Thursday 5 December

Informal Meeting - save the date!

Our next informal online meeting (our first as NAoHH) will be on Thursday December 5, 2024 at 17.00-18.30CET/16.00-17.30GMT. We are delighted that our new co-convenor Veronica Ferreri (Ca' Foscari University) will share her research with a short presentation and plenty of time for discussion.

The zoom link will be shared to the network mailing list prior to the event, please sign up if you are not currently a member and would like to attend.

We are looking forward to catching up with network members in December!

The Aftermath of War: Survival and History
In 2013, a rural Syrian community living not far from the Syrian-Lebanese border, involved in the revolution, was violently expelled from their home during a counterinsurgency campaign led by the Syrian regime and its allies. Displaced in Lebanon, the community built a camp and a school adorned with lush gardens that recalled their lost land, while shrouding the horrors of the war in silence. However, memories of the war spontaneously resurfaced in children’s paintings and nightmares, as well as in adults’ recollections of their past everyday lives, requiring a renewed effort to tame and mould this past into a specific historical knowledge for the community.
In this talk, I ask: Why is this past so crucial in shaping survival in the aftermath? I examine what type of history/story this collective wartime predicament requires and why it is essential when crafted for the community’s youngest generation, who lived through, witnessed and survived the violence of the counterinsurgency and expulsion. Survival, I argue, requires not only a retrieval of the ordinary (Das 2007), but also a serious engagement with questions of responsibility and complicity, history and historicity, even in the immediate aftermath of war or disaster.

Thursday 7 November 2024

Online book launch/roundtable

Monuments Decolonized Susan Slyomovic (UCLA) in conversation with Sultan Doughan (Goldsmiths) and Dan Hicks (Oxford)

Online roundtable and launch for Susan Slyomovics (UCLA) Monuments Decolonized: Algeria's French Colonial Heritage - in conversation with Sultan Doughan (Goldsmiths) and Dan Hicks (Oxford).

More book information: Monuments Decolonized: Algeria's French Colonial Heritage

Network Meetings

24 July 2024, EASA2024
6 August 2024, Online

Friday 17 May
15.00-16.00

Embodying the Gods: The Re-enactment of Myth in a Scottish Pagan Festival

Abstract:
Storytelling is an important element of Pagan rituals because it allows the participants to reconnect, bodily, emotionally and spirituality, with past and present. In this presentation, I draw on ethnographic data collected during the Samhuinn Festival taking place on 31st October in Edinburgh. This event marks the changing of seasons, gathers thousands of people, and brings ancient Celtic stories alive with a modern twist. The festival revolves around the staging and re-enactment of the epic battle between two characters, the Summer and Winter Kings. Both are accompanied by their respective crews of otherworldly creatures inspired in local folklore: fairies, beasties, and morrigans, among others. The re-enactment of this myth becomes a multi-sensory experience for both the participants and the audience, highlighting the role of storytelling in the elaboration of individual and collective spiritual experiences.

Friday 14 June
(15.00-17.00 GMT, 16.00-18.00 CET)

This workshop between EASA networks EnviroAnt and NAoHH explores collaborative possibilities of conversations between our research questions and approaches. Our guiding theme is temporalities. We consider the differences and synergies on how we engage with imaginaries and intersections of the present, the future and the past? What do we need to consider in our relations to the present and future as well as the past?

Friday 12 April

This online roundtable with Jeremy Walton (University of Rijeka) and David Henig (University of Utrecht) and Zeynep Oğuz Kursar (Harvard, University of Zagreb) was the second in our NAoHH 2024 seminar series. The NAoHH series aims to gather anthropologists (and beyond) to present and discuss their takes on history in different ways. This event addressed "Conversations" and explored transdisciplinary dimensions of historical anthropological work between:

• Jeremy Walton (University of Rijeka)
• David Henig (University of Utrecht)
• Zeynep Oğuz Kursar (Harvard, University of Zagreb)

Friday 26 January

The Politics of Scale: Perspectives from and on Anthropology of History

Pamela Ballinger (University of Michigan), Dominique Santos (Rhodes University), Georgeta Stoica and Marta Gentilucci (CUFR Mayotte) and Alice Elliot (Goldsmiths)

The Roundtable will unfold in a dialogical, research-experiential, and collaborative manner. Four scholars are invited to open up the space of exchange by sharing research experiences and ethnographic examples on how and why they scale history in particular ways; what this opens up and limits; and which potential pitfalls emerge.

Friday 8 December

Informal online meeting

Network member Malte Gembus will share some research thoughts.
Yetu - Nanik - Satajtoj: Young People and their engagement with Past, Present and Future in the Guatemalan diaspora.

Thursday 30 November

Book launch and Roundtable conversation (online) Weaving Europe, Crafting the Museum

Magdalena Buchczyk (Magdalena Buchczyk (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin) in conversation with Aimee Joyce (St Andrews) and Magdalena Zych (Seweryn Udziela Ethnographic Museum, Kraków)

Friday 13 October
15.00-16.30 BST

Sultan Doughan (Goldsmiths) shares her research: 'What's secularism got to do with it? On history as a political resource of the present'.

Informal presentation (10-15 minutes) with plenty time for questions and discussions, as well as catching up and sharing network news and plans.

Friday 26 May 2023
16.00-18.00 BST

Online Book Launch. Monumental Names

Friday May 19 2023
15.00 GMT/London

Informal meeting

Our regular informal meetings offer space to be sociable, as well as discuss ideas about future plans and network projects.

The speakers will be the network founders, Giovanna Parmigiani (Harvard Divinity School) and Helen Cornish (Goldsmiths) - who will share some aspects of their research on magic, witchcraft, histories and historicities.

Thursday 11 May
15.00-17.30 BST

NAoHH workshop. What makes history more public than anthropology?

In What Makes History More Public than Anthropology? NAoHH, the EASA Network for an Anthropology of History and Heritage explores intersections between an anthropology of history, public anthropologies and public histories.
This first of three workshops (2023-2024) asks

• What might it mean to consider an anthropology of history in the public domain? Is this an engaged or applied model?
• Public histories often favour narratological approaches to the past, does an anthropological approach to public history challenge theoretical conventions?
• Do anthropological theories and ethnographic methods undermine public histories? Or do these offer insights when navigating difficult or contested accounts?
  Organised by Helen Cornish (Goldsmiths) & Giovanna Parmigiani (Harvard) NAoHH Convenors

Contributors (abstracts available through link)

• Carol Balthazar (UCL)
• Dominic Bryan (Queens University Belfast)
• Julia Binter (Staatliche Museen zu Berlin)
• Galina Oustinova-Stjepanovic (Glasgow)
• Elaine McIlwraith (Western University, Canada)

Friday March 24 2023
15.00 GMT/London

Informal meeting

This informal meeting will give us time to discuss any thoughts or ideas about future plans and network projects.
Also, Dom Bryan (Queens University, Belfast) will share some thoughts about his research.

Friday 27 January 2023
15.00 GMT
Informal meeting with speakers on zoom (invite by NAoHH Mailing List)

• Katarzyna Puzon (Institue for Advanced Studies global dis:connect, Ludwig Maximillian University of Munich): 'Sound Archives and Their Entangled Legacies'
• Nina ter Laan (University of Cologne, University of Siegen): 'Re-membering the Rif through Sound and Song: (Post)-colonial pasts and musical practices among Riffians between Morocco and The Netherlands'