[URBANTH-L]CFP: What is Capitalism and What Comes Next? (Slovakia)

[Angela Jancius]

WHAT IS CAPITALISM AND WHAT COMES NEXT?

First Joint Biennial SASA - CASA Conference
September 21-22 2009, Pezinok, Slovakia

The title of the conference refers, first, to the collection of essays What 
Was Socialism and What Comes Next (1996) by Katherine Verdery, a seminal 
book in the anthropology of postsocialism, and second, to the nature and 
prospects of contemporary capitalism in the context of the present economic 
and environmental crises. We are calling for a discussion on how the 
anthropological studies of postsocialism can contribute to the understanding 
of these crises.

We believe capitalism in its various models should not be conceived of and 
studied only as an economic but also as a political and moral configuration 
whose specific activities are interlinked with wider social, technological 
and cultural processes and their particular historical developments. 
Economic practices are embedded in social spheres such as community, 
religion, kinship, and science. As many anthropologists have demonstrated, 
forms of production, distribution, exchange and consumption are not only 
based on abstract cost-benefit logic but are involved in social ontologies 
and relations, socio-technical and religious practices, and power 
configurations. An anthropological analysis of capitalism should therefore 
focus on the conditions, moral expectations, ideas and actions that depend 
upon and result in the re/production, distribution, exchange or collapse of 
various forms of capital.

It is not the stability of capitalist systems but their ongoing change in 
time and space that is at issue. Bearing in mind the empirical grounding of 
anthropological knowledge, we believe that the debates on post/socialism and 
post/capitalism in Central and Eastern Europe should contribute to a) 
discussions about the current global economic and environmental crises as 
they are understood and manifested in local settings, and b) identification 
and description of modes of production alternative to those dominating 
contemporary capitalisms.
We believe it is time to put capitalism, particularly as it is manifested in 
Central and Eastern Europe, under analytic scrutiny, as anthropologists 
(Verdery, Hann, Humphrey, Yurchak, and others) have done with 
post/socialism. A key insight from those scholarly discussions was the 
identification of incoherence and internal tensions within systems and of 
the role of different forms of resistance at the edges of state socialism. 
The space opened up by the ongoing economic and environmental crises allows 
for an examination of the dynamics of contemporary capitalisms at the centre 
and the margins.

The first biennial conference is organized jointly by the Slovak Association 
of Social Anthropologists (SASA) and the Czech Association for Social 
Anthropology (CASA). We believe that conferences that bring together these 
professional anthropological associations offer an excellent opportunity to 
introduce the discipline to a wider academic public.

The keynote addresses will be delivered by Chris Hann (Max Planck Institute 
for Social Anthropology, Halle) and Stephen F. Gudeman (University of 
Minnesota).

The conference aims to address the following questions and themes:

. What are the key practices of capitalism in contemporary Central and 
Eastern Europe? How have understandings of work, work ethics, work relations 
and work discipline been changing in the postsocialist period?
. What are the things that capitalism and the welfare state cannot deal 
with? How do social exclusion and inclusion and welfare regimes shape the 
lives of the people on the margins, and vice versa?
. What is the interrelationship between migration and migrants on the one 
hand, and the long-established division between the labour market and the 
market for goods and services on the other?
. How can we describe the relationships between nationalism and capitalism? 
Is it a paradox of capitalism after socialism, or a necessary symbiosis of 
capitalism and nationalism if ethnic hatred influences politics in most of 
Central and Eastern Europe? How might we analyse economic nationalism and 
nation-state protectionism from the perspective of everyday life?
. What are the moral foundations of capitalism after state socialism? Has 
religion offered a complementary or alternative moral underpinning for the 
development of capitalism in Central and Eastern Europe? How can we describe 
the relations between state welfare systems and religious ideas and 
practices of charity, sharing and social assistance?
. How is anthropology (along with other social sciences) shaping and shaped 
by capitalism? In what forms and with what consequences is "academic 
capitalism" brought to bear in Central and Eastern Europe? How has the 
'native experience' of socialism influenced the ways in which capitalism has 
been theorized by social scientists? Has that experience worked as a kind of 
anthropological distance or rather as a lack of it in the production of 
academic knowledge?

Organisation of the conference:

This two-day conference will consist of one plenary session focused on the 
central theme followed by parallel panels connected to that theme. A plenary 
discussion will be held to bring together findings from the panels and draw 
conclusions.
The language of the plenary session is English.

The organizers particularly welcome panel and paper proposals that address 
the problems faced by the anthropological community in Slovakia and the 
Czech Republic. The languages of the panel sessions are English, Slovak, and 
Czech.

Important deadlines:

Paper proposals for the plenary session should be sent via email by May 30, 
2009.

If you are interested in organizing panel sessions dedicated to a particular 
topic, you should send panel proposals, names of proposed participants and 
abstracts by May 30, 2009.

Abstracts should not exceed 300 words.

The titles and abstracts of panel sessions, to which individual papers shall 
be addressed, will be announced via email by June 15, 2009.
Individual applicants will be informed about the outcome of their paper 
proposal by June 15. All proposals as well as organizational inquiries shall 
be sent to SASA.CASA.09 at gmail.com

The conference fee of 50 Euros covers the costs of the two-day conference, 
dinner and a one-night's accommodation in a local hotel for each 
participant.

The conference preparation committee:
Juraj Buzalka, Comenius University, Bratislava, Slovakia
Jakub Grygar, Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic
Davide Torsello, University of Bergamo, Italy
Tomás Samek, Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic
Jakub Grygar
Masaryk University
Brno, Czech Republic
Email: sasa.casa.09 at gmail.com
Visit the website at http://www.casaonline.cz