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Contribution short abstract:

This contribution aims to inquire into the ambiguous ways regional pride and belonging can act as catalysts of societal critique. Focusing on radically localised, 'anti-mobile' placemaking practices, it makes visible the powerful role ideas of regionality occupy in the current political moment.

Contribution long abstract:

In my contribution to this roundtable, I aim to reflect on the ambiguous ways ideas of regional pride and belonging can act as catalysts of societal critique. Drawing on village ethnography in the Austrian Alpen-Adria region, I will shed light on placemaking practices in rural communities that are at once characterised by long histories of cross-border mobilities and a pronounced support for radically localised, “anti-mobile” (Lems 2023) worldviews. By zooming in on the ways village inhabitants use ideas of regionality to contest the perceived horizonlessness of the liberal paradigm, I will discuss the ambiguous and often-times exclusionary ways people create a sense of belonging to place. I argue that rather than writing such radically regionalised placemaking efforts off as backward, traditionalist ways of relating to the world, anthropologists need to pay attention to them. They make visible a deepening chasm between scholarly imaginaries about mobile, cosmopolitan identities and people’s lived experiences in an increasingly fragmented global political arena.

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Contribution short abstract:

This paper follows the threads of a long-forgotten tombstone dedicated to a municipality that seized to exist after a municipal merger in central Switzerland. In so doing, it hopes to show how 'the region' becomes a contested arena for local politics evading traditional left-right categorizations.

Contribution long abstract:

This research focuses on municipal mergers in central Switzerland and their effect on local communities and self-conceptions. It argues that the ongoing success of the New Right in Switzerland can only be understood in tandem with governmental reforms in the spirit of New Public Management. In the canton of Lucerne, where this research was conducted, municipal mergers are the result of a large-scale reform package, designed to give the canton better odds in the geo-economic competition within Switzerland, but also vis á vis global pressures. Regions are restructured and strategically de-institutionalized, as 'inefficient' municipalities are dissolved into larger units.

As these measures are met with local resistance, different epistemic vocabularies emerge and compete in the affected communities, as people try to make sense of their new 'place' in the world: As their home region changes, its inhabitants must, too. These initial negotiations cannot be mapped cleanly onto preconceived left-right dichotomies. It is precisely in this space where the SVP - a prototype of the European 'New Right' - has established itself as the only party opposing such mergers. Their preferred idiom mirrors arguments and narratives deployed by the SVP on macro-issues, like the relationship between Switzerland and the EU.

The 'region' in my research thus becomes an early site of contestation between different epistemic constructions of Switzerland. Tracing the story of an old tombstone, I show how people forget and remember in order to realign themselves with new ways of 'being from this region'.

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Contribution short abstract:

The northeastern region of India holds a strategically important location in the geo-political unit of South Asia. This paper explores how ethnic identities shape the reading of populist trends in India and whether these trends can challenge the existing power structures in India.

Contribution long abstract:

The northeastern region of India holds a strategically important location in the geo-political unit of South Asia. With three of its states sharing borders with the neighbouring country Bangladesh whose influence on the region has been immense, the Northeast operates within a peculiar political, social and cultural framework. Much of Social Science scholarship about North East India has contextualised the region as the periphery or frontier to mainland India and within this dominant imagination, the region has been understood through narrow categories of being ‘disturbed’, ‘conflict-prone’ and being a hotbed for insurgency. Parallel to such a narrative, has been the rise of right-wing politics in Northeast India in the last decade. The best example of this is Assam, a multi-ethnic state with the largest population in the region where the right-wing Populist Party BJP swept the Assam legislative assembly elections and made a strong return to power in 2021. The paper aims to identify how a combination of factors such as the populist leadership of the state and the forerunning of the discourse of ‘indigeneity’ led to the rooting of the party in Assam particularly. This was although BJP’s stance of seeking a unified cultural identity across India has always been a challenge in the northeast, given the multi-ethnic character of the region. My paper argues that the regional leadership moulded itself as a replica of the national leadership to gain popular support while at the same time wielding populist strategies based on regional and ethnic sentiments.

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Contribution short abstract:

Using the conflict over a Bismarck monument as an example, I will demonstrate how the far right in the multi-ethnic border region Lusatia uses the heritage of Imperiality to reinvigorate the politics of Germanizing the region, and thus suppressing the region’s legacies of ethnic plurality.

Contribution long abstract:

The Lusatia region in Eastern Saxony accommodates two nationalities: German and Sorbian. Sorbs, who have settled in the region since the 5th century (and thus claim indigeneity today), have been officially recognized as a national minority since 1948 by the (formerly Eastern) German state, and have their own language, schools, cultural institutions, and their own parliament. The city of Bautzen/Budyšin in Upper Lusatia has also become, within then past ten years, a stronghold of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD). In 2021, the local parliament decided on a motion by the AfD to rebuild a Bismarck monument in the city, which led to massive protests by the Sorbian community who had suffered immensely under Bismarck’s anti-minority policies in the 19th century and the attempts to Germanize the minorities situated near the borders of the Prussian empire. Using this ethnographic case study, I show how the region of Lusatia and its heritage becomes a site of political experimentation by far-right agents. Using the figure of Bismarck, they attempt to re-emphasize the region’s Germanness and eradicate the plurality of histories that have shaped Lusatia as a multi-ethnic region. The struggle over the Bismarck monument, as the case study exemplifies, becomes a struggle over the hegemony of political identities. It is not just the heritage of Bismarck that the local far right wants to reinvigorate, but also the Imperial politics of Germanizing and homogenizing the German nation.

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Contribution short abstract:

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork at the Parliament of Quebec, I highlight the limits of analyses based on self-determination or left/right politics and focus on the interdependence and interactions between Quebec and a host of other stakeholders.

Contribution long abstract:

Using the concept of “the region” to challenge the hierarchies between various actors allows us to contribute to broader theoretical debates questioning the nation-state as the necessary form of the political. Since the 1980s, anthropology has made significant strides in analyzing a growing diversity of political forms and in arguing that sovereignty is not a black or white question. However, regions have been notably absent from these discussions focused on nation-states, international or supranational bodies and nongovernmental associations. I conducted fieldwork at the Parliament of Quebec during a rare single-party minority government formed by the pro-independence Parti Québécois. As such, I was able to question the narrative whereby a dominant cleavage based on questions of self-determination or constitutional debates was gradually being replaced by a left/right split. By looking at how existing political structures actually work on the ground, we can see these that two cleavages have intersected in complex ways alongside a multiplicity of ever-changing topical issues of the day. We can also emphasize the interdependencies of regions and other political categories or forms. The Parliament of Quebec is in near-constant interaction not only with domestic, mostly nongovernmental social forces, but also with a wide variety of other political forms inside and outside Canada. This includes, in the first category, witnesses at parliamentary committees and, in the second, inter-parliamentary relations with other orders of government in Canada’s federal structure, other “regions” outside of Canada, sovereign countries and international or supranational organizations.

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Contribution short abstract:

In the presentation I present the Ukrainian Donbas region and its intersection of local and global influences of what does it mean to be 'rigt' or 'left', 'central' and 'regional' or who benefit from regionalism and cantralisation. I base my paper on the research conducted between 2016 and 2021.

Contribution long abstract:

The Donbas is an Ukrainian region that has been presented as troubled borderlands since beginning of its modern history. Based on my months-long ethnographic field research conducted in the span of 5 years (2016-2021) in the city of Kramatorsk, a specific form of settlement called ‘monotown’ or mono-specialised town, I would like to present the pre-2022 grassroots initiatives of young local activists aimed at challenging the perception of their home region.

I specifically focus on the intersection of civil society-strengthening projects that flourished after 2014 up to the 2022 full-scale Russian invasion, with this region’s difficult history and usually stereotypical view from the outside and its influence on both the region seen as 'right-wing', conservative and even 'backwards', as well as 'leftist', understood in terms of post-socialist stereotypes and socialist nostalgia. Before Russian mass invasion in February 2022, local Donbas activists crafted their work based on hope and imaginary of better future (Appadurai 2013) balancing between two main actors of the monotown: the state and the town-forming enterprises. But there was also a third player: the influent external models of activism. They were coming mostly from abroad with international projects and NGOs and with their presumptions of what does it mean to be 'rigt' or 'left', 'central' and 'regional', who benefit from regionalism and cantralisation. This images had been intersecting with foregoing and alluvial forms of being active citizen, creating new modes of engagement, as well as new patterns of adjustment to political and social reality.

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Contribution short abstract:

Based on fieldwork with the movement opposing the construction of a bridge between mainland Italy and the island of Sicily, in this paper I explore the risks and potentialities of mobilising the notion of "defence of the territory" in political struggle.

Contribution long abstract:

In 2023, the right-wing government of Italy announced it would once again take up the plan of constructing a bridge between mainland Italy and the island of Sicily. In response, the struggle against the bridge of Messina “No Ponte” was revived, having laid dormant since the project was halted in 2012. I joined the No Ponte demonstration in August 2023, and in my roundtable contribution I will share some reflections on the political project of the movement against the bridge.

Beyond opposing the construction of the physical bridge, the movement challenges the kind of nation- and region-building the infrastructural project represents (Ben-Yehoyada, 2014). The bridge is promoted by the Italian government and the contracted company as not only creating jobs and facilitating the movement of goods and people between Sicily and mainland Italy, but also “connecting Italy to Europe”. The protesters, who demand small-scale infrastructures and the conservation of the strait of Messina’s ecology instead, articulate their refusal of the bridge as “difesa del territorio”, defence of the territory.

In this paper I analyse how "difesa del territorio" brings together a variety of political actors, ranging from environmental movements, rank-and-file unionist, feminists, to anti-militarists and independentists. What can the way the movement against the bridge mobilises the notion of territorio tell us about our anthropological categories, such as the national or the regional? And how can anthropology help us recognise the potentialities and risks of territorio as a site of political struggle?