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Annika Lems (MPI for Social Anthropology): Was there a “Pre” to Post-Liberal Cultural Practices?

Beschreibung

In recent years Europe like many other parts of the world has been marked by a distinct backlash against liberal and cosmopolitan agendas. The Brexit referendum in the UK was the first in a succession of events throughout Europe that revealed how many people are craving the return to an idealised, imperial or authoritarian past – a past they believe holds a stronger sense of community and social cohesion. In this presentation I aim to I inquire into the lived temporalities underwriting the current backlash. Based on my ongoing ethnographic fieldwork in mountain villages in the South of Austria that form a traditional bastion for reactionary political movements, I will shed light on the kinds of histories people search out to create a sense of belonging and temporal cohesion. I will demonstrate that while such everyday, alternative readings of history can function as a “social glue” that bind communities together, they simultaneously act as means of excluding “others”. By tracing genealogies of exclusionary and anti-cosmopolitan cultural practices in the German-speaking Alpine region, I will pose the question whether there has ever been a “pre” to what is widely assumed to be the afterology of a liberal democratic era of modernity. (Speaker's abstract)

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