The first seminar of the department this academic year, on November 5, 2025 at 2:00 PM in room B228 in Jinonice.

Dear colleagues,

I am pleased to invite you to the first seminar of the department this academic year, on November 5, 2025 at 2:00 PM in room B228 in Jinonice.

This time, two researchers will present their research: Mariann Vaczi (University of Nevada, Reno) and Laura Kuen (Institute of Ethnology CAS, Institute of Sociological Studies, Charles University).

The seminar will be in English. Below, you will find the annotation and flyers attached.

I look forward to meeting you,

Jitka Wirthová

Date: 5.11.2025

Venue: room B228 in Jinonice campus: https://fsv.cuni.cz/en/contact-us/faculty-buildings/jinonice-campus

Time: 14:00 - Mariann Vaczi

https://www.unr.edu/basque-studies/people/mariann-vaczi

Title: The Geopolitics of Traditional Sports: Catalonia's Human Towers

Short annotation:  The building of human towers (castells) is a centuries-old traditional sport where hundreds of men, women, and children gather in Catalan squares to create breathtaking edifices through a feat of collective athleticism. The result is a great spectacle of effort and overcoming, tension and release. Drawing from ethnographic research, this lecture will discuss the thriving castells practice as a symbol of Catalan cultural heritage and identity amid debates around national autonomy and secession from Spain. While the main function of building castells is to grow community through a low-cost, intergenerational, and inclusive leisure activity, this traditional sport has also provided a social base, image, and vocabulary for the Catalan secessionist movement. Highlighting the intersections of folklore, heritage, ritual, and sport, this talk will capture the subtle processes by which the political emerges: how the body becomes politicized and ideology becomes embodied, with all the desires, risks and precarities of collective constructions.

Short bio: Mariann Vaczi is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Nevada, Reno. Her ethnographic work has focused on the geopolitics of sports and movement cultures in Spain. Her main work includes Catalonia’s Human Towers: Castells, Cultural Politics, and the Struggle Toward the Heights (Indiana University Press, 2023); Soccer, Culture, and Society in Spain: An Ethnography of Basque Fandom (Routledge, 2015); Indigenous, Traditional, and Folk Sports: Contesting Modernities (co-edited with Alan Bairner, Routledge, 2023); and Popular Culture, Identity, and Politics in Contemporary Catalonia (edited with Alessandro Testa, Boydell & Brewer  2023).

Further reading: https://iupress.org/9780253067166/catalonias-human-towers/

15:00   Laura Kuen

Title: Rootling: A multimodal exploration with pigs

Short annotation: Pigs rootle to eat, play, and know. As omnivorous animals, they use their snouts to disturb the soil, uncover foods and understand their environment and other pigs. Rootling (www.rootling.place) is an interactive website to wander and wonder about pigs. This talk introduces Rootling as a playful, multimodal output in the context of the BOAR ERC project (www.wildboar.cz). Inspired by our ethnographic, historical and geographic research on and with wild and domestic pigs, the website offers a playful engagement with broader discussions such as contemporary human-animal relations, shared environments, or tensions of care and killing.

Short bio: Laura Kuen is a doctoral candidate in the BOAR ERC research project at the Institute of Ethnology, CAS as well as at the Institute of Sociological Studies, Charles University. Having conducted ethnographic fieldwork on small-scale pig farming in the Ukrainian Carpathians between 2021-2024, Laura’s research engages with shifting dynamics of more-than-human care in times of war. A visual anthropologist by training, Laura has produced two documentary films and works as exhibition curator on human-environmental relations.

Further reading: Explore the website www.rootling.place