Bordering encounters, sociality and distribution of the ability to live a ‘normal life’

Dzenovska, Dace

doi:10.1111/1469-8676.12075

Cited by 29 publications

(25 citation statements)

References 33 publications

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“…Two political messages seem to be clearly articulated through this: first, here is where the EU starts -this is in, there is out; second, look how the material standards are on this side of the border and compare. The restoration of administration buildings, infrastructures, parks and various tourist attractions in Narva seems to convey the sense that belonging to Europe is superior to belonging to Russia, demonstrating how the category of Europe has an enormous discursive force still (Dzenovska 2014).…”

Section: Brokenness Can Be Contagiousmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…A contemporary approach to these phenomena seems to require a more relational and comparative approach, as well as the invention of new terms and categories such as 'children of the new east', 'post-Eastern Europe', and 'geopolitical subjectivity split in half', since the meaning of location, traditions and national identity is being shattered, as well as the self-awareness of being Eastern European and the responsibility of the past. Hence, there is an increasing need to analyse the region in relation to the global present, and not as substantively defined based on past geopolitical vocabulary (Dzenovska 2014;Ivancheva forthcoming).…”

Section: More Cosmopolitan No Less Localmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Remains of the Soviet Past in Estonia

2018

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The FRINGE series explores the roles that complexity, ambivalence and immeasurability play in social and cultural phenomena. A cross-disciplinary initiative bringing together researchers from the humanities, social sciences and area studies, the series examines how seemingly opposed notions such as centrality and marginality, clarity and ambiguity, can shift and converge when embedded in everyday practices. Alena Ledeneva is Professor of Politics and Society at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies of UCL. Peter Zusi is Lecturer at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies of UCL.By adopting the tropes of 'repair' and 'waste', this book innovatively manages to link various material registers from architecture, intergenerational relations, affect and museums with ways of making the past present. Through a rigorous yet transdisciplinary method, Martínez brings together different scales and contexts that would often be segregated out. In this respect, the ethnography unfolds a deep and nuanced analysis, providing a useful comparative and insightful account of the processes of repair and waste making in all their material, social and ontological dimensions.Victor Buchli, Professor of Material Culture at UCL This book comprises an endearingly transdisciplinary ethnography of postsocialist material culture and social change in Estonia. Martínez creatively draws on a number of critical and cultural theorists, together with additional research on memory and political studies scholarship and the classics of anthropology. Grappling concurrently with time and space, the book offers a delightfully thick description of the material effects generated by the accelerated post-Soviet transformation in Estonia, inquiring into the generational specificities in experiencing and relating to the postsocialist condition through the conceptual anchors of wasted legacies and repair. This book defies disciplinary boundaries and shows how an attention to material relations and affective infrastructures might reinvigorate political theory.Maria This is a book about many things. Originally, it appears as a critique of discourses about the past, and yet it unfolds as an ethnography of pastness that deals with the contemporary city, geographies of affect, generational change and materiality. The work interweaves a number of topics related to how physical and cultural wasting are rarely synchronised, accounting for diverse ways of treating inheritances and the different intensities of urban memory that they generate. By studying the material and social afterlife of the Soviet world in Estonia, I attempt to show the dialectical relation between construction and demolition, and how the need to build something new entails the disinvestment and neglect of the legacies from the old regime. With a fringy anthropology, I explore how the vanquishing over the Soviet world happened on a different time scale from the decay of its legacy, allowing for new availabilities, intricate reappropriations and unforeseen opportunities for recuper...

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Section: Brokenness Can Be Contagiousmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: More Cosmopolitan No Less Localmentioning

confidence: 99%

Remains of the Soviet Past in Estonia

2018

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“…Human encounters become sites that challenge state‐based definitions, boundaries and lines of power (between citizen and non‐citizen, for example). Hence, the relationships between border guards and border‐crossers in Latvia are not defined solely by the border regime, but also by particular understandings of public sociality (Dzenovska : 272). These encounters unexpectedly turn into interactions between subjects who are not merely defined in terms of state belonging, but also as people in search of a ‘normal life’ (Dzenovska ).…”

Section: Alternative Socialities With the ‘Other’mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Hence, the relationships between border guards and border‐crossers in Latvia are not defined solely by the border regime, but also by particular understandings of public sociality (Dzenovska : 272). These encounters unexpectedly turn into interactions between subjects who are not merely defined in terms of state belonging, but also as people in search of a ‘normal life’ (Dzenovska ). Interactions between the indigenous population and newcomers incorporate and expand culturally shaped patterns of sociality.…”

Section: Alternative Socialities With the ‘Other’mentioning

confidence: 99%

Socialities of solidarity: revisiting the gift taboo in times of crises

Rozakou

2016

Social Anthropology

135

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This article addresses solidarity and the opening of social spaces in the relations between refugees and residents of Greece who try to help them. ‘Socialities of solidarity’ materialise alternative worldviews; they are loci for the production of lateral relationships; places inhabited by the prospects that derive from the political production of sociality. The article discusses the ‘gift taboo’, dominant in the pre‐crisis era, that reflects the risks of giving to the formation of horizontal relationships. In the contemporary ‘European refugee crisis, and other crises, the gift taboo has collapsed, posing challenges to the egalitarian visions of sociality.

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“…The turn towards the study of diplomatic sites as promoted by Neumann paves the way for a study of existing forms of everyday diplomacy. The sites of everyday diplomacy, again, are multiple, including neighbourhoods (Bryant 2016); container markets (Humphrey and Skvirskaja 2009); picnics (Marsden and Ibañez-Tirado 2015); checkpoints (Reeves 2014); or state border offices (Dzenovska 2014). Everyday diplomacy thus emerges not only from the embodied practice and etiquette of mediating encounters with various others, but also from particular spatial and material configurations that, in particular conjunctions, enable the processes of mediation and mediated exchanges to actually unfold between different actors, assemblages or groupings across political, cultural and geopolitical divides.…”

Section: Re-scaling Diplomatic Sitesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Hospitality as Diplomacy in Post- Cosmopolitan Urban Spaces Dervish Lodges and Sofra-Diplomacy in Post-War Bosnia-Herzegovina

Henig¹

2016

The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology

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If the first step in developing an ethnography of everyday diplomacy requires re-scaling analytical focus on the forms of mediated exchange beyond the realm of the nation-state, this needs to be followed by an exploration of the 'sites' where everyday diplomacy actually takes place. One such 'site', which epitomizes the quintessence of diplomatic practice, is dining and commensality. By re-scaling this axiom beyond state-level diplomacy, I explore how the notion of sofra [table/dining etiquette] is deployed by a Muslim Dervish brotherhood in a post-cosmopolitan town in post-war Bosnia-Herzegovina. I suggest that the notion of sofra embodies both a mode of being diplomatic as well as a site of everyday diplomacy. The sofra thus enables the brotherhood to stage 'events of hospitality' to forge and mediate relationships between various 'others', locally and transnationally. interested in the other-worldly matters and Islamic healing and dreaming, he was told by his fellow villagers that he might witness some miracles in the lodge. The boy was warmly welcomed and taken to the room, with comfortable sofas covered by ram skins and embroiled pillows, where the sheikh usually received guests. The boy was immediately seated by one of the dervish disciples at the nearest corner of the sofa facing the sheikh, which is reserved for honoured guests. He was offered hot and cold drinks and a snack made of biscuits and fruits. The refreshments were served on the sofra 1 that had been spread between him and the sheikh. This gesture of hospitality, bringing the boy and the sheikh to the sofra, made the boy more relaxed. With increasing confidence he asked: 'Is it true that you can make the Qu'ran levitate when you are reciting from the book?'. The sheikh smiled, sipped from his glass of tea, encouraged the boy to eat something from the sofra and replied: 'Making the Qu'ran levitate? That's nothing. It's more comfortable to make my heavy body levitate over the Qu'ran when I am reciting from the book, don't you think so? Unfortunately, I am not in the mood today so you will need to come another time'. Everyone in the room apart from the boy, who was still hoping to see something miraculous, laughed. Then the sheikh started asking the boy questions about the village and a number of villagers whom he seemed to know.The boy, evidently perplexed by both the response as well as the sheikh's detailed knowledge of his own village and individual villagers, a kind of miracle [keramet] as well, answered all questions and left the lodge. To my knowledge he has never come back.Here I am less concerned about the details of the boy, as his story is not entirely unique in the social life in the lodge -on the contrary. Over the years of my fieldwork in the lodge I have become accustomed to such guests, diverse categories of individuals, coming from the town, surrounding villages and further afield. The questions they seek the sheikh to answer concern miraculous healing, and making and writing amulets [zapis]. Although the sheikh did not perform 3...

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Bordering encounters, sociality and distribution of the ability to live a ‘normal life’

Cited by 29 publications

References 33 publications

Remains of the Soviet Past in Estonia

Remains of the Soviet Past in Estonia

Socialities of solidarity: revisiting the gift taboo in times of crises

Hospitality as Diplomacy in Post- Cosmopolitan Urban Spaces Dervish Lodges and Sofra-Diplomacy in Post-War Bosnia-Herzegovina

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