COST Action IS0803 2009, Workshop 2
Money
Zagreb (Croatia), 16-17 October 2009
Convenor
Renata Jambrešic Kirin
renata@ief.hr
+ 385 1 4596 718
Venue
Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Research
Zagreb
Title
Money and the shifting locations of eastern peripheries
The Zagreb workshop held on 16–17 October 2009 focused both on theories of money and the cultural principles behind the everyday uses and cross-border exchange of money. Apart from political circumstances, war and famine, money is a major social force that compels people to cross borders. With a large diaspora that equals its current population (4.5 million), Croatia fittingly exemplifies that simple truth. But there is no simple truth in social sciences, particularly regarding money as a rather troubled object of study which implies observing how material life and power relations affect people’s thinking about social values, identity and life in general. Zagreb, as Croatia’s capital and transit city, served as a suitable venue for reflecting on this interdependence. It presented an example of how socialist inheritance and neoliberal capital come into collision on a daily basis.
The shared understanding of civil rights, consumption patterns and lifestyles are gradually homogenizing our continent, but the price of the “European dream” has been paid by migrant workers with restricted labour rights, by the ever-widening inequality gap, and by the constant relocations of industries and businesses. Crossing the border westward is still not easy for non-EU citizens from the eastern peripheries of Europe because of the ever-changing regimes of visas, the Schengen regime on border control and other legal regulations. Simultaneously, new mobile technologies additionally enable easy transfers of migrant workers’ money worldwide and augment the remittance business.
The participants of the Zagreb meeting presented case studies exploring the diverse and changing ways in which trading, consumption, (“real” and virtual) money transfers and money conversion, different forms of payment and newly constructed currencies play a part in redefining the borders that they cross, producing both new inequalities and new paths of development in the once-proud welfare states of the Eastern bloc, from FYR Macedonia to Lithuania. The conclusions reached confirmed that money contains both an instrumental quality and a cultural performativity that is exposed in the culturally diverse notions of sustainability, wealth and poverty, stigmatized or preferential currencies, aspects which are often neglected in political economy. Some of the visible outcomes of this meeting are definitions of some basic concepts which are already accessible on the intranet website, along with working papers whose aim is to introduce good research practices and promote the economic anthropology approach to the study of borders.
The workshop contributions were divided into four thematic groups whose aims were:
a) To present ethnographic surveys on everyday aspects of the remaking of eastern European peripheries through the uses of money in small-scale trading, consumption, crediting and exchange
b) To question the consequences of unemployment and the flexibilisation of the labour market, including so-called transitional restrictions on the free movement of labour following the Eastern enlargement of the EU
c) To explain the “war-like” logic of global finance and its effects on the peripheries of Europe (Kosovo, Lithuania, Croatia)
d) To discuss the shifting forms of social networking (transnational family, organized crime) in post-conflict and post-socialist Yugoslav region.
Structure of the meeting
The Zagreb workshop drew together expertise and reports from current research on the “co-movement of money and people” carried out by scholars coming from diverse disciplines: economists, anthropologists, human geographers, semiologists, ethnologists, criminologists. In line with EastBordNet Action’s structure and selection criteria, the convenor (Renata Jambreši? Kirin), assisted by Orlanda Obad, made a selection and out of 19 applications 14 were selected from 11 Parties to the COST Action (Austria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Germany, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Netherlands, Turkey, UK). The final decision was made in consultation with the Steering Committee of the Action. Two participants were not able to participate (Shannon Pfohman and Nese Ozgen), and the total cost of the project was less than planned, which amounted to 5,637 EUR. The WS2 ultimately gathered 12 funded and 4 non-funded participants from Croatia: 11 presenters, a convenor and 2 discussants. The number of senior and early stage researchers was equal: 8 ESRs vs. 8 senior researchers. Before the meeting, all participants received the booklet with abstracts and academic CVs and half of them also prepared an outline of their presentations which were distributed shortly before the workshop.
The workshop was successful in creating an intellectually demanding but friendly atmosphere where young researchers received many responses and valuable advice from mentors on how to finalize their studies more successfully. On the first day the presentations were limited to 20 minutes followed by a 10-minute discussion. The next day’s morning session was open to all participants to present short summary comments after which the two discussants summarized the highlights of the meeting. The choice of having an economist and an anthropologist as discussants helped considerably in paving the way for findings, “problem areas” and shortcomings in the presented works. The discussants fostered a comparative perspective across the fieldwork material and analytical background. The economist’s remarks contributed to a better understanding of similarities between economic trends and economic forecasts for Central and Eastern Europe while the anthropologist’s “intervention” was instructive in indicating the spectre of needs, moral drives and desires that could clarify recent human migrations and transnational forms of earning and spending money besides basic economic interests. Both discussants commented not only on the particular topics and arguments but also formulated some general conclusions about the relevance of looking critically at the economic aspects of remaking the eastern borders of Europe.
The discussants’ remarks and general discussion will help participants in improving their working papers while their requirements towards the Action network’s Wiki page will urge them to continue further communication. Some of the related Wiki entries and working papers of this meeting have already been posted on the Action’s intranet site (open-air-markets, remittances, hedge funds….) while others will be posted in the following weeks.
Summary of the presentations and discussions
The first set of papers was based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork. Research reports focused on the everyday practices of gaining, spending and circulating money in “marginal” places – such as small towns in the ?ód? region, two coastal towns in the Aegean, and villages of south Bohemia. Martin van der Velde presented the results of ethnographic descriptions carried out in collaboration with Szymon Marcinczak and Jolanta Jakobczyk-Gryszkiewicz of the ?ód? textile open-air markets (OAMs) which appeared after 1989. Thanks to the ethnographic “thick description”, van der Velde managed to show how the mall-like bazaars in central Poland, associated with socially-embodied transactions, are important factors in inventing old-new ways of transborder trade which have specific regional characteristics but also a much longer history. Border-crossing clients from the surrounding states, such as the Czech Republic, Belarus, Ukraine and Russia, form an important factor in the economic revival of regional textile production but also help in improving neighbourhood relations and facilitate the Schengen border-regime. The ensuing discussions focused on the question of why money travels across the border more easily than people and how is it that the ?ód? OAMs ability to revive the local production of textiles is competitive to Chinese textiles making it a unique case among the post-socialist countries.
As an anthropologist familiar with the regional economic and socio-cultural changes, Sarah Green presented her research on gold and euros as two basic references of material value on the Greek-Turkish border. Her contribution focused on the shifts in the value placed on different forms of payment to reflect on how different forms of money leave traces of diverse borders. Supported by rich visual materials, Green illustrated the use of official and alternative currencies at local bazaars in the Aegean towns, and local shops providing “online trade” services. She also demonstrated how small-scale transactions which involve payment in cash, particularly when interactions occur across borders, set up conditions for translating, converting or exchanging one kind of value into another. One of the highlights of the discussion was the observation about people’s perception of the euro as a politically constructed currency, money of speculation and uncertain future which is in contrast to the solid, older currencies such as drahmas, dinars, zloty which signify a period of good, decent and secure life in a welfare state.
Yasar Abu Ghosh gave us another example of everyday “actual uses of money” revealing the ritual quality and plurality of its functions and meanings among the long-term unemployed Roma in small places in South Bohemia close to the Austrian border. The Roma clients (perceived as a collective body) are criticized since their ways of spending do not correspond to their status as “needy” recipients of social benefits, but periodically, when they earn money from seasonal jobs in agriculture, they are more than welcome as customers and those who are lent money. In paternalistic as well as denouncing discourses on Gypsiness, the structural poverty of the Roma and their culturally projected backwardness constantly mingle. The resourcefulness of the moneyless Roma, according to Abu Ghosh, resist their structural inequality while their manipulation of the monetary system is a form of craving for recognition and individualization.
The discussion following the first section provided examples for the theory that there is no “neutral” or “general purpose money”. It offered some graphic historical illustrations for the cultural politics of blaming the victims for “non-rational behaviour” regarding money “burning-in-the-pocket” (women workers at the beginning of the 20th century, recipients of social benefits, Greenlanders, etc). The importance of taking into account gender, ethnicity, age and social status when studying local community models of exchange and survival was unanimously highlighted. One observation was made about commodity traders as an important factor in developing transitional economies and rehabilitating the intercultural knowledge of languages, mentalities, social values, and life expectations of their familiar customers in the region.
In the second set of presentations, young scholars presented their current research on how post-industrial economies, EU enlargement and ensuing westward labour migration, as along with the global financial crisis, have affected the well-being and structure of families within and outside the EU zone. In line with the preceding discussion, Zaiga Krišjane reflected on the problem of social beliefs, expectations and actual practices related to those Latvians who had gone abroad to earn more money and then return (75% of the interviewees), but only 50% of them ever sent any money back to Latvia. As a human geographer, Krišjane asked herself how the patterns and ritual habits of spending wages (in the homeland and abroad) differed with gender, age and professional status. Tihana Rubi? looked at the Croatian families of those “unemployed who work” and thus slip off the official statistical grids, describing how the lack of money is shaping people’s everyday realities, identities, hopes and self-confirmations. Her doctoral research will answer the question of how individuals and families, due to the restructured formal labour market and who live without money on a daily basis, have re-established the social and emotional balance in their everyday lives. The research on Polish migrant workers hired by Dutch employment agencies to work in The Netherlands, Belgium and Germany was carried out by Roos Pijpers. This case was a good starting point for the analysis of the consequences of EU discrepancies in the policies on labour mobility of the enlarged European Union. Notwithstanding the increased circular labour mobility between East and West in the post-enlargement years, the regulation of wage levels, labour rights, welfare benefits, pensions and tax deductions remains a distinctively national affair for 27 national systems. At present, there is no harmonized EU system of labour law, social security and taxation, and as a consequence, the more mobile workers there are, the more difficulties can be expected with regard to their legal and fiscal status.
The discussions that followed confirmed how family, gender, generational and social categories in post-socialist countries are significantly defined by the changes in the labour market operating within the grey zones of the “legal anomalies” of the still-unharmonised EU system of labour law, social security and taxation. Despite the significant socio-cultural differences in Croatia, Latvia, Poland, Kosovo and Lithuania with regards to social solidarity, remittances and transnational “kinship altruism” emerge as important factors for vitalizing Eastern European national economies.
The third thematic circle brought together expertise by economists, sociologists and cultural studies scholars in speaking about financial instruments and flows in the global financial system on a more abstract level of conceptualization. Karel Williams provided an introductory explanation of how money becomes finance and why finance has to become money in a neo-liberal economy, but also offered original reflections on hedge funds as an innovation analogous to the Deleuze-Guatarri nomadic “war-machine” revealing the aggressive nature of corporate capitalism in the new world order. The elaborated article by K. Williams, Ismail Erturk, Julie Froud, and Adam Leaver already accessible on the intranet, explains that it is increasingly difficult to distinguish hedge funds from other actors because the logic of war dictates that different actors use similar weapons and the irregulars are also in business with regular finance. Agnieška Juzefovi? demonstrated how in the peripheral Lithuanian transitional economy, money is treated as a major social force that determines social, material and moral relations in the country and in the region of North-East Europe. Represented by new national currency, money in post-Soviet countries not only represents purchasing power, but is a source of identity and a store of memory linking individuals to their community.
In the last session, the presented papers dealt with two phenomena found in post-conflict former Yugoslavia: the vast transnational family network resulting from (post)war migration (presented by James Korovilas and Carolin Leutloff-Grandits) and the close relation between former war crime and newer forms of organized crime (presented by Christian Axboe Nielsen). The first example offered a constructive and the second a destructive example of how money negotiates between and betwixt international borders, (former) war zones, and contested worldviews. Based on empirical research on criminal networks before, during and after the wars in former Yugoslavia, Nielsen’s expertise focused on organized crime as the most significant challenge that postwar societies are still confronted with on their road to European Union membership. The papers on remittances in Kosovo identified important shifts of meaning and direction of remittances which depends on: a) the shifting forms of patriarchal “traditional family” and inheritance; b) the geographic relocations of Kosovar family networks and, c) the length of time migrants spend working in a “foreign country”. It was generally agreed that we need anthropologically more precise definitions of categories such as altruism – obligation – morality – reputation, bearing in mind that money everywhere generates value and significance in human interactions as much as it erodes it.
The concluding discussion was moderated by two discussants, Emilio Cocco and Domagoj Ra?i?, who marked the highlights of the workshop and reflected on some of the problems and critical points missing in the presentations. Ra?i? pointed the role of overarching discourses of neoliberal capitalism, transition and EU accession, as well as macroeconomic policies, as a factor in the decontextualization of borders and center-periphery polarization. Increased flexibility of decontextualized economic actors has increased the systemic risk and contributed to the global crisis in central and peripheral areas. According to him, Lithuania, Estonia and Croatia, which have a different postsocialist heritage, human resources and economic changes, have been affected by the similar negative trends due to the global crisis, but their responses to the crisis have been different. From an anthropological perspective, Cocco raised doubts regarding wages as a dominant motivation for workers migrating westward. His other points of critique focused on the minorization of the gender issue in the context of the neoliberal geographical re-compositioning of capital and jobs and on the non-reflecting on the “democratic control” of the mobility of labour and capital. He also emphasized the need for taking into account political consequences of domestic hostility towards migrant workers and the new ideology of security, which feeds the insurance business as well as organized crime.
Conclusion
The participants of the meeting were called on to reconsider the existing anthropological theories on money (developed in contexts very different from the contemporary global economic conditions) or to offer original ethnographies. Most of them presented their research findings on the trans-border flows of money, remittances, welfare benefits, pensions as well as on the experiences of “labour recruits” circulating between the once-confronted socialist and capitalist economies. Those researching migrant “flex-workers” and their more-or-less forced transnational identities were particularly urged to theorize the “co-movement of money and people” neglected in migration studies as well as in studies on financial globalization. Although there are many studies of smuggling, illegal trade, remittances and so on, few researchers have focused their attention on what really happens when money travels with people.
The end result of the Zagreb meeting are several detailed studies on the everyday uses of money by border-shoppers, and on socially-embodied exchange rituals at bazaars and street corner markets that permeate money with anthropocentric qualities so that it becomes “smart”, “dirty”, “laundered” or “burning-in-the-pocket” money. The most inspiring ideas for future research on border and money focused on collective disenchantment with the euro vs. former national currencies, on the belligerent nature of global finance, on the impact of the cross-border bazaars economy on the “softening” of border’s protection regime and on the EU discrepancies in the policies on labour mobility. One of the conclusions was that homo oeconomicus is still not the dominant figure in transitional Central-Eastern Europe and the Balkans, but that neoliberal circumstances are gradually changing people’s ideas of sociability, belonging, solidarity, security, “traditional family”, inheritance and future perspective. This is perhaps the reason why Eastern Europeans are becoming more and more nostalgic about the socialist past, about the times when ideas were marketed instead of goods, and when the belief in a brighter future was more in vogue.