Togetherness, Solidarity, Relational Knowledge. Towards a Convivial Anthropology

Konferencja ma pokazać sieć inspiracji intelektualnych i współpracy badawczych, które budują nas jako badaczki i badaczy i współtworzą nasz Instytut. Chcemy wskazać kierunki, w których podróżowaliśmy, intelektualnie i w przestrzeni i przypomnieć o naukowym pokrewieństwie i zaciągniętych długach. Postulujemy, aby w czasach neoliberalnego współzawodnictwa i rozliczalności, wnosić do nauki więcej współbycia i solidarności. Inspirując się ideą antropologii wspólnego świętowania, dążymy do współpracy, koleżeńskości i szukania powiązań pomiędzy różnymi tematami, obszarami wiedzy i regionami.

Konferencja jest otwarta dla wszystkich chętnych. Prosimy o rejestrację: link

PROGRAM:

konferencja_program.pdf

JUNE 9, 2025 – DOBRA 55, ROOM 0.410

10:00 – 10:30 Opening of the Conference

10:30 – 12:00 Minds, Bodies, Environments: Anthropological Knowledge-Making in Unstable Worlds
Kirsten Hastrup, Ewa Klekot, Tomasz Rakowski

This panel will focus on possibilities of anthropological awareness and knowledge-making that can be raised and developed in unstable worlds of the present time. Some new approaches to first-hand ethnographic experiences will be invoked - in order to build a larger frame for ethnographic, pre-textual and spatially de-centered methods and anthropological knowledge-making. Finally, in this context, the participants will also discuss their views on the topics of uncertainty, change, liquidity, unobvious sociality, and ontological pluriversalism.

12:30 – 14:00 Gender Research, Gender Wars
Agnieszka Kościańska, Agnieszka Kosiorowska-Le Rall, Nicolette Makovicky, Frances Pine

The last decade has seen a vivid global debate on “gender.” Religious leaders and conservative politicians presented gender as dangerous ideology, while feminists and LGBTQ+ activists argued for gendered emancipation and rights. In this roundtable, we reflect on gender research in anthropology and ask: What is it about the very term “gender” that provokes this kind of reaction and usage? How might anthropological research contribute to the better understanding of the political and public debates taking place over this term?

15:00 – 16:30 Uncertain Identities, Questionable Certainties. Childhood Studies in a Messy World
Nicoletta Diasio, Ewa Maciejewska-Mroczek, Magdalena Radkowska-Walkowicz, Marta Rakoczy

This panel brings together experienced researchers to share insights from their work involving children. Following a brief presentation by Nicoletta Diasio on her research, the discussion will be structured around four key questions:
Why? Why is it important to conduct research with children?
How? How should research with children be conducted?
What? What areas of childhood studies are still underexplored, and what topics are the panelists most interested in researching next?
What for? What are the broader goals of childhood studies? What is the future of the field?

17:00 – 18:30 Performance 'Mycelium of Dreams', Węgajty Theatre

Dreams of different individuals can interact and merge with one another (as suggested by Bruno Schulz’s notion of “from dream to dream”). As if through underground, invisible trajectories of mycelium, dreams can connect with each other in surprising ways. Behind the seemingly light formula of simple scenic situations, etudes which have the lightness of conventional ritual actions, there hides a great load of meanings and questions. The titular mycelium, about which so much is said today in the context of cooperation, effectiveness, or survival, reveals its dark side.

Performed by: Zuzanna Dobrzańska, Maria Legeżyńska, Julia Lizurek, Wojciech Marczak, Jan Mrazek, Agnieszka Porowska, Tomasz Rakowski, Erdmute Sobaszek, Wacław Sobaszek, Eter Staniszewska. Stage direction: Wacław Sobaszek

18:30 – 20:30 Gala Dinner

JUNE 10, 2025 – DOBRA 55, ROOM 0.410

10:00 – 11:00 Future is Now: Anticipatory Anthropology
Anna Horolets, Alexandra Schwell

Anthropologists’ interest in the future has gained momentum in the context of multiple crises and catastrophes ranging from financial to refugee crises, from ecological breakdown to the global backlash of the far right. Future surfaces in anthropological writing as both threatening and hopeful (Appadurai 2013; Bryant & Knight 2019). As ‘a cultural fact’ it can be driving force for fear- mongering or ‘ethics of possibility’, depending on the local context, actions and values. In this panel we focus on the two ethnographic cases that bring to the fore the intricacies of the future and affective work of anticipation. Anna Horolets looks at the ‘reification of the future’ during the refugee crisis of 2015-16 in Europe (based on Mica et al. 2021). Alexandra Schwell takes state agencies' precaution measures for a Europe-wide power outage as a starting point to delve into the affective dimension of urgency politics, focusing on the power of fantasies and a blackout imaginary.

11:30 – 13:00 The End of Empathy?
Elizabeth Dunn, Iwona Kaliszewska

Empathy—or the imaginative projection of oneself into the life circumstances of another—has always been at the heart of the anthropological project. Today, however, we see an attack not just on particular kinds of empathy, such as empathy for refugees or for the poor, but an attack on empathy as a mode of thinking and feeling. Elon Musk, for example, said, “The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy,” and pledged to destroy empathy as a fundamental driver of government policy. How do we define empathy under such circumstances? How do we defend it as a core mode of engaging with others, given the current reign of selfishness and predation as modes of governing? How should empathy for others—including others we disagree with or dislike—inform anthropology today?

14:00 – 15:30 Contemporary Issues in V4 Countries
Juraj Buzalka, Jakub Grygar, Anna Malewska-Szałygin, Elena Soler

In this panel, members of the V4Net network affiliated with the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology will present findings from recent research conducted in the Czech Republic, Poland, and Slovakia. The studies explore contemporary socio-economic processes that connect global and local dimensions, complex political transformations, issues of collective memory and silencing, as well as forced migration driven by political events.

16:00 – 17:30 Subversion and Submission: Who Really Controls Urban Heritage?
Michael Herzfeld, Helena Patzer, Jaro Stacul

Drawing upon ethnographic research conducted in several European and Southeast Asian venues, the panel members discuss the processes through which nation-states place objects and people in and outside the category of 'heritage'. They explore the ways in which various kinds of agency negotiate the meanings of heritage through rhetoric and other practices both shared and contested by nation-state authorities and local communities. In these processes, idealized notions of community are both contested and modified by those who are 'evicted from history' or refuse to be associated with hegemonic narratives.

JUNE 11, 2025 – NATIONAL ETHNOGRAPHIC MUSEUM, KREDYTOWA 1, CINEMA HALL

10:00 – 11:30 Embodied Ethnographies: Sensory Methodologies After the Crisis of Representation
Piotr Cichocki, Agnes Kędzierska-Manzon, Sergio González Varela, Paul Stoller

The discussion explores how sensory and embodiment-based anthropology can revitalize the discipline amid the crisis of representation, which critiques its colonial roots and calls for a toward self-identification. It also examines how cross-regional collaborations—especially among postcolonial nations, African diasporas, Eastern Europe, and former colonial powers—can renew ethnographic practice through empathy, respect, and a more committed engagement

12:00 – 13:30 What is Religion and Why Bother to Study It?
Andriy Fert, Agnieszka Halemba, Zuzanna Bogumił, Catherine Wanner

This convivial panel opens a reflective discussion among scholars exploring how and why we came to study religion. We focus on the often-overlooked, everyday forms in which religion appears—in heritage, public life, or even in what is labeled as non-religion. Drawing on fieldwork in Eastern Europe and Eurasia, and on our collaboration within the Working Group on Lived Religion, we consider how religion persists, adapts, and becomes entangled in broader cultural and political processes. We also ask whether various ‘post-’ frameworks—post-socialist, post-secular, post-colonial—help us make sense of how religion functions today.

13:30 - Curatorial tour of the exhibition 'Two Faces of the Folk Artist’ by Ewa Klekot at the National Ethnographic Museum

To take part in the tour, please sign up at the registration desk.