COST Action IS0803 2009, Workshop 1
COST IS0803 2009 WS1
Eastern Peripheries
Brno (Czech Republic), 12-13 November 2009
Convenor: Jakub Grygar
Masaryk University, Department of Sociology
grygar@fss.muni.cz
+420 549 493 739; +420 775 648 748
Title: Multiple Easts: peripheries as practice
The proposed workshop will focus on re/production of the concepts of East and peripheries in the everyday practices of human, institutional and technological actors. Although some inspiration for this first workshop draws from actor network theory (Latour, Law, Mol, etc) and broadly phenomenological approaches, the aim is to open out the debate on what might constitute ‘East’ and ‘periphery,’ and to focus on everyday practices involved in generating
a sense of ‘East’ and ‘periphery’.
Many social analyses of the concept ‘East’ draw upon the perspective of post-colonial, structuralist and/or Foucauldian studies. The object of attention in these approaches has been either the historical process of representation of Others (inspired by, for e.g., Edward Said) or reflection of these representations by those represented, i.e. the Others (inspired by, inter alia, Maria Todorova). These approaches suggest that concepts, symbol, discourse or representation precedes practice: conceptions of the West about the Orient first create conditions which later enable action in a particular (orientalist) way. Images, ideas, narrations, metaphors, mental maps... these and other representations precede practices in these approaches – both at the centre and at the periphery.
While those approaches have many merits, particularly in pinpointing some of the discursive means through which a sense of both East and marginality have developed over time in different contexts, this workshop will focus more on practices. It aims to investigate and discuss different everyday enactments of the East and peripheries as the outcome of various actions and habitual practices. Through studying practice we want to display how different actors re/make reality.
If the East, peripheries and centres are not conceived as a priori existing frames in which practice take place, but rather as entities which are themselves enacted by concrete practice, then we cannot presuppose the existence of the East, peripheries, and centre as consistent, homogeneous and singular phenomena. The workshop hopes to explore these entities as multiple in Mol’s sense in TheBody Multiple: Ontology in Medical Practice (2002). It is then no longer possible to keep the notion of one “East” created and one “centre” with one “eastern periphery”. The workshop will explore the concept of multiplicity in relation to both ‘East’ and ‘periphery.’
However and whenever multiple Easts and peripheries are enacted, they also arise as a result of interactions between various actors. As has been particularly noted in actor network theory, the ability to act is not restricted to people or institutions (who are usually at the centre of social theory) but also involves other non-humans: international border crossings, legal norms and directions, documents or technologies participating at control of mobility.
Participant: Dr Anna M. Agathangelou
Director
Global Change Institute
Cyprus
Email: agathangelou@hotmail.com
Proposal for the meeting or other role at the meeting:
Anna Agathangelou will be reporting from the WG4 meeting, where she will have presented the following
paper: Impossible Missions: Deadly Nationalisms and Other Such Kinds of Humanist Projects
This paper examines the enclave and the refugee camp as a re-terittorialized zone of violence in Europe. Taking the Cypriot enclave and refugee camps (at different moments in the history of Cyprus) as re-territorialized zones, the paper engages with the different legal, photographic, historical and graffiti discourses that constitute these spaces as “exceptional.” These sites, I argue, embody intense relations and processes of (un) belonging, marked with (neo) colonial logics beyond the Cypriot communities that register different temporalities. Given the vital connections among the separated Cypriot populations, the project attempts to place the Cypriot (Greek and Turkish) enclave and refugee subject in a much larger context and considers post-national projects of belonging which have emerged and/or re-emerged since the Republic of Cyprus entry into the European Union. The reading of these two zones relies on a series of interviews made with Cypriots, interspersed with photographs and graffiti on the walls of Cyprus. More so, this project ultimately engages with understandings of time and space, including the articulation of cosmologies that disrupt the dominant linear narratives of history that promise the impossible through deadly missions.
Participant: Ms Marit Aure
Department of Planning and Community Studies, Faculty of Social Science
University of Tromsø
Norway
Email: marit.aure@sv.uit.no
Proposal for the meeting or other role at the meeting:
Becoming Russians in Norway
This paper analyses a process of becoming “eastern” in a context of labour migration from a scarcely populated and peripheral region of Northern Russia to an equally remote region of Northern Norway. This migration is highly gendered, dominated by women, but the paper discusses both how the Russian women and men enact and are constructed as Russians in the Norwegian village. The analyses draw on a phenomenological theory of practice (Moi 1998) which focuses on everyday activities, and the interconnections between meaning and materiality. Women and men are understood as spatial concrete bodies acting in specific, historically and geographically situations, being both subjects and objects. This paper asks in line with Moi (1998) what kind of values, norms and requirements the migrant men and women meet in the Norwegian community of arrival, and how the migrants practice is related to what the world do with them.
Participant: Ms Isabella Damiani
University of Trieste
Italy
Email: isabella.damiani@phd.units.it
Proposal for the meeting or other role at the meeting:
I am very interested to the Workshop 1 about the Multiple Easts. My topic is examination of the concept of Central Asia and relativity of this term, how and when this expression is born and because it takes the upper hand in comparison to the other toponimis less used as "Turkestan" or “Tartary." Connection to the relativity of the concept of East.
Participant: Dr Daniele Del Bianco
ISIG, Istituto di Sociologia Internazionale di Gorizia
Institute of International Sociology Gorizia
Italy
Email: delbianco@isig.it
Proposal for the meeting or other role at the meeting:
Cross-border cooperation: for borders to become centers
According to the level of juxtaposition of objective and subjective, formal and informal borders, a given border area structures itself along specific lines which, in turn, determine its relation with the respective national(s) system(s), namely the centre-periphery relation. The peripheral condition of border areas depends on the characteristics of one or more of its sub-systems (economic, cultural, infrastructural, linguistic, etc) and, thus, may suffer differently from integrated development lags. Cross-border cooperation (CBC) may be defined as the combined efforts of actors to challenge the peripheral condition of border areas by dismantling the concurrence of different types of borders (i.e. increase border permeability/filter function). CBC processes developed first within the culture/ethnic/linguistic field and, secondly, on economic/infrastructural/environment issues. Accordingly to the field of action and the typology of actions (i.e. of the network applied) implemented, CBC processes may reset the border area differently within the centre/ periphery paradigm. The empirical analysis of 52 European eastern border-areas, spanning from the Baltic Sea Region to South East Europe, individuated 4 main re-centering sectors: cultural autochthony, economic autochthony, cultural organization, institutional organization. Plotting all 52 areas in a “re-centering” chart, it argued that the sustainability for border to become centres is best achieved when traditional forms of CBC develop along new fields of actions able to promote both normative and cognitive legitimisation of the border area per se.
Participant: Mr Jan Grill
Migrationonline, Multikulturní centrum Praha
Czech Republic
Email: jg334@st-andrews.ac.uk
Proposal for the meeting or other role at the meeting:
Based on ethnographic fieldwork among Slovakian Roma living in Slovak-Ukrainian borderlands and labour migrating to the UK, I shall address construction of ‘Eastern-European’ margins of the Europe. By taking as a point of departure perspectives of Roma/Gypsies who have been historically portrayed as the most ‘marginal’ population of various states, I shall employ different strategy and ask to what extent, if at all, do they see themselves as marginal and their locality next to the Ukrainian borders as peripheral? I shall explore both discourses and ways of dealing with ascribed marginality and highlight migration as one possible strategy of contesting the interlocking discourses of periphery and margins. Roma/Gypsy practices and ways of relating to the state and to the discursive construct of Eastern Slovakia will be compared to some example of dominant majority of Slovaks (‘vychodnari’ – ‘Easterners’). I shall scrutinize the concept of ‘Easterners/Eastern Slovakia’, often associated with decline and backwardness vis-à-vis the state centre, through concrete everyday practices and discourses of various local actors. Complementary consideration will be also given to a crystallization of ‘Eastern-European migrants’ category in the UK in the light of author’s fieldwork among Roma migrants in the UK and upon their return.
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:
Workshop convenor.
Participant: Dr Haldis Haukanes
Education and Health Promotion
University of Bergen
Norway
Email: Haldis.Haukanes@skok.uib.no
Proposal for the meeting or other role at the meeting:
This paper will discuss periphery and centre as complex, contested and - not the least – layered notions in young Czechs’ narratives of their future life. Building on material collected in rural areas in two different periods of time (1995 and 2007/8), I start by examining the changing role of the “West” in the narratives - as a site of both vaporous dreams and concrete future plans. I further discuss the interplay between various representations of centre and periphery (east-west/ north-south/ urban-rural) in the shaping of the youths’ identities and feelings of belonging. Inspired by Hilary Pilkington’s work on Russian youth (among others), I see centre and periphery as relative and relational terms, implying that the centre is never only one, but also that the periphery is not only a deprived and powerless vantage point. Among my young informants the power of the peripheral is made visible through their use of romantic images of rural landscapes, which play an important role in the narratives both as a source of belonging and as motivation for future life choices.
Participant: Dr Olivier Thomas Kramsch
Nijmegen Centre for Border Research
Radboud University Nijmegen
Netherlands
Email: o.kramsch@fm.ru.nl
Proposal for the meeting or other role at the meeting:
Peripheralizing Europe: Towards a New Spatial Politics
In dialogue with the work of Dipesh Chakrabarty1 and Walter Mignolo2, this paper argues that significant intellectual work is now under way seeking to chart an understanding of Europe as a postcolonial (or ‘post-Western’) geopolitical entity. In this move, European borders are coming to occupy a key practical as well as theoretical site from which to re- define what some observers are calling a new “spatial politics”. Such a politics, it is suggested, holds the promise of developing non-Eurocentric perspectives on the EU while opening up issues such as the role of non-Western epistemologies in defining what we now understand as ‘European modernity’. The paper proposes to map this emergent intellectual landscape, and reflect critically on its suitability for understanding the complex reality of the many ‘Easts’ coming into focus as the EU seeks to redefine a position for itself ‘in the world’. With respect to Europe’s fitful Eastern peripheries, rather than ‘provincializing Europe’, the author suggests it might be more helpful to understand the ways in which Europe has always been complexly entangled with its external frontier(s). Examples from the late-19th century period of French penal reform, mid- 20th century decolonization and the EU’s most recent experience in establishing a ‘ring of friends’ to its East via the European Neighborhood Programme (ENP) will be used to round out the argument.
Keywords: Europe, postcoloniality, peripheralization, modernity, frontiers, ENP
1 Chakrabarty, Dipesh (2000) Provincializing Europe: postcolonial thought and historical difference. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
2 Mignolo, Walter (2000) Local histories/global designs: coloniality, subaltern knowledges and border thinking. Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press.
Participant: Prof Ann Therese Lotherington
NORUT
Northern Research Institute Tromsø
Norway
Email: atl@norut.no; post@norut.no
Proposal for the meeting or other role at the meeting:
The passport as actor in the enactment of the Russian-Norwegian border Abstract:
This paper discusses the passport as an actor in the performance of identity at an individual and national level in the context of female Russian marriage migrants to Norway. The point is to apply actor-network-theory as an approach, or method, more than a theory, in the analysis when I ask what role the passport plays in the enactment of the Russian- Norwegian border. I take as a point of departure that the passport can only be understood with regard to the conduct and practical experience of those using it, and that the passport is embedded in ‘heterogeneous networks’ (Timmermans and Berg 2003) of people, practices and things. The passport is nothing in and by itself but 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 it individual or that of a nation stat, takes place in practice, and can only be observed in everyday practice. Empirically the paper is 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.
Participant: Ms Aija Lulle
Centre for Science and Technology Studies
Latvian Academy of science.
Latvia
Email: aija@lza.lv; aija.lulle@lu.lv
Proposal for the meeting or other role at the meeting:
Foreign skills in Latvia: not so welcomed
Generally held opinions in the public and also academic debate on migration suggest that countries have to compete for skills, and incomers having them (highly skilled foreigners, locals coming back with their foreign diplomas) should be those facing the least barriers for international migration. It goes hand in hand with the discourse that on an individual level universally recognised education and skills would be valued and accepted anywhere in the globalised world. How far or actually little does the liberalisation go in removing barriers for skilled foreigners in Latvia, the north-eastern
periphery of the EU? To what extent the past experience under the Soviet rule is represented in the current restrictive migration regime in Latvia? What role does Europeanization play for opening up more opportunities for mobility of the skilled? How does a periphery become one of the main attractors to come to Latvia? Why some forms of the social production of skilled foreigners succeed, while others don’t? To answer these questions, the international migration is conceptualised from a structuration perspective describing structure/agency in various modes of entry, status passages and transnational practices of skilled foreigners in Latvia. Empirical data comes from documentary analysis and in-depth interviews with foreign professionals in Latvia.
Participant: Dr Irina Novikova
Center for Gender Studies; Dept of Culture and Literature
The University of Latvia (Riga)
Latvia
Email: iranovi@lanet.lv
Proposal for the meeting or other role at the meeting:
Thinking Race in Post-Soviet Nation-building (Latvia)
The paper focuses on relations between race and nation in Latvia, and it draws on the idea to develop an approach understanding the race/culture dimensions in the build-up of national projects in the post-Soviet societies of European North-East (Baltics). The research focus of the paper is on cultural conceptualizations of race, inflecting processes of cultural modernity in the societies of the European North-East, having experienced varying degrees of colonization/ subordination. I also look into relations btw national genealogies of the race/culture bind with European intellectual formations (e.g., Orientalism); With studying genealogies of thinking/practicing race/culture bind in the (re)constitution of nation in the comparative regional perspective (diachronics), the paper discusses some visual examples representing contemporary gendered views upon race/ethnicity/migration in Latvia, due to emerging new migrant and diasporic groups (synchronics). Basing on these examples, the paper approaches cultural discourses and practices in Latvia that treat race on the level of manifest content as well those permeated by ideas about race and yet seemingly unaware of this fact. By exploring the discursive contexts in which the relationships between race, gender and nation(alism) have been (re)constitued, the paper addresses concepts of “east”, “eastern”, “European peripheries” and more substantive questions of race, whiteness and Europeanness.
Participant: Ms Orlanda Obad
Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Research
Croatia
Email: orlanda@ief.hr
Proposal for the meeting or other role at the meeting:
Eastern Periphery Writes Back
The Images of the EU and the West in semi-structured interviews with the Members of the Croatian Negotiating Team for the Accession to the European Union Instead of applying some of the well-developed concepts which examine the ways in which European eastern periphery is constructed at the core of the continent, this study aims at reversing the gaze and focusing on the images of the EU and, more generally, the West in Croatia. In the interviews with the members of the Croatian Negotiating team for the accession to the European Union, a set of complex notions are uncovered, starting with the discussion of their everyday work tasks, such are meetings with the European Commission representatives in
Bruxelles, in which everything, from dress code to souvenirs, easily becomes a signifier of (political, cultural, "civilizational") power. Even though the nationality of the representatives of the Commission is, in line with the ideology of the EU, at first disregarded as irrelevant, a number of stereotypes, which reflect Croatian past and political relations, appear in the interviews. Even more interestingly, the interviews reveal how the negotiators position Croatia between the East and the West, and also negotiate their own unequal position with the representatives of the EU, sometimes by severely critiquing and confronting their counterparts, other times by adhering to their rules, which are regarded as more democratic and civilized.
Participant: Dr Rosie Read
Centre for Social Work and Social Policy
Bournemouth University
United Kingdom
Email: rread@bournemouth.ac.uk
Proposal for the meeting or other role at the meeting:
Public participation, modernities and the state: practices and negotiations of ‘Easts’ and ‘Wests’ in contemporary Czech volunteering
This paper focuses on a range of forms of public participation and volunteering in the socialist and post-1989 periods in the Czech Republic. The core issue to be explored concerns how contemporary volunteering programs and practices generate (and rely upon) distinctions between the role of the state in ‘Western’ political/economic liberalism and ‘Eastern’ state socialism. In particular, the paper will explore how and why it is that volunteers and volunteer coordinators tend to construct and experience their practices as fundamentally ‘different’ to those of the socialist period. This sense of
difference is generated through constructing public participation during the socialist era as something that was ‘coerced’ by the state rather than authentically ‘voluntary’; a situation which is felt to reflect the over- dominance of state socialist institutions and ideologies in people’s daily lives more broadly. The paper will examine the forms of agency which arise from this construction of alternative ‘Eastern’ and ‘Western’ modernities, as well as investigating what is ideologically obscured by them, (such the significant involvement of the state in promoting volunteering as part of ongoing welfare reforms). The paper is based on a six month ethnographic study on volunteering carried out in the Czech Republic in 2008.
Participant: Dr Vladislav B. Sotirovic
Faculty of Strategic Governing and Politics
Mykolas Romeris University
Lithuania
Email: vsotirovic@mruni.lt
Proposal for the meeting or other role at the meeting:
This research paper is a part of a wider study upon the reasons and the stream of the dissolution of the ex-Yugoslavia published by Vilnius University Press in 2006 under the title: “Sociolinguistic Aspect of Dissolution of Yugoslavia and Serbian National Question”. The research object of the paper is to examine the process of making separate (from Serbian, Croatian and Montenegrin) Boshnjak ethnonational identity by using the technique of “linguistic engineering/chirurgic” in the process of creation of an independent (from Serbian/Montenegrin and Croatian) Bosnian Language as a national language of Bosnian-Herzegovinian and Sandžak South Slavic Muslims (former speakers of common Serbo-Croat language). The final aim of the paper is to discover/present the ways in which various elements of linguistic diversity within former Serbo-Croat language have been “emblematized” and taken as markers of ethnonational and political identity of Muslim Boshnjaks and multicultural Bosnia & Herzegovina and Sandžak from 1993 (when official Boshnjak
ethnonational identity was introduced) up today.
Participant: Dr Csaba Szaló
Department of Sociology
Faculty of Social Studies, Masaryk University
Czech Republic
Email: szalo@fss.muni.cz
Proposal for the meeting or other role at the meeting:
Musical experience of ethnic borders
The symbolic power of music as a medium through which ethnic identities are performed and ethnic boundaries constructed is particularly important in the context of multi-ethnic Eastern peripheries. In my paper I will specifically focus on the border constituting and transgressing capacity of musical practices. Empirically I am interested in the processes of identity negotiation and syncretism – setting apart as well as fusing Hungarian, Roma, Slovak, and Romanian musical forms – as these are carried through in musical practices of an ethno-music group from a Slovakian-Hungarian border-town. Conceptually, I will deal with the chance to work out a theoretical model combining the phenomenology of musical experience (as it was articulated by Joseph F. Smith, Mikel Dufrenne) with the inspiration from Alfred Gell's anthropology of art accounting for the production, circulation and reception of art objects.
Participant: Dr Lefteris Topaloglou
Dept of Planning and Regional Development
University of Thessaly
Greece
Email: ltopaloglou@lga.gr ; etopalog@prd.uth.gr
Proposal for the meeting or other role at the meeting:
The new scene of borders in Europe: Emerging dilemmas concerns and metaphors
The contemporary scene of borders and border space in Europe is composed of a series of parameters: (a) the Eastward Enlargement of the European Union (b) the European Neighborhood Policy launched by the European Union’s new strategy (c) the 11/9 terrorist attack which imperatively addressed the issue of security. All the above developments have
triggered the discussion concerning the future borders of European Union. Within this context, a series of dilemmas, concerns and metaphors based on past eras have come to the fore. Which are Europe’s borders and where do they end? Where should the European Union’s borders extend to, following the next Enlargement? What is the European Union’s approach with regards to its external surroundings? What is considered to be European and what not? All the above are merely questions which are brought to the fore initiating a series of dilemmas and syllogisms. The present article, attempts to firstly examine the political and economic geography responsible for synthesizing the new image of borders in Europe in general and in Southeastern Europe after 1989 in particular. Moreover, the European Neighborhood Policy is analyzed whilst at the same time the main dilemmas and concerns regarding the future of the European Union are looked at.
Key Words: Borders, European Neighborhood Policy, Enlargement, Integration