#EASA2014 – Allegra’s Lab selection

As Carlo Cubero, member of the EASA Scientific and Local Committees, explained in a recent conversation with Allegra, the EASA meeting in Tallinn this year is very much driven by the notion of the ‘experiment’. “We see the Laboratories as part of a playful and carnivalesque atmosphere that we are after for the conference,” he insisted. No need to explain why Allegrians find their fellow labs enormously attractive and wish they could attend each of them. But with 16 labs running over four days, there is absolutely no chance! So here is our (very subjective) selection of labs that involve experiments with sensory ethnography, cooking, SCI-FI and music…A lot of fun ahead of us, without any doubt!

Not being there – the collaboration of senses

Location A-046

Date and Start Time 01 August, 2014 at 09:00

Convenors
Maria Cifre Sabater
Joonas Plaan (Tallinn University)

Abstract

This interactive laboratory tries to show if collaborations of senses can become instruments of playback, capturing moments of experience and engage them to a reflexive perception for succeeding review and interpretation. The laboratory is inspired by two studies about how locals perceive the environment in different parts of Europe. Tim Ingold posits that the practices by which human dwell in and, by dwelling, they perceive the environment and incorporate the landscape (2000). The question our laboratory raise is, can we become into a dialogue with the environment if the body is not there and what kind of perceptions the senses produce?

To answer that question, participants will immerse into a context of exploration and active experimentation. They will listen sounds from seascape and landscape, smell and taste local products, touch material artefacts, and see images from both fields. The images that refer to each sense will be disclosed through small windows that each person will consult according to their curiosity and interest of understanding. Therefore, we will enhance the infinite interpretation and reflection that emerge from the direct sensory experience. The experimental laboratory will end with a discussion with its participants.

We hope to contribute to the debate around the methodological and epistemological implications of using non-text based forms of knowledge in anthropological research. Furthermore, we are committed to the exploration of forms of presentation of anthropological knowledge that play with the boundaries of the traditional schemes of anthropology, which are mainly based on the production of academic papers.

(Re)creating intimacy through food: searching for (post-)Soviet taste

Location A-046

Date and Start Time 02 August, 2014 at 09:00

Convenors
Agnese Bankovska (University of Helsinki)
Karina Vasilevska-Das (Riga Stradins University)

Abstract

More than two decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the former member states have taken varying routes towards manufacturing a new sense of identity. Food has played an important role in this identity formation, as the search for national and authentic foods has become a powerful way of reinvigorating previously downplayed national tastes. However, even during the Soviet times several generations of people in the former USSR grew up with a common experience of tastes and food aesthetics that were shared across Soviet members states.

Laboratory will offer a creative way of tracing specific Soviet taste preferences, which, we argue, share similar characteristics across different post-Soviet countries and are cherished, integrated and adapted in the “new” food practices of today.

The unique venue of this year’s EASA meeting, in post-Soviet Tallinn, Estonia will offer an incomparable opportunity for this Laboratory to contribute to anthropological scholarship on the topic of post-Soviet intimacy, collaboration, innovation and continuity by subjecting post-Soviet experiences to creative social analysis.

The Laboratory will consist of a staged cooking event with 12 participants, of which 2/3 will be those who grew up in the former USSR between the 1950s and 1980s and 1/3 will be others invited to take part in the event. In addition, there will be two moderators – social anthropologists and a photographer.

The event, which is expected to last 3 hours, will be photographed and recorded so that a subsequent textual and visual analysis could later be extrapolated.

Anthropology at the edge of the future: forward play

Location M-225

Date and Start Time 01 August, 2014 at 09:00

Convenors

Sarah Pink (RMIT University)

Andrew Irving (Manchester University)

Juan Francisco Salazar (University of Western Sydney)

Johannes Sjöberg (The University of Manchester)

Abstract

This laboratory creates a collaborative environment to explore how anthropologists can become active in future temporalities and places where conventionally they do not venture.

The future raises a series of issues for anthropology, which has been situated out of the troubled ethnographic present into the temporality of the past. Yet, do we have a moral responsibility to be mindful of and prepared for doing anthropologies that account for the future – to create an anticipatory or interventionist public or applied anthropology? How should we engage with the ways with which activists, politicians, filmmakers, designers, science fiction, and corporations imagine, perform, represent, prepare for and approach futures? And how might such collaborations or relationships be realised?

Forward play has three main foci: forwardness/futurity; action and movement; and play in its different senses – of something that involves the imagination/imaginative possibility, action/practice/participation and contingency/possibility/future etc.

The laboratory will take place during one entire day divided into four sessions.

• Session 1: Provocations
• Session 2: Forward Play – Instruction Workshop
• Session 3: Forward Play – Practice
• Group 1: Playmaking
• Group 2: Group Action (moving, sensing, making)
• Group 3: Finding the future in the present
• Session 4: Presentations and Discussion

And when the policeman comes, will he dance with us?

Location Astra foyer

Date and Start Time 01 August, 2014 at 19:00

Convenor

Adomas Lapinskas (Sodertorn University)

Abstract

After the main program the participants of EASA are invited to participate in the night trip outside the walls of the university. Together with a street music collective “Autonominiai Shanchiu Vijurkai ” from Kaunas, Lithuania we will explore urban regimes of leisure, check the parameters of local vibe production and engage in nocturnal libidinal economies. Is it not an adventure that an intellectually inebriated collective of rogue anthropologists are looking for in the middle of the summer?

Theoretically, it is an invitation for a collaborative exploration of public space of Tallin, exploring the urban realm and intervening into the flow of everyday life. What does it mean to participate in public perfomance from ethnographic perspective? For us, the question itself depends on Goffmanian “frames” that we use to see it. What are the boundaries of artistic performance, public ritual or norm transgression? Can it be read as artistic/political action, challenging normative urbanities a la 1968? Does the intervention into the public soundscape mobilize anger and rage of the dispossessed, in the form of the drum beat – resounding from the squares from Syntagma to Maidan, circa 2008-2014 AD? Is it a commodified spectacle for tourist gaze? Accommodating to the pleasure regime of neoliberal city-as-playground for certain classes?

When a policeman comes, we will know better! Watch a video of action in Stockholm.

Participation is open. Some drumsticks will be provided.

Enterprise Estonia is Allegra’s official sponsor for the event.