COST Action IS0803 Work Group 1 2009
Borders
14-15 April, Nicosia, Cyprus
Convenor: Olga Demetriou
University of Nicosia
olga.demetriou@yahoo.co.uk
+357-22456555
Working papers from WG1 (Borders) are now available here.
The Summary Report on this meeting is now available here.
Productive Borders: Perspectives on the Critique of Duality
Borders are first and foremost markers of division. They signify a duality that has been critiqued by many philosophical strands, including post-colonialism, phenomenology, and post-structuralism. Much of this theorization has focused on the multiplicities that a dual understanding of the world obscures, while other theorists have more explicitly concentrated on the question of unity (e.g. the singularity of ‘community’, ‘democracy’, etc.) Yet both of these perspectives seem limited by their own excess: endless multiplicity as well as the singularity of identity and difference seem to lead to a vanishing point that escapes description. This work group meeting seeks to (i) analyse ways in which singularity and multiplicity have been related to each other across theoretical strands and (ii) enquire into how these might be brought to bear in understanding how borders produce difference and/or its disappearance.
Participant: Dr Nikolai Vukov
Institute of Folklore Studies
Bulgarian Academy of Sciences
Bulgaria
Email: nikolai.vukov@gmail.com
Proposal for the meeting or other role at the meeting:
Borders from the Perspective of Community Integration (paper abstract)
The current paper will address the scope and meaning of state borders from the perspective of community integration in borderline areas. The particular focus will fall on the processes of cultural adaptation and community formation of resettlers and migrants from Turkey to Bulgaria and from Bulgaria to Turkey since the beginning of the twentieth century. The purpose of the current paper is to go beyond the political and historically traumatic associations that still resonate in memories of resettlers and their descendants until today, but rather to focus on the construing of borders as flexible and culture-distinguishing markers. On the basis of examples collected from local and cases of cultural adaptation following forced resettlement, the paper will outline the processes of community formation among the groups of resettlers as strongly dependent on borders’ conceptualization. Yet, it will reveal borders as entities serving not only for political separation, but also as negotiable grounds where community integration inscribes meanings of mobility and permeability, of connection and trans-border cooperation.
Participant: Dr Svetlana Antova
Ethnographic Institute with Museum
Bulgarian Academy of Sciences
Bulgaria
Email: svetlinata@abv.bg
Proposal for the meeting or other role at the meeting:
Borders without Limits
This paper is based on an empirical data and mostly self-reflections from the Border territory at the physical Bulgarian-Serbian state border at the West-North Bulgaria. The Belogradchik’ inhabitants, also known as belonging to the regional Turlaci group, always possess the strong feeling about the physical border, but at the same time they have valid memories, relative, language, musical and cultural omissions. Namely there exist boundaries, timely developing, but there is a strong feeling for imagined communities too on two main levels – family and ethnos. The accents from these two levels are different. This border’s population has unclear distances to the two main centers – Belgrade and Sofia. The people living there say that even a meteorological prognosis from Belgrade is often more correct than the one they get from the meteorologists from Sofia. The population from the both sides of the state border do not mutually emigrate, but there are periodically meetings, which refresh the sensations about the commonly and the differently. In nowadays such type of border lands wash away its spatial map in migration and mobility conditions. And the real and imagined communities of people from the “Balkans” are often coming across at the emigrant’s environments.
Participant: Dr Olga Demetriou
University of Nicosia
Cyprus
Email: olga.demetriou@yahoo.co.uk
Proposal for the meeting or other role at the meeting:
Work Group Convenor.
Participant: Prof Sarah Green
Social Anthropology, School of Social Sciences
University of Manchester
United Kingdom
Email: sarah.green@manchester.ac.uk
Proposal for the meeting or other role at the meeting:
Lines, Traces and Tidemarks: reflections on forms of borderli-ness.
If borders mark differences, they do not all do so in the same way. While this has been studied from a range of angles, this has rarely focused on the forms that borders take, both in material and conceptual terms. Most often these days, borders are thought of as lines, or entities related to lines: walls, barriers, fences, perimeters, edges. Lines always evoke a sense of two sides, and of course, that has been critiqued by scholars who prefer to think in terms of rhizomes, webs, fractals or networks. Others have noted that most borders are experienced as a series of points rather than lines, as such: points at which people, things, animals, cross or fail to cross. Lines only really appear on images of borders – maps, GIS images, aerial photographs. Traces, on the other hand, evoke a sense of time in a way that lines do not: traces are not always visible, or if they are, then they are only a small fragment of the whole entity – the crumbs left from a loaf of bread, the memory of a conversation only half heard. Traces are porous, leave much room for doubt and speculation, and they change over time, perhaps disappearing altogether. Tidemarks perhaps combine lines and traces, mixing the notion of a place in particular with the sense of time passing, in different ways at different moments. A tidemark left by waves in the sand will disappear shortly; one left by spilled coffee seeping into the weft and weave of a white shirt may leave a longer trace. Using the ideas of lines, traces and tidemarks, this contribution is intended to begin a conversation on ‘borderli-ness’.
Participant: Dr Lefteris Topaloglou
Dept of Planning and Regional Development
University of Thessaly
Greece
Email: ltopaloglou@lga.gr ; etopalog@prd.uth.gr
Proposal for the meeting or other role at the meeting:
The Nature and the Role of Borders
Over the last decades, the main body of the literature faces the phenomenon of borders as a social making requiring interdisciplinary approach, in order to be understood and interpreted. However, despite the accumulated empirical evidence on particular case studies so far, one can hardly argue about an existing theory of borders which bridge the gaps among different perspectives and disciplines efficiently. Within the context of the classic geopolitical analysis, borders are seen as strategic places or defense lines whose main purpose is to maintain territorial dominance or hegemony into a global state-centered system. The recent scientific discussion on borders, largely influenced by economic approaches (where distance represents a crucial parameters), takes for granted that similar interpretations can also be applied in the social, cultural and political fields. However, in practice one may detect further types of borders (social, national, linguistic, political etc) operating along the lines of a different framework. Considering the later point of view, the interaction developing along the border space, becomes a rather complex and interesting procedure highlighting a dialectic relationship between space and society. The present essay, attempts to draw an overview of the relative theoretical discussion dealing with the nature and the role of borders.
Key Words: Borders, space, perceptions, identity, border regions
Participant: Dr Yael Navaro-Yashin
Social Anthropology
University of Cambridge
United Kingdom
Email: yn213@cam.ac.uk
Proposal for the meeting or other role at the meeting:
Knowledge-Practices on the Border
I would contribute with a paper on the multiplicity of disciplinary knowledge-practices in the theorization and crafting of ‘borderliness.’ I am particularly interested in the knowledge-practices which feed the conflict resolution industry, the way in which ‘borders’ are imagined between communities deemed to be ‘in conflict’ with one another and how variegated knowledge-practices propose (often in functionalist ways) to redeem or alleviate conflict. I enter this field as an anthropologist observing and researching the way in which relationality across ‘borders’ is informed by the investment in conflict-situations on the part of comparatist and multiple disciplinary practices. The ‘social relations’ between communities ‘in conflict’ with one another is up for grabs: it is being theorized, as well as governed and managed. How exactly the conflict resolution industry is unfolding is a question open for research by an anthropologist.
Participant: Prof Jane Cowan
Social Anthropology
University of Sussex
United Kingdom
Email: j.cowan@sussex.ac.uk
Proposal for the meeting or other role at the meeting:
‘Minority’: a category begotten by borders?
This presentation will look at the concept of ‘minority’ historically, ethically and politically in the context of eastern borderlands. Based on my historical work with League of Nations processes, I would argue that ‘minority’ begins to operate as a political-legal category only with the setting up of nation-state borders, and especially with the demise of the Ottoman and Hapsburg empires after World War I. ‘Minority’ replaces ‘nationality’, slightly shifting its meanings; nonetheless, the new term retains the notion of discrete ethnic/national groups, both presupposing and creating/reinforcing these. ‘Minority’ is a category through which people make claims, but also through which international and national institutions classify, count, allocate resources, determine if special rights are warranted, and govern. It is easy to criticise the artificiality of this concept, in relation to both past and present, showing both the concept, and particular exemplars of it, to be highly constructed. While not repudiating this critique (to which I have contributed) I want to look at other dimensions: first, the political uses of the concept and second, the ethical dimensions of supporting or criticising ‘minority’ as a political concept. In our era where justice processes are significantly framed in terms of a politics of recognition, what are the consequences of critiques that deconstruct ‘minority’ and insist on fracturing and multiplicity? What can we draw from debates on ‘strategic essentialism’ in other contexts (e.g., regarding indigenous peoples) for our own European (here, especially southern Balkan and Mediterranean) contexts? I will reflect on this with reference to strategic essentialising in relation to the Macedonian case in the 1920s.
Participant: Prof Tuija Pulkkinen
Christina Institute for Women’s Studies
University of Helsinki
Finland
Email: tuija.pulkkinen@helsinki.fi
Proposal for the meeting or other role at the meeting:
Ontologies of Productive Borders
Proceeding from the notion of borders as productive of difference and identity this paper explores two alternative ontologies of thinking the productiveness of borders. The focus will be, on the one hand on the tradition of thought based on certain Hegelian reflexions taking place in Jacques Derrida’s work, and on the
other the Spinozian tradition taking place in the work of Gilles Deleuze. In the discussion the paper takes as its point of reference two very different concrete historical cases of the activity of drawing borders, one being a drawing of a political border on the map of Europe in 1809 between Sweden and Russia, and the other being an epistemic border drawn in the discourses on sexualities in the late 19th century, both with multiple subsequent effects of terms of identities and differences. Drawing from previous work on these two cases of the productivity of border making activity the paper focuses on the two contemporary intellectual approaches to borders. I will try to distinguish the accounts of these processes informed by each of the ontological approaches, as their consequencies for thinking of border in terms of activity / passivity; positivity/negativity; and other aspects. I will read Deleuze’s classic work Difference and Repetition, together with Derrida’s idea of “difference”, thinking them against each other. The paper is part of ongoing work on the philosophical topic on contemporary ontological approaches and their effects, whereas the concrete cases of border drawing relate to my previous work in both areas, that of political history of Finland and that of theorizing sexual identity.
Participant: Dr Rozita Dimova
Institute for Eastern European Studies
Free University Berlin (Freie Universität Berlin)
Germany
Email: rozita@zedat.fu-berlin.de
Proposal for the meeting or other role at the meeting:
Neoliberalism, Nationalism and Border Arrangements in the Southern Balkans In explaining the contemporary contradiction between political dispute and economic exchange between Greece and the Republic of Macedonia, this paper will draw on the recent literature on neoliberalism to trace how neoliberal political-economic regimes are reconfiguring relationships between governing and the governed, sovereignty and territoriality, power and knowledge, nation-state and its subjects. An important stress will be paid to the reconfiguration of contemporary states and the growing range of privatizing domains and private authorities involved in larger transnational economic investments. By adopting an approach that looks at the contemporary globalized and neoliberal transnational circuits that are redefining the functions of nation-states, my presentation will critically assess the processes of governance and nationalism along border areas not only in South-eastern Europe but in other contexts where political disputes coexist hand-in-hand with intensive economic, symbolic and human exchanges.
Participant: Dr Antke Engel
Institute for Queer Theory
Germany
Email: engel@queer-institut.de
Proposal for the meeting or other role at the meeting:
Un-disambiguating Borders?! In order to subvert identity categories and binary logic in the field of gender and sexuality studies/politics I proposed the strategy of "VerUneindeutigung" (Engel 2002), a neologism, which might translate as "to un-disambiguate." The strategy proposes ways of reworking the binary gender order without being stuck in the alternative of either proliferating or abolishing gender. Rather, it consists in rendering ambiguous where regimes of normalcy pretend to provide simple truths or in intervening in processes that disambiguate complex relations. I would now like to transfer these considerations into the geo-political field. Can one understand borders as figures that disambiguate complex socio-cultural relations? Could one un-disambiguate borders in order to get rid of the binary constructions of here/there, either/or, and clear-cut distinctions suggested by national territory and citizenship? What does it mean to 'think' borders not only as abstract figures but also to consider the concrete regimes of border control as well as the socio-political, economic, and juridical measures that regulate migration and enforce expulsion or deportation? How do these measures relate to normative heterosexuality and the binary gender order? Can queer and anti-racist migration politics inspire each other in challenging the binary regimes of citizenship?
Participant: Dr Giovanni D’Alessio
Dipartimento di Scienze dello Stato
University of Naples Federico II
Italy
Email: gidaless@unina.it
Proposal for the meeting or other role at the meeting:
Spaces of Separation and of Integration: Symbolism in the Evolution of Post-War Mostar
The intention of this work is to focus on the trends towards separation and conflict, and on those towards cohesion and cooperation in Mostar (BiH), and to see how these attitudes and inclinations have interacted in the very recent history in shaping common grounds for cooperation and integration or, vice versa, separation and conflict. The research tried to analyze the development of political geography in the visual public space of Mostar after the 1990s war, and has started in association with a project of an ethnographic film on post-war Mostar (“Around Mostar, the Bridge and Bruce Lee”), which tells a story of two monuments, the Old Bridge and the statue of Bruce Lee. The first was established as an effort of the international community to promote reconciliation, while the latter was a provocative local and grassroots project based on the common grounds and orientation of the members of a local association. The task of the research, partly overlapping with the fieldwork for the ethnographic film, has been to observe the visual traces and discuss the symbolism in the urban public space to analyze the extent of division and integration in town. The effort is to observe how the two main and dominant ethnic and national groups present in Mostar since the end of the war have been interacting in the public arena, and to single out the elements of conflict and cooperation between them and among the whole population.
A) power point presentation and B) screening of Ethnographic film (26 minutes).
Participant: Ms Deniz Duru
Anthropology Department
University of Sussex
United Kingdom
Email: d.duru@sussex.ac.uk
Proposal for the meeting or other role at the meeting:
Multiculturalism and Coexistence: from the Ottoman Empire to Modern Turkey Abstract:
This paper explores the issue of “minorities” from the Ottoman Empire to Balkan nations and to the building of Modern Turkey. It looks into historical and regional background of Turkey's current political situation, delves into critical political events that affected minorities to document the ways in which minorities experienced the homogenisation of the country from the nation building stage until present. It explores the transition from the coexistence and multiculturalism in the Ottoman Empire to the rise of nationalisms and identity politics. This paper raises issues concerning "the uses of singularity and plurality in understandings of power and/or historical change", “construction of identities based on differences”, “the treatment of ethnic and religious differences by nation-states”.
Participant: Ms Marit Aure
Department of Planning and Community Studies, Faculty of Social Science
University of Tromsø
Norway
Email: marit.aure@sv.uit.no
Proposal for the meeting or other role at the meeting:
“They are more like us”
This paper is based on a study of female dominated labour migration in the Barents Region, from Northern-Russia to Northern-Norway. It explores the construction of sameness and difference among and between Russian migrants and Norwegian business managers, and argues that it is important to see these actors’ resources and constructions in connection. The constructions involve and make borders towards other groups of migrants, and actively use the anticipated similarities between the community of departure and arrival as a resource in the process of making meaning of a new situation. It shows how geopolitical changes and border policies, this being an outer Schengen border, is part of this process, while the actors also draw on resources and practices of different geographical scale and time. At the “very local” (Price 1999), the appearances of bodies are also involved in the construction of similarities and difference. Migrant’s and other
actors practices, transnational perspectives and geographical scale are thus important approaches in this analysis, demonstrating reconstructions, blurring and changing of difference and sameness across an east-west border in the north.
Participant: Ms Sanja Kajini
Gender Studies Department
Central European University
Hungary
Email: sanreve@yahoo.com
Proposal for the meeting or other role at the meeting:
WIKI ENTRY (LITERATURE REVIEW) on Travelling Concepts in Gender studies, with focus on the concept of ‘borders’ The discussion on ‘travelling concepts’ in Gender studies has a long tradition of attempting to overcome dualisms through interdisciplinarity and engaged ecclectisism. The theorization of ‘travelling concepts’ can be attributed to Mieke Bal’s claim that concepts ‘if well thought though, offer miniature theories, and in that guise, help in the analysis of objects, situations, states, and other theories’ (Bal 2002, 22). This functioning of concepts as ‘shorthand theories’ can be followed in their trajectory from scholar to scholar, through history and/or across disciplines. This wiki entry would attempt to engage with the concept of ‘borders’ as a traveling concept and follow its path in relation to conceptualizations of difference, sameness, binaries, power etc., in the interdisciplinary area of Gender studies. Preliminary bibliography: Cristina Beltran, ‘Patrolling Borders: Hybrids, Hierarchies and the Challenge of Mestizaje’, Political Research Quarterly, Vol. 57, No. 4 (Dec., 2004), pp. 595-607. Enik? Demény, ‘Crossing Boundaries: Gender in Interdisciplinary Perspective?’, Clare Hemmings and Ann Kaloski (eds), TravellingConcepts.net, York, UK: Raw Nerve Books, http://www.travellingconcepts.net/tuin1.html (accessed 21. 12. 2008). Eva Bahovec, Claire Hemmings, ‘Teaching Traveling Concepts in Europe’, Feminist Theory, December 2004, December 2004, Vol. 5 Issue 3, pp. 333-342. Mieke Bal, ‘Concepts’, in Traveling Concepts in the Humanities, University of Torronto Press, 2002, pp. 22-55.
Participant: Ms Katja Kahlina
Department of Gender Studies
Central European University
Hungary
Email: katja.kahlina@gmail.com
Proposal for the meeting or other role at the meeting:
Lesbian-ness/Gay-ness: A Potential for a Non-Exclusionary Perception of Sexual Identity?
In this paper I will try to establish a theoretical stance from which to evaluate different ways Croatian gays and lesbians see themselves, their sexual preferences and practices in relation to their sense of national belonging. Hence, I propose to present a theoretical paper that will attempt to answer the following question: how to perceive sexual identities in relation to the notions of citizenship and belonging that would not evoke endless multiplicity (that is always in flux) or a notion of a fixed, stable entity that conceals the process and change. Firstly, I will discuss new postmodern (queer) approaches to sexual identities that, in line with postmodernism’s critique of empiricism and grand narratives, call into question the notion of sexuality as a stable, fixed identity and expose the multiplicity, instability and fluidity of subject positions. I will then move to the critiques of queer theory’s negation of a whole dimension of sexuality – its reality as an identity category – posed from the materialist feminist perspective. Finally, by drawing on relational theories of identity (Barat, Somers, Wilton) as a process of doing (instead of being) that is situated in and produced by the interface between the social and the personal, my aim is to open up a space for conceptualization of identity beyond essentialism vs. social constructionism divide. In other words, by drawing on Tamsin Wilton’s conceptualization of lesbian-ness that is at the
intersection of multiple ways of doing sexuality and Barat’s notion of heterogeneity within the self my aim is to argue for a non-exclusionary perception of sexuality-as-identity.
Participant: Ms Agnieška Juzefovi
Culture, Philosophy and Art Institute
Lithuania
Email: agnieska_j@yahoo.com
Proposal for the meeting or other role at the meeting:
Shifting limits and dualism: Lithuanian peripeteias during the integration into EU
The tendency of dualism or disjunction in Western culture is deep-seated. A limit between two individuals, peoples or different layers of society is one of the most vivid symbols of such disjunctions. Duality can assume both positive and negative tone. With reference to phenomenological approach the idea will be grounded that inverse (Other) can help realizing ourselves – we often set eyes on our own face through Another. On the other hand, dualism and contraposition often hinder to strike up a positive dialogue with Another. The drawbacks of dualism will be shown up; it will be indicated how it can hinder to strike up an efficient dialogue with Another, to hear and understand him; the discussion will be done on how it is possible to overcome the disjunctions between individuals and peoples. The object of analysis will be Lithuania and the undergoing changes during the integration into EU. The disjunction between the mentality of the inhabitants of Lithuania and Western Europe is still quite vital, and although official Lithuanian policy declares orientation to Western values, in different aspects (e.g., woman’s emancipations, tolerance for other races and people of untraditional sexual orientation) the mentality of the Lithuanian’s is still closer to the inhabitants of post-soviet expansion than Western Europe. Various questions will be discussed: Does dualism exist (and how long) between the citizens of Lithuania and
European Union? How resettlement into cultural, economical and political space of EU helps the Lithuanians to consolidate their own national identity and how much does this destroy it? Keywords: limits, dualism, phenomenological approach, Me and Another, Lithuania, European Union, value.
Participant: Dr Yiannis Papadakis
Department of Social and Political Sciences
University of Cyprus
Cyprus
Email: papada@ucy.ac.cy
Proposal for the meeting or other role at the meeting:
This proposal is based on a paper that has already been published; Dr Papadakis will present his expert knowledge of the Cyprus border region as part of this work group.
Nicosia after 1960: A River, A Bridge and a Dead Zone
This paper explores various spatial dimensions of Nicosia, the capital city of Cyprus that eventually came to be divided in 1974. Capitals are generally regarded as the spaces exemplifying nationalist ideologies, and in Nicosia these processes acquired added urgency due to the ethnic conflict that took place in Cyprus, leading to almost obsessive efforts to inscribe the national Self on the landscape and erase the Other. At the same time, other social groups critical of nationalist ideologies have been able to employ ‘in-between’ spaces in Nicosia in order to articulate critiques of nationalism and foster interethnic cooperation. The multiple displacements of the inhabitants of Nicosia, as well as attempts to establish their own ‘places’ are compared with those of other displaced groups, namely the foreign migrants that gradually came to live there. (Note: This paper was written during 2000, before the April 2003 opening of checkpoints in Cyprus, and subsequent political developments, which are outlined in the postscript.)