Paper short abstract:

This Poster shows how ethnographic research in relations between humans and dogs can be used to track "Europeanization" in Podgorica. Europeanization is materialized in these Contact Zones as practices of "Doing-Europe", where governmental and everyday cultural dimensions come together.

Paper long abstract:

Podgorica as the capital of Montenegro has been for the last decades in a process that is called "Europeanization" by the field itself and sciences outside the field. Europeanization is an analytical category and a cultural and political phenomenon as well and should be investigated in it's governmental and cultural dimensions. This Poster is addressing the question, how transformations in the relations between humans, straying dogs and owned dogs can be used as a window for ethnographic tracking of Europeanization as transformation in Podgorica's urban culture?

The research this poster is based on is dealing with the question how humans, straying and owned dogs live together in the postsocialist urban culture of Podgorica. The remembered number of a few straying and very few owned dogs in Podgorica is constantly rising and in the fieldwork it turned out that Europeanization seems to be one of the driving forces of these transformations. An, in the field so called, "European Trend" of keeping purebred dogs as companions is growing. Abandoned individuals of this "lifestyle with dog" or their descendants often turn into straying dogs. Besides that, a law for the protection of animal rights following the standards of the European Union has recently been implemented and forbids the governmentally organized killing of straying dogs. The poster exemplifies how this field's actors of different species are tracked with multispecies ethnographical methods in their Contact Zones and how Europeanization is materialized in this field as a practice of "Doing-Europe" in which Europeanization's governmental and cultural dimensions come together.