This article adds to the literature interrogating existing hierarchies in global knowledge production by examining the dominant research on post-1989 Central and East European (CEE) environmentalism. ...Analyses of CEE environmentalism have predominantly relied on concepts and organizational models generated by research on environmental activism and politics conducted in Western contexts, resulting in negative assessments of CEE as lacking environmental engagement. This article proposes to re-think CEE environmentalism, arguing for a more positive perspective that takes into account the various traditional practices and informal outdoor and nature-based educational activities that have a long history in CEE. These originated to promote everyday pro-environmental behaviours that are motivated by a desire for authenticity, ethical living and personal integrity. While often overlooked by both Western and CEE observers alike, these forms of CEE environmentalism are strikingly compatible with the everyday material and ‘post-postmaterial’ environmentalism recently promoted by Western-based political theorists.
Comrades and spies Hrešanová, Ema
American ethnologist,
August 2023, Letnik:
50, Številka:
3
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
When Czechs consider their involvement in the global colonial system, they usually imagine themselves as the victims of Soviet imperial power. This is the case among those Czech anthropologists whose ...research under state socialism was tightly circumscribed. But focusing on this history alone enables Czech scholars to obscure their nation's participation in “colonialism without colonies” and to maintain presumptions of “colonial innocence.” In fact, Czechs themselves imposed internal colonialism on the Roma and on people living in the country's sub‐Carpathian region. Some Czech scholars are increasingly reflecting on Czech colonialism, but others still perceive the decoloniality debate as a Western import in the postsocialist era. Nonetheless, anthropology's decolonizing projects may offer ways forward, helping us understand how Cold War imaginaries persist in academia.
The article contributes to the debates in geography on the inequality of knowledge production and the context-dependent hierarchy of knowledge claims. It seeks to make sense of the invisibility, to ...Western academia, of East European informal food provisioning as a research topic with the potential to inform debates and theorisations regarding alternative food systems. Looking at how East European informal food practices have been read from the West is instructive for understanding how certain knowledge ‘travels’ and becomes universally accepted knowledge – or theory – or remains a partial knowledge with validity restricted to specific places and circulating within specific subfields.
The Picture as a Moving Image Su, Aaron
Visual anthropology review,
Spring 2021, Letnik:
37, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
For some longtime locals in Shanghai, China, street propaganda’s periodic renovations muddle the distinction between still and moving images. When the cyclic changing of propaganda pieces began to ...acquire filmic qualities for those who bore witness, they made recourse to these narrative and episodic properties to critique their experiences of political instability. Their discourses implicate media forms as genres of experiencing political transformation. Moreover, their refusal of still images in favor of fungible, overlapping filmic sequences lends ethnographic texture to ongoing scholarly debates about how to historicize the nonlinear development of contemporary Chinese politics, especially under the analytic of “postsocialism.”
Global urbanism tends to think cities in categories of "Global North" and "Global South". But what about all those cities that escape easy classification into these hemispheric categories? Cities ...that could be said to belong to the Global Easts. This introduction to the special issue "The Global Easts in Global Urbanism: views from beyond North and South" shines a spotlight on cities in-between North and South. At the risk of being sidelined in debates in global urbanism, these cities have much to contribute to global theorizations of the urban. This introduction presents a group of articles that in different ways illustrate the breadth and depth of current research on urban and geographical knowledge production in and with the Global Easts. We specifically focus on one emergent convergence among urban research concerns, namely, problematizing the unidirectional teleology of a transition to an ideal type free market economy with democracy which is often at work with regard to cities in the Global Easts. The collected papers draw our attention to a number of co-existing temporalities and differing time coordinates and claim that it is high time for the Global Easts to contest their marginalization in the global academe.
This paper brings together two streams of literature which rarely enter into conversation: diverse economies scholarship and critical readings of postsocialism. Mobilising the cases of food ...self-provisioning (FSP) in Czechia and agricultural cooperatives in Kyrgyzstan as an empirical basis for our reflections, we pursue a two-fold aim. Firstly, we call for attention to the postsocialist East as fertile ground for the study of diverse economies. Secondly, we offer a postcapitalist reading of postsocialism as embedded and emancipated theorising, arguing that diverse economies thinking can support novel representations of this geopolitical area and open space to appreciate economic diversity on the ground.
ABSTRACT
This article approaches the idea of eternity ethnographically. Specifically it turns to post‐Yugoslav central Serbia and the version of eternity (večnost) evoked by practicing Orthodox ...Christians in their daily lives. In this context, the eternal does not imply the everlastingness of persons and things in this life, or an inevitable cyclical “return.” Rather, eternity constitutes a dimension outside of time that sits alongside the present, a dimension that can be inhabited by ancestors and departed kin. In evoking eternity, people throw temporal life into relief, find solace in the face of death, and engage in the national community those no longer physically present. Against an essentializing view of the eternal as repetition or stasis, the article speculates about how evoking eternity is socially and politically generative, imbuing life with increased imaginative possibilities.
АПСТРАКТ
Овај чланак приступа идеји вечности са етнографске тачке гледишта. To се осврће на верзију вечности (eternity) евоцирану од стране православних хришћанских верника у свакодневном животу, а на територији централне Србије, у пост‐југословенском периоду. У овом контексту, вечност се не односи на трајанје особа и ствари у овом животу, или на неизбежни циклични повратак. Вечност је пре димензија ван времена која постоји поред садашњости, димензија која може бити настањена прецима или почившим ближњима. Евоцирајући вечност, људи истичу привремени овоземаљски живот, налазећи утеху у суочавању са смрћу и тако повезују са заједницом оне који више нису физички присутни. Противно виђењу вечности – као нечему што је понављање или застој – овај чланак посматра социјални и политички потенцијал евоцирања вечности, као прожимање живота појачаним маштовитим могућностима.
APSTRAKT
Ovaj članak pristupa ideji večnosti sa etnografske tačke gledišta. To se osvrće na verziju večnosti (eternity) evociranu od strane pravoslavnih hrišćanskih vernika u svakodnevnom životu, a na teritoriji centralne Srbije, u post‐jugoslovenskom periodu. U ovom kontekstu, večnost se ne odnosi na trajanje osoba i stvari u ovom životu, ili na neizbežni ciklični povratak. Večnost je pre dimenzija van vremena koja postoji pored sadašnjosti, dimenzija koja može biti nastanjena precima ili počivšim bližnjima. Evocirajuci večnost, ljudi ističu privremeni ovozemaljski život, nalazeci utehu u suočavanju sa smrću i tako povezuju sa zajednicom one koji više nisu fizički prisutni. Protivno videnju večnosti ‐kao nečemu što je ponavljanje ili zastoj ‐ovaj članak posmatra socijalni i politički potencijal evociranja večnosti, kao prožimanje života pojačanim maštovitim mogučnostima.
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