Distant tribes, post-colonial subjects, and other ‘exotic’ contexts that have offered the ethnographic baselines for the ‘ontological turn’ have also invited a barrage of criticism. Some of these criticisms can be fair, but many are misplaced and fail to recognise why many disciplines in the social sciences and the humanities have found it very useful to make an analytical distinction between epistemological and ontological approaches. This presentation will explore the extent to which post-conflict forms of memory management and the social imaginaries of global governance structures (themselves entertaining a resolutely unique ontology) have misunderstood the sociality of the very populations they believe they are over-seeing and reconciling in the states of the former Yugoslavia. It is argued here that a political ontological diagnosis offers new resources and remedies to an intractable situation, but also reconfigures our understandings of basic concerns around ‘multiculturalism’, new forms of political protest across Europe and abroad, and the potential for new political and economic dispensations more generally. Ontology matters, and it does not require a long-haul flight to prove as much.

The dynamic music exchange in the mass-mediated spaces of urban China and the transpacific sphere in the last two decades has challenged habits of thinking about modernity, globalization, and westernization. World music, a mass mediated, cross-cultural evolving music category, has testified to both old-fashioned cultural appropriation and more equitable cultural relations between various cultural forces and social groups. In this presentation, I will look at some of the modes of engagement in musical interaction within and across cultures at the turn of the century. Specifically, I will look into three music groups/projects, namely, Dadawa, Hanggai, and the Silk Road Project in their respective historical and cultural contexts to examine how ethnic musical heritage is used to negotiate cultural prestige in the postmodern order (Hanggai), how musical otherness is created for consumption of difference in global music commerce (Dadawa), and how accelerated transnational movements of people, ideas, and information energize and cross-fertilize music making (the Silk Road Project). I argue that music, often used as a metaphor of global social and cultural processes, not only reflects changes in such processes, but also itself is part of today's globalization that contextualizes certain styles and practices in specific institutional sites and histories.

The moving body is an essential aspect of being human, in where we have come from and in where we are going. This talk aims to address the generative capacity not only of the human body as such, but specifically of the moving body from an analytical and methodological point of view. I will, firstly, look at mobility and dance as an aspect of social organisation in the post-forager group of the Baka in central Africa. Examples from my fieldwork in Gabon will show how the transformation of mobility and dance movements can be considered as a ‘bodily commentary’ on the social changes occurring in Baka sociality. The second set of data on human movement in relation to socio-political changes comes from the Sardana dance and the castells, human towers, in Catalonia. Comparing these two movement phenomena exemplifies socio-historical differentiations in Catalonia and highlights current developments from the perspective of the moving body. Drawing together these diverse examples, which nevertheless come from the same research framework, I will introduce the concept of motility, which refers to the capacity to be mobile and the notion of a ‘politics of touch’, and show how they can serve as useful analytical and methodological ideas in understanding human movement. I conclude with an outlook on being human and social in a moving body in times of the growing importance of virtual realities.

Actualmente la zona fronteriza hispano-marroquí continua siendo uno de los focos mas mediatizados y mortales en el Mediterráneo respecto a la movilidad migratoria del sur y del este global. Los entrelazamientos que subyacen esta condición siguen interconectando Marruecos y España dentro de una misma historia compartida y dividida de (post-)colonialismo y de migración transnacional. Mi argumento adopta una perspectiva postcolonial y relacional desde los estudios críticos de migración sobre esta historia entrelazada. Este enfoque parte del hecho que la Europa contemporánea es una formación postcolonial, un producto de movimientos migratorios cambiados y renovados y de sus luchas que contribuyen a la constitución de Europa y a la negociación de sus derechos ciudadanos. Á través de estos procesos transformadores implicando el encuentro entre los supuestos residentes nacionales y los “Otros” migrantes, Marruecos como España se han convertido en sociedades “cosmopolitizadas”. Estas dinámicas desafían el proyecto político y discursivo dominante de la Unión Europea que se materializa hoy en un régimen de control de fronteras. Mi papel enfoca en los actores principales (non-, inter-estatales, ciudadanos) y en torno a los eventos migratorios actuales en la zona euro-africana entre Rabat y Murcia. Primero analizo las luchas sociales y políticas acoplando migrantes y “nativos” en nuevas formas ejemplares de colaboración solidaria como el sindicato de migrantes ODT-I en Marruecos o la PAH en España, siendo esta última un efecto significativo de la denominada crisis financiera Europea. En segundo lugar describo las relaciones de poder existentes, incluyendo discursos hegemónicos, “minorizados” y diversas prácticas de (non- y contra-)conocimientos de los actores; prácticas que en la vida cotidiana implican potentes imaginaciones sociales donde se negocian proyectos de migración, otras vidas posibles y que construyen así una nueva Europa co-imaginada como ”país de inmigración”.