COST Action IS0803 2009, Workshop 4
Time: Pasts & Futures
Belfast (Northern Ireland), 19-20 November 2009
Convenor: Hastings Donnan
School of History and Anthropology
Queen’s University
Belfast BT7 1NN, Northern Ireland, UK
Email:h.donnan@qub.ac.uk
Hidden histories and promised lands
A key issue around borders has been the various ways in which histories and possible futures have been silenced or proclaimed, erased or elaborated, volunteered or withheld. This workshop will examine how hidden histories and imagined futures come or do not come to light in people’s narratives, in re-mappings and re-namings, and in the shifting materialities of landscape. It will explore some of the dichotomies that have been used to explain the border’s diverse temporalities – official and unofficial, legal and illegal, from ‘above’ and ‘below’, displaced and emplaced – and ask how useful these have been in understanding how visions of the past and future come to be shared or contested. Some substantive topics through which these issues might be addressed are as follows, though contributions are not limited to these.
• Generational and gendered similarities and differences in representing the past/imagining the future
• Layerings of time in the landscape (e.g. buildings, monuments, roads, graffiti)
• Making peace with the past and room for the future: truth recovery, political transition and lustration
• Dislocating time: displacement, migration and lives lived in the past or future
• ‘Social’ and ‘monumental’ time; ‘local’ and ‘bureaucratic’ time
Participant: Dr Zerrin ÖzlemBiner
Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology
Germany
Email: biner@eth.mpg.de
Proposal for the meeting or other role at the meeting:
Returning from diaspora to homeland: Ethnographic explorations of past memories and present struggles between Syriac /Assyrians and Kurds at the margins of contemporary Turkey
This paper aims to discuss the historical experience and imaginary of Syriac/Assyrians in their attempt of returning from diaspora to their home villages and towns in South-eastern Turkey, located at border territory with Syria and Iraq. Focusing on the narratives of their past experiences as Christian local-subjects, and of future expectations as returnee- citizens, this paper aims to describe the daily practices of Syriac/Assyrians by analysing their attempts of reclaiming rights over the lost and or appropriated property in their towns and villages. The paper wants to discuss this process by showing how these struggles over the property ownership lead to simultaneous acts of revealment and concealment of memories in the history of violence between Syriac/Assyrians and Kurds as local subjects of the region, and with regard to that how these memories are mobilised to redefine and consolidate new borders, both physical and non-physical borders, between self and other, between self and the state.
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:
Unspeakable Histories in the making of Macedonian Subjects in Greece’s New Lands
This contribution will bring my work in northern Greece since the 1980s, and my historical work on the interwar period, into engagement with anthropologists, historians and others who have been writing about people in the New Lands (Macedonia and Thrace), incorporated in Greece in 1912. My focus will be on those speaking Bulgarian or Macedonian dialects, thus coming under suspicion as insufficiently Greek: some stayed, others left forever due to war or migration, and still others eventually returned. I’m interested in the difficulties these people faced, in a context of competing nationalisms, nation-building and ‘taboos’ against acknowledging internal multiplicity, in creating verbal narratives of themselves over time, and what the different studies tell us about ways that people remembered and/or forgot in the face of “unspeakable” histories while inserting themselves into a new present and future. Whereas some work has focused on oral histories (Danforth, Karakasidou, Van Boeschoten), other work has looked at different or less direct articulations: strategies of categorical ambiguity, evasion or circumlocution (Hart), of ‘Greater’ vs. ‘Lesser’ histories (Vereni) and of historical identities purposively embedded, though in fragmented ways, in the bodily practices of music and dance (Rombou-Levidi), while my work with League bureaucratic records offers up highly mediated accounts of Macedonian subjects’ identifications, claims and actions in the 1920s. What do these studies of modes of remembering and creating accounts of unspeakable histories say to theories of memory?
Participant: Prof Hastings Donnan
School of History and Anthropology
Queen’s University
United Kingdom
Email: h.donnan@qub.ac.uk
Proposal for the meeting or other role at the meeting:
Workshop convenor.
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:
Re-assessing Traumatic Past Twenty Years Later: Everyday Discourses on the Exodus of Bulgaria’s Turks to Turkey
The end of the communist regime in Bulgaria was marked by the exodus of local Turks to Turkey, which was in response to the politics of forceful assimilation instigated upon them by the communist authorities between 1984 and 1989. The lives of numerous families remained permanently marked by this dramatic experience. Now almost each Turkish family in Bulgaria has relatives in Turkey, who settled there during the ‘big excursion’ in 1989 and its aftermath. The personal trajectories of these settlers differ a lot: few have become successful professionals, many other try to adapt to life in immigration, yet others have adopted international migration as a major economic strategy, commuting not only between Bulgaria and Turkey, but traveling to other European countries too. The settlers get involved in various activities across the border – run small businesses, support their elderly parents, spend their vacations or study in Bulgaria, participate in political elections, etc. And in all their personal and family stories ‘Revival process’ assimilation campaign plays a crucial role. Moreover, current experiences reshape to a great extent the past event, attributing to it meaning and evaluations it did not bear before. When and how do people speak about this traumatic past experience? How do they interpret it in the light of their current lives? What is the role of the past in constructing present identities and planning ongoing practices? How do personal narratives about the ‘Revival process’ and the exodus correspond with the public talking (or silence) on the subject? These questions will be discussed in the paper, which draws upon fieldwork conducted among communities of Bulgarian-born Turks in North-eastern Bulgaria and in Izmir, Turkey.
Participant: Dr Natasa Gregoric Bon
Institute of Anthropological and Spatial Studies
Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts
Slovenia
Email: ngregoric@zrc-sazu.si
Proposal for the meeting or other role at the meeting:
Remembering the past and envisioning the future in Himara, southern Albania
The paper addresses the stories and remembrances recounted by elderly people in Himara municipality of southern Albania. After the fall of communism and reopening of the state’s borders have once silenced stories of movements and trading across the sea and over the mountains gained in salience again. While the stories about the women’s movements across the mountains de-borderise the municipality and differentiate it from other places in Albania, the stories about the mens’ movements across the sea transcendent the boundaries and reconnect the municipality to Greece and other places in Europe. When recounting these stories the local people continuously shift the municipality’s locatedness and its boundaries and reconstruct their sense of belonging.
Participant: Dr Jakub Grygar
Social Anthropology, Dept of Sociology
Faculty of Social Studies, Masaryk University
Czech Republic
Email: grygar@fss.muni.cz
Proposal for the meeting or other role at the meeting:
Attending as an unfunded participant.
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:
Genealogical memory and imagined futures in post-war Bosnian diaspora
The raising ethno-nationalism in collapsing Yugoslavia and the violent war in Bosnia (1992-1995) politicized ethnic belonging in the area. The pre-war Yugoslavian realities were, however, characterized by downplaying ethno-national differences and fluid negotiations of actual lived relationships. In post war Bosnian diaspora, there are different ways of remembering one’s family history in pre-war times. Some family connections across ethno-national boundaries are remembered and narrated, while others are forgotten and silenced. These practices of remembering and narrating are connected to different ways of envisioning the future of the new state of Bosnia-Herzegovina, as well as imagining one’s own futurewithin the diasporic space. In some cases, kinship relations are translated into ethnic idioms and re-interpreted in the current political climate, while at other times genealogical memory is used to question current discourses of ethnicity. My contribution here is based on my multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork with diaspora Bosnians who engage in active transnational relations between Finland and Bosnia.
Participant: Dr Stef Jansen
Social Anthropology, School of Social Sciences
University of Manchester
United Kingdom
Email: Stef.jansen@manchester.ac.uk
Proposal for the meeting or other role at the meeting:
Borders and horizons of possibility
In addition to embodying a past, borders, perhaps particularly those whose establishment was violently contested, may also be central to the production of futures amongst those who dwell near them. This may be materialised in very concrete dimensions of 'bordering practices', such as the particular shape or orientation of (re)built infrastructure (roads, grids of communication and utility provision, …). Through ongoing ethnographic work in Bosnia-Herzegovina, this presentation preliminarily explores the use of the notion 'horizons of possibility' to analyse the spatiotemporal work of borders with regard to people's engagement with the future.
Participant: Dr Tomas Ka?erauskas
Vilnius Gediminas Technical University
Lithuania
Email: tomas.kacerauskas@hi.vgtu.lt
Proposal for the meeting or other role at the meeting:
Great Duchy of Lithuania as a promised land
Great Duchy of Lithuania (GDL) is both a gold past andimagined future for some people in Belarus. On the one hand, GDL is a factor of Belarusian nation’s formatting searching different from Russia historical sources. On the other hand, GDL is a factor of belonging to Central Europe open to Western culture area, which has specific historical development. In this way GDL is a bridge to EU for many Belarusian intellectuals. What role does play nostalgia of an empire in formatting of a nation? In what way could a historical image become a political factor of nation’s future? The paper deals with these questions analyzing the images of GDL in other (not Lithuanian) nations.
Participant: Dr Jeanne Kormina
Sociology
Higher School of Economics, St. Petersburg filial
Russia
Email: kormina@eu.spb.ru
Proposal for the meeting or other role at the meeting:
Will act as discussant
Participant: Dr Britt Kramvig
Northern Research Institute Tromsø
Norway
Email: bk@norut.no
Proposal for the meeting or other role at the meeting:
The performance of the indigenous landscape in Sápmi
The Northern region of Norway has for centuries been a multicultural region with a high level of in- and out-migration. These historical processes have run together with governmental assimilation policies towards the indigenous Saami people throughout centuries. However, Norway adopted a Saami law in 1987, amended her constitution in 1988, and ratified the ILO convention 169 concerning Indigenous and tribal people in 1990 (Minde 2005), binding the Government to practice its legislation in accordance with international law. The opening of the Saami Parliament in Norway, Sámediggi, in 1989 was a turning point on the political scene, fuelling the decolonization processes that may be observed in contemporary society. The process of decolonization in Sápmi[1] is the focus of this paper. Decolonization runs on a political level; but even more on an emotional individual level; where knowledge-traditions that were broken due to the colonial forces are under reconstruction. How should we as researchers relates and frame such processes – are the past of the indigenous people reconstructed as narratives in relation to the contemporary power-structure or recalled; where the past in the present can be undone, as land and landscape can be undone and by this doing entering into an indigenous landscape.
Participant: Dr AnaïsMarin
Collegium for Advanced Studies
University of Helsinki
Finland
Email: anais.marin@helsinki.fi
Proposal for the meeting or other role at the meeting:
Water under the bridge: the Augustów canal, a tool for mapping a common future in the Polish-
Belarusian borderlands?
The Augustów canal connecting the Vistula and Neman rivers across today’s Polish- Belarusian border was built in the 1820s-1830s. After WWII however, only the Polish section of this 100 km long masterpiece of technology continued to develop, mainly for recreational navigation. With the establishment of Euroregion Neman in 1997, plans to modernise the Augustów canal and turn it into a cross- border tourism attraction were discussed. The purpose of this contribution is to analyse how the common past is tentatively restaged in current Polish and Belarusian discourses on this project in order to build a common future at the EU’s external borderlands.
Participant: Ms Chryssa Moisidou
Dept of History, Archaeology and Social Anthropology
University of Thessaly
Greece
Email: chmoysid@ha.uth.gr; xmoisid@yahoo.gr
Proposal for the meeting or other role at the meeting:
‘Hidden land, promised histories’: temporal anarchy as strategy toward autonomy.
Based on ethnographic fieldwork on social change in the Island of Icaria, this paper describes the experience and management of time though cultural constructs and practices that enhance and highlight the indeterminacy and disorder of sociality. Situated in settlements composed of barely visible and erratically positioned dwellings, social encounters in Icaria adhere to the values of secrecy and concealment. The hidden paths crossing the island’s surface are compared to the islander’s intricate visions of an egalitarian politics of local autonomy that link their memories from the past with hopes for the future and highlight the fluid, transitive nature, but also the potential of the present. Constituent elements of a utopian political imagination, these visions empower the islanders’ resistant discourse against the clear cut categorical distinctions on which the state-imposed hierarchal order rests.
Participant: Dr. Natalia Rashkova
Institute of Folklore Studies
Bulgarian Academy of Sciences
Bulgaria
Email: natalia.rashkova@gmail.com
Proposal for the meeting or other role at the meeting:
Memorial stories about the new Bulgarian-Serbian borderline established by the Treaty of Neuilly (1919) The paper presents narratives of inhabitants of Western Bulgarian border area (mainly from the Tran region), collected in the field ethnological research in the 1990th. The memorial stories reveal parts of collective memory about the traumatic events of depriving Bulgarian lands by the Treaty of Neuilly after the World War I. People related family stories of how their ancestors tried to save their lands by attempts to have an affect on the Treaty Implementation Commission, how Bulgarians from both sides of the border maintained their ties of relationship, visited each other, worked their fields. Loosing of thosforced division of the population inside and outside the border.
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:
How history takes place: an example from the Croatian-Bosnian border region
If one follows Edward Soja’s express aim to “spatialize the historical narrative, to attach to durée an enduring critical human geography” (Soja 1989: 1), it is salutary to investigate ways in which historical narratives and memories are embedded in physical surroundings and thereby made visible. A historical landscape is “both material and meaning” (Baker 1992: 3) and defined through phenomenological interaction and experience. It is shaped by visible historic interpretations as well as by meanings and interpretations related to them. Analysing various forms of local knowledge of a paradigmatic “landscape of violence” in the Croatian-Bosnian border region, I argue that individual as well as collective memories are attached to specific landscapes and thus have the potential to become sources for (re-)writing the local histories ignored or neglected by the historiography of the nation- state.
Participant: Dr Eleni Sideri
History, Archeology and Social Anthropology
University of Thessaly
Greece
Email: eliej73@yahoo.gr; elsideri@hotmail.com
Proposal for the meeting or other role at the meeting:
Nostalgia for the future: the dislocation of time in a post-socialist diaspora
The economic and political transformations of 1990s made popular in media and academia the term of transition. The latter suggested transformation and change, and fostered the promise of a better future. At the same time, several scholars underlined that a feeling of nostalgia had gradually emerged in post-socialist societies. What kind of expressions does nostalgia take and how does it connect to the metaphor of transition? What histories does it relate to? My paper will explore these questions among the Greek communities of post-Soviet Georgia. How do they map their community histories in the rural and urban landscape of post-Soviet Georgia? How do these histories unfold not only in the diasporic space of here and there, but also, between now and then? How do they use nostalgia as a way to critically reflect on and engage with their future?
Key words: nostalgia and post- socialism, space and time dis/re-location strategies, migration, diaspora
Participant: Dr Eftihia Voutira
University of Macedonia
Greece
Email: voutira@uom.gr
Proposal for the meeting or other role at the meeting:
The importance of reading Pushkin overtime
The phenomenon of East-West migration in Europe is normally identified with the fall of the Berlin Wall. In Greece, the large scale migration of ethnic Greeks from the former Soviet Union since 1989 has been labeled ‘repatriation’ or ‘return migration’, despite the fact that the majority of these populations had never been or had any access to their historical homeland. Upon arrival in Greece, their main concern was to adapt in the new environment. Yet, fifteen years later, anthropological research among these newcomer populations, shows a novel cultural identity formation which includes the emergence of a ‘reverse nostalgia’. This phenomenon involves the longing for Russian culture and a reassessment of the past based on a particular construction of belonging as part of a ‘russophone’ cultural identity with which post Soviet Greeks identify while in Greece. It is this type of belonging which they consciously try to transmit to their children. Paradoxically, the post Soviet migration construction of ‘Russianness’ is predicated on a typically Soviet rather than a post Soviet construction of the past.
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:
Border Shifts and Remapping of Time-Space: Material Signs of Resettlements along Bulgarian-Turkish Border
The current paper will aim to present the material signs of migration and resettlement that occurred along Bulgarian-Turkish since early twentieth century. By dwelling upon diverse examples of monuments, re-namings, memory accounts, etc. the paper will address the issue of how they narrate about different cases of resettlements (emigration flows, population exchange, etc.) in this area and how the memory of such events withers across time. Based on a continuing research in major locations on the two sides of the border, the paper will highlight the precipitation of historical events in materials signs, and their changingrepresentations with time’s passing.