Vilnius Lithuania -- Locating Crosses
My research work in Lithuania investigated the ways that Lithuanians in newly independent Vilnius conceptualized the historicity of buildings and bodies using a shared set of metaphors, images, and ideas. Both could have, and hide, scars created by political intervention; both could hold public and private interiors and hidden spaces; both could be understood to be rooted in, and gain life from, a specifically Lithuanian soil; both could pass as other when necessary. I argue that the 19th century articulation of Lithuanians as Europe's own aborigines ("original" people long isolated, practicing an earlier form of cultural production) supported the idea that Lithuanian space, place and self were natural - a natural outgrowth of an autochthonous cultural practice. Buildings and Bodies: Opening the KGB building in Vilnius |
USA -- The Workplace
My workplace work is focused on orchestrated culture creation: how leaders and staff create, put in place, and make sense of strategies designed to change behaviors and beliefs. I'm particularly interested in the rhetoric of 'driving change,' how organizations define their 'culture,' and the ways that intent and practice both conflate and obscure each other. "Making" culture change |
Veles, Macedonia -- Čalgija
Veles' chalgija music is rooted in Kojnik, the old town that hangs on the side of the hill that flanks the western banks of the Vardar river. This in process project is grounded in field recordings of one of the last chalgija ensembles left in Veles: a quartet that's a mix of older ethnic macedonian and turkish musicians, all of whom fear the end of their profession and their music. https://wfmu.org/playlists/shows/66168 Shopluk, Bulgaria -- A Little Village This project started with the question: how can one song have so many different melodies, meters and lyrics? Is it just one song? This short article investigated the shifting relationships between melodies and lyrics that one singer created in the context of shifting situations, circumstances, places and mood. https://sites.google.com/site/alittlevillage/ A LIttle Village > A Little Village, Anthropology News Dec 2010In Bulgarian folk songs melody and lyrics do not have a one to one relationship. Here, as in many other places in the Balkans, one melody can accompany many different stories, and so too a story can be told with different melodies. What gets sung depends on the situation, circumstance, place and mood of the singe |
Macedonia -- Worn Down
This in-process project will be a site specific installation that asks participants to notice the ways that no-longer practiced activities left marks -- ruts, erasures, detritus, landscapes -- in the lived world, and asks them to reflect on the life-ways that created those marks. What does it mean to have the residual effects of practice be the only way to infer practice? |