Paper short abstract:

This paper explores how Palestinian refugees in the West Bank made sense of their recent experiences of violence and insecurity through moral narratives and practices. Meaning-making implied positioning Palestinians as morally superior to Israelis and other outsiders, when it came to life styles and politics. The camp was conceptualised as a moral community, but under constant threat.

Paper long abstract:

At times of experienced threat due to violent conflict, societies tend to watch their social boundaries and to position one's own group as morally superior to one's opponent or enemy. This paper explores one such case, namely how Palestinians in a refugee camp in the West Bank made sense of their recent experiences of violence and insecurity through moral narratives and practices. Meaning-making at the time of intifada al aqsa implied positioning Palestinians as morally superior to Israelis, but also as superior to other Arabs and Westerners, when it came to life styles and politics. There was thus an on going process to uphold circles of sameness and otherness.

The camp was conceptualised as a moral community. This community was however under constant threat; the morality and community of the camp inhabitants had always been better in past times. There were also many concerns with moral contamination due to contact with outsiders, especially Israelis. This contamination could for instance occur through work or imprisonment in Israel, but also through a more general trend of modernisation and consumerism. Most importantly, morality involved gender discourses and the concepts honour and shame as they were understood locally. The argument of the paper is that this moral boundary-making is, except from a response to a deep sense of threat against the Palestinian society, also to be understood as "an investment in the game", to quote Bourdieu, i.e. a way to augment social being and to re-establish hope.

Paper short abstract:

This paper applies Michael Billig’s idea of “banal” to how Old Colony Mennonites imagine the end of times, arguing that these imaginations need to be constantly produced, updated and rejected, creating a stock of constantly applicable scripts and scenarios that remain marginalized, waiting for the right time to be activated.

Paper long abstract:

Catherine Wessinger's 1997 invitation to research "millenialism without the mayhem" has hardly been taken up, and most studies of millenarisms have focused on the spectacular practices performed by those believing to be in the last days. This paper focuses on the construction of millennialism in a self defined pacifist, quiet and world rejecting groups: the Old Colony Mennonites. This paper argues, applying Michael Billig's idea of "banal" to the imagination of the end, that these need to be constantly produced, updated and rejected, creating a stock of constantly applicable scripts and scenarios that remain marginalized, waiting for the right time to be broadly accepted.

Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the experiences of physical pain and loss in post-Soviet Chechnya that - mediated by legal engagements (e.g. extraction of confession, attendance of trials, corresponding the legal offices) - are expressed through conspiracy narratives and dreams, two often indistinguishable.

Paper long abstract:

This paper examines the experiences bound to physical pain, feeling of loss and the consequent suffering and grief that - mediated and produced through legal engagements (undergoing extraction of confession, memorizing fictitious crime details, attending trials, writing numerous letters, applications, and complaints, walking and negotiating the legal offices in search of the disappeared or in attempts to help the sentenced ones) - find the expression in dreams and conspiracy narratives in post-Soviet Chechnya. Based on the recent fieldwork paper argues that legal system situated within the local and federal politics and schemes of corruption, and subscribing to torture, kidnapping, fabrication of evidence, staged trials and contradictory rhetoric, also offer a framework for living through such experiences. Defined by the shared corporeal practices of reading, writing, handling, seeing, feeling, and dreaming these state operations, legal engagement helps to structure emotions and ascribe meaning to suffering. It turns law into the object of affective attachment in people's daily aspiration towards the idea of justice (spravedlivost) or hope to find the missing ones, yet it is indefinitely postponed and almost never realized within the labyrinthine bureaucracies of the state. Conspiracy narratives and dreams become the medium where such tensions, uncertainties and asymmetries come to be realized and conflated.

Paper short abstract:

In 2003 occurred the allegedly worst flood in history of Santa Fe, Argentina. In the wake of this disaster a protest movement emerged. This paper analyses their mobilisation in terms of memory work and aims at understanding how subjective experience is collectively expressed.

Paper long abstract:

Disastrous floods are historically recurrent in the town of Santa Fe in the Northeast of Argentina, generally affecting the socially most vulnerable people in town. In 2003, though, occurred what many santafesinos describe as the worst in memory. On this occasion a third of the city area was flooded and among the victims were many middle class residents who had never before been affected by the city's floods. For them, this was not only an unexpected event but also culturally unimaginable. Many of these victims constitute the protest movement of 'los Inundados' (the Flood Victims) that emerged in the wake of this disaster, claiming accountability of municipal and provincial governments for their actions before, during and after the disaster. Such claims have largely been dismissed by local authorities though. By conceptualising the narratives and practices of 'los Inundados' as techniques of memory, this paper aims at understanding how subjective experiences of disaster are expressed at a social level and thereby constitute an "accidental community of memory," which forms the basis for social mobilisation. The ethnography presented is based on fieldwork in Santa Fe in 2005.

Paper short abstract:

to follow

Paper long abstract:

The many years of repression during the 1990s in Kosovo and the subsequent war there are ever-present, not only in terms of images of loss and traumatic experiences of death and destruction, but also in the workings of everyday social and political life. Personal and collective images, narrations, and memories of the war shift and change as they are fused with ongoing life experiences within the folds of Kosovo’s precarious socio-economic situation. How is violence, fear and loss remembered and expressed by people in different social contexts? What meanings are embodied in references to, and depictions of, extreme violence and massacres? How does this relate to more ‘uneventful’ memories of fear and avoidance?

Anthropologists are rarely ‘there’ when major crises, such as war, actually occur (cf Nordstrom). We are left with the political, social and personal aftermaths. In telling and remembering, people’s claims to ‘truth’ may be especially strong and contradictory, which raises methodological issues of a particular poignancy and complexity. How does the anthropologist cope analytically and emotionally with tragic or horrendous ‘information’? As researcher one may feel a particular urge to find out ‘what really happened’, while instead one is constantly left with fragmented impressions and uncertainty. This need not essentially differ from other fieldwork contexts, but dramatic and violent crises underscore not only experiential uncertainty, but the issue of its methodological equivalent.

The ethnographic material is based on recurring shorter periods of fieldwork since 2000, in Kosovo and among Kosovo Albanian refugees in Sweden.