Postsocialist Europe Kurti, Laszlo; Skalnik, Peter
2009., 20090915, 2009, 2011-11-01, 20090101, Letnik:
10
eBook
Now that nearly twenty years have passed since the collapse of the Soviet bloc there is a need to understand what has taken place since that historic date and where we are at the moment. Bringing ...together authors with different historical, cultural, regional and theoretical backgrounds, this volume engages in debates that address new questions arising from recent developments, such as whether there is a need to reject or uphold the notion of post-socialism as both a necessary and valid concept ignoring changes and differences across both time and space. The authors’ firsthand ethnographies from their own countries belie such a simplistic notion, revealing, as they do, the cultural, social, and historical diversity of countries of Central and Southeastern Europe.
Over the past 15 years, the project of advanced European integration has followed a complex secular and cosmopolitan agenda. As that agenda has evolved, however, so have various hard-line populist ...movements with goals diametrically opposed to the ideals of a harmonious European Union. Spearheaded by figures such as Jean-Marie Le Pen, the controversial leader of France's National Front party, these radical movements have become increasingly influential and, because of their philosophical affinities with fascism and national socialism--politically worrisome.
InIntegral Europe,anthropologist Douglas Holmes posits that such movements are philosophically rooted in integralism, a sensibility that, in its most benign form, enables people to maintain their ethnic identity and solidarity within the context of an increasingly pluralistic society. Taken to irrational extremes by people like Le Pen, integralism is being used to inflame people's feelings of alienation and powerlessness, the by-products of impersonal, transnational "fast-capitalism." The consequences are an invidious politics of exclusion that spawns cultural nationalism, racism, and social disorder.
The analysis moves from northern Italy to Strasbourg and Brussels, the two venues of the European Parliament, and finally to the East End of London. This multi-sited ethnography provides critical perspective on integralism as a form of intimate cultural practice and a violent idiom of estrangement. It combines a wide-ranging review of modern and historical scholarship with two years of field research that included personal interviews with right-wing activists, among them Le Pen and neo-Nazis in inner London. Fascinating, provocative, and sobering,Integral Europeoffers a rare inside look at one of modern Europe's most unsettling political trends.
The Anthropology of Parliaments offers a fresh, comparative approach to analysing parliaments and democratic politics, drawing together rare ethnographic work by anthropologists and politics scholars ...from around the world. Crewe's insights deepen our understanding of the complexity of political institutions. She reveals how elected politicians navigate relationships by forging alliances and thwarting opponents; how parliamentary buildings are constructed as sites of work, debate and the nation in miniature; and how politicians and officials engage with hierarchies, continuity and change. This book also proposes how to study parliaments through an anthropological lens while in conversation with other disciplines. The dive into ethnographies from across Africa, the Americas, Asia, Europe, the Middle East and the Pacific Region demolishes hackneyed geo-political categories and culminates in a new comparative theory about the contradictions in everyday political work. This important book will be of interest to anyone studying parliaments but especially those in the disciplines of anthropology and sociology; politics, legal and development studies; and international relations.
Infrastructures are material forms that allow for the possibility of exchange over space. They are the physical networks through which goods, ideas, waste, power, people, and finance are trafficked. ...In this article I trace the range of anthropological literature that seeks to theorize infrastructure by drawing on biopolitics, science and technology studies, and theories of technopolitics. I also examine other dimensions of infrastructures that release different meanings and structure politics in various ways: through the aesthetic and the sensorial, desire and promise.
Foias argues that there is no single Maya political history, but multiple histories, no single Maya state, but multiple polities that need to be understood at the level of the lived experience of ...individuals. She explores the ways in which the dynamics of political power shaped the lives and landscape of the Maya and how this information can be used to look at other complex societies.
In northwest Namibia, people's political imagination offers a powerful insight into the post-apartheid state. Based on extensive anthropological fieldwork, this book focuses on the former South ...African apartheid regime and the present democratic government; it compares the perceptions and practices of state and customary forms of judicial administration, reflects upon the historical trajectory of a chieftaincy dispute in relation to the rooting of state power and examines everyday forms of belonging in the independent Namibian State. By elucidating the State through a focus on the social, historical and cultural processes that help constitute it, this study helps chart new territory for anthropology, and it contributes an ethnographic perspective to a wider set of interdisciplinary debates on the State and state processes.
Like stars, societies are born, and this story deals with such a birth. It asks a fundamental and compelling question: How did societies first coalesce from the small foraging communities that had ...roamed in West Central Africa for many thousands of years?
Jan Vansina continues a career-long effort to reconstruct the history of African societies before European contact inHow Societies Are Born.In this complement to his previous studyPaths in the Rainforests,Vansina employs a provocative combination of archaeology and historical linguistics to turn his scholarly focus to governance, studying the creation of relatively large societies extending beyond the foraging groups that characterized west central Africa from the beginning of human habitation to around 500 BCE, and the institutions that bridged their constituent local communities and made large-scale cooperation possible.
The increasing reliance on cereal crops, iron tools, large herds of cattle, and overarching institutions such as corporate matrilineages and dispersed matriclans lead up to the developments treated in the second part of the book. From about 900 BCE until European contact, different societies chose different developmental paths. Interestingly, these proceeded well beyond environmental constraints and were characterized by "major differences in the subjects which enthralled people," whether these were cattle, initiations and social position, or "the splendors of sacralized leaders and the possibilities of participating in them."
The Western world's borders increasingly seem like a battleground where a new kind of "threat" is repelled—the so-called "illegal migrant." At Europe's southern frontiers, sea patrols, advanced ...surveillance machinery, and fencing keep migrants out, much like at the U.S., Israeli, and Australian borders. Such investments have created a dense web of controls that displaces the border both inward and outward into the borderlands beyond it. Building upon recent border studies and ethnographies of illegality, I explore in this article Europe's migration controls by focusing on their temporal rather than their spatial aspects. I show that, in the borderlands, irregular migrants are not only subjected to extended periods of waiting, as migrants often are, but they also face an active usurpation of time by state authorities through serial expulsions and retentions. The ways in which migrants' time is appropriated reveal a complex economics of illegality, complementing existing "biopolitical" perspectives on Europe's borders. Las fronteras del mundo Occidental parecen crecientemente como un campo de batalla donde una nueva clase de "amenaza" es repelida—el así Ilamado "migrante ilegal." En las fronteras del sur de Europa, patrullas marítimas, sistemas de vigilancia avanzadas y vallas impiden la entrada de migrantes de una manera similar a los controles fronterizos de Estados Unidos, Israel y Australia. Tales inversiones han creado una densa red de controles que desplaza la frontera tanto hacia el interior como hacia al exterior y más allá de las zonas fronterizas. Basándome en estudios de fronteras y etnograféas de ilegalidad recientes, exploro en este artículo los controles migratorios de europa, concentrándome en sus aspectos temporales más que en los espaciales. Muestro que, en las zonas fronterizas, los migrantes irregulares no sólo son sujetos a períodos extendidos de espera, como suele ser el caso para muchos migrantes, sino que también enfrentan una activa usurpación de tiempo por parte de las autoridades estatales a través de expulsiones y retenciones en serie. Las diversas formas en que se apropia el tiempo de los migrantes revelan una compleja economía de ilegalidad, la cual complementa perspectivas "biopolíticas" sobre las fronteras de Europa.
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