Ethnographies of Grey Zones in Eastern Europe

Description

A riveting exploration that brings forth new conceptualizations of everyday life and uncertainty in Eastern Europe.

Over the last two decades, Eastern Europe has experienced extensive changes in geo-political relocations and relations. Attempts to establish liberal democracies, re-orientations from planned to market economics, and a desire to create ‘new states’ and internationally minded ‘new citizens’ has left some in poverty, unemployment and social insecurity, leading them to rely on normative coping and semi-autonomous strategies for security and social guarantees. Such processes testify to a paradoxical situation between the political attempts to create well-functioning, modern civil societies, and the reliance on normative laws on the margins of society.

This anthology explores aspects of everyday uncertainty, which are defined as ‘grey zones’. Within anthropology, grey zones have been conceived of in relation to political corruption and zones of ambiguity related to violence. Yet, the authors propose to expand the term to include situations where uncertainty and ambiguity have become part and parcel of everyday life and where the indefinable defines the situation. This book views these various grey zones not merely as legacies of socialism but as something in and of themselves; thus it deploys the notion of grey zones in order to find new ways of approaching and conceptualizing current situations in Eastern Europe, ways that are not preconfigured in terms of post-socialism or transition.

1. Introduction: What Is a Grey Zone and Why is Eastern Europe One? (Martin Demant Frederiksen and Ida Harboe Knudsen); 2. Living in the Grey Zones: When Ambiguity and Uncertainty Are the Ordinary (Frances Pine); 3. Between Starvation and Security: Poverty and Food in Rural Moldova (Jennifer R. Cash); 4. Brokering the Grey Zones: Pursuits of Favours in a Bosnian Town (Čarna Brković); 5. Good Neighbours and Bad Fences: Everyday Polish Trading Activities on the EU Border with Belarus (Aimee Joyce); 6. Bosnian Post-Refugee Transnationalism: A Grey Zone of Potentiality (Maja Halilovic-Pastuovic); 7. “Homeland is Where Everything Is for the People”: The Rationale of Belonging and Citizenship in the Context of Social Uncertainty (Kristina Šliavaitė); 8. Invisible Connections: On Uncertainty and the (Re)production of Opaque Politics in the Republic of Georgia (Katrine Bendtsen Gotfredsen); 9. The Lithuanian “Unemployment Agency”: On Bomžai and Informal Working Practices (Ida Harboe Knudsen); 10. The Last Honest Bandit: Transparency and Spectres of Illegality in the Republic of Georgia (Martin Demant Frederiksen); 11. Making Grey Zones at the European Peripheries (Sarah Green); 12. Coda: Reflections on Grey Theory and Grey Zones (Nils Bubandt); Index

Sujets

• POLITICAL SCIENCE
• World
• European

Informations

• Publié par: Anthem Press
• Date de parution: 15 avril 2015
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781783084357
• Langue: English

Extrait

Ethnographies of Grey Zones in Eastern Europe
ANTHEM SERIES ON RUSSIAN, EAST EUROPEAN AND EURASIAN STUDIES
Anthem Series on Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies publishes original research on the economy, politics, sociology, anthropology and history of the region. The series aims to promote critical scholarship in the field, and has built a reputation for uncompromising editorial and production standards. The breadth of the series reflects our commitment to promoting original scholarship on Russian and East European studies to a global audience.
Series Editor
Balázs Apor – Trinity College Dublin, Ireland
Editorial Board
Bradley F. Abrams – President, Czechoslovak Studies Association, USA Jan C. Behrends – Zentrum für Zeithistorische Forschung, Potsdam, Germany Dennis Deletant – University College London, UK Tomasz Kamusella – University of St Andrews, UK Walter G. Moss – Eastern Michigan University, USA Arfon Rees – University of Birmingham, UK Marshall T. Poe – University of Iowa, USA Maria Todorova – University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA
Ethnographies of Grey Zones in Eastern Europe
Relations, Borders and Invisibilities
Edited by Ida Harboe Knudsen and Martin Demant Frederiksen
Anthem Press An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company www.anthempress.com
This edition first published in UK and USA 2015 by ANTHEM PRESS 75–76 Blackfriars Road, London SE1 8HA, UK or PO Box 9779, London SW19 7ZG, UK and 244 Madison Ave #116, New York, NY 10016, USA
Copyright © 2015 Ida Harboe Knudsen and Martin Demant Frederiksen editorial matter and selection; individual chapters © individual contributors
The moral right of the authors has been asserted.
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Exploring the Grey Zones : Governance, Conflict and (In)security in Eastern Europe (Conference) (2013 Denmark) Ethnographies of grey zones in Eastern Europe : relations, borders and invisibilities / edited by Ida Harboe Knudsen and Martin Demant Frederiksen. pages cm. – (Anthem series on Russian, East European and Eurasian studies) “The volume is based on the international conference “Exploring the Grey Zones: Governance, Conflict and (In)security in Eastern Europe”, which was held at Aarhus University in Denmark on 1-2 November 2013.” Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-78308-412-8 (hard back : alk. paper) – ISBN 978-1-78308-413-5 (paper back : alk. paper) – ISBN978-1-78308-414-2 (pdf ebook) – ISBN 978-1-78308-435-7 (epub ebook) 1. Post-communism–Europe, Eastern. 2. Informal sector (Economics)–Europe, Eastern. 3. Europe, Eastern–Economic conditions–1989- 4. Europe, Eastern–Social conditions–1989- 5. Europe, Eastern–Politics and government–1989- I. Knudsen, Ida Harboe. II. Frederiksen, Martin Demant, 1981- III. Title. HN380.7.A8E97 2013 306.09437’09049–dc23 2015003721
ISBN-13: 978 1 78308 412 8 (Hbk) ISBN-10: 1 78308 412 X (Hbk)
ISBN-13: 978 1 78308 413 5 (Pbk) ISBN-10: 1 78308 413 8 (Pbk)
Cover photo © 2015 Martin Demant Frederiksen
This title is also available as an ebook.
CONTENTS Chapter 1 Introduction: What Is a Grey Zone and Why Is Eastern Europe One? Martin Demant Frederiksen and Ida Harboe Knudsen
PART I
RELATIONS
Chapter 2
Living in the Grey Zones: When Ambiguity and Uncertainty are the Ordinary Frances Pine
Chapter 3
Between Starvation and Security: Poverty and Food in Rural Moldova Jennifer R. Cash
Chapter 4
Brokering the Grey Zones: Pursuits of Favours in a Bosnian Town Čarna Brković
PART II
BORDERS
Chapter 5
Good Neighbours and Bad Fences: Everyday Polish Trading Activities on the EU Border with Belarus Aimee Joyce
Chapter 6
Bosnian Post-refugee Transnationalism: A Grey Zone of ‘Potentiality’ Maja Halilovic-Pastuovic
Chapter 7
‘Homeland Is Where Everything Is for the People’: The Rationale of Belonging and Citizenship in the Context of Social Uncertainty Kristina Šliavaitė
PART III
INVISIBILITIES
Chapter 8
Invisible Connections: On Uncertainty and the (Re)production of Opaque Politics in the Republic of Georgia Katrine Bendtsen Gotfredsen
Chapter 9
The Lithuanian ‘Unemployment Agency’: On Bomžai and Informal Working Practices Ida Harboe Knudsen
Chapter 10
The Last Honest Bandit: Transparency and Spectres of Illegality in the Republic of Georgia Martin Demant Frederiksen
PART IV
BROADER PERSPECTIVES
Chapter 11
Making Grey Zones at the European Peripheries Sarah Green
Chapter 12
Coda: Reflections on Grey Theory and Grey Zones Nils Bubandt
List of Contributors
Index
Chapter 1
INTRODUCTION: WHAT IS A GREY ZONE AND WHY IS EASTERN EUROPE ONE?
Martin Demant Frederiksen and Ida Harboe Knudsen
The concept of grey zones, which is the unifying concept of this volume, is probably most well known from Primo Levi’s account of his experiences in a Nazi concentration camp during World War II. In The Drowned and the Saved (1988) he describes the confusion and ambiguity experienced by those arriving at a concentration camp. Contrary to the expectations of the newcomers, such places were not split into neatly decipherable blocs of victims and perpetrators. This was due to the existence of a hybrid class of ‘prisoner-functionaries’: fellow inmates who, in order to secure their own survival, assisted SS officers in both mundane and brutal ways. Levi describes how ‘the “we” lost its limits, the contenders were not two, one could not discern a single frontier but rather many confused, perhaps innumerable frontiers, which stretched out before us’ (1988, 37). For those who experienced the atrocities of the camps, this disrupted the common tendency to separate good from evil, and as Levi notes, those who have since sought to understand and describe the camps have encountered the same difficulty. The Lager , as Levi calls the concentration camp, is a grey zone in which ‘the two camps of masters and servants both diverge and converge. This grey zone possesses an incredibly complicated internal structure and contains within itself enough to confuse our need to judge’ (Levi 1988, 42; see also Petropoulos and Roth 2005).
As Javier Auyero has argued in relation to Levi’s writings, the ‘grey zone’ stands forth as a zone of ambiguity that severely challenges pervasive polarities such as we/they, friend/enemy and good/evil – what Levi refers to as the ‘Manichean tendency, which shuns half-tints and complexities […] prone to reduce the river of human occurrences to conflicts, and the conflicts to duels – we and they’ (Levi, quoted in Auyero 2007, 32). For Primo Levi, Auyero asserts, the grey zone is an actual physical space, the concentration camp, but also just as much a conceptual tool that warns us against rigid or even misleading dichotomies. The grey zone here is ‘both an empirical object and an analytical lens that draws our attention toward a murky area where normative boundaries dissolve’ (Auyero 2007, 32). It is this conceptualisation of the grey zone that forms the premise of the present volume. The chapters that follow depict grey zones that are much more quotidian than the zones of terror described by Primo Levi. Yet, when read together these chapters are united in approaching the grey zone as something that can be both a concrete geographical space or object and also an analytical approach to understanding a given area or situation marked by ambiguity or porous boundaries. The chapters illuminate the ways in which grey zones have come to define, disrupt or create various forms of borders, relations and invisibilities in contemporary Eastern Europe. The volume consists of ethnographic explorations of grey zones in Lithuania, Poland, Belarus, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Moldova, Greece, Albania, Turkey and Georgia, along with chapters that assess the region at large, and a final chapter that considers the notion of grey zones – as it is developed throughout the book – beyond Eastern Europe.
The volume is based on the international conference ‘Exploring the Grey Zones: Governance, Conflict and (In)security in Eastern Europe’, which was held at Aarhus University in Denmark on 1–2 November 2013. For this conference we made an open call for participants to submit papers dealing with ethnographic depictions of various forms of uncertainty, ambiguity and turbidity in present-day Eastern Europe. We proposed that sociopolitical changes in the region within the last two decades have been so plentiful that they in themselves have become a permanent stage of being with no end point in sight. Transition has become its own goal; to this extent the idea of transition has lost its entire meaning along the way. Our attempt with this conference was to overcome the problematic fact that, despite criticisms from the field of social science, such unsettled