COST Action IS0803 2009, Work Group 2
Travel, Exchanges, Translations
Rome, 27-28 April 2009
Convenor: Emilio Cocco
University of Teramo, Dep. Theories and Policies of Social Development
ecocco@unite.it
+39 086126029; +39 3471109775 (cell. phone)
Working papers from WG2 (Travel, Exchanges, Translations) are now available here.
The Summary Report on this meeting is now available here.
Liquid Lands, Solid Seas: dislocations, exchanges and relocations across the eastern borders of Europe
The focus of this workgroup is on the processes of crossing borders and on the ways borders become visible and meaningful (or, conversely, how they disappear) at the eastern peripheries of Europe. Sometimes people, things, objects, places, beliefs move across borders and are exchanged, dislocated and relocated. In other cases, the borders move and make things domestic or alien from one day to the other.
Accordingly, proposals may discuss the relations between border crossing (moving) and time, investigating how frequency or period of crossing (moving) might affect the borders and the identities of the ones crossing. A special attention is dedicated to the means and the actors performing legal and illegal exchanges, conversions and translations across the borders.
The Work Group aims to explore these issues in the context of the changing notion of space- time in the contemporary global world, with a focus on different forms of social connection/disconnection and their impact on the classic ways to perceive territoriality. This focus can be developed in two ways:
Firstly, by considering the relations between the physical features of the borders and the way different points of observation can affect the social construction of the border. In this perspective, the relation between land and sea and the reciprocal construction is a guiding one.
Secondly, by studying how the uncertainties and the lack of transparency of the global social context stress territorial borders, which are trapped in an ultimately provisional condition between the past and the future. A good example is given by borders of the centers for temporary residence where illegal immigrants are closed for unpredictable time span.
Participant: Dr Kristina Abiala
Institute for Contemporary History
Södtertörn University
Sweden
Email: kristina.abiala@sh.se
Proposal for the meeting or other role at the meeting:
Moldova in a fragmented global space?
Is space less important in times of global communication? Or does space constitute important arenas for unequal distribution of opportunities and wealth? The notion of space might be more important for large groups of less advantaged peoples. In times of fragmentation some centers for commercialization exist simultaneously with areas of exploitation. Some areas like Moldova support other countries with cheap, well-educated labour that emigrate by irregular means to work in unofficial, but for the country of destination invaluable, work sectors. What once were permeable borders towards the Soviet Union or Romania now are borders very hard to cross to the neighboring Romania, a member of the EU. For the potential immigrants borders become painfully visible if they don’t hold valid passport or cannot pay for visa. ‘Illegal’ exchanges are costly for the individual emigrating and also make them vulnerable. They move across borders when they cannot earn a living in their country of origin, and their remittances lower the level of poverty and help the emigrant’s family to buy the necessities for everyday living. In circular migration some become travelers, negotiators, saleswomen. Not so bound to their nation-state and separate from their [incomplete]
Participant: Dr Laura Assmuth
Dept of Sociology/Academy of Finland
University of Helsinki
Finland
Email: laura.assmuth@helsinki.fi
Proposal for the meeting or other role at the meeting:
Identities and identity politics around Baltic borders
Borderlands are areas where local, religious, ethnic and national identities meet. This makes them ideal for studying the mundane forms of nation building. Our research project explored how the states’ efforts at nation building with and at their borders concretely affect the everyday lives of women and men, young and old, who live in a peripheral area of the former Soviet Union where Estonia, Latvia and Russia meet. The research team examined local residents’ efforts to adapt to, support or oppose the workings of the respective states and their representatives in a situation where the recently enacted state borders are an important part of everyday life. The issues of border, border crossings, citizenship and ethnic/national identity were vividly present in local people’s acts and conversations, and therefore we have used them in our analyses as clues to studying the local actors’ relationship with the state. Ethnic and other identities can easily become sensitive, politicized and even explosive issues in a borderland context. The paper deals with different kinds of outside involvement and interference in the research process and the challenges this poses to face-to-face ethnographic fieldwork around Europe’s eastern borders.
Participant: Prof Bojan Baskar
Oddelek za etnologijo in kulturno antropologijo
University of Ljubljana
Slovenia
Email: bojan.baskar@ff.uni-lj.si
Proposal for the meeting or other role at the meeting:
By bicycle, by car, and by train: Crossing circum-Adriatic cultural boundaries and state borders of an Italian pundit
The paper will analyze travel writing by the famed Italian journalist and travel writer Paolo Rumiz. In his travels around the Adriatic and into Central and Eastern Europe, Rumiz has always paid a good deal of attention to the state borders, cultural frontiers and the pullulating of recently rediscovered or invented little ethnic borders. His travelogues reveal an interesting evolution of attitudes toward borders and border-crossing of a Triestine pundit, himself originating from the contested borderland.
Participant: Dr Anne Britt Flemmen
Department of Sociology
University of Tromsø
Norway
Email: anne.britt.flemmen@sv.uit.no
Proposal for the meeting or other role at the meeting:
Exploring bifocality as a useful concept
Geographical proximity, increased mobility and a political focus on transnational cooperation characterize border regions. Transnational perspectives in migration studies focus on the connections between places of destination and arrival and the processes by which people live lives stretched across national borders (Basch et al 1994). Mobility is thus seen as an inherent part of migrant’s lives, making their orientation bifocal (Vertovec 2004). The concept of bifocality stresses the dual orientation underpinning much international migration and offers understandings of migrant lives lived here-and-there. Such dual orientations have considerable influence on migrant’s everyday life (Vertovec 2004:970). I will analyze if labour- and marriage migrants life in the scarcely populated and peripheral North-Norwegian border region to Russia can be understood in terms of bifocality, and what issues this raises regarding questions of citizenship and migrant’s social and economical integration, both in places of departure and arrival.
Participant: Dr Emilio Cocco
Dept of Theories and Policies of Social Development
University of Teramo
Italy
Email: ecocco@unite.it
Proposal for the meeting or other role at the meeting:
Work Group Convenor
Participant: Ms Isabella Damiani
University of Trieste
Italy
Email: isabella.damiani@phd.units.it
Proposal for the meeting or other role at the meeting:
The word “territory” takes different values in Central Asia, which can be seen as an extreme Eastern peripheries of Europe. In the northern desertic and semi-desertic areas, human organizations may not assume stable shapes, since farming and building are hazardous. It is impossible to enter for the sedentary armies: they have no skills for moving in this kind of landscape. The nomads build up topographic benchmarks with which identify the routes and live their own territory. This situation gave birth to the eurasiatic nomadic political culture, called tribal feudalism. In the southern part of the big centrasiatic waste overbear the stability and the agricultural culture. In these areas grew up the so-called “Oasis society”, through the political structure of the city-state, a real territorial state, which gave birth to centres of powers and richness. Here started a paradoxical situation: the tribal feudalism, despite its nomadic settle, ties itself to the territory, preventing its violation. The big southern emirates, on the contrary, despite their strongly territorialized political structures, develop a social system open to every kind of cultural exchange. The territory becomes public, the foreign is not stranger and it can perfectly integrate.
Participant: Prof. Magdalena Elchinova
Department of Anthropology
New Bulgarian University
Bulgaria
Email: melchinova@hotmail.com
Proposal for the meeting or other role at the meeting:
Crossing Borders, Re-defining Identities: On the Interpretation of Ethnicity, Religion and Kinship in Cross-border Relations
This paper will discuss the question of how borders influence shifting interpretations of family ties, as well as of ethnic and religious affiliations. Forms of cross-border mobility, such as migration, displacement, re-settlement etc. usually entail re-definition of (certain aspects of) group identities. The paper will describe and analyze examples revealing how identity categories, otherwise considered as fixed and immutable, are variably interpreted under the impact of certain political agendas, national(ist) projects, and everyday practices. The empirical background of the discussion are processes of mobility across the Bulgarian-Macedonian border (re- formulating kinship, ethnicity and national identity) and the Bulgarian-Turkish border (negotiating and re- defining religious and ethnic identity). Furthermore, the paper will elaborate on borders as meaningful categories that are being instrumentalized in the construction of group identities in everyday discourses.
Participant: Dr Madeleine Hurd
History Department
Södertörn University
Sweden
Email: Madeleine.hurd@sh.se
Proposal for the meeting or other role at the meeting:
Territorial Borders between Street Demonstrations and International Space
My text is historical in nature; I believe that a historical point-of-view will add to our understanding of the contemporary issues which are the focus of EastBordNet’s workgroups. My paper discusses how mass acclamation and mass protests are formulated and communicated when borders are moved over the heads of populations – which is what happened when Germany’s borders towards Poland were readjusted in the aftermath of World War One. Borderland Polish and German populations were not passive during this process. Both were mobilized in, among many other forums, mass demonstrations, which were designed to show the world either their “holy joy” or their “holy anger” at the planned redistribution of territory. In the process, Germans and Poles who had long lived in quasi-colonial quasi-harmony laid rival, and exclusive, claims to territory. Each claimed it as theirs, and only theirs, its culture, history and landscape all demonstrating its particular, undiluted national essence. Local spaces, and the imagined borders around them, were now reconstructed as lying within boundaries that separated – or should be used to separate - hostile and alien peoples. These “two peoples” were themselves, however, unable to decide the territories’ final fate; they awaited the decisions of the Versailles peace-makers. This projected them, and their celebrations and protests, into a sort of virtual space of (a) waiting and (b) appealing, via the media, both to Versailles and to international public opinion. Thus, while immediately experienced, local borders became achingly concrete, increasingly invested with weighty significance, the experience of borders and bordering had also to be projected, through newspaper reports on mass demonstrations, into the virtual world of international media.
Participant: Dr Laura Huttunen
Department of Social Studies
University of Tampere
Finland
Email: laura.huttunen@uta.fi
Proposal for the meeting or other role at the meeting:
The Bosnian diaspora and the changing cartography of borders
For those Bosnians who left the country during the Bosnian war and who stayed abroad as refugees, returning to the country after the war, to stay or to visit, has meant encountering new borders as well as old borders with new meanings. In my presentation here I will concentrate on the experiences of border-crossings for Bosnians who live in Finland but engage in regular transnational practices with their former home country. The evolving situation within the region of former Yugoslavia in general, and in Bosnia-Herzegovina in particular, makes the question of borders dynamic. For example, the border between the Bosnian entities, the Republika Srpska and the Federation, was established only with the Dayton peace agreement in 1995, and its practical significance for visiting Bosnians as well as for those contemplating more permanent return has changed significantly during these years. But, even if it is hardly distinguishable in the landscape these days, its existence still moulds significantly diaspora Bosnians’ perception of the social and political landscapes, and it affects the practical choices of those who return. The changing cartography of the ex-Yugoslav region with new state borders is perceived in relation to earlier memories of life in Yugoslavia, when the experience of crossing those borders was rather different from present experiences. Finally, diaspora Bosnians have a history of encountering the Finnish state borders, both as asylum seekers and refugees, and later as residents and citizens still marked by their diasporic connections.
Participant: Prof Damir Josipovic
Director
Institute for Ethnic Studies
Slovenia
Email: damir.josipovic@guest.arnes.si
Proposal for the meeting or other role at the meeting:
Physical and Symbolic Dichotomies: Territorial Sea and Marine Land vs. True and Fictitious People
In my paper I deal with the relationships between the notion of land and sea in contemporary Slovenian- Croatian border dispute. I compare these situations to notion of autochthony used in both countries (Slovenia and Croatia). In this sense I intend to discuss various aspects of border engineering and processing, and their impacts on perceiving of human population daily trapped in between spaces.
Participant: Dr Olivier Thomas Kramsch
Nijmegen Centre for Border Research
Radboud University Nijmegen
Netherlands
Email: o.kramsch@fm.ru.nl
Proposal for the meeting or other role at the meeting:
Passagenwerk of the EU Cross-Border
In his Passagenwerk, Walter Benjamin suggested that the Paris shopping arcades of the late 19th-century, while having lost their functionality as sites of commercial and symbolic exchange, retained a potent ‘aura’ that continued to inform key domains of 20th century modernity. His ‘Arcades Project’ sought, in part, to trace the influence of the ghosts of that 19th century past as they haunted his present, mapping in those Parisian ruins spaces that would have the potential to disrupt the linear notion of time and space embodied in standard geo-historiographical practice. In this paper I apply the insights of Benjamin’s Arcades to the study of a different set of ruins, namely that of cross-border infrastructure that now lie as the ruins of our previous century. The paper will analyze two sets of border infrastructure; the first comprising the mottled remains of former truck weighing stations, customs houses and passport control huts located between the Netherlands and Germany, following a route the author traverses each time he commutes to work; the second focuses on the still quite ‘potent’ border infrastructure located on the external border of EU-space, at the border crossing between Romania and Moldova. By examining each set of border crossing infrastructure -- the one a dislocated ruin, the other a relocated site fully infused with EU administrative utility and power -- the author attempts an archeology of internal-external EU cross-border relations, the better to unsettle the space-time of the contemporary cross-border in Europe’s eastern peripheries.
Keywords: Walter Benjamin, Passagenwerk, modernity, aura, Dutch/German border, Romanian/Moldavian border, archeology
Participant: Dr Jutta Lauth Bacas
Research Center for Greek Society
Academy of Athens
Greece
Email: bacas@academyofathens.gr
Proposal for the meeting or other role at the meeting:
How illegal is illegal border crossing? Analyzing the entry to Greece and the exit of Greece of clandestine boat migrants
The ways in which invisible sea borders become meaningful and shape the experience of border crossing is investigated in a research project I am presently conducting. Its aim is to document and analyze the sea routes of illegal migration from Turkey to Greece and from Greece to Italy. In a first phase (completed in 2008) I investigated the process of clandestine sea border crossing from Turkey to Greece on the Greek island of Lesbos. In the present phase (2009) I investigate the procedures and problems occurring during the unauthorized exit of transit migrants, who try to leave the country clandestinely through the port city of Patras. The focus of my contribution to the WG2 will be (a) analyzing the experiences of transit migrants in Greece in the context of national and European regulations and (b) discussing the concept of “illegal migrant” applied in the anthropological analysis. A literature review on the concept of the “other” in anthropological studies of transit migration (discussing the concepts of undocumented/unauthorized/illegal/transit migrant) could follow later to become a Wiki entry.
Participant: Ms Paola Monzini
Independent Researcher
Italy
Email: pao.monz@libero.it
Proposal for the meeting or other role at the meeting:
The routes of migrants to Europe: the irregular crossings of the Mediterrenean Sea
The arrival of rotting boats crowded with hundreds of individuals exhausted by a difficult crossing in wretched conditions is a powerful image too often seen in the newspapers. In the majority of cases, the sea crossing is only a small part of a long and eventful journey. The cross-Mediterranean flow of migrants without papers originates on the southern and eastern shores of the Mediterranean Sea, but it includes migration from several continents. Many Mediterranean countries have become transit routes as the main objective of the sea journey is to cross the most protected border, that of the Schengen area. In these countries migrants become clients of illegal organizations: they pay for a service and subject themselves to rough treatment, with high risk for their personal safety. The text reconstructs the routes and the organization of the travels which irregularly cross the Mediterranean Sea to reach Europe (Italy, Spain,Greece). Different migration flows and their evolution are presented, as well as the main strategies of the traffickers. Definitions of sea and land borders, and of their connections with the organizations of illegal crossings, will be investigated.
Participant: Dr Nefissa Naguib
Unifob Global
University of Bergen
Norway
Email: nefissa.naguib@global.uib.no
Proposal for the meeting or other role at the meeting:
The Northern Frontiers of the Mediterranean
While much scholarship on the Mediterranean points back to Braudel’s long continuities, and work on Scandinavian Mediterranean experiences highlight the far frontiers, I attempt to bring these themes together. The Mediterranean is a far frontier from Norway. Like all frontiers also this one is complicated and unstable, just like the spaces they surround. The kaleidoscopic feature of the Mediterranean and the forces which from time to time reduce or intensify is the focus of my paper. Using Norwegian encounters with Spain I want to explain how when historical developments are examined at the level of human beings, events of daily life are powerful features of human reconstructions of places. I propose an approach which circumvents maps and follows instead connections that personal geographies allow people to make. I think that if we do that, we will find that what seem to us as de-lineated physical and cultural
Mediterranean frontiers are also social worlds and entanglements beyond and between spaces, communities and persons in and beyond the Mediterranean.
Participant: Ms Shannon Pfohman
Department Political Science and Social Sciences
Free University Berlin (Freie Universität Berlin)
Germany
Email: pfohman@online.de
Proposal for the meeting or other role at the meeting:
Reconstructing Meaning After Multifold Border Crossings
In this workshop, I aim to present some of my PhD results with a focus on Bosnian refugees who originally crossed borders in search of humanitarian protection. After nearly 15 years of displacement and resettlement in Berlin and Chicago, my sample has reconstructed the meanings ascribed to their multifold border crossings. On the one hand, crossing these familiar borders to return “home” has lost its initial significance for them; it has become per se, a common ritual for those who are now known as “transnational migrants”, crossing borders on a regular basis. This development has changed dramatically since their original crossing in search of protection following the Bosnian war. Yet the meanings they ascribe to borders and border crossings are greatly influenced by their location and notions of imagined community or Heimat. Uncertainties in their legal status and a lack of transparency have meanwhile culminated in a constant state of flux, which affects their understanding of home, receiving community, as well as border crossings.
Participant: Dr Rita Salvatore
Dept of Theories and policies of social development
University of Teramo
Italy
Email: rsalvatore@unite.it; rita_salvatore@tiscali.it
Proposal for the meeting or other role at the meeting:
Title: Travelling towards the periphery of tourism A typical mark of the contemporary consumption experiences is that people have begun to look for what can be perceived both as unique and authentic. They think they can find it in the dress they wear, as well as in the food they eat or in the place they visit. This wider and wider individualization of consumption trends brings about a relocation of the borders between symbolic centres and their peripheries, especially in tourist encounter. An experience of research conducted in a mountainous eastern periphery of Europe (some demographically marginalised villages in inner Abruzzo) has showed how an area at the periphery of urban development can eventually turn into a new symbolic centre, that is to say into a tourist site. The main goal of the study is to read this process by focusing on the idea of exchange and relocation of the borders, especially between autochthonous community and foreigners (both tourist and new residents).
Participant: Ms Michaela Schäuble
Institute for Social Anthroplogy
Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg
Germany
Email: michaela.schaeuble@ethnologie.uni-halle.de
Proposal for the meeting or other role at the meeting:
Return to the Mediterranean? Euroscepticism and the (Re)Conceptualization of Ethnic Regionalism in Croatia
This paper aims to scrutinize the material and ideational grounds people at the ‘immediate outside of the European Union’ draw on to as they are faced with massive structural re-organizations of their livelihood.
Drawing on my fieldwork in rural Dalmatia, I am primarily interested in the ways in which people locate and represent themselves in the view of geographically, politically and historically shifting borders. One of the major aspects of the consequential return to local – environmental, geographic, economic, ecological and social – niches is the search for alternative scopes of action beyond the centralized control of the nation-state as well as the advancement of supranational economic and political blocs. In Dalmatia and along the Adriatic coast of Croatia, this search has recently led to an intensified affinity with the Mediterranean region. In the midst of current geopolitical contests, the Mediterranean re-emerges as a site of policy and scholarly attention and (re-) gains importance as an experimental field for shifting cultural and social formations. As a site of convergence and exchanges the Mediterranean evokes visions of a century-old cosmopolitanism and suggests the possibility that trade connections and tourism could secure the economic future of the region. Such reconceptualizations have also to be understood as a self-positioning towards Europe. The main motive of this re-orientation along regional rather than national lines is in my view not so much scepticism towards the modern nation-state as such, but the feared dissolution of it in a supra-national confederation of states as it is represented by the European Union. The concept(s) of “Return to the Mediterranean” and/or “Ethnic Regionalism” could alternatively also be considered for a Wiki entry.
Participant: Dr Aspasia Theodosiou
Department of Popular Music
Epirus Institute of Technology
Greece
Email: aspasia.theodosiou@manchester.ac.uk
Proposal for the meeting or other role at the meeting:
TRANSIT MIGRATION: GEOGRAPHIES OF SECURITY AND HUMANITARIANISM PROPOSAL FOR A PAPER OR A LITERATURE REVIEW
It has been observed that migrants often cross a range of countries before reaching their final destination in Europe. Within the migration policy discourse such migratory flows are called transit migration. Because of fear over illegal immigration and for humanitarian reasons transit migration has become a cause of concern for public and policy alike. This paper looks at the emergence of the concept and surveys a series of relevant empirical studies. It examines the discursive use of the idea, its politicised character and blurred nature, and its potential for understanding the multiple processes of relocating
European borders.
Participant: Dr Zdenk Uherek
Institute of Ethnology
The Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic
Czech Republic
Email: uherek@etno.eu.cas.cz
Proposal for the meeting or other role at the meeting:
Paper: Expectation and Reality: Crossing borders of the Czech Republic In this meeting I would like to refer about my field enquiry of immigrants from Ukraine, Belorussia and Kazakhstan to the Czech Republic. These immigrants came to the Czech Republic in 1991 – 2001 from the regions affected Chernobyl nuclear catastrophe and from the regions of Kazakhstan inhabited primarily by Russian speakers. Some of these immigrants are of the Czech origin and their transfer was assisted by the Czech state. Research of these immigrants could be partially held before their migration to the Czech Republic and then after their settlement in the Czech Republic. It enabled me to observe pre-migration behaviour, decision processes, preparation for moving out, boundary crossing and then adaptation in the new environment. It was possible to compare their former image of Central Europe and their encounters with new life conditions, strategies of survival, conceptualization of new space. In my contribution I shall present results of our both quantitative questionnaire survey and qualitative interviews and observations. I shallm also discuss present-day subsequent research focused on the integration of immigrants and the second generation.
Participant: Dr Irena Weber
Dept. of ethnology and cultural anthropology, Faculty of arts
University of Ljubljana
Slovenia
Email: irena.weber@guest.arnes.si
Proposal for the meeting or other role at the meeting:
Touristic M&Ms
Before entering Montenegro by car one is obliged to pay an ecological tax since the state which re-gained it's independence in 2006 has proclaimed the country to be an »ecological state«. The proclamation, substance of which is far from being clear, may be observed in a context of the symbolical repositioning of the territory rendering a distinction in competitive tourist space (particulary that of neighbouring Croatia). The current tourism strategies in Montenegro focus on several Ms: the Mediterranean, the mountains and multiculturality. Drawing on historical and contemorary narratives the paper shall look at the processes that navigate the construction of new identity and tourism remapping in the border area of Boka Kotorska.