Anthropology Matters Journal, 2006, Vol 8 (1)

Doing Fieldwork in Eastern Europe

Editor: Ingie Hovland
Guest editor on this issue: Michaela Schäuble

Editorial: Doing fieldwork in Eastern Europe: introduction

Michaela Schäuble (University of Tübingen) with the collaboration of Tomasz Rakowski (University of Warsaw) and Wlodzimierz Pessel (University of Warsaw)

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Articles

Doing fieldwork in Eastern Europe: fieldwork made easier

Fran Deans (University College London)

This paper explores how the post-communist setting of my fieldwork in a Hungarian Romany settlement aided, rather than hindered, my research. Far from finding distrustful and unstable communities and institutions in post-communist Hungary, I was assisted and encouraged in my research by the supportive and open attitudes of the Romany community members and civil society actors with whom I worked. Additionally, the communist records stored in Budapest archives provided detailed data that textured and contextualised my fieldwork. With sensitive fieldwork methods, Eastern Europe is as accessible and welcoming an environment as any anthropologist could hope to find!

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The Polish political scene as seen from a small town market

Anna Malewska-Szalygin (University of Warsaw)

This article presents the results of field research carried out in the spring of 2004 in the town of Nowy Targ (Podhale region, Poland), by the Institute of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Warsaw. The research was based on open-ended interviews-or rather long conversations-with the vendors in the market square, enabling us to observe the political scene from a particular point of view. They interviews brought out the perception of the authorities 'from below'. This perspective uncovered many aspects of politics that are normally hidden behind the legislative language of the Constitution or even behind the informative language of the mass media.

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Gatherers of central Poland: a field study

Tomasz Rakowski (University of Warsaw)

This paper concerns the way in which poor inhabitants of a rapidly industrialized terrain in central Poland gather and collect different sort of waste. Such phenomena as dwelling by using gathered scrap and any industrial waste serve as a field for an anthropological study. One the one hand the gathering is a certain strategy of surviving. On the other these collected things create a kind of a narrative - the objects anchor the gatherers experience, write down their biographies and reveal their relation to the local social and economic life.

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Rubbish as informants: a cultural contribution to Polish 'garbeology'

Wlodzimierz Karol Pessel (University of Warsaw)

This article is not intended to multiply the complaints of ecologists, though it certainly confirms-with the help of arguments taken from Polish realities-that consumption and garbage production comprise an urgent problem. Rather, this article is a preliminary trial project, inspired by United States 'garbeology', marking out a fairly new research field both for social anthropologists as well as for other researchers exploring the culture of contemporary cities. The new aspect is not the notion of the outcast itself, since the idea of vestiges and of various wastes as cultural material has been introduced and universalised very efficiently by post-modern philosophy. Instead, the innovative assumption is the movement of turning to the hard facts, namely to the material traces of human everyday activity: we should opt out of conceptualising garbage as metaphor, as thinking or as artistic figures, in order to go down to the refuse skip. Garbage can be used as informants too. The author tried this out during his 'fieldwork' in Warsaw at Christmas time.

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Myth, collective trauma and war in Serbia. A cultural-hermeneutical appraisal

Daniel Šuber (University of Konstanz)

This paper explores the close relationship between mythical narrative, collective trauma and their repercussions on the Serbian population since the mid-1980s. It is argued that Serbia's particular cultural-historically inherited frame of perception provided a fertile seedbed for Miloševic to successfully launch a policy of re-traumatization and thus establish widespread consent to his war policy among the population. Other cultural factors that might have contributed to broad approval of Miloševic's policy will be reflected on. Drawing on recently coined concepts like 'cultural trauma' and 'cultural fear', a specifically cultural-sociological perspective on the subject will be outlined.

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'Imagined suicide': self-sacrifice and the making of heroes in post-war Croatia

Michaela Schäuble (University of Tübingen)

Based on reflections during 12 months of fieldwork on gender-related recollections of war and violence in a central Dalmatian town in post-war Croatia, this paper explores how the traumatising experience of militant conflict (1991-1995) and subsequent affliction are dealt with on an individual level. Drawing on the example of a carnival episode in which one of my core interlocutors embodied a suicide bomber, I employ the concept of 'imagined suicide'. As a category of ironic commentary on global terrorism, yet an emblematic expression of discontent in a desolate post-war setting, 'imagined suicide' constitutes a concept in which violence is playfully performed as a politically creative force. My aim is to decipher the symbolism in which the dynamics of (imagined) violent action are embedded and to interpret its communicative messages in terms of intentional annotation of the actors' own reflections on their lives.

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In quest of Eastern Europe: troubling encounters in the post-Cold War field

Eleni Sideri (SOAS)

This paper examines various transformations regarding the categories of 'us' and 'them' that occurred during my year of fieldwork in Georgia (2003-2004). My research questions concerning the formation of a 'Greek diaspora' in Georgia through family memories and historiographical accounts led me to 'paradoxical' encounters, which seemed to challenge my perceptions of selfhood as well as my ideas about the political, historical and geographical topographies of Greece and Georgia. These troubling encounters seemed to drive me to a re-conceptualisation of both 'East' and 'West', not only as spatial and temporal/historical entities, but also as mutually constructed ideologies during the Cold War and post-Cold War period.

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Post-socialist disclosures: an imperfect translation of personal experience into ethnographic writing

Madalina Florescu (SOAS)

During the 1980s, disappearance was one of the means that authoritarian regimes used to control the knowledge of the population. State terror structures political subjectivities, for it produces cultures of fear, where speech becomes as diffused and unlocalisable as fear itself: rumours, denunciations, suspicion. The genre of the bodily practice of the commemoration of terror is, in this text, a symbolic exhumation, which allows the living to mirror themselves in the reflections of the dead. Disclosure is the aesthetic category of this post-mortem fissure that seeks to grasp the past that flashes up at moments of danger, to paraphrase Benjamin (1990), and to endow social disjunctures and the disappearance of language with a cultural form.

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Filming ethnicity in Southern Transylvania

Anne Schiltz (University of Manchester)

This paper is based on a summer of fieldwork in Southern Transylvania, Romania. I will reflect on my experiences of making an ethnographic film that explores ethnicity and identity of the Transylvanian Saxons. I will argue that ethnographic filmmaking requires a visual engagement with the research theme, and that the notions of work, belonging, and time/change are ways in which Saxon ethnic identity is embodied and reproduced aesthetically.

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