https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/02757206.2016.1226171?journalCode=ghan20

Abstract

This paper addresses the way that religious affiliation and conversion shape ongoing tensions over historical periods of exile, resettlement, exodus and elimination in a small town on the Eastern Polish border. I explore how local Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Christian’s negotiations of a troubled past are materialized and managed through narrating family histories of conversion, In particular, this paper focuses on the compromises that enable mixed faith marriages and the conflicts that emerge over the burial of religious converts. In these negotiations, members of both congregations deploy the local model of “neighbourliness” and the ideal of the borderlander, to greater and lesser success. Day-to-day the practice of considered neighbourliness helps local people to acknowledge and minimize religious and ethnic difference. However, conversion brings the realms of religion and relatedness into conjunction in a risky manner: marriage may offer an opportunity to enhance neighbourly connections, but burial is an event where the tensions over histories of conflict become apparent disrupting neighbourly relations and practices.

Keywords

Borderlands, Conversion, Family history, Poland, Christianity, Neighbourliness, Borders

Editors

Aimée Joyce, Katie Aston, William Tantam

Abstract

‘Tenses’ is a publication that emerges from the experiences and reflections and topics of new researchers and their engagement with current anthropological debates on ‘time’. The collection includes a range of writings crystallising critiques and narratives explored in the Goldsmiths, University of London, Department of Anthropology Doctoral Writing Up Seminar, 2012-2103 under the supervision of Professor Victoria Goddard.

Chapter in Ethnographies of Grey Zones in Eastern Europe: Relations, Borders and Invisibilities

Chapter on cross border trading, exchange, and morality

Author(s)

Katie Aston, Helen Cornish, Aimée Joyce

Abstract

Fifteen years ago an outpouring of new academic material asserted the value of being an insider in religious research. Conventional assumptions that linked objectivity with outsider status were challenged. This valuable burst of scholarship worked hard to critique the kind of research that preceded it, where faith or identity was seen to compromise research values, and undermine integrity and rigour. This special edition interrogates the legacy of the shift towards practitioner-research with religious-spiritual-magical-secular communities, particularly, but not only, when research examines broader social, historical and political concerns as well as the processes of faith and belief. It examines some more experiential dynamics of research to consider how the insider/outsider debate plays out from the inside of the research process.

http://diskus.basr.ac.uk/index.php/DISKUS/article/view/61