Anthropology of Europe

Organizer:

International Conference

Anthropology of Europe: what is it and how should it be practiced? Poznań

15th-16th October 2009

Partners: Institute of Ethnology of Slovak Academy of Sciences in Bratislava, Slovakia Institute of Ethnology of Hungarian Academy of Sciences in Budapest, Hungary Department of Social Sciences of University of Pardubice, Czech Republic

Honorary Patrons: European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA) Marshal of the Wielkopolska Region Voivode of the Wielkopolska Voivodeship Mayor of the City of Poznań Fundators: International Visegrad Fund Adam Mickiewicz University (AMU) Pfeifer & Langen Polska S.A.

http://etnologia.amu.edu.pl/anthropology_of_europe/index.html

INDEX

Amante Maria de Fátima 3

Markowitz Fran 28

Anǎstǎsoaie Marian-Viorel 4

Muršič Rajko 29

Barański Janusz 5

Nowicka Ewa 30

Barrera-González Andrés 6

Orviská Lucia 31

Bielenin-Lenczowska Karolina 7

Ostrowska Anna 45

Borsos Balázs 8

Pasieka Agnieszka 43

Buchowski Michał 9

Pernarčič Radharani 32

Červinková Hana 10

Pobłocki Kacper 33

Chwieduk Agnieszka 11

Podjed Dan 34

Čiubrinskas Vytis 12

Podoba Juraj 35

Filip Mariusz 13

Rakowski Tomasz 36

Galasińska Aleksandra 14

Repič Jaka 37

Gołębniak Marcin 15

Robbins Jessica 38

Goździak Elżbieta 16

Sárkány Mihály 39

Hann Chris 17

Schiffauer Werner 40

Hannerz Ulf 18

Schippers Thomas K. 41

Hastrup Kirsten 19

Schwell Alexandra 42

Horolets Anna 20

Sekerdej Kinga 43

Keinz Anika 21

Skalník Petr 44

Kim Dong-Ju 22

Sokolewicz Zofia 45

Klekot Ewa 23

Vonderau Asta 46

Kościańska Agnieszka 21

Wedel Janine R. 47

Kubica-Heller Grażyna 24

Wojtyńska Anna 48

Kürti László 25

Wulff Helena 49

Lewicki Paweł 26

Zalewska Joanna 50

Lubaś Marcin 27

AMANTE Maria de Fátima Technical University of Lisbon, Portugal Social and Political Sciences Institute University of Porto, Portugal Study Centre of the Population, Economy and Society [email protected]

‘Portuguese Like Us, Portuguese Like Intersubjectivity in Fieldwork

Them’: Reflections on Identity and

The main purpose of this paper is to approach some issues concerning the intersubjectivity in fieldwork. The field experience my paper deals with, took place when I was researching for my Ph.D. in cultural anthropology. Fieldwork was conducted on the Portuguese-Spanish border area, in between 2001 and 2003. During the fieldwork process I was required to move across the border and assume, on a daily basis, my condition as national citizen like half of my informants and foreigner like the other half. The relationship with the subjects and the way they ‘built’ me as a researcher and cope with my presence, often led me to reconsider decisio ns made in advance and redefine strategies taken as methodological adequate and safe. One situation that was particularly relevant on the level of researchers’ identity was caused by the double gaze subjects launched on the anthropologist: being Portuguese like ‘us’ (anthropology at home) or being Portuguese like ‘them’ (anthropology abroad). This aspect persisted throughout the fieldwork and made that period a time of conflict, mainly on the epistemological level but also at personal one. Within the framework of reflection this paper looks on the interactional process through which the knowledge is acquired, shared and transmitted exploring the dynamics of subjectresearcher relationship in order to understand how this relationship influenced the collectio n and analysis of data. It is my intention to explore the mutual meanings involved within the research relationship, the research encounter, we might say, and some of its consequences.

Maria de Fátima Amante, Ph.D. in cultural anthropology, is an Assistant Professor at the Social and Political Sciences Institute (Technical University of Lisbon) and researcher at the Research Center for Population, Economy and Society at Oporto University. Her main interests are: anthropology of borders, political anthropology, nationalism and identities. She is an author of Fronteira e identidade. Construção e representação identitárias na raia lusoespanhola (2007).

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ANǍSTǍSOAIE Marian-Viorel University College London, UK Department of Anthropology [email protected]

Traveling Back in Time? Ethical, Affective and Cognitive Dimensions of Doing Fieldwork in Contemporary Cuba as an Eastern European Anthropologists travel in space, but what about the possibility of traveling back in time? For younger Eastern European anthropologists real socialism was a childhood and teenage experience, but not anymore accessible for fieldwork at the time of their PhD studies. Nevertheless, the existence of a few still existing real socialist countries outside Europe offers a unique opportunity for a direct experience of socialism for an Eastern European. Based on my fieldwork experience of 15 months in contemporary Cuba, between 2007 and 2009, I will try to explore some affective, cognitive, and ethical dimensions of what it means to do research in a socialist country for somebody born and raised in late socialist Romania. My cultural intimacy with Romanian socialism proved both a resource but also a challenge in trying to understand the workings of Cuban socialism. Against emotions or thoughts of anxiety, hate, paranoia, fascination or impatience I had to develop and practice a cognitive ability of epistemological charity in order to understand the workings of Cuban socialism and in the same time the loyalty many Cubans feel for the Revolution. One of the consequences of fieldwork was the development of a cognitive self that presupposes, among other things, the capacity to distant oneself from personal feelings and judgments regarding an oppressive political reality.

Marian-Viorel Anǎstǎsoaie graduated from Sociology Department at University of Bucharest in 1998 and in the following year completed the MA in History at Central European University in Budapest. His MA thesis dealt with the effects of the communist state policies on the inter-ethnic relationships between Romanians, Hungarians and Roma in a Transylvanian village. Between 1999 and 2001 he was a Civic Education Project fellow of Open Society Institute affiliated with University of Babes-Bolyai, Cluj-Napoca, Romania where he was affiliated with the Institute of Cultural Anthropology. Between 2004 and 2006 studied Social Anthropology at Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris. Since 2006 he is a Marie Curie PhD student in Social Anthropology at University College, London. His thesis deals with work practices among tobacco growers in contemporary Cuba and ways of dealing with contingency in their everyday life. His research interests focused in the past on the study of interethnic relationships and Roma studies in Eastern Europe and currently he’s interested in economic and political anthropology, especially concerning economic learning, informal economy, moralities and politics and political cosmologies. Overall, he has a broader comparative interest in socialist and post-socialist societies.

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BARAŃSKI Janusz Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland Institute of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology [email protected]

Main Challenges of Contemporary Anthropology of Europe There is a growing importance of anthropology of Europe and anthropology in Europe. The main reasons for that fact are as much cultural as political. Namely, contemporary political changes, including the processes of the European integration, as well as the overwhelming globalization, concerning Europe as one of the world’s regions, encourage or even force the anthropological academic circles to dealing with the issues of intercultural communication, diffusion of cultures, localization, regionalization, or – last but not least – political cooperation and/or conflict rooted in cultural diversity. These phenomena are also the subjects of interest of some neighbouring disciplines, such as sociology and cu ltural studies. Especially the latter seems to have even greater experience in dealing with above mentioned issues than anthropology itself. Therefore there is a need for a scientific cooperation between these and other humanities and social sciences, while anthropology may substantially contribute to that both on the part of theory and method. Additionally the afore mentioned issues must result in the usage of an approach which has been known in anthropology for decades, concentrating on a kind of applied or engaged knowledge. According to the latest tendencies in philosophy of knowledge, epistemology or anthropology of knowledge, the need for the newest version of action anthropology is growing, if we are fully to participate in the bowl salad of the European and world’s cultures.

Janusz Barański is an Associate Professor at the Institute of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology, Jagiellonian University, Krakow. Author of publications on Slavic mythology, rhetoric, ritual, material culture, theory of culture, methodology, cultural studies. He is an author of several books: Socjotechnika, między magią a analogią. Szkice o masowej perswazji w PRL-u i III RP (Sociotechnics Between Magic and Analogy: Essays on Mass Persuation in Poland Under Communism and After the Fall of Communism, 2001) and Świat rzeczy. Zarys antropologiczny (The World of Things: An Anthropological Outline, 2007). Translator of works from anthropology, communication studies and cultural studies.

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BARRERA-GONZÁLEZ Andrés Complutense University of Madrid, Spain Department of Social Anthropology [email protected]

Mapping Europeanist Research: Socio-Cultural Anthropology and the European Research Arena The paper discusses what Europeanist research means for Anthropology at present; which is to say, what individual anthropologists and ethnologists are effectively doing under this conceptual umbrella. A broad definition of ‘Europeanist’ research is taken up, for the field pertains to a range of diverse disciplines. Yet, the paper aims to demonstrate how the engagement of Anthropology’s unique resources in theory, method and epistemology contribute to enhance ‘Europeanist’ research endeavours, or otherwise. The paper is also an invitation to reflect on how the development of an institutional arena in the domains of higher education and scientific research is affecting the status of the discipline in Europe. The stepping up of the processes of European convergence is having a decisive impact in t he fields of higher education and research. This shows, for instance, in rising budgets and the broadening of research programmes. What is the position that anthropology holds in such emerging competitive arena for research funding and policy formulation? Anthropology treasures some unique and quite impressive scholarly assets; and it has a great potential to act as a catalyst for interdisciplinary endeavours. Yet, anthropologists may also have to adapt cherished principles in their practice, method and epistemology, if they are to become principal actors in this new scenario. The paper stands for a more integrated approach in our research endeavours, for the unreserved engagement with neighbouring branches of knowledge in true and consistent interdisciplinary work.

Andrés Barrera-González is an Associate Professor in Social Anthropology at the Complutense University of Madrid. His main research interests are language politics and policies in Spain and elsewhere in Europe, and also the anthropology of Europe. He is the author of La dialéctica de la identidad en Cataluña (1985), Casa, herencia y familia en la Cataluña rural (1990) and Language, Collective Identities and Nationalism in Catalonia, and Spain in General (1995).

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BIELENIN-LENCZOWSKA Karolina University of Warsaw, Poland Institute of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology [email protected]

Doing Anthropology in thе Republic of Macedonia In my paper I would like to focus on conducting fieldwork in Macedonia. I will point both methodolgy of fielwork and ethnographic problems researched by Macedonian scholars. As an example I will try to analyse an academic discourse on ethnicity and national affiliation of Macedonian Muslims (Torbeši) – a group whose mother tongue is Macedonian, while a cofession – Islam. I have carried out my fieldwork in Macedonia for eight year, I regularly contact scholars from University in Skopje and use their publications. Nevertheless, some crucial definitions as anthropology (Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology; see: not cultural; they define anthropology in American way at University of Skopje is in Faculty of of Mathematics and Natural Sciences), ethnography or fieldwork are understood in different way. Above all, doing fieldwork there, alike in former Yugoslavia and Bulgaria as well as in Eastern Europe, consists in short visits in the place of research. It makes observing of everyday life impossible. Then, subjects are more ‘traditional’ like: customs, national outfit, popular religiosity. Macedonia is multi-ethnic and multireligious country. However, ethnographic fieldwork concerning ethnic and national minorities (communities) is carried out almost exclusively by foreigners. Macedonians conduct research only among their own community, i.e. Macedonians – both Orthodox and Muslims. Actually, there is no anthropological research carried out by minorities’ representatives – Albanian, Turks, Serbs, Vlachs etc. I will argue, this interest in research on Macedonian Muslims is connected with their politicisation in Macedonia, i.e. Albanianisation or Turkicisation. It is related to a faith of Torbeši that is associated either with Albanians or with Turks. They declare themselves variously – as Macedonians, Albanians, Turks, just Muslims (referring this way to a category of ‘Muslims’ as nationality – introduced in 1960s by J. Broz Tito) or Torbeši as separate ethnicity. In Macedonian political and academic discourse regarding Torbeši, this group is consider to be Macedonians who converted into Islam during Ottoman Empire. In this way, a number of Macedonians in official statistics is increased.

Karolina Bielenin-Lenczowska is a linguist and cultural anthropologist, graduated from University of Warsaw. She is an Assistant Professor at the Institute of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology, University of Warsaw. She conducts ethnographic fieldwork in the Republic of Macedonia on a subject of labour migration of Macedonian Muslims to Italy.

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BORSOS Balázs Hungarian Academy of Sciences in Budapest, Hungary Institute of Ethnology [email protected]

The Problem of the European Ethnographical Atlas vs. the Problem of European Ethnographical Atlases One of the good examples of various research methods and scientific elaboration of data in ethnology is the problem of the European Ethnographical Atlas. All the tremendous efforts to create an Atlas of Folk Culture referring to whole Europe that would have been edited on the basis of a standard scientific method and consistent aims had failed, as after nearly 30 years of investigations only one sheet appeared in 1980 (about annual bonfire) and no other sheets have been published since then. And in the meantime there has been a blossoming of national ethnographical atlases, and atlas projects are continuing up to recent times, e.g. the Romanian atlas is under publication in the 2000s. This paper investigates the scientific methods applied by the various atlases. It aims to find differences and similarities in them, observing whether they could be elaborated in a standard digital form in order to reach their declared aim that is to define cultural regions in the given territories.

Balázs Borsos got his MA in geology and geography in 1987 at the Eötvös University of Budapest. He graduated as an ethnographer at the same institution in 1988 and as a video editor in 1993. He got a diploma of non-fiction director at the Hungarian Academy of Drama and Film in 1996. He is CSc. of ethnography, he reached a degree in 1994. He has been working at the Institute of Ethnology of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences for more than 20 years, since 1999 as a senior research fellow. He became deputy director of the Institute in 2002. His main research interests are: visual and ecological anthropology, ethnocartography, African ethnology. He shot some non-fiction films in Hungary, Romania, Peru and Bolivia, did fieldwork in East Africa, Ukraine and Hungary. He is (co-)author of five volumes and several articles in Hungarian, English and German.

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BUCHOWSKI Michał Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland Institute of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology European University Viadrina in Frankfurt/Oder, Germany Chair of Comparative Central European Studies [email protected]

All Anthropologies Are Equal, but Some Are More Equal than Others In the last decades, globalization processes have created the conditions for the development of ‘world anthropologies’. Currently, theoretical and political perspectives make us more aware of the epistemological, sociological and cultural constraints of anthropological production as well as of prospects of building a transnational and heteroglossic community of anthropologists. Cosmopolitan anthropology project depends now on the excha nges of ideas among anthropologists located in different loci of the world system of knowledge production. Various permutations of relations between anthropologists emerge and they at least partly undermine such traditional categories as metropolitan and peripheral anthropologies. Notions of ethnographic fieldwork or epistemology have also become diversified and made legitimate. In several parts of Europe a dialogue between traditionally (self-) defined socio-cultural anthropologists and ethnologists give specific twist to ongoing global conversations. However, in these processes old hierarchies of knowledge are reproduced and new ones are produced. In relations between Western European and ‘postsocialist anthropologies’ they seem to be specifically determined both by material inequalities and dissimilar distribution of symbolic capitals

Michał Buchowski is a Professor of Social Anthropology at the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland, and of Comparative Central European Studies at European University Viadrina in Frankfurt/Oder, Germany. He was (2003-2004) a Distinguished Visiting Professor for International Affairs at Columbia University and he also lectured at the University of Kansas, Humboldt University and Rutgers University. He was a Fellow of British Council, Fulbright Foundation, Kosciuszko Foundation and the Humboldt Foundation, and worked as a research fellow in the Centre Marc Bloch in Berlin and CNRS in Paris. Currently he is the Head of the Institute of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology in Pozna ń, president of EASA and of Polish Ethnological Association. His scientific interest is in modes of thought and in Central European social and cultural transformations. He has published several books, among them most recently Reluctant Capitalists (1997), The Rational Other (1997), Rethinking Transformation (2001), as well as To Understand the Other (2004, in Polish); he is the co-editor of Poland Beyond Communism (2001) and The Construction of the Other in Central Europe (2002). At present he is working on issues related to the encounter of the free market and democracy with the realities of post-socialist Poland at the grass-roots level in Poland and Central Europe.

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ČERVINKOVÁ Hana University of Lower Silesia in Wrocław, Poland International Institute for the Study of Culture and Education [email protected]

Practicing Action Anthropology Emancipatory Research

in

the

Post-Socialist

Context:

Challenges

of

In my presentation, I will share my experiences with practicing action/activist oriented anthropology in projects that experiment with using the broadly understood anthropological method as a vehicle for social change. I will attempt to place my concrete ethnographic projects that I have been conducting in Poland in the last four years in the larger body of classical and more recent literature in activist/action/emancipatory anthropology, suggesting it as one of the possible directions through which anthropology may deal with the epistemological challenges the discipline faces in 21st century. I also want to contribute to the discussion on practicing anthropology in different contexts – I am Czech, have a Ph.D. from the US, but conducted research in the Czech Republic and now in Poland. I have reflected on the challenges connected to this moving between ‘home’ and ‘abroad’ in a paper I published in the book entitled Anthropology of Postsocialism: Perspectives from Home (Berghahn Books 2009).

Hana Červinková (PhD – Anthropology, New School for Social Research, 2003) teaches anthropology and works as a Director of the International Institute for the Study of Culture and Education at the University of Lower Silesia in Wroclaw, Poland. In her previous work, she has focused on issues of post-socialist transformation and she published an ethnography based on her doctoral field research in the Czech Air Force (2001-2002) in which she analyzes the changing institution of the Czech military and its place in Czech culture after the country’s entry into NATO (Playing Soldiers in Bohemia: An Ethnography of NATO Membership, 2006). She has published articles and edited a book on post-socialist transformation, cultural memory, anthropology in education and she has also translated books by American anthropologists into the Czech language. Since 2004 when she moved to Poland, she has been conducting projects in action anthropology, exploring the potential of the broadly understood anthropological method to serve as a practice-oriented tool – for the building of intercultural understanding and social emancipation of disadvantaged social groups.

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CHWIEDUK Agnieszka Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland Institute of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology [email protected]

It Is a Long Way to Tipperary or How We Could Understand Anthropology ‘at Home’ and ‘Abroad’ In my paper I would like to discuss the category of doing anthropology at home and abroad. I analyze my experience of fieldwork in France and Poland. The main idea of my presentation is that doing anthropology at home or abroad means to be in a long, chaotic process of understanding Others by our always changing Self. My point is to realize that these categories refer to many identifications which are not ‘fixed’ but dynamic i.e. dependent on situations, interactions in which an anthropologist participates using his/her own person – self as a tool of research. So in this case it is necessary to reject the idea that ‘at home’ could refer only to the notion of ‘a culture of nation which an anthropologist represents’ or to his ‘local culture’. The second point is that an anthropologist always acts differently towards different people and that he/she changes with a flow of time. Supposedly his/her ‘state’ and autostereotype are also relative and are caused by many factors. The most important one is his/her ‘own sensibility’ shaped by interactions with people during his/her private life and fieldwork. The second one concerns the way in which Others categorize him/her. During fieldwork both factors influence one another. In this case to be ‘foreign’, ‘other’ or ‘like us’ are very relative categorizations, independent from the place of our research but related to how an anthropologist ‘feels’ and understands him/herself as a person, human being interacting with others.

Agnieszka Chwieduk is an Assistant Professor at the Institute of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań. Her research interests include European and local identity and also small-group methodology. She carried out fieldwork in France, Alsace, Poland (in Matrimonial Agency), currently in Subcarpathia (Podkarpacie) and Romania. She is the author of several scientific articles and two books: Alzatczycy. Dylematy tożsamości (Alsatians: Identity Dilemmas, 2006) and Francuska antropologia kulturowa wobec problemów współczesnego świata (French Cultural Anthropology in the Face of Problems of the Contemporary World, co-ed., 2008). With Mariusz Filip she prepears (in Polish) a reader in history of anthropology of Europe. She is a member of EASA, PTPN (Secretary) and PTL. She also is a Coordinator of Student Scientific Circle at the Institute of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology.

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ČIUBRINSKAS Vytis Vytautas Magnus University in Kaunas, Lithuania Center for Social Anthropology [email protected]

Relocated Identities: Lithuanian Transnationalism Crossing European Borders The anthropological conceptualization of international migration might be applied for exploration of multiple ‘Europeanist themes’ for understanding politics of identity in the non-European world. Transmigration from Europe played a role in the transatlantic shapes of belonging, just to mention transnational Irish (Byron 2003) or Jewish (Safran 1999) identity politics in the US. The East European, the Baltic and the Lithuanian case in particular, have got a long and diverse history of migration waves, locations and strategies of group identity empowerment. The paper provides a case study (based on the field work in the US) of the application of identity empowerment through heritage as research perspective for the analysis of the East European transnationalism seen in the Lithuanian immigration in the US perspective. The paper reveals two patterns of the relocated identity evoked in reclaiming of the European heritages: ‘diasporic’ and ‘recognitionist’. The diasporic pattern of politics of identity (mainly shared by the descendants of émigrés from the Baltic countries wave of immigration in the late 1940s early 1950s) embraces transatlantic heritage in which culture stands for nation and is mobilized as claim to retain essential Lithuanian-ness, Latvian-ness or Estonian-ness. It is the best represented and institutionalized in ethnic institutions and the ethnic culture and heritage display practices. The pattern of diasporic identity was framed by long distance nationalism (Glick-Schiller 2004) and also reinforced by moral imperative of return to homeland. The ‘recognitionist’ pattern of politics of identity is based on the shape of heritage of ‘ethnic survivors’ – descendants of much more historically distant East European immigrants (of those who came to Texas in 1850s-70s). It consists of family and cultural ‘roots’ and ethnic history of the Lithuanian or Polish, Bohemian, Slovakian and other East European ancestors’ pasts, which can be traced as the local American ‘pioneers’ pasts. For example, the ‘Lithuanians - Texas pioneers’ past becomes empowered by claiming its public recognition and re-inscription into the local history of Texas. Here politics of identity is twofold. It consist of claiming for recognition of the transatlantic ‘roots’ and ethnic heritages as well as of reclaiming belonging to the local areas in the United States by striving to achieve re-chartering of the ‘overlooked for generations’ long-time ‘in-rooted-ness’ in it. It is exactly the identity empowerment of those subaltern, subversive (Hill, Wilson 2003) and marginalized groups, to which ethnic culture and heritage may be the best way to express their quest for recognition. Plenty of such strives could be exemplified by the anthropological evidence of indigenous movements all over the world. East European (Lithuanian) transatlantic migration shows a very similar pattern of ‘roots and genealogy’ interest group’s quest for recognition of the heritage which, after having been de-territorialized from Europe and ‘transplanted’ across the Atlantics, becomes evoked and (at least in some places) even reterritorialized by claiming of its in-rooted-ness in the local American soil. Vytis Čiubrinskas is an Associate Professor at the Departament of Sociology and Head of the Center for Social Anthropology at Vytautas Magnus University in Kaunas, Lithuania, Associate Professor of Anthropology at Vilnius University and also Adjunct Associate Professor at Southern Illinois University in the USA. His research interests include social cultural identity and identity politics, transnationalism and transmigration, anthropology of Europe, anthropology of post-Communism, development of disciplines of ethnology and anthropology in the East/Central Europe. He conducted fieldwork in the USA and Eastern Europe.

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FILIP Mariusz Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland Institute of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology [email protected]

How Similar Are ‘Home’-Members to Each Other? The Case of Fieldwork in Poland with Neopagan Nationalistic Order of Zadruga ‘North Wolf’ I have decided to conduct research on Polish neopagans because of my deep interest in pagan Europe and because of my agnosticism. The idea of revitalisation of Slavic paganism seemed to be a very attractive field of study but the movement was obscure for me, as I hadn’t known any heathens before. Since I took for granted that the ‘rest’ of their cultural equipment will be ‘the same’ as mine, I didn’t expect any intense exotics. Surprisingly during my fieldwork with Order of Zadruga ‘North Wolf’, I encountered a set of group’s ideas and actions linked directly to the radical nationalistic/racist cosmology, being for me par excellence alien. The dichotomy home/abroad, recently very popular in world anthropology but especially significant for anthropology of Europe, seems to assume a growth of the exotic, rising with ‘geopolitical’ distance. On the example of fieldwork with my ‘home’-members, I would like to show that living ‘at home’ (sharing the same localized culture) doesn’t deny the sense of extreme strangeness. I argue that cultural otherness is dependent on mental as well as bodily dispositions of individuals (habitus), and not on state borders or natural environment. The similarities and differences between me and the ‘Wolves’ are analysed within a framework of two oppositions: Europe/Non-Europe and East/West used for heuristic purposes only, not essentialised.

Mariusz Filip is a PhD student at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań (he studied also at University of Hamburg, Germany), where he has teached courses mainly on anthropology of Europe. He has carried out fieldwork in Poland with right-wing neopagans and in Germany with so called Slovincians, both supported by ethnography conducted in cyberspace. His main research interests are theory and methodology of anthropology and also issues connected to group identity. With Agnieszka Chwieduk he prepears (in Polish) a reader in history of anthropology of Europe.

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GALASIŃSKA Aleksandra University of Wolverhampton, UK History and Governance Research Institute [email protected]

Exploring European Margins at Work Back Home Two political and economic processes, the post-communist transformation coupled with the EU expansion, become factors which have an effect on lives of many Poles who decided to leave their domicile and move abroad. However, global economic changes as well as unastable exchange rates of Polish currency make many migrants think about return migration. There has been an on-going debate in the Polish media about the issue of return of the post-04 migrants and similar debate happens on internet forum. The discussions, as many other on the Polish fora, became heated and polarised. Many participants from Poland are openly hostile and critical towards those, who migrated, hence they describe a potential return as yet another failure or escape. In response to that, discussants from abroad posted their personal stories of success to counter the above claims and to advocate for staying abroad. On the other hand, there were also well argued exchanges posted from both Poland and abroad, in which interlocutors discussed the reason to return and talked about their personal experience of return. Interestingly, this part of the discussion was dominated by many entries about working conditions, employment, satisfaction and personal development at work. Many participants argued, that despite the United Europe of 27, a workplace is still a battleground between the European core and European margins, or between the Old and New Europe. In my paper I chose to focus on this particular part of my corpus, presenting its distinctive features. Anchoring the study in narrative and discourse analyses, I shall investigate topics and lines of argumentation of forum participants. I shall also describe the differences and similarities between ‘non-migrants’’ and migrants’ entries. The data come from an internet forum triggered by newspaper reports and articles in the electronic version of the ‘Gazeta Wyborcza’ in 2008 and 2009.

Aleksandra Galasińska is a Senior Research Fellow in European Studies in the School of Law, Social Sciences and Communications, University of Wolverhampton, UK. Her main research interests focus on ethnographic and discursive aspects of lived experience of postcommunism as well as post-enlargement migration on which she published in Narrative Inquiry, Multilingua, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, Ethnicities, Discourse & Society, and Journal of Multicultural Discourses. She is co-editor of Discourse and Transformation in Central and Eastern Europe (with Michał Krzyżanowski, 2009). Currently she is working on the edited volume devoted to Polish discourses of transformation (with D. Galasiński, forthcoming 2010).

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GOŁĘBNIAK Marcin University of Lower Silesia in Wrocław, Poland Department of Cultural Anthropology [email protected]

Beyond Borders and Boundaries – Learning Diasporic Identity: The Case of Greek Political Refugees in Lower Silesia In my presentation I will examine the process of building/creating/negotiating new diaposporic identity by Greek political refugees settled in the region of Lower Silesia in southwest Poland. I build on my ethnograhic study of survivors supplemented by archival materials, analyzing data from two perspectives: marco-perspective (sources from State archives – documents, photos, reports) and micro-perspective (individual perspectives of survivors/living generations collected through ethnographic fieldwork). I argue that the Polish Greeks that I study can be seen as a victim diaspora, characterized as it is by a ‘decisive break event’ in its history – in this case, legacy of political terror, civil war and forced exile (migration to Poland was a part of a larger migration process in which Greek communists and their families fled political persecution in Greece to the countries of the former Eastern Bloc. In the narratives of the Greek diaspora that I have been studying, victimization and nostalgia are omnipresent elements. I will analyze the metaphoric discourse of victimization and nostalgia embodied in such idiom as: ‘trauma of a journey across borders and boundaries’, ‘abandonment of family ties’, ‘temporary life’, ‘forbidings’, ‘recruitment of the janissaries’ etc. The main focus of my presentation, however, will be on a unique feature of the Greek diaspora in Lower Silesia – its sociopolitical context which put in motion a powerful learning process that resulted in changed social, economic and identity condition of its members. Wrocław and the region of Lower Silesia after WWII provided a unique social context in which Greek migration was a part the more general post-war migration processes which resulted in an almost complete change of population. As a result of ethnic cleansing, the region of Lower Silesia became a destination of multiple and geographically complex migrations and therefore the Greek refugees had become just other immigrants among immigrants – newlanders among newlanders. Greek refugees joined others in this new world and participated in a social experiment of great proportions. The above conditions led to two phenomena which make the Greek diaspora that I study unique: a) after the fall of Communism, the Greeks in Lower Silesia were not even considered an ethnic minority and were considered to be simply Polish; b) their social status had been dramatically improved. In my study, I look at the learning processes that have occurred in the Greek diaspora in Lower Silesia from two different perspectives. On the one hand, I use ethnographic methodology to examine my subject from an anthropological perspective, focusing on such elements as concepts of enculturation, acculturation and the constructing of a new identity. From the educational perspective I use the theory of situated learning and the community of practice theories to analyze the processes of diasporic group identity’s formation as a process of learning. In my research, I use ethnographic methodologies in collecting first -hand data from the surviving community. The data includes: transcribed structured and semi-structured interviews with community members, field-notes from my visits to people’s homes and casual encounters, transcriptions of group interviews and ‘biographical meetings’ I organized with members of Greek associations, as well as notes from my participation observation – carried out since October 2007. These first-hand ethnographic data are supplemented by archival resources and survivors ’ diaries, which I have managed to obtain in the course of my fieldwork research. I understand ethnographic methodology not narrowly as a set of research techniques and skills but as a widely conceptualized anthropological approach based on sensitivity in ethnographic observation combined as it is with theoretical and conceptual framework through which we understand social reality. This anthropological sensitivity has been the constitutive element of cultural anthropology as a ‘modern’ academic discipline within social sciences: starting with Bronisław Malinowski’s realistic village descriptions through self-reflective, interpretative, postmodern ethnography direct, participatory contact with informants the effort to undestand culture from their point of view has been at the core of the anthropological approach. The ‘emic’ perspective is a central point of this qualitative ‘emphatical’ methodology used in cultural and social anthropology – a researcher should participate in a group’s life, trying to look at the world through the ‘Other’s eyes’ to find out ‘hidden’ aspects of cultural and social practices. On the most basic level, my intention ethnographic in its nature, is to save a dying narration of the people who got to Polan d after WWII from disappearance. My work, however, shows a complex picture in which the narratives of the descendants of these different migration waves and the varied cultural traditions of refugees who come from different regions within Greece, become intermingled in the more unified story of creating a local community in Lower Silesia. In my work, therefore, I will show how Greek refugees and individual immigrants who came to Poland from different regions and based on very different motivations, created a living Greek community in Wroclaw. This community, as I will show, developed within a larger context of the immigrant nature of Wroclaw’s and Lower Silesia’s post-war identity Marcin Gołębniak (MA in Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań, 2001) teaches anthropology at the University of Lower Silesia in Wrocław, Poland. His research interests include memory and identity of a diaspora – the Greek diaspora in the Polish region of Lower Silesia and Indian diasporas in Fiji, as well as issues in visual anthropology (graffiti art). He is active as a leader of a student anthropological research group called /Interpretatornia/ a t the University of Lower Silesia and he is a member of ESREA (European Society for Research on the Education of Adults) where he works within two research networks: /Between Global in Local: Adult Learning and Development/ and /Migration, Identity, Xenophobia/.

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GOŹDZIAK Elżbieta M. Georgetown University in Washington DC., USA Institute for the Study of International Migration [email protected]

The Transnational Anthropologist: Reflections on Going Home to Study the Other Supported by a Fulbright research grant, I have been studying for the past few months Poles ’ attitudes towards the Other; i.e. foreigners, immigrants, and refugees living in Poznań and Wielkopolska. In this paper I discuss the effects of cultural familiarity (born, raised, and educated in Poland) and cultural strangeness (have been practicing anthropology for the past 25 years in the United States, adopted American understanding of migration issues, live in a multicultural society) on the quality and specificity of participant observation, ethnographic data collection, data analysis, and the ability to translate collected information into policy and programmatic recommendations applicable in the Polish context. I reflect on my hyphenated identity as a researcher both culturally familiar with the community I study and distanced from it by years of working and living in the United States.

Elżbieta M. Goździak is the Director of Research at the Institute for the Study of International Migration (ISIM) at Georgetown University and Editor of International Migration, a peer reviewed, scholarly journal devoted to research and policy analysis of contemporary issues affecting international migration. Formerly, she held a senior position with the federal Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) and the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA). She has taught at the Howard University’s School of Social Work in the Social Work with Displaced Populations Program, and managed a program area on admissions and resettlement of refugees in industrialized countries for the Refugee Policy Group. Prior to immigrating to the US, she was an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland. She is a recipient of two prestigious Fulbright grants to teach international migration at the Adam Mickiewicz University, in Poznań, Poland (October/November 2006) and to study the linguistic and cultural representation of attitudes towards foreigners in Poland (2008/2009) as well as a residential fellowship at the Rockefeller Center in Bellagio, Italy (July 2006) to participate in the Migration Dialogue sponsored by the Rockefeller and the German Marshal Foundations.

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HANN Chris Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle/Saale, Germany [email protected]

Against Europe: A Longue Durée Perspective As for the preceding conference, here I would wish to reaffirm my Eurasianism, i.e. question the justifications for ‘anthropology of Europe’, with implications of ‘culture area’ etc. Europe needs to be historicized – I don’t push Eurasia as another reification, just higher-level. rather, similarities across Eurasia turn out to be very important in a certain era of world history; and recognizing these is important for overcoming lingering ethnocentricities (including those still often implicit, sometimes explicit, in all the literature about Orientalism etc).

Chris Hann is a Director of the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology at Halle/Saale. Previously he taught at the universities of Cambridge and Kent in the UK. He has carried out fieldwork in Hungary, Poland, Turkey and China (Xinjiang). His main interests inc lude economic anthropology and the history of anthropology, with particular reference to Eastern Europe. He is the author or co-author of several books like: Tázlár: A Village in Hungary (1980), A Village Without Solidarity: Polish Peasants in Years of Crisis (1985), Civil Society: Challenging Western Models (1996), Teach Yourself Social Anthropology (2000), Galicia: A Multicultured Land (2005), Studying Peoples in the People’s Democracies (2005).

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HANNERZ Ulf University of Stockholm, Sweden Department of Social Anthropology [email protected]

The Shaping of Anthropologies Some thirty years ago, my colleague Tomas Gerholm and I started work on a special issue of the journal Ethnos on ‘The Shaping of National Anthropologies’. In the years that followed (and until now) the issue drew considerable attention, as an early attempt to understand the diversity of anthropology as practiced under different national conditions, and also the structure of center-periphery relationships within international anthropology. My presentation in Poznan will take this issue as a point of departure, and discuss changes in anthropology, in Europe and globally, since then. It will attend to anthropologists’ relationships to different audiences – the international scholarly community as well as wider audiences at home – and, in that connection, to questions of language. It will discuss factors involved in relationships between local and expatriate colleagues, and – starting out from a distinction made by George Stocking in an afterword to the Ethnos issue between nation-building and empire-building universities – conclude that anthropology has a responsibility to be a world-building discipline.

Ulf Hannerz is a Professor Emeritus of Social Anthropology, Stockholm University, Sweden, and has taught at several American, European, Asian and Australian universities. He is a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, an honorary fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, and an honorary member and former Chair of the European Association of Social Anthropologists. His research has been especially in urban anthropology, media anthropology and transnational cultural processes, with field studies in West Africa, the Caribbean, and the United States and among news media foreign correspondents. Among his books are Soulside (1969), Exploring the City (1980), Cultural Complexity (1992), Transnational Connections (1996) and Foreign News (2004). He was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Oslo in 2005.

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HASTRUP Kirsten University of Copenhagen, Denmark Department of Anthropology [email protected]

Scaling Anthropological Knowledge: Social Complexity as a Bottom-Up Process There is a sense that anthropology is being tested by new global realities. In actual fact anthropology has been permanently tested since its inception, because history has always been on the move. In this presentation I shall discuss the current challenges with a view to identifying various scales of knowledge that all of them are in some sense local. By taking off in a discussion of social complexity as the result of bottom up processes of action and deliberation, it is possible to scale the anthropological object in novel ways without loosing the foothold in actual social life that was always the hallmark of anthropolo gy. What is being tested right now is not anthropology as such but some of its concepts – notably those that depend on social boundaries. The presentation will take off in my current research in Greenland.

Kirsten Hastrup is a Professor of Anthropology at University of Copenhagen, Denmark. She has carried out fieldwork in Iceland, Greenland and the Far North. Her research interests include anthropological theory, epistemology, historical anthropology, anthropology of theatre, human rights, environmental and topographical anthropology. In recent years her research interest has centered on the environmental and social changes in the Arctic, notably in Greenland, where she has started a series of fieldworks in a small hunting community with the aim of studying local perceptions of threats and opportunities over a five-year period. She is the author or co-author of several books: Culture and history in medieval Iceland (1985), Nature and Policy in Iceland, 1400-1800 (1990), Island of Anthropology (1990), Other Histories (1992), Social experience and anthropological knowledge (1994), A Passage to Anthropology: Between Experience and Theory (1995), Siting Culture: The Shifting Anthropological Object (1997), A Place Apart: An Anthropological Study of the Icelandic World (1998).

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HOROLETS Anna Warsaw School of Social Sciences and Humanities, Poland Department of Political Science [email protected]

The Representations of Risk in the Accounts of Polish Travelers to the Former Soviet Union: Risk as the Border Markers Leisure travel comprise a bundle of cultural meanings for those who endorse it. Tourism is also a social practice that is involved in maintaining geopolitical and economic order in whic h the power relations between sending and receiving courtiers of tourists are asymmetrical. The presentation will be concentrated on the case study of young middle class educated Polish travelers to the former Soviet Union, Russia in particular. These tourists travel in a selforganized manner and choose wild nature sites perceive of themselves as non-mainstream tourists. They are kayaking, trekking and climb mountains. Risks taken with natural elements such as low temperatures, floods or wind are the repetitive component of their accounts. There are also some ‘human-related’ risks, e.g. when being in zones of war or at closed border zones. In the presentation the meaning of risk taking as a part of travelling will be analyzed. Risks will be viewed through the pairs of oppositions ‘natural/human’ and ‘authentic/fake’. The ultimate aim is to explore the ways in which the representations of risk in travellers ’ narratives function as markers of crossing cultural and/or civilizational borders.

Anna Horolets has her background in linguistics, anthropology and sociology. She wrote her PhD on the representations of Europe in Polish press (published in 2006 by Universitas Publishers, Kraków). Since 2005 teaches courses in sociology, anthropology and discourse analysis at Warsaw School of Social Sciences and Humanities. Her current research interests concentrate on methods of discourse analysis, political anthropology, national and European identities, symbols and myths in particular, as well as on the study of the role of travel experience in identity construction.

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KEINZ Anika European University Viadrina Frankfurt (Oder), Germany Chair of Comparative Central European Studies [email protected] KOŚCIAŃSKA Agnieszka University of Warsaw, Poland Institute of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology [email protected]

Researching Gender, Researching Europe The fall of communism and the following ‘Europeanization’ processes in an ‘enlarged’ Europe have not been a simple process of ‘harmonizing’ and ‘deepening’ Europe, but set new questions on the political and scholarly agenda signalled in such key terms as ‘diversity’, ‘intercultural dialogue’ and ‘equal opportunities for all’. Such words not only hint to Europe’s diversity in history, politics and ‘culture’, but to the need of discussing and exploring various notions of equality and difference. A focus on gender and sexuality provides an analytical lens for exploring different notions of equality and difference in post-1989 Europe. Both are not only closely linked to notions of democracy, but to notions of the public sphere and minority/majority issues. However, in many Western European countries, democracy is often linked to a notion of the public sphere as supposedly ‘secular’ while the revitalization of religion in some countries in Central Europe and the only supposedly secular public sphere as claimed e.g. in Germany points to new contestations within the European Union. Based on our gender-related fieldwork conducted in Poland which were differently designed due to our different intellectual backgrounds, we explore how a focus on gender and sexuality contributes not only to researching power relations within ‘Europe’ but provides a tool for problematizing hierarchies of knowledge in the political as well as academic field.

Anika Keinz received her PhD in European Ethnology at Humboldt-University of Berlin. She is currently an Assistant Professor at the European University Viadrina Frankfurt (Oder) at the Chair of Comparative Central European Studies. Her research interests include gender and sexuality, human rights and inequality studies. She is an author of Polens Andere: Verhandlungen von Geschlecht und Sexualität in Polen nach 1989 (2008). Agnieszka Kościańska completed her Ph.D. in anthropology at the University of Warsaw, Poland in 2007. She teaches at the Institute of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology, University of Warsaw. She is the author of Potęga ciszy (The Power of Silence, 2009) as well as the co-editor of Kobiety i religie (Women and Religions, 2006, with Katarzyna Leszczyńska) and the two-volume reader Gender. Perspektywa antropologiczna (Gender. An Anthropological Perspective, 2007, with Renata E. Hryciuk). Her research interests include gender, sexuality and religion.

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KIM Dong-Ju University of Michigan, USA Doctoral Program in Anthropology and History [email protected]

Encounters in Europe: Reflections on the Possibility of Cross-Cultural Conversation, Anthropological Knowledge, and Fieldwork in Poland The place of Europe as a research field within global anthropology has changed in outlook and importance as a result of post-colonial globalization and post-socialist transformations. In this context, I would suggest that anthropological theories produced mainly in non-European contexts are useful and essential in European case studies, at least as much as the seemingly particular historical trajectories of European countries. Based on my fieldwork in Poland as a non-European anthropologist, I will share and discuss what I think would be a productive way of reconciling these two aspects – understanding Europe through the mirror of the nonEuropean and explaining Europe in European terms. In concrete, I will examine fieldwork encounters, conversations with laypeople and local scholars, both anthropologists and nonanthropologists, and my own reflections from the time when I stayed in Wielkopolska for my dissertation fieldwork, which focused on post-socialist changes in agricultural science, knowledge, and management, and the implications of European Common Agricultural Policy from the viewpoint of farmers, scientists, managers, and rural experts.

Dong-Ju Kim is a PhD candidate in the Doctoral Program in Anthropology and History at the University of Michigan, and has been affiliated with the Institute of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology at the UAM during his fieldwork in Wielkopolska. His dissertation focuses on changing formations in agricultural knowledge within local networks of farmers and experts in Wielkopolska after privatization and Poland’s EU accession.

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KLEKOT Ewa University of Warsaw, Poland Institute of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology [email protected]

(Mis)Understanding in Fieldwork at Home and Abroad Doing anthropology at home and abroad obviously implies difference in cultural competences on behalf of the researcher, communication competences (both verbal and non-verbal) being one of the crucial questions. Although the most famous case has been obviously the one of Margaret Mead mislead by the informants who had apparently used on her a strategy of pulling somebody’s leg for fun that the researcher was probably not able to understand because of her lack of cultural and language competences, doing anthropology of Europe, be it ‘at home’ or ‘abroad’ often means similar problems of communication, even in one’s own native tongue. Using the experience both of fieldwork in my native tongue and country, and outside of these contexts, as well as of my work as interpreter and translator, I would like to ponder on the communication aspects of fieldwork practice, and their consequences for researcher’s (mis)understandings, and subsequently, the knowledge produced by her/ him.

Ewa Klekot graduated in archaeology and ethnology at University of Warsaw, received the doctoral degree in humanities, specialisation in art history by the same University in 2002, having defended the dissertation on social construction of the image of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. Since 1990 has been teaching in the Institute of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology, currently as an Assistant Professor. In the 1990s also worked as a free-lance art critic collaborating with Polish art magazines, periodicals and galleries. Has translated many works by leading social scientists into Polish, among them Zygmunt Bauman, Ruth Benedict, Mary Douglas and Marcel Griaule. Recent research (post-doctoral) concerns social creation of national heritage places in Poland, especially as a result of visiting practices. Her main research interests are: anthropology of art, especially visual arts, vernacular forms of artistic expression and heritage studies.

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KUBICA-HELLER Grażyna Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland Institute of Sociology [email protected]

One of the First Studies of the Anthropology at Home: Feliks Gross’ Unfinished Fieldwork of the Jewish District in Krakow Feliks Gross worked under the supervision of Bronislaw Malinowski in the late 30-ties. Gross’ initial idea was to carry out research in the Palestine, but he was not awared the Rockefeller Foundation grant. It was Malinowski, who suggested to study the Jewish district of Krakow, his and Gross’ home city. Gross started his work in 1938 and reported his achievements to his supervisor. Coming from an asimilated Jewish family, he had to learn Yiddish and enter allien world of traditional Jews in Kazimierz. The outbreak of the II WW stopped the research. Gross escaped to Lemberg and then to Vilna, where he continued his work under the auspicies of YIVO. He had to leave when Lithuania was invaded by the Soviet Army. Gross’ dramatic peregrination ended in New York, where he later lived till his death in 2006, pursuing an academic career of a sociologist. The correspondence between Gross and Malinowski together with other documents enabled me to describe this first, as far as I know, filedwork done at home in the Malinowskian tradition. My historical research was carried out in several American and Polish institutions thanks to the Kosciuszko Foundation grant.

Grażyna Kubica-Heller works at the Department of Social Anthropology, Institute of Sociology, Jagiellonian University, Kraków, Poland. She is interested in the history of the discipline (edited Polish edition of B. Malinowski’s diaries, works on the book about Maria Czaplicka, a Siberian fieldworker), feminist anthropology (a Polish book Sisters of Malinowski or the modern women at the beginning of the XX cent.), and the anthropology of cultural minorities (a Polish book Lutherans of Teschen Silesia, just finished another one: Lutheran ethos and the spirit of Silesianess). She is also a photographer and author.

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KÜRTI László University of Miskolc, Hungary Department of Political Sciences [email protected]

Home, Desire, Sickness: An Anthropology of Place Nostalgia Our knowledge of the anthropology of Europe has expanded recently with the application of transnational, postcommunist and globalist approach. However, a pronounced disjunction characterizes Europeanist anthropology as foreign and local anthropologists vie with one another in their desires to explain the changing nature of European societies. Since AngloAmerican professionals maintain hegemonic discourse - what Vico called earlier ars topica local knowledge production and distribution has been marginalized. The majority of such work has concentrated on areas such as the remnants of communism, transformation of high politics and the negative repercussion of European Union membership of former East European countries. In this presentation, I discuss an area usually neglected by anthropologists, namely the nature of the anthropological enterprise itself as practiced by those whose lives are influenced the most: local anthropologists. In 1977, John W. Cole suggested that anthropology has come part-way home, and in 1991 Robert C. Ulin has rebutted whether anthropology has made it all the way home. This study then draws on field research from the mid-1980s and 2000-2009 to examine the way that national and transnational governments attempt to regulate scholarship and the ways in which local knowledge is produced as the result of this confluence. I argue that three different aspects of European anthropology can be identified: exclusion, marginalization, and incorporation. While there is a considerable continuity in some (common) Europeanist practices, the nature and outcomes of such projects vary with the changing context and other features of Westernized (Anglophone) anthropological regime. Understanding this demands deta iled analysis of anthropology in concrete settings.

László Kürti received his PhD in cultural anthropology from the University of Massachusetts in 1989. He taught anthropology at The American University in Washington DC, and the Eötvös University in Budapest, and presently teaches at the University of Miskolc, Hungary. He conducted fieldwork in North America, Romania and Hungary. His English-language books include: The Remote Borderland (2001), Youth and the state in Hungary (2002), and served as co-editor for Beyond Borders (1996), and Working Images (2004). From 2001 to 2006 he served as the Secretary of the European Association of Social Anthropologists, and currently is member of the International Editorial Advisory Board of Visual Studies. He coedited Postsocialism: Anthropological Perspectives from Home (Berghahn, 2009) with Peter Skalnik.

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LEWICKI Paweł Humboldt-University Berlin, Germany Department of European Ethnology [email protected]

Anthropology ‘at Home’ vs. ‘Abroad’?: Some Remarks on Doing Fieldwork Among the European Commission Civil Servants in Brussels Based on the fieldwork experiences and field material gathered among the European Commission’s civil servants in Brussels, this paper discusses the assumption about different perspectives (at home vs abroad? Local, regional, national vs. world anthropology?) in Anthropology in/of Europe. Taking Paul Willis’ approach that ethnography should concentrate on the symbolical resources that power relations evoke as a starting point, I describe both the process of constant negotiations of the fieldworker’s position in the multifarious (supra)national and elitist context of the European Commission and the strategies of symbolical performance among old and new European Commission’s civil servants. I refer to concepts of ‘adaptations’ and ‘irritations’ to depict my expiriences in the field and to refer to practices and discourses mobilized by EU-Commission’s officials in order to change their self-perceived symbolical position. Based on these examples, I pose the question whether the divison ‘at home’ and ‘abroad’ still hold in todays ethnographic account.

Paweł Lewicki received his education and Master of Arts degree in ethnology and cultural anthropology at the University of Warsaw. Currently he is a PhD candidate at the Department of European Ethnology, Humboldt-University Berlin. He is researching symbolical powerrelations between EU-Commission civil servants after the Enlargement in 2004 and 2007. His main research interests are: anthropology of policy, anthropology of elites, power -relations, Europeanization, national identities.

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LUBAŚ Marcin Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland Institute of Sociology [email protected]

Transcending Nationalist and Metropolitan Provincialism: Toward an Anti-Dystopian Anthropology in the South-Eastern Europe One of the least admired parts of Max Weber legacy is his idea of the value free social science. A closer scrutiny of the Weberian programmatic texts allows to distinguish two general threads of argument in his presentation of value-free social science. First, Weber emphasized on the importance of the serious and self-critical scholarship - one which would be capable of testing scientific conjunctures. Second, he accepted the historicist thesis that there are no ultimate or unconditional values and that the plurality of the value-systems is inevitable. It would be probably better to avoid certain Olympic indifference present in the Weberian argument. On the other side, we can still appreciate some aspects of the Weber’s discussion of the social science and the social criticism relationship. My argument is that in order to practice more critical and socially sensitive anthropology, we need to engage in a more serious critique of anthropological knowledge and scholarship (This is Weberian point!). Such a critique should be grounded on the serious interrogation of the nationalist prejudgments which sometimes still frame our knowledge production. On the other hand, we must be more critical of the metropolitan anthropological projects which are predicated only on the flat constructivist and the nominalist models of anthropology. Its perhaps true that an idea of the social science as critical to the realization of the great social utopias, is in eclipse now. It does not, by any means, have to lead us to indifference and despair, or pretentious moralism. We should not give up social sensitivities inspired by the Marxian idea of the human emancipation. If our ethnographies, comparisons, and theories cast new light on the conditions which shape human possibilities, we can at least produce knowledge which may be used to evade dystopian scenarios. I will try to show how the anthropological scholarship on the South-Eastern Europe may be used and deployed to develop new local policies which can reduce ethno -religious rife and tensions, and eliminate the possibility of dystopias to come true. In this particular region anthropological scholarship may come as the corrective to the policies inspired by the scholars and experts who represent other branches of the social science.

Marcin Lubaś is an Assistant Professor at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków. He specializes in anthropological theory and anthropology of social boundaries, has done fieldwork research in the western part of the Republic of Macedonia. He is an author o f the book Rozum i etnografia. Przyczynek do krytyki antropologii postmodernistycznej (Reason and Ethnography: A critique of postmodern anthropology, 2003).

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MARKOWITZ Fran Ben-Gurion University in Beersheva, Israel Department of Sociology and Anthropology [email protected]

Whose Jews? Whose Bosnia? Whose Europe? Since the signing of the 1995 Dayton Peace Agreement and the Constitution that derived from it, the Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina [BiH] has been divided into two ethnically dominated territorial entities. Although Bosnia is recognized as a single, independent state, it remains under the strict supervision of the non-elected Office of the High Representative, whose mission it is to ‘oversee implementation of civilian aspects of the accord ending the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina.’ That accord was reached by dividing the citizenry into three constituent nations, each vested with collective rights to its own language, history, culture and self-governance. All citizens who claim belonging to minority groups and cannot or will not define themselves as Bosniacs, Croats or Serbs are assigned to the residual Ostali, or Other category. Against that increasingly accepted and acceptable categorical scheme, this paper examines the place of Jews in Sarajevo from their perspective(s), and how it is imagined and narrated by Serbs, Croats and Bosniacs. During the war that was fought for and against ‘ethnic cleansing’ Sarajevo’s Jewish Community pursued a policy of neutrality, and offered aid to all. Although for 500 years the Jews have been an integral part of multi-faith Sarajevo, in post-Dayton, 21st century Bosnia their otherness is being reevaluated: Whose Jews are they really? Are they allied with the Bosniacs, the Croats, or the Serbs? What do these questions reveal about belongings in Bosnia and about the Europe to which BiH is striving to belong?

Fran Markowitz is an Associate Professor at Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Ben-Gurion University in Beersheva, Israel. She holds a PhD from the Department of Anthropology at the University of Michigan, and since 1992 has been teaching cultural anthropology at Ben-Gurion University. Her research interests in ethnicity, migration, diasporas, family dynamics, racialization, cultural hybridity and difference have taken her from the U.S. to Israel and back and forth again, to Russia, and to Bosnia-Herzegovina. She is best known for her ethnographic monographs, A Community in Spite of Itself: Soviet Jewish Emigres in New York (1993) and Coming of Age in Post-Soviet Russia (2000) and for her collected volumes, Sex, Sexuality and the Anthropologist (coedited with Michael Ashkenazi, 1999), and Homecomings: Unsettling Paths of Return (coedited with Anders Stefansson, 2004). Her latest book, Sarajevo: A Bosnian Kaleidoscope is based on her longest and hardest fieldwork to date. It is scheduled for publication in early 2010 by the University of Illinois Press.

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MURŃIČ Rajko University of Ljubljana, Slovenia Department of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology [email protected] Post-anthropology ‘in’, ‘of’, ‘from’, or ‘in Spite of’ Europe: On Post-Imperial, PostColonial, Post-Socialist, and Post-Ethnological Anthropology ‘in’, ‘of’, ‘from’ and ‘in Spite of’ Central/Eastern Europe No matter if anthropology is derived from its fascination with the Other(s) living in the mo st distant lands or fascination with ‘the Other from within’ (i.e. peasants as carriers of authentic ‘folk’ or ‘national’ characteristics), it is in any case colonial, high-class, Eurocentric, nationalist and alienating scholarship. Even if some of us may pretend that our teachers may have not been a part of colonialism, high-class elitism, Eurocentrism, nationalism or other processes of alienation, it is not easy to find reasonable answers to the following question: How to speak in Central/Eastern Europe without being orientalised or to orientalise; how to interact without being patronised or to patronise; and how to act without either being colonised or to colonise? The author will briefly examine Slovenian ethnology and its relationship to social/cultural anthropology in the 20 th century through examples of its engagement in studies ‘in’, ‘of’, ‘from’ and ‘in spite of’ Slovenia, Europe and the world. Its development was based on permanent critical (re)evaluation of its subject, epistemology, methodology and theory. The last paradigmatic revolution of the discipline in the late 1980s rejected some basic principles then taken for granted, i.e. ethnology understood as a discipline aimed to study ethnicities (narodi) and their historical development documented in ways of life and ‘folk culture’. But even if we define ‘a way of life’ in any place, in any time, and among any distinguishable social group as the basic subject of ethnology, understood as cultural/social anthropology, there are still many problematic foundations left. With ironical use of the terms ‘post-anthropology’ and ‘post-ethnological anthropology’, the author will radically criticise his own position as Central/Eastern/South-Eastern European anthropologist who was trying to reject problematic principles of both, nationally oriented scholarship and scholarship rooted in colonialism, with his commitment to study contemporary popular music no matter of its location. Consequently, he will define a few possible theoretical strategies to overcome everlasting traps of reification. Rajko Murńič is a Professor at Department of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology at University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. He teaches basic methodological courses and gives lectures and seminars in popular culture at undergraduate and postgraduate levels. He published four monographs on music and popular music, co-edited seven volumes, most recently are Europe and its Other (2007) and Places of Encounter (2007). His professional interests comprise anthropology of popular music, theory of culture, methodology of anthropological research, philosophy of music, cultural studies, political anthropology, kinship studies, and social structure. His regional interests comprise Slovenia, Central and South-eastern Europe (fieldwork in Slovenia, Poland, Macedonia, Germany and Japan).

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NOWICKA-RUSEK Ewa University of Warsaw, Poland Institute of Sociology [email protected]

Stateless Nations in Europe: Their Problems and Perspectives This paper concentrates on nations/ethnic groups that continue to strive for their identity inspite of not having their own state. I intend to talk about the Valachians/Aromanians, who live in Greece, Albania, Macedonia, Serbia, Bulgaria and Romania and about the Roma/Gypsies, who live in all European states. Both groups in question are not concerned with forming their own seperate states (not counting marginal extremists). In some countries they have gained legal status as an ethnic minority, while in other ones they still struggle to be recognized as such to this day. Both of them have difficulty in preserving their language and traditional family ties. I will consider prospective solutions in preserving and developing their culture.

Ewa Nowicka-Rusek is a Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Warsaw and Warsaw School of Social Sciences and Humanities. She teaches courses in social anthropology, acculturation, culture diversity of Polish society, migrants’ adaptation in Poland, ethnic minorities in Europe and Siberia. She has carried out fieldwork in Siberia and Mongolia among native nations and in Central-Eastern Europe among Roma, Polish autochthons living outside the country, Greek repatriates from Poland. Her current project is research on Vlachs in Balkans. She is the author and co-author of several books, most recently published are: U nas dole i niedole. Sytuacja Romów w Polsce (1999), Polacy czy cudzoziemcy. Polacy za wschodnią granicą (2000), Homecoming. An Anthropology of Return Migrations (2008), Hermes Odyseusz i greckie powroty do ojczyzny (2008), Kulturowa odmienność w działaniu. Kultury i narody bez państwa (2009).

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ORVISKÁ Lucia University of Fribourg, Switzerland Department of Social Anthropology [email protected]

Trust in Investment Relationships and the Spirals of Trust or Mistrust in a Global Environment: Interdisciplinary Approach Trust is vital for maintaining stable relationships and cooperation, the basis of all exchanges and trade. Sociologically, trust is necessary for reducing the complexity of our reality and the future. But it can be ruined in a very short time, as we are experiencing it in the current financial and credit crisis, the worst in finan ce since the thirties of the 20th century. How did the people of the 21st century get into such a deep and global confidence? And why? As an anthropologist I have realized the importance of trust in everyday life and I’ve concentrated on it. As a finance specialist, working with people in the heart of financial markets, I became fascinated by observing the creation of spirals of trust and mistrust in markets during the crisis, based on the reactions of people. Firstly, trust will be analyzed as a part of social capital, inducing the problematic of its creation, its different types, connection with ethics, etc; how are spirals of trust and mistrust created? How are the globalization and new communication means influencing it? How is trust handled by different economical players (banking), politicians (state interventions?), on the local field (against the government, strikes) and externally in foreign countries (devaluation of currency, removal of capital)? Secondly, I’ll focus on a specific situation of EasternEurope countries during the crisis, especially those hit by lack of confidence (given and received). In the last part, I’ll try to analyze trust as a potential result of group culture and its competitiveness element. The analysis of the general part is based mainly on participative observation approach. Working every day with financial news, markets, investors, clients, I have observed reactions and I’ve held my ‘observation diary’. However, field data analysis and models complete the research. The first hypothesis results makes us think, that globalization and new communication means intensifies the reaction of trust and mistrust. That, in the absence of strict rules, ‘over-confidence’ can create a bubble, easily leading to creation of systemic (external) distrust when deceived. Furthermore, Intercultural trust and mistrust is intensified, which can be illustrated for example by Eastern Europe regions. Culture would play a big role in the creation of trust, which would possibly evolve during transition times. Its level would be important for the economical development of a country. However, in increasing interconnection, we are more exposed to a global feeling. In conclusion, I can tell that the role of trust in the personal, as well as in global world dyn amics is extremely important and with the actual economical crisis, everyone is starting to realize it. My work should enable a better understanding of the importance and its role to interested anthropologists, sociologists, finance specialists or just other people who want to learn more about what rhythms our lives: Trust. Moreover, I raise the question: Is it possible to reach a sustainably increasing and balanced level of trust?

Lucia Orviská is a PhD candidate at the Department of Social Anthropology at University of Fribourg, Switzerland. After finishing a scientific specialization in the Bilingual French High School in Bratislava, she studied and made practices in different cities in France and Slovakia (Lyon, Grenoble, Bratislava, Paris). She completed her M.A. as Engineer of International Business Development in a French co-programme of the University of Economics in Bratislava and the University of Social Sciences at P.M. France-Grenoble 2. Her actual research interests include the phenomenon of trust-distrust, social dynamics of financial markets, corruption, globalization, State, networks, communication and circulation, social responsibility, Central -Eastern Europe (especially Slovakia and Poland). Her knowledge of different languages helps to br idge the field analysis with different local and international theories. Since 2009 she is also the chairwoman and founder of a newly created NGO AkSen-Aktive senior in Slovakia.

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PERNARČIČ Radharani University of Ljubljana, Slovenia Department of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology [email protected]

Bleating vs. BLEEDING ANTHROPOLOGY In a seemingly simple way my paper radically shakes anthropology as a discipline. On one hand I intend to show how anthropology as an intellectual activity (in spite of its fieldwork methodology) has very limited, or hardly any real competence to acquire a correct (i.e. substantial) knowledge about body and, consequently, often about practice as well. Although the topic of embodiment/practice lately appears to be a part of almost every second research, it becomes clear that the bodily knowledge remains almost entirely untouched and slips away from any possibility of also being embodied (maybe even grasped). The key question I pose is therefore whether we consciously want to leave our discipline in this state. Knowing how intellectually gained knowledge can contribute to the development of people’s mental horizon, would we not also wish to develop methods, by which people could advance their ‘body intelligence’ and a more knowledge-based practice? To emphasize the importance of the latter for anthropology, I analyze a few cases which reveal how easily anthropologists can fail significantly launching our knowledge into the world, but also how the discipline can either be lifted or discredited – both due to the (dis)ability of anthropologists to embody knowledge and not only research, write and interpret it. Whether the future of anthropological content is not to remain an old denotational ‘chewing gum’, while its context more or less a matter of chance, anthropologists stand in front of a difficult dilemma of how to redefine our methods of acquiring and properly practicing knowledge.

Radharani Pernarčič graduated at the Department of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology at University of Ljubljana in 2005. In 2007 she also finished a bachelor degree in choreography and contemporary dance at the Amsterdamse Hogeschool voor de Kunsten / SNDO in Amsterdam. She is actively engaged in the fields of anthropology, performative arts and poetry, often participates at various conferences, holds workshops and makes projects in which she deals with mutual applications of anthropological knowledge and performative praxes. She currently continues her studies in a postgraduate (PhD) programme at the Department of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology in Ljubljana, where she is also employed on a research project ‘Comparative analysis of Slovenian anthropology within European research space: past, presence and future’. Her research interest are improvisation, play(fullness), creativeness (fieldwork in Holland from 2003 – 2005), social situation of freelance artists, embodiment, psycho-somatic processes, verbal and bodily communication, body intelligence and applicative methods.

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POBŁOCKI Kacper Central European University in Budapest, Hungary Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology [email protected]

The ‘Curse of Ham’: Geography of Capitalism for Anthropology of Europe In a highly compelling reinterpretation of the late Giovanni Arrighi’s model of historical capitalism, Ian Baucom (in his Specters of the Atlantic) argued that ‘our long contemporaneity’ can be traced back to the ‘financial revolution’ of the late eighteenth century. His account of the relationship between slave trade and financialization, suggest that the contemporary ‘financialized subject’ was conceived back then. I argue that Baucom’s argument is a partial reappraisal of Karl Polanyi’s account of the emergence of the three ‘fictitious commodities’: labor, money and land (or rather: space). These three commodifications engendered distinctive modern subjectivities – the wage laborer, financialized body, and contentious urbanite. Yet, all the three belong to the geography of what Baucom dubbed the ‘Atlantic space-of-flows,’ that constituted the spatial underpinning of the British and American world hegemonies. I suggest excavating another capitalist subjectivity, but one that belongs to a different hegemony (Dutch), different geography (Polish and Lithuanian Commonwealth) and different space-of-flows (Baltic). Further, I wish to redeem the original meaning of subjectivity: as the Althussierian int erpellation of public space. I suggest that capitalism in Poland engendered a distinctive subject position of cham. Today, a cham is a boor or an oaf who behaves rudely and disrespectfully in public (mainly urban) space. To understand the meaning of such quotidian urban encounters in Poland (and hence to do urban anthropology as advocated by Ulf Hannerz), we need to perform a ‘social etymology’ of that notion. This takes us back to the to the sixteenth century, when speculative grain trade between the Netherlands and Poland-Lithuania ‘dragged’ the latter into world capitalism, and ‘localized’ the Biblical ‘curse of Ham’ in the form of the racial category of chamstwo. This sixteenth century ‘refeudalization’ of Eastern Europe has been widely acknowledged as the beginning point of the East/West divide in Europe. I suggest that to understand the meaning of categories that structure social life in contemporary Poland, we need to reach back to that very moment and understand how they have been sustained in the longue durée by spatial structures, in this case the so-called ‘Jagiellonian spatial heritage.’

Kacper Pobłocki is a PhD candidate at Central European University, Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology. In 2008/2009 he was a fellow at the Center for Place, Culture and Politics (CUNY Graduate Center). His dissertation: The Cunning of Class: Urbanization of Inequality in Post-war Poland traces how social relations engendered by the serf-manorial economy of the 16th century and expressed by the ‘curse of Ham’ have enveloped both the 19th century industrialization and post-1945 urbanization of Poland.

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PODJED Dan University of Ljubljana, Slovenia Department of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology [email protected]

Shipwreck on the Birders’ Island: Methodological and Epistemological Problems of Doing Research ‘at Home’ and ‘Abroad’ ‘Imagine yourself suddenly set down surrounded by all your gear, alone on a tropical beach close to a native village, while the launch or dinghy which has brought you sails away out of sight.’ By this quote Malinowski introduced readers to his famous work Argonauts of the Western Pacific in which he described peoples and their cultures, which were far away from the centre of his geographical and cultural ‘coordinate system’. The author of the paper attempts to describe similar situation in completely different settings. He carried out his ethnographic research in a local organization, more specifically in a Slovenian birdwatching association. Even though the main part of the research was conducted in proximity of his ‘home’, he experienced similar feelings of alienation and emotional pressure, and difficulties in creating rapport with members of birding ‘tribe’ as Malinowski in Melanesia. The author therefore finds differentiation between ethnography ‘at home’ and ‘abroad’ obsolete. In his opinion new concepts connected to relations between researcher and researched subjects should be used (e.g. fluid interpersonal relations, dynamic cultural settings, complex systems, individual proximity) to describe current methodological and epistemological problems of anthropological research – especially in the field of organizational cultures and subcultures within the broader cultural background. In short, new coordinates of ethnographic research methods which go beyond ‘home’ versus ‘abroad’ and ‘us’ versus ‘others’ should be defined and used in order to return credibility to anthropology as a scientific discipline and ethnography as a research method.

Dan Podjed got his BA in Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Ljubljana in 2004. One year later he was employed at the Department as a research assistant. He carried out his ethnographic research within EuMon project (EU-wide monitoring methods and systems of surveillance for species and habitats of Community int erest; 6th EU Framework Programme). He is also in charge of the successful implementation of MA joint programme in social anthropology Creole. His fields of research are: organisational culture, complex social systems, volunteering, altruism and egoism, cyberanthropology, anthropology of alcohol and alcoholism. His regional interests comprise: Southern and South-Eastern Europe, cyberspace.

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PODOBA Juraj Slovak Academy of Sciences in Bratislava, Slovakia Institute of Ethnology Comenius University in Bratislava, Slovakia Faculty of Social and Economic Sciences [email protected]

‘What Do We Need Now?’: Social Anthropology in the Context of Post-Socialist Academia Two decenia after elimination of the Iron Courton, which had been isolating academic environment in the communist countries from the scientific/intellectual development in the rest of the world, we are still facing the difference in doing ethnology/anthropology on the both sides of former political and ideological division line. Contemporary anthropology represents a multiplicity of research and theoretical approaches. In the case of ethnology/anthropology in the context of post-socialist academia, this fact has a specific quality. The primar question in the on-going dispute, targeting the title of the conference could be formulated in the way, whether the current development of postethnography (post-národopis, post-néprajz, etc.) in the former communist countries, is really oriented towards (sociocultural) anthropology? And what does mean the notion ‘anthropology of Europe’ from methodological perspectives in the context of modern social research, when classical schemes within the discipline have been abandoned and many scholars are looking for new approaches? Using the title of Ernest Gellner´s essay from the beginning of the 1990s, the author is aiming to discuss the current position of ethnology/anthropology within post -socialist academia. He is going to raise questions concerning the relevance of current discussions on ‘anthropology of Europe’; e.g. the relevance of disputes on doing anthropology ‘at home’ and ‘abroad’. The goal of the paper is to overcome such approaches and to go a step ahead in the discussions on methodology of the discipline in the global context, when social scientists are facing actual challenges of changing human society and individual human communities and social groups.

Juraj Podoba is a researcher in the Institute of Ethnology of Slovak Academy of Sciences, Bratislava, where he obtained his doctorate. He was Visiting Lecturer at the Zürich University, Switzerland and Comenius University, Bratislava and a Visiting Fellow at the University of Cambridge, UK. His academic interests are, first, historical issues, including cultural diversity and development in the Carpathians; social, cultural and axiological changes connected with the process of industrialisation in Central Europe; and social processes in agriculture during the period of communist regime. Second, he is interested in issues related to the current period of transition. In this area he focuses on inter-ethnic relations in Eastern Europe and the link between environmental issues and nationalism.

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RAKOWSKI Tomasz University of Warsaw, Poland Institute of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology [email protected]

Local Craft, Theory from Abroad: Extra-Textual Sources in Polish Ethnographies in the Light of Western Methodological Inquiries I would like to focus on some Polish ethnographies written in the years 1960-80 by Jacek Olędzki, Piotr Szacki, and others. As I claim we can find a particular way of seeing ethnographic details in these works. At the same time I would say that the larger part of this ethnographic knowledge was gained thanks to specific skills of noticing and collecting the non-discursive / extra-textual facts during fieldwork. Therefore, a certain craft of participant observation has been developed within the local anthropological tradition. I will try to compare this craft of seeing and understanding ethnographic details with the phenomenological/experiential direction in Western anthropology. Methodological inquiries expressed by Thomas Csordas, Michael Jackson, Kirsten Hastrup, Anne Line Dalsgaard and also by Tim Ingold build a phenomenological framework for understanding people ’s actions. These are usually studies which express clear methodological points. On the contrary, the craft of seeing and understanding ‘social facts’ in Polish ethnographies is rather practiced than written down in the form of methodological claims. Therefore, I will put forward some important questions: Is there anything particular in the Polish tradition of gathering ethnographic material? Can we find anything similar to the phenomenological anthropology from abroad in Polish ethnography? Is there anything comparable in using the extra-textual sources in these two ethnographic traditions?

Tomasz Rakowski is an Assistant Professor at the Institute of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology, University of Warsaw. He has also obtained the qualification of a Medical Doctor from the Warsaw Medical University and works as a physician at an emergency unit in Warsaw and cooperates with the Department of Humanistic Medicine, Warsaw Medical University. He also teaches at the Institute of Polish Culture, University of Warsaw. His research interests comprise cultural dimensions of social trauma, anthropology of poverty, medical anthropology, research methodology, phenomenological anthropology. He has conducted fieldwork in Poland and Mongolia. His book Łowcy, zbieracze, praktycy niemocy. Etnografia człowieka zdegradowanego (Hunters, Gatherers, the Powerless Practicioners. An Ethnograhy of the Degraded Communities) will be published in October 2009.

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REPIČ Jaka University of Ljubljana, Slovenia Department of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology [email protected]

Doing Ethnography at Home – Abroad: On Some Methodological Quandaries of Ethnographic Research Among Slovenes in Argentina and Australia We are rather familiar with the distinction between doing anthropology at home and abroad but often ignore its possible methodological implications. As anthropological textbooks describe similarities and differences in applying ethnographic techniques in either familiar or alien location, this distinction is usually taken for granted. However, in certain migration studies this ‘obvious’ distinction becomes blurred or even highly problematic. Notions of ‘home’, ‘abroad’ and other spatial concepts are contested, highly symbolised and socially constructed categories. Epistemologically, supposedly unproblematic distinction between ethnography at home and abroad is in fact a construct with important methodological implications. I explore these implications by examining ethnological and anthropological literature on Slovene emigration and expatriatism as well as drawing from personal ethnographic experiences among Slovenes in Argentina and Australia. Slovene ethnographers, working in Slovene communities in Argentina, Australia, USA or elsewhere, often structured their research in a way of doing ethnography at home, focusing on migrants’ Slovene national identity and culture as self-evident unproblematic categories and to an extent neglected sociopolitical context in the country of residence. Slovene diasporic communities were often perceived and studied as independent islands, socio-cultural ghettos, even as ‘states within the state’. In a literature on Slovenes abroad, the main questions revolve around the persistence of ‘Slovene-ness’ – Slovene national identity, culture, language, traditions, habits, etc. Being a Slovene abroad is typically analytically understood in a primordial sense, which neglects the fact that Slovene identities are historically, socially, politically and culturally constructed in a diasporic context. It seems methodological approach to this topics partly originates in the problematic fundamental distinction of doing anthropology at home and abroad. Furthermore, organisation of research and posing research question are evidently imbued with the concepts of home and abroad, familiar and alien, own and other culture, etc. The paper presents a critique of primordialistic approach to studying Slovene emigration and explores methodological quandaries of the common epistemological distinction of doing ethnography at home and abroad hence adding to its deconstruction. Jaka Repič is employed as an Assistant Lecturer at the Department of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. He finished his PhD thesis in 2006 and subsequently published a book titled ‘Following the roots’: Transnational migrations between Argentina and Europe (in Slovene only for the time being). He is also co-editor of Places of Encounter: In memoriam Borut Brumen (2007). He teaches: Urban and transnational anthropology, Current trends in social and cultural anthropology, Introduction to methodology, and Ethnology of Australia and Oceania. As an associate fellow, he is involved in a doctoral program of anthropology at the Universidad Miguel Hernández de Elche with a seminar on Migrations and social development. His professional interests include transnational migrations, Slovene diaspora, urban anthropology, interethnic relations and Roma people in Slovenia. He conducted ethnographic fieldwork in Slovenia, Spain (2004) and Argentina (2004-05). His regional interest also lies in Oceania, where he explored internal and transnational migrations and urbanisation (Papua New Guinea 2002-03 and New Zealand 2006-07).

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ROBBINS Jessica C. University of Michigan, USA Department of Anthropology [email protected]

An American in Poland: The Role of Nationality in Ethnographic Research on Aging and Memory My dissertation research focuses on connections between transformations in elderly personhood and changing national and state formations though the study of contemporary practices of memory. While conducting 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Wrocław, Poland, it has become clear to me experiences and narratives of aging in Poland are remarkable for the degree to which they are bound up with the past and future of the Polish nation. When older Poles tell stories about their lives, they fill their narrations with historical details reaching back centuries, often highlighting the suffering of the Polish nation as well as themselves, their kin, and their ancestors. As I am beginning to analyze my data, the nation is emerging as central to any story I will tell about aging in contemporary Poland. Yet I cannot help wondering to what extent my positioning as a young American woman influences these findings. Do older Poles highlight Polish history because they think I need to be taught? Are they drawing on certain stereotypes of Americans in emphasizing or downplaying particular dimensions of their stories? If they were interacting with a young Polish woman, would they gloss over or highlight different times and places? And perhaps most importantly, can these questions be adequately answered? In order to attempt to address this issue, in this paper I will compare data from interviews with data from other sources (e.g., observations of public events, a newspaper series on aging in Poland, short published memoirs) in which my American identity was not a factor, thereby providing an understanding of how ‘insider’ or ‘outsider’ status can affect ethnographic research in Poland.

Jessica Robbins is a PhD candidate in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Michigan. Her research interests include aging, medical anthropology, kinship, memory, and postsocialism. Her current ethnographic research in Wrocław and Poznań, Poland, investigates connections between transformations in elderly personhood and changing national and state formations through the study of contemporary practices of memory. Supported by the Wenner-Gren Foundation, NSF, and several units at the University of Michigan, her research seeks to understand the social creation and unmaking of aging persons that can occur through changes in memory in personal, familial, and national contexts.

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SÁRKÁNY Mihály Hungarian Academy of Sciences in Budapestm Hungary Institute of Ethnology Loránd Eötvös University of Sciences in Budapest, Hungary Department of Cultural Anthropology [email protected]

Fieldwork at Home and Abroad: Personal Reflections As a Hungarian anthropologist I carried out fieldwork in some localities in Hungarian speaking territory. The longest and most profound was my research in Varsány between 19711975 and 2001-2005. I also had the opportunity to do fieldwork in Africa in Rititi, a Kikuyu village in 1993 and 1995. I focused on socio-economic features in both regions, though the historical circumstances were fairly different in these territories. In the lecture I compare these researches with regard to some problems. Some of them are the following: – social distance in fieldwork (positions at the beginning, their changes through interpersonal relations with time, various forms of ‘how to be alien’, is there something such as a European’ background, for example); – the relevance of language; – the relevance of the length of time in the field; – relations after fieldwork; – processual analysis versus conditional analysis, the relevance of the historical context and the problem investigated.

Mihály Sárkány is a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Ethnology, Hungarian Academy of Sciences and Associate Professor at the Department of Cultural Anthropology, Loránd Eötvös University of Sciences, Budapest. His research interests are: theory and method in cultural and social anthropology, economic anthropology, transformation of contemporary Hungarian rural society, East-African societies and cultures. Main publications: Studying peoples in the people´s democracies. Socialist era anthropology in East-Central Europe (coed. 2005); A közösségek közötti csere (Exchange between communitites. In Hungarian; 1998); Kalandozások a 20. századi kulturális antropológiában (Excursions into the cultural anthropology of the 20th centura. In Hungarian, 2000).

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SCHIFFAUER Werner European University Viadrina Frankfurt/Oder, Germany Chair of Comparative Cultural and Social Anthropology [email protected]

De-Localized Knowledge: The Contribution of Migration Studies to Anthropology Clifford Geertz framed the term ‘local knowledge’ to characterize the classical anthropological approach to systems of knowledge and belief. Local knowledge is ‘a mode of giving particular sense to particular things in particular places (things that happen, things to fail to, things that might), such that these noble, sinister, or merely expediant appliances take particular form and have particular impact’ (Geertz, C. Local knowledge New York 1983. Basic Books. 232). To study local knowledge means in other words to analyze the the functional, the socio-structural or the symbolic structural context. Migration, however, confronts us with the problem of delocalized, disembedded, decontextualized knowledge. The relation of knowledge to context is interrupted and fragmented. The paper discusses the challenges of approaching delocalized knowledge for anthropology. It focuses in particular on three questions (1) The management of insecurity; (2) Coping with the de-valuation (3) Re-inventing knowledge.

Werner Schiffauer is a Professor for Comparative Social and Cultural Anthropology Europa-Universität Viadrina Frankfurt/Oder. He studied pedagogics and anthropology at the Free University in Berlin from 1973-1983. From 1983 to 1993 he worked as a lecturer and later senior lecturer at the Johann-Wolfgang-Goethe Universität Frankfurt am Main and from 1993 to 1995 as professor at the Humboldt Universität zu Berlin. He has worked on the transformation of rural and urban Turkey, on labour migration the organization of diversity in European Societies and recently on Islam in Europe. Major Publications: Die Gewalt der Ehre (1983), Die Bauern von Subay – Das Leben in einem türkischen Dorf (1987), Die Migranten aus Subay – Türken in Deutschland: Eine Ethnographie (1991), Fremde in der Stadt – Zehn Essays zu Kultur und Differenz (1997), Die Gottesmänner – Türkische Islamisten in Deutschland (2000), Migration und kulturelle Differenz (2002), Civil Enculturation. Nation-State, School and Ethnic Difference in The Netherlands, Britain, Germany and France (2004, coed. with G. Baumann, R. Kastoryano, und S. Vertovec).

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SCHIPPERS Thomas K. Institute of Mediterranian and Comparative Ethnology in Aix-en-Provence, France [email protected]

Embedded Anthropologists in Europe: An Advantage or an Entanglement? This paper would like to reflect, with the help of some precise national and historical examples, on the benefits but also the limits of socio-cultural closeness between scholars and the people they study. It will try to examine the various (academic, economic, social and even political) benefits and constraints encountered when studying social groups in one ’s more or less familiar environment. The author will advocate ‘appropriate (methodological) distancing’ in order to avoid personal or social (over)entanglement with the society studied. He considers research should not be limited to the (re)production of vernacular discourses and representations, but that it also should include the establishment of ‘thick’ ethnographic facts and data. Instead of opposing empiric and written sources —fieldworkers vs footnote matadors— anthropologists working in Europe should have expertise in using and combing both in their search to establish ethnographic facts and sketch ideas about their meaning(s). A clear outlining of their methodological specificities and competences to produce empirical data could also contribute to improve the scholarly profiling of Europeanist anthropologists in regard to neighbouring (competing….) disciplines like history, archaeology, human geography, sociology or even cultural studies. Here the anthropologist ’s socio-cultural ‘embeddedness’ could be the keen, conscious and dynamic management of closeness and distance, of familiarity and impartiality with those she or he has chosen to study.

Thomas K. Schippers has studied anthropology and ethnology in France in Aix-en-Provence and at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris (PhD 1983). He has done fieldwork in the south of France, the Italian Alps, French Guyana and recently near the Portuguese-Spanish border. His research interest range from ethno-sciences and ecology (pastoralism, time perception, anthropology of space), the study of local identities in France to the methods and concepts of European ethnology (ethno-cartography, history of national anthropological and ethnological schools, ethno-vocabulary). Since the 1990s he has also been involved in various European networks and debates about the present and future on teaching and learning anthropology.

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SCHWELL Alexandra University of Vienna, Austria Department of European Ethnology [email protected]

How Dangerous Is the ‘East’?: On the Political and Medial Instrumentalisation of Eastern Europe in Austria The abolition of border controls in the course of the Schengen enlargement evoked ambivalent reactions on the part of the old member states. They called for compensatory measures, since once again fears and images of ‘the East’ as region of origin of cross-border crime were revived. Drawing on the concepts of securitisation and desecuritisation, the paper argues that the construction of security threats does not necessarily have to relate to their threat potential, but can be instrumentalised and utilised by competing actors for specific aims. Using the example of the Austrian ministry of the interior and the Austrian tabloids, the paper scrutinises how West-European security-political and media actors reacted to the challenges of the 2007 Schengen enlargement. It shows that the tabloids’ securitising strategy proved to be more successful than the ministry’s desecuritising strategy, because the newly emerged context did not support the congruence of the audience’s experiences and the minstry’s speech act. The paper concludes by scrutinizing to what extent the enlargement of the Schengen zone is generally suitable for overcoming the European East-West divide.

Alexandra Schwell is an Assistant Professor at the University of Vienna. She studied European ethnology, sociology and political science at Humboldt University Berlin and Adam Mickiewicz University Poznan. She obtained her PhD from the European University Viadrina Frankfurt (Oder), PhD thesis on the cooperation between German and Polish border guards in the European security field, published by transcript (Europe at the Odra). Research interests: European integration, security, Eastern Europe, border studies. Current research project: ‘The construction of security risks in Austrian and Polish state bureaucracies’.

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SEKERDEJ Kinga Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle/Saale, Germany [email protected] PASIEKA Agnieszka Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle/Saale, Germany [email protected]

Where Does ‘Anti-Churchism’ Begin?: Reflections on Researching Religion ‘at Home’ The hegemonic position of the Roman Catholic Church in Poland is undeniable. What begs the question, however, is whether this implies consequences for academic work on religion generally, and on the Church specifically. We argue that studying and writing about issues related to the Roman Catholic Church in Poland as native anthropologists raises specific problems which involve assumptions of what one should and should not write on this subject. We also ask whether there exist norms and expectations regarding scholarly work and publications on matters connected to the Church. In our presentation we would like to address two problems regarding the research on religion in Poland. Firstly, we discuss which topics can be studied and what seems to be required from a Pole investigating religion; secondly, what can be published afterwards. We would like to focus on these questions by presenting our own fieldwork experience, and moreover we intend to provide some examples of how anthropological and sociological literature in Poland deals with the dominant religion.

Kinga Sekerdej is a research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology. Her research interests include: religion in the public sphere, gender and religion, theories of ethnicity and nationalism. Her present work focuses on the social role of parish based groups. She defended her PhD in sociology at the Jagiellonian University in 2006. It was based on the dissertation The origins of Jewish and Arab nationalism. Agnieszka Pasieka is a PhD student at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology. She has recently completed fieldwork and she currently works on doctoral dissertation, regarding the dynamics of religious pluralism in South-Eastern Poland. Her research interests include: religion and gender, social memory, anthropological concepts of civil society. She defended my MA thesis (Italian mafia in the local reality, in Polish) at the Institute of Sociology, Jagiellonian University.

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SKALNÍK Petr University of Pardubice, Czech Republic Department of Social Sciences [email protected]

Anthropological Re-studies in European Setting: Experience and Visions My paper will address all three themes of the conference with a special emphasis on the first concerning the comparative research perspectives, namely the method of re-studies be it returns of the same researcher after some time to the same locality (Sárkány in Varsány, Hann in Tázlár, Skalník in Šuňava) or re-studies of localities by new researchers after a prolonged period of time (Dolní Roveň 1939, 2002-, Żmiąca 1901, 1951). The re-studies are not only offering a much needed time perspective enabling to follow the development of local society but also can be thrilling experience if the researchers originate from different countries. In the same society it is the tension between the researchers usually coming from urban cultural background to rural, but if the author of the first monograph was a foreigner a re-study by a local anthropologist may give an invaluable insight often dramatically revising the findings of the foreigner (Pitt-Rivers in Spain or Wiley in France). The question of the hierarchy of knowledge comes to the fore along with the differences of approaches by foreign and home researchers. The paper suggests to form a European research project of re-studies which would systematically submit to fieldwork scrutiny localities about which local or foreign anthropologists or sociologists published books but were biased by their methodological or supremacist approaches.

Petr Skalník is a Professor at Department of Social Sciences at University of Pardubice, Czech Republic. He taught at Charles University, Comenius University of Bratislava, University of Leiden and University of Cape Town, and at present teaches social anthropology at universities in Pradubice, Czech Republic, and Wrocław, Poland. He was the Czech ambassador to Lebanon (1992–1997). In 2003 he was elected the vice-president of The International Union of Ethnological and Anthropological Sciences. He is specializing in politics and Africa, his main research topic are: origins of the state, informal types of political power in Africa, post-socialism. He has edited or co-edited: The Early State (1978), The Study of the State (1981), Outwitting the State (1989), The Early Writings of Bronisław Malinowski (1993), A Post-communist Millennium (2002), Anthropology of Europe: Teaching and Research (2004), Political Culture (2004), Studying Peoples in the People’s Democracies (2005), Postsocialist Europe (2009).

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SOKOLEWICZ Zofia University of Warsaw, Poland Institute of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology [email protected] OSTROWSKA Anna M. University of Warsaw, Poland Centre for Europe [email protected]

Authors’ Dilemmas: How the Syllabus of the Anthropology of the New Europe Was Made The changes in Poland that began after 1989 influenced also the relations within and outside academic institutions and altered the ways of seeing and constructing anthropological research. As a result of it a new field of scholarly reflection in anthropology appeared and it was immediately accompanied by the need to develop an appropriate teaching program. In 1992 at the Centre for Europe of the University of Warsaw the first syllabus of this new subject – Anthropology of the New Europe – had been developed. The authors were well aware of the challenge to meet the whole complexity of the new field. Initially, as the cornerstones for t he whole program two groups of problems were recognized. First, was to challenge the tradition of existing educational system, which had been aimed at reproduction of the national identity. The authors therefore took the ‘national state’ as a non-fixed category. The second problem was related to the very changes in the field of anthropology itself (e.g. those following the ‘writing culture’ seminar, which concluded also in the turn to ‘thick description’ or stress on the role of individual). Particularly, in the practice of teaching we had to abandon the ‘heredity of scientific language’ and to turn to categories of everyday commonsense. The two above assumptions proved very fertile and in time resulted in constructing of the new approach to the question of Europe with a stress on the problems of modernity, its uneven distribution within Europe and its export on the outer world. This helped to re-organise the structures of scientific communication between teachers, researcher and students. The aim of the paper is to present and to discuss the problems in defining a new field of study and research (Anthropology of the New Europe) and its development over almost two last decades. Zofia Sokolewicz, Professor Emeritus of the University of Warsaw, Head of the Department of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology of the University of Warsaw (1973-1996), Jean Monnet Lecturer in EU Cultural Policy, fellow of the Polish Academy of Arts and Science. Fieldwork: Poland, Brittany Macedonia and Mongolia. Fields of interest: theory of culture, economic anthropology and anthropology of Europe. Anna M. Ostrowska is an Assistant Professor in Centre for Europe at University of Warsaw. She studied philosophy andcultural anthropology at University of Warsaw and at Amsterdam Center for Comparative European Social Studies. Between 1993 and 1997 worked at Amsterdam School for Social Science Research. Her interests include: economic anthropology, anthropology of Europe, history of theory in anthropology, communication and gender issues.

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VONDERAU Asta Humboldt University Berlin, Germany Department of European Ethnology [email protected]

East or West – Which Home is Best? My paper is based on experiences collected during field research in Lithuania for a now finished PhD project entitled ‘Cultural models of success and good life in the ‚new’ Europe’’. In a self-reflexive bent, I will analyse my relation to the then officially observed ‘brain drain’, i.e. a social phenomenon which emerged in Lithuania with the beginning of post-socialist transformation, and which saw younger Lithuanian scholars returning to their homeland for research purposes after having found their (intellectual) home in the West. I will show how this particular belonging and my state of being both familiar and alienated was perceived by different actors in the field and how it influenced the empirical research undertaken. My main concern certainly is not to essentialize the state of a ‚native ethnographer’; on the contrary, I attempt to critize the prevalent binaries of ‚home/not home’, ‚native/non native’, which may lead to a self-exotization and a narrowing of any analytical perspective. I will underline the multiple belongings of every ethnographer and the situational and contextual character of the notion of ‚home’.

Asta Vonderau is currently employed as a research associate (postdoc position) at the Department of European Ethnology, Humboldt University Berlin. She studied European Ethnology and Scandinavian Studies in Vilnius, Copenhagen and Berlin and was a research associate and project coordinator at the Baltic Sea School Berlin (Department of Northern European Studies) and at the Department of European Ethnology. In 2008 defended her doctoral thesis, Cultural Models of Success and Good Life in the ‘New Europe’. Her research interests are: postsocialist transformation and European integration processes in Europe (with a focus on the Baltic Sea Region), anthropology of policy, anthropology of elites, mobilit y and migration, consumption and lifestyle. She is an author of Leben im ‘neuen Europa’. Konsum, Lebensstile und Körpertechniken im Postsozialismus (Living in a ‘New Europe’. Consumption, Lifestyle and Body in Postsocialism), forthcoming winter 2009.

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WEDEL Janine R. George Mason University in Fairfax County, Virginia, USA School of Public Policy [email protected] Learning from the ‘Alien’: How the Study of Transitional Central and Eastern Europe Helps Illuminate Governance in the United States Today Studying Central and Eastern Europe – and observing how communism really worked and then came undone – has proved an ideal training ground for examining governing, power, and influence in the United States at the dawn of the twenty-first century. In trying to make sense of these arenas in my home country, I have found my experience in the former Eastern Bloc and the work of scholars from the region to be invaluable in three key ways. The first is in analyzing the system. As experience has shown, when a centrally planned state that had owned virtually all the property, companies, and wealth breaks down (and no authoritarian stand-in is put in its place), a network– based mode of governing and business arises to loosely replace it. The state-private nexus becomes the epicenter of governance and policy activity. Governance and policy making in the United States today are not altogether dissimilar: There a new era of blurred boundaries is marked by a great upsurge in contracting out of crucial federal government functions and a proliferation of quasi-government organizations and advisory boards, among other developments, and a resulting fusion (and confusion) of state and private power. Not only do a host of nongovernmental players do the government’s work, often overshadowing government bureaucracy. New institutional forms of governing join the state and the private, permeating virtually all arenas of government. The economic arena now vies for the ‘excellence in blurring’ prize with intelligence, military, and ‘homeland security’ enterprises, where so much action has taken place since 9/11. The second way in which research in transitional Central and Eastern Europe is instructive for dissecting governing, power, and influence in the United States is in the ethnographic focus on the players and networks that operate at the state-private nexus, influencing governing and policy decisions. When command systems unraveled and informal maneuvering was given free reign, self-enfranchising networks and groups, schooled in circumventing bureaucracy, mobilized themselves. They worked the state-private nexus to secure the resources and privileges necessary to further their own goals, whatever they might be. These networks and groups have been variously described as ‘institutional nomads,’ ‘restructuring networks,’ ‘unruly coalitions,’ and ‘clans’ by Polish, Hungarian, Russian, Ukrainian, and American ethnographers and analysts. My observation of institutional nomadic groups and clans has helped me theorize about ‘flex nets’—a new breed of influencers I have identified in the United States and globally. For instance, the flex net that I call the Neocon core, a tight-knit dozen or so players who have been working together for thirty years to remake American foreign policy according to their own vision, helped take the United Stated to war in Iraq through coordinated efforts via their state-private network. Likewise, the financial crisis intensified the interdependency of state and private power, as financial and political policy deciders ‘coincided’ at the highest echelons of power. Like nomadic groups and clans, flex nets operate at the interstices of official and private power, help organize the relationship between them, and thereby forge new forms of power and influence. Finally, ethnographic research in transitional Central and Eastern Europe has provided a basis for reexamining conventional categories and models that guide so much thinking about politics and society. For instance, because ethnographers saw that institutional nomadic groups and clans could not be reduced to ‘lobbyists’ or ‘interest groups,’ they invented their own terms and theories much more suited to analyzing the societies under study. Moreover, by focusing on players and their networks as drivers of governing and policy making, ethnographers laid the groundwork for badly needed critiques of social science categories such as ‘state’ versus ‘private,’ ‘bureaucracy’ versus ‘market,’ and ‘centralized’ versus ‘decentralized.’ These categories often obfuscate, rather than illuminate, the influence of the players. All this is just as true in the United States, and scholars there would do well to learn from this experience. For example, the Neocon core owes its influence at least in part to the ability of its members to test the rules both of the state (those of accountability) and of the private sector (those of competition) and to blur boundaries between bureaucratic and market practices. In short, the kind of ethnographic and anthropological analysis that enabled scholars to deal with the complexity, ambiguity, and messiness of political, policy, and social processes in transitional Central and Eastern Europe is uniquely suited to examine the interactions between public policy and private interests and the mixing of state, nongovernmental, and business forms that are increasingly prevalent in the United States – and around the world. Janine R. Wedel is a Professor at the School of Public Policy, George Mason University, also affiliated in Center for Social Science Research and Department of Sociology and Anthropology, George Mason University. She is the first anthropologist to win the Grawemeyer Award for Ideas Improving World Order (previous award recipients include Mikhail Gorbachev and Samuel Huntington). She has been a pioneer in applying anthropological insights to topics that are typically the terrain of political scientists, economists, or sociologists. After 25 years studying the role of informal systems in shaping communist and post-communist societies, she has also turned her attention to the United States. Her research areas are: anthropology of public policy, corruption, Eastern Europe, foreign aid, governance and privatization of poli cy, social networks. Most important books: The Private Poland: An Anthropologist’s Look at Everyday Life (1986), The Unplanned Society:Poland During and After Communism (1991), Collision And Collusion: The Strange Case of Western Aid to Eastern Europe (2001), Shadow Elite: How the World’s New Power Brokers Undermine Democracy, Government, and the Free Market (2009).

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WOJTYŃSKA Anna University of Iceland [email protected]

Heading the Far North: Polish Migrants in Iceland Iceland was – and to some extend still is – almost non-existing in the consciousness of the Polish majority. People would often confuse it with Ireland. There was no particular picture of this country in the common imaginary. Still, since early 1990s some Polish migrants chose this direction instead of more popular destinations like Germany, Belgium or England. Although this stream is a small percentage of all migrations from Poland, in Iceland, Poles form the biggest foreign group. In January 2009 Polish citizens made 45% of whole foreign nationalities in Iceland. In my presentation I would like to focus on motivations that direct Polish migrants to Iceland. Why they chose this so faraway place? And, why some of them eventually decided to settle in this country?

Anna Wojtyńska has graduated in 2002 at the University of Warsaw. Currently she is a PhD student in Anthropology at the University of Iceland. She is writing dissertation on Polish migrants in Iceland, focusing on transnationalism and migration experiences.

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WULFF Helena University of Stockholm, Sweden Department of Social Anthropology [email protected]

Forms of Familiarity Abroad: Trajectory, Technique and Text of Two Studies in Ireland With a background in dance as a practitioner and a scholar, I was inspired by a television trailer of the Irish dance show Riverdance and its subsequent opening night in Sweden in 1998, to set out on a study of dance, memory and mobility in Ireland. There I learnt about other Irish dance forms that were connected to Ireland´s transition into political independence as well as to the economic upswing of the late 20 th century. When I applied for funding, the Irish referee noted that it was an advantage that I was Swedish rather than English or American. As a part of the research, and out of a longstanding interest in literature, I read contemporary Irish fiction and met with writers. This generated my ongoing study of the literary world in Ireland, which in the past also had a political impact on the formation of Ireland as a nation. In this study, I focus on writers and their work practice, prestige and career patterns, and the local versus the global in a postcolonial age. In this paper, I will discuss different forms of familiarity and some instances of foreignness I have encountered in my field studies. For both studies, I have been going back and forth to Ireland, this is yo -yo fieldwork. I spend most time in Dublin, but I also go to other places around the island where literary events occur which makes for multi-sited fieldwork. During both studies I have presented papers at conferences and seminars in Ireland, and published with Irish, Swedish and other European editors and publishers. It is useful that I am able to operate in English in my field as well as in Irish academia. As to text genres, I have mostly written academic texts in English (journal articles, book chapters and one monograph), some academic texts in Swedish, and a few popular journalistic essays for magazines and a Swedish daily. I have participated in panels on Ireland at the AAA. It goes without saying that I rely to a great extent on Irish scholarship.

Helena Wulff is Professor at the Department of Social Anthropology, Stockholm University. She is Editor (with Dorle Dracklé) of Social Anthropology, the journal of the EASA. Her current research focusses on cultural form in a transnational perspective. Studies on dance and social memory through dance have generated questions in relation to place, mobility and emotions, as well as to visual culture. Her most recent research concerns writing and Irish literature as cultural process and form. Among her books are Ballet across Borders (Berg, 1998), Dancing at the Crossroads (Berghahn, 2007), the edited Youth Cultures (Routledge, 1995, with Vered Amit-Talai) and New Technologies at Work (Berg, 2003, with Christina Garsten), and The Emotions (Berg, 2007).

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ZALEWSKA Joanna Institute of Public Affairs in Warsaw, Poland [email protected]

Usefulness of Multi-Sited Ethnography in the Time of Social Change in Contemporary Poland I would like to discuss relations between local and external traditions in practicing anthropology, as well as local implications of global interdependencies, basing on the example of fieldwork described and analyzed in my PhD thesis. The aim of the research was to understand the experience of old age in contemporary Poland. It occurred that there is change of role and position of the old person in family and in society. There are new and old social practices performed by old people, which coexist in Warsaw, where the fieldwork was conducted. It is possible to distinguish between the old model of experiencing old age where being useful and avoiding idleness are core practices (it locates old age in family and local community), and the new models: active aging (supported by the EU agencies, promotes public activity of the old), aging in leisure culture (promoted by popular culture through media – TV series, TV shows), institutionalizing illness in old age in old people’s homes. These new models to some extent imitate western models, for example of the third age, but often what is imitated is surface, often the models do not imitate the core practices (for example aging in leisure culture in Warsaw does not content consumption which is the crucial practice in western aging in leisure culture, but what is imitated is pursuit for pleasure – this element makes aging in leisure culture similar in Poland and in western countries), they are specific for Poland and rooted in its history. Multi-sited ethnography occurred to be adequate method for fieldwork in contemporary Warsaw because of discontinuity and dispersion of various models of aging in Warsaw. Various communities adapted or preserved various models, multi-sited ethnography allowed to observe processes taking place in various sites. Comparing the coexistence of various models (which are of course concepts – tools for understanding various experiences) with sociological and anthropological studies on old age since before the world war II allowed to grasp the tendencies of change, to understand what is changing and in which direction. First conclusion is that the methodology of multi-sited ethnography, designed by American scholar, is very useful in Warsaw. It means that the theories of global flow, discontinuity are adequate in Poland. On the other hand the theories on the old age developed in the western countries seem not adequate. What does it say about the dichotomy global/local, when the methodology is applicable (universal?) and the diagnosis is specific?

Joanna Zalewska graduated from Graduate School for Social Research, Polish Academy of Science. She was a visiting fellow in Goldsmiths College, University of London, thanks to Marie Curie SocAnth. Currently she is a fellow in the Institute of Public Affairs – a think tank based in Warsaw. Her subject is ageing and old age in anthropological perspective, and social change.

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