Paper short abstract:

This paper will focus on conceptions of social change, identity and belonging in the town of Bethlehem, Palestine. These issues will be explored by looking at how experiences of social change, trust and community relations are expressed in people’s personal narratives.

Paper long abstract:

Personal narratives can provide valuable insights on how dramatic social changes are experienced by individuals. This paper explores local conceptions of social change and community relations in Bethlehem in the recent past. The West Bank town of Bethlehem has faced dramatic changes over the last fifty years. Once a predominantly Christian village in, Bethlehem has evolved into a mixed town with a Muslim majority, and a shrinking community of local Christians. After more than a century of emigration, mainly to the Americas, the old families of Bethlehem have dwindled in numbers, gradually being replaced by internal migrants from rural areas around Bethlehem and from Hebron. In Bethlehem, where identities are highly localized, and social boundaries are based on family ties and long term co-residence, these are seen as dramatic changes. In this paper, I want to explore how these changes are conceptualized through individual narratives of Bethlehem-residents. I will use examples to illustrate how descriptions of a community of the past marked by intimate and lasting social relations and mutual trust, are contrasted with more recent experiences of social fragmentation and alienation, as well as deprivation and insecurity under an ongoing Israeli occupation. Through narratives of Bethlehem past and present, I will look at how social and cultural boundaries are negotiated along regional, sectarian and family lines. Taking in a wider picture, I will comment on how individuals - through their narratives - connect experiences of social change with political processes at a national and regional level.

Paper short abstract:

Opening up Files: Adjudication of Egyptian Jewish claims in Cairo. Nefissa Naguib, University of Bergen. This paper is about Egyptian Jews and their access to foreign power's protection, loosing it and reclaiming it from the Egyptian state.

Paper long abstract:

Opening up Files:

Adjudication of Egyptian Jewish claims in Cairo.

Nefissa Naguib, University of Bergen.

The forces of modernity dislodged the Egyptian Jewish communities' deep roots in the country, giving rise to dramatic experiences of displacements. During the last decade there has been a growing interest in the history of Egypt's pluralistic past. This is more than a historical curiosity. It comes at a time when Egyptian judiciaries are opening files regarding Jewish properties and adjudicating cases for Jewish families claiming back what was sequestrated from them by the state between the years 1956 - 1961. We find in these cases recurring arguments about the claimants' self-presentation as 'Egyptian Jews' with emotional attachments to Egypt which was once their protective homeland. This paper is about the basis of their sense of security. Sketching ongoing cases adjudicated in Egypt, this is an attempt is to take a look back at powerful Cairo Jews and their access to foreign power's protection, loosing it and reclaiming it from the Egyptian state.

Paper short abstract:

I will focus here on the discourse of a Kosovo refugee, paying special attention to the autobiographical data which mingles in the conversation on traditional culture and trying to analyze temporal binary oppositions, temporal adverbials and markers, in order to illustrate the participant’s specific way of expressing social time.

Paper long abstract:

After the political events in Serbia in 1999, many Serbs from Kosovo were displaced and found themselves in refugee camps in Serbia proper. In this paper I will present the data obtained during the interviews with a participant from Kosovo, recorded in a Belgrade refugee camp in the spring of 2003. During our conversation I insisted on topics related to traditional spiritual culture, but interpolation of the participant's own autobiography into the formal discourse is evident.

The material I will analyze here contains two different types of autobiographical data. On the one hand, within the discourse on traditional culture, autobiographical data blend with the description of certain ritual rituals and, on the other, autobiographical fragments also occur in digressions on the participant's present life in the refugee camp, as opposed to her former, pre-refugee life.

I will focus here on some examples which illustrate a specific way of expressing time and try to analyze them using linguistic anthropology methods. Namely, I will explore binary oppositions such as now/then and the usage of temporal adverbials today, tomorrow, the day after tomorrow, also paying special attention to the temporal markers used by the participant as boundaries for past, present and future (e.g. one day before the war, one day before the bombing and so on).

At the end, I will stress that social time is a very important time dimension in the participant's discourse, in which people's behaviour is guided by rules and norms for relations with other people.

Paper short abstract:

This paper addresses questions concerning the lived experience of Christian Arabs in Damascus. Focusing on practices surrounding Christmas where tableaux of the naitivity crib is integrated in the homes of Christian families themes of past and present is being reflected.

Paper long abstract:

For the Christian Arabs of Damascus Christmas is a time for celebration. By focusing on the practices of Arab Christian families revolving around tableaux of the naitivity crib different kind of lived memories is reflected. The naitivity crib connotes both the time for perpetual birth and new beginnings. And at the same time it is filled with memories and practices from a past. Taking the cue from Hannah Arendt's idea on natality and Giorgio Agamben's reflections on the naitivity crib the paper attempts to investigate the zone opened by the tableau, the place where past and present fuses, and a dual perspective is put forward, a perspective which focuses on both rhythms and refrains of life. Hereby a conjecture is proposed of the thinking of Henri Lefebvre found in his attempt at an Rhythmanalysis of Mediterranean Cities and the thinking of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, namely in their concept of refrains as recurring themes in a social landscape. By this a discussion is opened on how Christian Arabs refashions old and new in daily life.

Paper short abstract:

This paper shows that long-term semantic memory, a millenary long history and heritage practices conncected with the standing stones called «babas» from Mediterranean part of Croatia are transmitted from illiterate times and premodern (memory transmitted customs) orality to the present moment.

Paper long abstract:

On the basis of several examples of standing stones found during the author's own fieldwork in Mediterranean part of Croatia this contribution tends to prove that a woman - memory incorporated monoliths known as babas - can be considered as a genius loci, genius of the town. Babas bring happiness and overall prosperity to the individuals and to the town so they have to be donated fruit and wheat and kissed when seen for the first time. It will be shown that features of archaic culture, suppressed and sublimated, live on through symbolic undertones of the mythological and legendary heritage in a kind of syncretistic reality of female cults and legends. This paper shows that in the case of this material practice chosen to encode memory, there is no tension between constancy and variation in transmission of culture. Its aim is to show that long-term semantic memory, millenary long history and heritage practices are transmitted from illiterate times and premodern (memory transmitted customs) orality to the present moment.

Paper short abstract:

The paper discusses intercultural, trans-regional and interreligious dialogue and relations in the southern Italian institutional engagement of North African, Balkan, and Middle Eastern partners. The ethnographic focus is on publicly funded programs in the performing arts and heritage promotion.

Paper long abstract:

Film festivals, concerts, and a variety of events centered on intercultural, trans-regional and interreligious dialogue, practice, and heritage seem to be flourishing in southern European settings. This ethnographically informed paper focuses on the case of Apulia, the Italian southeastern peninsular region, in its institutional engagement of North African, Balkan, and Middle Eastern partners in the Euro-Mediterranean context. I overview current practices and discourses of intercultural, trans-regional and interreligious dialogue, focusing in particular on publicly funded programs in the performing arts and heritage promotion. I then offer an evaluation of these attempts' actual socio-cultural impact, interrogating the accompanying rhetorical clichés and the meanings that dialogue, diversity, cultural heritage, and geographical locale assume. The paper is also interested in mapping the unintended implications of such increasingly institutionalized cosmopolitanism. For example, do "socially engineered" cosmopolitan practices and discourses magnify, reify, or paradoxically obliterate the diverse histories and everyday lives of Apulian coastal towns? And how do asymmetrical relations of power across the Euro-Mediterranean region traverse the stages where cosmopolitan heritage is to be performed?

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores attempts to draw on the heritage of 'rooted cosmopolitanism' in efforts to re-establish relationships of mutuality on the divided island of Cyprus.

Paper long abstract:

The traditions of cosmopolitanism and everyday mutuality for which the Mediterranean is known are part of the living memory of many of its inhabitants, but the conditions, institutions and spaces for its continued survival as practice have been severely attenuated by nationalism, conflicts, and the re-drawing of boundaries during the 20th century. This paper explores attempts to draw on the heritage of 'rooted cosmopolitanism' in efforts to re-establish relationships of mutuality on the divided island of Cyprus. Focusing on the ethnography of a recent community tourism development project, the paper explores the reasons for the failure of the project to achieve its political aims, and considers the implications of this experience for understanding the relationship between 'Politics' and 'civil society'.