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| Semester | spring semester 2024 |
| Course frequency | Once only |
| Lecturers | George-Paul Meiu (gp.meiu@unibas.ch, Assessor) |
| Content | The rapid and, at times, quite radical transformations of social, political, and economic regimes in the recent history of Eastern Europe have posed key challenges to how people have remembered their pasts and imagined their futures. Over the past two centuries alone, the transition from feudal systems and monarchies to socialist societies and then neoliberal capitalist ones have produced different understandings of social reproduction. The geopolitical shifts between different empires (Ottoman, Habsburg, Russian) and transnational orders (Soviet Union, European Union) have given rise to sometimes conflicting ways of passing down property and custom to craft futures. This course explores this complex and shifting cultural terrain through the lens of memory and inheritance. For anthropologists, inheritance or the ways in which people pass down property, knowledge, and social roles, among other things, has been a central modality for building particular kinds of society: who inherits what (and when) shapes how a society construes and hierarchizes its members, whether according to gender, generation, kinship, race, ethnicity, or class. Strongly tied to the rules of inheritance is the deployment of memory: various modes of remembering and forgetting help sustain or undermine specific social and political orders. What forms of memory and inheritance have emerged in the distinct palimpsest of the historically diverse orders of Eastern Europe? What can historical anthropologists learn from the objects, properties, knowledges, and affects passed down in these contexts and from the silences, secrets, or unconscious legacies they carry? Students will address these questions by learning about the particular cultural politics of Eastern Europe and by raising, through the anthropology of the region, new questions about memory and inheritance in the contemporary world order more broadly. |
| Language of instruction | English |
| Use of digital media | No specific media used |
| Interval | Weekday | Time | Room |
|---|---|---|---|
| wöchentlich | Monday | 16.15-18.00 | Ethnologie, grosser Seminarraum |
| Date | Time | Room |
|---|---|---|
| Monday 26.02.2024 | 16.15-18.00 | Ethnologie, grosser Seminarraum |
| Monday 04.03.2024 | 16.15-18.00 | Ethnologie, grosser Seminarraum |
| Monday 11.03.2024 | 16.15-18.00 | Ethnologie, grosser Seminarraum |
| Monday 18.03.2024 | 16.15-18.00 | Ethnologie, grosser Seminarraum |
| Monday 25.03.2024 | 16.15-18.00 | Ethnologie, grosser Seminarraum |
| Monday 01.04.2024 | 16.15-18.00 | Ostern |
| Monday 08.04.2024 | 16.15-18.00 | Ethnologie, grosser Seminarraum |
| Monday 15.04.2024 | 16.15-18.00 | Ethnologie, grosser Seminarraum |
| Monday 22.04.2024 | 16.15-18.00 | Ethnologie, grosser Seminarraum |
| Monday 29.04.2024 | 16.15-18.00 | Ethnologie, grosser Seminarraum |
| Monday 06.05.2024 | 16.15-18.00 | Ethnologie, grosser Seminarraum |
| Monday 13.05.2024 | 16.15-18.00 | Ethnologie, grosser Seminarraum |
| Monday 20.05.2024 | 16.15-18.00 | Pfingstmontag |
| Monday 27.05.2024 | 16.15-18.00 | Ethnologie, grosser Seminarraum |
| Modules |
Modul: Archive / Medien / Theorien (Bachelor's degree program: Eastern European Studies) Modul: Einführung in die Ethnographie einer Grossregion (Bachelor's degree subject: Anthropology) Modul: Forschung und Praxis (Master's degree subject: East European History) Modul: Gesellschaft in Osteuropa (Bachelor's degree program: Eastern European Studies) Modul: Gesellschaft in Osteuropa (Bachelor's degree subject: Eastern European Cultures) |
| Assessment format | record of achievement |
| Assessment details | Attendance (20%) In-class presentation (20%) Book Review (30%) Final take-home exam (30%) |
| Assessment registration/deregistration | Reg.: course registration; dereg.: not required |
| Repeat examination | one repetition, best attempt counts |
| Scale | 1-6 0,5 |
| Repeated registration | no repetition |
| Responsible faculty | Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, studadmin-philhist@unibas.ch |
| Offered by | Fachbereich Ethnologie |