Paper short abstract:

This paper analyses the Italian minority community living on the island of Lošinj, Croatia. I analyse how emotions are relevant in the private story-telling of past memories and how, in a context where Croatian nationalism is quite relevant, these hidden identity discourses rarely become public

Paper long abstract:

This paper analyses the Italian minority community living on the island of Lošinj, Croatia. I analyse how emotions are relevant in the private story-telling of past memories and how, in a context where Croatian nationalism is quite relevant, these hidden identity discourses rarely become public outside of the realms of the family and the minority community.

The theoretical framework of the research is drawn on complementary fields, including emotion studies, studies of identity formation and political conflict and studies on memory and rhetoric. My focus on emotions is based on three levels of analysis: emotions as discourses, embodied experience and performative acts.

The island of Lošinj is part of the Kvarner Region, an area barely studied by anthropologists. In 1922 the Italian fascist government took power and ruled for almost twenty years, violently oppressing the Croatian population. At the end of April 1945, these places were incorporated into communist Yugoslavia. From 1945 to 1955, in a context of violent ethnic revenge, 80-90% of the Italians decided or were forced to leave, mainly to Italy, but also to the United States and Australia. Since then, both in communist Yugoslavia and the more recent Croatian state, the remaining Italians have often been discriminated against.

Ethnographic fieldwork has investigated the stories that are transmitted through members of families across the generations. The stories, although they can be about tiny episodes of everyday life, are symbolic of past and current attempts, failures and successes of coexistence between the Croatian and Italian ethnic groups.

Paper short abstract:

The paper will analyse some shots taken by the author in the Sarajevo area during the last political elections held on October 1, 2006. The aim will be to highlight different concepts of the political space expressed by the main political actors during their electoral activity.

Paper long abstract:

The paper will consider the last political elections as a symptomatic event: revealing:

1) Ethnocultural boundaries between the main national groups created and marked by the ethno-nationalist parties manipulating cultural elements (such as alphabets) used in electoral jumbos and pamphlets. Cultural boundaries, in this case, try to turn the administrative boundaries drawn by the Dayton peace agreement into a line of cleavage. According to this strict monoethnic logic citizens choose with their vote which national, political and territorial side they are on.

2) (Geo)Political borders perceived and held between Bosnia-Herzegovina and EU.

Inclusion of Bosnia-Herzegovina in the political and economic space of EU is linked to the successful transition to democratization. In the electoral period, the use of the right to vote is presented by the International organizations such as OSCE as the key to this process. Through the use of an evolutionist rhetoric, the political propaganda directed by foreigners, presents the high rate of abstensionism as a proof of Bosnian political backwardness on the way towards Europeanization.

3) Socio-economic borders highlighted by civilians movements such as DOSTA! (Enough!) who denounce material discrimination following trans-ethnic criteria.

Ethnonationalist arguments are here seen as a political trick to obscure the division line between a corrupted political and economical elite and the Bosnian society at large - the social victims of the wartime and of the collapse of the socialist political system (unemployed people, women, displaced persons, Roma etc...,).

Paper short abstract:

How do memories of the programmatically anti-bourgeois Soviet state shape present-day notions and practices of citizenship? How do these notions and practices relate to contemporary political realities and social movements in other parts of the world? Addressing these questions, my paper investigates the cognitions and experiences of citizenship among the Tushetians, a transhumant ethnic group traditionally settled in the Georgian Highlands on the borderland to Chechnya and Dagestan. By analyzing cognitive data obtained from rankings and pile sortings concerning the meaning of places like schools, roads, churches, hospitals etc. for citizenship, I reflect on the way the state is inscribed in landscape.

Paper long abstract:

As in many other languages, the Georgian word for "citizenship" refers to the city as a place and to bourgeois values as the underlying class culture. What kind of meaning does it convey, then, to members of the Georgian nation state living in remote rural regions? How do memories of the programmatically anti-bourgeois Soviet state shape present-day notions and practices of citizenship? How do these notions and practices relate to contemporary political realities and social movements in other parts of the world?

Addressing these questions, my paper investigates the cognitions and experiences of citizenship among the Tushetians, a transhumant ethnic group traditionally settled in the Georgian Highlands on the borderland to Chechnya and Dagestan. By analyzing cognitive data obtained from rankings and pile sortings, I reflect on the way the state is inscribed in landscape. In a historical excursus, I address transmitted experiences of the state or proto-states during two periods: the feudal 18th century, and the Soviet 20th century. The Soviet period is evoked by the results of questionnaire interviews conducted during my fieldwork in 2007.

The findings point at transnational forms of citizenship and call for a nuanced and differentiated conceptualization of notions like state, nation, citizenship and their respective relations. They also question a myth reiterated by Western political scientists and Georgian social analysts alike, according to which the Georgians were alienated from the state for almost 200 years, due to Russian, later Soviet colonialism.

Paper long abstract:

The aim of this paper is to attempt to understand how the movement of people through a political border, a dictated cultural divide, defines a space where questions of 'legitimate/illegitimate existence' are posed, manipulated and fought upon. By focusing at the ways the inhabitants of both sides of the Greek-Albanian border and the corresponding state apparatuses have dealt with those that have been crossing the state lines outside the official paths, I intend to bring forward the transformations of discourses on legitimacy/illegitimacy; transformations that ultimately point at the complex relations between the presumed marginality of the border zone and the equally presumed ubiquity of the (nation)-state. Furthermore, besides the afore mentioned relations, or rather on the side of it, is important to attempt to reassess the role of anthropologists in creating yet another border zone, that of the ethnographic fieldwork, which also has to come in terms with the same basic questions -where the border is, or rather where the border stops.

Paper short abstract:

The paper explores the "reconstruction of property" in postsocialist Romania through the investigation of the policies concerning Jewish properties. I show how the process of reprivatisation intersects with “ethno-national” political discourses and projects.

Paper long abstract:

Like most of the Central and Eastern European countries, Romania put in place restitution policies after the collapse of the communist regime. However, the first restitution laws privileged certain categories, while excluding the non-citizens (emigrants who had lost or renounced their citizenship), the non-residents (citizens of a state who reside abroad), the formers owners dispossessed before 1945, and the so-called "religious and ethnic minorities".

While most political leaders have justified the legal cut-offs by a necessary limitation of restitution due to budget constraints, others have explained this agenda by using "national" (or nationalistic) arguments. Their arguments are often built around the idea of "Romanianess": they claim that the government should have implemented in Romania "ethnos"-based restitution policies. "A country is a living organism. If we cut it into pieces, in concert with the foreigners, we will offend God…" (says a member of the nationalistic Great Romania Party).

My research aims to give an answer to the following questions: how the process of reprivatisation intersects with "ethno-national" political discourses and projects? Is this "ethnification" of restitution policies (Offe 1997) seen as legitimate not only by some of the politicians, but also by their potential voters?

My research is based on a field-work conducted in Bucharest, Romania (2004 - 2007), in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, Israel (2006, 2008) and on research in the archives.

Paper short abstract:

This paper deals with theoretical and methodological issues concernig migration in the Greek-Albanian border region. It questions established notions and tools used in this specific field of research, reflects on the notion of ''multi-sited ethnograhy'', examines the term "transethnography" and proposes the term "transborder ethnography".

Paper long abstract:

The fall of the Albanian regime in 1991 led also to the violent fall of the national border between Albania and Greece. The massive exodus of Albanians to Greece created by the time a transnational space which on a local scale presents a special interest due to the continuous movement of people and goods between the two sides of the border. The mobility in a space that crosses today the national border but in the past constituted a unity poses serious problems in the study of migration, which call for a reflection on established theoretical as well as methodological tools used in this context. This paper aims to present a ''problematique'' on doing ethnographic research in such an area.