“OBJECTS, TIME, TRANSMISSION”

The second edition (see first edition here) of the “Anthropology Field School” takes on the topic of Objects, Time, Transmission. It explores how artefacts—their materiality, surfaces, and substances, but also their investment with meaning, affect, and desire—shape ways of being in time. How do objects help us craft and anchor the temporalities of inheritance, genealogy, and attachment? And how are histories of social ruptures, failures, and discontinuities transmitted through objects? Over seven days in the Transylvanian village of Criț, Brașov county, Romania, MA students from Basel and Bucharest and anthropologists from England, Switzerland, and Romania will explore will explore this theme through lectures, excursions, informal discussions and a film screening.

** Public lectures and the film screening will take place in the barn of the medieval church burg in Criț. (Entrance through the yard of Casa Kraus)

Tuesday, June 24, 2025

10:00-11:30 Public Lecture

“On the House, Uncanny Intimacies, and the Unconscious of Inheritance”

George Paul Meiu (University of Basel)

Anthropologists have long explored the “house” as a key structural unit of marriage, kinship, and social reproduction; as a stage for the performance of attachment and mutuality; or as the embodiment of memory and desire. Psychoanalysts too have tackled the “house” as a site of intimacy and comfort but also aggression and horror. Thinking through houses—their designs, material inventories, and political economies—in southeastern Transylvania, Romania, this lecture explores conceptual intersections of anthropology and psychoanalysis, through the notion of an unconscious of inheritance: how forgotten histories of dissident sexuality, collective loss and humiliation, familial desires and aspirations inform subjective orientations to houses and things; how the inheritance of houses or, now in contexts of heritage tourism, houses as “cultural inheritance” can both occlude and reproduce uncanny intimacies that transmit more than what is known or observable; how absences, silences, secrets linger in material form, orienting and reorienting subjects from the myriad interstices of the house. If psychoanalysts, like Freud and Jung, often saw the house—its attics, cellars, and hidden rooms—as metaphors of the unconscious, I read the unconscious of inheritance, not as simply metaphoric, but inherent in the material traces and textures of objects and houses. The unconscious is then not simply like a house, but an important material layer of it.

Wednesday, June 25, 2025

10:00-11:30 Public Lecture

Objects in the Propagation of the “Infrahuman”

Zainabu Jallo (University of Basel)

In recent years, the concept of the infrahuman has attracted significant scholarly interest within the Humanities. Paul Gilroy (2019) characterizes it as a state of being "Human, but not quite human." Social psychologist Jacques-Philippe Leyens (2007) and his colleagues articulate it as an implicit belief that one's own group—distinguished by attributes such as intellect, political ideology, social standing, or religious affiliation—possesses a superior level of humanity compared to those outside the group, who are perceived as less human. 

How do objects fuel an idea such as infrahumanization, wherein the qualification of being human is accorded to some and denied to others? This lecture explores the role of various objects in shaping temporalities and experiences related to the development of the "infrahuman", drawing on examples from the discredited discipline of criminal anthropology with case studies from Torino, Havana, and Bahia.

Thursday, June 26, 2025

10:00-11:30 Public Lecture

Temporal Plurality and Archival Return: A Case Study from Nigeria

Paul Basu (Oxford University)

European colonization entailed not only the domination of people and their territories and resources, it imposed particular understandings of time – linear, progressive, commodifiable – on those it colonized, denying the validity of indigenous conceptualisations of time and temporality. In this presentation, we explore what happens when objects are taken out of their indigenous context, held in temporal suspension in museums (where they have been used to narrate otherness in terms of temporal distance), and then returned to indigenous contexts changed by colonialism and postcolonial modernity. The presentation draws upon fieldwork undertaken as part of the Museum Affordance/[Re:]Entanglements project in Igbo-speaking areas of Nigeria, reflecting in particular on the recirculation of anthropological photographs from the colonial era. What multiple temporalities converge in these photographic objects and their represencing of ancestors and ancestral time?

Thursday, June 26, 2025

15:00-17:30 Film Screening and Discussion

Pride and Concrete / Mândrie şi Beton (2013, Petruț Cǎlinescu)

One in six Romanians has gone abroad to work. Most of them come from rural areas and the money sent back home has irreversibly transformed their native villages. Unlike in the city, where even competition is experienced and perceived individually and behind closed doors, changes are highly more visible in villages, where the main street is open stage to social competition. (Watch trailer)

Mândrie și Beton is an independent, long-term journalistic project documenting the transformation of traditional Romanian villages in the north of the country, shaped by decades of labor migration. Initiated in 2010 and now in its second phase (2021–2022), the project captures how economic shifts, Brexit, and the pandemic have altered the social and physical landscape of rural Romania. While international portrayals often romanticize an unchanging, folkloric countryside, Mândrie și Beton focuses on a more complex reality—where stainless steel gates replace wooden fences, concrete mixers drown out animal sounds, and villages are shaped by the aspirations of those who live abroad. Through visual documentation and field research, the project tells the story of a community caught between two worlds: one built in the diaspora, and one constructed at home, often never fully inhabited. By confronting nostalgia with material and social evidence, Mândrie și Beton challenges the myth of the untouched village and records a phenomenon that is as invisible in public discourse as it is irreversible in everyday life. 

Friday, June 27, 2025

10:00-11:30 Public Lecture

“Roma” or “Țïgan”? Linguistic Respect or Scientific Truth?

Gelu Duminică (Independent Scholar)

The distinction between "Roma" and "Țigan" is more than just a linguistic choice—it carries historical, social, and cultural weight. “Roma” is the term that the Romani people use to describe themselves. It is recognized internationally and is considered respectful. “Țigan” has historically been used to refer to the Roma people, but over time, it has developed negative connotations and is often seen as pejorative. In Romania, the official term for the Roma minority has been updated to reflect this shift, acknowledging that "Țigan" has been used in derogatory ways. However, some Roma individuals still use the term among themselves, while others prefer "Roma" to avoid stigma. Language evolves with society, and the choice of words can shape perceptions.

Saturday, June 28, 2025

10:00-11:30 Public Lecture

“Buddhist Artefacts: Pre-Islamic Legacy or Cultural Heritage?”

Anna Schmid  (Museum der Kulturen, Basel)

The Museum der Kulturen Basel (Museum of Cultures Basel, MKB) houses ten objects categorized as representative of the "Gandhara style” (also referred to as the Graeco-Buddhist style). These artefacts are worldwide recognized as art. This art, which is well represented in the museums of the Global North, was created between the 1st century BC and the 5th century AD in what is now northern Pakistan and eastern Afghanistan. What makes Gandharan art so extraordinary is that for the first time, Buddha was depicted as a person and no longer represented only by symbols such as the “stupa" or the "wheel of teaching.” This art gained renewed attention and unexpected topicality when the Taliban blew up the statues of Bamiyan in 2001. The incident also had an impact on Pakistan. To this day, parts of Pakistan are littered with Buddhist remains: monastery ruins, statues, and rock paintings. With the exception of the Pakistani Ministry of Archaeology and some academics, little attention has been paid to these remains of a bygone era. This has changed in the last fifteen years. In blogs, newspapers and other media, various Pakistani voices engage in (sometimes heated) debates about this legacy: To whom does the cultural heritage belong today? Who is responsible for it (the legacy/heritage)? Which religious, aesthetic-artistic, social and economic arguments are shaping the debates?

Sunday, June 29, 2025

10:00-11:30 Public Lecture

“A Thin Blanket”

Magdalena Crăciun (University of Bucharest)

Two strips of white handwoven cotton cloth cover the couch in our living room. They were once sewn together and formed a blanket with hand-made needle lace attached to one side. I often find myself caressing this cloth when I sit on the couch. I wash it more often than I should do, so I can feel its crisp texture. I carefully drink or eat, and anxiously observe everyone who drinks or eats, while sitting on the couch. My engagement with this blanket has long been somatic and affective. I felt it, enjoying colour and texture, or worrying that it might accidentally be damaged. Touching the thin cloth brings me comfort and provokes memories of happy days in my grandmother’s village. One day I asked my mother what she knew about the blanket. I have since then regarded the blanket as the material manifestation of a lineage of women. I had assumed that my maternal grandmother hand wove it. I learned that someone else did it, a generation before my grandmother, from cotton that villagers cultivated on their land. This woman, my great-great-aunt, gifted it to my grandmother in commemoration of her dear departed young daughter, my grandmother’s only female cousin. My grandmother and, later, my mother, deemed this blanket worthy of inclusion in a wedding trousseau. And so, for about a hundred years, until my mother gifted it to me, women in our family have handled this blanket with care, airing it out, inserting dried flowers into its folds, and moving it from trunks to closets. In this presentation, I weave together memories of this object with analytical thoughts on the articulation of womanhood and the transmission of cloth and clothing as well as of skills of crafting, maintaining and repairing such objects in south Romania.