Social and Cultural Anthropology

While hailed for granting a deeper understanding of a local reality, an easier access to information and an almost effortless construction of research networks, anthropology at home was flagged for the researcher’s implicit bias and tendency to take things for granted, for his lack of detachment from the field and thus his pre-disposition to producing distorted perceptions of the subject under investigation. Lack of objectivity was an accusation that accompanied most native anthropological endeavours. Without contesting the validity of such concerns, the paper herewith aims to analyse the perks and perils of doing anthropology at home and to dismantle the prejudice circumscribed to such an approach.

The paper herewith was constructed as an imagination exercise. It is built on the hypothesis that a new financial meltdown will create the premises for baby teeth to replace money in all their functions. Exploring various theories of economic anthropology, it reflects on the concept of money and the conditions of existence and production of human societies. In line with existing scholarship, the paper embraces the substantivist position according to which economic behavior is to be analyzed in terms of social, political or religious embeddedness.

Structured in six sections, the paper begins with a Foreword where the reflection themes are delineated, capitalising on anxieties brought forth by the recent referendum held in the United Kingdom (UK) to gauge support for the country's continued membership in the European Union (EU). It then continues with Baby teeth in our pockets, a section touching on the myth of barter and arguing for its deconstruction. The third section, More to life than money…, reviews theories on the spheres of exchange that revolved around the malignity of general-purpose money and the subordination of society to the market economy. The penny in our thoughts is the fourth section which turns towards theories reviving the concept of social currencies and special-purpose money in the attempt to counterbalance the homogenizing effect of all-purpose money. Lastly, Exit through the gift shop, is the section where, building on the Maussian theories of the gift, scenarios of trading with baby teeth are explored. In the Afterword, the paper closes with a short reflection on the state of affairs and the future of the Union that the UK is preparing to leave.

#Brexit, #money, # spheres of exchange, #social currencies, #gift, #human economies.

The aim of this paper is to take up the model of social biography and explore how the life of photographs, their materiality, their social ebbs and flows, their shifting roles and meanings as they cross different spaces and perform different functions not only cast light but also effect and affect the lives of humans they come in contact with. In reaching its goal, the paper focuses on Mariken Wessels’s exhibition shown at FoMU Antwerp – Taking Off. Henry My Neighbour – and tries not only to recompose the lives of its lead characters, Henry and Martha, through an active engagement with the objects on display but also to capture the complex interplay of supporting actors – artist and viewer – in the story that comes to life beyond the image, how they themselves are transformed in this subject-object interaction while adding new layers and lenses of interpretation to the original story. #photography #visual culture #social life of things #material culture

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Romania during the 2016 parliamentary elections and the street protests that erupted in their aftermath, the paper herewith aims to analyse how the state is affectively apprehended through the sensuous interactions between political subjects and electoral objects and how humour can regain its generative power in carnivalesque performances, fashioning political subjectivities that foreground a citizenship of becoming. #state #political affect #citizenship of becoming #humour #political subjectivity

This article offers a study of narratives of ethnic  identity among  young Ruthenians  in Serbia. The analysed data comes from in-depth interviews and questionnaires conducted in 2016 with nine informants studying at the University of Novi Sad. The narrative approach has proven to be  most  suitable,  especially  when  trying  to  understand  the  individual  perspective  of  one’s ethnic  and  linguistic  identity. In  order  to  understand  Ruthenians  as  an  ethnic  minority  in Serbia,  the  study  also  provides  a  brief  overview  ofthe  historical  context,  including information  on  Ruthenian  migration  from  Transcarpathia  to  Vojvodina  in  the  eighteenth century,  their  strategic  positioning  towards  the  nation  states  they  have  lived  in,  their  Greek-Catholic denomination as a factor distinguishing them from other ethnic communities, as well as the intersubjective understanding of their ethnic identity. Vojvodina, the northern region of Serbia, where they  live,  is a  multicultural and  multi-confessional province, which  has proven to  be  both  an  opportunity  and  a  challenge  for  this  community.  The  historical  overview  also presents how they have obtained their minority rights since their migration to the region.

Etnološki izazov Rolana Barta (Rad je predavan na konferenciji "Centennial Filiations. Theory, Aesthetics, and Politics of Literary and Cinematic Fiction", u marta 26-27, 2015 godine koju je organizvao prof. Rađi Valuri (Raji Vallury) u ime departmana za strane jezike i književnost na Univerzitetu Nju Meksiko (New Mexico) uz velikodušnu podršku fondacije Kerol Rejmond (Carol Raymond)) U znak sećanja na Filipa Vatsa (Philip Watts) Čitajući odgovore na Barta u periodu između 1970-ih i 1980-ih, pogotovo odgovori američkih i britanskih kritičara, zapanjen sam količinom utrošenog vremena na objašnjavanje Barta. Sigurno je svrsishodno, iako sam uvek smatrao da je jedna od najmanje ubedljivih misija koju akademski diskurs u humanistici zadaje sebi-objašnjavanje novih misli. Bart je želeo da ga čitaju, razumeju i upotrebljavaju, a ne da ga objašnjavaju… Bartovi radovi o bioskopu (eng. cinema) i uopšteno, ne zahtevaju nikakvo objašnjavanje danas. Želim da pokušam da iščitam teoriju i da pronađem druga značenja, drugi entuzijazam i druge znakove koji nam mogu biti značajni danas. Filip Vats (Philip Watts), Bioskop (Cinema) Rolana Barta

Narratives of ethnic identity and language among young Pannonian Ruthenians in SerbiaThis article offers a study of narratives of ethnic identity among young Ruthenians in Serbia. The analysed data comes from in-depth interviews and questionnaires conducted in 2016 with nine informants studying at the University of Novi Sad. The narrative approach has proven to be most suitable, especially when trying to understand the individual perspective of one’s ethnic and linguistic identity. In order to understand Ruthenians as an ethnic minority in Serbia, the study also provides a brief overview of the historical context, including information on Ruthenian migration from Transcarpathia to Vojvodina in the eighteenth century, their strategic positioning towards the nation states they have lived in, their Greek-Catholic denomination as a factor distinguishing them from other ethnic communities, as well as the intersubjective understanding of their ethnic identity. Vojvodina, the northern regi...

Changing one’s place of residency creates new challenges, such as how to preserve social, cultural, ethnic or national identities and how to create a comfortable living environment in the new country; creating a new ‘home.’ In this article I explore ways in which migrant women transform a new place into a space, into a new home. More specifically, this article answers the question of the mechanisms used by Israeli women who immigrated to Belgium in order to create a setting wherein they feel a sense of comfort and belonging. I call this mechanism ‘social bubbles’, a term taken from Cohen (1992) in his work about types of tourists. Cohen named it ‘environmental bubbles’. My aim is to develop the use of the term for general migration. Looking at a religious group is often discussed in terms of ‘enclaves’ (Sivan, 1991; Valins, 2003). Enclaves are social forms where people live completely within the boundaries of the group. Individuals are not obliged to remain in the community (in the ...

Meta-model merging is the process of incorporating data models into an integrated, consistent model, against which accurate queries may be processed. The efficiency of such a process is very much reliant on effective semantic representation of chosen data models, as well as the mapping relationships between the schema and data instance elements of the data models. Within the data warehousing domain, the integration of data marts is often time-consuming. Intuitively forming an all-inclusive data warehouse presents tedious tasks of identifying related fact and dimension table attributes. Moreover, the ability to process queries across these disparate, but related, data marts poses an important challenge. In this paper, we introduce an approach for the integration of relational star schemas, which are instances of multidimensional data models. These instance schemas represented as data marts are integrated into a single consolidated data warehouse. Our methodology, which is based on model management operations, focuses on a formulated merge algorithm and adopts first-order Global-and-Local-As-View (GLAV) mapping models, to deliver a polynomial time, near-optimal solution of a single integrated enterprise-wide data warehouse.

Changing one's place of residency creates new challenges, such as how to preserve social, cultural, ethnic or national identities and how to create a comfortable living environment in the new country; creating a new 'home.' In this article I explore ways in which migrant women transform a new place into a space, into a new home. More specifically, this article answers the question of the mechanisms used by Israeli women who immigrated to Belgium in order to create a setting wherein they feel a sense of comfort and belonging. I call this mechanism 'social bubbles', a term taken from Cohen (1992) in his work about types of tourists. Cohen named it 'environmental bubbles'. My aim is to develop the use of the term for general migration. Looking at a religious group is often discussed in terms of 'enclaves' (Sivan, 1991; Valins, 2003). Enclaves are social forms where people live completely within the boundaries of the group. Individuals are not obliged to remain in the community (in the enclaves) but there is social pressure to do so. I compare the term 'enclave' with 'social bubble' and explain that the use of the term is more flexible, dynamic and leads to a new perspective on the whole phenomenon of integration of social groups: religious, ethnic, national and for different migration purposes; asylum seekers, expatriates, refugees and others. Although the concept of bubbles could describe social groups, such as Jewish people in Brussels, Belgium, this article focuses mainly on Israelis who immigrated to Brussels.

The purpose of this study is to compare two groups of Jewish women, native-born and migrants, who reside in Brussels regarding their social integration into nativeborn Jewish and non-Jewish communities and the acculturation strategies they employ. It seems that Brussels is not as socially and culturally open, as perceived by the interviewees. Hence, the social networks of women in our study, as well as their acculturation patterns, differ in degree of separation between native-born Jewish women, non-Israeli immigrants and Israeli immigrants. The former maintain social networks characterized by fluid boundaries between them and the majority society, whereas non-Israeli immigrants are characterized by shared, not very dense networks with the native-born Jewish community and diasporic networks. Finally, Israeli women are characterized by almost completely closed social networks, which can be defined as a distinct "Israeli bubble." As for their acculturation strategies, native-born women are those who are more integrated among non-Jews and nativeborn Jews, as expected from their familiarity with the culture and their long-term interactions, despite being partially marginalized as minority. Migrant women are less integrated and more separated from both native-born Jews and -to a larger extent -from non-Jews; so are Israelis. Social networks which gradually become communities are mainly created by women and maintained by them over the years. Therefore, the study of social networks, their structure and construction through daily interactions, and their contribution to the ethnic-diasporic community building have become the source of women's strength in the host country -as immigrants and as a native-born minority group.

In this paper, we use data from Guatemala to map areas that are important for the provision of indirect ecosystem services—services whose benefits are enjoyed at some distance from the ecosystem that provides them, such as watershed services (enjoyed downstream) or biodiversity conservation (enjoyed globally). These services are usually externalities from the perspective of land users, and so tend to be under-provided. Mapping the areas that supply such services links the supply and demand of ecosystem services in a spatially explicit way, allowing us to identify and prioritize areas of conservation interest.