Click the star to add/remove an item to/from your individual schedule.
You need to be logged in to avail of this functionality,
and to see the links to virtual rooms.
Log in
- Convenors:
-
Alina Apostu
(SOAS University of London)
Mukta Das (SOAS University of London)
Send message to Convenors
- Format:
- Panel
- Location:
- 26 University Square (UQ), 01/005
- Sessions:
- Wednesday 27 July, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
Transforming under global forces, everyday future-making within postcolonial and postsocialist settings needs renewed theoretical and ethnographical approaches. How can we understand processes, affects, and materiality of future-making by bringing the posts into dialogue?
Long Abstract:
Much debate exists about how postcolonial studies, focused on discourses, practices, identities, and postsocialist studies, focused on the political economy of the former socialist states, are in fact co-constitutive (Badescu 2016; Chari and Verdery 2009). Postcolonial and postsocialist conditions both involve ruptures, often violent, with former states of conformity and nonconformity, dependence and independence from a shared vision of past, present and future. At a time when geopolitical manoeuvrings and political transformations make 'transition' a permanent phenomenon, there is a desperate need to understand how people construct the futures that they are transitioning to (Appadurai 2013). This panel invites ethnographers of the two posts (either or both) to enter a dialogue about how the promises of the past are shaped or eclipsed by desires for the future and consider:
How can we transform the theoretical lenses of these 'posts' to get insight into the transitions towards the future that former colonised and socialist countries are undergoing?
What sort of future-making processes and affects are at work in postcolonial and postsocialist settings following the ruptures in their histories?
What affective and material dimensions emerge, are mobilised, reoriented, repurposed, in postcolonial and postsocialist settings and to what effect? How do these shape future-making?
What are the promised, (un)desired futures that shape the imaginaries of people living in postcolonial and postsocialist conditions?
The aim of the panel is to compare and, crucially, to debate and contour a future for theoretical and ethnographic approaches to everyday future-making in postcolonial and postsocialist settings.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Wednesday 27 July, 2022, -Alina Apostu (SOAS University of London)
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores the potential of complementary sensory and discursive methods for exploring future-making and imagination in post-socialist urban settings in Bucharest, Romania.
Paper long abstract:
This paper proposes a set of complementary sensory and discursive methods for a 'thinking aloud with others' experiment.
The methods form the core of a currently developed post-doctoral project proposal to explore what futures are possible and imagined by post-89 generations that live Bucharest, Romania, a city marked by a socialist past. How relevant is that past, how much of it do post-89 generations still sense in the spaces they traverse and live in everyday, and how does that condition how they imagine their futures?
Methods will involve sensory observations of public life, creating sensory maps of the city, sensory elicitation activities (watching tv, listening to the radio, travelling to work, shopping, leisure activities), semi-structured interviews, intergenerational interviews; these methods will be framed by ongoing participant observation with an NGO focused on changing the urban life through raising public awareness and engagement with urban space. I will attend to the sounds, smells, sights, fears, uncertainties, hopes, pleasures, repulsions that make up the urban experience of post-89 generations, to show the tensions and contradictions that arise between how people feel and describe a city with a socialist past and the effects of these tensions on public urban life.
I will discuss the methods in more detail and explore their relationship to the urban settings. I will then invite the audience to take part in short experiments with some of these methods and then reflect, as a group, about their potential for offering new research insights and re-imagining our research practices.
Carolin Maertens (Rachel Carson Center, LMU Munich)
Paper short abstract:
This paper brings to attention the shifting geographies of future-making in the context of international, religiously underpinned development interventions in post-Soviet Tajikistan. It highlights how the relocation of opportunities and their financing shape livelihoods in particular ways.
Paper long abstract:
In the mountainous and remote South-East of Tajikistan a good life used to be not a matter of the future, it was actually lived. Today, materially solid livelihoods, state welfare, and a rich cultural life constitute fond memories of a past that collapsed together with the Soviet Union. Iskhoshim was a buzzling town on the Soviet outer border with Afghanistan—equipped with a theatre, central heating, a boarding school, an airport, tarmac roads, hospitals—welcoming engineers, scientists, and tourists from all over the USSR. Today, Ishkoshim’s residents rely on remittances to survive, mostly sent from Russia. Pondering economic opportunities, the statement “There is no future here” often seemingly concluded this familiar post-socialist story of decay and nostalgia—just to continue with a particular twist: For the largely Ismaili Muslim population of the Western Pamirs, the end of the Soviet Union not only initiated the return of their spiritual leader, the Aga Khan IV, and, in particular, extensive development interventions in all spheres of life carried out under his auspices; it also fundamentally reconfigured the geography of future-making. Shifting away from former (Soviet) destinations while still financed by remittances sent from those, ambitious future aspirations are now following the contours of the resource-rich transnational Ismaili community abroad.
Based on twenty-one months of fieldwork conducted between 2013 and 2019, this paper offers an ethnographic entry point to draw attention to the remapping of desires in the ‘posts’ and how the relocation of opportunities and their financing shapes livelihoods in Ishkoshim and beyond.
Polina Manolova (University of Tuebingen)
Paper short abstract:
This paper seeks to reveal a so far underexplored potentiality of postsocialist migrant imaginaries as a political praxis of envisioning alternative futures (Castoriadis 1987) by invoking meanings and values from embodied experiences of the pre-1989 past.
Paper long abstract:
Recently, anthropologists of migration have theorised how the absorption of the globalised promise for a ‘good life’ and the rapidly diminishing pathways for its realisation had turned migration into an existential necessity (Schielke 2021; Vigh 2009; Elliot 2021) for a great number of ‘abjected’ subjectivities (Ferguson 1999). In these renderings migrant imaginaries often denote a world of simplified binaries - the West signifies desire and future becoming while the non-West is marked by different ‘lacks’, of hope, civilization, progress, life. This paper seeks to reveal a so far underexplored potentiality of postsocialist migrant imaginaries as a political praxis of envisioning alternative futures (Castoriadis 1987) by invoking meanings and values from embodied experiences of the pre-1989 past. Focusing on Bulgarian labour migrants from the late-socialist and early ‘transition’ generation the paper argues that they imagine life in the West as socialist ‘normality’ imbued with ideals of social stability, dignity in labour, and solidarity. I trace how these imaginations emerge as counterpoints to the traumas of the postsocialist present which has led to the complete rejection of the political ideology of neoliberal capitalism by a majority of the ‘left behind’. Rather than a master narrative of essentialised superiority and epistemic subordination, migrants’ imaginings transpire the West as an empty signifier able to carry self-affirming and politically emancipatory agendas of socialist modernity into a Western future. Migration becomes a vehicle for inverting the dominant delegitimisation of the socialist past as backward and for reasserting interpretative authority over subjective experiences of postsocialism as regressive modernity.
Janusz Baranski (Jagiellonian University)
Paper short abstract:
The form and content of the cultural revival of the Polish Spisz region is to some extent shaped by external experts. In the light of postcolonial studies, one can claim that it is a form of the colonial nature of their activity in cultural policy. This type of symbolic violence meets with resistance “from below” of some activists and inhabitants of the region.
Paper long abstract:
Polish Spisz is a multicultural border region characterized primarily by Polishness, but with Slovak, Hungarian, German, Ruthenian, Romani and Jewish elements. This is related to the long history of the region, dating back to the Middle Ages, which until 1918 was part of the Habsburg Monarchy. Since the beginning of the political changes of the end of the 20th century, the region has been experiencing a cultural revival, inspired by local social elites (teachers, officials, activists, the business world), but also by external experts (ethnographers, historians, musicologists, choreographers). In this cultural borderland, it also leads to disputes about heritage, its resources or ways of using them for the benefit of the region. The aforementioned experts play an important role, in particular ethnographers, ethnologists, and folklorists, who act as arbitrators deciding on the value and usefulness of specific cultural content, products and practices. Their influence often means imposing choices from the resources of the regional cultural heritage. In the light of postcolonial studies, it is possible to indicate the colonial nature of their activity in the field of cultural policy, simply showing the ways of practicing the regional culture. Moreover, some local elites (activists, animators) are involved in this process. This type of symbolic violence meets with resistance “from below” of some region’s activists and inhabitants who do not accept the values, forms and cultural content arranged by professionals into the form of classical kastom. They reject treating their own heritage in the form of an unchanging, staged fossil and promote an attitude of creativity, independence, agency of local cultural practices and forms of creativity not constrained by an oppressive kastom scenario.