A posztszocializmus és a rendszerváltások gazdaságantropológiája

Társadalomelméleti Kollégium
Körtartók: Szépe András, Gagyi Ágnes, Éber Márk, Pulay Gergő, Jelinek Csaba

További körökről információk itt.
Akit izgat a téma, a kör vagy a szakirodalom, emailben érdeklődhet nálam: zginelli[kukac]gmail[pont]com.

A kör ötlete az előző féléves “Rendszerváltás” olvasókörön merült fel, annak is az egyik utolsó alkalmán, ahol a rendszerváltással kapcsolatos antropológiai irodalomról beszélgettünk. A kör konklúziója az volt, hogy egyrészt van elég sok angolul publikált, a “nyugati” diskurzusban is ismert, mára már klasszikus kutatás (téeszekről, informális gazdaságról, szegénységről, stb.), másrészt viszont a kelet-európai, főleg 1989 után intézményesült antropológiai diszciplína ezekről nem nagyon vesz tudomást különböző tudományszociológiai okokból. A kör célja a kelet-európai posztszocialista átalakulások kontextusában született, a kortárs kritikai társadalomtudományok irodalmába kapcsolódó, de ebben a régióban kevésbé ismert munkák összegyűjtése és feldolgozása. A kör során megpróbáljuk felfejteni hogy a leegyszerűsítve szocializmusból kapitalizmusba történő átmenetnek nevezett folyamat során hogyan változtak meg a különböző társadalmi-gazdasági intézmények és a hatalmi erőviszonyok. A szövegek kiválogatásánál fontos szempont, hogy azok a helyi folyamatokat a globális hierarchia-viszonyokba beágyazottan kezeljék.

A kör során minden alkalomnak lesz egy-egy felelőse, aki az adott alkalom témájából alaposan felkészül és az adott alkalmat moderálja. A kör célja hogy a témák közötti kapcsolatokat együtt, közösen fedezzük fel és rakjuk össze. A kör végeztével nyáron egy rövid erdélyi kutatótábort is tervezünk, ahol Gagyi József antropológus vezetésével egy romániai falu példáján keresztül a “terepen” is végiggondoljuk a félév elméleti munkáját.

1. alkalom: Does it make sense to study postsocialism?

Buyandelgeriyn, Manduhai (2008): Post-Post-Transition Theories: Walking on Multiple Paths. In Annal Review of Anthropology, Vol. 37, pp. 235-250.

Thelen, Tatjana (2011): Shortage, fuzzy property and other dead ends in the anthropological analysis of (post)socialism. In. Critique of Anthropology Vol. 31, No. 1, pp 43–61.

Dunn, Elizabeth C. & Verdery, Katherine (2011): Dead ends in the critique of (post)socialist anthropology: Reply to Thelen. In Critique of Anthropology Vol. 31, No. 3, pp 251–255.

Thelen, Tatjana (2012): Economic concepts, common grounds and 'new' diversity in the Anthropology of post-socialism: Reply to Dunn and Verdery.  In Critique of Anthropology Vol. 32, No. 1, pp. 87–90.

2. alkalom: Postsocialism, postcolonialism, globalization – in the field and in the academy

Buchowski, Michał (2006): The Specter of Orientalism in Europe: From Exotic Other to Stigmatized Brother. In Anthropological Quarterly, Vol. 79, No. 3, 463-482.

Cervinkova, Hana (2012): Postcolonialism, postsocialism and the anthropology of east-central Europe. In Journal of Postcolonial Writing, Vol. 48, No. 2, 155-163.

Gille, Zsuzsa (2010): Is there a Global Postsocialist Condition? In Global Society, Vol. 24, No. 1, pp. 9-30.

Rogers, Douglas (2010): Postsocialisms Unbound: Connections, Critiques, Comparisons. In: Slavic Review, Vol. 69, No. 1, pp. 1-15.

Tishkov, Valery A. (1998): U.S. and Russian Anthropology: Unequal Dialogue in a Time of Transition. In Current Anthropology, Vol. 39, No. 1, pp. 1-18.

Keough, Leyla J. (2006): Globalizing 'Postsocialism:' Mobile Mothers and Neoliberalism on the Margins of Europe, In Anthropological Quarterly, Vol. 79, No. 3, pp. 431-461.

Poblocki, Kacper (2009): Whiter Anthropology without Nation-state? Interdisciplinarity, World Anthropologies and Commoditization of Knowledge. In Critique of Anthropology, Vol. 29, No. 2, pp. 225-252.

3. alkalom: Postsocialism and capitalism

Eyal, Gil (2000): Anti-Politics and the Spirit of Capitalism: Dissidents, Monetarists, and the Czech Transition to Capitalism In Theory and Society, Vol. 29, No. 1, pp. 49-92.

Daphne, Berdahl (2005): The Spirit of Capitalism and the Boundaries of Citizenship in Post-Wall Germany. In. Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 47, No. 2, pp. 235-251.

Boyer, Dominic-Yurchak, Alexei (2010): American Stiob: Or, What Late-Socialist Aesthetics of Parody Reveal about Contemporary Political Culture in the West. In Cultural Anthropology, Vol 25, No 2, pp: 179-221.

Altshuler David S. (2001): Tunneling Towards Capitalism in the Czech Republic. In Ethnography, Vol. 2, No. 1, pp: 115-138.

Buyandelgeriyn, Manduhai (2007): Dealing with uncertainty: Shamans, marginal capitalism, and the remaking of history in postsocialist Mongolia. In American Ethnologist, Vol. 34, No. 1, pp. 127-147.

Patico, Jennifer (2009): Spinning the Market. The Moral Alchemy of Everyday Talk in Postsocialist Russia. In Critique of Anthropology, Vol. 29, No. 2, pp. 205-224.

4. alkalom: Development, liberalism and personhood

Holc, Janine P. (1997): Liberalism and the Construction of the Democratic Subject in Postcommunism: The Case of Poland. In Slavic Review, Vol. 56, No. 3, pp. 401-427.

Creed, Gerald W – Wedel, Janine R. (1997): Second Thoughts from the Second World: Interpreting Aid in Post-Communist Eastern Europe. In Human Organization, Vol. 56, No. 3, pp. 253-263.

Junghans, Trenholme (2001): Marketing Selves: Constructing Civil Society and Selfhood in Post-socialist Hungary. In Critique of Anthropology, Vol. 21, No., pp. 383–400.

Sampson, Steven (2002): Weak States, Uncivil Societies and Thousands of NGOs. Western Democracy Export as Benevolent Colonialism in the Balkans, source: http://www.anthrobase.com/Txt/S/Sampson_S_01.htm

Arfire, Ramona (2011): The Moral Regulation of the Second Europe: Transition, Europeanization and the Romanians. In Critical Sociology, Vol. 37, No. 6, pp. 853-870.

Kaneff, Deema (2002): Why People Don’t Die ’Naturally’ Any More: Changing Relations between ’The Individual’ and ’The State’ in Post-Socialist Bulgaria. In The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Vol. 8, No. 1, pp. 89-10.

5. alkalom: Postsocialist disorder

Nazpary, Joma (2002): Post-Soviet Chaos. Violence and Dispossession in Kazakhstan. London-Sterling: Pluto Press.

Port, Mattis van de (1998): Gypsies, Wars & Other Instances of the Wild. Civilisation and Its Discontents in a Serbian Town. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.

Koehler, Jan – Zurcher, Christoph eds (2003): Potentials of disorder. New Approaches to Conflict Analysis. Manchester University Press.

6. alkalom: Agriculture, property, cooperatives

Lampland, Martha (1991): Pigs, Party Secretaries, and Private Lives in Hungary. In. American Ethnologist, Vol. 18, No. 3, pp. 459-479.

Creed, Gerald W. (1995) Agriculture and the Domestication of Industry in Rural Bulgaria. In American Ethnologist, Vol. 22, No. 3, pp. 528-548.

Hann, Chris (2006): “Not the Horse We Wanted!” Postsocialism, Neoliberalism, and Eurasia. Berlin: LIT Verlag.

Humphrey, Caroline-Verdery, Katherine eds (2004): Property in Question. Value Transformation in the Global Economy. Oxford-New York: Berg.

Verdery, Katherine (1994): The Elasticity of Land: Problems of Property Restitution in Transylvania. In. Slavic Review, Vol. 53, No. 4, pp. 1071-1109.

Waal, Clarissa de (2004): Post-socialist Property Rights and Wrongs in Albania: An Ethnography of Agrarian Change. In Conservation & Society, Vol. 2, No. 1, pp. 19-50.

7. alkalom: Work and workers in postsocialism

Burawoy, Michael-Krotov, Pavel-Lytkina, Tatyana (2000): Involution and Destitution in Capitalist Russia. In Ethnography, Vol. 1, No. 1, pp. 43-65.

Kideckel, David A. (2008): Getting By in Postsocialist Romania. Labor, the Body & Working-Class Culture. Bloomington-Indianapolis: Indiana University Press

Friedman  Jack R. (2007): Shame and the Experience of Ambivalence on the Margins of the Global: Pathologizing the Past and Present in Romania’s Industrial Wastelands. In Ethos, Vol. 35, No 2, pp. 235-264.

Dunn, Elizabeth C. (2004): Privatizing Poland: Baby Food, Big Business, and the Remaking of Labor. Ithaca-London: Cornell University Press.

Heintz, Monica (2006): “Be European, Recycle Yourself!” The Changing Work Ethic in Romania. Berlin: Lit Werlag.

Stenning, Alison (2005): Where is the Post-socialist Working Class? Working-Class Lives in the Spaces of (Post-)Socialism. In Sociology, Vol. 39, No 5, pp. 983-999.

8. alkalom: Poverty

Haney, Lynne (2000): Global Discourses of Need: Mythologizing and Pathologizing Welfare in Hungary. In Burawoy, Michael et al: Global Ethnography. Forces, Connections, and Imaginations in a Postmodern World. Los Angeles-London: University of California Press, 48-73.

Smith, Adrian et al (2008) The Emergence of a Working Poor: Labour Markets, Neoliberalisation and Diverse Economies in Post-Socialist Cities. In Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography, Vol. 40, No. 2, pp. 283-311.

Ries, Nancy (2009): Potato Ontology: Surviving Postsocialism in Russia. In. Cultural Anthropology, Vol. 24, No 2, pp 181-212.

Caldwell, Melissa L. (2004): Not By Bread Alone. Social Support in the New Russia. Los Angeles-London: University of California Press.

9. alkalom: Postsocialist nationalism and the question of community

Hann, Chris (1998): Postsocialist Nationalism: Rediscovering the Past in Southeast Poland. In Slavic Review, Vol. 57, No. 4, pp. 840-863.

Creed, Gerald W. (2004): Constituted through Conflict: Images of Community (And Nation) in Bulgarian Rural Ritual. In American Anthropologist, Vol. 106, No. 1: pp. 56-70.

Henig, David (2012): ‘Knocking on my neighbor’s door’: On metamorphoses of sociality in rural Bosnia. In Critique of Anthropology, Vol. 32, No. 1, pp. 3-19.

Partridge, Damani James (2008): We Were Dancing in the Club, Not on the Berlin Wall: Black Bodies, Street Bureaucrats, and Exclusionary Incorporation into the New Europe. In Cultural Anthropology, Vol. 23, No. 4, pp. 660-687.

10. alkalom: Money and morality

Lemon, Alaina (1998) "Your Eyes Are Green like Dollars": Counterfeit Cash, National Substance, and Currency Apartheid in 1990s Russia. In Cultural Anthropology Vol 13, No. l, pp 22-55.

Wanner, Catherine (2005): Money, Morality and New Forms of Exchange in Postsocialist Ukraine. In Ethnos: Journal of Anthropology, Vol. 70, No. 4, pp. 515–537.

Rogers, Douglas (2005): Moonshine, money, and the politics of liquidity in rural Russia. In. American Ethnologist, Vol 32, No 1, pp. 63-81.

Sneath, David (2006): Transacting and enacting: Corruption, obligation and the use of monies in Mongolia. In Ethnos: Journal of Anthropology, Vol. 71, No. 1, pp. 89-112.

11. alkalom: Informal economy/Corruption/Crime

Ledeneva, Alena V (1998): Russia’s Economy of Favours. Blat, Networking and Informal Exchange. Cambridge-New York: Cambridge University Press.

Humphrey, Caroline (2002): The Unmaking of the Soviet Union. Everyday Economies after Socialism. Ithaca-London: Cornell University Press.

Shore, Chris – Haller, Dieter (2005): Corruption. Anthropological Perspectives. Ann Arbor-London: Pluto Press.

Polese, Abel – Rodgers, Peter eds (2011): Surviving post-socialism: the role of informal economic practices. Special Issue of the International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy, Vol. 31, No. 11.

Wedel, Janine R. (2003): Mafia without Malfeasance, Clans without Crime. The Criminality Conundrum in Post-Communist Europe. In Parnell-Kane eds. Crime’s Power. Anthropologists and the Ethnography of Crime. Palgrave: New York, pp 221-244.

Mapping Neoliberalism and Its Countermovements in the Former Second World (July 23-27, 2012, Budapest)

Prehistory

This conference had some pre-history. In July 2011, under the auspices of Budapest’s Central European University (CEU), a summer school took place. Its unwieldy title (“(Neo)liberalization of Socialism and the Crises of Capital”), stellar organizers (Mary Taylor, Csilla Kalocsai, and Judit Bodnar) and faculty (Johanna Bockman, David Harvey, and Ivan Szelenyi) attracted a group of young scholars interested in transcending the worn-out paradigms through which postsocialist societies are still interpreted in mass media, policy analysis, and academic research: communism v. democracy, transition to democracy, and the most idiotic of them all—“return to Europe.”  Once the participants arrived in Budapest, many of them turned out to be no mere detached, Weberian scholars but social movement activists in their own national contexts, whose critique of neoliberalism drew on their activist practice.

Inspired by the experience of mutual recognition, by the stakes of our conversation, and the rare opportunity to talk to other critically-minded scholars from a region whose cultural and intellectual interconnections have been largely severed, we decided to meet the following year, in late July 2012, once again in Budapest. The reunion was to be at the same time a narrower and more ambitious affair than last year’s. Narrower, because this time we lacked the institutional affiliations, the major funding, and the intellectual resources that made the last year’s summer school possible. More ambitious, because the conversation had already begun, the commonalities/ camaraderies had been established, and new allies from other postsocialist countries identified and invited. Overall, approximately 40 participants from 10 East European countries participated in the event. The dearth of funding was more than made up by the ingenuity and energy of the main organizers—Agnes Gagyi and Csaba Jelinek. And if the 2011 summer school was more exclusively focused on neoliberalism and the conversations about the social movements opposing it took place outside of the formal curriculum, the program of the 2012 gathering maintained a focus on both. Even though without official CEU participation, this time we also benefited from the sheer number of young East European scholars concentrated at that university, who would frequently drop in on our panels. With a few exceptions, most of the participants were PhD students or junior faculty. Of the disciplines represented, anthropology, sociology, and history accounted for probably 2/3 of the participants, but there were historians of literature, specialists in education and urban planning. That English was our lingua franca meant that many of us were either based in or had spent significant time at English-language universities.

The late-/post-socialist intellectuals & neoliberalism

Joining us via skype, Mary Taylor (City University of New York) opened the conference by putting conference participants on the same page by giving with a magesterial account of the 2011 summer school she helped organized. The panels then proceeded chronologically. Organized by Dan Cirjan and Piotr Wcislik, the first of them continued the work of last year’s summer school by identifying the origins of today’s neoliberal order in the late-socialist period and thus of defetishizing 1989 as a watershed. And if last year the focus was on the practices of the Soviet-bloc states, the three main presentations of this panel dealt with the attitudes of the late-socialist intelligentsia. Starting with Yulia Latynina’s oft-repeated ruminations on the (limited) capacity of ordinary people to choose their rulers, for example, Ilya Budraytskis (Institute of World History, Russian Academy of Science/ Russian Socialist Movement) offered a detailed historical account of the Russian intelligentsia’s relationship with “the people.” To simplify his argument, if the emerging nineteenth-century intelligentsia sought to overcome its enormous social distance from “the people,” its late-twentieth-century successors took exactly the opposition direction: towards greater distinction from the masses. Specifying his terms, Budraytskis argued that today’s intelligentsia comprises two vastly different social categories—poorly paid teachers, museum workers, and others who have not become part of today’s capital flows, on the one hand, and well-to-do urban middle classes, on the other—and is thus primarily a residual ideological and historical category with little real economic basis. The huge irony Budraytskis pointed to was that it is precisely Latynina and her peers throughout Central and Eastern Europe who have achieved virtual monopoly on the category “democrats” while at the same time denying the right and capacity of “the people” to govern themselves. While Latynina represents the reductio ad absurdum of the anti-populist liberal position, this attitude is shared by the majority of postsocialist intellectuals, who view the poor and the less educated as the major obstacle to their countries’ accession to “the West.”

Other talks throughout the conference kept returning to that motif of the anti-populism of the intellectuals in its different manifestations. Drawing on Spanish material, Nellie Buier (CEU/ Critic Atac) showed how professional historians have suppressed the histories of working-class militancy in the last years of Franco’s rule in favor of a more orderly transition narrative with settlements negotiated between political leaders. The intellectuals’ epistemological, cultural, and political bias against working-class subjects quickly emerged as a central theme in the conference and the theme of future initiatives. Joining the conference via skype, Stefan Guga (CEU/ Critic Atac) demonstrated Romanian sociology’s scholarly erasure of the working class over the last twenty years. If it ever merited any attention, it was in the role of “homo Sovieticuses” incapable of participating in civil society (a category reserved for “the middle classes, the agent of progress in the transitology/ democratization paradigm). It suffices to look at the questions on which the Russian Levada Center bases its surveys to see that those problems aren’t confined to Romanian sociology. Continued scholarly struggle against “communism,” topics-defined research grants, and ultimately, postsocialist sociologists’ own class position and aspirations explain the huge lacunae and biases of their field.

Another whole panel run by Mikolai Lewicki, Adam Ostolsky and Maciek Gdula (Warsaw University/ Krytyka Politycna) was devoted to the banishment of the category of “class” (except, of course, in the oft-invoked “middle class”) from Polish sociology and its replacement with a stratification analysis, whose central categories (division of labor, inequality, mobility) not only offer a very weak critique of the contemporary neoliberal order but also help naturalize it. Interestingly, they argued, the substitution took place with the very founding of sociology in Soviet-bloc countries, already in the 1960s rather than after 1989. Governments, state socialist or capitalist, don’t particularly like the exposure of social conflict in their societies. Happy to oblige, Polish sociology has traditionally divided society into eight functionalist (and hence, reasonably harmonious) strata. Departing from that convention in the second part of their panel, Ostolsky and Gdula limited that number to three and offered a Bourdieusian class analysis of those categories. Their presentation was followed by a lively exchange regarding the applicability of Bourdieu’s theory beyond French society, the relevance of their findings about Polish class structure to other postsocialist societies, and the difference between Marxian and Bourdieusian class analysis. (The latter was found more pessimistic as it could not imagine a world without exploitation, unlike the former, which had a utopia.)

Right to the City

One of the most impressive panels was a collective presentation by six members of Budapest’s City for All group, comprising homeless people and student activists (Mariann Dosa, Zsuzsana Postfai, and Csaba Jelinek). After an extended introduction of David Harvey’s Right to the City (RTC) framework and the global context of urban struggles, the presenters focused on their own movement. An alliance of homeless people and younger, middle-class student activists is not necessarily an easy one to maintain. That the City for All has survived the tensions over the last several years and even come up with strategies to diminish the division of labor between the two groups is a testimony to the longevity of their initiative.

In the ensuing discussion about the applicability of the RTC framework, conference participants did not reach a single conclusion about its potential. On the one hand, the processes of urban dispossession and capital accumulation and the resulting tensions between extreme wealth and extreme poverty are if anything more dramatic in the postsocialist world than they are in Western European or North American cities, where this framework was first developed. As RTC activists assert following Henri Lefebvre, the city has indeed become the new factory, the new site of consciousness formation. On the other hand, that framework misses the poverty and social problems spatially displaced outside of the city. Many on the left would find the rights concepts on which RTC is based too liberal to offer an analysis of power relations. Complicating the applicability question is the sheer unevenness of the postsocialist urban structure: if the stories of the homeless activists were about escaping unemployment in smaller towns and villages only to find themselves without housing in Budapest, the city where the jobs and capital are concentrated, Warsaw does not enjoy such a dominant position vis-à-vis other Polish cities and the Polish RTC movement is less centered on the country’s capital. Kacper Pobocki (University of Poznan/ RTC Poland) demonstrated how RTC language and practices could be employed by both middle-class bicyclists in need of bike lanes and by working-class city-dwellers, who have seen the public space available to them diminish owing to overbuilding. Using his study of the Romanian city of Cluj, Norbert Petrovici (Babeş-Bolyai University/ Group for Social Action) examined an urban politics based on another, more problematic alliance: between the nationalist middle classes (represented by Mayor Gheorghe Funar) and working-class ethnic Romanians.

In the ensuing discussion, Volodymyr Ishchenko (Protest Data Project Director @ Kiev’s Center for Society Research/ the Ukrainian Commons journal) expressed his doubts whether Ukrainian urban movements can become the site of core leftist struggles. Urban protests, he argued, have so far failed to transcend the NIMBY (not-in-my-backyard) stage and link up in a geographically and politically broader movement. At the same time, urban struggles are easily co-optable as the far-right Ukrainian party Svoboda recently illustrated when it claimed the successes of one particular wave of urban protests in Kiev. In her comparative study of Venezuelan and Bulgarian practices of squatting and the official response to them, Mariya Ivancheva drew attention to the role of the state in those struggles. The contrast between the Bulgarian state’s eviction of the Roma inhabiting one Sofia neighborhood and the Venezuelan state’s (contradictory, but still, admirable) initiative of housing Caracas’s homeless in refugios (abandoned hotels and other unused buildings) was not in Bulgaria’s favor. When the European Court and NGOs finally intervened to help the evicted Roma, they did so in a highly problematic way, reducing the eviction to individual discrimination based on skin color rather than urban inequalities and economic structure.

The Uncivil Society: Countermovements on the Right

The discussion of urban social movements nicely set up the next two panels devoted to counter-hegemonic movements on the right and the left, respectively. A number of different frameworks have been applied to the study of right-wing movements. In terms of their origins, most scholarship has seen their members as either homo Sovieticuses unable to adapt to the new realities or as subjects driven by populist (unrealistic) passions. In terms of political function, right-wing movements are often interpreted as a surrogate left (here one is reminded of August Babel’s “anti-Semitism as the socialism of the fools” thesis) or as the Trojan horse of capitalism. Martin Marinos’s (U of Pittsburgh/ New Left Initiatives, Bulgaria) presentation sought to place the major Bulgarian nationalist party (ATAKA, which at its peak received 15% of the vote) precisely on this more traditional left-to-right spectrum. He contrasted their loudly declared interest in social justice for Bulgarians with the emptiness of the publicity stunts meant to demonstrate that commitment and the equally loudly declared support for national capitalism. Ultimately, he had to conclude that whatever their economic views, they are at best of secondary interest in their overall ideology and their coherence is thus not particularly important. The other two case studies examined the specific forms in which nationalist parties operated. Marek Mikuš (LSE) described a Serbian right-wing movement attempting to fight the Belgrade LGBT Pride Parade, among other things, by adopting the language and practices of an NGO. This, uncivil society, mimics all the features of civil society, defends its prisoners (arrested as for beating up Pride Parade participants), using the language of human rights, supports “grassroots” initiatives (to beat up some or other minority), and runs a “civic slate” of candidates for parliament. Finally, Ilya Budraytsksis contextualized right-wing movements’ trajectories in and out of the Russian system of managed democracy. In the mid-2000s, the ruling elite attempted to incorporate nationalists into the parliamentary system through the Rodina party. When the party grew in popularity on the eve of the 2005 Moscow Duma elections and when nationalists showed signs of radicalization (especially in the aftermath of the 2005 anti-Chechen pogroms in the northern city of Kondogopa), however, it was thrown out of managed democracy and the authorities set about taming its more extremist factions. Despite the nationally specific context out of which they emerged, the right-wing movements looked very recognizeable to all conference participants and the discussion proceeded without significant disagreements.

Too numerous to capture: Countermovements on the Left

That wasn’t true of the counter-movements on the left, the panel meant to be the centerpiece of the whole conference. Whether it was the exhaustion of the fourth day of the conference or the fact that most of us had left the bar at 2 am the night before thanks to Gáspár Miklós Tamás’s presence, the accounts told of leftist political protests in postsocialist societies did not stick together very well. It was suggested later, at the end of the conference, that the panel’s coherence problem might be symptomatic of the lack of knowledge of each other’s social movements and our absence of a common language to articulate them. The conference was not assembled under the formal principle of representing different groups from the postsocialist world: it just so happened that a significant portion of the participants were involved in one social movement or another. Those movements took very different forms. The panel was opened by András Istvánffy, the leader of the Fourth Republic, a Hungarian formation that identifies as a populist left and is in the process of entering electoral politics in Hungary. Other participants identified their organizations as journals of social critique: the Polish Krytyka Polityczna, the Ukrainian Спiлне (Commons), the Belorussian Прасвет (Dawn) or the Romanian Critic Atac. In each case, the journal serves as the basis for a much wider range of activities of the group. But even within the range of those journals, the situation is barely comparable. Founded in 2002, Krytyka Polityzna is the oldest such magazine and the largest organization. It has a huge publishing house with over 100 employees, discussion clubs in a couple of dozen Polish cities and ongoing international efforts such as a London branch and a Ukrainian-language version of the journal. By contrast, the Нови Леви Перспективи (New Left Perspectives) collective to which most Bulgarian conference participants belonged emerged only this year and is only now developing a journal of its own. Nevertheless, in addition to the impressive speaker series it initiated this year, they are frequent travelers to smaller Bulgarian cities where they screen political documentary films as well as active participants in Sofia protests. A member of that collective, Mariya Ivancheva spoke at length about her experience of trying to persuade young middle-class ecological protestors from Sofia to act beyond their immediate class interest and link their struggles with other social or labor protests. Another organizational form represented at the conference was student activism and even then there were several different instantiations of it: the Ukrainian independent student union Direct Action, the Croatian union of students and faculty, and the Hungarian Student Network. The three groups represented different types of response to the inaction and bureaucratization of the official student unions in their country. Such a variety of organizational forms reflects the specific conditions faced by activists in a given society but also complicates their interaction.

Longer talks

While the conference was conceived as a “school without teachers,” several senior scholars did support our effort with a talk. In the opening day of the conference, the Hungarian historian and sociologist Attila Melegh (Corvinus University/ Global Civil Society Program) offered a comparative view of political violence in the post-WWII world, the world of Stalin’s Gulag and political purges in the newly-constructed Soviet bloc but also of colonial and racial violence perpetrated by the British, French, and US state. Melegh argued that the latter is usually missing from discussions of totalitarianism, a discourse usually reserved for Nazi Germany and the Soviet bloc. This kind of erasure allows a figure such as Robert Schumann to be remembered solely for his role as the founding father of the European Union rather than a major figure of mid-twentieth-century French colonial policy. What allowed Melegh to conduct such comparisons was not some measure of the political violence such as numbers of casualties, but the economic relations that underlay that violence, whether of a Stalinist or capitalist kind. Defining capitalism as a global fight for resources, for example, he posited that there is no such thing as a capitalist state in itself. Such a state necessarily exists within a capitalist state system of which colonial capitalism constituted a major part in the post-WWII period.     

In his talk “Whitened Histories,” the Hungarian-American sociologist József Böröcz (Rutgers U, New Jersey) continued his long-term project of applying a postcolonial perspective to the European Union. In this talk, however, he focused on race relations in Hungary’s postsocialist politics. Defining a racial view of the world as a perspective that divides humanity into distinct populations, which could be placed in a hierarchical and trans-historical order, Böröcz claimed that the coincidental development of that view, of classical sociology, and of many of the institutions of the modern East European state meant the incorporation of that view into scholarship and state bureaucracy. The socialist state was only partially interested in or successful at its elimination. Since the end of that regime type was divorced from critiques of pre-1945 capitalism, what we have now is the full-fledged restoration of that racial worldview in the postsocialist world. In its pursuit of its pre-communist origins and the privileges of global whiteness, the Hungarian state has been rehabilitating fairly odious expressions or proponents of that racial worldview, especially from the interwar era. Employing the trope of “whiteness”—both physical and metaphorical,--Böröcz went on to interpret a number of cultural debates in today’s Hungary that range from the politics of memorialization (the ghettoization and leveling of art produced during state socialism or the rehabilitation of some odious pre- or anti-communist figures) to representations of Africans or Roma in mass culture. For him, the whole pursuit of a “European” identity in the postsocialist world is a deeply fraught activity because of the inextricability of “European identity” from whiteness and colonialism.

Professor László Bruszt (European University Institute/ CEU) gave a talk on critical sociology. Speaking in favor of a more pluralistic approach to critical sociology, Professor Bruszt argued that neoclassical sociology (the ideas of Max Weber, Emile Durkheim, and Karl Polanyi) could also serve as basis for social critique, favorably contrasting that tradition to “dogmatic Marxism.” Despite the very cordial tone of the subsequent question-and-answer session, one was left under the impression that most of the audience were left unpersuaded by Bruszt’s argument, siding instead with “dogmatic Marxism.” The final question posed by a member of that audience—whether one could say that neoclassical sociology’s positive ideal lies in a “capitalism with a human face” whereas Marxism cannot imagine an ideal within contemporary capitalism, answered by Professor Bruszt in the affirmative—gave a succinct formulation to the difference between speaker and the majority of the audience.

The conference closed, appropriately, with an uplifting and programmatic speech by Gáspár Miklós Tamás, a leading Hungarian intellectual and former dissident. According to him, the demise of the Communist Party as a political form opens the question about the forms our challenge to the global economic order could take. Without giving concrete answers to that question, he suggested three principles in developing those forms: an insistence on spontaneity and refusal of hierarchy; no abandonment of our preoccupation with theory; and a certain monastic rigor. He went on to elaborate the last point through an extensive analogy with early Christianity, which owed much of its success to the fasting, celibacy, and life of voluntary poverty of its practitioners. Early Christians’ courage of absolute refusal offers a powerful model of the self-denial of academic accolades and institutional acceptance. Using the example of the Soviet bloc of the 1960s, which entered into a competition for economic development with the West (and lost), Gáspár Miklos Tamás argued that today’s left shouldn’t compete with the liberal mainstream on the latter’s terms but should instead build its own, parallel institutions. Similarly, we shouldn’t debate the liberals on their own terms. We shouldn’t have to accept the moralizing and naturalizing terms of today’s discourses about the Greeks/ gypsies/ the poor being too lazy, the intellectuals—too useless, the old—too old. At best, those debates put us on the defensive. The only hope we have of winning them is by reframing them historically, for our side is with history and against the moralizing and racializing discourses of the right. And if the postsocialist left is weaker than many of its kindred movements in the West or the South, capitalism in this part of the world—its institutions, its legitimacy, and its hold over people’s minds—is also weaker. Eastern Europe has always been a weak link of capitalism and this is the source of our hope. The fact remains as true nowadays as it was in Lenin’s time.

           

What Is to Be Done?

Following Gáspár Miklós Tamás’s speech, the conference participants spent the final hour planning what is to be done after they leave Budapest. Even after an exhausting five days there was a collective determination and sufficient energy not to let this conference be yet another event promptly forgotten after its end. The political and intellectual stakes of the conversation were simply too high. Most of the proposals voiced concerned the integration of the various ongoing initiatives (upcoming activist meetings of the Transeuropa Network, academic conferences in the US later in 2012, the ex-Yugoslav Subversive Festival or thematic journal issues by the Hungarian Fordulat and the Ukrainian Commons) that place neoliberalism and its countermovements at the center of the analysis of postsocialist societies. The Bulgarian participants graciously offered to host next year’s gathering. Most of this concluding session, however, went towards the proposal to establish an open-source online magazine, in the format of Eurozine, but postsocialist in scope and leftist in its politics. The practical labor on such a magazine would allow to both work out the collective identity and to attract new people. The success or failure of the conference will be in large part measured by the realization of those proposals.

Regardless of their fate, however, in at least one respect the conference was an indisputable success. Critically minded young scholars from different East European societies, no longer content with the mantras of “democratization,” “civil society,” and “Europe,” which have at best unwittingly obscured and at worst valorized the neoliberalization of the former Second World, met each other, walked the streets of Budapest, and drank many a beer in Budapest’s Jewish district. Getting to know each other, to compare notes, to form communities and relationships is the first and necessary step to any transnational challenge to the neoliberal hegemony in the postsocialist space.

Rossen Djagalov

A Nyugaton túli urbanizáció: posztszocialista városkutatási konferencia

Lesz egy városkutatási konferencia a kelet-(közép-)európai térségről és a posztszocialista város kérdéséről.

Dear colleagues,

We invite abstracts for our stream at the RC21 conference ‘Resourceful Cities’ to be held in Berlin, 29-31 August 2013:

Urbanism beyond the West: Comparing Accelerated Urban Change in Eastern Europe and the Global South

Convenors: Monika Grubbauer (Darmstadt University of Technology) and Joanna Kusiak (University of Warsaw)

In the search for new models of urbanism, attention is now being shifted towards non‐Western cities. Yet the urban dynamics of post‐socialist Eastern Europe are largely disregarded in the recent literature on global urbanism with its focus on the North‐South axis. Although the cities of Eastern Europe and the Global South have been theorized as radically different, the former being described as “under‐urbanized” and the latter as “over‐urbanized”, we propose to include Eastern Europe in what Ananya Roy calls “new geographies of theory”. In cities of both regions the intense socio‐material transformations of recent years have been highly uneven, normatively guided by foreign aid programs and neoliberal policy agendas. In both cases we can also observe new forms of “insurgent” or “messy” urbanism emerging in reaction to new inequalities and arbitrary politics. Despite substantial (i.e. infrastructural) differences, we claim that comparing cities of Eastern Europe and the Global South may both re‐open the regionally biased debate on the “post‐socialist city” and contribute to the broader discussion on global and comparative urbanism. This session invites contributions comparing major phenomena of urban change in both regions as well as papers theorizing the post‐socialist city in global terms. Following the question of how patterns emerging from accelerated urban change can be treated as resources for new models of urbanism, we suggest the following topics:

• new inequalities and new solidarities
• accelerated socio‐material change as a challenge for sustainable urban policy
• reshaping relations of property and new property forms
• changing urban form and infrastructures of daily life
• foreign policy aid and its discontents
• urban informality and marginality
• ethnographies of urban society between neoliberal dreams and dystopian reality
• the notion of “chaos” and its use in the global urbanism debate

The deadline for submission of abstracts is 31 January 2013. Please send your abstracts (300-500 words) to abstracts[at]rc21[dot]org and the session organizers Monika Grubbauer (grubbauer[at]stadtforschung[dot]tu-darmstadt[dot]de) and Joanna Kusiak (jkkusiak[at]gmail[dot]com).

Please contact us for any questions. More information on the conference and the submission of abstracts can be found on www.rc21.org/conferences/berlin2013.

Egy 1971-ben megrendezett konferencia emlékei: nyugaton

Arról a bizonyos, 1971-ben megrendezett konferenciáról, amelyet még Enyedi György szervezett:

„Our conversation began in 1971 in a noisy reception hall in Budapest. Anne Buttimer enjoyed seeing the quotations from textbooks in quantitative geography contract into a real person. On my side I was happy to be able to apologize for not having rendered an account of Swedish social geography that Anne had asked for in a letter, sometime in the early sixties. The following day we went for a walk. Human nature being as it is, it was not long until I selfishly began preaching ’time-geography’, using an envelope and the sandy park way to explain my graphs and what I believed they were good for.

Anne had just finished a paper on Vidal de la Blache’s geography, and we agreed that his central concept of genre de vie was a common ground where our interests met. I also became convinced that Anne had great sympathy for the general direction of my efforts to grasp ongoing processes in their evolving context. An older scholar as much as a younger one likes to be understood and appreciated. I was glad to have won a proselyte.

But with Anna Buttimer one must be prepared for the unexpected.

Everyone is familiar with a situation like this. Summer evening after a warm day: well known near things and sounds as night comes on. Suddenly a flash of light engraves sharp contours up to a distant horizon. You find yourself in the midst of a landscape with depths that routine daytime preoccupations have prevented you from seeing. To see them is revealing and alarming. One fine day some years after Budapest Anne said to me that the worldview depicted in my kind of diagrams reminded her of a ’dance macabre’. I felt a startling flash of light. I was alarmed. My whole effort had for decades been to work towards a holistic view of geography which should be able to catch evolving life.”

(Torsten Hägerstrand, Foreword. In: Anne Buttimer and Tom Mels (eds.) By Northern Lights: On the Making of Geography in Sweden, 2006, pp. XI) 

Szerintem ez két szempontból is nagyon tanulságos lehet (ezeket nem most gondoltam ki):

1. Hägerstrand "modelljeinek" magyar interpretációja miatt: az időföldrajzot pl. nem alkalmazták (szemben a kvantitatív-modernista diffúzió elmélettel), és "modellként", nem pedig a kvalitatív kutatás kibontásával, a szerző eredeti kontextusának, céljainak megfelelően lett bemutatva;

2. a konferencia elhelyezésének, a "nyugati" tudás és intellektuális kapcsolatok kibontakozatlanságának, hatástalanságának lokális, magyar kontextusa miatt.

LAKATLAN: kihasználatlan városi terek térképezése Budapesten

Van egy nagyszerű projekt, a LAKATLAN, amely az üres/lakatlan városi épített terek kihasználatlanságának a kérdéséről, és ezeknek a feltérképezéséről szól. A résztvevők célja egy olyan közösségi térkép létrehozása volt, amelyen ezek a terek láthatóvá válnának Budapesten. Ez a buli, amely elsősorban egy kurzust és egy előadássorozatot foglalt magában, a Kortárs Építészeti Központ (KÉK), a Művelődési Szint (MüSzi) és a Moholy-Nagy Művészeti Egyetem (MoME) szervezésében készült, a résztvevők pedig a MoME hallgatói. A projekt leírása:

"A MoME 2012 őszi kurzusa és a hozzá kapcsolódó előadássorozat fókuszában a közép-európai régió városainak poszt-szocialista, poszt-indusztriális, illetve válság-okozta átstrukturálódása során megüresedő ingatlanok sorsa áll: az előadások a város, a kerület és az egyes épület léptékeiben foglalkoznak a feltérképezés és leltár, a spontán és ideiglenes használat, a formális és informális építészeti újragondolás, a civil, kulturális és szociális hasznosítás lehetőségeivel. A félév során a hallgatók egy, a Budapesten üresen álló tereket és ingatlanokat leltározó közösségi térképet (crowdmap) hoznak létre, várospolitikai javaslatokat készítenek elő, valamint részt vesznek az üres városi terekről és ingatlanokról szóló könyv / információs kiadványok megtervezésében és szerkesztésében. Az előadássorozat célja az üres ingatlanok felhasználási lehetőségéről szóló vita elindítása, és dialógus kialakítása a közönség, a hazai és a külföldi előadók között."

A készülő térkép már elérhetővé vált a neten, lehet a projekthez csatlakozni!

"A LAKATLAN egy politikailag és kereskedelmileg független, nyitott hozzáférésű közösségi térkép, melynek célja az üres városi ingatlanok leltárba vétele, kategorizálása, azok adatainak összegyűjtése és nyilvánossá tétele."

Posztszocializmus és posztkolonializmus: a moszkvai afrikai bevándorlók

Találtam egy baromi érdekes (2009-es) cikket, amely a posztszocialista és a posztkolonialista problémaköröket hozza össze az oroszországi, konkrétabban Moszkvában letelepedő afrikai bevándorlók vizsgálatán keresztül. Izgi mi? Itt az absztrakt:

"While Western Europe has a long history of facing and studying the issues of immigration, this phenomenon is still recent for the ex-socialist states and has not been studied sufficiently yet. At the same time, the ‘closed’ nature of the socialist societies, the difficulties of the ‘tran-sitional period’ of the 1990s predetermine the problems in communication between the mi-grants and the population majority, the specific features of the forming diasporas and of their probable position in the receiving societies. The study of African migrants in Russia (particu-larly, in Moscow) recently launched by the present authors consists of two interrelated parts: the sociocultural adaptation of migrants from Africa in Russia on the one hand, and the way they are perceived in Russia on the other. One of the key-points of the study is the formation or non-formation of diasporas as network communities, as a means of both more successful adaptation and identity support."

Szocialista és poszt-szocialista urbanizáció AAG szekció

Nos, találtam egy másik nagyon érdekes AAG szekciót is, amely a szocialista és poszt-szocialista urbanizáció kérdésével foglalkozik, és ahogyan olvashatjátok az összefoglalóban: úgy általában. Tehát mind a jelenlegi "szocialista" rendszerek városaival, mind a múltbeli "szocialista" rendszerek, kormányok városfejlesztésével, a 20. századi urbanizációs ideológiák hagyatékával is foglalkozni akarnak, és eleve a "szocializmus" jelentését átfogóan a szociáldemokráciától az államszocializmusig értelmezik. A felhívás azért is különösen izgalmas - azon túl, hogy a térségünk ebben a kérdésben közvetlenül érintett -, mert azt írja, hogy a neoliberalizmus válságára adott válaszként újabb alternatívákat kell keresnünk, ennek érdekében pedig a szocialista modellek hagyatékának kritika újraértékelése szükséges. Szerintem ez egy elég problematikus vállalkozás, talán jól mutatja a "nyugati" akadémiai baloldaliság ellentmondásos viszonyulását az ún. "szocialista modellekhez", tehát hogy meg akarnak belőle tartani valamit, mégis tudják, hogy nem szabad átállni a sötét oldalra (hiszen "történtek csúnya dolgok" stb.). A valós probléma inkább az, hogy a (mondjuk weimari) szociáldemokráciának már nagyon kevés köze volt a (mondjuk bolsevik/szovjet) államszocializmushoz, még ha a 20. század modernizmusában részben átfedésben is vannak, amely a szerzők figyelmének középpontjában van.

Call for Papers

Association of American Geographers

Los Angeles 9 -- 13 April 2013

"Socialist and post-Socialist Urbanisms: Critical Reflections; Comparative

Perspectives"

Douglas Young, York University, Toronto

Lisa Drummond, York University, Toronto

Urban life in the 21st century has been shaped in quite significant ways by the thoughts, practices, ideologies and social organization of the 20th century. We seek papers that focus on the urban legacies of 20th century socialism and explore their impact on urban policy, spatial form and everyday life in the 21st. With the neoliberal model of city-building appearing to be in crisis mode and new approaches to urban issues urgently needed, we consider the possibility that a critical reassessment of the legacies of socialist models could provide valuable lessons for urban policy makers and citizens alike.

Actually existing socialism has taken many forms ranging from social democracy to repressive state socialism. The common thread of the 'social' that runs through them all is a commitment to the modernist idea of universal progress, a desire to create a socially de-differentiated society, and a heightened degree of state intervention in processes of city-building and urban governance. We seek papers that explore urban areas representing some of those variations of socialisms as well as variations in their fates. These could be cities that are socialist today, cities in countries that are transitioning to market socialism, post-socialist cities, and cities in neo-liberalizing former social democracies.

We particularly welcome papers that will contribute to the development of comparative perspectives (for example, Asia and Europe) if not within individual papers then from the sum of papers on the panel as a whole.

Papers could explore a wide range of topics including urban planning, housing, social policy, community development, local politics, economic restructuring and political ecology.

Please send abstracts of no more than 250 words to Douglas Young (dogoyo[at]yorku[dot]ca) and Lisa Drummond (drummond[at]yorku[dot]ca) by 8 October.

15. Történeti Geográfusok Nemzetközi Konferenciája - Prága

2012. augusztus 6-10. között Prágában tartják meg a 15. Történeti Geográfusok Nemzetközi Konferenciáját (15th International Conference of Historical Geographers). A konferencia házigazdája és helyszíne a Prága belvárosában elhelyezkedő Károly Egyetem (Univerzita Karlova) Természettudományi Kara, az eseményt a kar a Cseh Tudományos Akadémiával, a Történelemtudományi Intézettel és a Cseh Földrajzi Társaságnak a Történeti Földrajz és Környezettörténelem Szekciójával közösen szervezi meg. A prágai konferencia jelentősége, hogy a 14 eddig megrendezett konferencia után az első olyan, amelyet posztszocialista országban tartanak meg. Éppen ezért ez nemcsak felhívja a figyelmet a kelet-közép-európai térség sajátos történelmi adottságaira, hanem elő is segítheti a diskurzust a sok szempontból közös történelmi múltú országok között, különös tekintettel posztszocialista múltjuk megértése érdekében.

A konferencia igen széles körű és változatos témákban várja az előadókat, tág teret adva ezzel a kritikai szemléletű előadásoknak is. A szervezők különösen várják és támogatják az európai fiatal kutatók részvételét. Az absztraktok leadási határideje 2011. december 31. (szombat). Azok számára, akik 2012 március 31-ig regisztrálnak, a részvételi díjak kutatók esetében €270, diákoknak €140, kísérőknek €80, a konferencia vacsoráért (opcionális) minden esetben €45 összegeket kérnek. Az egyetemi hallgatók számára felhívom a figyelmet arra, hogy egyetemüktől rendszerint támogatás igényelhető a konferencia költségeinek fedezésére, így például az ELTE TTK hallgatók számára tudományos célokra benyújtott pályázatok maximum 75%-át, de személyenként félévente legfeljebb 50.000Ft-ot fedezhet az egyetem (http://hali.elte.hu/rendkivuliksporttudkult). Szóval, érdemes támogatások után érdeklődni!

A konferencia meghirdetett témái:

• Historical geography: past, present and future
• Teaching historical geography
• Historical geography archives and methods (research)
• Borderlands, cores and peripheries in historical geographical perspective
• Changing rural landscapes: transformation of the countryside
• Changing historical towns: transformation of urban space
• Nature, society and environmental change
• Historical natural hazards and climate change
• Historical land use: theory and methods
• Regional, national and transnational identities
• Heritage: creation, conservation, protection, extinction
• Local places – global processes: places of memory – memory of places
• Geographies of colonialism and post-colonialism
• Spaces of mobility and migration
• Spaces of conflict: war and post-war landscapes
• Transitioning economies: industrialization, urbanization, and capitalist development
• Leisure transition: tourism, sport and recreation
• Changing Central Europe
• Applied historical geography

Forrás: http://www.ichg2012.cz/en/welcome