Yesterday marked the beginning of the third edition of the summer school series "The Balkans: Spaces, Societies, History." This year, the focus is on "Sensory Heritages & Sensitive Memories in the Balkans". Several of the workshops will allow doctoral students to delve into the anthropological, ethnographic, and historical aspects of food preparation and consumption in the region, such as "Sensing Heritage, Inheriting Senses: Between (Im-) Materialities and Mobilizations" and "Taste, Distaste... Contest? Food, Sense(s), and Identity."
Organized by a coalition of academic institutions, including École française d’Athènes, École française de Rome, CETOBAC, Aix-Marseille University, Università degli Studi di Trieste, University Lumière-Lyon2, University Sveti Kliment Ohridski, Sofia, and University Paisii Hilendarski, Plovdiv, this initiative has gathered scholars from across Europe.
This summer school aims to apply the “sensory turn” in social sciences to heritage and memory processes in Balkan societies. The cultural identities in the Balkans are often linked to unique sensory experiences, which are transmitted, recreated, negotiated, and contested. These sensory dimensions contribute to the creation of individual and collective memories and the embodiment of heritages as lived experiences. This process combines cognition and interpretation, experience and representation, performativity and reflexivity
Methodological and theoretical proposals based on concrete case studies will be discussed, utilizing senses not only as objects of study but also as modalities of knowledge. The aim is to promote innovative formats and activities that encourage shared experiences, reflections, and discussions beyond disciplinary boundaries. Participants are encouraged to engage in in situ sensory proposals and non-conventional approaches, leading to tangible outputs at both individual and collective levels.
Heritage and memory are often analyzed through discourses, practices, and representations, involving critical approaches to heritage policies, official versus alternative narratives, memory concurrence, contested heritages, and the politicization of culture and history. These studies touch on identity, alterity, temporalities, spatialities, knowledge, power, and community building at various scales—local, national, and transnational. However, these approaches often overlook the sensory and perceptive dimensions: how these processes are embodied and performed, and how they engage the senses (sound, taste, sight, smell, touch). This summer school seeks to address this gap by exploring the embodiment of heritage and memory through sensory experiences.
Questions central to this exploration include: How do sensory experiences mark places and times, forming distinct ‘sensoryscapes’? What role do heritage and memory play in expressing and creating specific ways of being in the world, including relationships to places, objects, milieus, living beings, and supernatural entities? How do body politics influence heritage and memory across different cultural and historical contexts? Can we discuss politics of the senses, including policing and politicizing senses, and the moralizing or discrediting of specific senses?
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