The big historical events of the 20th
century and the radical political and social changes in Southeast
Europe in the new millennium caused deep transformations of people’s lives and life trajectories. After the life course standardization in the period of industrialization and the institutionalized
individualism of the period of reflexive modernity the current situation is
marked by a huge variety of life trajectories, life styles, and life choices
which are a sign of the new global order. Some social theorists claim that globalization
is entering the intimate space of personal lives, affecting family and
emotional life, commercializing and commoditizing it. But despite the common social patterns of life courses in Europe and beyond,
there are of course differences in the individual life trajectories, e.g. in the
meanings of childhood and youth, of age and ageing, of family life and work life
in different societies and points of history.
In order to understand
people’s lives from birth to death anthropologists conceptualize and conduct
research on human’s life courses. The concept of life course enables the understanding
of human lives within socio-cultural and political contexts, stressing agency
and people’s everyday experience. With regard to Southeast Europe we need to
understand how historical events, which produce deep structural changes, have
influenced the construction of individual life courses; how age based social
identities are experienced along the life course; what new life course
identities and representations of life periods are produced; and also how the experience
of ageing changes during contemporary life courses, in order to outline the
complexities and varieties of life courses in the context of the radical social
transformations which this European region has experienced
in the eras of socialism and globalization.
The primary goal of the conference
will thus not be to focus on the demographic, political, or economic causes of
these changes in individual life courses and the family but on their socio-cultural
consequences for everyday life, i.e., on people’s strategies of coping and adaptation,
on their concepts and attitudes towards these changes as well as on the
concomitant cultural expressions such as changes in family rituals or
traditions.
We seek papers based on empirical
ethnographic, folkloric, or anthropological research that analyse the changes
in Balkan life courses, in families, childhoods, work-life, and old age
resulting from the historical processes of socialism and post-socialism,
modernisation and globalization. The papers should – in some way or other –
relate to the following dimensions of the life course:
1. Family and kinship: traditional and modern roles and
relations, (neo)patriarchy; generations and generation units, communication
and relations between generations; familism, family and kinship networks vs.
friend networks, loyalty and trust; kinship and family as metaphor, their
symbolic, emotional, ideological and political uses.
2. Parenthood: traditional and new models; roles
and relations of family members, ‘postmodern’ transformations of gender roles (unisex),
images of women and men, (neo)patriarchal roles; patchwork families;
homosexuality and family, sexual minorities.
3. Childhood and youth: care of children, family care,
children’s culture, games, songs etc.; youth, coming of age, schooling /
education, youth culture, games, songs, narratives, social media; life-cycle
rituals / rites of passage (birth, birthday, graduation, wedding, etc.)
4. Grown-up life and family: work-life and leisure;
establishing a family, having a job, an apartment or house; leisure activities
for families, children, youths; “normal biographies”; family enterprises:
cooperation, loyalties, rituals; forms of leadership, gender roles; family and
(work) -migration, torn-up families, children left behind, grand-parents as
parents; roles of media and communication technologies.
5. Ageing and old age: traditional, modern, and
‘postmodern’ concepts of ageing and old age; age and gender; old-age
pensioners; rituals (retirement, funeral etc.); care of the elderly: in the
family or in homes for seniors; relations to younger generations in the family;
6. ‘Passing on’: family traditions and rituals; family
histories, chronicles, memories, pictures, narratives, songs, secrets; inheritance
and the transmission of property, land, valued objects; inheritance and gender;
inheritance and migration/emigration.
7. Demographic change: consequences for everyday life
and culture, differences between (social, ethnic, religious) groups.
Please submit a proposal that contains your full name,
institutional and disciplinary affiliation with an academic CV of max. 5 lines,
the title of your paper and an abstract of 200 words with specific information
about research methods and sources. The organizers give preference to
submissions based on fieldwork and/or the use of ethnographic, folkloric, or
closely related archive materials. The paper proposal must be in English, while
the papers presented at the conference can be in English, French or German.
The deadline for the submission
of panel proposals is 30 November 2015, for the submission of
paper proposals is 31 January 2016.
Please send your proposal to:
Prof. Evgenija Krǎsteva-Blagoeva, New Bulgarian
University
and to Prof. Klaus Roth, Munich University
Participants
will be notified before the end of April
2016 about the acceptance of their paper.
Conference Site, Organization
The congress
will be held at New Bulgarian University ,
Sofia Magdalena Elčinova, and Ana Luleva.
Funding, Travel and Accommodation
Depending on
availability of funding, the conference organizers will cover at least part of
the travel and accommodation costs for participants from Albania , Bulgaria ,
Bosnia-Herzegovina , Croatia ,
Greece , Kosovo ,
Macedonia , Moldova , Montenegro ,
Romania , Serbia , and Turkey
Accommodation
for participants who qualify for financial support will be pre-arranged. Other
participants will also be assisted in making hotel reservations. More
information about accommodation will be published on the conference website (http://inasea.net/?page_id=14 ) in due time.
Registration Fee
InASEA
members who have paid their dues for the last two years are exempt from the registration
fee. Non-InASEA members and non-paying members will be asked to pay an on-site
registration fee equivalent to 25 € (for participants from the above-mentioned
SEE countries) or 50 € (for participants from all other countries).
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