Monday 11 February, from 09:00 to 17:00
at the University of Malta
at the University of Malta
The workshop will be held on Monday 11 February 2019, from 09:00 to 17:00, at the University of Malta
The convenors are Jean-Paul Baldacchino and Giovanni Tarantino.
The event is free. Reserve your seat by by 11 January 2019 (for catering purposes) by sending an email to Isabelle Abela.
This workshop will look specifically at the relationship between emotions and moral structures in the Mediterranean region. It starts from the premise that ‘emotions may actually be essential and enduring features of our moral character’ (Oatley 1999: 5).
The workshop will integrate two different perspectives. It will look at the role that emotions have played in the construction of ‘moral reason’ in the Mediterranean. What is the relationship between morality, emotions and rationality in the different societies of the region? When are sentiments valid grounds for moral action? The workshop will also look at specific emotions whose proper object could be identified as ‘moral’ (pride, shame, guilt, compassion and humility, for example). Are there regional similarities in the ways in which such emotions are understood and the actions they impel? Do the the local semantic inflections of such moral sentiments underscore a different understanding of morality and/or the emotions? Were there significant historical shifts in the ways in which such emotions are articulated within the economic, political and social currents in the region? How are moral sentiments engendered in the Mediterranean?
Recognising that such emotions, if not socially constructed are at least socially articulated, contributors to this workshop will look at varieties of moral sentiments in the Mediterranean and its narratives. Contributors can focus on individual emotions (past and present), look at the deployment of emotions or conduct a comparative study of one or more emotions within a society or across different societies across the Mediterranean basin.
The workshop will integrate two different perspectives. It will look at the role that emotions have played in the construction of ‘moral reason’ in the Mediterranean. What is the relationship between morality, emotions and rationality in the different societies of the region? When are sentiments valid grounds for moral action? The workshop will also look at specific emotions whose proper object could be identified as ‘moral’ (pride, shame, guilt, compassion and humility, for example). Are there regional similarities in the ways in which such emotions are understood and the actions they impel? Do the the local semantic inflections of such moral sentiments underscore a different understanding of morality and/or the emotions? Were there significant historical shifts in the ways in which such emotions are articulated within the economic, political and social currents in the region? How are moral sentiments engendered in the Mediterranean?
Recognising that such emotions, if not socially constructed are at least socially articulated, contributors to this workshop will look at varieties of moral sentiments in the Mediterranean and its narratives. Contributors can focus on individual emotions (past and present), look at the deployment of emotions or conduct a comparative study of one or more emotions within a society or across different societies across the Mediterranean basin.
Programme
09:00
Registration
Registration
09:15 – 09:30 Opening Remarks
09:30 – 11:00
Session 1: The Moral and the Political in Turkey
Session 1: The Moral and the Political in Turkey
Moderator: Prof. Nadia Al-Bagdadi, Central European University
‘Learning to Perceive the City: Activism as Ethical and Sentimental Education in Istanbul’
Prof. Christopher Houston, Department of Anthropology, Macquarie University
‘Melancholy is a City: The Moral Refuge of Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul’
Dr Norbert Bugeja, Mediterranean Institute, University of Malta
‘Modifying the Moral Self Through Sufi Music Pedagogy in Turkey’
Dr Banu Senay, Department of Anthropology, Macquarie University
Discussion
11:00 – 11:30
Coffee Break
Coffee Break
11:30 – 13:00
Session 2: At the Borders of Morality: Anthropological Perspectives on Morality and Sentiments in the Mediterranean
Session 2: At the Borders of Morality: Anthropological Perspectives on Morality and Sentiments in the Mediterranean
Moderator: Prof. John Chircop, Mediterranean Institute, University of Malta
‘Amoral Sentiments in the Mediterranean: Familism, Civility and Pride’
Prof. Jon P. Mitchell, Department of Anthropology, University of Sussex
‘Is Honour a Moral Sentiment? Re-interpreting the Honour-Shame Syndrome in the Mediterranean’
Dr Jean Paul Baldacchino, Mediterranean Institute, University of Malta
‘Narrating the Humanitarian Border: Moral Deliberations of Territorial Border Workers on the EU’s Mediterranean Border’
Dr Daniela DeBono, Mälmo University
Discussion
13:00 – 14:30
Lunch Break
Lunch Break
14:30 – 14:40
‘The “Mediterranean Basin” System of Human Movement: How to Design and Develop a Form of Mathematical Modelling which Captures its Mid- and Long-Term Behaviour’
Prof. Graziano Gentili, INdAM Rome
14:40 – 16:30
Roundtable
Roundtable
‘Entangled Sentiments: Feeling for a Global History of Emotions from Within Different Disciplines’
Moderator: Dr Katrina O’Loughlin, Brunel University
Participants: Lisa Beaven (La Trobe University), Nadia al-Bagdadi (Central European University), Luisa Simonutti (CNR-ISPF Milan), Mirko Sardelić (Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts), Giovanni Tarantino (University of Florence), Ann Thomson (European University Institute)
16:30 – 16:45
Concluding Remarks
Norbert Bugeja is Senior Lecturer in Postcolonial Studies at the Mediterranean Institute, University of Malta. He has lectured at the universities of Warwick (UK), Kent (UK) and Malta. His published research in Postcolonial and Mediterranean Studies includes the volume Postcolonial Memoir in the Middle East (Routledge, 2012) as well as book chapters, guest-edited journal special issues and peer-reviewed articles. He is General Editor of the Journal of Mediterranean Studies.
Modifying the Moral Self Through Sufi Music Pedagogy in Turkey
Dr Banu Senay is a Lecturer in the Department of Anthropology at Macquarie University, Sydney. She has extensive research expertise in the areas of migration, transnationalism and diasporic politics, and is the author of Beyond Turkey’s Borders: Long-distance Kemalism, State Politics and the Turkish Diaspora (I. B. Tauris, 2013). Her current research on Islamic art pedagogies in Istanbul engages with debates in anthropology about skilled learning, ethics, and Islamic cultural politics. She has a forthcoming monograph on this research project titled Musical Ethics: Islam, Self-Making, and the Ney in Turkey.
Jean Paul Baldacchino is Head of Department and Senior Lecturer in Anthropology at the University of Malta.
Concluding Remarks
Abstracts and Bio-notes
Learning to Perceive the City: Activism as Ethical and Sentimental Education in Istanbul
Christopher Houston, Maquarie University
Between 1975 and the military coup in 1980 Istanbul was a city of activists. Leftist groups’ educating of militants involved cultivating a sense or sensibility that would enable them to notice and decry particular aspects of the environment – poverty, injustice, and inequality – or be moved to action by certain dimensions of people’s lives. Activist organisations were communities of practice, transforming militants’ ethical perceptions. In this paper I explore activist enacting of these ethical sensibilities in the gecekondu, the massive ring of shantytowns that surrounded the city and served as a vast pool of cheap labour for its factories and industrial workshops. Militant groups perceived the shantytown as a site of revolutionary potential. But did their service, consciousness-raising and attempts both to fit in with, mobilise and change local inhabitants meet with residents’ support and approval?
Christopher Houston is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia. He has carried out extensive fieldwork in Turkey on Islamic social movements, nationalism and urban anthropology, including most recently on political activism in Istanbul in the years immediately before and after the 1980 military coup. He is author of Islam, Kurds and the Turkish Nation State (Berg Publishers, 2002), and Kurdistan: Crafting of National Selves (Indiana University Press, 2008); and co-editor of Phenomenology in Anthropology: A Sense of Perspective (Indiana University Press, 2015). He has published his work in a number of journals including Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute; Die Welt das Islams; Political Geography; Theory, Culture and Society; International Journal of Urban and Regional Research and Critique of Anthropology. He was President of the Australian Anthropological Society in 2014 and 2015.
Melancholy is a City: The Moral Refuge of Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul
Norbert Bugeja, University of Malta
Istanbul-born novelist Orhan Pamuk has often made observations about his own ‘fate’ as a writer whose itinerary – unlike those of writers like Vladimir Nabokov or Joseph Conrad which were inflected by exile and displacement – is firmly informed by Istanbul, the city of his birth. This paper will argue that Pamuk’s writing, and especially his apparent ‘Istanbul trilogy’ – the novel The Black Book, the memoir Istanbul, and the novel The Museum of Innocence – deploys a specific understanding of melancholic affect that seeks to diversify his native spaces in order to derive from them insights, at once political and affectional, into the post-imperial and early Cold-War metropolis. In this body of literary work, the melancholy key that Pamuk terms hüzün expands into a capacious critical index in its own right. Hüzün becomes a grammar through which Pamuk laments the demise of the city’s multi-ethnic conviviality under Ottoman rule, and takes a stand against the persecution of the city’s non-Muslim religious and ethnic communities leading up to and following the establishment of the Turkish Republic. Most importantly, it is a critique of the moral degeneracy of Kemalism as a societal and political normativity that has undermined its own promises in the process of carving out an identitarian form of national selfunderstanding. Hüzün is an affective dimension endowed with spatial characteristics: a sentiment that may at once absorb the city’s peripheralisation and historic loss, and open the latter up as a mode of moral agency. It becomes a ‘poetic licence’, as Pamuk would have it, to ‘feel paralysed’ in the face of the systematic implementation of political amnesia by various discourses of power over a century that has changed the ex-imperial metropole’s standing in the world.
Norbert Bugeja is Senior Lecturer in Postcolonial Studies at the Mediterranean Institute, University of Malta. He has lectured at the universities of Warwick (UK), Kent (UK) and Malta. His published research in Postcolonial and Mediterranean Studies includes the volume Postcolonial Memoir in the Middle East (Routledge, 2012) as well as book chapters, guest-edited journal special issues and peer-reviewed articles. He is General Editor of the Journal of Mediterranean Studies.
Modifying the Moral Self Through Sufi Music Pedagogy in Turkey
Dr Banu Senay, Macquarie University
This paper explores the pedagogy of an important and highly popular Islamic musical practice in the city of Istanbul, the tradition of ney playing (the reed flute). Intimately connected with Sufism in both the Ottoman Empire and, for better or worse, in modern secular Turkey, the ney has been a key instrument in both Ottoman and post-Ottoman art music. In this talk I examine the transformative power of this art practice to cultivate in learners not only new artistic but also ethical perceptions. I frame the transformative faculty of this musical enterprise ‘ethical modification’ to avoid over-privileging the efficacy of the skilled practice for fashioning radically different moral selves. Inspired by emerging debates in the anthropology of ethics, I outline the ways in which the ney is taught both through a technical focus on music and through the Islamic pedagogical practice of sohbet (companionship-in-conversation), proposing how they combine together to cultivate certain affective-ethical dispositions in players’ moral selves.
Dr Banu Senay is a Lecturer in the Department of Anthropology at Macquarie University, Sydney. She has extensive research expertise in the areas of migration, transnationalism and diasporic politics, and is the author of Beyond Turkey’s Borders: Long-distance Kemalism, State Politics and the Turkish Diaspora (I. B. Tauris, 2013). Her current research on Islamic art pedagogies in Istanbul engages with debates in anthropology about skilled learning, ethics, and Islamic cultural politics. She has a forthcoming monograph on this research project titled Musical Ethics: Islam, Self-Making, and the Ney in Turkey.
Amoral Sentiments in the Mediterranean: Familism, Civility and Civic Pride
Jon P. Mitchell, University of Sussex
This paper examines the cluster of moral sentiments surrounding notions of civic pride, civil engagement, civility, and its opposites. Civility has recently become a subject of concern for political scientists and commentators, particularly in the USA, who lament its erosion in political and public discourse. Although ostensibly a debate about manners, the deeper roots of this concern with civility link it not merely to politeness or etiquette, but also deeper civic virtues. Lack of civility threatens the very possibility of society (Bejan 2017: 7). In the Italianate Mediterranean, civility – or civiltá – has signalled an aspirational (often literal) urbanity linked to elite forms of civil participation and civil engagement. This contrasts with more popular (and less civil) forms of civic pride, but also with the enduring alter to civility – as represented in various forms of familism, clientelism, tengentismo, and corruption that appear to work against the social, and against the public good. This paper examines the tensions between civility and its opposites in Naples since the Second World War, and in debates about corruption in Malta.
Jon P. Mitchell is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Sussex, UK. He has been researching Maltese culture and society since the early 1990s and written on diverse topics including the politics of nationalism and Europeanisation, clientelism and corruption, social memory, religious ritual and religious experience, and football. His publications include Ambivalent Europeans (Routledge, 2002), Powers of Good and Evil (Berghahn, 2002), Global and Local Football (Routledge, 2008) and Ritual, Performance and the Senses
(Bloomsbury, 2015).
Is Honour a Moral Sentiment? Reframing the Debate on Honour in the Mediterranean
Jean Paul Baldacchino, University of Malta
The ‘honour-shame syndrome’ has been considered as the ‘locus classicus’ of the anthropology of the Mediterranean. While the paradigm has long been challenged as a form of ‘Mediterraneanism’ (Herzfeld 1980, 1999), in this paper I argue that honour is a relevant moral principle in the Mediterranean. While the turn to the study of emotions in Anthropology has forced us to re-evaluate some of the classical binaries that have endured within anthropology, honour has never been considered as an emotion per se. Honour tends to conceived of either as part of a ‘code’ in a pseudolegalistic discourse, or rendered into a quasi-pathological symptom of a deficient ‘moral reason’.
Adopting a phenomenological approach, this paper will seek to re-evaluate honour as an intentional state. This paper will seek to test the proposition that honour could be considered as a ‘moral sentiment’ and therefore an essential component of moral structures.
Jean Paul Baldacchino is Head of Department and Senior Lecturer in Anthropology at the University of Malta.
He is also currently the Director of the Mediterranean Institute at the University. He has published articles in a number of journals covering the anthropology of religion, popular culture and the anthropology of emotions. He has conducted fieldwork and published his research in the Mediterranean region and in South Korea.
Narrating the Humanitarian Border: Moral Deliberations of Territorial Border Workers on the EU’s Mediterranean Border
Daniela DeBono, Malmö University
The European Union’s external border is the quintessential ‘humanitarian border’. It is presented as a humanitarian and caring enterprise, while concealing its border control and exclusionary elements. Territorial border workers are the frontline fieldworkers tasked with implementing the laws and policies underpinning this humanitarian border, making them foremost actors in its construction. They present a defensive façade which may be interpreted as critical, but which actually merely oscillates within the humanitarian vs security debate, thus reproducing the basic tenets of the ‘humanitarian border’. However, intertwined in the intricate fabric and form of these personal narratives is an emergent sense of discomfort with the dominant humanitarian security framework. These elements suggest an ongoing search for a normative reference which is based on simple humanist ideas, human dignity and draws on their encounters and observations of these newcomers. In this rudimentary search for a ‘normative humanism’, I argue that we can detect a desire for a more ‘humane border’ rather than the current ‘humanitarian border’. This article draws on multi-sited and long-term ethnographic work and is based on the personal narratives of territorial border workers located on the European Union’s external border in Sicily, Italy.
Daniela DeBono is Senior Lecturer in the Department for Global Political Studies, Malmö University, Sweden, and a member of the Malmö Institute for the Studies of Migration, Diversity and Welfare (MIM). She is also Marie Skłodowska Curie COFAS Fellow at the European University Institute and Malmö University. She is a Research Affiliate with the Mediterranean Institute, University of Malta. Her background is in anthropology and human rights, and she received her PhD from the University of Sussex. Her publications focus on the migrationhuman rights nexus, with particular reference to irregular migration in Malta and southern Europe, first reception of irregular maritime migrants, deportation and citizenship. She is currently working on a multi-sited ethnographic project examining the everyday life of people working in the first reception systems on the EU’s southern external borders.
International Seminar Series