Workshop 11
Between Beer and
Bureaucracy: The Anthropology
of Clubs and Voluntary
Associations
Convenors:
Anna-Kathrin Warner,
University of Bremen
anna-kathrin.warner@freenet.de
Cordula
Weissköppel, University of Bremen
In anthropology you find at
least two kinds of inquiry on clubs and
voluntary associations:
Either they function mainly as background
or by-product of the
research on a different topic because for
example they are used to
get access to the people of interest;
or they become the central
object of ethnography. However,
clubs and associations are
important and interesting sites to
observe processes of
community-building and of social inclusion
and exclusion on a
face-to-face level, especially in complex, so
to speak
“modern” nation-states in which most of the essential
aspects of life are
organised by official institutions. Sport clubs
as well as quite exclusive
associations like the Rotary-club serve
as social networks and
reference point for performing individual
identities. At the same
time members have to fulfil bureaucratic
obligations to gain the
status of an association, and they learn
how to use bureaucracy for
their own interests, which seems to
be the case for migrant
communities in Germany.
In our workshop we would
like to discuss case studies from
throughout the world which
will focus especially on these points
of intersection between
individual agency (subject positions),
shared systems of
self-organisation (common sense building)
and following bureaucratic
necessities (structural character)
concerning clubs and
voluntary associations. How do people
perceive their action
within associations? To what extend do
they (consciously)
instrumentalise the structural character of
their associations and its
function within society? By this we
intend to highlight the
still open question how the transformation
from “agency”
into “structure” and vice versa can be theorised
adequately.
Voluntary Associations:
General Characters and Anthropological
Perspectives
Anna-Kathrin Warner,
University of Bremen
anna-kathrin.warner@freenet.de
More Beer for Women!
Competing Male Singing Clubs in a
German Village
Gertrud Hüwelmeier,
Free University of Berlin
gertrud.huewelmeier@rz.hu-berlin.de
The Field of Heritage
Clubs in Milwaukee, Wisconsin
Magdalena Tellenbach
Uttman, University of Wales Swansea
magdalena.tellenbach@uttman.com
Around a Pint. The Past,
Present and Future of European Clubs
in the Congo after
Independence
Benjamin Rubbers, Free
University of Brussels
‘It’s not
all beer and skittles!’ An Ethnography of Older Migrants’
Club Life
Caroline Oliver, University
of Newcastle upon Tyne
Caroline.Oliver@newcastle.ac.uk
Individual Emancipation
Versus Expressing Collective Identity
in Brussels
Marc Verlot, University of
Ghent
Economic Altruism? The
Symbolic Economy of the Berlin Trotting
Course Association
Ina Dietzsch, Humboldt
University of Berlin
Taekwondo on the Move:
Intersecting Stories of a Martial Art, a
Club, a Working-Class
Neighbourhood and Migrant Lives
Sally Anderson, University
of Copenhagen