These are the confirmed keynote speakers to the 7th APA congress:


Plenary session 1
June 5, Wednesday | 09:30 – 10:30
Rector’s Building, NOVA

Cristina Sánchez-Carretero
Instituto de Ciencias de Patrimonio (Incipit)
Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC)

“2019: Antropologías sobre/para/en transformación”

 

Cristina Sánchez-Carretero es antropóloga, doctora por la Universidad de Pennsylvania. Actualmente es científica titular del Instituto de Ciencias de Patrimonio (Incipit) del Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC), donde coordina la especialidad de antropología. Su investigación se centra en los procesos de patrimonialización en las sociedades contemporáneas; conflicto y patrimonio; estudio de nuevos rituales de duelo; y la intersección entre los procesos migratorios y la revitalización de prácticas religiosas. Entre sus libros destacan Heritage, Pilgrimage and the Camino to Finisterre: Walking to the End of the World (Amsterdam: Springer, 2015), Grassroots Memorials. The Politics of Memorializing Traumatic Death (Oxford: Berghahn, 2011), editado junto con Peter Jan Margry, El Archivo del Duelo. Análisis de la respuesta ciudadana ante los atentados del 11 de marzo en Madrid (Madrid: CSIC, 2011).

Este congreso de la APA, con su lema “2019” sugiere –y apunta como desiderátum- una antropología “sin fronteras temáticas, conceptuales o epistemológicas”. Dejando a un lado la discusión de si es posible la ausencia de fronteras, en esta conferencia reflexiono sobre las normas no escritas que delimitan los temas, conceptos y epistemologías del trabajo antropológico. A través de ejemplos del campo patrimonial, propongo analizar las transformaciones silenciosas (Jullien 2010) activadas en/desde/contra “2019”. La elección del término “transformación” no es baladí: para el filósofo François Jullien, es uno de los lugares de lo “no-pensado” en las lenguas indoeuropeas. El uso de las tres preposiciones del título de esta conferencia –un recurso que Jordi Roca llevó al extremo en su artículo “¿Antropólogos en (o ante, bajo, con, contra, de, desde, para, por, según, sin, sobre, tras) la empresa?” (2007)- me permite articular una primera parte dedicada a las antropologías sobre procesos de transformación; otra dedicada a las antropologías para la transformación; y unas reflexiones finales sobre las antropologías en transformación, centrada en la geopolítica de las antropologías y la renovación del papel de las asociaciones en las trasformaciones de nuestras disciplinas.

 


 

Plenary session 2
June 6, 2019, Thursday | 09:30 – 10:30
Rector’s Building, NOVA

Ramon Sarró
School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography
University of Oxford

“A Profeta e o Mártir: História e Paisagem no Norte de Angola”

Ramon Sarró (PhD London 1999, Habilitação Lisbon 2010), Associate Professor at the School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography of the University of Oxford and Fellow of St Antony’s College.

Prior to joining the University of  Oxford in October 2012, Ramon Sarró had been a Senior Researcher at the Institute of Social Sciences of the University of Lisbon since 2002, as well as a Fellow at the Program for Agrarian Studies, Yale (2010-11). He has been a member of the French network REASOPO since 2009. He has conducted research in Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Portugal, Angola and the Democratic Republic of Congo. He is the author of the award-winning The Politics of Religious Change on the Upper Guinea Coast: Iconoclasm Done and Undone (International African Institute 2009) and co-editor, with Antónia Lima, of Terrenos Metropolitanos: desafios metodológicos (ICS 2007) with David Berliner of Learning Religion: Anthropological Approaches (Berghahn 2007), and with Ruy Blanes and Markus Balkenhol of Atlantic Perspectives: Places, Memories and Spirits in Europe, Africa and the Americas, forthcoming in September 2019 in Berghahn). He has directed the EU (NORFACE)  programme “Recognizing Christianity: How African Migrants Redefine the European Religious Heritage” (2007-2010), and has been the British PI of the programme “Currents of Faith – Places of Memory”, an EU (HERA) consortium (2013-1016), for which he has conducted 9 months of fieldwork in rural Angola. In 2010, together with Simon Coleman (Toronto), he created the annual review journal Religion and Society: Advances in Research (Berghahn).

Sarró has worked on the agrarian, religious and political dimensions of social change in Africa and the diaspora, as well as on the manifestations of prophetic imagination and on material culture (including its iconoclastic destruction). A manuscript on the prophetic invention of a Kongo alphabet is currently under preparation. Currently, he is also the PI of the international project “Mangroves and Aluminium”, funded by the John Fell Fund large grants award scheme (2018-19), in which team of researchers from Europe and Guinea (Conakry) are assessing the impact of aluminium mining upon the mangrove-rice farming communities of the Guinean coast, a region he has been familiar with since 1992. This is accompanied by a twin project which consists on the curation of an exhibit on Baga art in New York, with the focus on the ways Baga art expresses the relationships between farmers, animals and environment. Since 2013 Sarro has also been very active in the revitalization of the Ethnographic National Museum of Bissau, an institution created in 1987 but that had disappeared during the civil war of 1998-99. Based on old photographs, Sarro and a team of researchers have reconstructed the history of the museum and managed to re-create it in the capital of the West African country. A book in Portuguese, funded by the Gulbenkian Foundation, narrates the research and shows the images digitally recuperated (O Museu Nacional Etnográfico da Guiné-Bissau: Imagens para uma História). Together with Marina P. Temudo and Roger Canals, he is currently editing a film, tentatively entitled “Chasing Shadows”, that they have shot in Guinea-Bissau, capturing the material works of prophetic imagination among Balanta farmers.

In tune with the intention of the conference to discuss end of the world challenges for humanity and for anthropology, in this presentation I discuss the entanglement between apocalyptic memories (and expectations) and cultural heritage in Northern Angola, and how this entanglement inscribes itself in the ruins and in the forests, affecting not only the livelihoods of the individuals living there, but also the ethical decisions of anthropologists trying to make sense of what it is to live in a world in ruination.


Plenary session 3
June 7, 2019, Friday | 19:30 – 20:30
Cineteatro Capitólio

Sensorial Keynote

This plenary session, open to the city of Lisbon and to the general public, will take the form of a “sensorial keynote” which aims to approach / arouse sensations through sounds and images:

Vítor Bandeira / Tjak – “Traveling (Brazil): Sounds of the forest, in the distant storm. The song of the Uirapuru announces the coming of good weather. In Mato Grosso, Xingu, meeting with Kamayura Indians, on the Araguaya River, Bananal Island, with Karajá Indians. Finally “Umbanda” and trance, in Manaus. The voice of the Father of Saint accompanies us from the beginning. (Victor Flag Records -1964/5) “. [listen to excerpt here]

Catarina Alves Costa – “See and hear the world as an ethnographic gesture”.

A partir de algumas sequências de filmes com uma componente autoral, esta apresentação abre caminho para pensar os usos da imagem e do som como formas de encantamento, exploração, observação, descoberta e finalmente, interpretação de universos etnográficos distintos. A antropologia surge aqui ligada à ideia de perceção do mundo sensorial capturado fugazmente pela câmara e tornado, assim, virtual.

Filipe Reis – “Anthropology and listening to the world”

A antropologia e a escuta do mundo é uma peça áudio e visual que convida a audiência a escutar com os olhos e a ver com os ouvidos através da projecção de imagens, narração e arte sonora. Vagamente inspirada nas ideias “ingoldianas” sobre percepção e sensorialidade, a peça inclui gravações de campo do arquivo sonoro do autor (com destaque para uma ida recente ao barbeiro) e fragmentos de peças sonoras e documentários realizados recentemente.