During the last edition of the 4^th Vienna Anthropology Days (VANDA), I have presented findings from my doctoral research project Permissible Truths under the title “Who can talk about racism in Germany and how?” as part of the panel “Digital narratives: Exploring digital dimensions of shared experiences and collective memory”.Using the methods of digital anthropology and digital ethnography, I have been following artists documenting and exposing cases of racism in the art world in Berlin on social media, highlighting the exceptionalizing and exclusionary politics and practices in Germany limiting who is permitted to talk about racism and how. The weaponization and politicization of history is particularly targeting migrant artists who resist this dislocation and instrumentalization of “German guilt”. In an era of aggressive silencing, digital and social media provide an alternative platform (albeit with limitations) to tell the stories of struggle, mourning, and racism. For the VANDA presentation, I chose to focus on “memes” and present my work on political humor and the use of mems as a form of digital storytelling.

Below is presented one of the examples, it is an AI generated image that was circulated online in the winter of 2024 following the attack of a racialized group of protesters that were taking part in a large demonstration against the far-right. The group was attacked by the other predominantly white protesters. The demonstration against racism was triggered by the reports that there have been mass gatherings of far-right groups across Germany. Simultaneously, there was a large public outcry caused by the outrageous “Ausländer Raus” [“Foreigners Out”] video scandal.

In response, also have a look at the powerful protest song by Bundaskanzlerin & Vitling here.

This summer has been intellectually stimulating as Pierre had the opportunity to present two papers at the conference of the European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA) in Barcelona, Spain, and of the European Association for Urban History (EAUH) in Ostrava, Czech Republic.

His first paper, “Dakar in Block: Concrete Diversions,” followed the life of a concrete block in Dakar. This work examined how concrete can shape urban landscapes, lives, aspirations, and identities in cities like Dakar. The second paper, “Cementing Dakar’s Heritage: House Biographies,” took a broader view, questioning the intersection of house stories, heritage, and the temporalities of concrete.

Barcelona and Ostrava provided the perfect settings to think critically about the built environment and the ways we navigate it. Barcelona, with its rich architectural history and contemporary urban dynamics, was an inspiring place for reflecting on the role of materials like concrete in shaping cities. In Ostrava, a city marked by its industrial past, temporality and heritage are questioned fascinatingly.

Now, back in Vienna, with renewed energy for writing and teaching.

Manuela presented her work on art collecting at the TIAMSA Art market conference at the University of Melbourne in July 2024

On February 19, 2021, eighteen days after Myanmar’s military seized power in a coup, a group clad in black dropped a banner from an overpass in Yangon, which had been engulfed in strikes, demonstrations, and blockades after the coup. The banner read: hnaung kyo: hmá t’ba: sone: shone: saya ma’ shi. The slogan is a translation of the phrase from the Communist Manifesto, “Nothing to lose but our chains.” The banner is faithful to the Burmese translation of the Manifesto, which we owe to the Communist Party of Burma (CPB), itself founded in 1939 in the throes of anti-colonial revolution.¹ But meanings can shift in the process of translation, circulation, and (re)interpretation over time. One blogger rightly described the Burmese slogan’s literal meaning as “Nothing to lose but our strings of attachment.”

Aung, Geoffrey Rathgeb. 2024. “A Revolutionary Present”, In “Back to the Present” edited by Timothy P.A. Cooper, Michael Edwards & Nikita Simpson, American Ethnologist website, January 26 2024,

read full article here:

A Revolutionary Present by Geoffrey Rathgeb Aung

Smartphones and construction sites are intertwined in Dakar. This article explores how content on social media shapes the use of concrete in Dakar and our representations of the construction sector. This article is published in Roadsides and is part of a special issue on “Concrete”!

Wenzel, Pierre. 2024. “Shaping Concrete on Social Media in Dakar, Senegal.” Roadsides 11: 70-77.

read full article here: https://doi.org/10.26034/roadsides-202401110

What can a critical analysis of imperialist political economy offer the decolonial turn in the contemporary social sciences? How might revisiting “classic” anti-imperialist thought and politics from the global South push scholars and activists to envision a more revolutionary decolonization? And how, in our discipline’s history, have anthropologists variously opposed or been complicit with the workings of imperialist power? In this article, and in the special issue of Dialectical Anthropology that this article introduces, we engage these questions with a call to bring imperialism “back in” to anthropological research and analysis. Our proposal, however, is not simply for an anthropology of empire, but for an anthropology against empire—a project, that is, not solely of interpreting imperialism, but of aiding its abolition.

Read full article here:

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10624-024-09724-0

Evgenija Filova is currently on fieldwork in Berlin, capturing the city through her photographs (see below). It is right before the EU elections and the city is plastered with posters from parties both left and right, with parties on the right spectrum openly advocating for anti-migration. This comes simultaneously with the scandal from the luxury holiday resort on the Sylt Island on the northern coast, when a video went viral of a white crowd chanting in German “Germany to the Germans, foreigners out” while partying and displaying Nazi-era gestures. While the video was horrifying crowds on social media, the German media merely gave attention to an issue that is ripping through the German public scene, with more and more videos shared online of similar crowds at parties and in night clubs chanting for “re-migration”. Only a few months ago, another scandal broke out of a mass gathering held in secret by different groups on the right spectrum meeting to discuss “mass deportations” from Germany. While hundreds of thousands gathered in front of the parliament to protest the emerging rise of the far-right, public figures across the political spectrum and politicians in high positions of power have been likewise talking of anti-migration.

Germany today is a scary reality to be living in.

P.S. While I choose to focus on the alarming presence of anti-migration content, the resistance is omnipresent. One of my favorite stickers reads: “They see but do not recognize, they hear but do not comprehend.”

This article historicizes and conceptualizes the Myanmar radical tradition: a tradition of thought and practice that has animated radical politics across Myanmar’s twentieth and twenty-first centuries. From anti-colonial struggle to decolonization, and from communist insurgency to left feminism, ethnic rebellion, and today’s revolutionary upsurge following the 2021 coup d’état, this radical tradition is best understood not as something bounded or solitary. Rather, it names a productive conjoining of radical thought and practice from within Myanmar, as well as from other times and places, beginning in the imperial world order of the early twentieth century. Revisiting scholarship on transatlantic and transpacific radicalisms, we argue that attention to imperialism offers important insights into Myanmar’s modern history and contemporary dynamics, including the Myanmar radical tradition. Yet, the Myanmar radical tradition—heterogeneous and internally conflictual, a site of historical dispute—also sheds light on the changing imperial world order, which we show has a fundamentally reactive, counter-revolutionary quality. Today’s late imperialism, we argue, can be seen as a retaliatory response to the long arc of decolonization, a story within which Myanmar’s contemporary revolutionary struggle renders the Myanmar radical tradition very much a living tradition.

read full article here:

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10624-024-09716-0#:~:text=We%20argue%20that%20the%20Myanmar,subjection%2C%20exploitation%2C%20and%20revolt

Logistical turbulence: Between valorization and violence along the China–Myanmar Economic Corridor

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/02637758241243163

Two PhD positions are currently available at the Institute of Cultural and Social Anthropology at the University of Vienna in the ERC project “‘The anthropology of the future: an art world perspective’ (ANTHROFUTURE)” (PI: Manuela Ciotti).

The extended application deadline is 16.06.2024

• PhD Position in the Anthropology of Art and Digital Media (Job-ID im univie Karrierecenter: 2382)
  
• PhD Position in Visual Anthropology (Job-ID im univie Karrierecenter: 2383)