This conference brings together three GAA regional working groups, Anthropology of Europe, the Middle East and the Mediterranean, to explore rurality as a reserve and resource for future-making in their interconnected and transnational regionalities. It invites participants to explore situated practices of future-making in order to trace how rurality is achieved, marked and (de-)stabilized in different places. Through concrete ethnographic case studies, we aim at conceptualizing the the rural beyond well-known center-periphery dichotomies. Well aware that the rural and the urban can only be "understood as a continuum irreducible to the polarity of one or the other term" (Chio 2017:362); we use the rural lens to create an anthropological laboratory (Albera 1999) which enables us to " write against established categories" (Horden 2014:9).
This conference invites researchers to reflect on the various perpetuated methodological urbanisms, ruralisms and regionalisms, i.e. the persisting preoccupation of ethnographers with urban spaces and research in geographically and/ or politically bounded categories like Europe, the Middle East and the Mediterranean. Most of these categories contribute to the construction of our methodological iron cage as Wimmer and Glick-Schiller pointed out in the term methodological nationalism (2002:302).
With the focus on rurality as an anthropological laboratory and lens, we aim to challenge earlier essentialist approaches and at the same time emphasize its contradictory and thus productive potential.
Der LIT Verlag ist ebenfalls vor Ort, präsentiert sein Fachprogramm – und wünscht allen Teilnehmerinnen und Teilnehmern eine schöne und ertragreiche Zeit.