Mgr. Petra Ponocná, Ph.D.

Petra Ponocná 

vystudovala Sociální a kulturní antropologii na Univerzitě Pardubice. Disertační práci založenou na etnografickém výzkumu svátku Día de Muertos v Mexiku obhájila v roce 2020 na Fakultě humanitních studií Univerzity Karlovy. 

doc. Lale Yalçin-Heckmann, Ph.D.

Kurds are commonly described as the largest nation without own state. This talk will consider various aspects of this statement and give broad outlines of Kurdish ethnic and national identity formation and the struggles of statehood. The contribution will draw from my own anthropological research in the 1980s as well as from the co-authored book ‘The Kurds’ which was published in 2000 and recently had its 6th and fully revised edition. I will reflect upon the changes and continuities of Kurdish self-determination and identification from an anthropological perspective. 

Lale Yalçin-Heckmann

has studied sociology in Istanbul and anthropology at the London School of Economics, writing her dissertation on tribes and kinship among the Kurds in Turkey. After moving to Germany she carried out research on Turkish migrant communities. At the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle/Saale she worked on privatization and agrarian property in Azerbaijan from which she wrote her habilitation book. There she also led the research group “Caucasian Boundaries and Citizenship from Below”. Since 2010 she is Docent at the University of Pardubice, the Czech Republic; she has been a faculty member of the Max Planck International Graduate School ANARCHIE (Anthropology, Archaeology, and History), and extraordinary professor at the Martin Luther University in Halle. From 2014 to 2021, she held the position at the MPI of senior researcher and coordinator of the ERC Project “Realising Eurasia: Civilisation and Moral Economy in the 21st century” (REALEURASIA).   

Yalçın-Heckmann has worked in the fields of economic anthropology, kinship and gender, tribalism, migration, ethnicity and religion. In her first research she looked at kinship relations and gender, household economy and property rights and how these cascade to shape tribal relations and politics. At the same time she examined the political history of the Kurdish region in order to critically assess theories about the rise and fall of tribal systems and semi-nomadic mode of production. Gender politics and marriage alliances were part and parcel of this study. The most prominent outcome of this research is her monograph Tribe and Kinship among the Kurds (Peter Lang 1991) which has been translated also into Turkish in 2000. Her co-authored book (together with Martin Strohmeier) Die Kurden has been published in 2000 (C.H. Beck Verlag), was translated and published in Turkish and Greek and has been fully revised and updated several times. Further publications from this research appeared as journal articles and book chapters in English, German, Turkish and French.   

Her second major research area has been within the anthropology of migration. Focusing on migrants from Turkey, she carried out research on the emergence of ethnic colonies in two smaller cities in Germany and France as well as examining the role of religion in family socialization. How Turkish migrant children learn about religious and moral ethics and how these are further shaped through local educational and social policies were explored.   

A third major area of research has been the Caucasus and the former Soviet republics of this region. After studying rural economic transformation and agrarian privatization in Azerbaijan (published as The Return of the Private Property, LIT Verlag, 2010), the research group she led looked at citizenship concepts and practices in Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan. The researchers focused on how citizenship was perceived as an economic issue but also associated with the political repression in the past, and how the post-Soviet state has come to be perceived as nationally close but politically distant.   

Her project within REALEURASIA has been about the moral and cultural economy of fragrant rose and rose oil industry, based on fieldwork in Turkey. She has edited a book from this project which appeared in open access, hard bound and paperback versions (Moral Economy at Work, Berghahn, 2022). She continues working on another manuscript on the past and present economies of rose oil as a global product, based on her research in Isparta, Turkey.   

Mgr. Lada Viková, Ph.D.  

Vyhlášení výsledků soutěže Člověk a společnost, kterou pro studenty středních škol již poosmé zorganizovala KSKA.