EASA, 2006: EASA06: Europe and the world
Bristol, UK, 18/09/2006 – 21/09/2006
(W100)
Eastern Europe as a field of anthropological enquiry (roundtable)
Location Wills 3.31
Date and Start Time 19 Sep, 2006 at 18:30
Convenor
Michal Buchowski (University of Poznan)
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Short Abstract
Various scholarly traditions have created different pictures of Eastern Europe. We will examine how context dependent is anthropological knowledge production of and in this region, and what kind of academic relations have emerged in this field of study.
Long Abstract
Eastern Europe has been studied by both anthropologists from outside Europe, from Western Europe and by indigenous scholars themselves. This has created a complex situation in which various groups of researchers have produced different pictures of the societies living in this area. The multiplicity of views represented by these various clusters of experts should generate not only a voluminous body of ethnographic materials, but also comprise an ideal groundwork for insightful anthropological interpretations. However, several specialists claim that Eastern European anthropology has not managed to establish itself as an influential sub-field within the discipline. We will discuss whether this is the case and if so, what has brought about this state of affairs? If this is not the case, what has given rise to such views? The debate should therefore address the research agenda of these various scholarly traditions, the particular understandings of what anthropology in this region is all about, what is universal and also what is particular to doing anthropology of and in Eastern Europe. Since 1989 many studies about this region have been carried out within the framework of post-socialism. Now one must ultimately question whether this intellectual practice was, or still is, theoretically fertile. Attempts have also been made to compare the post-socialist condition with other historical developments. Which ones and to what extent can these studies be substantiated? Furthermore, can we, for instance, draw parallels between post-socialist and post-colonial scholarship? The latter point brings us back to the anthropological enterprise itself, namely, to the issue of whether a flow of ideas and convergence of research paradigms is occurring that enables scholars examining Eastern Europe and living and working in Eastern Europe to work together. But is this mutual partnership or is it colonization involving hierarchies of knowledge based on relations of power within academia?
Chair: Michal Buchowski
Papers
Challenges in the field
Long Abstract
Ethnographic regions are rather arbitrarily defined objects. Heuristically it may be worth examining successes and failures of recent anthropological research in the area. These point to a need for interdisciplinary collaborations. I will focus on the nature of new training initiatives.
Contribution
Long Abstract
In this presentation I explore the complicity of anthropology and East-Central Europeanness to consider the roles of anthropologists in the academe both at home and elsewhere. Through a careful reading of previously published articles and chapters on anthropology in Europe, I argue that anthropology is both marginalised by the outside as well as the inside (ourselves). I consider how different anthropological schools must work in unison in order to have important implications for a new European anthropology. I situate my examination of Hungarian anthropology in a broader context by considering how anthropology of the East-Central European kind produces knowledge about anthropology at home and anthropology about home,and what effect such enterprise may have on anthropological development in general.
Contribution
Long Abstract
There seem to be several sets of questions embedded here, which could be untangled through discussion. One is concerned with the region of 'eastern Europe', and old debates about representation, othering, and orientalism (who can and should 'speak for' whom?). A second strand of questions, with more of a practice bent, follows research training, collaborations, and the object of research itself, in the area. Some very important and critical questions can be raised in this context about methods and training, and about collaborations across disciplines and countries. The third general problematic, which in some
ways I find the most intellectually interesting, is concerned with appropriate tools of analysis for the the history and political economy of the region: is postsocialist still an appropriate term, or do arguments coming from postcolonial studies have as much or more to say? Or is it perhaps time to stop thinking in terms of local histories and lived worlds which must always be defined in relation to some ideological past?
Contribution
Long Abstract
I will argue that anthropology needs alliances in central and eastern europe that will allow it to become a cosmopolitan social science and not a regional specialism. Folklore is very probably not such an ally. I will discuss present weaknesses of the anthropology of postsocialism and will claim that a closer focus at the issues at stake in the revitalized conjunction of anthropology and history, in particular in the light of current neoliberal globalizations and new imperialisms, could help to envision improvements of substance and tactics.
Post-socialism as a field of scientific enquiry
Long Abstract
The contribution will offer a critical reading of the rapidly spawning post-socialist literature and argue that post-socialist studies seem to have adopted a research agenda that is closely reminiscent of that in classical, modernist social and cultural anthropology, thus presenting a specific epistemological "regression" to a type of "realism" in an emergent problem field.