COST Action IS0803 2009, Workshop 1
Eastern Peripheries
Brno (Czech Republic), 12-13 November 2009
Convenor
Jakub Grygar
grygar@fss.muni.cz
+420 549 493 739; +420 775 648 748
Venue
Masaryk University, Department of Sociology
Joštova 10 Brno, Czech Republic
Title
Multiple Easts: Periphery as Practice
Structure of the meeting
The workshop focused primarily on the concept of ‘east’ and ‘eastern’ and secondarily on what counts as the eastern periphery of Europe and how these concepts may transform during the current period of time.
Accordingly, selected participants discussed re/production of concepts of East and peripheries in the everyday practice of human, institutional and technological actors during this workshop. The workshop was intended to open out the debate on what might constitute ‘East’ and ‘periphery,’ and to focus on everyday practices involved in generating the sense of ‘East’ and ‘periphery’.
The convenor of the workshop asked participants to think about this scope in two ways. First, by investigating and discussing different everyday enactments of the East and peripheries as the outcome of various actions and habitual practices. Through studying this practice we wanted to display how different actors re/make reality. Secondly, if the East, peripheries and centres are not conceived as a priori existing frames in which the practice takes place but rather as entities which are themselves enacted by a concrete practice, then we cannot assume the existence of the East, peripheries, and centre as consistent, homogeneous and singular phenomena. Thus the workshop was intended to explore these entities as multiple.
Objectives and aims of the workshop
The workshop took place in Brno and lasted for 2 days. Selected speakers presented both empirical and theoretical analysis of wider processes of both imagining and practicing borders / Europe’s eastern peripheries.
The structure and the aims of the workshop were consistent with the objectives of the COST Action IS0803, giving special attention to the aim of getting together people from different disciplines across the social sciences and humanities.
For this first workshop a total of 19 researchers from 12 Parties to the Action applied to attend, The convenor (Jakub Grygar) made a selection on the basis of: (i) the quality of the proposed applications, (ii) a balance of early stage and senior researchers, (iii) a balance of topics and regions of specialisation, (iv) a balance of theoretical and empirical proposals, and (v) a balance of Parties participating. The final decisions were made in consultation with the Steering Committee of the Action (the Steering Committee consists of the Chairman, Vice Chairman and all the Convenors of meetings for 2009, a total of 9 MC members). 13 papers were selected during this selection. However, as the date of the workshop approached, more and more enrolled participants apologized for not coming to Brno. At the end only 5 from the 13 selected participants gave personally their paper at the workshop. To make the workshop viable the convenor opened the meeting for other scholars who are not members of the Action and presented also a draft of his own paper. Accordingly, the purpose of the workshop also become getting together expertise and reports from a current research being carried out by scholars who are Parties to the Action and by scholars who are not parties of the Action. Paradoxically, this lack of parties from the Action enabled bringing together regional specialists with conceptual specialists as well as bringing together scholars working on the eastern periphery of Europe. This situation set out the stage for an ongoing process of sharing knowledge both empirical and theoretical. However, one problem caused by the lack of participants involved to the Action was obvious: the workshop participants could not get information from WG2 and WG4.
Comments on the presentations and the following discussion:
An abstract of each presentation discussed at the meeting can be found on the EastBordNet website. Working papers from the workshop have been available on the website since the end of February 2010. The papers mostly discussed the topics of imagining and practising mobility with a special focus on the transnational and cross-border migration.
The workshop was opened by screening two short documentary films from Wolfgang Widerhofer and Markus Glaser´s project “Across the Border Five views from Neighbours”: The ?eské Velenice Infinity, by Jan Gogola, and Helpers, by Peter Kerekes. These two films present the international Czech – Austrian and Czech-Slovak-Austrian border as intangible and invisible.
The workshop itself was divided to four thematic sections: Imagining periphery (chaired by Miklós Wörös), Re-reyfing borders: culture, race, and ethnicity (chaired by Csaba Szaló); New borders, old regimes? (chaired by Jakub Grygar), and Practisizing spatialities (chaired by Haldis Haukaness).
Panel Imagining periphery opened anthropologist Haldis Haukanes with her presentation of imagining the periphery and the centre among young generation of Czechs. Her paper The beauty of quietness. Romantic notions of the rural and processes of de-peripherization among young Czechs dealt with the periphery and the centre as complex constellations of identification among youngsters in rural localities of the Czech Republic. Haldis Haukaness considered the periphery and the centre as multilayered and relational notions: there are always multiple centres and peripheries which relate to one another in complex ways. According to the author the centre-periphery dimensions change over time. Thus there are constant processes of “peripherization” and its opposite - “de-peripherization”– going on. These processes of becoming more peripheral or moving closer to the centre may sometimes seem contradictory but are seldom mutually exclusive.
Naming-and-placing in the scientific practice of geographers was an issue addressed by Isabella Damiani´s paper Central Asia, Turkestan, Turan: many words for a single land.
Second panel Re-reyfing borders: culture, race, and ethnicity was composed of the following papers: (i) (In)visibilities of Race, Ethnicity and Gender – Baltic Contexts given by Irina Novikova and (ii) Vladislav B. Sotirovic´s paper Making Boshnjak ethnonational identity by creation of Bosnian language in Bosnia & Herzegovina and Sandžak, 1993 – 2009. Both papers focused on post-communist space and tools of ethnic mobilization.
Irina Novikova focused especially on relations between the race and nation in Latvia and it is based on the idea of developing an approach which would understand the race/culture dimensions in the build-up of national projects in the post-Soviet societies of European North-East (Baltics). By studying genealogies of thinking/practicing race/culture linked to the (re)constitution of nation from the comparative regional perspective (diachronics), Irina Novikova discussed visual examples representing contemporary gendered views upon race/ethnicity/migration in Latvia. Based on examples of migrant and diaspora groups, the author approached cultural discourses and practices in Latvia. By exploring the discursive contexts in which the relationships between the race, gender and nation(alism) have been (re)constituted, Irina Novikova addressed concepts of “east”, “eastern”, “European peripheries” and more substantive questions of race, whiteness and Europeanness. Vladislav B. Sotirovic focused on sociolinguistic aspects of dissolution of Yugoslavia. He discussed processes of Boshnjak ethnonational identity.
Third panel New borders, old regimes? discussed the changed character and scope of borders after the Schengen enlargement in 2007. Social geographer Lefteris Topaloglou argued in his paper The new scene of borders in Europe that the contemporary scene of borders and the border space in Europe are composed of series of parameters such as the eastward enlargement of the European Union; the European Neighbourhood Policy launched by the European Union’s new strategy; and the 9/11 terrorist attack, which, imperatively, addressed the issue of security. According to Lefteris Topaloglou these developments have triggered a discussion about the future borders of the European Union. In his paper the author attempted to examine the political and economic geography responsible for synthesizing the new image of borders in Europe in general and in South-eastern Europe after 1989 in particular.
Alexandra Schwell in her paper De/Securitizing the 2007 Schengen Enlargement: Austria and “the East” provided an analysis of current Austrian politics and a medial discourse towards migrants from post-Soviet space. Drawing on concepts of securitisation and desecuritisation Alexandra Schwell argued that the construction of security threats does not necessarily have to relate to their threat potential but can be instrumentalised and utilised by competing actors for specific aims. Using the example of the Austrian Ministry of Interior and the Austrian tabloid press the author scrutinised how West-European security-political and media actors reacted to the challenges of the 2007 Schengen enlargement. Alexandra Schwell showed that the tabloids’ securitising strategy proved to be more successful than the ministry’s desecuritising strategy because the newly emerged context did not support a congruence of the audience’s frame of reference and the ministry’s speech act.
The final panel Practisizing spatialities opened a theoretical discussion about an actor-network theory in the study of borders and the role of non-human actors in the study of identities. Ann Therese Lotherington presented her paper The passport as actor in the enactment of the Russian-Norwegian border where she discussed the passport as an actor in the performance of identity in the context of female Russian marriage migrants to Norway. When the author asked what role the passport plays in the enactment of the Russian-Norwegian border her point was to apply the actor-network-theory as an approach, or method, more than a theory. The point of the author’s departure was that the passport can only be understood considering the practical experience of those using it. The passport is embedded in ‘heterogeneous networks’ of people, practices and things through such practical experience of those using it. The passport becomes of significance the moment a closed border is to be passed. Thus the point is not to study the passport in isolation but to follow its use in practice because the performance of identities, being individual or being a national state, takes place in practice, and can only be observed in everyday practice. Empirically, the paper was based on a longitudinal study of Russian immigration to North Norway where individual and group interviews, participant observation and document analysis were used as methods.
Jakub Grygar´s paper Devushka and the cigarette: Fluid migrants across the EU border later developed some points about identity and power at border-crossings. In his paper the author explored the relationship between cross border migration, identity of moving objects, changes of their ontology and political practice. Via ethnography of transborder migration between Poland and Belarus Jakub Grygar pursued how both state borders/ borders of the EU and migrants are performed and acted. Methodologically he used actor-network theory in the way it was modified by the work of John Law, Annemarie Mol, and Susan Star with James Griesemer. Migrations of devushka (a generalization of local transborder petty-traders) and cigarettes (a representative of the most present commodities in the borderland) across the external EU border illustrate the character and power of social networks, which are the very source of identity. From this point Jakub Grygar enriched the debate of boundary objects, practices of incoherencies and fluidity in the actor-network theory. Analytically, he argued that studying human and non-human migrants as boundary objects reveals how the border procedure constructs and makes intelligible a particular relationship between politics, experience and practice at the external EU border. Treating petty-traders and transferred commodities as ‘methodologically one object’ has therefore important analytical consequences on how we understand their practical efficacy.
Conclusions
The WS1 2009 discussed the term periphery from various perspectives. Social anthropologists, geographers, political scientists and historians who participated on the workshop reached an agreement that the representations of periphery we examined are discursive not only graphic compared to cartographers' maps produced under orders of a state which are purely graphic. These representations have been identified not only as the outcome of scholar practice but also as the common sense. The workshop participants discussed how these representations involve the use of a shared spatial imagery and how they effect producing a remarkably consistent mental picture or map of the world. Despite the apparent fixity of their geographic referents, spatial categories have historically possessed remarkable fluidity. Spatial categories have also taken on various identities and have identified places and people removed far from their original territorial homes. First of all it is the state which establishes the peculiar relationship between the history and the territory. However, states are not only actors who act between the spatial and the temporal matrix. New forms and technologies of communication shape our understanding of belonging and thus do not challenge only the fixity of territorial borders and social boundaries but also modify spatiality itself.
There was a long debate at the workshop about the role of agents moderating imagination-and-practice of spatiality, centre, and periphery. Passports, visas, languages, roads or railways, maps, Internet... all these actors are not only tools for/ of the practice but also tools of imagination: they shape our admissibility to act in the world. This shape has both theoretical and methodological implications in the perspective from space to action. “Space” is now seen as an agency of the actors. “Action” is no longer an element of “space”. This implicit spatiality of action is enabled (and limited) by 1) material and 2) social character of involved actors. What we used to describe as spatial problem (periphery e.g.) can be understand as an issue of type of action. The studied actor is in the centre from the proposed “action-centred perspective” in its larger material and social context. The space then “only” signifies the discursive frame of reference.
Later we focused on the shift in perspective from “geography of things” to “geographies of actors”. The workshop participants agreed that if we understand “periphery” as a formal and classificatory concept it becomes clear why the periphery takes different meanings in everyday life. The economic, political, and cultural dimensions of everyday practice refer to different spatial frameworks and make a link to a “common ground”. Using the action-centred perspective the peripherialization is multi-dimensional and also highly differentiated from power (economical, political, and symbolic).
List of working papers
Lefteris Topaloglou: The new border scene in Europe
Lefteris Topaloglou: The role and nature of borders
Ann Therese Lotherington: The passport as actor in the enactment of the Russian-Norwegian border
Isabella Damiani: Central Asia, Turkestan, Turan: many words for a single land (completed by February 2010)
Haldis Haukaness: The beauty of quietness. Romantic notions of the rural and processes of de-peripherization among young Czechs (completed by February 2010)
Irina Novikova: (In)visibilities of Race, Ethnicity and Gender – Baltic Contexts (completed by February 2010)
Jakub Grygar: Devushka and cigarette: Fluid migrants across the EU border
List of wiki entries
European Neighbouring Policy (Lefteris Topaloglou, completed)
Securitisation (Alexandra Schwell, completed by March 2010)
Transborder marriage (Ann Therese Lotherington, completed by March 2010)
De-peripherization (Haldis Haukaness, completed by February 2010)