sowi:doc Awards 2021

The sowi:doc Awards for the academic year 2020/2021 are awarded to:

This interdisciplinary dissertation addresses social organization at two Early Bronze Age (3rd millennium BC) sites of Çukuriçi Höyük and Platia Maogula Zarkou from socio-cultural anthropological perspectives. Based on a controlled comparison between the archaeological evidence and ethnographic examples of non-state societies, the aim of this study was twofold. First, to understand the role of households at each site. Second, to address which type of non-state social organization is appropriate to describe social organization at these sites, if any. The study argues that multiple types of socio-political organizations co-existed at the dawn of the Bronze Age in the Aegean and critically addresses the limitations of applying socio-cultural anthropological models to the archaeological record. Sabina’s revised dissertation entitled “Çukuriçi Höyük 4: Household economics in Early Bronze Age Aegean” is currently in print with the Austrian Academy of Sciences Press.

Sabina Cveček defended her dissertation in February 2021 at the Faculty of Social Sciences of the University of Vienna (adviser: Andre Gingrich). Since March 2021 she works as a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Prehistory & West Asian/Northeast African Archaeology at the Austrian Archaeological Institute of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. Her research interests include archaeological anthropology, non-state socio-political organization, exchange networks, and subsistence practices in the Aegean and Anatolian prehistory.

Contact: sabina.cvecek@oeaw.ac.at

The dissertation explores the meaning and experiences of age and ageing in the arts and culture from a practice-theoretical perspective, asking when, how and where age is being done in the field of cultural production. It combines data from three case studies exploring artistic production, consumption and institutional frameworks. The results illustrate that both production and consumption in the cultural field are age coded, highlighting that specific expectations are placed upon older producers and consumers of the arts and culture. Regarding artistic production, analysis revealed the importance of value regimes in the cultural field that place a strong emphasis on the economic value of art that older (retired) artists rarely (can) produce. In the area of cultural consumption, this is exemplified by the socio-material arrangements of theaters, in which healthy, able bodies are adopted as a norm, which marginalizes the experiences of older consumers of the arts and culture. These results opens up the cultural field as a topic for gerontology. It makes clear that in times of demographic change, not only the health and care sector need to react to the changing age structures of modern societies, but so too should the cultural sector.

Vera Gallistl defended her thesis in December 2020 at the Faculty of Social Sciences of the University of Vienna. She is a researcher at the Department for Sociology at the University of Vienna and the Center for Gerontology at Karl Landsteiner Private University for Health Sciences. She is co-editor of “Cultural Gerontology” (Springer, 2022). In her current research project, Vera Gallistl works on a critical exploration of AI in elder care, developing a socio-material theory of ageing. 

Contact: vera.maria.gallistl@univie.ac.at