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- Convenor:
-
Tiina-Riitta Lappi
(University of Jyväskylä)
- Stream:
- Narrative
- Location:
- A226
Short Abstract:
This panel focuses on how people see (currently or in earlier times) themselves, their agency and well-being, in relation to existing realities and imagined futures and how these views are narrated in varying contexts.
Long Abstract:
In everyday lives people face variety of individually experienced or collectively shared challenges calling for active agency and imaginative ideas in finding ways to to tackle these issues. Ideas for making one’s life better or being able to survive at all may be something never heard of before or they may be ideas taken from the past, old traditions re-interpreted for current uses. Better futures and well-being are also central issues when existing societies are critised and alternatives are introduced. Often utopias are related with larger societies or communities of the like-minded but as well they may be thought of as, for example, futures or everyday lives envisioned by individuals, ordinary people, trying to make best possible choices and decisions for their own well-being. This panel focuses on how people see (currently or in earlier times) themselves in relation to existing realities and imagined futures and how these views are expressed in different kinds of narratives.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Iwa Kolodziejska (Institute of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology, University of Warsaw)
Paper short abstract:
How do short folklore forms present in magazines on herbal medicine popular among Central Ukrainian villagers influence local plants knowledge and sense of national and local identity.
Paper long abstract:
A few titles of magazines on herbal medicine are popular in Central Ukrainian villages. They are Ukrainian editions of such magazines issued and popular also in other former USSR countries. Illustrations in surveyed magazines are based on idealised visions of rural life full of short folklore forms. Illustrations of this type are more common in the magazines than iconography of plants. Such magazines are commonly read by villagers as the source of medicinal plants knowledge. Due to the state withdrawal the plant knowledge, especially on medicinal plants, is significant for everyday well-being. As self-medication is the first and very important curing strategy, such knowledge also gives the feeling of agency.
I analyse the magazines read by Ukrainian villagers and compare them with declarative knowledge and practices of the readers, collected via ethnographic research (participant observation, unstructured interviews, villagers' plant collections surveys, filming). By doing so I aim to answer the following questions: How is the knowledge from written sources incorporated into practice? Do these type of narrative and illustration influence the shape of medicinal plants knowledge of Ukrainian villagers? Are there new plants incorporated into local pharmacopoeia due to the national heritage discourse present in the magazines. Do they influence the sense of local and national identity of the villagers.
Elena Trifan (National University of Political Studies and Public Administration Bucharest)
Paper short abstract:
Personal development narratives are constructed around the hope that almost anything is possible and within reach. This paper explores the promises of personal development practices and the construction of the imagery of the perfect self.
Paper long abstract:
In this paper, I will explore the meaning of personal development practices, having the starting point the way they are promoted: as a mean of resolving all types of crises, from social crises, due to unemployment and low productivity to personal crises, due to unhappiness or unfulfillment.
Personal development is both a purpose and a process in which the individual engages in hope of becoming a better version of him or herself. From private kindergartens, student NGOs, trainings offered by employers to peer-pressure and institutional pressure, personal development is increasingly present in the working environments of Bucharest. The providers are promoting personal development as a mean of attaining better jobs, better relationships, and better lives through the process of working at one's self. It is a quest for the perfect human being capable of creating the perfect world and resolving all the problems with his/her bare self.
Personal development directs people towards extreme individual accountability, as they are the only ones who can improve themselves and guide the course of their lives, responsible of their own failure and success.
Arndís Hulda Audunsdottir (University of Iceland)
Paper short abstract:
In this paper I discuss the Utopian Icelandic country as the poet Sigurður Breiðfjörð envisaged it in his poems as well as how social changes affected him.
Paper long abstract:
In this paper I discuss the Icelandic poet Sigurður Breiðfjörð (1798-1846), one of the last great rímnapoets, and how the social changes he lived through affected him. I base my paper on a research I did on his mansöngvar which is, simply put, the personal part of the old Icelandic rímur (the Icelandic narrative poems). By studying them it is possible to get an inside into Sigurðurs feelings and opinions on live, society and politics. During Sigurðurs lifetime the society began to change and romanticism and nationalism had an effect in Iceland. This was not least in the realms of poetry where poets like Jónas Hallgrímsson fought against rímur on the basis of them being too old-fashioned and shameful for the country. Sigurður was very popular amongst the masses but the cultural elite wanted a change and to alter the image of Iceland. In his poems, Sigurður criticises his society, not least the elite and those who had the power and money.
In his mansöngvar poems Sigurður sees the countryside and the old Icelandic community as an Utopian country as I will discuss.
Maja Adzija (Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb)
Paper short abstract:
Red ocean –first croatian science fiction and utopian novel written by a female author Marija Jurić Zagorka and reading of utopia as a satire of society
Paper long abstract:
Marija Jurić Zagorka (1873-1957) was the first croatian female journalist, author of many popular history and romance novels. Although her work was well received among female readers, the critics often put Zagorka in frames of trivial literature of less or no value. However in the last decades there is again a huge interest not only for her published books but also for her cultural, social, humanitarian and other activites. It is less or completely unknown that she is also an author of the first croatian science fiction and utopian novel, neglected for years. The novel is titled Red ocean (with clear asocciation to Russian revolution and reveals Zagorka's stand on social order) and it was published only as a part of the newspaper "Jutarnji list" from 1918 until 1919, hundred years after publication of one of the earliest examples of science fiction novel in the world "Frankenstein: or The Modern Prometheus" by Mary Shelley.
The novel "Red ocean" was never turned into a book and this research aims to help the revalorization of her body of work and her bold ideas about possible development of society through discourse analysis. Often utopias serve as a society satire and Zagorka, in order to avoid sanction or condemnation, decided to use this framework to expose her ideas on nationality, feminism, politics and other social and culture phenomenons.
Ileana Gabriela Szasz (National School for Political and Administrative Studies Bucharest)
Paper short abstract:
The research is based on a visual documentation which looks at the reactions, the daily activities, the thoughts and feelings that emerge in the first weeks of retirement of my parents.
Paper long abstract:
How do two people, who spent over twenty five years working in the same state controlled enterprise, cope with the retirement moment? After three years of rejected retirement applications, a sixty years old couple finally got the answer they so much hoped for. The research is based on a visual documentation which looks at the reactions, the daily activities, the thoughts and feelings that emerge in the first weeks of retirement of my parents. What happens to the time they used to spend at their job? Is this experience the reword they were hoping for? Their stories about the efforts they've made to keep a job in the past decade and the openly expressed desire to start this new stage in their lives are in strong contrast with the way they manage time and activities. The discourse about an idealized projection of retirement shifts towards resignation.
Francisco Cruces Villalobos (Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia)
Paper short abstract:
Through collaborative workshops, I explore invisible changes in the intimate sphere at Madrid and Montevideo. The poetics of daily life embedded in “micronarratives of the self” can be read as an agonistic genre of discourse having to do with the struggles of metropolization.
Paper long abstract:
How are the forms of urbanity changing? What role do have the emergence, politization and visibilization of the intimate sphere in such changes? Can we get political or poetical insights from them?
These are the questions at the base of my current ethnography on the metropolization of living between young and modern not-so-young dwellers in Madrid (Spain) and Montevideo (Uruguay). By means of collaborative workshops for collective exploration -open to further visual ethnography at the home setting- I deal with an object that could be referred to as "micronarratives of the self": an agonistic plot where the heroic ego (sometimes parodical or tragicomic) is the main character in the Sisific task of "making yourself" in the big city -so affirming his/her space for authonomy, among the facilitations/obstacles provided by other actants like parents, couple, friends and others.
My content is that the poetics of daily life embedded in such stories result from a new regime of urbanity. On the one hand, they question and trespass the limits taken for granted in a more classical, canonical urban common sense of first modernity, with their eroded couplets public/private, production/consumption. With the remapping of boundaries, also their implicit invisibilization, devaluation and subordination of the domestic space become eroded. Second, they reveal the emergence of a new regime embodying the current, contemporary fascination with the creative, the quotidian, the affective and the intimate -a fascination easily contained in the trope extimacy.
Tiina-Riitta Lappi (University of Jyväskylä)
Paper short abstract:
This paper focuses on what living in poverty means culturally and socially in everyday lives of the poor. Emotions and feelings related to varied daily practices and routines will be analysed in order to get a deeper understanding of what poverty really means as a (forced or non-optional) way of life.
Paper long abstract:
Studies on poverty in developing countries focus for the most part on poor people's income as well as material conditions and other measurable (such as housing or level of education) aspects of poor people's lives. When development is understood solely as something aimed at improving people's financial and material conditions, feelings and emotions raised and experiences obtained by those living their everyday lives in poverty without a view of a better life are not taken into account as something worth studying or understanding. As ethnologist I'm not interested in measuring poverty. Instead, I want to focus on what living in poverty means culturally and socially in a communal level as well as in the lives of individuals. In this paper, based on ethnographic research in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, I argue that more attention should be paid to emotions and feelings as a meaningful aspect of experiencing poverty. This also goes for narratives focusing, for example on women's livelihoods, since emotions and feelings related to varied daily practices and routines can reveal a deeper understanding of what poverty really means as a (forced or non-optional) way of life.