COST Action IS0803 2009, Workshop 2
COST IS0803 2009 WS2
Money
Zagreb (Croatia), 16-17 October 2009
Convenor: Renata Jambresic Kirin
Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Research
renata@ief.hr
The Summary Report on this meeting is now available here.
Title: Money and the shifting locations of eastern peripheries
For social theorists money is a rather troubled object of study that implies observing peoples' economic, social and political transactions in moral rather than cultural terms. For example, economic anthropologists are still actively engaging with the classic texts written by Mauss, Sahlins, Simmel and Marx on issues of money and its relations with commodities, trade, gift and social exchange - texts that were developed in contexts very different from those in contemporary global economic conditions. More recently, and partly influenced by the postmodern turn, scholars are inventing influential theories and metaphorical concepts – liquid society, symbolic capital, social games, moral economy, preferential democracy, postcolonial studies – which disclose organic linkages between Western epistemologies and capitalist discursive constructions of social realities. When it comes to the issue of borders, it seems that money both creates and negates borders, marking the cultural logic of bonding and affiliations, the historical state of affairs, the differentiation between formal and informal economies, as well as professional and kinship loyalty; but money also negotiates between and betwixt the people transgressing political blocks, war zones, ethnic communities, and moral codes, and thus builds the global web of links and progressive movements (such as fair trade and creative commons initiatives). Money is one main tool of development policies and prosperity but also the main agent of "turbo-capitalism" and "cowboy entrepreneurship," producing deep inequalities and the collapse of sociability in once proud welfare states of the eastern peripheries of Europe. The Balkan routes of "bloody money" exchanged and laundred by warlords, followed by routes of drugs and trafficking, are only minor financial management compared with the international trade of heavy weapons and humanitarian business from the North to the global South.
In this period of major shifts of leading capitalist societies towards state interventions, the ideology of free market, synonymous with liberal democracy, loses its credibility and Marx’s thesis about the market corrupting the moral values it is by default based upon, is more relevant than ever before. The global explosion of money, markets and telecommunications has severely exposed the frontiers and borders of, and within, European national communities to greater freedom of movements and to unpredictable changes of social values, social habits and moral standards regarded in public
discourses as the erosion of basic (both Christian and secular) modern values. The first workshop on money as major social force that initiates social, moral and material relocations of Europe’s eastern peripheries will focus firstly on a discussion of some of the relevant social and cultural theories of money and studies on the use of money, "metaphors of market" and
financial exchanges and movements in the eastern peripheries of Europe. The second focus will be on the reports of empirical research that consider the role of money in fuelling new migration movements, new forms of "real" and virtual sociability, mafia-based transnational networking as well as progressive attempts to humanize commodity-oriented societies east of the former Iron Curtain.
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:
To Earn Money with Bloody Tears
This phrase has long attendance in Bulgarian speaking space. This is often exploited among migrants and their relatives in Bulgaria. Are migrants heroes, hostages or victims? Is the migrant’s choice free or they are forced? How much free is the free movement of people in the case of Bulgarian migration of Post Socialist transition? These are the main questions of my paper. The objective is the family model and its transformation in the time of crisis, shaped through male and female migration processes. The Socialism cultivated generations of people who had not take care about “the bread”. This is why they grew up touching ignoramus and with careless of money origin and behavior. Nowadays when the job is a lot, the money are less, there arise a deep question about the values of children, growing up with their grand parents, moving with or living far from their migrated parents.
Participant: Dr Renata Jambresic-Kirin
Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Research
Croatia
Email: renata@ief.hr
Proposal for the meeting or other role at the meeting:
WS2 Convenor.
Participant: Dr Carolin Leutloff-Grandits
South Eastern European History
University of Graz
Austria
Email: carolin.leutloff@uni-graz.at
Proposal for the meeting or other role at the meeting:
Remittances and their impact on transnational family networks: Migrants from former Yugoslavia and Turkey in comparison
With the aim to transfer money across borders many work migrants left their home country and lived for several years and later even decades in a foreign country. This was especially the case for former “guest workers” from Turkey and socialist Yugoslavia in Austria and Germany. Remittances kept up family relations across states, in fact the money from labour in foreign countries was meant to secure and support the family at home. However, many former guest migrants took their families to the country of migration and stayed on. Today, often the second and third generation of former work migrants lives in Austria (and Germany). This paper focuses on the shifts of the meaning and direction of remittances following relocations of family networks as well as by the passing of decades and generations. What kind of meaning do remittances
have for transnational family networks, in how far do they support kinship networks and in how far are they also a burden to them? The paper will be based on a current literature review as well as on first insights into a research on transnational family relations of former Yugoslav and Turkish work migrants in Graz.
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:
Of gold and euros: locating value on the Greek-Turkish border
When borders mark differences that matter to people, they almost always involve assertions of differences in values, of whatever kind. That sets up conditions for needing to translate, convert or exchange one kind of value into another when interactions occur across borders. One of the most common forms of transaction of this kind involves payment. Yet there are surprisingly few social or cultural studies about these kinds of cross- border transactions: although there are many studies of smuggling, illegal trade, remittances and so on, few theorists of money, in itself as money, have focused their attention on what happens when money travels. This contribution will use shifts in the value placed on different forms of payment to reflect on how different forms of money leave traces of diverse borders. The examples of gold and euros will be used as two transnational forms of payment, each with very different histories, and each with very different relations to the Greek and
Turkish sides of the Aegean. The contribution will be based on ethnographic fieldwork in two coastal towns in the Aegean.
Participant: James Korovilas
Bristol Business School
University of West England
United Kingdom
Email: James.korovilas@uwe.ac.uk
Proposal for the meeting or other role at the meeting:
‘The motive to send remittances: Evidence from the Kosovo Albanian diaspora’
This paper is focuses on the flow of money, or remittances, from the Kosovo Albanian diaspora in the UK to their family members in Kosovo. This flow of remittances into Kosovo performs a number of vital functions within the economy, such as alleviating poverty and promoting economic development. This paper examines the migrant’s possible motive for sending money to family members in Kosovo. The literature on migrant remittances often assumes that migrants have a purely altruistic motive to send remittances, further assuming that there is no tangible economic benefit accruing to the migrant. However, the behavior of ‘remittance active’ migrants, in terms of their motives to send remittances, is complicated and it is clearly not the case the majority of Kosovo Albanian migrants send remittances for purely altruistic motives. The results of a survey of Kosovo Albanian migrants is used to demonstrate the extent to which this particular flow of remittances as a form of investment, with tangible economic benefits for the remittance active migrant.
Participant: Prof Karel Williams
Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change
University of Manchester
United Kingdom
Email: karel.williams@manchester.ac.uk
Proposal for the meeting or other role at the meeting:
Money making elites, corporate business models and the crisis of financial innovation
Ismail Erturk, Julie Froud, Adam Leaver and Karel Williams
The ongoing financial crisis is generally represented as a crisis of financial innovation related to techniques of securitization using derivatives; and the abuse of these techniques is then blamed on the bonuses paid to investment bankers. This paper stands back to consider the changing business models in banking over the past twenty years when mass marketing replaced intermediation in retail banking and proprietary trading replaced merger and acquisition advice in investment banking. The implication is that current problems are deep seated and embedded in shareholder value driven corporate business models;
and by implication the solution requires less re-regulation and more social innovation and experiment with remutualization and new kinds of banks. The paper is an exercise in analyzing the circuits contexts in which money became finance (personal and corporate) over the past twenty years and now finance needs to become money so that an utility banking system reliably provides safekeeping of deposits, responsible credit and payment systems.
Participant: Dr YasarAbu Ghosh
Dept of Anthropology, Faculty of Humanities
Charles University in Prague
Czech Republic
Email: abughosh@fhs.cuni.cz
Proposal for the meeting or other role at the meeting:
Crediting recognition: the meanings of money and exchange in the case of long-term unemployed Roma
The long term unemployed Roma in South Bohemia live most of the time on social benefits. This informs much of their relations to society: they repeatedly defy the obligations of reciprocity since their ways of spending do not correspond to their status of the “needy” assigned to them by the social policies and by the dominant discourse on Gypsiness. In this the structural poverty of the Roma and their culturally projected backwardness constantly mingle. It is interesting to observe to what extent are these social relations mediated through the social appropriation of money. The Roma as well as the social workers and other non-Roma have different understandings of the monetary exchanges taking place among them. This is revealed in the practices of gaining, spending and circulating money. The analysis of these practices highlights the plurality of money and the distinctions built on the actual uses of money (Viviana Zelizer). It also points to the resourcefulness of the moneyless Roma to resist their structural inequality by manipulating monetary transactions and thereby craving for recognition.
Participant: Dr Christian AxboeNielsen
Institute of History and Area Studies
University of Aarhus
Denmark
Email: slacan@hum.au.dk
Proposal for the meeting or other role at the meeting:
The Symbiosis of War Crime and Organized Crime in the Former Yugoslavia: Assessing the Long-Term Impact of Criminality on the Rule of Law and European Integration Efforts
The growth of organized crime and its interconnection with European organized crime both presaged and informed the collapse of the Yugoslav state in the early 1990s. A tight nexus emerged between state security services and militaries and organized criminal gangs who converged to enjoy parasitic gains during a time of war. No aspect of society remained
immune to the criminalization of social, political and economic transactions, with spillover effects visible even in those areas not directly engulfed by armed conflict. Since the end of the wars in the former Yugoslavia, these networks have offered opposition, often violently so, against democratization and efforts to introduce the rule of law. Based on empirical research on criminal networks before, during and after the wars in the former Yugoslavia, this paper will assess the progress achieved to date while focusing on the most significant challenges that these societies still confront on their road to European Union.
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:
The Role of Transnational Migrants’ Remittances in Recreating Borders in the Former Yugoslavia
Based on the analysis of my interviews with Bosnian refugees who have resettled to Chicago and Berlin, the role of money and sending remittances to their families in Bosnia seem to have greatly contributed in reshaping borders. In this workshop I would attempt to present concrete examples based on my research as to how money sent to the country of origin has been conducive in recreating borders, while also considering how money sent from Bosnia to refugees in Berlin, for example, has assumed a surprising position in dynamics of money and migration in the receiving society.
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:
Discussant.
Participant: Dr Zaiga Krišj?ne
Department of Human Geography
University of Latvia
Latvia
Email: zaiga.krisjane@lu.lv
Proposal for the meeting or other role at the meeting:
Earning and spending money from abroad: Case of Latvian labour migrants Paper is based survey results on geographic labour force mobility conducted in 2006. The survey was structured along different themes. A special series of questions were posed to those respondents who both worked and lived outside of Latvia. These were posed only to those questions who were abroad for a certain period of time to earn money or gain experience and had now returned to Latvia. The aim of the paper is to analyse spending of money earned abroad. In the survey nearly two-thirds of respondents declared that they had gone abroad so as to earn more money, 50% of them did send any money back to Latvia. Spending differed not just by gender, but also by age.
Participant: Dr Roos Pijpers
Human Geography and Spatial Planning
Radboud University Nijmegen
Netherlands
Email: R.Pijpers@fm.ru.nl
Proposal for the meeting or other role at the meeting:
Money, labour mobility and institutional fixity in the enlarged European Union (empirical paper)
The Eastward enlargement of the European Union, or rather one of its main implications, the opening up of the
labour markets of old Member States to workers from new Member States, is the central theme of this paper. Despite the instalment of transitional restrictions on the free movement of labour by various countries, the circular labour mobility between East and West has much increased in the post-enlargement years. Meanwhile, the regulation of wage levels, labour rights, welfare benefits, pensions and tax deductions remains a distinctively national affair. At present, there is no harmonised EU system of labour law, social security and taxation, and only minimal coordination of what currently amounts to 27 national systems. As a consequence, the more mobile workers are, the more difficulties can be expected with regard to their legal and fiscal status. Polish migrant workers hired by Dutch employment agencies and put to work consecutively in the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany are a far greater source of legal anomalies than are cross-border commuters between the Netherlands and Germany. The paper argues that for some protagonists in the current European mobility
landscape, including migrants but notably labour recruiters, service providers and employers, precisely these systemic incompatibilities offer ways to obtain significant cost advantages and profits.
Participant: Dr Martin van der Velde
Nijmegen Centre for Border Research
Radboud University Nijmegen
Netherlands
Email: m.vandervelde@fm.ru.nl
Proposal for the meeting or other role at the meeting:
?ód? Textile Open-air Markets – the Saga Continues
This contribution scrutinizes the phenomena of post-Comecon, textile open-air markets (OAMs) in the ?ód?- region in central Poland. These OAMs serve both as outlets for locally and regionally produced textiles, as well as products from CIS-countries and even South-East Asia. Next to the local and regional customers the markets also are depending on clients from Belarus, Ukraine and Russia. As such border-regimes like Schengen are of great importance. Next to the changing economic performance of the OAMs I will discuss primarily the actors involved in the textile trade, their socio-demographic characteristics, and the networks they establish to run enterprises. One specific and discerning character of the ?ód? textile OAMs is that they came into existence after 1989. Thus, they are the genuine offspring of post-socialist transition contributing significantly to municipal budgets through tax revenue. Using the TPSN (territory-place-space-network) model, developed by Jessop et al. (2008), as an heuristic framework for grounding the cases, we acknowledge the influence of territorial realpolitik of particular actors on economic well-being of the OAMs in general, and on the individual actors’ networks in particular. By tracing changes in the spatial extent and content of chains of demand and supply, the discussion
hopes to further the understanding of links between effects of changing border-regimes and consequent different scalar policies and the performance of local micro-enterprises forming the phenomena of post- Comecon OAMs.
Reference
Jessop, B., Brenner, N. & Jones, M. (2008) Theorizing sociospatial relations, Society and Space, 26, pp. 389 -401
This contribution is based on a paper that is currently being prepared together with Szymon Marci?czak and Jolanta Jakóbczyk-Gryszkiewicz, both from the Department of Urban Geography and Tourism, University of ?ód?, Poland
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:
Peculiarities, shifting and perspectives of Lithuanian financial system in the face of global crisis Lithuanian economical system will be analyzed and money will be treated as major social force that initiates and determines social, material and moral relations of the analyzed region; it will be demonstrated how these relations developed inside the country and affiliating contacts with other countries, especially in the region of North-East Europe. With reference to analytical, hermeneutical and phenomenological methods, the analysis will be made on relevant philosophical, social and cultural money theories. The emphasis will be made on the shifting of Lithuanian financial system which is visible in the latter decades, the discussion will be made on how the conception of financial interchange fluctuates in Lithuania and what are perspectives for its future
development. Special attention will be given to a conceptualized Lithuania’s orientation into the politics of European Union, and also to the influence of present financial crisis to Lithuanian economical system.
Keywords: money, economics, financial interchange, instability.
Participant: Ms Tihana Rubic
Department of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology
Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences
Croatia
Email: trubic@ffzg.hr
Proposal for the meeting or other role at the meeting:
From the late 1980s the significant socioeconomic and political changes in former socialist European countries have occurred, and thus have affected the structure of formal labour market, causing the high level of (long-term) formal unemployment. For my doctoral research I have proposed qualitative ethnographic research on taking decisions, creating strategies, shaping and rationalizing the projection of the future in processes such as post industrialisation (Bell 1973; Myles 1990) and deindustrialization (Dunn 2004). The formal labour market constraints and decrease provoke the need to answer the question of how, due to diminished and restructured formal labour market, individuals and families have (re-)established the social and emotional balance in their everyday lives? How the lack of money is shaping people’s everyday realities, identities, hopes and self-confirmations? Relevant empirical studies on changes in the labour market (Dunn 2004, Kideckel 2008) in post socialist European countries show how gender and generational social categories are significantly defined by
the changes in the labour market. That raises the question: what has happened to those categories in the context of mass dismissal, and widespread long-term formal unemployment in Croatia from the 1990s to this day? How cultural logic of bonding and affiliation could be linked to the categories of gender and generation, when it comes to the question of money transfers, making of a money, or simply living without it on a daily basis?