Paper short abstract:

I consider how Europe is stitched back together through patterns of transit and transfer, sometimes fluid sometimes contested. Europe is presented as the outcome of diverse forms of crossborder exchanges and transborder returns, themselves shaping traditional ideas of place and political imagination

Paper long abstract:

There might be one Europe, but many ways of doing it taking place simultaneously.

We thus deal with a key, understudied question: how a series of parts remain in relation to each other after a crisis, and another crisis, and one more crisis. Europe(s) happens through the back and forth move of people and ideas, by transferring, displacing, dispersing and dividing. We take part in Europe through acts of sharing that are themselves generative of specific social relations, nexus and spaces between nations (Čapo 2014). However, too little attention has been paid to the socio-technical infrastructures (channels, protocols, rituals, and policies) that facilitate the iterance to happen–the multiple returns and exchanges going through multiscalar intersections.

The idea of Europe brings together differently positioned agents speaking to each other. It is cultivated in constructed common grounds and through different forms of partaking and partaging. Europe, therefore, appears as more than a geographical continent and a historical community. It is a projection that happens through exchanges. Alas, this elusive quality has implications for the relations between spaces, actors and scales.

As we can see in the case of Narva, Europe has more to do with political horizons and particular forms of engagement and renewal than with essences (Čapo 2019; Eriksen 2019; Martínez 2019; Strathern 2021). In Narva, Europe is performed between multiple intellectual, institutional, legal and financial threads, enacted through forms of cross-border exchanges and acts of transfer and return, instead of a spatial sense of fixity (Green and Laviolette 2015; Laviolette et al. 2019).

Paper short abstract:

Tracing the erratic effects of processes of Europeanization can open productive analytical perspective onto 'Europe' as a powerful and hierarchical, but simultaneously fragile and uncertain formation.

Paper long abstract:

In this contribution I would like to discuss ways to decenter hegemonic notions of 'Europe' by centering Lviv - a city in western Ukraine, located in the "immediate outside of the EU" (Jansen 2015). Over the last centuries various imperial formations, nation states and political ideologies have crossed here and left their socio-material remains behind. Different temporalities of 'Europeanness' and alternative global entanglements of 'Europe' are tangible in the city space and produce contemporary effects.

Lvivians have become daily experts in relating the stuff abandoned by bygone political formations. Rearranging "imperial debris" (Stoler 2013) into new forms of urbanity has evolved as principal dynamic of contemporary city making. When "projects of Europeanization" (Welz/Lottermann 2009) hit this urban ground they generate new infrastructures, connections and capabilities as much as ruptures, voids and ruins. Tracing these erratic effects opens productive analytical avenues for a critical examination of 'Europe' as a powerful and hierarchical, but simultaneously fragil and uncertain form.

Russia's full scale invasion of Ukraine has added further layers to these complexities: politically enforced antagonism and post-imperial disentanglement have reappeared as powerful dynamics reconfiguring contemporary Europe; displacement and influx, ruination and repair constitute parallel processes of urban development in times of war.

Based on ethnographic research on imperial debris, war and city making in Lviv I will propose "erratic Europeanization" as one way to redress Eurocentrism. I will argue that critical perspectives on "Europe" and "Europeanness" are indispensable for a European Ethnology that aims at examining ethnographically political processes shaping the contemporary.

Paper short abstract:

Focusing on the disappointment that was generated in the course of a humanitarian project in Montenegro, I will discuss what humanitarianism looks like as a political formation from the perspective of a Southeast European semiperiphery and what lessons this bears for thinking about Europe.

Paper long abstract:

Approaching humanitarianism from the perspective of Southeast Europe illuminates that ‘ugly feelings’ (Sianne Ngai) present a constitutive element of the affective-emotional constellation of humanitarianism. Focusing on disappointment that was generated in the course of a humanitarian project in Montenegro, I will discuss what humanitarianism looks like as a political formation from the perspective of a Southeast European semiperiphery.

Placing an ethnographic focus on ‘ugly emotions’ sheds light on the largely invisible and awkward position of the so-called Global Easts within what Ticktin (2014) calls ‘transnational humanitarianism’ as a political and moral formation. Humanitarianism has been one of the defining features of the European political project, reiterating the colonially inflected distinctions between the Global North and the Global South. Yet, the positions of the various Global Easts in this constellation remain odd – which means that they deserve analytical attention. I will illustrate how actors from one of these diverse Global Easts were included as potential providers of aid in the racialized and class-based discourses about humanitarianism, while being simultaneously excluded from actual participation in various humanitarian projects due to structural constraints. This simultaneous inclusion into the racialized and class-based discourses and exclusion from actual participation in humanitarian projects generated disappointment.

Considering what humanitarianism means and how it is practiced in 'Global Easts' is important for understanding the European project better. It sheds light on multiple, unequally positioned Europes that have taken shape after the end of the Cold War as well as on the discursive practices that stitch them together.

Paper short abstract:

Based on a critical review of Sweden-based Ethnology with an empirical focus on postsocialist Europe, this paper discusses four modes of disciplinary territorialisation: methodological nationalism, methodological regionalism, institutional territorialization, and epistemic marginalization.

Paper long abstract:

This paper offers a critical reflection on research conducted by researchers based in Swedish Ethnology whose research has explicitly contributed empirically and theoretically to knowledge on postsocialist Europe. Based on a critical review of such existing literature, the aim of this paper is to identify overarching trends and themes within this body of literature, especially after 1989, and to critically reflect on which kind of ethnological knowledge has hitherto been produced about the region. We will discuss our findings in terms of four modes of territorialisation involved in ethnological research, which we believe deserve further critical attention and reevaluation: i.) to what extent Swedish Ethnology with an empirical focus on postsocialist region remains shaped by methodological nationalism, ii.) how the shifting borders both in and of Europe since 1989 raises a related set of questions concerning what could be called methodological regionalism, and about the inbuilt epistemological dilemmas regarding different scales of territorialisation, iii.) how methodological regionalism, tends to be naturalised and reproduced not just by discourses about “Eastern” and “Western” Europe but also by institutional means such as research funding other forms of research governance; and, iv.) how, against this background, we see a strong need to systematically explore issues of epistemic inequality and marginalisation in Sweden-based Ethnology with an empirical focus on the region. In doing so, we hope to reactivate some older debates of what “the European” in European Ethnology means – and to contribute to a renewed debate about its current pitfalls and future potential.

Paper short abstract:

Taking the failures of two long-term researched cases of “Western modernity", the post-war Austrian nation state and CERN, as a contrastive starting point, I want to ask what concepts of caring identity, love, friendship, desire and relating might be integrated into a more-than-modern Europe.

Paper long abstract:

I have been conducting two very different ethnographies in the past fifteen years on European identities. The first empirical field focussed on post-imperial cultures of Austro-Hungary, especially on Austria and its literary scene within the European context after WWII (Dippel 2015, Dippel/Bopp-Filimonov 2020).

The second ethnographic field focussed on the European Organization of Nuclear Research, CERN, at the borderlands of Switzerland and France (Dippel 2017, Dippel 2021). Epistemically, both cultures are shaped by Leibniz’s monadologic philosophy in their ideas of binarism, harmony, community, and hierarchy and order. Both fields can be considered post-imperial cultures. Both experience(d) a decline in impact and power. Both replace the idea of empire with the position of an umpire, blinding their self-centeredness.

Austria still preserves the cultural heritage of a society, which thought itself the center of the universe (A.E.I.O.U. - Austria erit in orbe ultima), and fails to reconsider its neutral position. CERN is the epitome of science as a universal, studying the universe's origins. “Europeanness” is embedded within the master narrative of CERN (Mobach/Felt 2022), serving as a global community model.

Taking the failures of these cases of “Western modernity" as a contrastive starting point, I want to ask what concepts of caring identity, love, friendship, desire and relating might be integrated into a more-than-modern Europe. Europe is provincialized and surrounded by deadly borders. What projections of love are still alive that let the heartlands of Europe fail, and (not even) fail better, when trying again to understand what Europeanness could mean?