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- Convenors:
-
Carna Brkovic
(University of Mainz)
David Henig (Utrecht University)
- Discussant:
-
Don Kalb
(University of Bergen)
- Stream:
- History, politics and urban studies
- Location:
- A106
Short Abstract:
We invite contributors to trace ethnographically the notions of humanity/humanness, and the moral registers they entail, in humanitarianism, charity, or human rights activism, to locate the zones of encounters, contests or mediation between them across different scales/contexts in Eastern Europe.
Long Abstract:
This panel explores the political positionings and uses of the concepts of 'humanity' and 'humanness' in Eastern Europe. These concepts have proliferated over the past quarter of century since the disintegration of the socialist ecumene across the region with the rise of the humanitarian agendas. Yet only little has been ethnographically researched about how 'humanity' is defined and used on different scales in Eastern European contexts. Humanity/humanness constitute a part of an everyday routine and vernacular forms of moral imagination (e.g. merhamet, or čovjekoljublje in BiH). They can also be located in the vocabularies and practices of the international humanitarian aid 'industry', and in the attempts to push the state to adopt human rights laws. The mushroomed humanitarian workers, volunteers in religious charities, human rights activists, and a wide array of other actors engaged in doing the good often claim that fellow-humans constitute the 'target' of their activities rather than categorical targets such as refugees, religious groups, citizens. Yet such claims are not innocent. The (seemingly apolitical) concept of humanity can be seen as a 'site of governance' where different ideas about humanity 'find concrete expression in the governing work that operationalizes those ideas to produce order, prosperity, and security' (Ticktin and Feldman 2010). In this panel we invite contributors to trace ethnographically the multiple notions of humanity/humanness, and the moral registers they entail, in order to locate the zones of encounters, contests or mediation between them across different scales and contexts in Eastern Europe.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Marek Mikuš (Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology)
Paper short abstract:
Human rights discourse is central to the ongoing 'Europeanisation' of disability policy in Serbia, but the reform has been uneven and contested. Appeals to human rights are being mobilised in struggles over public resources between various kinds of civil society organisations working on disability.
Paper long abstract:
Appeals to human rights and international law that codifies them are central to the ongoing 'Europeanisation' of policies toward disabled people in Serbia. Government documents and reform advocates describe it as a shift from a paternalist 'medical model of disability' to a rights-based 'social model of disability.' The emphasis is now on non-discrimination and equality of disabled people and their full integration into the society, including the labour market. However, given the implementing capacities of the Serbian state and the condition of the economy and physical infrastructure, this ideological shift has remained a promise rather than a reality. As protests of disabled people in 2011 revealed, it is also largely out of tone with their actual acute problems. Still, human rights discourse has become a symbolic marker mobilised in the struggles over limited public resources for civil society organisations dealing with disability issues. Professionalised NGO-type organisations use it differentiate themselves from what they call 'traditional' associations of disabled people, which they characterise as obsolete, inefficient and often corrupt, and to bolster their own demands for changes in funding policies that would privilege them over the former. However, the stereotypes about 'traditional' associations do not adequately describe a more differentiated and dynamic reality. In general, the shift to a rights-based disability discourse and policy has been uneven, contested and, in the current Serbian context, marred by a worrying association with the neoliberal rhetoric of individual self-reliance.
David Henig (Utrecht University)
Paper short abstract:
This paper focuses on the rise of soup kitchens in Bosnia-Herzegovina, and explores the workings of soup kitchens as: i) sites where ethics of immediacy addressing social justice 'here and now' can be located, and ii) sites of imagination and thinking anew about politics, economy and care.
Paper long abstract:
In Bosnia-Herzegovina, thousands of citizens rely daily on soup kitchens. Whereas in the years of the war in the 1990s and its immediate aftermath soup kitchens were one of the many sites of the international humanitarian interventions, nowadays they are largely maintained through more localised means and impulses of care and help. This signals a shift towards the grassroots redistribution and circulation of resources in running soup kitchens. Today, the soup kitchens are financed by the Cantonal governments, supported by volunteer labour, food provisions from villages, small donations from individuals, entrepreneurs, business companies, and local or religious communities, all of which are inspired by different giving impulses and moralities of care. These include Catholic and Islamic organisations along with the Red Cross, and local non-governmental organisations. In this paper I move beyond the discourses on humanitarianism and philanthropy as an analytical proxy in tracing the impulses of giving and care, and suggest we conceive of these impulses as instances of everyday ethics of care for fellow human beings instead. Specifically, I focus on the vernacular notion of 'merhamet' that Bosnians of different walks of life associate with human qualities, affective registers, and aesthetics of action to act good-heartedly in the world. Specifically I trace ethnographically how the notion of 'merhamet' is used in the context of three soup kitchens as an instance of the ethics of immediacy (Mittermaier 2014) addressing the future-oriented imaginings of social justice in the world 'here and now'.
Carna Brkovic (University of Mainz)
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores vernacular universalistic understanding of 'humanness' in Bosnia and Herzegovina, in which a 'human being' is an apolitical, layered moral project that needs to be developed through hard work that could take a lifetime.
Paper long abstract:
This paper explores understandings of 'humanness' articulated in a TV show and by my interlocutors in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BH). The TV show transposed local ideas about what constitutes a human being (čovjek) into a coherent media narrative and it directly intervened in the organization of humanitarian actions across BH, by connecting people who needed humanitarian aid with donors.
The narrative suggests that a 'human being' is a layered moral project that needs to be developed through hard work that could take a lifetime. Gender, nationality, age, and other vectors of power are in this vernacular, universalistic concept of humanity understood as layers under which one's human core is located. Although such ideas about who and what constitutes a 'human' potentially could be stretched to include all of the people in the world, thus purporting to be universal, they contained traces of philosophical movements developed during the SFR Yugoslavia and they reflected the concerns of the post-war, post-socialist, Dayton BH.
For instance, the host of the TV show and his guests resolutely claimed their humanitarian activities were not political. Instead, their narrative presented politicians as those who were presumably obsessed with people's sense of ethno-national belonging, and 'us' as those concerned with helping fellow humans to survive, irrespective of their ethnicity, nationality, gender, age, and other layers which envelope the human essence in this understanding of humanness. The paper explores how such attempts of depoliticization 'from below' relate to the more global anti-political claims of international humanitarianism.