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.