Scientific Program

Sessions & Abstracts

Making the (Muslim) Other in the 'Civilizational Fortress' of (Central) Europe (KEYNOTE)

1. Anthropologies of the Environment: Acknowledging complex interweavings and building integrative frameworks for understanding (YOUNG SCHOLARS' FORUM)

2. Dangerous Worlds: Encounters of Art and Violence

3. Digital Visuality

4. Engaging with 'Homo Narrans': Storytelling and the Imagination in Ethnographic Research

5. Global Palestine- Research approaches beyond national frames

6. Human entanglements with infrastructures: mobility, sociality, and the built environment

7. Lost in Digitalization: How can Anthropology Navigate the Digital? (YOUNG SCHOLARS' FORUM)

8. Loving the Other: 'Radical Connectivity' in Ethnographic Fieldwork

9. Migration and housing in contemporary cities. Opportunities to stay, move and settle

10. 'More than Flight' - A Mentored Young Scholars Session on Refugee Studies (YOUNG SCHOLARS' FORUM)

11. Moving with/through things

12. Portable panopticons: (in)visibility, intimacy and exposure in the age of democratized surveillance

13. Power, Capitalism and Ecology in Rural Central-Eastern Europe

14. Refugee regimes, questions of integration and the challenges of communication

15. Sovereignty in an Unequal World: Anthropological Perspectives

16. The "Wild" (beyond the) West? Human-animal relations and the shifting frontier of 'wilderness'. A roundtable organized by the TANDEM/ "Bewildering Boar" project (ROUND TABLE)

Conveners & Abstract: Virginie Vaté, Anibal Arregui & Ludek Broz, ; Szczygielska, Marianna

Contact: virginie.vate@gsrl.cnrs.fr

Thursday, September 20, 2018 | Slot 1 | Room 3

The “Bewildering Boar (BB): Changing Cosmopolitics of the Hunt in Europe and Beyond” is an incubator project within the TANDEM program of the CEFRES (http://www.cefres.cz/en/cefres). Its general aim is to develop the study of human-animal relations in the European context, while exploring, more specifically, the multiple controversies existing around wild boars. Eurasian wild pigs (Sus scrofa) feature regularly in European public discourse, for their numbers have been rising spectacularly across the continent. While in some parts of Europe this species generates sympathy, in others humans have declared war on wild boars. Debates revolving around them are often related to local definitions of “wilderness”. Just how “wild” are wild boars, given that, like other game animals in Europe, they are subject to a number of management practices on the part of humans that seem to alter their very “nature”?

For this roundtable, members of the BB project invite reflections on the shifting frontier of wilderness that allow for comparison of local definitions of the “wild” in so-called “Western” and “non-Western” contexts alike. What changes are observable in our perception of animals as they continuously break the naturalized behavioral boundaries that underpin our epistemological distinction between “wilderness” and “domesticity”? How can wilderness be conceptualized not only in relation to animals but also to land, wildlife management practices, human-animal conflict, and biosecurity? Can this vision further bewilder the static division between “the West and all the rest” or, as Descola (2005) would put it, between “naturalist ontologies” and other ones? We suggest that multispecies lenses allow for a new understanding of human-animal relations and their changing boundaries in a cross-ethnographic, comparative sense.

We hope to initiate between the participants of the roundtable and its public an engaging debate around the (shifting) frontier of wilderness in human-animal relations.

Participants:

Aníbal Arregui, French Research Centre in Humanities and Social Sciences in Prague (CEFRES) / Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Vienna;
Susanna Gartler, Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Vienna;
George Iordachescu, IMT School for Advanced Studies, Analysis and Management of Cultural Heritage (Italy) / Visiting Researcher, Sociology and Anthropology of Development (Netherlands)
Peter Schweitzer, Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Vienna;
Marianna Szczygielska, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science / CEFRES
Virginie Vaté, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS, France), CEFRES & GSRL

17. The 'layered cake' of neighborness: everyday interactions at different scales

18. Theorizing social change: social organization, complexity and inequality (YOUNG SCHLARS' FORUM)

19. Tracing the Intimate

20. Transforming Health, Transforming Healthcare: The Insights from Post-Socialist Worlds

21. VANDA Contributed Papers

22. Postersession