30 Kacper Dziekan
Collective Memory – rethinking an old concept in 21st century
11:30-12:00 Tadeusz Maszewski
The Hindu diaspora in South Africa: questions of group identity
12:00-12:30
David Šebenik
Marginality of LGBTQI+ Migrants and Refugees In The EU
12:30-13:30
Lunch

13:30-14:30
Marie-Pierre Gibert
How can we talk about what we do? Narrativity and work
14:30-17:00
Excursion: guided tour and tasting
www.kreislauf.bio
 Day 2
Tuesday 17 July 2018
09:00-10:00 Steve Coleman
Condensed and insurgent narratives
10:00-10:30 Katia Kashtan
The Ban on the Veil. Meaning of the new law to Muslim communities in the West (Case study in Bern, Switzerland)
10:30-11:00
Break
11:00-11:30
Cristina Rodríguez Reche
Daugther of Mixed Unions of Muslim Immigrants and non-Muslim Natives in Barcelona and Granada: Dynamics of Religious Mixedness and Gender
11:30-12:00
Saskya Tschebann
`Till nature do us part. Case study of the cemetery „cimetière naturel de Souché“ in Niort, France
12:00-12:30
Salome Kalandadze
The Role of Media Representation on Ethnic Minorities: Case Study in Slovenia
12:30-13:30
Lunch
13:30-17:30
Workshop by Dr. Darcy Alexandra
Bern’s Colonial Past: workshop and alternative city tour (http://www.cooperaxion.org/schweiz/)
Day 3
Wednesday 18 July 2018
09:00-10:00
Kamila Grześkowiak
Researcher and "Others" – social media and autoethnographic experience
10:00-10:30
Mateusz Kulesza
How transition from analog to digital photography influenced methods of anthropological research
10:30-11:00
Break
11:00-11:30
Anna Fierz
Doing radio in Vienna: The free radio station Orange 94.0 and its voices
11:30-12:00
Rebecca Picallo Gil
Can we drive to a sustainable future?
12:00-12:30
Kaja Štolfa
Sustainable consumption in Slovenia and Austria – the case of Zero Waste movement; comparative analyses
12:30-14:00
Lunch
 
14:00-15:00
Jaka Repič
Place-making and return mobilities among Slovenians in Argentina
15:00-15:30
Break
15:30-16:00
Juliette Lamarche
Fast versus Sustainable Fashion. Anthropological approach to a new marketing strategy
16:00
Planned: drinks and snacks
all staff and students of the institute are welcome to join
Day 4
Thursday 19 July 2018
 
09:00-10:00
Seda Yuksel
Ethnography in Times and Places in Turmoil: Narratives of War and Entrepreneurialism
10:00-10:30
Maria Arnelid
“Where doing good meets modern technology" - social entrepreneurship, innovation and the vision of a brighter tomorrow
10:30-11:00
Break
 
11:00-11:30
Judit Gerse
Lost in conspiracy: the Hungarian state propaganda after 2015 and the case of the “Röszke 11”
11:30-12:00
Małgorzata Kowalska
Storytelling and collaboration in anthropological research
12:30-14:00
Lunch
 
14:00-16:00
Student evaluation / Meeting Steering Committee
including break
16:00
SUB-Party
 
Day 5
Friday 20 July 2018
 
09:00-10:00
Ana Svetel
Perceptions of perfection: Images of the Nordic countries in the contemporary nonfiction
10:00-10:30
Cristopher Kobler
Ayahuasca for tea time– When different epistemologies meet
10:30-11:00
Break
 
11:00-11:30
Aleksy Szymkiewicz
Corporate body
11:30-12:30
Olivier Givre
Anthropology: science and society. "Learning by doing" anthropology
12:30-13:30
Lunch
 
13:30
Final Session

Feld, Steven 32012 (1982): Sound and Sentiment. Birds, Weeping, Poetics, and Song in Kaluli Expression, thirtieth anniversary ed. with a new introduction. Durham [N.C.]: Duke University Press.

Jackson, Michael 2013: The Politics of Storytelling. Variations on a Theme by Hannah Arendt, 2nd edition. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press.

Jackson, Michael 2013a: The Wherewithal of Life. Ethics, Migration, and the Question of Well-Being. Berkeley etc.: University of California Press.

Jackson, Michael 2002: The Politics of Storytelling. Violence, Transgression, and Intersubjectivity. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press.

Rapport, Nigel and Morton Nielsen (Eds.) 2017: The Composition of Anthropology: How anthropological texts are written. New York: Routledge.

Rapport, Nigel 1994: The Prose and the Passion. Anthropology, Literature and the Writing of E.M. Forster. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Stoller, Paul 2014: Yaya's Story: The Quest for Well‐Being in the World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Acknowledgments
We are grateful to our CREOLE partners and for the financial and organizational support from the University of Bern, including the International Office of the University of Bern, the Faculty of Humanities and the Institute of Social Anthropology including its student council.