COST Action IS0803 Workgroups 2010
WS1: Eastern Peripheries
On the Road: Eastern Peripheries in Everyday Border Crossings
Second Workshop 1 meeting
University of Eastern Finland
Mekrijärvi, Forest Station (Finland)
26-27 November 2010
Convenors:
Eeva Jokinen
Eeva.Jokinen@Joensuu.fi
+358-40-5351823
Tuija Pulkkinen
tuija.pulkkinen@helsinki.fi
+358-50-3646647
Description:
The first WS1 meeting focused on everyday practices as a means to explore the multiplicity of expressions and understanding of the notions of ‘peripheries’, ‘east’ and ‘eastern.’ This workshop will follow on from that by looking particularly at everyday practices of border-crossing and transportation around eastern peripheries, in order to explore the ways that people experience the multiple, and currently changing, practices and markers of ‘east’ and ‘eastern’ in different locations. While the first WS1 meeting aimed to identify the multiple ways that east and eastern were conceptualized through practice, this second workshop will focus on the implications of travelling through or across these borders.
What happens concretely on the road when people cross borders along the eastern peripheries of Europe, and how does this differ in different regions? Have the changes brought about at borders by the expansion of the EU, as well as other changes governing these transfers and transportation – also changed the sense of moving between east and west, periphery and centre? What is going on when people sit in a car or a bus and queue at a checkpoint at such places these days? What happens when people listen to a guide who hosts the tourists across the border by telling “facts” and narratives about the border? What is the value of visiting the other side on a daily, weekly or monthly basis because of work, caring about friends and family, or buying things that are cheaper or just better on the other side, and has this experience been changing? What sort of concrete transfers are being done, and what is their wider significance?
Participant: Anna M. Agathangelou
Global Change Institute
Cyprus
Email: agathangelou@hotmail.com
Proposal for the meeting or other role at the meeting:
Here I am planning to look again on Cyprus but with a focus on story-telling of the everyday of how west, and west, east and eastern are constituted within the two different parts of Cyprus. More specifically, here I am planning to look at sacred spaces (i.e., cemetaries, mosques, churches, and other archeological sites) and conjuct them with poetry and food recipes to engage the question what becomes constituted as east and west, the centre and periphery. I want to produce here a guidebook of photos and poetry in order to show systematically these productions but more so, the ways people disrupt them everyday.
Participant: Zeynep Alemdar
International Relations and Political Science
Okan University
Turkey
Email: Zeynep.alemdar@okan.edu.tr
Proposal for the meeting or other role at the meeting:
"We used to exchange the first watermelon of the season across the barbed wire" a lady from Saricaali, a small village on Turkey's border with Greece, said. What does this exchange mean for the people, how has it changed? Have the interactions between the two countries, from the Kardak crisis- an international dispute over a small islet in the Aegean- to the Turkey's EU accession negotiations, influenced the neighborly relations between the Saricaali people and their neighbours on the Greek side? How so? This contribution explores these questions through field research at the conjunction of the Eastern borders of the European Union and Western borders of Turkey.
Participant: Laura Assmuth
Dept of Sociology/Academy of Finland
University of Helsinki
Finland
Email: laura.assmuth@gmail.com; laura.assmuth@wippies.fi
Proposal for the meeting or other role at the meeting:
I would like to participate in the WS 1 meeting as a discussant and commentator of papers by junior scholars of the Network. My anthropological research during the 2000s has been focused on the (North) Eastern borders and borderlands of the European Union: first, in a project on everyday lives, identities and border crossings on the Estonian-Latvian-Russian borderland 'triangle' (2000-2006) and second, in an ongoing project on ideas and ideals about the future in peripheral rural communities located on both sides of the EU eastern border: in Finland, Estonia, Russia and Ukraine (2007-2010). Both projects are collaborative research efforts done in close cooperation with anthropologists and ethnologists from the countries studied. Because of such long-tern involvement in empirical research in the eastern borderlands of Europe, I feel I have a lot of methodological and practical-logistical expertise that I can share with the participants of the workshop. I would also like to discuss issues of research ethics that fieldwork in such politically charged locations entails If a formal paper is expected, I would like to propose an English-language translation of a methodological text I recently wrote for a Finnish-language edited collection: "Naisia molemmin puolin rajaa: tutkimuksellisia
kohtaamisia Venäjän, Viron ja Latvian välisellä rajaseudulla" ("Women on both sides of the border: research encounters in the borderland between Estonia, Latvia and Russia").
Participant: 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:
My work is not currently directed to this kind of everyday border crossing, but I like the simplicity and specificity of the approach suggested: to focus on small, slow, mundane, boring episodes. This brings our attention to the processes of the routinization of borders, which helps to produce a sense of their normality and ontological existence. I might be able to reflect on this--in think piece fashion-- in historical perspective in relation to the borders I know best: those along the northern edge of Greece, and on the bureaucratic, political, legal, social processes that lie behind making borders something that can--or cannot--be crossed in this mundane, routinized way.
Participant: Sarah Green
Social Anthropology
The University of Manchester
United Kingdom
Email: Sarah.Green@manchester.ac.uk
Proposal for the meeting or other role at the meeting:
Discussant
Participant: Jan Grill
Migrationonline, Multikulturní centrum Praha
Czech Republic
Email: jg334@st-andrews.ac.uk
Proposal for the meeting or other role at the meeting:
Stories from the road alongside Roma migrants to the UK: From eastern European borderlands where there is ‘nothing to do’ to western world of ‘everything’
This paper shall focus on several ethnographic stories and vignettes of travelling alongside the eastern Slovakian Roma to the Great Britain – by long-distance coaches from Slovakia to London; by airplanes and cars. I shall describe several journeys from the ‘East’ to the ‘West’ of Europe (and back) and look particularly at the experiences of crossing several borders on the way. Based on various stories of encounters on the way - interactions with other travellers inside the bus and outside during the ‘smoking breaks’, at checkpoints, with and/or without smuggling Ukrainian cigarettes to the UK, bringing and hiding-cum-smuggling high sums of cash money to home villages in Slovakia - I shall highlight some cultural contradictions involved in narratives of frequent and experienced Gypsy labour migrants and the politics of evoked discourses of ‘experienced travellers’ to ‘West’ vis-à-vis the migration novices from the same ‘eastern European’peripheries (such as, for example, non-Roma au-pairs travelling to the UK). The paper will be based on long-term anthropological
research among East Slovakian Roma labour migrating to the UK after the Slovak accession to the EU in May 2004 (but who were also asylum-seekers to various western European countries during the late 1990s).
Participant: Carola Häntsch
Department of Philosophy
University of Greifswald
Germany
Email: haentsch@uni-greifswald.de
Proposal for the meeting or other role at the meeting:
Participation as a discussant; special interest in the subject: practical experiences of the concept of "Easterness".
Participant: 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:
Interpellation and confession at the border
This presentation will start from descriptions of two kinds of situations in which I, an EU citizen, crossed state borders in the company of citizens of one of the post-Yugoslav states. The first kind concerns crossing the newly established borders between those new states—mostly by bus or by train, sometimes by car or on foot. The second kind concerns entering the EU from the post-Yugoslav states, by bus, by train or by plane. In both cases I will focus on the routine interactions between border guards and travellers. My presentation will attempt to understand some of the patterns in these routines in the light of two concepts. The first one is *interpellation*, as developed by Althusser, who famously gives the example of the policeman hailing someone on the street by saying: 'Hey, you there'. The second one is *confession*, the production of a discourse of truth about oneself as a subject, as developed by Foucault in his discussion of sexuality. In addition to improving my ratings of academic capital by citing dead French thinkers, I hope to show that these concepts may help us to analyse routine practices that shape border-crossings.
Participant: Eeva Jokinen
Department of Sociology and Social Polic
University of Joensuu
Finland
Email: eeva.jokinen@joensuu.fi
Proposal for the meeting or other role at the meeting:
Convenor WS1 2010
Participant: Margarita Karamihova
Ethnographic Institute with Museum
Bulgarian Academy of Sciences
Bulgaria
Email: karamihova_m@abv.bg
Proposal for the meeting or other role at the meeting:
The presentation’s starting point is a borderland communities’ dream. It is about 90 years kept up local peoples’ dream to re-open the border between Bulgaria and Greece. It is placed between the region of Gotse Delchev (South-Western Bulgaria) and the city of Drama (Northern Greece). For about a century (long dureé – F. Broudel) period, the re-opening of the road to Drama was a part of Bulgarian national propaganda. It was feeding the hopes for prosperity for border area people too. The fiction of differences between getting poorer and abandoned border area of Bulgarian socialist block territory, and the possible getting more wealth capitalist Greek (border)land were stimulating people’s expectation and dreams. What exactly had revealed after this border checking point opening? What were the first reactions of local
Bulgarian citizens? Does the one century dream for re-connection coming true fulfils the expectations and serves new strategies for prosperity of the people of the region? How do they utilize this pass two years later? All those and some more answers to be discussed when listening to the song:
Blow, blow, white wind,
Swing the green forest,
Melt the white snows,
Open the road to Drama.
I want to go to Drama.
Participant: 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:
Where Authenticity is Located and How it is Pronounced: Soviet and post-soviet pilgrimage to one village Orthodox priest (Pskov oblast')
The paper represents some results of research made in a small island of Talabsk located in Pskov lake (Pskov oblast') just in 50 km from the Russian-Estonian border. This remote place has become well known among Russian Orthodox people since mid 1990s when mass pilgrimage to the local village priest father Nikolay (Gurianov) started. Visitors coming from different parts of Russia, as well as from other countries (Belorussia, Estonia) venerated him as starets, a sort of living saint. In the paper I will discuss the following questions: 1) how and why the 'cult' of this starets has been constructed; 2) how the spiritual search of late soviet intelligentsija (especially so called tvorcheskaya (creative) intelligentsija who 'discovered' this holy person in the mid 1980s transformed into the Orthodox religious culture; 3) which tropes of authenticity (purity; remoteness, etc) are used in the religious language of pilgrims to the island and how they are converted into religious concepts.
Participant: Elena Nikiforova
Fafo Institute for Applied International Studies
Norway
Email: elenik@bk.ru
Proposal for the meeting or other role at the meeting:
Utopic visionary as a tool for crossborder integration in the Barents region
This proposal mirrors my recent interest in cultural, social and political development taking place in the Barents region, particularly across the border between Norway and Russia. For the last several years these borderlands have been actively appropriated by art communities of Norway and Russia as an arena for art experiments on the given theme, namely integration of two communities. These activities have generated a number of exhibitions addressing this region and depicturing a future prosperous life in the borderless Arctic. For this workshop, I aim to explore a cultural scene emerging around the Russian-Norwegian border with a particular emphasis on the activities conducted by the Oslo based art organization 0047 and also on the transborder festival 'Barents Spektakel'.
Participant: Ne?e Özgen
Sociology
Okan Universit
Turkey
Email: ozgen@eth.mpg.de; nese.ozgen@okan.edu.tr
Proposal for the meeting or other role at the meeting:
"Crossing weekly for gambling: Casual housewives' adventures to Bulgaria”
The papers is not aiming to attempt to ask another sad story on border crossing. The paper is attempting to find the way /mechanisms of border crossing in the sake of a gamble party (a quick and satisfied one) to the other side, to Bulgaria among Turkish middle age and class women by weekly. Unknown numbers of women cross the border in any week to Bulgaria’s peripheral border villages (even some small holiday motels, even some of them are outmoded) for gambling; and keep up their gambling-closing during the whole weekend-s, turn to Turkey by loosing or earning some pocket money for their pleasures. They are seen either as tourists or foreigners or illegal, they have some legal/informal ways/papers/bribes etc. to be seen as legal; although they are spending huge money and satisfied by themselves in a forgotten corner; they
are still unseen by sociologists and even by officers in two sides. I will follow their road to Bulgaria, I ask to find who are they and who is arranging/driving/manipulating the gambling parties for these old ladies. How are they find to each other, how are they coping their lost/von money in a foreign country; and what is the experience and adventure-s by crossing weekly as a ‘normal’ travelers? Such as: Are they smuggling some little goods, bringing some specific things for their relatives or vice versa? How are they cope with to the all state issues around them and the state mechanisms as an old fashioned lady; how do they explain and ask by themselves the belonging and identity mechanisms, when they are arranging a illegal gambling for the next weekend-s?
Participant: Tuija Pulkkinen
Christina Institute for Women's Studies
University of Helsinki
Finland
Email: tuija.pulkkinen@helsinki.fi
Proposal for the meeting or other role at the meeting:
Convenor WS1 2010
Participant: Emanuela Rinaldi
Department of Sociology
Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore
Italy
Email: Emanuela.rinaldi@unicatt.it
Proposal for the meeting or other role at the meeting:
Italian business- travelers in Eastern Peripheries and shaping of cross-borders relationships
The paper focuses on the interplay between the reshaping of business relationship among Italian businessmen and the construction of new form of cross-border personal relationships, especially with women. In doing so, we experimented the use of two different techniques: first, we interviewed 15 Italian business-men travelling with different frequency and length (from 1 week end to 6 months) in 4 Eastern peripheries countries (Czech Republic, Poland, Romania; Russia-Siberia). They were divided in 3 groups: those who were travelling mainly for work (group 1), mainly for caring about friend, partner or family (group 2) or leisure activities, tourism, fun (group 3). Topics covered during the interview ranged from their image of the country before travelling there, to the report of their main expenses while there, till the description of how their personal relationships with local had started and developed. Then, before they leave for their journey, we asked them to look at what was going on around them when they would have been sitting in an airport hall or station in the eastern country they were going to visit and describes it with 5 photos, videos or narrative episodes. Results of the ongoing research will be discussed highlighting the difference among the three groups.
Participant: Irena Weber
Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology
University of Ljubljana
Slovenia
Email: irena.weber@guest.arnes.si
Proposal for the meeting or other role at the meeting:
Entering Utopia: Tax collecting at Montenegrin Border
In September 1991 the Parliament of Republic of Montenegro declared Montenegro “an ecological state” (while Montenegro has re-gained it’s independence as state only in 2006). It became clear soon after the proclamation that the “ecological state” is somewhere in the realm of Utopia and recognized as “a long path leading to the goal that only the next generations might achieve” or “an ideal to strive to”. However, based on the Declaration, a special eco-tax has been introduced that all foreign visitors entering Montenegro by car are obliged to pay upon crossing the border. The eco-sticker, valid for six months must be put on the windshield before proceeding to passport control. The paper among other things addresses the tension between the mundane tax collection at the border and the utopian idea (in many ways concurrent with the utopian socialist tradition) at Croatian Montenegrin border in Boka Kotorska.