Pētnieks Klāvs Sedlenieks piedalās antropoloģijas konferencē Viļņā
2022. gada 16.–18. jūnijā vadošais pētnieks projektā (Re)moving Ties Klāvs Sedlenieks piedalījās Viļņas Universitātes organizētajā konferencē Old Discipline, New Trajectories: Theories, Methods and Practices in Anthropology.
K. Sedlenieks konferencē uzstājās ar prezentāciju Growing up in Europe: a century of theoretical self-deception.
- Tēzes
Growing Up in Europe: A Century of Theoretical Self-Deception
Klāvs Sedlenieks
Western anthropologists invented the concept of kinship to describe the “other” which seemed to be integrated by kin ties. While European (broadly speaking) kinship principles rested on the assumption that birth-related ties must be re-evaluated and replaced by choice-based ones during the process of growing-up, the societies with strong “kin ties” seemed to be lingering in social childhood. I use Western social theories not as sources of intellectual wisdom, but as ethnographic artifacts produced by the intellectual elites of the societies under scrutiny. Theoretical assumptions like status contract, Gemeinschaft-Gesellschaft, strong-weak ties, bonding-bridging social capital—all reiterate the same vision of social change where the past, and early social life is associated with ties produced through birth and the future is associated with choice. A similar framework (flesh vs spiritual kinship) was advocated by European Christians since early Medieval times. Many of these theories draw direct parallels with (European) assumptions of individual development: if birth-related ties are not severed, pathology of sorts results. The fear (or prediction) of the constantly disappearing European family also is a part of the general narrative of growing up in Europe. I argue that we need to start looking at European kinship not via theory that was developed to describe the “rest” but as an integral part of European social fabric and consequently evaluate the stream of global theories (e.g., proposing ends of history) in a world where Europe heads towards the periphery.
