Articles by admin

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Larache in the summer time

16/07/2011 admin 0

On summer nights, in the center of Larache (a port on the Atlantic, 80km south of Tanger) stroll all moroccans that came back from Europe on vacations. New cars, european clothes, overconfident attitudes: almost every family of the city has some relative in Spain, England, Belgium, France, Netherlands. In Larache, fish abounds, vegetables are cheap, and housing is affordable. It was here that the first experience of public housing in Morocco took place in the 20s: the neighborhood of Kalleto (Hay Jadid, New neighborhood), built for slum dwellers and migrants from aroubía, rural areas. For its inhabitants, each fight, every bad night, is felt as a shame, for it reminds them they are not in Europe, where everything is perfect: as the shikis (stuck up) of the center seem to assert, parading their pretended wealth.

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The Fire & the Word: more on militant ethnography

28/06/2011 admin 0
As in the two previous posts on anthropological theory [post1 - post2], we keep linking texts that could help us to understand the contradictions of an ethnography "within" social activism, i.e. produced inside of a direct engagement with revolutionary political movements, rejecting neutrality and the so-called ethnographic distance, toward the development of an anthropology of action.
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What can we do with industrial heritage? action and reflection from Barcelona’s Can Batlló

21/06/2011 admin 0
In spite of all the scholarly studies on the importance of preserving Barcelona's ancient factories (Tatjer 2008), the usual practice in postindustrial urbanism has been their systematic demolition; sometimes preserving isolated chimneys: more than industrial memory, they seem to celebrate the annihilation of the worker's movement. The conflict around the industrial complex of Can Batlló, a 13 ha. late-XIX-century factory in La Bordeta district (Sants, Barcelona), almost completely abandoned, opposed (as usual) on one side the greed of the landowners and the complicity of the City Council, and on the other the needs and demands of the district's residents.
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A naval battle in Vallecas (Madrid): utopia as a device to build identity

11/06/2011 admin 0
2011 will be the 30th year in which, in the outskirts of Madrid, and despite the ban of the City Council, the Naval Battle of Vallekas will take place: a popular and politically engaged fiesta that celebrates the independence of the neighborhood and its the proclamation of Vallecas as a seaport. Anthropologist Elizabeth Lorenzi, got involved in the neighborhood since 1998, and recently published an ehtnography of the fiesta (downloadable for free in PDF) in which, beginning from the Naval Battle, she analizes the urban and social transformations of Vallecas in the last decades, the role played in it by the grassroot movements, and the consequences of all this in the building and maintanance of the neighborhood identity. The Naval Battle celebrates and strenghtens the vallekanismo: the neighborhood as a frame for social mobilizations. Through this symbolic device, the long history of political demands, neighbors' struggles, anarchist movements of Vallecas, become part of the process of constructing the neighborhood identity.
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Barcelona’s new mayor, in a barrio that doesn’t fit him well

25/05/2011 admin 0
We always liked this photo. In 2004, who is now the new mayor of Barcelona visited Bon Pastor neighborhood: this photo was taken in the casa barata of some friends (and informants) of ours. What is really interesting here is the presence, we might call it, of the different kind of people portrayed. The man on the right, the grandfather, the girl, look solid, real, strong. The politician in the middle seems like he was cut out and sticked on a scenario that doesn't fit him: it makes him feel unconfortable, like he didn't know how to behave. Some places make the power feel unconfortable; and the power - rightwing or leftwing, it's the same - tries by all means to wipe them out.
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“Right to the City” congress in Hamburg, june 2-5, 2011

12/05/2011 admin 0
The Network "Right To The City" Hamburg invites to collective confusions, encounters and diversions. At different places spread over the city, on 2 – 5 June 2011 a lot of planned and unplanned activities will take place. Join us and * create situations & crowds * roam through the city & discuss through the night * celebrate on the concrete & analyse the urban abyss * disassemble your very own practices & save utopian potentials * join us at the "Right To The City Congress" and bring along your neighbours. Take a look at THE THESES TO THE CONGRESS
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Poblenou 03-08 (Barcelona about Barcelona)

09/05/2011 admin 0
POBLENOU 03-08: Video realized by Suporttotal, gathering part of the visual work done by Jordi Secall during the years 2003-2008 in Poblenou. Photos of historical moments like the evictions and demolitions in the alleys now part of Parc Central, images of can Ricart and La Escocesa still alive, the biblical entrance of Makabra in can Ricart, and other more recent ones filmed in video, like grafitis on the roof of former Caminal art workshop, or the eviction of a family in calle st. Francesc in summer 2008. 11 frenetic minuts of music, video and photos.
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Other worlds exist

04/05/2011 admin 0
[/caption] Maybe anthropology is slowly dropping its positivist burden and stepping towards the contemporary world. In Low and Merry's opening article of Current Anthropology's recent supplement Engaged anthropology, diversity and dilemmas (2010), the authors highlight how little attention the peers who reviewed the article payed to the problem of objectivity and neutrality, until now required to legitimate any ethnographic research. Maybe scholars are slowly recognizing that personal and political engagement in the struggles and demands of the communities studied represent an enrichment, not an obstacle to the production of cientific knowledge. As Micheal Herzfeld (2010) notices in Gentrification, engagement and the neoliberal hijacking of history, it is an ethical duty of anthropologists to show alternative possibilities to neoliberal cynism, and to make them accessible and understandable to the public.
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Two new books about Barcelona

02/05/2011 admin 0
These two freshly published books by Chiara Ingrosso provide new insights on Barcelona's urban and architectural history: the first analizes the city transformations from Franco's dictatorship to future urban plans; the second draws a route around four neighborhoods, Barceloneta, Poblenou, La Mina and Bon Pastor. Both of them are illustrated with Mario Spada photographies, and, as a whole, they show the catalan capital very different as how it is usually represented in Europe and in the whole world, underlining its several dark sides.
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Foreigner Rome (the uses of diversity)

23/04/2011 admin 0
[/caption] Zoning means that some parts of the city, for real estate or urbanistic reasons, are devoted to certain groups of population: if there are neighborhoods where immigrants live, it's obvious that the schools of these neighborhoods have to cope with much more children born from foreigners. Such is the situation in Torpignattara, in the east periphery of Rome: a primary school is undergoing a series of public debates abounding in words like "ghetto", "emergency", "alarm", "banlieue". While right and left-wing politicians declare themselves worried for the school's "italianity", its teachers are carrying out their work worthy of the best italian pedogogical tradition, using diversity as a resort to supply to the massive cuts and decadence of public education. Until when they will call them "foreigners"? Rome is changing, and while some use this transformation to boost war among the poor, others understood its potential to come through the cultural and political stagnation of the so-called "Italian society".
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Ainhara Del Pozo Nogales

21/04/2011 admin 0

Graduated in Political Science and Social and Cultural Anthropology. She has participated in an academic mobility program at the University of Belgrano in Argentina. She has studied the Master of Anthropology and Ethnography (University of Barcelona) where he carried out an ethnographic study on the mobilizations for the improvement of primary care centers in Barcelona, carrying out a case study of the conflict of CAP Raval Nord.

Currently, she is pursuing doctoral studies at the University of Barcelona, investigating various social movements for environmental justice

Member of the research group Antropologia de les Crisis i les Transformacions Contemporànies (CRITS) at the Universitat de Barcelona.  Additionally, she is part of the Observatori d’Antropologia del Conflicte Urbà (OACU), and the working groups Antropologia de l’Estat i de l’Acció Pública, and Perifèries Urbanes at the Institut Català d’Antropologia (ICA).

Thematic lines: Political anthropology, social movements and collective action. Urban anthropology, processes of gentrification, revaluation and urban transformation.

Email: ainhara.delpozo(a)gmail.com

Academia.edu: https://ub.academia.edu/AinharaDelPozo

ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7107-3889

Researchgate: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Ainhara-Del-Pozo-Nogales…

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Stefano Portelli

21/04/2011 admin 0

Check also his personal webpage

Stefano Portelli (Rome, 1976), independent researcher attached to the Institut Català d’Antropologia, founding member of the Research group of Perifèries Urbanes, administrator of the website https://periferiesurbanes.org, and member of the multidisciplinary collective of anthropologists, architects and town planners Repensar Bonpastor. He graduated in Cultural Anthropology in 2001 from the University of Rome “La Sapienza” with a thesis on the contradictions of international development cooperation based on field work in the periphery of Managua (Nicaragua), valued with the highest note summa cum laude. In Barcelona, it dealt with the social impact of urban transformations and the interaction between collective memory and struggles for the territory, promoting projects subsidised by the ICA and the Memorial Democràtic de Catalunya. Mentrestant treballava com a educador social amb infants i menors no acompanyats, interessant-se en les ideologies del control i en l’autonomia dels nens en l’espai públic.

Starting in 2004 he began field work in the neighborhood of cheap houses of the Bon Pastor, which was being demolished. In collaboration with an association of local residents, and with a coordinating team by Professor Manuel Delgado, the research focused on past and present forms of opposition to the planning and impact of the reconfiguration of the space on the everyday and perceptions of the inhabitants, with special interest in the dynamics of immigration and exclusion, on the techniques of conflict resolution, and the autonomy of children. In 2009 this work was subsidised by l’Inventari del Patrimoni Etnològic de Catalunya, and the resulting monograph “La ciutat horitzontal: lluita social i memòria col·lectiva a les cases barates de Barcelona”, was published in 2015 in Catalan and in Spanish.

In 2007-2008 I attended the training “Ethnopsychiatrie des nouveaux désordres psychosociaux” at the Georges Dévereux Centre of the University of Paris VIII, focusing since then on ethnotechnics for conflict management and psychological problems, in particular the practices of adorcism linked to Sufi brotherhoods: He resided in Larache (Marrecos) during 2009-2010, and is currently investigating the adaptation of these techniques to the context of the diaspora in Europe, and analysing the applications of space anthropology in social and therapeutic intervention.


Publications (check also his personal webpage):

Activist*scholar collaborations in times of crisis, and beyond: Reflections on ‘Urban Activism: Staking Claims in the 21st Century City’

From the Horizontal to the Vertical

Pietro Saitta, Prendere le case

Eviction and displacement from the neighbourhood of Douar Wasti in Casablanca, Morocco

“The Cry of the Excavator. Notes on the social impact of urban renewall”

La ciudad horizontal. Urbanismo y resistencia en un barrio de casas baratas de Barcelona

“La ciutat horitzontal, Lluita social i memòria col·lectiva als marges de Barcelona”

“The casas baratas of Bon Pastor: a worker’s reservoir on the edges of Barcelona”.

“Sul mito della partecipazione cittadina a Barcellona: dall’urbanismo franchista al ‘modello’ democratico”

“Repensar Bonpastor: una intervención multidisciplinaria independiente en un barrio afectado por la transformación urbanística”

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Juan Granero

21/04/2011 admin 0

Born in Xàtiva (València) in 1993. He studied undergraduate studies at the Universitat Catòlica de València (UCV). Graduated in Social and Cultural Anthropology from the Universitat de Barcelona (UB), and Master in Anthropology and Ethnography at this same university.

Interested in urban issues and religious anthropology. He has carried out fieldwork in the city of Barcelona and in the Valencian Country. He defended his TFG under the title “Música sin permiso: Apropiación y significación del espacio urbano a propósito del músico itinerante en el metro de Barcelona”. He is currently working on his TFM, provisionally entitled: “Donde los santos fuman: Ritual y Subalternidad en un pueblo del interior valenciano”, in which he tries to reconstruct the history of the area through an emerging festive ritual. He is a member of various research groups other than Perifèries Urbanes. Among them: GREMHER of the Universitat de Barcelona and the Group de Treball on Anthropologia, Imatge i Cultura Visual (IVAC) of the Institut Català d’Antropologia.…

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Iván Ramírez

21/04/2011 admin 0

Iván Ramírez Osorio (Bogotá, 1993) studied anthropology at the Colegio Mayor Nuestra Señora del Rosario in Bogotá, Colombia. He is currently a student of the master’s degree in anthropology and ethnography at the Universitat de Barcelona. He is part of the research group associated with the Institute Català d’Antropologia (ICA) Perifèries Urbanes and the research and development project (R & D) MOVER.

His Master’s Final Work (TFM) seeks to describe the relationships, associations and temporalities that infrastructures have with people, government entities and economic entities.

Specifically, it works on the case of the unfinished high-speed train station (AVE) in La Sagrera, the implications that the planning and execution processes of the project have on the daily lives of the people who cohabit the Station and the various networks that make up this mega-project.…

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Photos: Barcelona’s Montjuïc

11/04/2011 admin 0

Four photos of Montjuïc mountain, when there still were people living on it. Even if for history it was only “slums”, many of them remember houses, written records, roads and street numbers. These photos come from private collections of former residents of “Eduardo Aunós” neighborhood. The old slum dwellers, almost all of them from Murcia or Andalusia, had to leave their houses in the 1920s, because of the celebration of an Universal Exposition. They were relocated in the Casas Baratas, but then their sons and nephews were evicted again at the end of the century. The need for land hit again those immigrant families; and it doesn’t matter how many generation they had been living in their “welcoming land”.…