[Gandur] Kallað eftir málstofum fyrir SIEF ráðstefnuna í Zagreb 2015: "Utopias, Realities, Heritages: Ethnographies for the 21st Century"

[Valdimar Tryggvi Hafstein]

*SIEF 2015 Congress in Zagreb: Call for panels!*

The 12th international congress of SIEF (International Society for
Ethnology and Folklore) will be held in Zagreb, Croatia from 21-25 June
2015. The call for panels is out and closes on 9 November 2014. The call
for papers closes 14 january 2015.

More than 500 ethnologists, folklorists, anthropologists, cultural
historians, and other colleagues from all over Europe and beyond will meet
to present their research and share during four days of keynotes, panels,
papers, posters, meetings, and parties. The congress theme is “Utopias,
Realities, Heritages. Ethnographies for the 21st century” (see more
below). Attached,  you will find the congress poster.

For the call for panels and workshops, see:
http://www.siefhome.org/congresses/sief2015/cfpan.shtml.

For general information on the SIEF congress in Zagreb:
http://www.siefhome.org/congresses/sief2015/index.shtml.

*Theme: Utopias, Realities, Heritages. Ethnographies for the 21st century*
‘A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even
glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always
landing. And when Humanity lands there, it looks out, and, seeing a better
country, sets sail. Progress is the realization of Utopias’, wrote Oscar
Wilde at the beginning of the 20th century. If his time heralded progress
as the realization of utopias, the past century has buried many visions of
future: big modern projects and the idea of linear progress itself are
dead.

The public fascination with heritage in recent years might be understood
in the context of this history of temporal imaginations: burying various
visions of the future, we excavate multiple visions of the past. Indeed,
heritage also presupposes a projected future for which we must safeguard
it, populated by future generations who we imagine will care. In between
utopia and heritage are day-to-day realities, the ordinary and the
routine: the practices and expressions that ethnologists have long taken
as their principal objects. It is in this most mundane of realities that
people realize their utopian visions and heritage imaginaries, motivating
their action and interpreting their existence in the context of imaginary
pasts and futures.

The congress theme takes the triad of utopias, realities, and heritages as
a challenge and seeks to relate it to the ethnographic study of expressive
culture and everyday practices: from religion to politics, from heritage
to spatial imagination, from the physical to the virtual, from narrative
forms to the food chain, from music to the museum, and from nationalism to
tourism.

...

The congress offers a critical platform for debating contemporary and
historical imaginaries of utopias, realities, and heritages. Participants
are encouraged to frame the debate with keywords from ethnological and
folkloristic inquiry, such as circulation, performance, community, genre,
visual culture, material culture, digital culture, migration, home,
memory, morality, gender, religiosity, discipline, hegemony,
governmentality, ethnicity, corporeality, and so on and so forth.


*The congress host country and city: Zagreb, Croatia*
Zagreb is an excellent point of departure for excursions to the rest of
the country and, following the Congress, spending a moment at some of the
Adriatic resorts outside the high season. To plan your trips consult:
www.croatia.hr, www.mint.hr and www.zagreb‐touristinfo.hr.

After two decades of state independence, Croatia, the youngest member
state of the European Union, is still undergoing political and economic
transformation and recovery from the difficult period of the 1990s.
Located at the juncture of Central and Southeast Europe, Croatia and
Croats perceive themselves at the crossroads of the Mediterranean, Central
European (Alpine, Pannonian) and Balkan cultural spheres. Throughout
history Croatia has been under Venetian, Austrian, Hungarian, Ottoman and,
more recently, Yugoslav political influences.

Iconic places exhibit the country’s multilayered cultural and political
history: Dubrovnik and Split on the Adriatic coast, Istrian coastal towns
and interior villages, the old town of Zagreb, which stands in sharp
contrast with the hectic downtown area of the modern city and the less
renowned northeastern area – Slavonia and Baranja – which has recently
been developing village tourism based on ecologi‐ cal production. Croatia
is also famous for its thousand islands (e.g. Kornati, Hvar, Korčula,
Mljet), crystal-clear seawater, pebble beaches, sailing opportunities,
pristine nature (e.g. Plitvice and Krka lakes), good wines, well preserved
cultural heritage...