Southeast European (Post) Modernities

Chalga, a fusion of pan-Balkan folk styles with pop, wedding, and Romani music, has become a mass phenomenon since the 1990s. This paper analyzes popfolk economically (who is profiting), politically (who has what kind of power), representationally (who and what is being represented musically and visually), and historically (how it has changed) with an eye to the role of Roma and the question of modernity. Critics of chalga, composed of the intelligentsia, nationalists, and many folk musicians, accuse it of being crass, low class, pornographic, kitch, and formulaic, as well criticising it for its exotic eastern elements. Defenders see chalga as a bridge between east and west, as pan-Balkan entertainment, and emphasize musical unity. Chalga’s Ottoman legacy in the form of inclusiveness and “cosmopolitanism” has been discussed as a possible counteraction to ethnic nationalism.

I claim that various versions of popfolk carry out specific ideological work, some nationalist in nature. Current debates center on what it means to be Balkan, often contrasted to what it means to be European or “modern”; ironically, the Gypsy looms prominently in the imagery of the backward/oriental Balkans. Roma remain the most marginalized group, but they are precisely the group from which pop/folk appropriated its style. One the one hand, for some opponents, chalga has become the enemy of the nation and the Roma are to blame. On the other hand, chalga music exhibits many Romani stylistic and visual elements, and Roma are sometimes employed in the industry. This paper, based on 20 years of ethnographic fieldwork with Roma, analyzes these contradictions.

Naumović, Slobodan

(University of Belgrade, Serbia)

Can Reflection on Modernity be Modern again in Post Postmodern Southeast Europe?

Anthropology was the brainchild of Enlightenment wherever it appeared. Influenced by the Herderian worldview, ethnology as its continental successor soon turned its back on the rationalist project of modernity, seeing in it the dreaded enemy of Tradition. From the foundational period, the relationship between ethnology and the project of modernity remained complex and paradoxical in SEE. Local ethnologists often resolutely struggled to modernize their disciplines, making them more competitive internationally, while at the same time developing traditionalist and autochtonist ideological agendas on the national arena. Later, communist ideologues attempted to reinvent a role for ethnology in their project of forced modernization, albeit with limited and at times antimodern results. More recently, the process of anthropologisation of SEE ethnologies added further paradoxical twists, as the resulting occasional postmodernization of the discipline set some anthropologists against the ideas and values of modernity. However, yesterdays’ overconfident postmodernist reports of the death of modernity, both in anthropology itself and in the wider society, now seem exaggerated. After a short lived phase of neoliberal triumphalism, legitimated by postmodernist cerebral excesses like the idea of the “end of history”, many “core” European countries are joining the tango of instability and unpredictability. SEE is ceasing to be the privileged “laboratory of transformative processes”. Western and SEE anthropologists will have to join forces to reinvent new modes of reflecting (re)appearing forms of modernity both in science and the world at large if their disciplines are to become “modern” again in the rapidly changing era of post postmodernity.

Nitsiakos, Vassilis

(University of Ioannina, Greece)

From Pre-Modern Kurbet to Post-Modern Transnationalism: Theoretical and Methodological Issues

Migrartion in recent decades has taken on new features, which demand a renegotiation of the theoretical as well as methodological premises for its study. Globalisation and the conditions of post-modernity have formed, ultimately, a new framework that re-contextualises and re-configures the phenomenon of migration.

Transnationalism has been a key-term in this process. In the new migration it refers to the fact that the migrants’ networks of social relations, their activities and patterns of life involve, on the whole, both home and host societies: a social field is being formed which links up the two countries irrespectively of borders and geographical conditions, the new migrants living inbetween and forming “hybrid” identities.

In this paper I question the validity of such a concept for the understanding of migration in a specific Balkan ethnographic context, that of the Albanian-Greek transborder area. Instead of the term “migration” I adopt the term “transborder mobility”, deconstructing nationalist approaches to this mobility, which has been a diachronic process in all the Balkans. The common term Kurbet, an ottoman legacy of the Balkans, is used as a starting point in an attempt to understand the historical background of mobility for work, examine the effects of the establishment of national states and their borders upon it, and finally, to interpret the new “migration” after the fall of the Albanian communist regime and the “opening” of the border.

The border, in its juridical-political and symbolic dimension, acquires a crucial role in terms of theory as well as methodology and “transethnography” or “transborder ethnography”, which are proposed as proper methods emphasizing mobility and passage through places, to avoid difficulties that derive from maintaining either classical or multi-sited ethnography.

II. Pre-organized Panels

Note:

The abstracts of the papers presented in the pre-organized panels are listed in section III (Paper Abstracts) in alphabetical order by name of the person giving the paper.

Labor, Time, and Calculation: Coping with Capitalism in Southeast Europe (Panel 1.1.)

The papers in this panel examine how local communities have responded to the challenges of recent economic change. Because the renewal of market capitalism has been one of the primary changes in postsocialist countries, we focus on three central topics in classic studies of capitalism – labor, time, and calculation – in four cases.

Capitalism’s distinctive qualities as an economic system are intertwined with social and cultural factors. This system shapes labor relations, both at the level of social structure and through ideologies about the value of work, forms of commensuration, and leisure as labor’s antidote. Capitalist rhythms of production also require linear and divisible forms of time and the deployment of calculative reasoning in both economic and social activity. Historical and ethnographic studies, however, have revealed tremendous variation in how communities respond to “capitalist” forms of labor, time, and calculation. Capitalist penetration is never total, as individuals and communities “contest,” “domesticate,” and “localize,” this economic system through other social and cultural practices.

Our papers use examples of shifts in labor, time, and calculation to reveal the negotiation of community identity vis-a-vis the market and state. This negotiation happens at the interface between community and market, but as two of the papers remind us, that interface is also often located, experienced, and negotiated in the heart of community activities, like rituals. Thus, the negotiation of capitalism, through labor, time, and calculation, occurs at multiple points of everyday life. Through our discussion of new trends in capitalism, we hope to expand the study of local economic transformation beyond the previously dominant framework of postsocialism, and to bring our case studies into comparison with other patterns of social change in southeast Europe and elsewhere.

Organizers

Jennifer Cash, Detelina Tocheva (Max-Planck-Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle/Saale)

Participants Discussant

Miladina Monova Nevena Dimova

Detelina Tocheva

Jennifer Cash

Monica Vasile

Negotiating (Post)Modernities: the Western Balkans in the Process of EU-Enlargement (Panel 3.6)

Existing research into discourses and images of EU related processes and the EU’s eastward enlargement has persuasively shown that these processes are perceived as being oriented from the centre outwards, toward the periphery, with the degree of “civilisation,” “modernization” and “Europeanness” decreasing in the same direction. On the other hand, images, discourses and practices employed in the negotiation of Europeanness on both sides of this “civilizational slope” (Melegh 2006) are characterized by simultaneous occurrences, mutuality and equivalence in function and nature. The proposed panel aims to relate political processes of EU enlargement with diverse modes of practicing and negotiating modernities in the Western Balkans, in order to show that complex processes of the (self-)perception of societies in the Western Balkans are active agents and participants in the process of shaping and negotiating ideas of Europe.

Three papers have a particular focus on the shared Yugoslav legacy and the complex, multilayered and multidirectional discourses of (self)potential and (self)emancipatory practices related to the Europeanization discourses. The panel aims to illumine the ways in which the postmodern ambiguity of the accession discourses (Busch and Krzyzanowski 2007) not only provides scope for imagining Western Balkan societies as passive, silent, and a postcolonial other (Petrović 2009), but also produce both emanciaptory discourses on Europe and the Balkans, and the thematisation of Europe as nostalgia or utopia.

Organizer

Ana Hofman (Scientific Research Center of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Ljubljana)

Participants

Ana Hofman

Ildiko Erdei

Tanja Petrović

From “Rural” to “Plural” – Reinventing Locality via Tourism

This panel seeks to investigate how tourists shape local forms of rural tourism by the latter being conveyed the role of cultural entrepreneurs for the local heritage. The panel asserts that more attention often needs to be paid to the way the consumer – the requirements of tourism demand – shapes locality.

Rural areas stand at a crossroads, caught between global and local flows and processes, no longer purely associated with the production of agricultural commodity, but seen as locations that incorporate tourism, leisure and food production and consumption. At the same time, globalizing frames such as UNESCO, EU policies, Slow Food, etc. shape the production of locality. The impact on the everyday life of targeted populations can be seen in the transformation of local regulations and policies, the potential of creating and recreating cultural landscapes and local architecture, etc. New and hybrid forms of tourism can transform the physiognomy of places, with greater conformity to urban constructs than local needs. Links between tourism and local resources emerge in a global context of changing trends in, and pressure from, tourism demand. All this requires a shift from “selling what we can produce” to “producing what we can sell”. Food and gastronomy being part of the cultural tourism experience, participation in farm or arts-and-craft activities, visits to (former) industrial sites, together with other actions, refine and develop the traditional displays of locality.

Organizers

Raluca Nagy (Université Libre de Bruxelles, Laboratoire d'Anthropologie des Mondes Contemporains)

Monica Stroe (National School of Political Sciences and Public Administration, Department of Sociology, Bucharest)

Participants

Raluca Nagy

Monica Stroe

Bogdan Iancu

Marko Stojanović

Photography and (Post)Modernity (Panels 1.4 and 2.4)

In the Ottoman Balkans and Turkey initial modernization processes were closely related to the emergence of still photography. In the year 1839, when sultan Abdülmecid I presented his far reaching reform project in the garden of Gülhane, Daguerre presented the prototype of his photo camera. Despite the fact that large parts of his Jewish, Muslim and Orthodox population were opposed to being photographed or taking photos due to religious reasons, sultan Abdülhamid II not only allowed photography but actively used it in order to represent the modernity of the Ottoman Empire to the European powers. Similarly, this was also the case with the young Turkish Republic, when the government commissioned the young Austrian photographer Othmar Pferschy to represent its achievements in thousands of photographs. Until WWII, photography remained a bourgeois project in Balkan societies. In the socialist era photography became a powerful instrument for the representation of socialist modernity. Private photography, however, was relatively expensive: former religious considerations were overshadowed by financial ones.

However, on the whole, the Balkans remained latecomers in mass photography until the early 1990s. Transition was accompanied not only by the introduction of digital cameras but also by other digital media. Photography lost its privilege of visual representation in favor of the video camera.

No systematic research has been conducted on the relationship of the photo camera, representation and (post)modernity in the region. Recent work has situated the image and the camera as key elements in an intersection between modernity and a critique of modernity. Photography is not only a product of particular social and cultural environments, but also a force that itself accelerates change and transformation. Yet the idea of an objective representation of the visual has long been questioned with far reaching implications for the basic premises of modernity. The ambiguity of the meaning of images questions the idea of an “ultimate truth” and entails a profound epistemological shift from modernity to postmodernity. The challenge of the realistic paradigm also has far-reaching consequences for ethnographic practice and our understanding of the photographic visual in terms of methodology and interpretation. The panel therefore aims at inspiring research into emic and etic photographic visual representation, as well as into vernacular theory construction of visual representation in the Balkans.

Organizers

Robert Pichler (University of Graz, Dept. of Southeast European History)

Karl Kaser (University of Graz, Dept. of Southeast European History)

Participants

Martina Baleva

Anelia Kassabova

Nenad Radić

Simona Čupić

Robert Pichler

Margit Rohringer

Imagining, Shaping, and Tagging: Changing Spatial Practices in Southeast European Land- and Cityscapes (Panel 2.1)

Pursuing Arjun Appadurai’s question concerning “the nature of locality, as lived experience, in a globalized, deterritorialized world” (Appadurai 1991: 196), this panel aims at delineating the relation between practices, conceptions and imaginations of place in rural (border) areas of the former Yugoslavia, as well as in the urban contexts of cities such as Mostar, Sarajevo and Belgrade. The contributors are focusing on hitherto neglected spatial aspects of the politics, and ask how, despite the incessant shifting of borders, institutions, divisions (along ethnic/political/religious lines), and identities, local actors constitute public space.

Arguing in opposition to the current predominant deconstructivist approaches that land- and cityscapes cannot be read like texts but should instead be seen as effectively experienced through dwelling, movement, utilization and/or inscription, our panel proposes an understanding of space that combines physical, imagined and social aspects of the environment. Taking into consideration the materiality of space as well as people’s embodied, imagined and lived social relations with their surroundings, the contributors touch on topics such as everyday “spatial practices” (Michel de Certeau), political iconographies and visual techniques of appropriation and/or metamorphoses of public space, the (in)visible and (im)material modalities of borders, the rescaling of territorial administrative categories in processes of state-formation as well as the geopolitics of mobility regulation.

Historical landscapes and continuously changing cityscapes are both material and meaning, defined through phenomenological interaction and experience. They are shaped by visible historic interpretations as well as by meanings and interpretations related to them. We argue that memories, as well as ongoing commentaries, are attached to specific land- and cityscapes and thus have the potential to become sources for (re-)writing the local histories that have been ignored or neglected by official historiography. Accordingly, this panel is concerned with deciphering the inscriptions and attributions of historical narratives in rural and urban spaces in the context of post-socialist and post-war transformations.

Organizer

Michaela Schäuble (Seminar für Ethnologie, Martin-Luther Universität Halle-Wittenberg)

Participants

Michaela Schäuble,

Larissa Vetters

Ana Aceska

Daniel Šuber

Revival of Religious Festivities in Southeastern Europe since the Early 1990s (Panel 2.5)

This panel is open for anthropologists/ethnologists interested in the theme of the revival of traditional religious rituals in different parts of Southeastern Europe. It will deal with the ways in which new forms of rituals, stemming from the pre-Second Word War period, have emerged again after being restrained during socialism. Panel participants are expected to have first hand fieldwork experience of these events as well as an overview of the situation in a particular region and country.

We would like to concentrate on public celebrations that incorporate processions, i.e. the ritual circumambulation of the settlement, as part of the celebration of the protecting saint of a church, village, or town. In presenting the material, a short history of the revival of the rituals is welcomed. The focus should concern the extent to which the basic characteristics of these rituals have changed in comparison to pre-socialist times, these being: space, time, actors (organizers and participants), activities, verbal messages and artifacts. We would also like to discuss how different local contexts determine varied modes of celebrations, such as environmental conditions (landscape and climate), demographic structure (newcomers vs old timers), urban/rural settings, ethnic, religious and political affiliations, class and other social divides.

Through a comparative approach we will thus be searching for an answer as to how the revival of traditional ritual forms in the past two decades is connected with various (post)modern processes in Southeastern Europe.

Organizer

Vesna Vučinić-Nešković (Philosophical Faculty, University of Belgrade)

Participants

Jakša Primorac

Katerina Seraïdari

Marinella Vuševa

Vesna Vučinić-Nešković

III. Paper Abstracts

Aceska, Ana

(Department of Sociology, Humboldt University, Berlin)

The City and the “Dusha (Soul)”: Imagining the Spatial Changes in Post-War Mostar, Bosnia-Herzegovina

The city of Mostar in Bosnia-Herzegovina has a very peculiar urban history. At the beginning of the 1990s it witnessed two major urban transformations: from a "united" to a “divided” and from a socialist to a post-socialist city. This “accumulation of conflicts” brought many urban changes: there is a street serving as a borderline that vastly structures the lives of the city dwellers; the names of many streets and squares changed together with their role in the lives of the locals from the two sides of the city; “the mall” became an important community meeting place; the modes of entertainment in public space modified and the city dwellers recognize (as my fieldwork data shows) that many practices related to “the city” (like “coffee drinking” or “evening walks along the promenades”) changed and dislocated in post-war times. In the local press and the various other local “conversations” about “the city” these spatial changes are imagined, remembered and represented in various ways. One of the most visible of them gathers around the idea that in post-war times Mostar lost its "dusha" (soul).

This paper will look at the content of two local journals, “Most” and “Mostariensia”, published in Mostar before and after the last war, and will try to make an anthropological assessment of how the various post-war urban transformations of Mostar are being imagined, remembered and represented in these two local journals. The main source of data will be the various historical, anthropological, sociological and artistic articles in these two journals that have the post-war urban transformation of Mostar as their main theme of thinking.

Anovska, Kleanti

(Institute of Folklore "Marko Cepenkov", Skopje)

The Influence of Recent Changes in the Lifestyles of Vlachs upon their Folklore

Under the influence of the industrial revolution between the two Worlds Wars, a great number of Vlachs in the Republic of Macedonia left their nomadic style of life and moved to villages, later to settle in towns and participate in industry. Following this period labeled as a socialistic self-managing Society, characteristic of the Former Yugoslavia in its dissolution and transition period over the last two decades, a new environment, new life conditions, and changes in the type of economy have arisen.

In analyzing folklore material collected among the Vlach, it has been shown that storytelling was a necessary means for transmitting their specific way of life. A large number of indicators were used in the survey (sex, age, education, religion, financial status) through which the author determined the social origin of the Vlach storytellers. This paper deals mainly with their occupation as a determinant factor, for the following reason: an occupation is the sum of the same or similar working activities having a number of social and economic characteristics. These characteristics are classified in two groups: 1. Cattle-breeders, i.e. those who are directly occupied with cattle-breeding and the members of such a family, and 2. Craftsmen, i.e. members of a craftsman's family.

Each storyteller is connected directly to everyday life through his occupation. As a result, differences arise among storytellers in that some of them like to add details while others pay closer attention to the traditional way of storytelling, etc.

Athanasopoulou, Angeliki

(Academy of Athens, Research Center for Greek Society)

"Constructs and Uses of a 'Western' Identity: the Case of Albanian Immigrants in Greece"

This paper focuses on the ways in which Albanian immigrants in Greece construct the ‘western’ dimension of their identity, thus claiming their inclusion to the ‘western’ world. According to social and political scientists, as well as in the public image, the ‘West’ is identified with modernity, i.e. the departure from anything that is conceptualized as traditional, old custom, irrational and uncivilized. Albanian society is conceived as a ‘traditional’ one, far from modern society, differentiated to the ‘West’. This differentiation is constructed historically – Ottoman era, building of the national state, socialist period – and synchronically, i.e. after the collapse of the socialist regime (both inside the country and in the context of external migration). The study is based on material from an extensive period of fieldwork research in a rural area (1996-1997), and from two research projects in Athens (2004-2005 and 2006-2007), including participant observation and interviews. It is also based on a brief research trip in Albania in August 2006. The paper studies how during particular phases and in particular settings of migration, Albanian immigrants, differentiated by gender and age, display different aspects of themselves – perceptions, practices and features of their lives – in order to legitimize their ‘western’ identity. Through this process, Albanian immigrants face specific needs and interests; they pursue diverse goals; they speak about their past and present experiences; they value and organize their lives in Greece; and finally they plan their future.

Banta, Ionela Carmen

(University of Craiova)

The Marriage Ritual in a Block of Flats, in a Neighbourhood on the Periphery of the City of Craiova (Romania)

The Craiovita neighbourhood was built during the Communist period of the '70s, designed specifically for workers comming from a rural environment and working in the big industries of Craiova at that time.

The rituals of "passage" (birth, marriage, burial) are a specific part of the day-to-day life of the inhabitants of the socialist blocks of flats. For instance, in observing the marriage ritual, one notices that its contents involve a series of sequences taken from the traditional Romanian ritual with some adaptations: the shaving of the groom, the arrival of the godparents, the departure of the bride and groom from the building, the ring dance in front of the stairway, the assembly leaving for church, accompanied by an accordionist. The wedding takes place in a restaurant rented months before.

The show awarded by this ritual gather many of the inhabitants from neighbouring blocks of flats.

Bealcovschi, Simona

(Université de Montréal)

"Le Nous fragmenté et le Je cosmopolite. Les nouvelles dynamiques identitaires roumaines"

Le postsocialisme nous apparaît comme une période de réaménagements structuraux, exacerbée par le contexte de la mondialisation et du néolibéralisme voués à affaiblir les cadres traditionnels et à déraciner les individus de leurs communautés de référence. Période de fragmentation sociale, elle est segmentée par, d’une part, la survivance d’un « Nous » ancré dans le passé et d’autre part, par l’icône émergente d’un « Je » individualiste et fluide, imparfaitement forgé par le contact avec l’Occident et l’expérience transnationale.

Qu’arrive-t-il, aux anciens ancrages iconiques indispensables à la réalisation du Soi intime ? Quels sont les ancrages des immigrants ? Vivant en Occident certains individus renforcent un « Je » cosmopolite qui se prouve cependant trop fragile pour se perpétuer quand il se heurte contre le « Nous » communautaire ? Pourquoi, certains individus incorporent-ils aisément l’altérité et le cosmopolitisme tandis que les autres tendent à renforcer la tradition créant des formes idiosyncrasiques, voire de nouvelles traditions (Hobsbawm) ? Ces différences peuvent être interprétées autant comme des formes de résistance au changement que comme des pratiques de valorisation intime (empowering).

Souhaitant contribuer aux débats qui entourent la nature de la postmodernité dans le contexte roumain, je propose d’explorer quelques dynamiques de l’émergence des formes de métissage et l’ambivalence culturelle indicible.

Ma présentation s’appuie sur une recherche empirique réalisée sur une douzaine de familles de migrants roumains saisonniers en Europe

Benga, Leana

(The Folklore Archive of the Romanian Academy in Cluj-Napoca)

Bonfires for Not Just Any Dead: Experiential Meaning and Ceremonial Expression for a Long-Concealed Trauma

This case study comprises research into the ceremonial bonfires of St Dumitru (October 25th), in Arges County on the Valea Doamnei, where we used ethno-visual methodologies to investigate the local syntax devoted to unborn dead children. Bonfires are lit by children and youth, fir trees cut down, and the performance of the bonfire involves all age categories. This all leads to the central meaning of the ceremony, which is the giving of alms to children and youth by women for the souls of their aborted children, of those dead at birth, and of those dead who were un-christened. Beyond the concrete symbolism of light and warmth for the departed, this custom makes one shudder in its confesional dimension, which is very important within a traditional society: by their mere presence with alms by the bonfires, women confess an abortion and the community affirms its multifarious forms of solidarity. It should be noted that the custom continued uninterrupted during Ceausescu’s time, even after the law against abortion, when this would risk heavy punishment. Interviews here revealed profound layers in the relation of life to death in a rural region of Romania, especially as this ceremony assists what is usually assisted by rites of passage: birth coinciding with death (as an act of the supreme failure of life), un-consumed life, abortion as a refusal of fertility, all inside a rural society where calendrical ceremoniality stands above all for celebrating, stimulating and defending fertility.

Our working hypothesis addresses the experiential foundation, both concrete and cognitive, of the narrative-ceremonial complex from rural traditional areas.

Bardoshi, Nebi

(Institute of Cultural Anthropology of Tirana)

The Kanun of Land and Social Relations in Post-Communism: The Case of North Albania

Several publications concerning the anthropology of post-socialism are dedicated to the distribution of land. This only remains purposeful if the study of this phenomenon is closely related to social morphology, legitimacy of politics, collective identities, and the state authority, etc. The ethnography and analysis presented by anthropologists noted that theories of transition (called transitology), especially regarding land regime, are inadequate, taking different forms when faced with different social realities at a local and national level. Regarding the distribution of land by the state, it is observed that different systems and regimes have been implemented. On one hand, the state has employed the principle of restitution, while on the other it has employed the principle of distribution, with combinations of the two systems also in existence. This presentation will focus on analyzing the distribution of land in a context where state law exists but land is distributed according to the traditional law, called Kanun. It will explore the ways in which social structures served as systems for the transmission of Kanun knowledge during and after communism, how such knowledge was used in post-socialist time to de-legitimize the state law, and conversely, how traditional land law was used during and after communism to maintain social structure.

Branda, Aline Ioana

(Babes-Bolyai University of Cluj-Napoca, Faculty of European Studies)

Narratives of Change: A Case Study

This paper will present the results of research that focuses on the impact of highway construction on a rural community directly involved and affected by this process.

Quite recently, a small part of the highway linking Cluj (Transylvania) with Budapest has been opened and is currently functional. Its construction has diverse meanings and has had diverse consequences for the inhabitants of a few villages near Cluj, as they are placed in the strict vicinity of the current highway. Part of the highway is clearly placed on certain ex-land parcels belonging to villagers who have inherited, transmitted and symbollically internalized it down the ages.

This paper will analyze the current situation in Savadisla, a village affected where the inhabitants are facing different problems related to the changes. The village is well known, situated in the ethnographic area of Calata (Transylvania), comprising mixed ethnic groups

(Hungarian, Romanian, Roma and, recently, a few Italian families). Essentially, through collecting current narratives on highway construction, I am going to approach issues such as the following: the ways in which current interethnic relations are renegotiated in the present context; whether there is a new dynamic of marginal groups and the “nouveau riche”; aspects related to cultural patrimony demonstrated in the villagers’ views and direct responses to the new challenges and the strategies they are adapting, etc.

The methods I use will be mainly life histories.

Cash, Jennifer R.

(Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle/Saale)

Managing Time in Moldova: Transformations of the Ritual Cycle under Postsocialism

This paper considers the balance of work and leisure imagined, created, and experienced through the observance of holidays and other ritual occassions. Throughout history, changes in the economy and in ritual cycles have correlated, reflecting and enabling the appearance of new ideologies and practices related to work and/or leisure. This is especially true for the modern period, both from the initial appearance of capitalism and industrialism, and in the twentieth-century efforts of states to engineer and better control economic development. The Soviet Union, for example, transformed the cycle of annual holidays in its constituent republics with the intent of spreading political ideology and increasing economic productivity and efficiency. While there is a rich literature about the surprising effects of Soviet policies concerning holidays and rituals, there has been no sustained study of post-Soviet or postsocialist transformations in ritual cycles and their connection to changing economic practices and ideologies.

This paper examines the transformation of the ritual cycle in Moldova, considering both public holidays and other widespread celebrations. There are three primary questions to be addressed: 1) how do changes in ritual reflect changing conceptions of time and patterns of time-use, 2) how do changing patterns of time-use intersect with economic activity, and 3) which agent - the state, market, or local communities - has been the most effective in transforming the ritual cycle to its own interests?

Broilo, Federica

(Oriental Studies, Università Ca' Foscari, Venice)

Islamic Cultural Heritage Policies in Albania: Some Examples

The number of edifices, testifying to the Ottoman culture and civilization in South Eastern Europe and particularly in Greece, decrease each day. For this reason, it is very urgent to take charge of the remaining monuments, often misunderstood as “Byzantine”, by taking photographs, measuring them, drawing their plans and elevations and documenting their inscriptions. Cultural heritage is a witness to the history of a country. Each historical influence, such as the Islamic influence, contributes in a specific way to a growing heritage, thus enriching cultural diversity and giving shape to specific, complex, stratified cultural identity, as is the case for countries in South-Eastern Europe. The economic, political and social changes South-Eastern Europe underwent during the last fifteen years have contributed to make local populations aware of the exigency of reaffirming their cultural identities and cultural heritage. Nowadays, in some of these countries, protection of the Ottoman architectural heritage is very limited or almost absent; sometimes the monuments stand in a very dilapidated state. Also, the damages caused in the last century by wars are still visible and sometimes, unfortunately, irreversible. What is required now is a guiding strategic plan, which will define the heritage and explain institutional responsibilities and practices. The plan should also be made clearly comprehensible to the general public, emphasizing its role in the appreciation and protection of the heritage, which is shared by all citizens of South-Eastern Europe. This paper will focus on the development of Islamic cultural heritage in Albania.

Catrina, Sonia

(Romanian Peasant Museum of Bucharest, Bucharest)

Functional Interdependences within Romanian Rural Communities

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the importance of economic factors in establishing social networks between "entrepreneurs" of rural tourism. Sociability is studied from the perspective of owners of tourist pensions who develop certain relationships with other members of their community working in the same area. The paper therefore considers the relationships that are created according to criteria of belonging to the common practices of exchange/exclusion within the group and also outside of it.

The question is posed as to whether modernity submits the relationship between rural actors to a reflexivity exercise. To test this argument, knowledge is sought as to whether the rural world is able to align itself with modernity by assuming the power of individual action, through a rationalization of the actions of the rural actors, here called "new" peasants. Where does sociability end for owners of guesthouses when they relate to other "entrepreneurs" working in the same field of activity? Does tourism generate conflicts, exclusion and antagonism between these persons or, on the contrary, solidarity? Can we talk about solidarity born of professional practices? What element prevails in establishing solidarity with another person: kinship, neighborhood, friendship or responsibilities deriving from a superior status?

Saying this, we are assuming that competitive economic contexts, and elements "acquired" by the experience of tourism, superimposed on a traditional cultural pattern, give the owners the choice of a network of action to satisfy their needs related to tourism practices.

Ceausescu, Ania

(West University, Timisoara)

The Influence of Social Groups in Lifestyle Choices made by Romanian Teenagers

Today, lifestyle is an important instrument in the definition of social identity and it represents a very important theme for anthropological and sociological research. The novelty of this study is that it focuses on teenagers from an urban intercultural enviroment on the one hand, and on a comparative analysis between the lifestyles of urban youth and those from rural areas (a village from Timiș County, Romania) on the other.

The prime objective is to identify the main dimensions of the lifestyles of young people representing a target population. The target group is formed from adolescents enrolled in secondary school education (middle school, high school, school of arts and crafts) from both urban and rural areas. From the urban area a heterogenous group was selected (pupils from a highschool in Timisoara) that presents differences in terms of culture, ethnicity, religion and housing. In the rural area, the target group was also formed from teenagers enrolled in an educational program in the current academic year. A questionnaire was used for the young people in the urban area and a semi-directive interview for the comparative analysis. Some main dimensions of the lifestyles of these teenagers can be observed: there are "conservative teenagers”, who value the family and education; "religious teenagers”, for whom religion is very important; and "modern teenagers”, for whom the most important value is leisure. This of course underlines the importance of further analysis within this anthropolgical theme.

Ciolcă, Alina-Carmen

(Political Science Department, University of Bucarest)

Séparation Eglise-Etat en Roumanie postcommuniste? Rapports politico-sociaux autour de la question de la présence des symboles religieux dans l’espace public roumain

Cette présentation se propose d’analyser sur plusieurs paliers la question de la présence des symboles religieux dans l’espace public postcommuniste roumain, notamment dans des institutions publiques comme l’école. Il s’agit exclusivement des symboles religieux orthodoxes - les icônes - et l’analyse sera centrée particulièrement sur la période 2006 – 2008, lorsqu’il y a eu un débat public et une mise en question de cet aspect chargé d’enjeux politiques et culturels. De même, je tenterai d’opérer une contextualisation dans un questionnement plus large sur la nature de la relation Eglise-Etat et sur la validité du paradigme de la séparation Eglise-Etat, associable traditionnellement à un idéal, voire stéréotype de société occidentale démocratique-libérale, dont l'implantation en Roumanie reste pourtant problématique. Le niveau macro de la recherche vise, d’une part, le cadre normatif-législatif réglementant les questions tenant au rapport de la sphère religieuse avec celle publique. D'autre part, on observera dans de grandes lignes le contenu du débat public autour de la question ouverte en 2006, s’il y a des positions partisanes articulées dans ce débat, si les principaux partis ont au niveau identitaire des positions concernant la problématique de la laïcité/neutralité de l’Etat, si le clivage droite-gauche se relève pertinent dans ce sens et quelle serait la légitimité des positions pro-laïcité/neutralité. Le niveau micro se penchera sur la manière dont des citoyens roumains de diverses appartenances ou convictions religieuses aperçoivent la présence des symboles religieux orthodoxes dans l'espace public et les facteurs qui ont influencé leurs perceptions.

Cupic Simona

(University of Belgrade)

Fashion (in) Photography:
Fashion, Visual Culture and Identity in Serbia between the World Wars

Attitudes towards the way of dressing are expressed as aspects of cultural integration and economic and social disintegration, which may be followed in various forms of visual culture (painting, sculpture, daily and periodical publications, photographs…). The disappearance of national costumes in Serbian society corresponds to the process of modernization and a higher quality of life. Clothes were a denotation of social status. How quickly the latest fashion objects could be acquired, their quality, origin or way of being made are some of the indicators of the social position of the person wearing them, but also of other forms of social differentiation: marital status, gender, profession and even political identity. However, the fact remains that clothing has often been simply an external manifestation underlining mimicry rather than a genuine acceptance of new values. Despite being the most trivial sign, clothing was the easiest denotation of status that could be noticed. From satin, fur and jewelry, to parasols and gloves, the language of the way people dressed provided evidence concerning class anatomy. In this paper, the role and place of fashion in the construction of a bourgeois identity will be analyzed and presented as a visual space of both disintegration and integration of the primordial and the modern, and an indicator of the rural-middle class transformation and personification of the new society born upon the foundations of such integration.

Cotoi, Calin

(University of Bucharest)

Social Sciences and East European (Mis)Representations of Modernity

The ambiguities between a “traditional" or "modern” organizing core for discourse in the social sciences became apparent when the "modern", in its colonial and postcolonial forms, had to confront not only its "traditional” or archaic origins, but also different non-western modernities.

Non-western modernity appears as a never ending incomplete project of “modernization” steered by an enlightened elite. South Eastern Europe has sometimes been construed as the location of a deficient or totally different modernity. Paragons of modernity like the industrial revolution or the capitalist patterning of social life “were born and grew outside countries where Orthodoxy has been the dominant religion” (Kokosalakis 1995: 234).

Modernity in non-western, “peripheral” areas comes, nonetheless, with deep European genealogies, in the vision of man given by the Enlightenment as harbinger of universal and secular values: equality, human rights, freedom of speech, moral autonomy of the subject, and so on. Non-western engagement with European thought often entailed a “weapons of the weak” strategy (Scott 1987). In the same way that subaltern classes and the have-nots confront dominant classes by using the resources of public discourse for framing specific interests, nationalist elites can confront European colonial/imperial elites through European thought. This is one of the reasons why European genealogies of political thought are both “indispensable and inadequate” in understanding modernities and modernisms of non-western regions (Chakrabarty 2000).

This paper proposes, by confronting Chakrabarty and Mitchell’s analysis with East European modernities, a way of understanding modernity that goes further than the “different modernities”.

Depner, Anamaria

(Johann-Wolfgang-Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main)

Aus alt mach Erbe. Der Umgang mit historischer Bausubstanz in Timisoara im Spannungsfeld zwischen „postmodernem Liberalismus“ und „normativer Europäisierung“.

Die zwei Jahrhunderte österreichisch-ungarischer Verwaltung prägten Timisoara im Stil der Großstädte der Doppelmonarchie. Die Sanierung der insgesamt 14.500 Altbauten und damit Wiederherstellung des „typischen Charakters“ Timisoaras ist angesichts der als vorbildlich geltenden Entwicklungen im Westen Europas nicht nur wünschenswert sondern unumgänglich, zumal u.a. seitens der EU hohe Summen für die Förderung der altbaugerechten Sanierung in Aussicht gestellt wurden. Die Stadt sowie ihre Berater und Unterstützer aus dem Westen sind bemüht, den dort vertretenen Umgang mit Denkmälern in Osteuropa umzusetzen.

Zwar betont man in Timisoara, sich als Erbe der Zeit, die diese Denkmale hervorgebracht hat, und in kultureller Verbundenheit mit ihr zu verstehen. Doch die historische und kulturelle Bedeutung der Gebäude scheint für die Bewohner nicht mit der Substanz selbst verbunden zu sein. In Timisoara ist allerorten die Veränderung, Ergänzung und zuweilen Zerstörung, zumindest aber Nichtbeachtung des Alten sichtbar. Beispielsweise sind, bis auf wenige Ausnahmen, die Fassaden der Altbauten geprägt von Umbau- und Umgestaltungsmaßnahmen im Sinne des ästhetischen Empfindens und Repräsentationsbedürfnisses ihrer Besitzer.

Dies drängt die Frage nach einem normativen, von einer westlichen Sicht und Empfindungsweise geprägten Diskurs über die Sanierung baulichen Erbes auf – und gegebenenfalls den Folgen einer solchen Normierung für eine Gesellschaft, die diese Werte nicht nachvollziehen kann. Der hier vorgeschlagene Vortrag bietet die Möglichkeit, vor der Folie gesellschafts- und kulturanalytischer sowie kulturhistorischer Fragestellungen, Aussagen zu formulieren über lokale und gesamteuropäische (Selbst-)Imaginationen, (Werte-)Diskurse und dem Einzug der (Post-)Moderne in osteuropäische Länder.

Dimova, Nevena

(New Bulgarian University, Sofia)

Changing Models of Parenting within Contemporary Urban Families in Bulgaria

Increasingly one can see a growing number of fathers tending to their young children in the public playgrounds of the big cities in Bulgaria, especially Sofia. An unusual sight in the past, more fathers currently take care of their young children either during usual work/business hours or before and after work. This project seeks to explore changing patterns of parenting in a central neighborhood of Sofia and their relation to political, social and economic processes of transformation in Bulgaria after 1989. It asks what this relatively new phenomenon tells us about the gender of the labor market, social organization and state services, and changes in gender ideologies and the practices of urban families with young children in post socialist Bulgaria.

This paper is based on two months of ethnographic research among families who frequent several childrens playgrounds in the “Lozenetz” neighborhood of Sofia. Through three family scenarios, the roles and responsibilities of men and women within and outside of their homes were studied. This was in order to trace changing gender relations and connect them to the context of social politics and practices in the Bulgarian state, fluctuations in the labor market, and the personal choices of individuals.

In comparison to socialist family models, this paper shows that both competitive models and models of relative equality of gender relations within urban families have been constructed since 1989. These practices are also possible because of the appearance of new roles such as the “super man”, “equal partner”, and “active father”, associating some men in Bulgaria with active participation in the private space of the famiy.

Dinca, Melinda / Bulgaru, Teodora

(West University, Timisoara)

A History of Changes in Work Opportunities: a Thematic Monography of the Commune of Coronini

This study focuses on the changes in work opportunities in a small commune near the Danube called Coronini. As with all the nearby communes during the communist era, Coronini had great capacity in terms of labour opportunities due to the presence of an industrial mining giant. The labour enviroment was very stable for a long period of time during the communist era and the arrival of democracy has challenged the active population to adapt to a completely new enviroment. The collapse of the communist regime has brought the collapse of industrial giants all over the country. The local quiddity (a commune formed by two very different villages, Coronini and Sfanta Elena, distinguished by ethnical, demographical and geographical criteria) has given rise to different coping strategies. For Coronini, whose population is formed strictly of ethnic Romanians, localization near the border and Danube has brought incredible opportunities (petrol smuggling during the Serbian war, the possibility of commerce across the Serbian borders, fishing as a traditional occupation, etc). The village of Sfanta Elena, whose population is formed strictly of ethnic Czechs, has more limited geographical and natural resources. Our study describes the local labour history from 1989 until the present day and presents an analysis of the similarities and differences between these two Romanian villages in terms of the historical development of the labour enviroment, coping strategies, and preservation and inovation in labour opportunities. A semi-directive interview and document analiysis were used, as well as participatory observation, in order to collect the foundational information of our study.

Djordjevic, Crnobrnja Jadranka

(Ethnographical Institute, Serbian Academy of Sciences, Belgrade)

Customary Law - Instrument of Cultural Petrification

In Serbia both customary and civil law have been simultaneously implemented for more than a century. Parallel functioning of these systems, which are diametrically opposed both structurally and in content, represents a specific legal dualism. The existence of legal dualism and parallelism is evident in various spheres of law. This paper will observe such dualism and parallelism within the institution of inheritance, inheritance law being the sphere where, according to theoretical and ethnographic literature and field-work data, they are largely manifested. In other words, this dualism/parallelism is manifested with almost the same intensity from the moment of its emergence in the mid 19th century until the present day. Previous ethnological and anthropological research into customary law in Serbia showed that parallel use of customary and civil law represents a social problem sui generis. In the present era this determines, on the one hand, the re-examination of the role and power of customary law within civil law, and on the other, the role and power of civil law in overcoming social problems (such as gender discrimination, for example). In light of this, the aim of this paper is to discuss, through analyzing field work data such as statements from informants and court archive data from the Vranje region of Serbia, the question of the role of customary law in the construction and preservation of patriarchal cultural models in the area of inheritance, as well as the role of civil law as an example of public policy that tries to change existing social realities.

Djurić-Milovanović, Aleksandra

(Institute for Balkan Studies, Serbian Academy of Sciences, Belgrade)

How Long Have You Been in the Truth? - Expressing New Forms of Religiosity: Romanian Neo-Protestants in Serbia

According to many anthropologies and sociologies the collapse of communism and the emergence of a new nationalism in a number of post-communist countries resulted in religious revival. After the communist period of 1989/1990 in Romania and Serbia, the number of those declaring themselves to be "believers” considerably increased. This religious growth also meant a moving away from traditional religious expressions towards new religious forms. Focusing on the process of converting to Neo-Protestantism after the communist era until the present day, this aticle aims to present results of ethnographic fieldwork conducted from 2008 in different Romanian villages in Vojvodina province, Serbia. The majority of Romanians in Serbia belong to the Romanian Orthodox Church, but during the last decade the number of Neo-Protestant churches has increased. This article explores how different religious groups, often stigmatized in public discourse, such as Nazarenes, Seventh-day Adventists, Pentecostals, Jehovah Witnesses and Baptists, influenced the religious changes that have taken place over the last decade. Even though these religious communities were established at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century, they are often perceived as new forms of religiosity in this region, having become more visible and numerous after the communist period, especially among ethnic minorities. In addressing these issues, this article explores the role of new religious identities that have emerged in the region, the historical continuity of Neo-Protestant communities, and their transformation during different historical periods.

Dohotariu, Anca

(Université de Bucarest & l'École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Marseille)

Les relations familiales chez les jeunes couples non mariés en Roumanie. Pratiques, représentations, valeurs : une enquête comparative Roumanie - France

Depuis plus de trente ans le paysage complexe des « nouvelles » conjugalités contemporaines se trouve au cœur des réflexions internationales sur la famille et la vie privée, des réflexions qui cherchent à saisir en profondeur les significations, les attentes et les valeurs de référence qui organisent aujourd’hui la vie en couple. Qu’en est-il en Roumanie ? À la suite d’un régime totalitaire imposant le modèle de la famille nucléaire légitime largement répandue, l’après 1989 connaît des transformations profondes des représentations et des pratiques de la vie à deux. Ces transformations, évidemment plus visibles chez les plus jeunes, concernent à la fois le développement de l’union libre, la progressive émergence des valeurs démocratiques, les transformations lentes mais profondes du mariage lui-même. On dispose pourtant encore de peu de recherches et de données qui rendent compte de ces mutations. Cette communication présente les résultats de la première enquête sociologique dédiée au couple non marié en Roumanie. Cette enquête qualitative fondée sur près d’une centaine d’entretiens permet de déceler en profondeur les métamorphoses contemporaines du lien de conjugalité. Nous nous proposons ainsi d’observer comment se redéfinit aujourd’hui la catégorie du couple, et en particulier la façon dont les représentations, les pratiques et les valeurs intègrent la question de l’égalité de sexe, et comment les transformations en cours témoignent de l’inscription de la Roumanie dans un certain sens de l’évolution de la modernité contemporaine. Ce travail s’inscrit dans une enquête comparative Roumanie – France.

Dokuzović, Lina / Tatlić, Šefik

(Academy of Fine Arts Vienna; Faculty of Philosophy, Zagreb)

Transition as a Void: Integration, Complicity and Resistance

This article analyzes the contemporary conditions under which democracy and capitalism are intertwined during the transitional processes of post-socialist states and the discrepancies that lie within that relation. A significant link between neoconservative ideology and the growth of neoliberal “free” market consensus replaces the “Godless” socialist past and all historical traces with a proclaimed morale, in order for integration to take place during transition. We refer to that discrepancy as a “void” and analyze its role in creating modes of life, and its function not only in the social, economic and cultural gap between the “developed” and the transitional, but also as the space where neoconservative/populist and neoliberal dimensions of the regime overlap in relation to the dominant order. In conclusion, the analysis tackles the notion of resistance and its consequences, such as ethnic divisions and fundamentalism, within the designated pretenses of transition.

Dorondel, Stefan

(Francisc I. Rainer Institute of Anthropology, Bucharest)

Food for the Dead: Reinforcing Social Ties, Work-Exchange and Postsocialist Agriculture in Romania

This paper examines the link between an ancient ritual called pomana (food and drink offered for the souls of the dead), agricultural work-exchange and the annual reinforcement of social ties among neighbors, family and friends. In this paper I highlight the fact that in postsocialist agricultural conditions, work-exchange is the most rational response to a highly fragmented land of a rural population involved in both the industrial sector and in subsistence agriculture. Work-exchange is usually practiced among relatives, godparents and neighbors. This paper links the religious act of offering food and drink for the souls of the dead in certain periods of the year to the necessity of preserving and reinforcing social ties through which agricultural land is worked. In ethnographic literature pomana has been analyzed as a purely religious act, a link between people and their ancestors. However, it will be shown that pomana is not just a religious act but a response to the incertitude of the economic environment and to the necessity of working the cropland. This paper also argues against mainstream literature on social security in postsocialist countries, which claims that social networks have been weakened in postsocialism. On the contrary, I show that a postsocialist economic environment strengthened social networks by using traditional forms such as pomana. This picture is further complicated by bringing an ethnic factor into the analysis. Ethnic minorities, especially those marginalized at the national level, such as Roma and Rudari, are both excluded from pomana and from the work-exchange circuit.

Efremova, Georgia

(University College London)

Integralist Lifestyles, Nationalist Politics, and the Construction of Cultural Difference as Part and a Response to the (Post) Modern European Project

My research explores the recent success of radical nationalist mobilization across CEE, at the present juncture of postsocialist transition and democratic development, as the new cultural politics emerging in response to the multiple impacts of integration into a transnational state project. This is expressed in the significant electoral gains of political parties Ataka and Jobbik, and the associated phenomena of uniformed mass power in the face of the Bulgarian and Hungarian National Guards. I explore the ways these movements are able to reshape and homogenize local socio-economic grievances, many of which are linked rhetorically to the presence of burdensome Gypsies in various parts of society, into communal subjectivities underpinning new cultural-nationalist projects. The political attempt to link the search for lost or disappearing socio-cultural solidarities with a new way of imagining society, as a reaction against ‘impoverished social meanings and degraded moral claims’ driven today by intensive Eurointegration, termed ‘integralist politics’ by anthropologist Douglas Holmes, is the position my study takes. I examine the culturalization of the political field providing the wider conditions of opportunity for this new politics, and the fundamental shift in the construction of difference as incompatibility and supposedly culturally distinct behaviour, underpinning the success of nationalist politics and placing ‘the Gypsy issue’ at its center. I also look at the ways complex local structures of power and contestation, and struggles over resources have shaped the receptiveness towards these new ways of thinking about the ties that bind and connect citizens in modern Europe.

Ehrlich, Kornelia

(Leibniz Institute for Regional Geography, Leipzig)

Ljubljana: a "Creative City"? Europeanization in Southeastern Europe

Change did not only come to Slovenia after 1991, but also became a relevant issue when Slovenia became a full member of the European Union in 2004. The country was then finally projected into European and global competition and its capital, Ljubljana, was also affected by these processes. Ljubljana was catapulted into a global city competition where the development of a unique profile is essential. At the same time, in knowledge-based societes formation of the urban is driven by the concpet of creativity. When applying the creative city concept to new contexts, a dualistic process can be observed: the original concept of the creative city changes as well as its context into which it is translated, due to different cultural, social and economical backgrounds.

This paper asks whether the process of translating the creative city concept, which is closely related to the topic of creative industries, is taking place in Ljubljana, and if so, in what way this fitting into context appears. It also asks whether Ljubljana is trying to shape something new and whether it makes concessions to the supranational scale in order to fulfill expectations in urban competition and within the EU. The paper thus shows how Europeanization can be observed in Southeast Europe whilst looking at processes of cultural production and the process of diffusing EU values and urban structures in new contexts.

Erdei, Ildiko

(Faculty of Philosophy, Belgrade University)

IKEA in Serbia: Debates on Modernity, Culture and Democracy in the Pre-Accession Period

This presentation will focus on the relations between notions of modernity, culture and democracy that constitute part of the public discourse related to the opening of IKEA in Serbia. After its short presence in the former Yugoslavia at the end of the eighties, the Belgrade store was the first ever to be closed, and the very first place where IKEA withdrew due to the outbreak of the war. Ever since, there has been a longing for the re-opening of an IKEA store both in private spheres and the public arena, always constituting a part of some kind of pre-election promise and a token of “final” modernization and democratization of society.

Debates concerning the IKEA store can be understood as interplay between the desired modernization and Europeanization of the consumption choices and possibilities of the Serbian consumer, as well as hesitating state policy towards accession to Europe. They can also be understood “genealogically” as a proof of the longstanding presence of the ideas, ideals, memories and historical practices connected with the legacy of socialism. These range from the preference for a Scandinavian type of modernity and (social) democracy (exemplified in the political promise of Milosevic’s government at the beginning of the 1990s to strive for a “Swedish standard of living”), to the memories of a type of modern furniture from IKEA that is “our own”, produced by “Sloveniales”, and nostalgic accounts of Yugoslav modernity.

Erol, Ayhan

(Dokuz Eylul University, Izmir)

Changing Modes of the Alevi Musical Culture: Traditionalism, Avant-gardism and Consumerism

Alevis in Turkey have allegiance to the Twelve Imams, who are patrilineal descendants of the Prophet Muhammad’s cousin and son-in-law Imam Ali, remaining clearly distinct from Iranian Shiism. Throughout history Alevis have been discredited and persecuted by the Sunni orthodoxy, and they have been marginalized since the 16th century. Within this religiously marginalized and closed social structure they formed their own rules and thus drew apart from the direction of central authorities. The cem ritual officiated by the dede appears as the most significant phenomenon in this process. Holding a central significance in cem rituals, songs (deyişes and nefes’) and dances (semahs) are simultaneously perceived as an expression of faith.

The Alevi ritual songs were ontologically separated from the ceremonies, together with the development of the recording industry and the state-run mass media in the 1950s. This religiously specific and contextually embedded musical tradition became an omnipresent product through the production and dissemination of its recordings in the 1990s. Today there are several discernible stylistic categories in contemporary Alevi musical practice, including traditional, modern and postmodern forms. These are all concerned with authenticity. I will analyze these preferences in looking at the strategy of the revivalists. This approach will allow a turning away from questions directed towards defining the “essentialist traits” of Alevi musical culture towards questions of how the music is used by musicians in contemporary culture.

Gavrilović, Ljiljana

(Institute of Ethnography, Serbian Academy of Sciences, Belgrade)

MMORPG: Entering the World without Borders

Until last year, due to the strict visa regime, years of isolation, and inability to travel freely, Serbia’s citizens were relatively restricted in their contact with European countries. However, the rapid development of the internet in the first decade of 21st century has allowed greater access to information, as well as exposure to various social networks that are an integral part of the synthetic world, in wich Massively Multiplayer Online Games played a significant role.

The analysis of comments made by the players of World of Worcraft (the largest MMORPG, with more than eleven million players throughout the world) will address how the players from Serbia fit into the global community of WoW players, how they feel about the world without borders, and how playing within this synthetic world better influences offline communication and integration into contemporary European and world trends.

Gehl, Katerina

(Institut für Volkskunde/Europäische Ethnologie der Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München)

Helden, Räuber, Heilige – Folklore-Elemente der massenmedialen Politikvermittlung im heutigen Bulgarien

Die sich demokratisierende bulgarische Öffentlichkeit nach 1989 erklärte die journalistische Sprache für eine der „schuldigen“, weil ideologisch am stärksten belasteten Sprachen, die dem Regime gedient hatten. Die Folge war die bis heute andauernde „Emigration“ (Georgi Lozanov) der journalistischen Sprache in die Alltagsrede, die, von ideologischen Zwängen befreit, als einzige die totalitäre Welt mit einer „Gloriole des Heldentums“ verließ. Die Liberalisierung der Mediensprache vollzog sich vor allem durch die Annäherung an die körperlich-alltägliche Identität des „Privatmenschen“ sowie an die Folklore-Formen bzw. -Narrative. Reime und ganze Lieder, Gerüchte, (biografische) Erzählungen, Witze, aber auch Elemente der Volksweisheit und des Volksglaubens unterfüttern Reportagen nicht nur über die „Helden des Underground“, sondern auch die Nachrichten aus der Politik.

Anhand von hochfrequentierten Metaphern und stilistischen Formen soll gezeigt werden, wie politische Inhalte zur Konstruktion eines allumfassenden „Wir“ genutzt werden, zur ständigen Reproduktion eines geteilten lokalen Wissens, das xenophobe Haltungen festigt, integrative Funktionen erfüllt und besonders aufschlussreich ist bezüglich der konsensfähigen Politik-Bilder, die den öffentlichen Wahrnehmungsraum der Gesellschaft prägen.

Habinc, Mateja

(Faculty of humanities Koper and Faculty of tourism studies, Portorož, University of Primorska)

Folklore Events: an Ethnological Heritage, Unwanted Heritage, or Socialist Tradition?

Since 1991 Slovenia has had to establish itself as a tourist destination. In this process attempts of defining and incorporating into tourism what is thought to be its heritage were made. Many tourist strategies and much evidence from all over the country show how heritage in tourist contexts is usually conceptualized as deriving from a pre-second world war period, and concerning a number of “ethnological heritage” seasonal holidays, gastronomy and souvenirs are emphasized. Despite Slovenes being amongst the most numerous visitors of the former Yugoslav republics, Tito’s grave, his birthplace, and a museum of Avnoj in Jajce where new, socialist Yugoslavia was supposedly founded, tourism for domestic socialist/communist heritage sites does not exist. Thus this paper first of all follows Ullrich Kockel’s division between heritage and tradition and asks what “socialist heritage” stands for. It then analyzes whether the situation in Slovenia provides evidence that it could be a part of “unwanted heritage”. Finally, a case study is presented of contemporary folklore events which are today a popular type of sociability for at least one sector of the Slovene population. Despite the fact that they appeared mostly after 1945 and had huge ideological support, the author does not see contemporary folklore events as a part of "unwanted heritage". On the contrary, she classifies them as, at the same time, a post-modern and socialist tradition, labelled in tourism as ethnological heritage.

Habit, Daniel

(Institut für Volkskunde/Europ. Ethnologie, LMU München)

Becoming "European"? Forms of Interpretation of the Cultural Heritage in Patras and Sibiu, European Capitals of Culture 2006/2007

After a brief introduction to the development of the concept of the European Capital of Culture program and its movement towards peripheral regions and places, this article focuses on the concrete examples of Patras 2006 and Sibiu 2007 and the implications of the concept for the cities, especially for their urban spaces and housing environments. Following the approaches of urban anthropology, the cities themselves will be the centre of attention, together with the strategies of “self-culturalization” that can be witnessed during the process of becoming a cultural capital. Furthermore, as a contribution to the program, the dimensions that make up possible cultural governance are required to have become visible throughout the overall development of community action within the last few years. The European Capital of Culture program can be seen in the context of an internal colonization of Europe, and in the cases of Patras and Sibiu, dominating Western European strategies and access to cultural heritage and authenticity clash with local conditions and expectations. The comparison of these two participants at the EcoC program showed two very different approaches towards the overall concept and also to the city’s own role in a European context.

Hajdu, Ada

(National University of Arts, Department of Art History and Theory, Bucharest)

The Creation of Romanian National Cultural Heritage - White Spots and "European" Approaches

My paper will analyze what “The Strategy for the National Cultural Heritage of the Romanian Ministry of Culture and National Patrimony”, issued in 2008, defines as architectural monuments, and what it establishes as policies of preservation and promotion for the architectural monuments, in comparison with previous documents of this kind issued after 1989, focusing on what can be applied to the architecture of the 19th and 20th centuries. Constructions are labeled as “historical monuments” by the newly created National Institute for Heritage, on the basis of the “Methodological regulations for classification and inventory of historical monuments”, also issued in 2008. The attention given by both “The Strategy…” and the “Methodological regulations…” to enlarge the selection criteria for classifying buildings as historical monuments, so as to allow the inclusion of new types of architecture – industrial heritage, health resort architecture, etc. – indicates the intention to create the image of a “European”, “modern”, “civilized” Romania during the last two centuries, while completely eluding socialist architecture. As well as this, the shift from focusing mostly on religious Christian architecture and rural domestic architecture, towards urban and non-Christian constructions demonstrates the need to present a contemporary Romania which values plurality of religion and ethnicity, at least at the level of official discourse; even if in practice it seldom seems to be the case.

Halili Rigels

(University College London, School of Slavonic and East European Studies)

When the War Ended? – Historical Debates Regarding WWII, Politics of Memory and Rituals of Remembrance in Post-Communist Albania

This paper starts with the on-going debate regarding the date of Albania’s liberation in the autumn of 1994. In communist Albania there were two equally commemorated National Days, the 28th of November, the day of Declaration of Independence in 1912, and 29th November, the day of liberation during WWII. In post-communist Albania the 29th of November has aroused controversies and, depending on whether right wing or left wing parties are in power, has been either commemorated or omitted. In both cases discussions regarding this issue have contributed to the growth of political fever in the country.

This paper aims at contextualizing the discussions around the “29th of November” within a larger analytical framework. Debates regarding the National Day are part of larger efforts towards reshaping the collective memory in post-communist Albania. Similar trends are also visible in the recent development of Albanian historiography and ethnological and folklore studies (though under the new name of social anthropology). In this sense, the aim of the paper is to reveal the main characteristics of the politics of memory in post-communist Albania. However, I also intend to analyse various rituals and practices of remembrance, both in real life and the virtual world, which quite often tend to oppose the ‘official’ politics of memory, thus enforcing a group's “own” version of what happened and what should be remembered. Commemorating or not-commemorating therefore becomes not only a manifestation of political loyalty, but also a declaration of social and cultural belonging.

Hande, Bilsel Engin

(Bahcesehir University, Istanbul)

Buying Things as Rituals of Interaction among Young College Istanbulite Women

For most people shopping forms a significant part of everyday life. It is estimated that women spend 22 minutes a day or 2 years of their lives shopping and men about half this amount of time (McCaffrey 2006). Yet despite this, there is something of a label attached to shopping; that it is a trivial, vacuous feminine activity of consumption that is not really important, and is implicitly compared to the "socially" useful work carried out in the male sphere of production. However we can easliy see how the purchase of goods and services is vital to a capitalist economy, from items such as hair accessories bought by teenage girls to the acqusition of huge corporations. We might also argue that at micro social level things we shop for also have a symbolic value, which is their significance and meaning to us in the context of our everyday lives. Douglas and Isherwood coined the term "material culture" to refer to the relationships between people and objects. Therefore we can say that the things we acquire, display, exchange and consume help us to relate to one another and to reporoduce the structure of the society.

In this study, I will examine the way in which the shopping practices of female college students aged 18-23 studying at different universities in Istanbul both reflect and constitute the social worlds in which they are embedded, through conducting indepth interviews. I will begin with a discussion of the various meanings that "buying things" can have and of the "rituals" of interaction involved in going shopping as a cultural practice. I will also examine the rise in the consumer culture of Istanbul and its effects upon shopping practices.

Hemming, Andreas

(Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg & Georg August University Göttingen)

Home Away from Home: Creating Mirdita

Based on nine months of fieldwork in the highlands of northern Albania, this paper will discuss the diverse expressions that the relationships of migrants with their home community take. Migration in Albania takes on many forms, the most prominent in the media and scholarship being of the (illegal) international variety. What is often forgotten is that a great deal of Albanian migration takes place within the country's borders: villagers have in the past two decades moved increasingly into towns and townspeople to the cities. While the results within this diversity of migration (in terms of geographic distance from 'home') are often the same (depopulation, demographic shift, brain drain), the (emotional) distance from home and how this is dealt with is quite different. In this paper the different kinds of emotional attachments to 'home' that develop, be it a more or less abstract homeland or home region, or a specific town or village, will be discussed, as will the forms in which these attachments are expressed and the emerging implications of these new forms of emotional attachment.

Hofman, Ana

(Scientific Research Center of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts), Ljubljana

(Re)Balkanization of Europe: Balkan Music Awards 2010

Balkan popular music has for decades been present on the world music scene (such as the ‘fascination’ with Bulgarian choirs including Le Mystère des voix bulgares during the 1970s) and grew particularly during the 1990s, when Balkan countries “opened to the West.” Simultaneously, this “Balkan fascination” has for a long time been a way of representing "exotic Balkans" and the ways in which the rhetoric of positive balkanism is internalized and used within Balkan countries.

This paper addresses the Balkan Music Awards, which was held on May 16th 2010 by Balkanika Music Television as an open-air concert at Alexander Batenberg Square in downtown Sofia. An audience from eleven Balkan countries voted for the best Balkan song from songs already chosen as the representative of the country. The event organizers openly employed discourse such as “Balkans-as-region” and “shared Balkan identity,” emphasizing its significant political and (self)emancipatory potential. This paper will focus particularly on the use of discourses of modernity in the employement of the popular music genre and the politicization of self-balkanization as a new way of empowerment. This will be analyzed in the relationship of the Western Balkans to the Balkans, as a result of local interpretations of dominant Europeanization discourses.

Hristov, Petko

(Institute for Ethnology and Folklore with Ethnographic Museum, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences,, Sofia)

New Local Identities and “Returning” Religiousness in the Post-Socialist Balkans

This paper will present the results of the author’s fieldwork research during the past few years in Bulgaria, Serbia and Macedonia. Through the re-vitalisation of traditional ritual patterns and the invention of “new” ones with no traditional prototype, a new local and group identity has been built in a number of regions in the central part of the Balkans. Based on renewed traditional collective celebrations (the village "sabor" for example), new ritual practices (the so called “youth kurban” in Midwestern Bulgaria), and the renovations of traditional places of cult (village chapels, family votive crosses) by gastarbeiters who returned to their birthplaces in Serbia and Macedonia, the role of a “returning” religiousness in building group cohesion and local identities will be shown.

Hysa, Armanda

(Institute of Cultural Anthropology and Study of Arts, Tirana)

The Charshija: Between Premodern Fame, Modern Exotism and Nostalgia, and the Global "Chinese" Marketplace

The charshija was the main economic centre of handicraft production and exchange in towns and cities during the Ottoman period and the beginning of the new nation-states in the Balkans. It was the principal market for trade in regional agricultural products and was also the principal site where different social and political actions used to take place. The charshija often therefore became synonymous with the town or city itself. With the consolidation of nation-states, it became one of the principal sites where that which was considered to be premodern (charshija as Ottoman heritage and hense, according to Todorova, an important cultural and economic element of the Balkans) met modernity (different reforms undertaken by the nation-state to become modern and hence, again according to Todorova, European). The few existing charshijas that managed to survive the process of modernization in different Balkan countries seem to have become places where two tendencies oppose each other. The crucial meaning the charshijas had for the premodern past of towns and cities has turned them into places of historical identity, and this is why they are often proclaimed as monuments of cultural heritage. However, most of the merchandice sold at the shops in the charshija comes from China and Turkey, making them unattractive places for consumers and often risking trade itself.

The aim of this paper is to analyze how these two tendencies clash in different charshijas in the Balkans (Kruja, Skopje and Prizren) as well as the ways in which this clash is experienced and perceived by the charshijali (the people who work at the charshija).

Iancu, Bogdan

(University of Perugia, Department of Man and Territory & National School of Political Sciences and Public Administration, Bucharest, Department of Sociology)

Fishing in Muddy Waters – Tourism and Access to Resources in the Danube Delta

The opening of a tourist resort brought upon the massification of tourism in a village along the route of one of the Danube’s arms (Sf. Gheorghe) into the Black Sea (the Danube Delta). At the same time, the local population’s access to resources was reconfigured by an ambiguous set of regulations on local fishing derived from the recent status of natural reservation. Paired with the massification of tourism in the village, this factor triggered a process of structural transformation of households and of the locals’ attitudes towards a territory managed to a great extent by external institutions.

My aim in this paper is to analyze the manner in which the local population imagines various forms of touristic entrepreneurship shaped by the new constraints regarding fishing, by the possibility of access in various areas of the reservation and by the continuous mirroring with the “forbidden city” (the name of the tourist resort built eight years ago to host a film festival). I also look at the way local gender relations are reconfigured by the predilection for female involvement in yard tourism. During the presentation, I will focus on some of the techniques used to shape a landscape ready for consumption, both from the part of the locals and from the entrepreneurs external to the community: mapping and valuing available resources in connection with an experience economy frame which appeared after the dramatic decrease in industrial fishing.

Iliescu, Laura Jiga

(The Institute of Ethnography and Folklore “Costantin Brailoiu” in Bucharest)

New Forms of Religious Practice Performed in Cyberspace

The Internet has become more than a source of finding and sharing information (as was expected when created in 1968-1969), it has become part of contemporary life, a huge site with its own rules, actors, language, mechanisms of creation and transmission messages, symbols, specific gestures, etc.

The topic of religion on the Internet as a subject for anthropologists, sociologists, ethnographers, folklorists or ethnologists was highlighted about 10 years ago. This research approaches two interconnected aspects of this subject. First, ritual gestures – such as pilgrimage and confession – as performed within cyberspace and within a real environment, and the relation, if any, between them. Despite evidence that virtual reality holds an important global feature, we are interested here in discovering the specifics that occur when religious gestures are performed by Orthodox Christians. Secondly, we are interested in the way Romanian “traditional” religious institutions face this challenge.

Cyberspace is very different from real areas we are accustomed to when carrying out fieldwork, which is why methodological questions concerning the collecting and interpreting of data will be raised during my intervention.

Ilić, Marija

(Institute for Balkan Studies, Belgrade)

“How Old Do You Think I Am?” Pronouns of Power and Solidarity in Serbia Today

This paper addresses the use of the pronouns ti (lat. tu) and vi (lat. vous) in contemporary Serbian. The analysis is based on questionnaires that were disseminated among three groups of interviewees: (1) students of both genders at Belgrade University; (2) women aged between 35 and 45; (3) men aged between 35 and 45. The questionnaire is divided into three parts: (I) private and family life; (II) public life; (III) communication with peers / younger / older interlocutors. The paper draws upon the famous Brown and Gilman (1960) article on pronouns of power and solidarity, in which the use of Serbo-Croatian pronouns was also referred to. The paper analyses what kind of social distance is proposed and projected by the pronoun used today, whether there are any significant gender and generational differences, and whether there is still power asymmetry of the “T/V” pronoun use in some public and private domains. It is argued that the “T/V” pronoun use, on the one hand, still proposes some kind of power asymmetry, based upon a patriarchal model which encompasses differentiation by age. On the other hand, this seniority-based model is often seen as a marked linguistic form connected to age-discrimination, especially among women when communicating with younger interlocutors.

Ivanova, Miglena

(Institute of Ethnology and Folklore with Ethnographic Museum, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Sofia)

New Political Elites as Patrons of Hip-Hop Graffiti Writing

The old legible graffiti that existed on the streets of the biggest Bulgarian towns in the 1980s and early 1990s has almost completely been changed by hip-hop graffiti. Following the basic forms of the global graffiti tradition, these images are legible to the hip-hop graffiti writers whilst remaining almost illegible to other citizens, who usually see them as scribbles of vandalism. At the same time, by aestheticizing the production of new hip-hop graffiti and treating it as a specific, modern and difficult art, Bulgarian elites seriously affect its prestige and popularity. The large amounts of legal graffiti can not but appear as a result of special agreements between graffiti writers, municipal authorities and political elites. For almost a decade these recurrent agreements have proved to be more than just singular cases – they attest rather to the existence of a special system of patronage. This article will seek to reveal the reasons underlying its proliferation and will make an attempt to explain how and why political elites re-use these instances in order to demonstrate their own “inner sense” of belonging to the EU and the globalizing world or to construct for themselves a positive public image as creative political leaders with modern artistic preferences, deep social sensibility and a will to implement pertinent changes.

Janev, Goran

(Max Planck for Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, Göttingen & Institute for Sociological, Political and Juridical Research, Skopje)

What Happened to the Macedonian Salad? The Establishment of Modern Ethnocracy

Macedonia must have seemed an odd and exceptional place when it inspired the Western imagination to borrow its name for a mixed salad in which different ingredients cut into big chunks are thrown into a bowl without any particular order. Before modernity came to Macedonia it was a region with an incredible mixture of languages, religions, costumes, customs, or to use the favourite shortcut, cultures. When modernity arrived in Southeast Europe it was turned into a region with an unbearable mixture of peoples, ethnicities, and nations. Since the end of Pax Ottomana the remnants of the pre-modern ethnic disorder are still being sorted by various political and even military means. Modernity, for its complexity and ambiguity, cannot be captured by making it synonymous with nationalism, but because of its numerous overlaps and similarities I will focus on it by looking at the case of the Republic of Macedonia.

After almost two centuries of the dissolving of its cultural mixture, the Republic of Macedonia, which emerged as an independent country after the collapse of the Yugoslav federation, is still dealing with the results. Complicated power-sharing mechanisms have been introduced in conjuncture with the dominant discourse of ethnonationalism. Multiculturalism as an ideology or as a set of policies was never given a chance in Macedonia, nor in the whole region of Southeast Europe for that matter, as nationalism was embraced first. In this paper I will explore the uncritical acceptance of modernity and its confrontational character based on binary logic and the consequences for this region of remarkable long-standing diversity.

Kassabova, Anelia

(Institute for Ethnology and Folklore with Ethnographic Museum, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Sofia)

Visualisierungen als Strategie zum (Un-) Sichtbarmachen von Sozialausgrenzungen (am Beispiel der staatlichen Kinderfuersorge in (post)sozialistischem Bulgarien)

Am Beispiel von Fotos und Filme als Quellen wird die problematische Modernisierung am Beispiel der sich wandelnden Politiken des Bulgarischen Staates gegenueber Kindern in den sog. "Mutter&Kind- Heime", resp. ("Heime fuer Kinder ohne elterliche Fuersorge") analysiert. Einerseits wird der Wandel in der Sozialpolitik aufgezeigt, doch auch Kontinuitaeten in der Politik gegenueber das/die "Andere(n)" (ethnisch, sozial, physich und/oder psychisch "andere") Durch die Fragen Wer Wann Was Wie fuer Wen fotographiert und filmiert wird der Versuch unternommen Visualisierungen als Strategie zur Sichtbarmachen und/oder zum Verdecken von sozialen Problemlagen und sozialen Ausschlussmechanismen zu thematisieren. Insofern das konkrete Beispiel einheimisches, bulgarisches Foto- und Filmmaterial und zugleich auch auslaendische Visualquellen einschliesst, kann man dadurch das komplexe Wechselspiel zwischen Innen- und Aussenperspektive, zwischen "Modernisierungsschuebe" von Aussen und von Innen in einer globalisierten Welt angehen.

Kijewska Anna

(Institute of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology, University of Lodz)

“When Religion is Not the Corn Value” - Local and National Islamic Variety in North-Eastern Bulgaria (Categories and Metaphors in Ethnic Studies)

The tekke – a Muslim monastery – is a popular phenomenon among Muslims belonging to several different ethnic groups in today’s northeastern Bulgaria. The concept of a tekke originally comes from the Dervish tradition, but today people go to a tekke as a pilgrimage and to perform the ritual killing of an animal, adak kurban – a thanksgiving sacrifice. The ritual is characteristic for all Muslims, but there are a lot of differences in performing the sacrifice, in methods of food preparation and in rituals performed over the grave of the holy person. What is most important is that these differences are not only motivated by ethnicity, but also by local traditions (changing between villages and municipalities).

Even though Sunni Islam does not maintain the concept of a “holy person”, local Sunni authorities accept activities at the tekke and make financial profit from them. They control the rituals performed at the tekke, forbid paying homage to the holy person (which would be against Sunni Islamic principles) as well as local traditions that are not against Islamic principles. There are differences between clerics educated in foreign countries (such as Turkey, Iran, United Arab Emirates) and those educated in Bulgaria. These differences contribute to the introduction of foreign, national models of Islam into Bulgaria.

I would like to discuss the usefulness of ethnicity as a category in the study of cultural (religious) change in multiethnic society, and to present alternative categories I use in my research at Kyz Ana Tekke (near Targovishte, northeastern Bulgaria): interculturalism, local religiosity, local and national variety of Islam, as well as others.

Knight, Daniel

(Durham University, UK)

The Relocation of Greek Businesses in the Balkans: a Capitalist Diaspora

With the continued expansion of the European Union and the recent return to peace in the Balkan region, Greek investors, both corporate and individual, are relocating their business interests northwards into other Balkan states. Enticed by the promise of inexpensive labour and low taxes the operational centres of many Greek businesses have been relocated, creating a ‘Greek capitalist diaspora’ in the Balkans. This movement obviously has a substantial impact on the local economy of many regions of Greece. Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork, this paper will explore the affects of this relocation on the local economy of Thessaly, central Greece. Special attention will be given to how times of economic crisis exacerbate the consequences of repositioning transnational investment. The increasing numbers of small-scale entrepreneurs and highly qualified corporate executives conducting business north of the border have both contributed to the national crisis on the macro level and intensified the perception of victimisation caused by economic austerity measures on the local level.

Koleva, Daniela

(Sofia University)

Has the "Lost Generation" Found its Way? Youth Cultures, Communities and Causes in Present-Day Bulgaria

By 'lost generation' I refer to the generation of the transition, i.e. those born in the 1980s and early 1990s, whose 'formative years' (Mannheim) have coincided with the period of rapid and radical societal transformations affecting the very framework of values hitherto considered monolithic and immutable. This paper is based on a research project funded by the National Science Fund of Bulgaria (2009-11) and explores youth subcultures with a special focus on their use of and/or dependence on the internet in the process of what might be called a post-modern 'privatisation' of sociality. Sources include fieldwork and statisitcal data. The main argument will challenge the notion of the 'lost' generation, viewing youth cultures primarily as active and creative ways of adaptation to a dynamic social environment while also admitting their importance as a means of self-expression (DIY-identities).

Krasteva-Blagoeva, Evgenia

(New Bulgarian University, Sofia)

“Old” and “New” Collective Consumptions in Bulgaria (or Why it is Not Good to Eat Out Alone)

This text examines different forms of collective consumption practices in post-socialist Bulgaria. We will argue that they are a primary characteristic feature of the post-socialist (post-modern?) Bulgarian consumer culture. In its very essence consumer culture is bound to liberal ideas, accentuating the individual and his/her rights to consume freely and, presumably, on his/her own. For various reasons such individualism is relative in Bulgaria, many consumption practices being predominantly carried out collectively by groups of people, such as circles of friends, colleagues, or relatives. Eating or drinking coffee alone, for example, is considered inappropriate, especially for women. Shopping is also a collective act; for example, someone is frequently invited to come along “for advice”.

Consumption not only integrates existing social ties and groups, but creates new ones. New consumer practices evoke the appearance of new fan groups, sharing a common interest. Their behavior is also exclusively collective; for example, they create their own feasts, etc. Typical examples in this respect are folk dance clubs or the forum of Nissan drivers in Bulgaria.

Such consumer “tribalism” contrasts with the frequently mentioned inability of Bulgarians to work in a team, and with some other stereotypes such as being quite individualistic. We will seek possible explanations for this controversy, and using fieldwork observations will try to build upon the theoretical achievements concerning the capacities of consumption to create and maintain social groups and identities.

Lafazanovski, Ermis

(Marko Cepenkov Institute for Folklore, Skopje)

Rebuilding the Institutional Ruins: “Attacks”, “Resistances”, and Post-Socialist Institutional Changes in Nation Building Processes in the Republic of Macedonia

The problem of the modernization of post socialist institutes in Macedonia has opened up a lot of questions concerning the possibility of the inclusion of western conceptual models (modernization, new institutionalism) in a traditional and conservative cultural context. In looking at concepts of formal and informal institutional structures, this paper analyzes the defense mechanisms against “institutional attacks” and structures of “resistance” as perceived and developed in the context of national building processes in Macedonia.

What are the types of problem that arise with institutional changes? What are the consequences? What relations are there between new institutionalism and national building processes? What happens when the existing traditional institutions have to be replaced by new modern ones? These are some of the questions that are posed with the aim of better understanding institutional modernization in Macedonia.

Lauth Bacas, Jutta

(Academy of Athens)

National Identity and Every Day Life after the Depth Crisis in Greece

In April 2010 Greek state bonds had been characterized as junk bonds and Greece was on the fringe of bankruptcy. A stabilization programme and loans from the IMF and EU prevented this worst-case scenario, and harsh measures to cut public spending were introduced.

Several factors have to be taken into account when analyzing the reason for the Greek depth crisis. Next to economic aspects, political and social factors are also relevant. Social scientists hint at the system of political patronage, which lead to an overloaded public sector in Greece and to bribery occurring in many spheres of public life. The political culture fostered this approach of seeking individual gains at the cost of the common good from the top to the bottom of the social pyramid (Lauth Bacas 2008 in Forost Arbeitspapier 44: 27-41).

My proposed paper aims at investigating the social effect of the depth crisis on everyday life in Greece by using an anthropological approach. In analyzing features of everyday life after the depth crisis in Athens, the proposed presentation will focus on expressions of self-esteem and national identity in times of crisis, referring especially to everyday discourses in Greece as they could be observed in the media and on the Internet. Taking personal proposals and individual statements as a starting point, the anthropological analysis will analyze these contributions in regard to everyday expressions of national identity in times of financial crisis in Greece.

Lelaj, Olsi

(Institute of Cultural Anthropology and Arts Studies, Center for Albanian Studies, Tirana, Albania)

The Proletarianisation of Peasantry: A Narrative of Socialist Modernity in Albania

This paper takes on a diachronic vision and aims to narrate a part of Albanian’s socialist modernity through the eyes of socialist industrialization and the working class. It should be pointed out that the process of modernization in Albanian society started after 1912 with the declaration of independence from the Turkish Empire. Until the end of WWII the process was slow and often interrupted by wars and political instability. It was only after the installation of Enver Hoxha’s state socialism that the process of industrialization and modernization became a political priority, enabling over subsequesnt decades the transformation of Albanian society into an industrial country. Consequently, up until the 1990s’ workers were considered to be the most precious jewel of the socialist system because the working class held, at least as ideology and discourse portrayed it, both economic and political power. This diachronic approach will thus allow light to be shed on the specificity and dynamics of socialist modernity, industrialization and proletarianization in Albania. The structural organization and composition of the working class during socialism will also be taken into account and portrayed as a necessary basis in order to understand the peculiarity of the Albanian working class formation and process of the proletarianization of peasantry during almost 50 years of state socialism.

Luleva, Ana

(Institute of Ethnology and Folklore with Ethnographic Museum, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Sofia)

Remembering and Justice: Post-Socialist Discourses in Bulgaria

How a society treats its past bears directly on how it builds up and perceives its present, and what expectations it has for its future. After 1989, a shift occurred in the memory culture of post-communist societies. This paper questions the types of memory culture that have emerged during the transformation period and how they conform with the identity which Bulgarian society aspires to, having become part of a new community (the EU).

The problems of the politics of memory and reconciliation in post-socialist Bulgarian society are also discussed, as well as those of justice for, and public recognition of, the victims of two different political regimes and the master narrative of Bulgaria’s recent past.

Lungu, Corina

(Ovidius University Constanta)

Coping with the Absurdity of Communism in Matei Visniec's "How to Explain the History of Communism to Mental Patients"

Staged for the first time in 2000, Matei Visniec's play entitled "How to Explain the History of Communism to Mental Patients" provides a retrospective look on the process of indoctrination and cultural "cleansing" that took place in Communist Europe. Some years after the fall of the Communist regime in Romania, Visniec offers a cathartic representation of the tragic absurdity of that period, when indoctrination and the re-creation of history were considered the solution to all the problems of society, including mental disorders. "How to Explain the History of Communism to Mental Patients" thus becomes a means of coping with recent history and understanding the changes that have occurred during the last decades.

Maeva, Mila

(Institute of Ethnology and Folklore with Ethnographic Museum, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Sofia)

Internet and Emigration of Bulgarian Citizens to the United Kingdom

After the collapse of the communist regime in 1989 Bulgaria was in economic and social crisis, the economic status of the whole population dropping sharply. That critical situation and the limited employment market in Bulgaria have forced many Bulgarian citizens to emigrate as a way to survive. For a short period of time they have created big immigration groups in Western Europe. In contrast to other countries (France, Germany or Spain) emigration of Bulgarian citizens to the UK is a relatively new phenomenon that has become a massive movement after the acceptance of Bulgaria into the European Union in 2007. Their number has gradually increased, reaching almost 200 000 in 2009 according to unofficial estimates. This makes the Bulgarians in the UK one of the largest ‘new’ Bulgarian expatriate communities in Western Europe.

This paper will present the influence of new technologies such as the Internet on the emigration possibilities of Bulgarian citizens to Britain (predominantly in England). Fieldwork research showed that the global virtual network facilitates movement processes and helps in the process of adaptation and integration in the new country. My working hypothesis is that the Internet is not only an instrument for free everyday communication with relatives and friends in Bulgaria, but is a source of information and cultural exchange that influences the changing values of Bulgarian society.

Malešević, Branka

(Department of Anthropology, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta)

‘It Seems That We Could Speak of Different Europes’: Temporal Tropes, Memory-Work, and Ethical Public History in the Donauregionen Future

The aim of my paper will be to examine the relationship between memory culture and different framings of temporal experience in east European Croatia and Serbia. A crucial point, I will argue, is that memory discourses, or what Paul de Man identified as ‘a complex juxtaposition of reversible movements that reveal the discontinuous and polyrhythmic nature of temporality’ and Peter Krapp as a ‘kind of memory without memory, a kind of forgetting without forgetting’, are useful when examining ethical public history. In this respect the lived experience of time involves not only collective memories of the socialist past but includes narratives surrounding ‘Ethics of the Future’. In other words, as post-socialist struggles are said to be about the meaning and ownership of modernity, it also implies that ‘fluid’ time has come to be a constitutive element of social analysis. On the basis of my preliminary research in eastern Croatia and northern Serbia, I will demonstrate the role memory culture plays in restoring and reconstructing a new view of the present. This is especially the case when social actors, outdated monuments and ‘things’ from the socialist period are attributed with agency. While ethical public history and social analysis serve to destabilize existing assumptions about modernity, I will argue that they also offer a more complex interpretation of the present, since, apropos of Walter Benjamin, nothing is ever abandoned, everything is preserved; the appearance of a new paradigm does not abolish the former paradigm.

Marinov, Tchavdar

(Ecole française d'Athènes)

“Welcome to the Land of Orpheus”: Politics of Heritage and Tourism in Post-Communist Bulgaria

This paper deals with the national “mobilization” and touristic branding of some recent archeological discoveries in Bulgaria. Today, the “Valley of the Thracian kings” near the town of Kazanlâk, the “Temple of Dionysus” in Perperikon near Kârdžali and the “Tomb of Orpheus” (Tatul, Momčilgrad municipality) are among the most advertised monuments of the country and, undoubtedly, the most marketed archeological sites representing the ancient “Thracian heritage”. In post-communist Bulgaria the latter has been actively exploited in order to prove the “ancient roots” and the long cultural continuity of the small Balkan nation. This archeology is thus supposed to substantiate its millenary “European belonging”.

In fact, the “cult of Thracians” (these being interpreted as Bulgarian “ancestors”) was launched during the communist period when archeologists, (art) historians, ethnographers and linguists forged the image of Bulgaria as inheritor of the ancient Thracian culture, estimated no less valuable than that of classical Greece. After the fall of the communist regime, touristic business gave its own “patriotic contribution” to a construction of heritage, within which the exactitude of scholarly interpretation has been progressively sacrificed for the sake of successful marketing.

This paper tries to examine to what extent these new, business-oriented, politics of heritage can be understood as a continuation of the official state-sponsored cultural policy of communism, and to what extent they are a result of rupture and innovation in which different kinds of actors and entrepreneurs take part.

Marjanović, Vesna

(Ethnographic museum in Belgrade, Belgrade)

Wedding Customs as a Marker of Challeges among Young Couples in Serbia (the Context of Adopting a "Western" Model as a Status Symbol)

The purpose of this paper is to critically review the scenario of traditional and contemporary wedding ceremonies, which are still being constructed and bulked out during transitional times in Serbia. More often a “new model” is being accepted within the younger population. As is the case with traditional forms regarding the time when they were formed and the conditions in which they were developed, new forms also become a type of marker highlighting the "new way" of thinking and behavior during the marriage. In both cases, the structure of marriage is established within the form of current socio-political regulatory categories. For Serbian people the core of the wedding custom has always represented a very important part in the life of individuals and communities, with certain parts of the customary context representing a significant form of identity.

Depending upon the context and scenario of the wedding ceremony in the past, regional, religious and ethnic affiliations were distinguished. For all of this to have sense and fulfill the expectations imposed by the culture, rituals within the wedding ceremony had to be carried out according to the traditionally proposed model. However, after the Second World War the "civilization" of rural society, the political orientation in Serbia, the faster flow of information and technology, and changes in the socio-political system caused the natural reshaping of some components within the traditional wedding ceremony. Nevertheless, the changes did not carry the essential character of the traditional form of wedding celebration kept in many areas until the beginning of the 21^st century. Traditional and contemporary models of behavior are still interwoven, although the former is far more latent and gives priority to the other as to the progressive. In contemporary Serbian society, the pursuit of cultural identification with global changes has resulted in formerly existing wedding rituals becoming condensed, more often becoming legitimate entertainment in the wedding party in which the wider family of the young married couple is reduced to the closest relatives, guests being a number of friends who were classmates of the newlyweds.

Markov, Ivaylo

(Institute for Ethnology and Folklore Studies with Ethnographical Museum, Sofia)

Labour Mobility among Albanians from Macedonia: the Yugoslav and Post-Yugoslav Dimension and the Socio-Cultural Dynamic

The submitted paper examines the labour mobility of an Albanian community from the territory of Western Macedonia. The basis of the proposed examination is field work from the last 3 years among Albanian labour migrants from the Republic of Macedonia. My work encompasses interviews with former and present migrants in their home villages, with their friends and relatives who have not migrated, as well as interviews with Albanian migrants from Macedonia who work in Slovenia.

The pattern of labour mobility created by Albanians has developed interesting characteristics in both periods mentioned (Yugoslav times and contemporary independent R. of Macedonia), but has still not been studied sufficiently. On the basis of the study of concrete migrant narratives I attempt to explore possibilities and conditions of mobility, reasons for migrating, and social and cultural dimensions in the process of leaving a native place as a strategy of making a living.

Attention is focused on migration and mobility from the point of view of the dynamics of cultural models and identities that individuals and groups carry and develop, and their reflections on the sending societies, as well as among the people who either temporarily or on a longterm basis live in diaspora, returning at regular intervals. The main research questions are: how do the social organisation and family-kin relationships change and transform into networks of mutual assistance and help, and even into business networks? Do family-kin relationships and connections between migrants and non-migrants change local communities (village infrastructure and architecture, the models of consumption etc.), and if so, how?

Márton, Mihai

(Southeast and East European History, Department of History, University of Regensburg)

Ethnic Denotations: The Hungarian Case

Analysing Hungarian ethnic denotations reveals ongoing societal changes and the perceptions related to them in Hungary. Although the Hungarian case might be very specific, this tool of discourse analysis is applicable to other societies.

During the Socialist Era there was no open debate in Hungary regarding the Hungarians in neighbouring states. The situation changed substantially after 1990. A close examination of two high circulating Hungarian dailies during the heated debate over the Hungarian Status Law (2001-2003) has shown how present this issue has become in Hungary. Generally speaking, this Law granted Hungarians from neighbouring states certain financial, medical and educational privileges. The number of ethnic denotations which do not have a specific geographic-political reference reached 103. Thus, there are now numerous categories of practice, in contrast to a single official category of analysis, which was stipulated in the Hungarian Status Law and yet is hardly ever used.

I argue that the myriad of ethnic denotations used in Hungarian public discourse to denote Hungarians from Hungary’s neighbouring states are a symbol of a significant change in Hungarian society from primordial and essentialist views to more differentiated notions and constructivist positions. This is not a linear change and should be seen as an ongoing open debate whose end is yet to be seen. Furthermore, these ethnic denotations reflect a variety of issues within Hungarian society: historic consciousness, current political issues, aspects of ongoing nationalism, and changes in the economic situation, thus illustrating the constant social transformation.

Métrich Louise

(University College London, School of Slavonic and East European Studies)

Remembering, Reconstructing, and Imagining the Past: Taking over Memories of December 1989 in Romania

More than twenty years after the events of December 1989 in Romania, debates concerning their nature and the parties involved have not dried up; in particular, the so-called ‘revolution’ has been very present in the Romanian media, particularly each year in December. On the other side, grey areas still subsist; lots of questions have remained partly unsanswered and many others have not been addressed yet. For example, the question of memory, regarding particularly the experience of those—actually the majority of people—who did not directly partake in the events: what has been remembered from these events and transmitted to the younger generations? It seems that most memories transmitted to the generation born at the end of the 1980s and later concerned life under communist rules, so that the ‘revolution’ in December 1989 is an ‘unspoken event’.

This research aims to analyse memories of these crucial events of December 1989 in Romania, focusing in particular on Romanian citizens who did not experience the events as active participants because they were too young and were consequently passive witnesses, experiencing the events through children’s eyes. These ‘passive witnesses’ are now the new active generation in Romania, trying to find a place alongside the old generation which experienced communism.

Mitrović, Marijana

(Ethnographical Institute of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Belgrade)

Negotiating Europeaness and a Memory Surplus in Post-Yugoslavian Feminist Genealogies

The historian Andrea Petö claims that the "majority of stories in Eastern Europe are told by men" and therefore feminist researchers have to seek out the existing memories of women. On the other hand, historian John Gillis claims that women – as the keepers and embodiments of a plural experiential memory – are “opponents” of official history, the bearers of that abject memory surplus which cannot be subsumed under the authorized systems of knowledge (1994). In this paper I confront abovementioned Petö’s thesis about the lack of women’s stories in former Yugoslavia with Gillis’ theory of an abject memory surplus that women’s stories imply. The aim is not only “to change the dominant historiographical discourse”, but also to help “recover the intellectual and emotional matrilineage” and to reconstruct broken feminist genealogies in Europe. I examine this problem in the context of the rememberence of feminist conferences in Dubrovnik’s Inter-University Center 1986-1990, as the transnational encounters placed in Yugoslavia.

In the memories of the “local”, former Yugoslav participants, the conferences in Dubrovnik stand as a European moment or period of Yugoslavia erased from dominant genealogical discourses, a nostalgic moment in which they were not exotic “others within”, but the hosts and a part of utopian, intellectual and Leftist Europe, despite reciprocal differences. They connect postsocialist processes in former Yugoslavia with the gradual diminishing of leftist movements in Europe. This view challenges the idea of the Balkans as “the dark side within” Europe, and shows that the political phenomena affecting former Yugoslavia are part of broader European political tendencies.

Moisa, Daniela

(Université Laval, Québec, Canada & Centre Interuniversitaire d'Étude sur les Lettres, les Arts et les Traditions)

Maisons de rêve à Certeze. (Re)construction des identités sociales à travers le bâti dans la Roumanie socialiste et postsocialiste

À partir du village roumain, Certeze, dont le surnom est « Le Petit Paris », nous nous intéressons à la relation entre les pratiques résidentielles et les constructions identitaires dans leur sens social avant et après la chute du régime socialiste. Situé dans une région périphérique de la Roumanie, le Pays d’Oas qui, depuis les années 1970, s’engage dans une ample mobilité du travail activée par les projets de construction de la nouvelle société socialiste, Certeze est marqué par l’apparition d’un autre phénomène, de (ré)construction des maisons privées, visibles par la grandeur et par le luxe. L’ouverture des frontières après 1989 amène les Certezeni à tourner les yeux vers l’occident, la France notamment, la nouvelle destination de la migration du travail. Ce contexte à la fois nouveau et ancien pousse le phénomène bâtisseur déjà existant sur place vers une consommation ostentatoire de l’espace se traduisant par une concurrence ardue « d’avoir la plus grande, la plus belle et la plus moderne maison ». On se demande dans quelle mesure cette nouvelle architecture qui porte souvent des noms tels « la maison de type américain », « autrichien » ou « français » reflète vraiment un changement fort des pratiques, des savoir-faire et des représentations de l’espace traditionnels. Notre hypothèse est que dans les sociétés postsocialistes, la logique pratique de l’extension et de la transformation de l’espace domestique est reléguée dans l’ombre par l’augmentation des motivations symboliques, notamment le prestige social ou l’honorabilité individuelle et familiale à l’intérieur de la communauté et de la société.

Mojsieva-Gusheva, Jasmina

(Institute of Macedonian Literature, Ss. Cyril and Methodius University, Skopje)

Gender Identity in Modernism and Postmodernism

This study will review typical modernistic characteristics and modified forms of behavior in Postmodernism through the prism of male-female relations, making use of the Macedonian novels “Pirej” by Petre M. Andreevski and “Peperutka” by Saso Tasevski as prepositions. The first novel is related to the Modernism and modernistic concept of a universal and coherent whole, self-confirming the notions with a steady, statically determined, and clearly referential frame. Its relation with a self-identifying code anchors modernistic identity in a pre-symbolic and pre-mirror phase, in which things are univocally defined. It is ideologically defined since, on a social level, it stands for non-difference, where everyone has to endeavor to obtain the estimated male model. In the second novel completely different gender relations are constructed. Its characters are focused upon new western influences in a polyvalent manner with complexly constructed identities, and as such suit the theme of a modernistic dynamic and respect for diversity. The auto-reporting spirit of the characters in the second novel, from the postmodern perspective through which they are perceived and valued, is constantly self-questioned, sometimes pausing, astonished in front of plenty of situations of enforced gender conflict.

Their solution, through the policy of gender identities, does not include modern social processes. This is considered as one of the main factors for modernization, which gradually and definitely challenges the past patriarchal setting of gender identity, even in the region of Southeast Europe and in the EU.

Monova , Miladina

(Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle/Saale)

House Economy and Ritual Life in a Macedonian Town: the Case of Tobacco Growers

This paper presents a study of tobacco growers in a Macedonian town, and the way in which economic activities produce rituality. In Macedonia, the introduction of the so-called “market economy” succeeds the previously renowned Yugoslav model of “market socialism.” Labor activity in Macedonia today (whether in the industrial, agricultural, bureaucratic, or service sectors), relies largely on a complex set of networks involving kinship, friendship, and community relationships and values.

Through the case of tobacco farming, we will focus on the process of calculation performed in households, when actors evaluate costs, profitability and the general advantages of tobacco growing compared to other activities. We will consider the overlapping of two logics. On the one hand people refer to notions such as profitability, predictability, risk, control, and trust; on the other hand, labor practices (as ritual) show the importance of kinship, neighborhood, and relationships of friendship in achieving economic goals. We will raise the question of how different households commensurate reciprocities, help, unpaid labor, and self-exploitation (children, retired or poor relatives), in the context of inequalities and generational conflicts. The question therefore concerns the ways in which individuals and groups deal with an apparent contradiction between market relationships and kinship/friendship/community ideologies.

Murtezani, Izaim

(Institut of Folklore "Marko Cepenkov", Skopje)

Space (The Center of Town) as Locus and Focus (Following the Example of the Project SKOPJE 2014)

The center of Skopje, according to the project called "Skopje 2014" promoted by the Government, began to receive a new architectural image, but it resulted in a very strong debate as to whether this project is in accordance with the spirit of the times and the reality that exists in the country. The project, which provides the construction of Macedonian historical monuments and the sacred object of the church, has become a bone of contention between people of different ethnic and religious backgrounds, and also among Macedonians.

Accordingly, the following moments could be taken into consideration: first, the inauguration of these constructions as well as its current activities could be viewd as a kind of ritual (rite of passage). If the ritual appears as a result of resolving some sort of crisis in an individual's life, or in society as a whole, especially from an ontological perspective, then the above mentioned project seeks to overcome the crisis of the community.

The cult of the past represents a unique perception of time, and this gives a good illustration of the project "Skopje 2014" that, among other things, provided a number of monuments in the history of the Macedonian people, starting from the ancient, with the monument of Alexander the Great, until recent times, represented by the monument of the defenders (members of the Macedonian security forces who participated in the military conflict in 2001). The project "Skopje 2014" opened a series of dilemmas and posed a series of questions that could be interesting for investigation from a sociological, ethnological, psychological, historical, aesthetic, and anthropological point of view.

Nagy, Raluca

(Université Libre de Bruxelles, Laboratoire d'Anthropologie des Mondes Contemporains)

From a ‘Leopard’ to a ‘Waffle’ Fence: Local Comparative Aesthetics in Maramureș and Bucovina

Following the interest of the general panel, this paper focuses on new local architecture in two neighbouring regions of Northern Romania, Maramureș and Bucovina.

New houses that are more or less finished and found in both areas (as well as other regions of Romania) give the impression of an excessive building process. Generally, migration remittance leads to an almost exclusive real estate investment, but these new houses are often uninhabited. Moreover, building practice has another important ingredient in that both areas are touristic. The local understanding of what modernity and comfort means transforms the houses, together with their respective annexes, into the result of the financial and aesthetic influences of both migration and tourism.

The meaning of this new architecture is created by local tourism entrepreneurs who portray the locality and underline its attributes to convince tourists of a certain specificity, authenticity, and “rurality”, etc. Even though the architecture is supposed to be local, it is explicitly influenced. New houses in Bucovina often have gates inspired by the traditional gates in Maramureș. The new fashionable fence, described by locals as typical because of the excess of stones in their rivers, exists in other regions in Romania and makes one think of another “specific” modern fence in the Maramureş villages.

A “generational difference” between these two regions can be seen when it comes to newly built houses, from the first, big “show-off” houses built in Maramureș, to the “cosier” style built later in Bucovina.

Nazarska, Georgeta

(State University of Library Studies and IT, Sofia)

Youth Cultures, the Orthodox Church and Nationalist Formations in Bulgaria: Coexistence in the Postmodern Situation

This paper examines the attitudes of the traditional Orthodox Church and extreme right, nationalist formations towards new youth cultures in Bulgaria during the Post-Totalitarian period.

The paper deals with the attitude of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church towards new phenomena associated with the activity of young people: music and its alternative forms of addiction, New Religious Movements (called "sects"), cohabitation without marriage, and the demonstration of homosexuality and bisexuality. Emphasis is placed on the opposition of the traditional and modern, religious and secular, collectivity and individuality.

Secondly, the paper examines the attitudes towards the same phenomena of the extreme right, nationalist formations that have become extremely popular and influential among young people between the 1990s-2010s. The relationship between their appearance and a number of factors such as the change in the value system after the end of the Cold War, destruction of traditional micro-social institutions, secularization process, migration, and globalization, is outlined. Their phraseology and ideology, based on strong social stereotypes and prejudices, is representative of the culture of exclusion and demonstrates a lack of tolerance in times of cultural pluralism.

This paper is based on the research of various sources (publications, audio and visual sources), and field work (participant observation, semi-standardized interviews and a focus group).

Neagota, Bogdan

(Babeş-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca)

Ceremonial Expressions of Local Popular Cultures in Postsocialist Romania: ‘Făşanc’/‘Fasching’ from Banat Mountains (Paper and Anthropological Film)

The aim of this paper, rather than finding proofs supporting ideology, is to find ways of understanding the contribution of popular cultures to the European heritage of identities. Among the bouquet of identity resources of present-day Europe, the popular cultures of Medieval and Modern Europe, prolonged partly into the present, hold much consistency both regionally and locally, primarily through deep inter-textual stratification, as well as through privileging structures of continuity.

It would nonetheless be methodologically incorrect to address popular culture in isolation, as if it were the survival of a cave of living fossils, severed from official culture; that is, the culture of elites, with whom it might have self-defined its opposition through polemics. On the contrary, it is more likely that popular culture functioned organically, through genuine integrative hermeneutic networks, trying to incorporate the input of institutional culture, translating it within a sui generis hermeneutics into vernacular language, and integrating it into a regional semiotic.

In order to put forth popular culture from the perspective of subsequent ceremoniality, a ceremonial complex was chosen that is underlain by magical-religious ideologies, today more or less concealed, yet rooted in archaic historical-religious circumstances, containing enough efficient adaptive strategies to modernity to be visible throughout contemporary Europe: the Carnivals of the Mountainous Banat, with their complex diachronic inter-textual stratigraphies, mechanisms of adaptation and inclusion to the present Romanian reality. Our analyses are based on anthropological fieldwork developed in this region (10 villages) that commenced in 2007.

Niculae, Simona

(Central European University, Budapest)

From “the Pride of the Nation” to “Totally Corrupted”: the State of Professional Foresters in Romania

Since its emergence in Romania - at the end of the XIXth century – professional foresters had the self-perception of being an elite group with a mission beyond the scientific management of forests, a mission to teach people their national values. This mission faded during socialism, though nationalist discourse remained and fitted in well with the propaganda of the time. The foresters were still an elite, but more contained, representing the state and its great achievement, rather than turning back to the people as intended before. As the state was the only owner of the Romanian forests, and the foresters had the responsibility of managing and exploiting all the woods in a centralized manner, their image was of a group having such expert and specialized knowledge that outsider interest in any aspect related to the forests would be excluded. After 1989, within the process of land reform, one of the longest and most contested processes in postsocialist Romania was launched as regards the privatization of forests. As a result, the status of foresters became uncertain: still experts yet at the same time more or less willingly involved in illegal activities related to the administration of forests. Another representation portrays them as victims of different groups with various interests in forests: from politicians to the representatives of the institution they all once belonged, the National Administration of Forests. This paper will discuss the process of transformation of this professional group under various regimes, its diverse representations, and roles played in relation to different actors. For this purpose historical and anthropological data were used.

Oancea Costin, Valentin

(University of Bucharest, Faculty of Foreign Languages)

Language and Men's Place in 21^st Century Romania

After the fall of communism people were able to speak and think freely. In recent years there has been an explosion of research in the domain of sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology, analysing gender related differences in language use. The main goal was to identify the features of what Robin Lakoff (1975) called "men's language" and "women's language". Certain myths regarding men's use of language have arisen in the last decade (e.g. men use swear words, taboo words, men are impolite, men talk about sports and cars, etc).

The aim of this paper is threefold: to investigate the linguistic devices used by Romanian men in their speech, based on empirical data (natural-occuring conversations) in order to back up the hypothesis that men have a special way of talking, different from women; to present different opinions in linguistic literature; and to see what role is played by the social variable of age and social class in these gender differences. This paper also relies on a research project that I conducted among students (both male and female) at the University of Bucharest and at "Ovidius" University in Constanta in order to establish the conversational strategies of men and women.

Orhon, Goze

(Hacettepe University, Ankara & University of Essex)

“Has Not Been That Easy”: Transition to Neoliberalism and the 1980 Coup d’Etat in Turkey

On the 12th September 1980 Turkey experienced the third coup d’etat in its national history. Unlike those preceding it, the 1980 coup has been evaluated as the initial step in a series of economic, political and social changes in Turkey. Besides interventions on a macro level, the military coup also intended to repress the massive political movements which were experiencing their “heydays” both in the Left and Right wings, organized under political parties, associations, illegal organisations and trade unions. It would even be enough to illustrate the statistics that show that 30 000 people were discharged from their work because that they were politically “unfavourable”; 14 000 people were denaturalized; and 30 000 people had to leave the country and became political refugees in Western Europe.

Although much study appears to have been carried out from different disciplines, this period has not yet been the subject of a sociological study. Drawing on the data gathered for an ethnographic work in progress, this paper aims to present these changes through the accounts and experiences of witnesses of the coup. The paper will provide a comparative analysis of people’s accounts in which the aforementioned changes can be followed. In other words, this study tends to concretize what "transition to neoliberalism" meant in people’s daily lives.

Oteanu, Ana Maria

(National School for Political Studies and Public Administration, Bucharest)

Social Remittances - Based Initiatives: Conspicuous Consumption and Social Recognition

Material remittances (financial and in kind) are described as essential income for home families and have theoretical implications such as increased household savings and the changing distribution of income (Grasmuck, Pessar, 1991). However, the levels of consumption and investment are deeply influenced by transferred social remittances.

The present research is primarily concerned with embedding the uses, displays and attached meanings of remittances in two rural settings in North-East Romania (the county of Neamt – with one of the highest Romanian rates of prevalent emigration), focusing on the delegation of household tasks and the attached development strategies, such as migration driven entrepreneurship vs life strategy, with a focus on house construction.

Social remittance based initiatives help increase the social recognition and prestige of migrants both in their communities of origin and destination. Therefore, remittances such as innovative ideas, managerial skills or even patterns of architecture assimilated by the migrant and later implemented, confer prestige and social recognition, and uphold the migrant's reputation.

Migrants’ houses, fundamental assets for the recognition of their mobility status after 1990, are in direct relation to their new desired status quo. The lack of basic household infrastructures, combined with unproductive, economically irrational investment – so-called conspicuous consumption - can also be explained by the migrant desire for social esteem. Thus, migrants and non-migrants are occupying the same social space, where the "house" is the new key figure of the so-called remittance landscape!

Papa-Pandelejmoni, Enriketa

(University of Tirana)

Religion and Gender between Public and Private Lives in Post-Socialist Albania

This paper will deal with religion (religious institutions) and its impact on gender during the transition period in Albania, focusing mainly on the situation of women. My intention here is to analyse the religious and social discourses on public and private lives.

In 1990, Albania abrogated the law on the prohibition of religious propaganda, thus beginning the “revival period” of religion and religious institutions. People were finally free to follow their belief. After the demise of Communism in Albania, faith has regained some of its importance in the lives of ordinary Albanians.

During the early phase of transition in Albania there was a withdrawal of women from political and public life with regard to gender equality during the socialist period. In this early stage religion was itself pushed into the private realm and tended to reinforce women’s domesticisation by becoming the guardian of private life and family values. Religion did identify women as the protectors of moral values, tradition and the family. However, more recently, religious institutions have been involved in discussions concerning the social problems and challenges of transition, such as the loss of moral values and spiritual virtues, divorce, abortion and domestic violence.

Pavićević, Aleksandra

(Ethnographic Institute, Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Belgrade)

New Religiosity and Relation towards Death: Serbia at the Beginning of the Third Millenium

The revival of religion that took place over the last decades of the 20th century was a worldwide process. Its diverse expression depended largely on different cultural-geographic areas and their respective differences in local, traditional and cultural heritage. One of the significant general features of the revival of religion was an adjustment made in religious teachings, thoughts and behaviors, in order to fit the modern way of life and the current historical and political events within particular regions.

It is a common fact that social, economic and war crises that affected the Yugoslav region at the end of the 20th Century were followed by an increasing role of the church and religion in the lives of the people. Though actual state politics at that time was proclaimed as atheistic, a gate for new/old relations and cooperation between the state and church (mainly the Serbian Orthodox Church) was opened. Reflections of the revitalized role of the Church were primarily visible at the level of collective identities, where confessional declaration became an inevitable part of national self identification. The interpretation of religious dogmas and history within these arising identities was often superficial and could not have been taken as a parameter of real religiosity.

In order to scrutinize ethnicity and religiosity we have to answer the question if and how the revival of religion affected the lives and self-determination of individuals. Was it related to eventual changes in their everyday lives or in their attitudes and behaviour during crucial moments of life?

In this paper I will try to examine and compare rural and urban concepts of death in contemporary Serbian society, and to verify whether these were influenced by the aforementioned processes.

Pavlović, Mirjana

(Ethnographic Institute, Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Belgrade)

Serbian Community of Romania in the Process of Transition

The passage from a dictatorial regime and planned economy to a democratic pluralist society with a market economy, i. e. transition, began in Romania following the 1989 Revolution and is still ongoing, despite the country having joined the European Union in 2007.

In this paper I will analyze the ways in which some of the known transitional processes affected life in the Serbian community in Timisoara. These processes include, on the one hand, a change of attitudes towards minorities and a stress on multiculturalism, and on the other, reaffirming religious and ethnic belonging. Focus will be laid on the role and meanings of the new and/or old, modified ways of life and values of the individual, family and minority groups in both an ethnic and social sense.

The basis for this analysis is field-work research pursued within the Serbian community of Timisoara from 2002 to 2006, as well as data from literature and the “Naša reč” magazine published in Timisoara in Serbian.

Petre, Raluca

(Ovidius State University of Constanta)

What Does Communist Mean in Post-Communist Times?

In this paper I address various understandings of the term communist, especially as it is used by young people in Romania that were either born after 1989 or that do not have a personal memory of the communist period. My hypothesis is that one of the main sources for the specific connotations of the term is derived from media products, especially American movies. It is useful to observe the interplay between understandings mediated through the media and those derived from family stories or history manuals. In the paper I also problematise the lack of consensus when it comes to recent history in Romania that can be observed in history manuals. I believe this situation paves the way for the ambiguous connotations of the term communist for young people. My understanding is that the lack of clear borders between historical meanings and fiction creates concrete social consequences for the relation of the young generation with the past.

Petrov, Martin

(Sofia University)

Love in Postsocialist Society (the Case of Bulgaria)

During the last decades in western societies intimate relationships are less and less defined by clear rules and roles. The experiments of the sexual revolution seem to be a thing of the past, yet what the language of Facebook calls ‘it’s complicated’ has become a common ‘relationship status.’ These developments have become the subject of many academic debates with different authors seeing in them anything from a complete loss of subjectivity to a final and complete unleashing of man’s vitality and creative powers. Clearly the problem here is very much a philosophical one but it also seems necessary to distinguish between different, perhaps even opposing tendencies.

In Bulgaria the collapse of the communist regime was also in a way the collapse of the socialist family and its traditional values (as described by Ulf Brunnbauer), not only for pragmatic but also symbolic reasons. The percentage of extramarital births, for example, has risen steadily from around 10% in 1990 to nearly 50% in 2004. An analysis by Elitsa Kuzdova-Dimitrova of the 2008 European Values Study conducted in Bulgaria shows two distinct groups among those in an ‘active reproductive age’ – one valuing liberty and personal satisfaction in their relationships and the other, security.

A critical analysis of discourse and immages could help to clarify the sense which expressions such as ‘liberty’ and ‘security’ take in this case.

Petrova, Ivanka

(Institute for Ethnology and Folklore with Ethnographic Museum, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Sofia)

Orthodoxe Praxen in bulgarschen Kleinunternehmen

Ein bedeutsamer Teil der Transformationsprozesse in der Gesellschaft Bulgariens ist die Wiedergeburt der Religion und das Wachstum ihres Einflusses in mehreren Lebensbereichen. Im Vortrag werden einige Praxen im Arbeitsalltag der kleinen Unternehmen in Bulgarien dargestellt, welche direkt mit der orthodoxen Glaube und mit der Einstellung zu der christlichen Institution in Verbindung stehen. Solche Praxen sind z.B. die Weihe des Unternehmensgebäude, der Wahl eines Heiligen als Unternehmensbeschützer und die damit verbundenen Rituale, das Beschenken von Kirchen und Klostern. Es werden die Herkunft dieser Praxen, die Gründe für deren Existenz sowie ihre gegenwärtige Rolle dargestellt. So wird auf die Stelle der Religion im kleinen Unternehmentum in Bulgarien hingewiesen.

Petrova, Velislava

(Sofia University)

Les femmes d'un marché urbain

Dans les années 1980-1990 dans la ville de Dimitrovgrad, une ville phare du régime communiste, commence à se développer un marché urbain qui est devenu un des lieux de commerce principaux substituant pendant une quinzaine d’années le secteur dysfunctionnant de la grande distribution en Bulgarie.

Ce nouveau phénomène transforme non seulement la ville en détournant son infrastructure héritée du régime précédent, mais amplifie et engendre de nouveaux rapports de forces qui redéfinissent la structure sociale, économique et politique de la ville.

Au sein du marché, dans les expériences professionnelles et personnelles, se détache la figure de la femme marchande: quoi que se soit une femme près de la retraite ou une jeune entrepreneuse: on observe que le nombre des femmes impliquées sur le site est très important. En effet, le marché s'avère comme le site privilégié de la réalisation professionnelle des femmes de la ville à cause de certains facteurs de leurs situations personnelles qui favorisent la flexibilité.

La communication adresse le rôle du genre dans le processus d’institutionnalisationn du marché en plein air à Dimitrovgrad et sera centré autour l’analyse des récits de vie des femmes qui travaillent sur le marché de la ville. Elle problématise l’impact produit par l’investissement individuel des femmes marchandes au sein de leurs relations familiales.

La question qui reste est si le travail sur le marché n'est pas un moyen de renégociation de leur position dans leurs familles ?

Petrović, Duško

(Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Zagreb)

Student Resistance

This paper will analyse the new forms of resistance to a neoliberal political agenda in the sphere of public education in Croatia. As an answer to the government's neoliberal politics towards higher education in 2009, students of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Zagreb formed an "Independent initiative for the right to free education". The major task of the group was to try to change government politics on higher education. As a means of accomplishing that task they organized a collective protest in the spring of 2009 by obstructing the teaching process for a month. This paper will analyze the tactics and politics behind the student protest of spring 2009 at all the major universities in Croatia. The major goal of the analysis will be to reveal how a carefully planned method of protest achieved such success. How did a group of 25 to 30 students without any (modernistic) type of party organization manage to obstruct the teaching process at two major universities and 16 faculties in Croatia? What is 'postmodern' in this form of protest? In the process they managed to occupy media and political attention from political parties, government and non-government organizations, intellectuals from Croatia, South-Eastern, Central Europe and the entire World. Afterwords protests with similar agendas took place in some European states in autumn 2009.

Petrović, Tanja

(Scientific Research Center of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Ljubljana)

Mourning Lost Modernity: Workers, Europe, and (Post)Yugoslav Post-Socialism

This paper looks at discourses and practices through which the memory of Yugoslav socialist workers is maintained and negotiated in a post-socialist (and post-Yugoslav) reality, and in which workers have not only lost prominence and social status, but everything socialist (and Yugoslav) has come to be presented as essentially non-European. Particular attention will be paid to the relationship between the socialist workers' identity and belonging to Europe, established through looking at workers' narratives (about their work and life in the past, working standards in socialism, quality and status of their products, etc.), practices of (re)naming factories and products in the post-socialist period, and 'official' discourses found in factories' newspapers and brochures, museum exhibitions, etc. The analysis of these various discourses and practices will show that concepts such as “European democracy” and “East European socialism,” “modernity” and “backwardness” are not necessarily mutually exclusive from today's viewpoint, and neither were they in the past.

Prato, Giuliana B.

(University of Kent, UK)

Free Market and Liberal Democracy in Albania: An Anthropological Approach to Regime Change

Drawing on ethnographic data collected in the Albanian cities of Durres and Tirana, this paper offers a critical assessment of the theories of democratization and regime change in the Balkan Region. Methodologically, I argue that while anthropologists are increasingly faced with the challenge of having to take into account analyses of macro-processes, only an empirically-grounded anthropological perspective can shed light on these processes at the micro-level and on the cultural and social dimensions that influence people’s responses. Far from engaging in a deterministic search for historical continuities, I argue that what may appear as a cultural legacy, or a restoration of an old mentality, may well instead be a new development of familiar patterns that assume new meanings and are used to new ends.

Ethnographic research suggests that these two broadly defined approaches, one focusing on macro policies and the other on micro processes, need not be mutually exclusive. When considered as complementary, they can lead to an informed understanding of the complexity of the social realities under study. From such a perspective, this paper looks at how people respond to macro policies; that is, how they absorb or reject, or manipulate the new ‘parameters of action’. It seeks to show that in-depth ethnographic analysis can provide an informed knowledge of the necessary adaptation, negotiations and redefinition of social identities that inevitably accompany the process of democratization and the attendant social changes.

Primorac, Jakša

(Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Zagreb)

Holy Week Processions in Croatia

After the fall of socialism and the war in the early 1990s, a process of strong revival of religious traditions has taken place in Croatia. Ritual practices of the dominant Roman Catholic Church, whether official or popular, have been revived and reinforced in local communities. Today, these practices are promoted, organized and performed both by prominent believers and the clergy.

The Catholic rituals are mostly conceived as complex performative structures, and processions represent one of their most expressive, highly condensed ritual forms. At the same time, there are significant historic, regional and ethnographic differences between northern and southern parts of Croatia. In contrast to the Central-European area of the North, the Mediterranean area of the South is rich in the diverse and abundant practice of processions. Three main types of processions can be distinguished, namely: the processions in honor of the Virgin Mary and patron saints that are held throughout the year, theophoric Corpus Christi Feast processions, and processions for Holy Week. The latter ones are incorporated into the most intensive ritual period of the year – the Easter Triduum. Its revived practices generate multiple social activities and implications, which are the main topic of the paper. It will be shown how Holy Week processions are prepared and performed, and how they influence the life of various local communities.

Pusceddu, Antonio Maria

(Department of Philosophy and Theory of Human Sciences, University of Cagliari)

“Albanians made us Lazy”: Rural Developments along the Greek-Albanian Border

This paper explores the effects of macro-structural processes such as the neo-ruralist transition in EU countryside, and the post-socialist transition in Southeast Europe, from the point of view of a small-scale ethnography carried out in the highlands of Greece in 2006 and 2007. It discusses recent changes along the Greek-Albanian border, brought about by distinct and concomitant processes: the neo-ruralist transition fostered by the EU agricultural policy reform, specifically the rural development programs for 'less advantageous areas'; the political transition in Albania at the beginning of the 90s and the redefinition of territorial mobility in border areas it entailed. The historical contingencies in which these processes intersected with local dynamics of change created a new situation for the demographic and economic survival of highland villages along the border. The neo-ruralism prompted by the EU since the late twentieth century, with its strong emphasis on the preservation of 'traditional culture' and 'local identities' within a post-productivist perspective of agriculture, has encouraged the local appropriation of such notions, along with State rhetoric of heritage, in order to negotiate new economic opportunities and new social representations of places and identities. In this process a significant role has been played by the (re)opening of the Greek-Albanian border, which made it possible for border villages to hire Albanian migrants as cheap labor. The renovated mobility across the border also had an important cultural effect, providing a comparison between the unfulfilled expectations of development and modernity in the area, and opening new spaces for defining both 'modernity' and 'tradition'.

Radić, Nenad

(University of Belgrade, Faculty of Philosophy, Art History Department)

The Hegemony of Vision: Josip Broz Tito, Photography and Issues of Modernity in Former Yugoslavia

Throughout his long reign Josip Broz Tito was constantly and systematically photographed on a daily basis. This unique diary of his public and private life (today in the Museum of Yugoslav History) is the richest source of our knowledge about his constant public presence. Appearing in daily journals, special monographs and other media, these images enabled Tito to greatly influence and form public attitudes towards life in the broadest possible way. Through analysis of some typical sets of photographs, the aim of this paper is to demonstrate the power of these messages to form the attitudes and opinions of ordinary people. Focusing on the representation of the ruler’s body in photographic vision as a paradigm of knowledge, ethics, and power, this paper will show how Yugoslav socialist modernity was created, sustained and controlled.

Radojičić, Dragana

(Ethnographic Institute, Serbian Academy of Sciences, Belgrade)

The Migration of Russians as a Global/Local Social Phenomenon

This paper discusses Russian migration both as a global and a Russo-Montenegrin phenomenon. Since the early 2000s Russians have intensively been buying real estate, especially in the Montenegrin littoral, and in mountainous regions as well. Intensified construction of housing units is an indicator of numerous changes on the local level, firstly in the area of apartment building and economic empowerment of the local population. Real Estate agencies thus advertise their services for many houses in the Russian language. This paper will focus special attention on the social aspects of Russian migration. Published and electronic media provide valid information related to the residence and activities of Russian newcomers. I also collected valuable data during fieldwork I carried out in 2007 that allows an analysis of the new ways of migration. The presence of the Russians is felt on a daily basis throughout the year. It is manifested in the Russian language being heard on the streets, in banks, shops, pharmacies, hotels and restaurants, tourist agencies, as well as in advertising. The old Russian cemetery in Herceg Novi is experiencing a revival: a chapel is being built and the cemetery itself re-built. The questions that will also be addressed here are the following: what is the reflection of this transitional, Orthodox fluctuation on the global economy and what are the related changes on the cultural and social plan, given the possible assimilation of Russians to this area?

Radović, Srdjan

(Ethnographic Institute, Serbian Academy of Sciences, Belgrade)

(Un)Changed Biography of a Town: History, Memory and Usage of Jajce’s Heritage

Almost twenty years after the break up of Yugoslavia, the Bosnian town of Jajce is still primarily associated with its World War II heritage (symbolical grounding place of the socialist and federative state) and is usually put under public and media spotlight merely once a year, on the 29th Novemeber, the occasion of the annual evocation of the historic antifascist council meeting held in 1943. Based on field-work ethnography and media resources, this paper will scrutinize the changes that had occurred in previous years in the physical, symbolic and ideological set-up of the Jajce commemorative ensemble (local memorial museum, evocative rituals, social gatherings etc.). Attitudes and experiences of both the inhabitants and visitors of the “birthplace of Yugoslavia” display an array of views on their own/common past, present and future, and on the political changes and transformations of the last two decades. This paper will also explore the modes of use for the site, which once represented par excellence a mutual Yugoslav landmark, in the context of a continuing dominant nationalist paradigm in most former Yugoslav states, and also in the context of the local community and their own specific use of the town’s historical heritage in everyday life and during the annual focus on the town. The issue will also be addressed as to how this newly resurrected and defined/recycled memory culture, and the locality that embodies it, relate to the phenomena of (Yugo)nostalgia, the commercialization of everyday socialist experience, and contemporary political projects and movements.

Ranković, Daniela

(University of Belgrade, Faculty of Architecture)

New Belgrade Post-War Changed Identity – Sustainable Modern City – Social Transformation

The 20th century will be remembered for the enormous developments that provoked admiration and praise, but also critique and skepticism regarding their sustainability over time. New social ideology required a new ideal city which would symbolically represent the new society. Today, New Belgrade is a city within a city, the former pride of the communist authorities, which was primarily occupied by marshes and only represented a connection between two independent urban settlements – Belgrade and Zemun.

The totalitarian architectural brutalism produced many buildings, and even entire residential quarters, which were monumental in a very negative sense. The monotonous morphology and urban volumes, which exploded far beyond the human scale, lead to a further estrangement between the people and the city. Still, in time, the people of New Belgrade started to show an increasing level of adaptability to their living space. The changes brought by the new millennium lead to the rapid reshaping of the physical structure and demography. Unfortunately, rapid development has its toll. Inevitably, profit is the main drive of the urban development, and it is playing a major role in the shaping of New Belgrade.

No doubt, in the world of architecture tension and sometimes conflict has long existed between those who welcome the architecture of modernity and modernizing globalism and those who reject it. The city, with its people as a trigger of progress in the future, is also an anchor connecting us to the past. In both cases, the city enables us to travel through time, fast forward through events and bring us times long past, making us move in both directions.

Ristovska-Josifovska, Biljana

(Institute of National History, Skopje)

Gender Relation in Macedonia after Socialism (Phases of Development from Declaration to Legislation)

This article addresses the historical phases of gender relations in Macedonia throughout two main periods, focusing on the Macedonian women’s rights movement that came after socialism, based on various documentation provided from different sources. We take into consideration the fact that in the period before 1990, all individuals in the socialist society, having a mono-political parliamentary system, had limited political or social roles, the centre of power being a Communist/Socialist Party. A multi-parliamentary democracy in Macedonia has been practiced since its independence, after the decomposition of the Yugoslav Federation, when a new historical époque influenced changes in each aspect of society. A period of intensified civil organization on different bases began as a result of individual initiatives and ideas of citizens, which led to the establishment of various organizations, institutions, and political parties. Regarding gender equality, efforts were directed towards strengthening the position of women in society as well. In order to set a basis for changing the laws and regulations of domestic legislation, some important international documents related to the international women's movement and gender equality have been accepted. Concerning the process of the institutionalization of women's activities, we find several very important historical mile-stones that marked the path from the first and basic normative documents up to the post-socialist period. Accordingly, these phases of development, from declaration to legislation, will be the key interest of my article.

Rozakou, Katerina

(Independent scholar)

Crafting the ‘Volunteer’ in Greece: New Forms of Governmentality and Subversive Socialities

This paper examines narratives of ‘volunteerism’ and ‘civil society’ that emerge in Greece in the beginning of the 21st century as part of new forms of governmentality. These narratives craft the new European and Greek citizen and echo visions of the ‘modernization’ and ‘Europeanization’ of Greek society. The paper focuses on the ways in which the left engages with such processes through the case of a voluntary association. The association, formed in the 1990s, is a typical example of the emergence of voluntary and non-governmental associations under the influence of EU projects and state initiatives. Moreover, it reflects the transition from other modes of action - ecological, anti-military and feminist movements as well as political groups - to new institutionalized forms of relatedness. Diverse agents creatively post-interpret new modes of governmentality: an ‘expert’ on ‘volunteerism’, a ‘young European volunteer’ and ‘volunteers’. Despite the institutionalization and professionalization attempts, subversive models of sociality persevere and challenge governmentality processes.

Schäuble, Michaela

(Seminar für Ethnologie, Martin-Luther Universität Halle-Wittenberg)

“The Land Where East Meets West” – Dalmatia as a Geographical and Geopolitical Niche

Dalmatia is often referred to as both “Balkan” and “Mediterranean” and in either case the region is characterised by its dense fragmentation that not only impinges on dominant cultivation techniques, channels of trade and “political and ethnic untidiness”, but also reacts against the religious topography (Horden/Purcell 2000: 25 & 622). In their comprehensive study of Mediterranean history, P. Horden and N. Purcell emphasise that “the religious landscape of the Mediterranean world has always closely reflected a fragmented topography and the geography of the means by which the fragmentation is overcome” (ibid: 404). The striving towards unambiguousness and consistency in order to overcome fragmentation is also a prominent characteristic of the ecological niche structure in Dalmatia and constitutes an important way of responding to the constraints of the environment. The attempt to eradicate ambiguity is also currently politically exploited and manifests itself in the trend in which conservative and/or populist political parties increasingly support institutions or events that promote specific local, regional and national values as ‘authentic’ and contrast them to threatening invasions from abroad. Following J. Frykman’s assessment that identification with place and territory seems to be one of the most prominent sources of cultural identity of the Europe of today (see Frykman 2003: 1171), my presentation takes a closer look at the spatial aspects of the Croatian self-assessment as historical Antemurale Christianitatis (“bulwark of Christianity”) and further touches on gendered aspects of place-making, as well as the sacralisation of space in the context of pilgrimages.

Seraïdari, Katerina

(Facultés Saint-Louis, Bruxelles, and LISST, Centre d’Anthropologie Sociale, Toulouse)

Religious Processions in the Aegean (Greece): When Continuity is Defined by Change

Even though, in the case of Greece, there has been no revival of traditional religious practices (since they had not been restrained as in the case of neighbouring countries during socialism), religious processions took on new forms after the Second World War. These changes concern mainly spatial and temporal aspects. Namely, certain villages were abandoned due to internal and external emigration, while new tourist resorts gradually gained importance and thus constituted the new stopping places during processions. It is also the case that many processions are no longer carried out on foot or on the back of a donkey, but by cars and buses, the choice of the means of transport thus modifying the duration and the course of the procession. Based on ethnographic data collected since 1995 during several trips to the Aegean islands, this paper will also analyze the ways in which processions reflect the change of womens’ positions in these local communities and how novelties introduced by emigrants who return to honour the patron saint of their birthplace have been gradually adopted by the locals. It will further discuss the disparity between the participation in processions of older informants, who are motivated by devotion, and the involvement of younger people, who associate religious processions with the necessity of preserving natural landscapes and cultural patrimonies. From this point of view, if we can speak of revival as a (post)modern process in the case of other Southeast European countries, the dominant discourse in Greece stresses the decline of religious rituals due to the gradual secularisation of the country. All these parameters make Greece a counter-example in the region, the study of which can provide a useful point of comparison.

Şerban, Stelu

(Institute for South East European Studies, Bucharest)

Hidden Identity or National Minority? The Case of Bulgarians in Romania

This paper’s topic revolves around the idea that genuine identities contribute to the making up of ethnicities in certain areas in South East Europe. The case I illustrate this point with concerns the Bulgarian speaking population from South Romania. The empirical content of the paper is grounded upon fieldwork I carried out in 2003 in rural areas and in 2010 in a few communes close to Bucharest.

A concept proposed in recent litterature is that of a "hidden minority" (Petrović, Promitzer, Sikimić 2004). Groups of the population featured in this concept will have faced dramatic "historical" circumstances. On one hand, political modernization did not erase their traditional social structures; on the other hand, they were victims of global events such as world wars, colonizations, and deportations, tragedies which were carried out within the national states. As such, in my opinion, the concept of a national minority is inappropriate, whilst that of a hidden minority covers too little, considering the capacity of these people to design their ethnicity. That is why I prefer the concept of a hidden identity.

Inspired by the seminal work of Michael Herzfeld on Cultural Intimacy (1997), as well as by concepts of resistance and hidden transcripts (Scott 1985; Idem 1990), I argue that these hidden identities could be seen as forms of resistant ethnicity.

Šuber, Daniel

(Sociology Department, University of Konstanz)

Politics of Walls: Reading Images in Contemporary Serbia

This presentation is based upon a research project that was designed to convey information on the cultural dynamics underlying the transmission processes of political meaning in post-war Serbia. Hereby, graffiti and street-art production are taken for 'everyday media' that may deliver exceptional evidence of local people's views on politics and thus challenge such predominant views according to which "nationalism still tends to be viewed as positive," and that "movement forward toward stable democracy can only be difficult” (Ramet/Pavlaković 2005: ix).

After shortly introducing the research design (sample, content analysis, focus group analysis) and the results of our graffiti/street-art survey, I shall interpret our findings against the socio-historical context of the research and elucidate the complex transmission dynamics underlying the recent proliferation of political icons, such as 'three fingers' and diverse slogans and symbols addressing the Kosovo issue after the method of Panofskyan resp. Mitchell's theory of 'iconology.' Here, we have to account for recent developments such as the emergence and expansion of rightist movements such as Obraz, 1389, Naši, and their strategies to take over the public space and streets in their aim to 'normalize' a 'Serbian way of life'. In conclusion, a media theory corresponding to the Serbian mediascape will be presented and our results measured against the predominant views introduced at the beginning.

Shkreli, Inis

(European Studies Faculty, Cluj-Napoca & Institute of Cultural Anthropology and Art Studies, Tirana)

Narrations on Migration and the Adaptation Process among Vlachs of Korça in Albania

Conducting research into borders and border areas, their solidity (modern) and liquidity (postmodern), seems very relevant for the so called marginalized provinces of nation states, but it gets even more interesting in such a multi-faceted area such as southeast Albania, a region that borders Greece not only as a state, but as the EU as well. In the countries of SEE migration across borders and transnational activity occur on a daily basis, to some extent thanks to Europeanization and globalization, as well as economic crises in native countries.

This paper is based on interviews taken among Vlachs in the city of Korça in southeast Albania. Fieldwork experience lead my research on migration issues and the locals’ expressions concerning the border, border-crossing, their personal experience and adaptation to a new life in the host country. The paper will be focused on the vast video/audio material collected in the field, which is related to stories about border, border crossings, how the Vlach minority perceives the concept of the alien versus the land which hosts them (Greece), and their self identification with this concept. The paper will cover a period of time from the beginning of the fall of communism to the present day.

Simeunović Bajić, Natasa

(Faculty of Culture and Media, Belgrade)

Social Exclusion in a Post-Socialist Context: The Representations of Roma in Serbian Print Media

The Roma are the largest ethnic minority in Europe with official estimates of up to 12 million. However, the Roma community is still highly marginalized, especially in Southeastern Europe.

The mass media are a very important part of everyday life: they represent the cultural, political, economic and social processes and have a central role in forming and reflecting public opinion. My research subject is therefore concerned with the mass media representations of Roma.

What are the forms of media policy in Serbia? What is the historical status of the Roma minority in Serbia? What is the relationship between the present media status of the Roma minority in Serbia and the socialist past of former Yugoslavia? We will try to answer these questions.

This paper engages with the complexity and contradictions in media representations of the constructed idea of the Roma minority. The paper investigates how, when, and in what ways the Roma enter media space and what the media-created images of this group are. The article makes use of my own research project concerning the ways in which Serbian print media represented Roma between 2005 and 2010. I can not see any betterment in the treating of the Roma minority in printed media. It is presently promoted that Roma have a different culture and different formulas of behavior that are not in accordance with the norms of the majority. Print media are distributing stereotypes which are ghettoizing Roma. They are depicted as uneducated, beggars, dirty and animals. Therefore, media stereotypes are one of the main sources of the negative social position of Roma in Serbia.

Simić, Marina

(Univeristy of Belgrade, Faculty of Political Sciences)

The Deceit of Goods: Consumption and Reconstruction of ‘Normality’ in Post-Socialist Serbia

It has been noted in literature on post-socialism that the idea of ‘normal life’ figured prominently in people’s understanding of the recent socio-political changes and their own social position. In this paper I want to explore this rather vague idea of normality in order to show how people in Serbia try to recreate normality through shopping practices, while also connecting it with the ideas about location and certain understandings of cosmopolitanism. I would argue that in Serbia, ‘normality’ refers to ‘Western’ goods, among other things, but it seems to me that their status and my informants’ ability to appropriate them were far from straightforward.

Drawing from my long term fieldwork research in the Serbian town of Novi Sad, I focus on a particular group of people – mostly young, well-educated and relatively high social status Serbs – exploring the ways in which they feel dislocated by recent socio-political changes. Most of them tried to build their social position through different practices understood as ‘cosmopolitan’, but practiced by people who just happened to live in Serbia. In that sense, the seemingly mundane practice of every-day shopping – and I especially concentrate on goods closely connected with bodies: food and clothes – and the commodities themselves served as the medium between my informants and the specific 'others' they wanted to become. However, the imagined ‘normality’ they tried to (re)create through the appropriation of these goods did not only include the ‘appropriation’ of ‘Western-ness’ (equated with European-ness), but also the erasure of this mimicking practice itself that was seen as brought by the fall of Yugoslav socialism.

Smigiel, Christian

(Leibniz Institute for Regional Geography, Leipzig)

The Formation of a New Powerful Elite? A Look behind Newly Produced Post-Socialist Urban Landscapes: The Case of Gated and Guarded Neighbourhoods in Sofia

Gated and guarded neighbourhoods have been once referred to as spaces of global neoliberalism par excellence (Brenner and Theodore 2002). In fact, when looking at the rapid proliferation of gated and guarded neighbourhoods in Southeastern Europe one can arrive at a similar conclusion. The interplay of international real estate companies, global capital, finacially well-equipped residents and a rather passive public administration (urban planning) has created this new feature as part of a neoliberal urban landscape.

Moreover, it is of great interest for urban researchers to get an insight into what is happening behind these newly produced spaces. Based on five different case studies from Sofia, this paper will question who the new residents are, what the motifs are for this voluntary exclusion, and what kind of conflicts can been found behind these walls and fences. Later, this paper will discuss whether gated and guarded neighbourhoods might lead to the formation of a new powerful social class.

Smith, Erin

(Laboratoire d'Ethnologie et de Sociologie Comaprative, Université Paris X Nanterre)

Getting Your Foot in the Door: miq dhe lekë

Despite official ideology of equality and fairness, many social resources such as education, access to health care and employment were determined to some extent in Socialist Albania by the political history of the individual’s ligneage and the strategic mobilisation of better-placed relatives or affines. In today’s capitalist Albania, the political allegiance of the individual continues in many cases to play a major role in the obtaining and betterment of her economic position. In the last fifteen years, however, a new factor has entered the prerequisites for obtaining desired resources: lekë (money, or in this case, bribes). Using data from extensive fieldwork in villages around the town of Fier in Albania, I shall examine the case of strategies used by recent university graduates to enter the labour market in their field of specialisation. I will outline the relative importance over time of mobilising miq and lekë in the obtention of a job, and discuss to what extent the very definition of miq in these contexts has changed in recent years. I will analyse actors’ perceptions of the options that are open to them, the efficacity of such strategies, and the perceived long-term consequences of current transformations in informal entry tactics into state and private employment. Is rampant corruption on all levels seen by locals as a transitory phase prior to EU accession and (supposedly consequent) attainment by Albania of “European” standards of governance and transparency? Or is it seen rather as an unfortunate but unavoidable development of local power relations in conformance to and in imitation of the norms at play in the two major host societies of Albanian migrants?

Sorescu, Andrei-Dan

(Faculty of Political Science, University of Bucharest)

Modernity and the Picturesque - A Romanian Understanding of Identity and Alterity

Going beyond the canonical Romantic definition of the “Picturesque”, the aim of this paper is to establish the way in which the nascent modern Romanian culture - starting with the late 18th century - appropriated and internalized as part of its self-image the perception of its anecdotal exoticism, as first conceptualized by Western travelers. Themselves confronted with modernity’s heightened perception of and conflicting views on alterity, such Western visitors left a long-standing legacy of interrogation and doubt in matters of identity and cultural insertion .The picturesque - as will be argued - may thus be seen as a constant of the modern Romanian cultural perspective on both “traditional values” and the present. What is more, one may contend that the Romanian narrative of the picturesque has a tradition of its own which, far from being abolished by a would-be postmodern deconstruction, has seen a massive revival after the fall of Communism, as a way of relating to a traumatic recent past, a way to re-establish cultural continuity and to explore the “alterity” and place of Romania within an increasingly significant context of European identity. Finally, the novel way in which the post-1989 understanding of the picturesque has come to accommodate the Romanian perception of the neighboring Republic of Moldavia as a cultural space at once familiar and exotic - umistakeably picturesque - is yet another topic open for further research and debate.

Staab, Nicolai

(Universität Erfurt)

Problems in Applying Theories of Religion in (Post-)Modernity to Southeast Europe

In the social sciences and anthropology, the process of modernization in the field of religion usually implies a coincidence with secularization, deinstitutionalization and the individualization of beliefs. While sociologist Grace Davie already revised the theory she had developed in the nineties about "believing without belonging," limiting it to Western Europe, this paper tries to encourage the discussion of the applicability, especially of theories of a religious market, to Southeast European countries mainly illustrated by the example of Romania.

This paper is primarily based on the results of empirical investigations which apply various models and theories on the religious landscape of the country. Despite revealing some tendencies towards the individualization of belief in Romania, the results show clearly that adherence to one of the established religious communities is still the norm. The presenter concludes that the causes of this deviation lie in the history of the ecclesiastical and state institutions. As the paper will show, their relationship with society differs essentially from that in the West. Accordingly, and in the words of the sociologist of religion Danièle Hervieu-Léger, a “belonging without believing” appears to be more adequate.

Stahl, Irina

(Institut of Sociology, Roumanian Academy, Bucharest)

Une acculturation désirée. Le cas de la ville de Bucarest au XIXe siècle

La ville de Bucarest se retrouve au XIXe siècle dans un profond processus de changement social. Les modèles culturels venus auparavant d’Istanbul sont peu à peu remplacés par d’autres, importés de l’ouest de l’Europe. On assiste à une acculturation volontaire, désirée et recherchée qui va changer, en quelques décennies seulement la vie de ses habitants, mais aussi l’aspect de la ville tout entière.

Parmi les nouveautés, les vêtements, que les femmes et les jeunes s’empressent d’apporter de Paris et de Vienne surtout. Les boyards, aux hautes fonctions politiques se montrent plus réticents, car aux yeux des Turcs, la manière de s’habiller n’était pas anodine. Les nouveaux habits bouleversent profondément la société. Ils apportent l’égalité et l’uniformité sociale, le contraire des confortables habits orientaux qui marquaient nettement le statut social du porteur.

Des nouveaux meubles arrivent, car les habits européens ne vont plus avec les larges divans turcs. Néanmoins, les vieilles habitudes sont trop enracinées pour s’effacer aussi vite et il n’est pas rare que l’on préfère s’asseoir par terre, les jambes croisées, à coté des chaises, tout en gardant le haut-de-forme sur la tête, comme auparavant les kalpaks.

Dans les salons on commence à parler surtout le français, ce qui facilite les échanges.

Ces changements sont l’apanage des classes aisées de la ville. Les paysans, situés en bas de l’échelle sociale, y restent apparemment insensibles.

Afin de bien comprendre ce processus d’acculturation, il convient de l’encadrer dans un contexte géographique large, car à l’époque, on le retrouve, avec des particularités locales, dans toute la région du sud-est européen.

Stefanović-Banović, Milesa

(Institute of Ethnography, Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Belgrade)

Religious Material Culture as a Source of "(Post)Modern" Orthodox Christian Idendity in Serbia

A return to religion after several decades of secularism and rationalism has brought new religious practices to social and cultural life in Serbia. These transformations, in certain aspects, include a return to pre-socialist religious tradition and to a greater extent create new patterns that attempt to fit into the old and traditional context. This has resulted in a number of hybrid practices, that emerged from the influence of “modern Western” culture, as well as from the rising economic strength of new elites. This phenomenon is probably the most noticeable of examples of a material culture, as the most common way of manifesting religiosity.

This paper will research insufficiently explored examples of the new perception of religious material culture. The examples comprise the commercialization of religious customs and needs (exclusive religious tourism, expensive religious objects, etc.), excessive public religious demonstrations and a general shift of focus from the spiritual to the material. I will analyze whether these phenomena are the actual result of modern man’s religious needs, or a current trend, which can possibly have permanent consequences on the preservation of traditional values, and also on society’s general cultural and spiritual development.

Stoicescu, Adrian

(Universty of Bucharest, Faculty of Letters, Chair of Anthropology)

(Be)Gendering Existance - Towards a New Type of Pattern: The Retrosexual

It has become increasingly obvious that the complexity of human kind in present times acts as a way of reshaping the traditional patterns of assessing the statute of the individual as part of a group on the one hand, and as an individual on the other hand. The same is also true for gender, where the traditional split into two homogenous categories has for some time now stopped working. The shades of grey that overshadow the traditional taxonomies lead to an increasing need for the re-devision of the old categories into new, clearer, and smaller groups that create a new identity from that ashes of the old insufficient ones. That being said, a new male category is culturally emerging, yet unlike the category of metrosexual, now old itself, in which the male profile leans towards femininity sets or, to be more accurate, resets masculinity in being an emphasis on the old features that were held previously by males. The present paper will try to expand upon the features that the Retrosexual has today and the way in which this category creates its identity.

Stojanović, Marko

(Ethnographic Museum in Belgrade)

Ethno Village: Desirable, Irreal and Functional Construct of Identity

Cultural tourism in the communication space of globalized civilization functions also as a spectrum of possibilities for the development of countries in transition. Since cultural tourism participates in heritage industry and implies, broadly speaking, all phenomena, relations and events that arise through communicational exchanges between the indigenous and tourists, the phenomenon of ethno tourism, and in particular the ethno-village, gains a specific meaning in post-war Serbian society. Through the examples of three ethno-villages, it is possible to recognize (through self-determination in anthropologic discourse and the distribution of its meaning within interest and target groups) a transposition of various constructs of identity in the communication channels I – We, We – We, and We – Others. This research was conducted using examples from a republic institution – the Open-air Museum Sirogojno, a private ethno-village Stanisici, and the alleged private tourist resort Mecavnik, owned by the film director Emir Kusturica, whose most significant programs are financed by the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Serbia. Concepts of their tourist offers and models of their realization show the use of elements of cultural heritage, in the form of various state cultural (sociological) interpretations of the past and projected future.

Stroe, Monica

(National School of Political Sciences and Public Administration, Department of Sociology, Bucharest)

Tourism, Food and Landscape in the Fortified Villages of Transylvania: Exploring Global Patrimonialisation Practices in Local Contexts

The proposed paper focuses on the processes of local identity building supporting the emergence of a regional tourism brand, Târnava Mare, now home to several of Romania’s UNESCO World Heritage Sites – Saxon fortified rural churches (Kirchenburgen) – and appreciated as a cultural landscape (comparable to its practices with more consecrated vineyard landscapes).

The local branding process aggregates a network of stakeholders around the Saxon region, triggered by a national context of public agenda debates on local development and decentralisation, but also national identity and country branding (the post EU accession years). The existence of an observed rhetoric engages several power themes: material landmarks of Saxon heritage (cultural landscapes, gastronomy, handcraft), food-related policies and practices (locality, organic/homemade/traditional/typical products, agro-tourism), and sustainable development.

Research questions concern the agents and phenomena contributing to the emergence of a local tourism brand and of a market for authenticity, history, and landscape: How is the interaction between local and international actors and knowledge fluxes shaping the patrimonialisation process? How does the added value of "Saxonness" as symbolic capital contribute to the production and touristic consumption of locality in Târnava Mare? To what extent do the selection and promotion of landscape, history, experiences, and products blend into a regional ethos?

Tamminen, Tanja

(Finnish Institute of International Affairs, Helsinki, Finland)

Re-Establishing Cross-Border Cooperation in the Rugova, Theth and Prokletija Mountain Areas - Adaptation, Appropriation, Resistance

The post-communist era of Southeastern Europe is marked by a commonly shared discourse on Europeanisation – EU jargon of sustainable development, integration, regional cooperation and European partnership, but also a more interventionist discourse of project management, benchmarking, state-building and peace building. Cross-border cooperation is presented as a way of overcoming conflicts related to nation-state building and a step towards European integration. The Patron of the Balkans Peace Park Project – a cross-border cooperation project in the border area of Albania, Kosovo and Montenegro – Graham Watson notes: “Whilst EU membership remains a beacon of hope for Balkan countries, schemes like the Balkan Peace Park Project are vitally important to peace in Europe. The Project rises above the politics that have plagued the region - - this embodies both the spirit of liberalism and European integration.” This paper (partly based on field research in the region) aims at analyzing the Peace Park Project (the idealist discourse that surrounds it and the reality on the ground) in the context of the re-established communication lines between Albanians across the borders. Despite outspoken good intentions, this project also presents a number of unexpected disadvantages to the people living in the border villages. This paper analyzes the mechanisms adapted to cope with these challenges concerning the idealism of cross-border cooperation, appropriation of new concepts and resistance. Approaches towards this cross-border region and the above mentioned cooperation project are compared, including those at the level of Brussels, the capitals involved and border villages.

Teampau, Petruta

(Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca)

Beauty, Body and Social Change in Post-Communist Romania

My research looks at how new consumerist values and norms in post-communist Romania have colonized the bodies of women and how these women negotiate new meanings with previous understandings of beauty and femininity. First, I have used discourse analysis of beauty advice publications (1970-1989) to understand what the standards of beauty were for women during late communism. Addressed to women in all social strata, these publications enforced a kind of “civilizing process”, teaching women the minute details of self-management and care (including personal hygiene and health). The discourse was highly ideological, enforcing a rather traditional gender identity.

I have also conducted a series of in depth interviews with women aged 25-50 to understand through their narratives how, after the demise of communism, they have negotiated the new challenges and requirements with previously ingrained understandings of beauty and femininity. If during communism, women were encouraged to display a careful, smart, “feminine” appearance as part of the role of their sex and their civic duty, afterwards we have witnessed the “privatization” of feminine beauty: it not only became more body-focused, but also a personal resource. The body was the locus of enjoying the fresh sense of freedom and of hedonist investment, but also the symbol of a new, better life, and the marker of the individual’s commitment to such a life. However, I argue that the post-communist body is more of a palimpsest with several layers of understandings and meanings, and not a complete innovation.

Telbizova-Sack, Jordanka

(Graduiertenschule "Religion in Modernisierungsprozessen" der Universität Erfurt)

„Europa“ in den Debatten muslimischer Bevölkerungsgruppen Bulgariens: Konstruktionen und Wandel

Wie nehmen Muslime und Muslimas in Bulgarien "Europa" wahr, welchen Bildern, Stereotypen und Patterns folgen sie?

Der Beitrag spürt den Bildern, Perzeptionen und Argumentationsmustern nach, die im Hinblick auf "Europa" und den "Westen" in den Diskursen der Muslime und Muslimas im bulgarischen Staat vorhanden sind. Was ist "Europa" für sie? Ist es das Christentum? Ist es Säkularisierung oder Atheismus? Ist es ein Symbol der Macht oder der ökonomischen Effizienz? Wird es durch Demokratie und Menschenrechte vertreten? Oder gilt es als moralisch dekadent? Wird es als eine homogene Einheit wahrgenommen, oder ist es eher eine vage Vorstellung voller Widersprüche? Steht der „Westen“ stellvertretend für Europa? Oder wendet man sich gegen die Usurpation des Europabegriffs durch einen triumphierenden „Westen“?

Anhand von Textanalysen (muslimische Presse, Internetveröffentlichungen, publizierte Werke muslimischer Intellektueller) sowie Experteninterviews und anderer Standardverfahren der Feldforschung will das Referat diesen Fragen nachgehen und die aktuellen Europa-Debatten bei ethnisch und sprachlich heterogenen muslimischen Gruppen im jüngsten EU-Mitgliedsstaat nachzeichnen.

Die Auseinandersetzungen zu „Europa“ und zum „Westen“ knüpfen unmittelbar an die unter den muslimischen Bevölkerungsgruppen stattfindenden Werte- und Identitätsdebatten an.

Thoma, Dimitra

(Academy of Athens, Research Centre for Greek Society)

Immigrant Students' Contribution to the Shaping of a Positive Professional Identity of Greek Teachers in Secondary Education

This paper focuses on the experiences at work of Greek teachers who work with second generation immigrants, as well as the impact these have on their professional identity.

The study relies upon the “labour process theory” regarding teachers’ work, Bourdieu’s concepts of students’ “cultural capital” and “habitus” towards knowledge, and Bernstein’s concept of the “framing” of pedagogical knowledge. The empirical material which we will be presenting and discussing is the product of a sociological qualitative piece of research based on 25 semi-structured interviews with teachers. The project took place during 2007-2009. Some of the basic themes we discussed referred to teachers’ daily professional life, the role of the family regarding students’ educational achievement, teachers’ relationship with parents, and teachers’ professional status.

According to the data, over the last two decades teachers’ work at public schools has been degraded as native students mainly trust and pay attention to the flourishing system of para-education. This situation results in a degradation of teachers’ work and professional status. The presence of immigrant students in Greece contributes to the shaping of a positive professional identity. Contrary to what is generally said, their presence upgrades teachers’ professional status. They constitute a "devoted and faithful audience", which "boosts teachers’ morale" and shapes a positive professional identity. Immigrant students save teachers’ “professional honour” as they regain their work object.

Tocheva, Detelina

(Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle/Saale)

Postsocialist Capitalism and the Rural Domestic Economy: Domains and Limits of Calculation

This paper explores the transformations of the Bulgarian rural house economy and its connectedness to the larger new capitalist framework through the case study of villages situated in the Rhodope Mountains. After the collapse of socialism, the rural household economy continued to combine subsistence farming and cash incomes from wages/salaries and pensions/private businesses. However, the crucial importance of farming has been reassessed in distinctively new ways. Most cash incomes are too limited and fluctuant, the only “hard” income being old-age pensions. As a result, domestic production (livestock, land, gardening) compensates for the lack of cash by producing products for self-consumption and/or for sale. Within the frame of household consumption, villagers tend to consider their products as cheap, or with no price value. When traded, however, villagers insist upon costly production and physical effort, arguing for the highest market prices. The threshold between the two possible destinations of the products, domestic consumption and trade, is uncertain, for one rarely knows what and how much of it will be for sale. Whether the value of labor will be calculated is therefore also uncertain, which is reflected in the ambiguous ways in which the villagers think of their own labor. The calculation of the value of domestic agricultural labor has been a longstanding theme in anthropological research. This paper returns to this classical theme by looking at a society in which the necessity for home farming is the experience of most rural and some urban families, as an unavoidable domestic component of the new capitalist modernity.

Trifunović, Vesna

(Institute of Ethnography, Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Belgrade)

"Winners" and "Losers" of Transition as New Social Groups in Serbian Society

During the last two decades the process commonly known as “transition” has brought changes and novelties in Serbian society that have affected various spheres of social life. The effect that this process had on individuals in Serbia is vividly depicted through the categories of “winners” and “losers” of transition. These categories exist both objectively, in terms of the elevation or degradation of one’s economic and social status, and as conceptualizations that are created by the members of this society. Winners and losers of transition, hence, represent specific social groups that emerged as a novelty in new social circumstances. However, the conceptualizations of these social groups are not only based on objective parameters, such as the mentioned elevation or degradation of social and economic status - they also include diverse aspects which altogether form complex notions of these two categories in Serbian society. My goal in this paper is to examine the aspects from which these new social groups are observed and evaluated in the context of Serbian transition. I am interested in the ways members of this society identify and think of winners and losers of transition, and how they perceive and categorize themselves when it comes to these concepts. In this way, various views and value orientations that may have had a certain effect on the process of transition in Serbian society can be revealed.

Ullmann, Katrin

(Institut für Kultur und Medien, University of Düsseldorf)

Familienbilder in den Selbstbeschreibungen junger Erwachsener aus Südosteuropa

Im Anschluss an aktuelle Fragestellungen und Perspektiven in der Familienforschung möchte ich auf der empirischen Grundlage qualitativen Interviewmaterials Familienbilder von jungen Erwachsenen (20-30 Jahre) aus Südosteuropa (Herkunftsländer: Serbien, Kroatien, Bosnien, Slowenien, Rumänien, Bulgarien) vorstellen. Sie sind Bestandteil meines kulturwissenschaftlichen Promotionsprojekts, das sich mit Generation(n) und Zugehörigkeit(en) im globalen Raum beschäftigt. In meinem Beitrag zur Konferenz richte ich den Blick auf die Erzählungen über Familie und Vorstellungen von Familie, die im Interviewmaterial zu finden sind. Mein besonderes Interesse richte hierbei zum einen auf den für mich in (Neben-)Erzählungen sichtbar werdenden Zusammenhang von Familie und Angst, wobei ich Angst als familienkonstituierendes und verstärkendes Element im Sinne des ‚doing family’ verstehe. In den erinnerten Ängsten junger Südosteuropäer werden aber auch (Kriegs-)Erfahrungen sichtbar, die sich auf die Fragilität von Familie als Schutzraum für Kinder und Jugendliche beziehen. Zum anderen interessiert mich die identitätsstiftende Bedeutung von Familie im Kontext räumlicher Selbstverortungen. Gerade für die Legitimation (trans-)nationaler Selbstverortungen oder einer ‚self-re-balkanization’ (Kolozova) wird die Herkunft der Vorfahren bedeutungsvoll.

Uzun, Emel

(Hacettepe University, Ankara & University of Edinburgh)

“I am a Nationalist Person”: Meaning of Nationalism(s) in the Discourse of Ordinary People

Besides the economic transformations it foresees, neo-liberalism, as a hegemonic ideology of the 1980s and post 80's, calls for new structures in society that are based on nationalism. Amongst other ideologies, nationalism holds a superior position in the political arena, which appears to be invisible, unconscious, normal and banal. In order for other ideologies to gain a position in the area of political discourse, articulating with nationalism(s) becomes necessary.

It is possible to witness nationalism in everyday life through concrete practices that produce and reproduce (national) identities in commonplace encounters. The context of migration, which makes the concept of nation and belonging more important, can be accepted as an example which makes nationalist identities more salient. In this context I think that a new, ordinary type of nationalism is produced through various clichéd expressions in the discourse of ordinary people. The statement “I am a nationalist person” is one of the most popular of these clichés. This statement refers to a positive concept of nationalism and it seems very far from all other political positioning. It is the most important example of the apolitical discourse of ordinary people.

This paper is a part of research in progress, and so I will provide some sample interviews carried out with Turkish immigrants in Scotland. My aim in this paper is to understand how people define nationalism(s), what the meaning of being nationalist is, and what the positive and negative references to nationalism(s) are.

Vaetisi, Serban

(Babes-Bolyai University of Cluj-Napoca)

New Urban Spaces and Materialities in Postsocialist Cluj, Romania

This paper explores the forms and uses of some recently built environments in the city of Cluj, Romania. Adopting an ethnographic perspective of studying cultural practices, and a visual-anthropological approach of questioning the images and representations of symbolic objects/places, research is based on an ongoing investigation of new urban spaces and buildings in a postsocialist context.

Over the last 20 years, accompanied by the many transformations that occurred in the region, urban space was subject to significant changes and reconfigurations. From the point of view of its material culture, houses, commercial and religious buildings, former factories, banks, parks, cars, monuments, and urban furniture became both the significant elements of these changes and references to new cultural, political, social, and economic statuses and relationships.

We focus on the forms (architectural/aesthetic, ideological, and functional) and uses (legal, symbolic, and ritual) of such objects and places, and the interaction between them and human bodies, as a particular category of materiality, in a selection of relevant “case studies”.

Our study attempts to provide a description and an appropriate interpretation of the challenges invovled in the transformation (in the context of local urban planning and development) of urban materialities and practices, as well as to assess people's approaches and responses to such transformation, from the viewpoint of their everyday life, innovative and creative utilizations and resistance. Subsequently, the issues of producing new imbalances, uncertainties, and losses will be critically addressed and evaluated as a result of both the forms and uses of these new urban objects and places.

Vangeli, Anastas

(Center for Research and Policy Making, Skopje)

The Surreal Case of Ekrem Jevric - Internalization of Balkanism and the Need for the Self-Ridiculization of Others

This paper examines the case of Ekrem Jevric, a middle-aged prosaic labor migrant from rural Montenegro who moved to New York City and became an unlikely music star, regardless of his obvious lack of musical skill or knowledge. Jevric, after having uploaded an amateur video to Youtube of his amateur thrash song “Kuca poso”, became an instant celebrity among Balkan diaspora in the US, as well as back home. His song quickly scored millions of views, and soon Jevric started performing live shows. News agencies from the Balkans and beyond, including the BBC, reported his story. After several months, Jevric made a trip to his homeland, where he was welcomed like a rock star.

This case, accompanied by surreal elements such as the featuring of Jevric in a Dolce and Gabanna commercial, raises several important questions for further study. Through an analysis of the video material and the comments made by and for Jevric, this paper tries to analyze two key aspects of this case. First, the internalization of Balkanist discourse in diasporic and local discourses. In the case of Jervic, internalized Balkanism is projected onto himself - his song is about his inability to cope with “western” values - while the discourse of his fans dispersed around the globe is not homogeneous. The second aspect is the promotion of the culture of “failure” and the pleasure of watching people ridicule themselves, which in this case transcends the internalized Balkanism and refers to a broader phenomenon on the social web.

Vartolomei, Adelina

(Ovidius University of Constanta)

The Modern Aeneas: Romanian Women Abroad

This paper will focus on Romanian women in contemporary times who have become a mirror image of Aeneas, the mythic hero. Just as Aeneas sets out on a journey to fulfil his destiny and find a better life, Romanians embark on quests in order to find better paid jobs and a stable economic situation. In order to prove this point, I will make reference to several movies that already reflect the changes in Romanian society, most particularly ‘Cealalta Irina’ (The Other Irina), directed by Andrei Gruzsniczki and released in 2009, and ‘Francesca’, directed by Bobby Paunescu and released in 2009. I will approach gender roles and deconstruct them, demonstrating that women no longer hold a passive role but are in fact amongst those trying to earn money, and also that the role of the victim is not always played by women. Moreover, I will discuss the impact of multiculturalism and how it affects relationships within the country as well as on the Continent. Last but not least, I will consider this group of women who travel to work abroad as a different type of minority because of the different reactions they have caused.

Vasile, Monica

(Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle/Saale)

Does Crisis Increase Calculation? Timber Trade, Risks and Work in the Highlands of Romania

My paper will relate the present economic crisis to increasing calculation in trade. In the highlands of Romania, I have researched a village of timber traders who were very successful immediately after the fall of communism. Their ascending track of success made them stick to the ideology of “anything goes”, as they made substantial profits even without a clear business plan. This continued up until the past two years when economic crisis caused the construction market to breakdown. Today the producers-traders have begun to calculate the costs and benefits of their trade and take only “calculated risks”. They have begun to include in their accounting the price of timber for their work; they even include stress as a cost, in order to generate an “accurate” statement for themselves as to whether it is worth keeping up with timber production and sales.

I will show how a situation of economic breakdown can bring calculation to the fore and cause traders to become more specialized, thus in a way meeting the demands of a “capitalist market”, however black it may be.

Vetters, Larissa

(Max Planck Institute of Social Anthropology, Halle/Saale)

Mastering the Politics of Scale - Elite Place-Making Projects in Contemporary Mostar, Bosnia-Herzegovina

This presentation looks at strategies of place-making by local elites in the post-war environment of the divided city of Mostar in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH). It explores how, on the one hand, such place-making strategies articulate with “state-building” projects, and on the other, “state-rescaling” projects, which are both being put forward by “the international community”. Rather than presuming a neo-liberal development strategy, carried out by international organizations to be a global driving force of changing state configurations in BiH, I focus on the agency of locally embedded, but state-wide and internationally connected elites. I trace the ways in which elites draw on the sense of locality as a lived and historically contingent experience and thus a source of their legitimacy, yet simultaneously also refashion the meaning of locality in their response to international "state-building" and "state-rescaling" initiatives. My analysis is based on three cases of local negotiations around initiatives by organisations of the European multi-level governance structure: the promotion of local self-government reforms, the formation of networks of cross-border cooperation, and regional economic development plans in the field of transport infrastructure.

Acknowledging that territorial-administrative entities are not a static platform of social relations, but are imagined, shaped and experienced as constitutive elements of these social relations, my aim is to explore from an anthropological perspective what consequences such elite place-making strategies have for perceptions of Mostar as a unit of local self-government in the wider context of external state-building and Euro-Atlantic integration.

Voell, Stéphane

(Philipps-Universität Marburg, Institut für Vergleichende Kulturforschung, Fachgebiet Völkerkunde)

Kulla and Koshki: Identity and Traditional Law in Albania and Georgia

In Northern Albania and Georgian Svaneti, both "kulla" and "koshki" are defence towers in which, amongst other reasons, families entrench themselves in times of blood feud. Both are material witnesses of traditional law in the Balkans and Caucasus and both have their place in the self-portrayal of local people. In this paper I will discuss the ways in which tradition, and in particular traditional law, is used in presentations of identity in Albania and Georgia. Rather than discussing whether traditional law is still a relevant legal frame of reference for day to day behaviour, I will argue that an assumed contemporary relevance of traditional law is based to a large extent on this enacting of traditional law. The paper is based on field research carried out in Albania (2001-2003) and in Georgia (2009-2010).

Voicu, Cristina-Georgiana

(Alexandru Ioan Cuza University of Iaşi)

From Colonial Power to Neoliberal Eastern Europe

In purely historical, economic and social terms, the postcolonial experience and the postcommunist experiment have distinct profiles that cannot be conflated. The ideologies that put them into orbit are obviously different. The post in postcolonial, like the post in postcommunism is the post of space clearing gesture; besides, even if for dissimilar reasons, both paradigms are postrealist, in the sense that they are anti-mimetic. Postcolonialism is rooted in capitalist ideology whereas the postcommunist experiment claims to represent a final transcendence of capitalism. An important part of the paper will attempt to parallel the post communist experience with the postcolonial and interrogate whether we may apply the postcolonial perspective to postcommunist contexts. Based on the fact that race and ethnicity issues are central in the postcolonial order, this paper aims to consider the concept of ethnicity in its cultural determinations across the dichotomy East/West, establishing the relationship between postcolonial and postcommunist ethnicity and tracing analogies between Communist and hegemonic colonial discourse. Crossing the former Iron Curtain, another part of the paper will explore the way Central and Eastern European countries coped with ethnic provocation in their troubled past and the way in which multicultural policies are still at a loss to shape the new postcommunist context.

Vučinić-Nešković, Vesna

(Philosophical Faculty, University of Belgrade)

Litija of Kuti: Sabor of the Bay of Kotor, Montenegro

The early 1990s was a period of the revival of religion, but also the turbulent breakup of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. By 1995, when the war officially ended in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, all the former Yugoslav republics had already become independent states, with the exception of Serbia and Montenegro, who redefined their political unity and stayed together within the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.

In 1995, the village of Kuti within the Bay of Kotor revived their traditional Easter Procession, and since 1999 they have done the same with the Vidovdan Procession. In these public religious celebrations the official Serbian Orthodox ritual is merged with popular village practices that can be remembered from the pre-socialist period. The central part of these celebrations is the ritual circumambulation of the village, which takes place after the morning liturgy and is followed by a festive feast organized for all the participants.

This paper will address the ways in which the Easter Procession (Vaskršnja litija) in Kuti became the Sabor (central gathering) for that part of the Bay’s population, who searched for ways in which to express the Serbian component of their identity in what was becoming an exclusively Montenegrin one, created by the Montenegrin political elite who had been in power since 1997. It will also trace the ways in which the meaning of litija changed in accordance with the political situation up until 2006, when a unilateral referendum for the independence of Montenegro was successfully realized, and then from 2006 untill the present day, during which the Serbian population was placed in the position of being between a former constitutive nation and a new ethnic minority.

Vuckovic Juros, Tanja

(Dept. of Sociology at Indiana University & Dept. of Social Policy at University of Zagreb)

The Communist Past in the Capitalist Present: The Experience of Two Croatian Post-Yugoslav Generations

Many scholars agree with Mannheim's thesis about real social change occuring only when new generations, fully socialized in new regimes, replace the old ones. In the meantime however, the generations who live durung this transition cannot just standby waiting for these new societies to form. The generations of youth that are now reaching adulthood and full-fledged membership of postcommunist societies are the ones caught in-between regimes. On the one hand, they may have been born in recent years or after the break-up of communist regimes, and on the other they may have spent either their formative years or their whole lives in a new capitalist regime. For these generations, communism is in the past, and yet it is still recent enough to be bound to the lived experiences of their parents and the majority of people who surround them. In addition, it is embedded in the institutions that surround them. As a result, members of these transitional generations are socialized in the values of their new capitalist societies, but at the same time they still have access to the possibly conflicting or competing values of the previous regime. My research question therefore concerns the ways in which members of these young transitional generations legitimize their experiences of capitalism in light of the available perspectives of the previous communist regime. I examined this question by conducting 72 in-depth interviews with two Croatian post-Yugoslav generations (born 1978-81 and 1989-91). Specifically, I examined what these generations thought was good or bad in the Yugoslav communist/socialist system and how this compares to their lives and expectations within Croatian capitalism.

Vusheva, Marinella

(New Bulgarian University, Sofia)

Pilgrimage and Ritual Practices in Post-Socialist Bulgaria

The purpose of this paper is to introduce and analyze contemporary aspects of new religious practices in post-socialist Bulgaria. My research is focused on the veneration of miraculous icons and the specifics of the modern pilgrimage. The miraculous icon has always been an important “social actor” in the period of crisis in Eastern Europe.

As such, miraculous icons contribute to the emotional dimension of ritual, but even more importantly always act as nodes, tying in rhetoric, power and religion.

We can thus use the veneration of the miraculous icon and associated ritual practice, such as processions, as a “mirror” of the social processes in a particular local community.

The postmodern pilgrimage as a “sacred” manifestation, articulated within the specific parameters of a particular faith, heritage, or project, is crucial to a pilgrim’s identity. Even though pilgrimage and tourism may be intensely individual experiences, they are innately social phenomena. I will thus discuss the difference in the production and meaning of belonging within these two discourses, as well as the points of intersection between them. The focus will be on the appropriation of the idea of the veneration of miraculous icons and pilgrimage, with its modern accoutrements, by the cultural tourism industry. This phenomenon will be viewed in the context of contemporary aspects of post-globalization and its unavoidable spectrum of “traditional” spirituality.

Yancheva, Yana / Pimpireva, Zhenia

(Institute of Ethnology and Folklore with Ethnograophic Museum, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Sofia)

The Changing Family Among the Bessarabian Bulgarians in the Post-Soviet Space

The largest Bulgarian diaspora is to be found in Bessarabia. Formed at the end of the 18^th century as a result of the Russian-Turkish wars in the Balkans, it expanded during the 19^th century, when the region was within the frontiers of the Russian Empire. Further on in the 20^th century it continued its existence under the conditions of the changing state and political regimes. Since 1991 Bessarabia has been divided between Moldavia and Ukraine and its territory has been populated by Russians, Ukrainians, Moldovans, Gagauzes, Bulgarians and others.

Since 1991 post-Soviet societies have been swept by a profound economic crisis, which has had a direct impact on the possibilities of rural employment. These new circumstances are bringing changes to the family. This paper will follow the impact of the crisis on essential everyday work activities and the realignment of the priorities of daily life. It will follow the new daily family activities, male and female spheres of activity, the mutual assistance of family partners, and the relationship between generations, etc.

Since the majority of Bessarabian Bulgarians are still involved in agriculture, an essential part of the paper will address the economic function of the family in the post-socialist period. Interest will be centered upon the influence of the newly founded "co-operative farms" on families' strategies of survival.

Zahova, Sofiya

(Institute of Ethnology and Folklore with Ethnograophic Museum, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Sofia)

Up-Grading the Tradition: Incorporation of Mobile and Internet Telephony into Traditional Customs and Practices in Montenegro

Montenegro was among the less developed Yugoslav republics and entered the phase of industrial modernity only in the second half of the 20th century. Today, however, the effects of the late modern or postmodern era, as well as the impact of the so called “third industrial revolution” in the field of mobile telephony, are not only underpinning business, the public sphere and everyday life, but are also penetrating into and influencing practices of the ethno-cultural tradition. Mobile phone usage became a mainstream communication technology for the population in Montenegro, and in recent years skype telephony has been growing rapidly. This communication provides possibilities for the creation of a space with socio-cultural functions for families, relatives and wider communities.

What brings stimulating challenges for an ethnographer is the application and incorporation of mobile and internet telephony into festive and socio-cultural traditional patterns. A number of customs involving life-cycle practices (introducing the families of a couple to be married via skype conversation; calling at a certain stage of a ritual to short-cut a distance or substitute a real meeting) as well as other occasional socio-normative customs that are still practised in Montenegro (the reconciliation of two families involved in a conflict of blood revenge) incorporate patterns related to mobile telephony connecting people from the community.

The proposed paper will present and analyse the application of this new technology in phone communication, as a newly immerged yet already constituted part of certain customs, in which the traditional performing of the custom is “up-dated” and transformed.

Zlatanović, Sanja

(Ethnographic Institute of Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Belgrade)

Family and Kinship in a Post-War Context: A Serbian Community in Southeast Kosovo

This paper is based on field research carried out in southeast Kosovo from 2003 to 2006. The focus of interest was the Serbian community, a mainly rural population. The aim was to examine the relation between ethnic and other forms of identification (religious, regional, gender) in a context that had undergone profound change since 1999, when an international protectorate had been set up for the region.

This article focuses on changes occurring in relations of family and kinship in the period following 1999. The pronounced traditionalism of the Serbian family in the context of rapid social change (war and post-war trauma, international administration, the migration of some of the population to Serbia, the influence of globalization...) acquired new forms, reflected in gender and inter-generational relations, procedures of property inheritance, etc. The symbolic language of family rituals such as weddings (a private event which takes place in the public arena), expresses an imaginative merging of global and local into glocal.