ΣΕΜΙΝΑΡΙΑ ΤΗΣ ΤΕΤΑΡΤΗΣ
Τμήμα Κοινωνικής Ανθρωπολογίας, Πάντειο Πανεπιστήμιο
Χειμερινό εξάμηνο 2023-2024
Τετάρτη 18 Οκτωβρίου, 15:00-17:00, Αίθουσα Α1, Νέο Κτήριο
ΠΡΟΣΚΛΗΣΗ
Σας προσκαλούμε στο σεμινάριο της Τετάρτης 18 Οκτωβρίου με ομιλητή τον Dr Nicholas Lackenby, Πανεπιστήμιο του Cambridge:
“Suffering through and bearing witness: How the ethnic becomes ethical in Serbia”
ΠΕΡΙΛΗΨΗ
This paper explores how discourses of suffering encourage people to reflect on extended kinship ties as a ‘project of ethical import’ (Seeman 2017). It draws on ethnographic materials from central Serbia, where local people have much to say about collective victimhood, injustice, and the harshness of post-Yugoslav life. The paper argues that in evoking this supposedly unseen Serbian suffering – and seeking external, non-Serb witnesses to it – my interlocutors actualise Serbian peoplehood as a moral domain. Moving beyond institutional accounts of the nation-state, discourses of suffering reveal how kinship ties are self-reflexively imbued with intrinsic value – how the ethnic becomes ethical.
ΒΙΟΓΡΑΦΙΚΟ
Dr Nicholas Lackenby is a social anthropologist, with interests in morality, religion, nationalism and belonging. He is particularly curious about the intersection between ethics and ethnicity, and the ways in which people may perceive seemingly organic, historically-rooted collective identities as providing them with a sense of moral direction. Regionally, he has conducted extensive ethnographic fieldwork in the former Yugoslavia, especially Serbia. His current project – funded by the Leverhulme Trust – explores how Serbs living in present-day Croatia and Bosnia commemorate the atrocities committed during the fascist Independent State of Croatia [NDH] (1941-1945). He uses multi-sited fieldwork to document the grassroots processes by which ordinary people make, market and moralise a ‘genocidal imaginary’. Ultimately, he is interested in how the sacralisation of historical trauma forges subjects who increasingly define themselves in exclusive ethno-religious terms – but also in terms of that original violence committed against them.
Recent publications
2022, CURRENT ANTHROPOLOGY
Paper icons and fasting bodies: the aesthetic formations of Serbian Orthodoxy
2022, Material Religion: the journal of objects, art and belief
Apophatic love, contagion, and surveillance: Orthodox Christian responses to the global pandemic
2022, Anthropology and Medicine
‘They’re so into it’: Perceptions of ‘Religion’, Orthodoxy and Belonging in Post-Yugoslav Serbia
2022, e-Rhizome3(2):86-102