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Panel call for paper:
*Working title: Biographical time in contexts of radical social changes:
methodological questions*
Radical social changes (wars, revolutions, displacements) are producing
a space of uncertainty, with its hopes and worries, which has long-term
consequences on individual biographies. The impact of an 'event' is not
limited to the event itself, but equally to the period preparing it (if
it is the case) and the period afterwards, which is a period of changes
whose time limits (/durée/) is difficult to establish.As a result the
link between biographical breaks and historical events is hard to
establish during the protagonists' lifetime and is often abandoned by
anthropologists to historians.
Our question is thus methodological: how can anthropologists find the
appropriate modes of inquiring into the relevance of social change at a
biographical level given the ethnographic present that is their own (OR
"at a given moment: that of their fieldwork")? What can anthropologists
say about the relevance of time in social change when they arrive in the
field at a moment T, given that each actor's life experience is
irreducible to the common historical experience that anthropologists
might master by reading historical accounts? How can anthropologists
compensate for their absence since the moment T-i that makes ontological
sense for the protagonists?
We could note here that life experience shapes memories and
anthropologists are used to collect memories, but the collection of
biographies and memories is also dependent upon the biographical and
historical momentT in which these are collected. How could they be given
the 'right' relevance for making sense of the past in ethnographies of
the present? How can anthropologists understand present action in light
of the historically known or recounted past, beyond the simplistic term
in use:'legacy'?
More than that, the exacerbated uncertainty of times of crisis leaves a
strong mark on individuals, which often does not surface in rational
accounts of life biographies. If studies of trauma and suffering with
their focus on the emotional experience compensate the dominant focus on
uncertainty as risk, the positive emotional 'times of crises are times
of great freedom' (André Gorz) side of the coin is often neglected. What
methods can be used to capture the complex individual process of making
sense of one's place in history, while still aiming to make sense of
history (OR "understand social change")?
*Please contact Monica Heintz or Isabelle Rivoal for more informations
or to submit an abstract
*
Laboratoire d'Ethnologie et de Sociologie Comparative -- CNRS / Paris
Ouest Nanterre
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