Hana Cervinkova__Michal Buc

Rethinking Ethnography in Central Europe

E d i t e d b y Hana C ervinkova , Michal B uchowski , a nd Zden ě k Uherek RETHINKING ETHNOGRAPHY IN CENTRAL EUROPE Copyright © Hana Cervinkova, Michal Buchowski, and Zdeneˇk Uherek, 2015. Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2015 978-1-137-52448-5 All rights reserved. First published in 2015 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States— a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978-1-349-57126-0 ISBN 978-1-137-52449-2 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/9781137524492 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data. Rethinking ethnography in Central Europe : / edited by Hana Cervinkova, Michal Buchowski, Zdeneˇk Uherek. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Ethnology—Europe, Central—Case studies. 2. East Europeans— Europe, Western—Social conditions—Case studies. 3. Post-communism— Europe, Eastern—Case studies. 4. Europe, Central—Social conditions— 21st centruy—Case studies. I. Cervinkova, Hana, 1973– editor of compilation. II. Buchowski, Michal, editor of compilation. III. Uherek, Zdeneˇk, editor of compilation. DAW1026.R47 2015 305.800943—dc23 2015008117 A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Knowledge Works (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: September 2015 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Contents

A c k n o w l e d g m e n t s vii

Introduction On R ethinking E thnography i n C entral E urope: Toward Cosmopolitan Anthropologies in the “ Peripheries” 1 Michal Buchowski and Hana Cervinkova

P a r t I M o b i l i t i e s 1 Othering the Self: National Identity and Social Class in MobileL ives 23 M a r e k P a w l a k 2 Renegotiating S ymbolicC apital,S tatus,a ndK nowledge: P o l i s h P h y s i c i a n s i nS w e d e n 4 1 Katarzyna W olanikB oströ m a ndM agnus Öhlander 3 Mobile E ntrepreneurs:T ransnationalV ietnamesei n the C zech R epublic 59 Gertrud H ü welmeier 4 Pavlivka I odine S pring W ater: T ransnational E ntrepreneurship i n P o s t - T r a n s i t i o nC o n t e x t s 7 5 Zden ě k U hereka ndV eronikaB eranská 5 Giving B irth i n B erlin: R eproductive E xperiences o f Polish M igrant W omen 89 I z a b e l l a M a i n

Part II Contesting Transition: Activisms and Expert Knowledge 6 New U rban A ctivismi n S lovakia: T he C ase o f Bansk á B ystrica 115 A l e x a n d r a B i t u š í k o v á vi ● Contents

7 Feminist a nd Q ueer S ex T herapy: T he E thnography o f Expert Knowledge of Sexuality in Poland 131 Agnieszka K oś cia ń ska 8 Civil Society and EU Integration of Serbia: Toward a Historical Anthropology o f G lobalizing P ostsocialistE urope 147 M a r e k M i k u š

Part III Postsocialist Modernities 9 On the Road: Polish Modernization from the Perspective of the A nthropology o f t he M otorway 175 Waldemar K uligowskia ndA gataS tanisz 10 Ethnographyo f P ostsocialist R uralC hange:S ocial M emory, Modernity, Local Empowerment, and Internal Displacement 195 H a n a H o r á k o vá 1 1 D a l a i - L a m a i s m : A nO r i e n t a l i s t C o n s t r u c t i o n o f Postsocialist C onsciousness 217 M a r t i n H ř í b e k A f t e r w o r d 2 4 1 Michal B uchowski a nd H ana C ervinkova

L i s t o f C o n t r i b u t o r s 247 Index 253 Acknowledgments

The editors would like to acknowledge the International Visegrad Fund for its support for the research and writing of this volume under the Standard Grant Project Social and Cultural Change in Contemporary Central Europe (21320085) and the support of the Institute of Ethnology of the Czech Academy of Sciences RVO 68378078. This publication was subject to external peer-review and we thank the anonymous reviewers for their generous and helpful comments. We would like to acknowledge the invaluable help of the language editor Sophie Richmond and of Patrycja Poniatowska who compiled the index. Finally, our appreciation goes to Mireille Yanow, Mara Berkoff and the production team at Palgrave Macmillan for their excellent support and collaboration.

INTRODUCTION

On Rethinking Ethnography in Central Europe: Toward Cosmopolitan Anthropologies in the “Peripheries”

Michal Buchowski and Hana Cervinkova

I Rethinking There have been many studies with “rethinking” in the title.1 E d m u n d Leach’s collection of essays probably comes first to mind as a book that influenced anthropological thinking in the Anglo-Saxon world and beyond. The authors of this volume do not have the ambition of changing the course of thought in anthropology and the individual chapter authors do not spend much time trying to “understand what is happening in social anthropology” and they do not “go right back to the beginning and rethink basic issues . . .” (Leach 1961: 1, original emphasis). Neither do any of them enter “the game of building new theories on the ruins of old ones” (Leach 1961: v). In a rather m odest way, they present findings from their ethnographic fieldwork conceptualized through contemporary anthropological concepts, bringing ethnographic accounts from their research field and interpreting issues they find important for the understanding of societies and peoples they study. Rethinking Ethnography in Central Europe is is literally an account of ethnography in Central Europe, but contextualized through a particular historical perspective on anthropological studies on the region and in the region. This book represents the “tip of an iceberg” of a new wave of writings in Central European anthropological scholarship. 2 ● Michal Buchowski and Hana Cervinkova

Central Europe Several questions should be explicated, beginning with the notion of “Central Europe.” In most writings this term is assumed intuitively or simply taken for granted, but like any geographic and political notion, it has a long and controversial history. It is not our aim to explain or define it thoroughly here. It should suffice to say that the concept was invented in the nineteenth century as a German political idea of Mitteleuropa aimed at creating a zone stretching from the North Sea to the Adriatic, in which German culture and language, seen as superior in relation to Slavic, Romanian, and Hungarian forms of communal and economic lives, were to dominate (Partsch 1904; Naumann 1916). In the interwar period, the idea was hijacked by Czechoslovakia’s president, Tom áš G. Masaryk, who turned the tables around and applied the notion to the newly (re-)established states lying between the Baltic nations in the north and Greece in the south, and sandwiched between Germany and the Soviet Union. Culturally, linguistically, and religiously diversified societies, subjected to various imperial policies through centuries, were combined in the narrative as at least partly unified in terms of shared cultural features and historical destiny. World War II and the Cold War consigned the idea of Central Europe to oblivion, but it was revived in 1970s and 1980s by Central European intellectuals who once again used it as an emancipatory tool. As Milan Kundera, the Czech é migr é writer argued, Central Europe was the West kidnapped by the “barbaric, Asiatic East” (1984). This fully essentializing strategy was not purely strategic, since it seems that participants in the discussion truly believed in the existence of these historically shaped cultural zones, and its ultimate goal was to undermine the dichotomous Cold War division of Europe. On the one hand, it was showing the need to question the naturalized and hierarchical West–East dichotomy, while at the same time pushing Soviet satellite states more toward the highly valued West, and also implying the existence of a tripartite structure defined by post– World War II geopolitics (Buchowski and Ko ł bon 2004: 69–71). The disintegration of the communist bloc led to various redefinitions of the idea of Central Europe. In the 1990s the term was used as a way of distancing the so-called Vi š ehrad states (Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Slovenia) from other countries that were seen as lagging behind in implementing neoliberal reforms, were unstable politically and economically, often defined religiously by Christian Orthodoxy, and located further east than Poland and the Baltic states, and south of Hungary and Slovenia (this included especially countries in the region On Rethinking Ethnography in Central Europe ● 3 torn apart by the post-Yugoslav Balkan wars). Paradoxically, the idea was used in this divisive way by the very former oppositionists who were involved in the reinvention of the idea of Central Europe as applying to all Soviet satellite states a few years earlier. These included the postcommunist national leaders—such as Vá clav Havel in Czechoslovakia and the Czech Republic and Tadeusz Mazowiecki in Poland—who represented their countries as forming the “northern tier” of former communist Europe and deserving the supposedly uplifting label of “truly catching up” with the West. However, with the “big-bang” expansion of the European Union in 2004 (which included five former Soviet satellite states and three former Soviet Republics), followed in 2007 by the accession of Romania and Bulgaria, and then Croatia in 2013, many of these former political considerations about Central Europe lost their geopolitical value. Maybe, in the constant game of identities, inclu- sions, and exclusions, the political idea of Central Europe will be used again. The currently ongoing dramatic conflict in the Crimea and the Donbas region could possibly prompt Ukrainians to identify with values perceived by them as “Western” and proclaim themselves Central Europeans, and thus reinvent the construct of Central Europe in the context of a peril originating from the mighty and “barbaric East.” We present this brief story in order to make it clear that Central Europe is a creation that has acquired a realistic status through articula- tions in practices and, in consequence, in social relations—interethnic, intergroup, interstate, and interregional. Real people live in certain regions, but there is nothing intrinsic about the notions describing them; the latter are merely categories that, in discursive, mostly hegemonic processes are assigned culturally hierarchized values.

Anthropologies We have recourse to the history of the idea of Central Europe in order to make parallels and analogies to the development of anthropology in this region. The issue is extremely complex and multidimensional. Therefore, let us present it in several steps.

Stereotypes It has been commonly assumed that Central and Eastern European ethnology (the field considered to be closest to Western social and cultural anthropology, along perhaps with sociology) was both politically controlled and theoretically flattened by ideological and vulgar Marxism. In particular, influential é migr é scholars who came back from Western 4 ● Michal Buchowski and Hana Cervinkova countries to Central Europe supported this view. The Czech anthropologist V á clav Hubinger (1997), for instance, claims that totalitarian regimes constantly intervened in research practices (p. 532), Bronis ł aw Malinowski’s writings were banned (p. 531), and Western anthropological production did not infiltrate Eastern European scholarships (p. 531). Peter Skaln í k confirms this view and talks about struggles for anthropology (2002) and ambivalent relationships between old-school ethnologists and newly arriving anthropologists (2013: 222). Let us discuss these views, keeping in mind that the account that follows focuses virtually only on the “early socialism” period (up to the late 1960s); the list of arguments and authors cited represent merely a limited choice among many others, and the views expressed are confined primarily to the “northern tier” of Central Europe. The notion of centralized management of sciences fits the organizational principle of the Soviet system, which followed similar rules in other spheres of life, including nationalization of industry, the collectiv- ization of agriculture, and the imposition of one-party political systems. As Magdalena Elchinova states, at the turn of the 1940s and 1950s the social sciences and the humanities were patterned on the Moscow model. This implied the “ideological evaluation of disciplines, centralized state administration of science and academic activity, compulsory unified standards for higher education and science, separation of teaching and research work” (2002: 25). This fact is confirmed in many other articles published in several volumes (Hann et al. 2005; Mih ă ilescu et al. 2008; Brunnbauer et al. 2011). However, as Elchinova claims, “this pattern was not uniform” (2002: 25), and was implemented to a varying extent and in different ways in individual countries. Poland can serve as an example. The creation of the Polish Academy of Sciences in 1953, an institution dedicated exclusively to research, did not mean that university employees could not engage or were banned from research activities. On the contrary, they continued to be very active and the leading figures in Polish ethnography (as the discipline was called until late 1970s) in the first two-and-a-half decades of Communist Party rule were affiliated with universities (e.g., Kazimierz Moszy ń ski, Kazimierz Dobrowolski, Witold Dynowski, Eugeniusz Frankowski, Jó zef Burszta, Kazimiera Zawistowicz-Adamska). Similar arguments can be applied to the constant interventions of political authorities in research practices. One cannot deny that such direct steering took place in some places, during certain periods of time, and in certain cases. However, this was by no means a dominant pattern. As Zofia Sokolewicz, for example, argues: “The Polish authorities On Rethinking Ethnography in Central Europe ● 5 took remarkably little interest in the choice of issues researched by anthropologists” (2005: 299). The main reason was that the field of study was considered a marginal discipline focused on vanishing folk groups or exotic cultures overseas. This external assessment by authorities was, probably deliberately, reinforced by ethnographers themselves. “[T]here was also tendency within these fields [ Volkskunde and V ö lkerkunde] to focus on politically and ideologically neutral topics” (Posern-Zieli ń ski 2005: 111). One of the presumptions has been that scholars in the region were preoccupied merely with the study of folklore that ultimately served the nationalist cause. It is true that in some cases such a function allowed ethnography to survive in the academic structure. C ă lin Cotoi comments that folklore studies constituted “the amalgamation of positivism with national romanticism” (2011: 145). Czech scholar Petr Lozoviuk calls this tendency “ethnoscience” (with a very d ifferent meaning from the American understanding of this antecedent of cognitive anthropology). At the core of the discipline one finds “the theory and methods . . . derived to a significant degree from the older n á rodopis [ethno-graphy], with its focus on the nation as an enduring ethnic community” (Lozoviuk 2005: 229). However, while the nation-building themes are certainly present in some traditions, this does not apply to the whole region. It does not explain why many academics in countries such as Czechoslovakia, Eastern Germany, Poland, Hungary, and Yugoslavia managed to preserve their scholarly interest in distant societies of America, Africa, and Asia. Similarly, we can dispel the popular myth that vulgar Marxism des- potically reigned in ethnology in the region. Such political coercion indeed existed in the Stalinist period (1949–53), when Soviet authors who were widely translated into Central European languages con- demned Bronislaw Malinowski as “a reactionary representative of the British colonial-anthropological service” (Potiechin 1952: 12, cited in Jasiewicz 2005: 166). Several ethnographers were forced to make ideological statements. However, as Lozoviuk comments on the Czech language area, “Marxism was often used in the texts produced in this period, [but] it was little more than a stock phrase, an accommodation to the imperatives of the system” (Lozoviuk 2005: 229). Similarly, Juraj Podoba, who has been very critical of local n á rodopis during and after socialism, concludes that in Slovakia “anthropology at the end of the 1980s was no more Marxist that it had been in the 1930s and 1940s” (2005: 252)—after four-and-a-half decades of orthodox Marxism’s domination. Mihá ly Sá rk á ny, referring to the 6 ● Michal Buchowski and Hana Cervinkova

1950s and 1960s in Hungary, notes that “armchair theorists had a profound knowledge of Marxism . . . though few engaged with Marxism seriously to address research problems and methodology in anthropology” (2005: 98). He adds that already in the 1960s there was a move “towards western anthropology” (Sá rk á ny 2005: 100–101). The Polish anthropologist Aleksander Posern-Zieli ń ski noted that ethnography actually constituted a safe haven from ideological pressures and “was not strongly influenced by Marxism-Leninism or Soviet anthropological models . . . We experienced no strong pressures to incorporate basic principles of historical materialism into our methodology” (2005: 110). There is compelling evidence to claim that Polish ethnologists practiced everything but Marxism, even in the period of Stalinist tyranny (Buchowski 2011: 148–159), not to mention the rich pluralism experienced in this ethnological tradition since the 1970s. Even if there is “a tendency to mythologise its [ethnology’s] history, and a certain myth of resistance to the socialist regime has developed . . .” (Podoba 2005: 251), the account given by so many prominent scholars, some of whom had personal experience of socialist states’ scientific policies, has a clear message—Marxism, especially in its vulgar form, had never been fully absorbed by scholars nor did it guide their research practices. It functioned as “the ‘empty slot’ of scientific discourse” (Cotoi 2011: 134), a set of immutable assumptions never disputed, or at best challenged only indirectly. Only oppositionists and intellectuals in some countries with a degree of freedom—such as Yugoslavia, Poland, or Hungary—especially in late socialism (i.e., after 1970) were able to openly undermine Marxism. Most ethnographers “opposed” historical materialism by subverting it to other, even more hegemonic discourses, such as the “nation” and “scientificity” (Cotoi 2011: 134). In the case of ethnology, Buchowski calls this hegemonic discourse “ethnographism” (2011: 160), a paradigm of research based on positivist precision in ren- dering “facts” propelled by a romantic idea of saving precious vanishing folk traditions. The claim that Western ideas did not creep into socialist scholarship is also hardly tenable. We could turn this question around and ask if it ever occurred to Western scholars to absorb ideas coming from anywhere other than the West, particularly from Central Europe. The way V á clav Hubinger presents this question reflects the unquestioned hierarchy of knowledge, a real hegemonic arrangement naturalized in a scientific community as “obvious obviousness” that theories are produced only in dominant centers and should be emulated in the peripheries. Subjects accepting such reasoning in the margins actually represent a sort of On Rethinking Ethnography in Central Europe ● 7 postcolonial mentality, or crypto-colonialism, 2 as M i c h a e l H e r z f e l d calls it, which includes as one of its features the country’s “comparative irrelevance to the production of theory in the West” (2002: 902). However, let us assume that this approach to geography and the geopolitics of knowledge production is substantiated. From this vantage point, the picture of Central European scholarship was never so bleak as it is presented. Here are some examples. In the case of Slovenia, Slavko Kremen šek explains that “we expanded considerably the scope of our research in the last thirty years [i.e. 1965–95], and at least some of us have never even dealt with problems which could be termed folkloristic” (Kremen š ek 1995: 55, cited in Godina 2002: 9–10). Elchinova emphasizes the

remarkable development of Bulgarian folklore studies in the 1970s and 1980s. It elaborated a highly productive systemic approach towards a study of folklore. Folklore was seen as a type of culture and was subsequently analysed with regard to its socio-economic context (forms of property, division of labour, dominant forms of occupation, social structure, type of settlement, social hierarchies, etc.). (2002: 26)

When we consider the research concerns of these folklorists, there is no doubt that they constitute a set of questions pertinent to social anthropology. One such well-known “folkloristic school” emerged in Bratislava (Kiliá nov á 2005), which can lay claim to truly advanced scholarly achievements. Czechoslovak ethnology in the 1960s experienced years of development, especially in the area of African studies, carried out by Ladislav Holý and later Milan Š tuchl í k, both of whom later emigrated to the UK where they worked as professors. Some experts refer to this particular ethnological tradition as the “Czech school” (Koffer 2011: 179). And, contrary to Hubinger’s claim, two volumes by Malinowski were already translated into Polish in the 1950s. And Malinowski’s student, Andrzej Walig ó rski, was a great proponent of functionalism; his work, Antropologiczna koncepcja czł owieka (Anthropological Concept of Humans), published in 1973, was widely used as a textbook at Polish universities. Many other Western anthropological books were published in Polish; to give a spectacular example, by 1970 four fundamental works by Claude L é vi-Strauss were available in Polish translations, some of which came out earlier than their English equivalents. And, in the 1970s, phenomenology, hermeneutics, structuralism, and local theory of practice were all part of the mix in Poland (cf. Buchowski 2011: 159–170). These are only some examples that show how Western 8 ● Michal Buchowski and Hana Cervinkova anthropological concepts were distributed and intermingled with ethnological theories under communist regimes. The main point we want to make here is that multiple theoretical borrowings took place in Central Europe, especially in the “late socialism” (from the 1970s onwards). The particular situation of Czechoslovakia, which experienced harsh period of “normalization” after the 1968 Soviet invasion and the crushing of the Prague Spring, cannot be generalized across the whole region. The examples of high- profile folklore studies to which we referred and the formation of the “new Polish ethnology” in the 1970s show that original and locally invented research programs based on rich empirical materials were developed in the region. Central European ethnology at that time, at least in some countries, was multifarious and theoretically diversified. And thanks to divergent scientific policies in various countries, ethnological and anthropological traditions in the region varied. Changes in these policies, which often fluctuated between the liberal and the strict end of the spectrum depending on the current political situation, made the picture even more complex.

Hierarchies and Stages Thus, at the end of communism, ethno-anthropology in several Central European countries was an established discipline (cf. Buchowski 2002). For some, the distinction between anthropology and ethnology continues to be crucial (cf. Skalní k 2013: 222), but for many others, including the authors included in this volume, it is not that important. Interestingly, in those countries that implemented relatively liberal scientific and cultural policies, and that had diversified ethnological traditions under communism, the alliance between ethnologists and sociocultural anthropologists proved possible and has quickly become a reality. For example, at many universities in Poland and Slovenia the respective disciplinary institutions are called “departments of ethnology and cultural anthropology.” Such unions helped prevent the often futile academic debates that have preoccupied scholars in other countries of the region for decades. In “late socialism” and soon after communism’s collapse, knowledge flows proceeded in a crypto-colonial fashion and the undisputed hierarchy of knowledge was accepted. The direct import of ideas from the West was a sine qua non for being treated as an anthropologist. The Polish anthropologist, Graż yna Kubica, once sardonically characterized the situation of the discipline in the 1980s and 1990s in the following way: “In Central Europe anthropologists are those ethnologists On Rethinking Ethnography in Central Europe ● 9 and anthropologically minded sociologists who speak English and go to anthropological conferences” (personal communication). Being an anthropologist also often implied a certain neglect of local traditions and acceptance, in one way or another, of Western concepts and paradigms. On the one hand, this led to internal divisions and conflicts whereby scholars enlightened by or in the West tried to elevate themselves by demoting “traditional” ethnographers as backward. On the other hand, this also led to anthropology being understood as a repli- cation or recycling of both older and current Western (mostly Anglo- American and partly French) theories. This was not true for all actors, of course (Hann 2005: 196) and, as I have argued elsewhere, many of these efforts cannot be seen as na ï ve imitations or mimicry (Buchowski 2004: 12). In some contexts, the smuggling of ideas had an important educational function and, with the help of student and visiting scholar exchanges, it prompted further development and establishment of the ethno-anthropological discipline in the region. Eventually, however, resistance to Western domination and the “one- way street” flow of ideas emerged, and not necessarily only on the part of the “folklorists.” Awareness of existing hierarchies of knowledge and pride in local intellectual traditions started to emerge. Janusz Bara ń ski, commenting on the critical autoreflective tradition present in Polish ethnology, ironically said:

Unfortunately, the American postmodernist wave arrived on our Slavic seashores, which effectively trumped local reflection about concerns expressed in a similar spirit. We ourselves started the Californization of our folksy, but at least our own and original ethnology: we walk on Polish soil, but we somehow keep our heads in the virtual smog of Los Angeles. (2010: 28)

His words are symptomatic. In English-language publications, from the very beginning of the century, Central European scholars mainly discussed the immaturity of anthropology in the region. One can even read about Bulgarian anthropology as an “infant sister” (Elchinova 2002: 24) of its Western counterpart. The “anthropologization of ethnology” (cf. Godina 2002: 10) was seen as a long-lasting and positive process, a view shared and repeated by many Central European colleagues. Several scholars contributing to the volume edited by Skalní k (2002) explicitly or implicitly wrote in this manner. Some authors, on the other hand, began to report on institutional and intellectual reforms in Central European ethnologies 10 ● Michal Buchowski and Hana Cervinkova

(cf. Č apo- Ž mega č 2002; Brumen 2002; Buchowski 2002). Soon the mood became even more radical and Central European anthropologists began focusing on the value of local academic traditions. In the middle of the first decade of this century, several straightforward exchanges on the hegemonic relationship between “Western anthropologists” and “Eastern ethnologists” took place (e.g., Buchowski 2004, 2005, 2012; Hann 2005; Verdery 2012; Kü rti and Skalní k 2009a: 14–17; Cervinkova 2012). Central Europeans accused their Western peers of not being attentive to locally produced ethno-anthropological knowledge, of not inviting native anthropologists to contribute to collectively edited volumes, and in general of being focused solely on Western writings and being generally “Western-centric.” Claims were made about the existence of hierarchies of knowledge and unequal treatment. All these conversations have helped to bring the views of Western and Eastern or Central European researchers closer. At least partly, Western anthropologists working in the region admitted that they did not pay enough attention to local scholarship and its wisdom. As Katherine Verdery (2012) confessed:

I acknowledge with regret that when I first went to Romania as an ambi- tious graduate student, I felt intellectually superior to my Romanian ethnographer-colleagues even while recognizing that they had a wealth of knowledge I lacked about Romanian life-ways. But they didn’t have “theory,” and that’s what I had been trained to care about.

Eventually, articles stressing the actually existing exchange of ideas that took place in the past and that appreciated the expertise of local scholars appeared (cf. Hann 2009, 2012, 2013), and an elaborated discussion on the issue was held (Hann et al. 2007). The policy on edited volumes exemplifies the evolution in attitudes to the issue. Practically all edited books on Central and Eastern Europe, many of them of excellent quality and serving as milestones for the development of anthropological discourse on the area, did not have local authors on board. It was only a matter of time until there was a reaction on the part of local anthropologists. And so, in a book published at the beginning of the decade (Buchowski et al. 2001), the editors deliberately chose authors from Eastern and Western Europe, as well as from the United States, and, by the end of the decade, the book Postsocialist Europe (K ü rti and Skaln í k 2009b) was written in a decolo- nizing vein, whereby all authors, with the exception of the author of the “Afterword,” were local Central European anthropologists. Tellingly, On Rethinking Ethnography in Central Europe ● 11 the subtitle of their volume was Anthropological Perspectives from Home , and the editors declared:

Theoretically and methodologically, our starting point is that anthropologists living and working in the society they study may offer alternative views concerning their home countries compared to those who visit for the single purpose of conducting fieldwork. (Kü rti and Skalní k 2009a: 8)

Their voice is clearly founded on modes of alienating and ignoring local scholars already identified (a process and debate summarized in the previous paragraph) and should be seen as a fully conscious emancipatory project that becomes even further radicalized.

European anthropology of the “other kind” . . . should not be thought of simply as “echoes” or “replicas” of dominant and hegemonic Western anthropology, but rather as anthropological traditions of their own right, mortgaged to specific sic political, cultural and academic milieu. (K ü rti and Skaln í k 2009a: 14)

It was clear that the anthropological intra-European colonies were striking back. But at the same time, the chapters included in the volume clearly showed the influence of concepts from Western anthropological and local traditions. Thus it seems that, in his general diagnosis, Peter Skalní k was right when he wrote wryly that: “Western-type anthropology has colonised Eastern ethnology only gradually and not always successfully” (2013: 221). We think that this state of affairs is by no means harmful or wrong. But the “very last thing we want to do is to ‘import’ a new and superior intellectual commodity into a ‘parochial’ intellectual landscape” (Pobł ocki 2009: 240). The actual merging of horizons and flows of ideas is the best possible solution for world anthropologies, which are neither ethnocentric nor hegemonic. Anthropology that utilizes and mixes wisely theories originating in different places, while properly addressing local issues in a global perspective, is something we should constantly strive for.

Parallels Now we can close the circle. Central European anthropology has undergone similar trajectory to that of the geopolitical region of Central and Eastern Europe. Volkskunde in Mitteleuropa , not coincidentally both German terms, was born as a nation-building project, and ethnography and folklore studies developed their scientific methods and academic 12 ● Michal Buchowski and Hana Cervinkova status over many decades, and throughout the interwar period and after 1945. However, after World War II, hegemonic Western discourses ideologically defined these traditions as backward disciplines carried out behind the Iron Curtain. These homogenizing stereotypical images, insensitive to historically changing periods of freezes and thaws in scientific policies and to the internal diversity of local traditions, made the region a presumed kingdom of vulgar Marxism. Ethnologists know- ledgeable about Western theories often treated this “Westernity” as a clear signal of their belonging to the “better” Western academic world. Like Milan Kundera, who attempted to define the Western character of Central Europe, many anthropologists treated traces of a Western imprint as legitimizing their modern ways of practicing ethnology and the right way to be “true” anthropologists. Therefore, in their first emancipatory efforts, ethnologists wanted to show affinities with Western anthropology and catch up with them. Immediately after the collapse of one-party communist regimes in Central Europe, this crypto-colonial tendency intensified. However, after a while, the growing consciousness of existing hegemonies and inequalities paved the way for a second wave of emancipation, based simultaneously on the critique of the domination visible in academic practices and appreciation of Central and Eastern European intellectual traditions. This stage can be compared to Central Europe’s unification with the rest of the continent, with its emphasis on diversity in unity. In this phase, self-appreciation plays a vital role: we are different, but not worse. The book Postsocialist Europe is representative of this pattern. The edited volume presented here is different. As we argued in the first paragraph of this introduction, our contributors problematize various phenomena with regard to working at home, but are not really concerned with the issues of inequalities and hegemonies discussed above. Intricate relations between them and their Western counterparts do not really seem to disturb their minds. Their writing reflects concern with the furthering of anthropological insights into such issues as global economic and cultural dependencies, mobilities, citizens’ activism or social movements, and how these articulate at the local level. Most of the authors live and work in Central Europe, but are preoccupied with global issues, and therefore identify with global anthropology above all. Central Europe has dissolved, at least partly and for the time being, as a reference point for Central European societies. By analogy, Central European ethno-anthropology has transmuted itself into a part and parcel of general anthropology, but without neglecting local traditions. This volume speaks to this process. On Rethinking Ethnography in Central Europe ● 13

II We present the chapters in three parts. The first part includes ethnographies that focus on different aspects of transnational mobilities as they affect people living in or coming from Central Europe. Marek Pawlak has been studying with Polish migrants in Norway for many years and in his chapter he focuses on the intersections of national identity and social class in how his subjects construct their mobile lives. He focuses on people’s identity strategies and discusses the processes of othering, which involve both his interlocutors and those about whom they speak, and in relation to whom they identify themselves—their co-national s, other Poles “living (mobile) lives between Poland and Norway.” Importantly, in his material based on deep ethnographic research, he shows how the Polish migrants’ imaginaries and power relations are grounded in the East–West divide, which serves to qualify certain migratory lifestyle as better than others, “valorizing one mobility at the cost of others.” His chapter is an important contribution to scholarship focusing on ways in which social class and nationality interact in the construction of mobile identities. Katarzyna Wolanik Bostr ö m and Magnus Ö hlander also focus on Polish migrants, building on their interviews with Polish doctors who have moved to and work in Sweden. In trying to understand why “highly skilled professionals leave their country of origin to work abroad,” they identify a set of political, economic, professional, and personal reasons, which force these professionals to leave their home country and “put a well-established symbolic capital at risk.” In their focus on the symbolic capital of migrants, the authors identify what they call the symbolic capital’s double movement. This is because a crucial condition for transnational mobility among physicians is the possibility to reinvest their symbolic capital, and this requires that Polish doctors’ competences are recognized in the Swedish context. This process of recognition, they show, is not a simple transfer and acknowledgment of qualifications. On the contrary, the professional mobility of the Polish doctors requires migrants to perform in particular ways that fit in the everyday medical workplace cultures, making their symbolic capital recognizable to the “Swedish gaze.” Gertrud H ü welmeier has been studying Vietnamese diasporas in Central Europe through multisited ethnographic fieldwork in bazaars in the eastern part of Berlin, Prague, Warsaw (and also Hanoi). In her chapter, based primarily on her ethnography of the SAPA market in Prague, she focuses on the nature of socialist pathways of migration, the 14 ● Michal Buchowski and Hana Cervinkova establishment of the bazaars and the diversity of encounters between locals and the Vietnamese. She argues for continuity in postsocialist mobilities and social relations of Vietnamese in Central Europe after the end of socialism. In her account, based both on the history of Vietnamese migrations and her ethnographic study of present-day Asian bazaars in Central Europe, she shows the Vietnamese marketplaces in postsocialist countries as localities of social interaction between citizens and migrants, as multiethnic localities where the everyday life of transnational communities is performed. Zden ě k Uherek and Veronika Beranská build on their longitudinal ethnographic research with Czech Ukrainians who settled in the Czech Republic from the Chernobyl region at the beginning of the 1990s. Like Hü welmeier’s, their work also shows how the migrants’ current transnational business activities are influenced by socialist- period international state linkages. They illustrate these socialist and postsocialist continuities through the story of transnational entrepreneurship of one immigrant family whose members in their business activities build on their experience of the Chernobyl nuclear catastrophe and their social contacts in the Ukraine rather than networks in the country in which they settled. Uherek’s and Beranska’s chapter makes an important contribution to our understanding of how postsocialist immigrants from the former Soviet Union to Central Europe navigate their journey from socialist to “neoliberal” business activities, and live mobile lives in the midst of changing political systems and uncertain economic conditions. At the conclusion of the first part we present an ethnography by the Polish anthropologist Izabella Main, who focuses on women’s reproductive health in a transnational migratory context. Since 2011 Main has been studying with Polish women living in Berlin and in her text she focuses specifically on their antenatal and birth experiences, pointing out how these migrants negotiate the differences in patterns of birth between German and Polish health care. She discusses the struggles between different cultural and professional knowledge that come into play in the process leading toward birth—the knowledge of the Polish women who draw predominantly on Polish birth cultures and the plural professional knowledge of Berlin’s medical personnel, which is perceived as more holistic and democratic than that present in Polish health care. In the second part of our volume, we include ethnographies that focus on new developments in the area of activist and expert knowledge in institutions, new movements, and grassroots organizations. We open this part with the text by Alexandra Bituší kov á , who has been studying On Rethinking Ethnography in Central Europe ● 15 urban activism and urban grassroots movements in the Slovak city of Banská Bystrica. In her text, Bituší kov á describes three different activist organizations that focus on urban affairs, urban communities, and governance, convincingly challenging research that has described civil society in Central and Eastern Europe as weak and undeveloped. Her study, based on participant-observation, is a valuable contribution to our understanding of new ways in which people in postsocialist urban settings organize and create spaces for action. Agnieszka Ko ś cia ń ska’s study of Polish sexology offers another example of research that points to new ways in which dominant discourses (both global and national) are being challenged by informal networks and actions that interact with historical traditions developed during the socialist period. She shows the historically grounded differences between Polish sexology under socialism (dating back to the 1970s) and American sexology, which today constitutes the main point of reference for mainstream Polish sexologists. These differences in historical traditions as well as systemic factors, she argues, make mainstream Polish sexology today more open to influences from the knowledges generated by feminist and queer therapy that are nurtured and developed by unregistered and informal therapeutic practitioners in Poland. Marek Miku š focuses on individual histories and life trajectories of former nongovernmental organization (NGO) workers who first gained their professional experience by working in the newly emergent NGO sector in Serbia in the 1990s, and who were then absorbed by the public sector that has been undergoing deep changes due to Serbia’s prepara- tions for its accession to the EU. Mikuš ’s “historical anthropology” of EU integration through the ethnography of Serbian civil society illuminates the power-laden, path-dependent process of postsocialist transformation and transnational process of integration, and also offers a unique perspective on the nongovernmental sector in Serbia. The last part of our book contains chapters that explicitly focus on and think through the economic, social, and political aspects of postsocialist modernities. Waldemar Kuligowski and Agata Stanisz’s multisited ethnography focuses on one of the most important infrastructural and highly politicized developments in postsocialist Poland—the construction of highways. In their study, Kuligowski and Stanisz call this complex phenomenon “modernization through motorways” and show how the construction of highways, widely seen as the key step to Poland’s Westernization, impacts lives in the individual communities that sur- round both the new motorways and the former roads that lost traffic due to the construction of the new infrastructure. 16 ● Michal Buchowski and Hana Cervinkova

Hana Horá kov á ’s ethnography of the Czech village of Lipno shows the dramatic consequences of a local modernization of a rural community through tourism. The development strategy, authored by local authorities and sponsored and carried out by Dutch companies, has generated the fracturing of social networks and new structures of inequality. In her study, Hor á kov á tries to understand this change by focusing on how social memory of the socialist past continues to play a role in these processes of change that involve contestations and conflicts between newly emergent social groups. We close this volume with Martin Hří bek’s intriguing study of a highly visible phenomenon of the Czech post-1989 political discourse and practice known as Dalai-Lamaism. H ří bek uses Dalai-Lamaism— the political and cultural sympathy with Tibet among a significant portion of Czech politicians and the Czech public—as a vantage point to examine the historical place of the Oriental other in the construction of the Czech national consciousness. He shows that Tibet has assumed the traditional place of the Oriental element in the Czech national consciousness previously occupied by imaginary connections with other countries of the East (China, Russia, India) that have served “to endow the Czech historical experience and national struggle with a u niversal—even transcendental—appeal.” Hří bek’s historically grounded account is an important contribution to the understanding of the place of the Oriental other in Central European national ideologies and imaginations. We thank all the authors for accepting our invitation and for contributing to this volume, and close our introduction with the hope that their texts will help deepen and expand our understanding of contemporary Central Europe and new anthropological production in and on this geopolitical area.

Notes 1 . We wish to acknowledge the support of the International Visegrad Fund through the Standard Grant Project Social and Cultural Change in Contemporary Central Europe (21320085) and the support of the Institute of Ethnology of the Czech Academy of Sciences RVO 68378078. 2 . C r y p t o - c o l o n i a l i s m i s : the curious alchemy whereby certain countries, buffer zones between the colonized lands and those as yet untamed, were compelled to acquire their political independence at the expense of massive economic dependence, this relationship being articulated in the iconic guise of On Rethinking Ethnography in Central Europe ● 17

aggressively national culture fashioned to suit foreign models. Such countries were and are living paradoxes: they are nominally independent, but that independence comes at the price of a sometimes humiliating form of effective dependence. (Herzfeld 2002: 900–901)

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PART I

Mobilities

CHAPTER 1

Othering the Self: National Identity and Social Class in Mobile Lives*

M a r e k P a w l a k

Introduction The intersections between national identity and social class play a pivotal role in constructing mobile lives, in particular, among migrants following Poland’s accession to the European Union (EU). Their identity strategies—embedded in the complex ideological interdependencies as well as the co-national relations and positioning within a group of migrants—create an interesting context for research and analysis. In this chapter, I focus on specific ways of othering the self and co-nationals among Polish migrants living (mobile) lives between Poland and Norway. I argue that, in the migratory situation, the process of othering entails particular power relations and imaginaries grounded in the East–West divide, which in turn imply the idea of either a proper or embarrassing migratory lifestyle. I first problematize the process of othering, a topic that has been neglected in migration research. Next, I describe the field of my research inquiries as well as their theoretical and methodological implications, which constitute the conceptual framework of the chapter. I place the main focus on the ongoing transformations of theoretical assumptions about contemporary migration flows, including the “sedentarist” and “nomadic” perspectives. Third, I use ethnographic details from my anthropological fieldwork conducted in Norway and Poland in order to analyze the context of power relations, global imaginaries, and representations that function within a group of co-nationals in a migratory situation. I conclude by pointing out elements that have a significant impact on valorizing one mobility at the cost of others. 24 ● Marek Pawlak

Problematizing Othering in Migration Research The process of othering already has a long tradition in the social sciences and humanities, in which it is extensively used as a conceptual framework for the interpretation and analysis of collective imaginaries and the construction of identities. The Other is often evoked as a vehicle for recognizing the self and the interactions between them always involve a sense of power relations as well as essentialized and reified images of ethnic, national, or social matters. Furthermore, such relations are never evenly balanced and both parties are usually (un)consciously biased. In other words, the relationship between the self and the Other always entails a relationship between one who is powerful and one who is powerless. The complex interplay between these figures introduces the significant role of difference and similarity. Interestingly enough, despite the fact that the figure of the Other is a common aspect of the phenomenon of migration (e.g., evident in attempts toward social cohesion in the receiving countries, the context of migrants’ cultural background and livelihood strategies), the actual process of othering is seldom used as an analytical framework in migration scholarship. Rather, it is the general concept of difference (social, cultural, economic, and political) or mechanisms of inclusion, exclusion, and stigmatization that are employed in interpretations and descriptions of the relations between the migrants and their host societies. The reason for that might be the predominance of quantitative sociological, economic, and demographic research in migration studies, which focuses on macro levels of analysis and calculable factors of mobility, while neglecting the importance of individual life stories and diverse forms of belonging that go beyond traditional conceptualizations and the boundaries of nation-states. I do not intend to set aside the importance of scientific analysis on a large scale, which obviously contributes to migration studies by mapping particular flows, presenting historical and contemporary migratory trends, and project- ing their trajectories. However, I argue that it is important to employ a more local, emplaced, and collaborative approach to migrants and migration phenomena. I want to propose that one needs to achieve a sense of “cultural intimacy” (see Herzfeld 2005) in order to rec- ognize, explore, and ultimately scrutinize the significant, but often concealed, issues that are relevant for individuals living mobile lives. Anthropology gives us a unique perspective and the apparatus to interpret and analyze the nuanced details that are always attached to each migration story. Othering the Self ● 25

Considering the process of othering in migration research, it is crucial to go back to the initial understanding of its assumptions and implications. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, in her well-known essay “The Rani of Sirmur” (1985), analyzes historiography and points out the historical narratives that imply the construction of hegemonic relations between the colonizer and the colonialized and essentialized Other. Thus, Spivak’s reading of the archive material and historical accounts of “the third world woman” includes tracking literary tropes and gaps, and deconstructing their significance in the context of imperial powers and political struggles. In her analysis she identifies three basic strategies of othering: (1) the direct or indirect imposition of power relations, in which the powerless is presented as subordinated to the powerful; (2) the recognition of the moral inferiority of the Other, who ipso facto is imagined as being of lower, even pathological status in this respect; and (3) the assumption of the cultural superiority of the powerful, which de facto is understood as an evolutionary process of possessing knowledge and technology (see Jensen 2011). Edward Said’s (1978) concept of the Other’s exoticization adds another important dimension to the understanding of othering, implying the construction of essentialized representations grounded in social, cultural, and political imaginaries. In his view, the Other is reduced and limited to fascinating accounts that present exotic enchantment and mythicized cognition. Nonetheless, the process of othering in Spivak’s analysis is clearly multidimensional “[ . . . ] in the sense that it touches upon several different forms of social differentiation, and that othering as a concept can therefore be combined with what has later been conceptualized as intersectionality” (Jensen 2011: 65). The aforementioned strategies seem, at first glance, to apply to the relationship between the migrants and their host societies. The former are quite often in the position of a generalized figure of them that neglects any internal divisions and sociocultural complexity; the latter, on the other hand, are most often in the position of symbolic and actual power, which determines the relations between majority and minority and imposes specific images and representations. More importantly, however, the interdependencies between the powerful and the powerless introduce yet another analytic dimension of migration, which concerns migrants’ internal identification. Thus, the intersections of different social, cultural, political, and economic categories and migrants’ backgrounds play crucial roles in their identity strategies that are embedded not only between majority–minority relations, but also within the particular group of co-ethnic or co-national migrants who settle in the 26 ● Marek Pawlak receiving country or live intensively mobile lives. Such an intersectional approach emphasizes the simultaneity and mutual co-constitution of different sociocultural categories, the particularities of experiences that are shaped by these interactions, and the co-c onstitutive character of power relations. Intersectionality challenges us to look at the different social positioning of migrants (e.g., male/female; low-skilled/high- skilled; European/non-European) and to reflect on the different ways in which they participate in the reproduction of these relations. In other words, intersectionality serves as an instrument that helps us to grasp the complex interplay between disadvantages and privileges in migrants’ mobility and livelihood strategies. Therefore, the process of othering and intersectionality are two interdependent realms that strongly influence migration flows, networks, and identification strategies. In this chapter I argue that the process of othering is a very useful vehicle for exploring and analyzing identity strategies constructed by migrants who live intensively mobile lives between Poland and Norway. This othering includes two dynamic and situational sets of identification practices and strategies: on the one hand, othering is grounded in the intersections between national identity and social class among co-nationals; on the other hand, it also involves othering the self, in the sense of positioning the self as superior and powerful.

The Field of Polish Postaccession Migration Poland’s accession to the EU and the Schengen area has radically changed traditional Polish conceptualizations of such categories as emigration, immigration, and return. Migration as a socioeconomic phenomenon was usually framed as a unidirectional movement involving people moving from a sending to a receiving country. The final and expected stage of such movement was structural integration. Such an approach had crucial consequences for the theoretical and practical understanding of migration, which often includes a misleading perspective of “ethnic lenses” and the quite common pitfalls of methodological nationalism (see Glick Schiller 2010). A brief look at the public discourse about migration in Poland shows that common accounts mistakenly follow this traditional understanding, describing migrants as uprooted, disseminated or those living far from home (land). This essentialist perspective follows a common national framework of reference, imposing on people the need to choose life within one set of national borders. Each crossing thus evokes a sense of loss, discontinuity, and the incompleteness of one’s identity. Othering the Self ● 27

Such conceptualizations resemble a “sedentarist metaphysics” (Malkki 2001), which, although they have been widely and substantially criticized in anthropology and migration scholarship (see Glick Schiller and Salazar 2013; Gupta and Ferguson 2001), still pervade common-sense understandings and public discourse. However, such accounts are at odds with contemporary research findings on postaccession migration, which is more diverse in terms of flows, trajectories, frequency, and motives. Polish migrants use the possibility of spatial mobility as a vehicle for adapting to the context of enlarged Europe. However, instead of relying merely on transnational connections, many of them stay mobile as long as their pragmatic thinking and economic calculation suggest it. Postaccession migration is therefore often defined as “liquid,” with a multiplicity of options and heterogeneous forms of attitudes and possibilities of being mobile (cf. Engbersen et al. 2010; Grabowska-Lusiń ska and Okó lski 2009). As a result, many Polish migrants can be seen as almost “settled in mobility,” which becomes their lifestyle and livelihood strategy. When we look into the individual life stories of Poles in the United Kingdom, Holland, or Norway, we find that, for them, economic migration seems to be a specific, self-taught, and highly profitable profession and their most common expectation would be to “live here” (in Poland) but “work there” (the essentialized West). It does not, however, mean that living a mobile life neglects “here- and-there” localities or emplaced practices and immobilities. To be sure, the so-called mobility turn (Urry 2007) introduces a more processual and dynamic context of migration research, but the strong and one-dimensiona l emphasis on mobility itself may sometimes lead to a fetishization of movement and neglect of immobility. An anthropological perspective reminds us that the mobile lives of postaccession migrants should be problematized through dialectical analysis of mobility and immobility (see Glick Schiller and Salazar 2013), as well as through the relations between mobilities and localities. In other words, while analyzing contemporary migration flows, trends, and patterns one has to consider a larger aspect of the social imaginary, representations, and power relations, which often valorize one’s mobility at the cost of others. Glick Schiller and Salazar (2013: 195–196), while exploring contemporary research on different forms of global migration, introduce the “regimes of mobility” approach, which provides a balance between sedentarist and nomadic approaches to migration phenomena. Therefore, the authors propose six key directions for the analysis of mobility and immobility. First, mobility should always be analyzed in the context 28 ● Marek Pawlak of immobility, and the mutual and dynamic relations between them should be emphasized: in order to define mobility, we need to know what mobility is not. Second, both mobility and immobility must be understood as embedded in the unequal context of power relations, which—third—are shaped through the social, cultural, political, and economic dependencies of capital production and which play out within particular local contexts. Fourth, the analysis should encompass different social agents within different situations, including (but not limited to) state institutions, which define such categories as “territory,” “border,” and “legality.” Consequently, one needs to explore situations in which some mobilities are valorized positively (e.g., those associated with tourism, business, and knowledge, and highly skilled migrants) and others negatively (e.g., illegal migrants, refugees, low-skilled migrants). Fifth, “regimes of mobility” pose a challenge to the traditional concept of social class, which perhaps today is not only related to access to various resources, but also the possibility of moving and the ability to do so. And, finally, sixth, the analysis should also include the context of time and space, which is shaped by the relations between mobility and immobility. Thus, apart from local and national dimensions of migration phenomena, there is also a global realm of forces, factors, and impacts, which reproduce, transform, re-scale, and re-structure particular movements and spaces, as well as images, worldviews, and attitudes (see Glick Schiller 2010: 129). Following this contemporary approach to migration and mobility phenomena, I have collaborated with Polish economic migrants living intensively mobile lives between Poland and Norway. 1 T h e i n i t i a l fieldwork in Oslo turned out to be too limited; the locality “there” appeared to be just a one piece of the puzzle and I realized that I also needed to explore and analyze the “other” side of the flows—namely, the locality “here,” in Poland. The importance of physical mobility in the lives of my field collaborators made me think about the field as a multilocal dimension of various sociocultural interdependencies and practices. Certainly, it was not a field “in the strict sense of the term” (see Amit 2000) and my collaborators were not solely my “informants.” Some of them, after achieving initial goals, decided to either settle in Norway or return to Poland. Others—intentionally and pragmatically—continue d to live intensively mobile lives, settling themselves in mobility rather than locality itself. I have also worked with migrants, who we may call “undecided,” and whose livelihood strategies involved postponing the ultimate decision of staying or leaving, even if it entailed individual challenges and exhaustion. Some of Othering the Self ● 29 my collaborators strongly identified themselves with nationality and the imagined category of “Polishness,” while simultaneously economiz- ing its meanings and functions; others, interestingly enough, attempted to “reject” it by either contextually concealing “national visibility” or by perceiving it as a matter of secondary importance. In Norway, they lived and worked in Oslo, Drammen, or Christiansen, but their connections were often focused on Polish cities of Poznań , Wrocł aw, Warsaw, or other smaller towns and villages. Importantly, however, I did not—to paraphrase Clifford Geertz— conduct fieldwork on a group of Polish migrants, but rather worked within a group. I see myself as following Brubaker’s suggestion (1996: 18) that one needs to move beyond primordial and essentialized as well as modernist and instrumentalist paradigms that regard nations as substantial and actual collectivities. Both the “objective” (e.g., language, religion) and the “subjective” (e.g., myths, memory) factors that are often used to describe the function of nations lead to the methodological pitfall of reification, which then results in transforming practical categories and employing them as analytical ones (see also Jasku ł owski 2009). There is, however, a strong tendency in public discourse—and even in academia—to “grasp” the world’s sociocultural complexity and present it as a mosaic consisting of homogeneous, national, ethnic, and racial groups, which are limited, homogenized, and essentialized (Brubaker 2004). Such an approach is what Brubaker calls the groupism fallacy and it leads to an analytical reduction of any internal diversity, while also neglecting “emic” understandings of relations and interactions between individuals. The external and “visible” factors are then imposed on the heterogeneous intrarelations and sociocultural identification strategies. Brubaker instead proposes a groupness perspective, which emphasizes contextuality, processuality, and contingency. However, this does not mean that the mechanisms of identity politics cease to be important. On the contrary, such an approach enables the analyst to avoid regarding the “national” as the substantial and para- mount point of reference in an individual’s identity construction and leads her to focus on specific moments in which she may analyze both coherence and incoherence regarding internal and external identity factors. In other words, the basic analytical category should not be the group as an entity, but rather groupness as a concept determined by particular sociocultural contexts and dependent on variable situations open to change. In the following section, I will bring in an ethnographic example to demonstrate how this approach works and show what the main factors of intragroup relations and dependencies are. 30 ● Marek Pawlak

Othering: Polakkenism versus Cosmopolitanism In Wrocł aw, a city located in southwestern Poland, I met with Ania,2 a young female migrant. At that time, her everyday life was intensively mobile and she found herself being split between Oslo, Warsaw, and Wroc ł aw. Ania’s migration story begins with a decision to join her husband in Norway, where she initially took up a state-funded physiother- apy internship in one of Oslo’s hospitals. Simultaneously, however, she enrolled in a psychology course organized by a private university in Poland’s capital city of Warsaw. Wrocł aw, the fourth largest Polish city, located 300 km southwest of Warsaw, is her hometown, which she visits quite often. During our conversation, the context of national stereotypes and auto-stereotypes was evoked. Almost immediately after we had started talking, the figure of the Polish construction worker in Norway appeared and came to dominate our discussion. Ania told me: “But you know, in Norway, we call them Polakkene ,” and when I asked her to elaborate on this, she added: “you know what I mean—a typical robol. ” Polakkene is a form of declension (accusative) of the Norwegian word for “Poles” and the Polish term robol signifies a rather pejorative description of a manual worker (English prole). What struck me most was not only the terms she used, but especially Ania’s positioning and anti-identification toward other co-national migrants. Who is the “we” in her situational and relational statement? “We,” the Poles? Or perhaps even “we,” the Norwegians? What does she mean by this sort of othering and stigmatization? Ania was not the only one who emphasized strong distinctions and a self–otherness contrast while talking about co-nationals in Norway. Marta and Kuba, two architects with whom I collaborated in Oslo, also had similar identification strategies that included the processes of othering, stigmatization and—to put it more generally—hostility toward Polakkene . At the same time, I also met Krzysztof, Piotr, and Tomek, male construction workers and my key collaborators with whom I lived in Oslo, who might be “categorized” as Polakkene. They were my indispensable migratory guides who told me about all the pragmatics of living in Oslo and “socialized” me as one of them (cf. Pawlak 2012). I want to propose that, among others, there are two distinctive—and contradictory—kinds of habitus of those living mobile lives between Poland and Norway. In these kinds of habitus, symbolic power relations and class differentiation within the group of Polish migrants become evident. I call these two kinds of habitus Polakkenism (Krzysztof, Piotr, Othering the Self ● 31 and Tomek) and cosmopolitanism (Ania, Marta, and Kuba).3 F o l l o w i n g Pierre Bourdieu’s (1984) work on habitus, distinction, and lifestyles, one may argue that an individual’s daily identity strategies and sociocultural practices are embedded in a wider set of constructed, yet simultaneously objectified and externalized, dispositions that are acquired during the life of the individual. However, in the case of migrants, such a set of sociocultural, economic, and political dispositions must also be supplemented by transnational ties and connections, as well as the process of socialization in a migratory situation (see Guarnizo 1997; Pawlak 2013). Importantly, the individual is simultaneously conscious and unconscious with regard to following a particular set of dispositions; the power of habitus lies in daily habits and routines of which individuals are unaware, rather than in the awareness of existing rules and principles. In the case of migrants, it may manifest itself in individual identity narrations and observable practices of everyday life in a transnational or migratory context (Vertovec 2009: 66–69). Different circumstances generate different kinds of habitus and, ipso facto, sociocultural practices and lifestyles. The latter constitute systems of social meanings, which are distinctive and belong to particular groups (see Bourdieu 1984: 169). The combination of the social position of migrants and the context of migration itself leads to the production of similarity within a specific habitus and, subsequently, to migratory practices that fit within the logic of this habitus (Guarnizo 1997). Seen from this perspective, Ania, Marta, and Kuba function in a different transnational habitus from Krzysztof, Piotr, and Tomek, and such different identity positioning results in a hegemonic struggle and the process of othering. Polakkenism is mainly characterized by clear pragmatic choices driven by economic calculation. Therefore, for Polakkene there is no genuine need to interact with Norwegian society (except for work-related interactions), let alone a desire for any other deeper kind of integration. Cosmopolitans strongly anti-identify with this mobile way of life; rather, they function in small networks, in which belonging is (paradoxically) restricted and limited. Cosmopolitans integrate with the host society, simultaneously othering co-national migrants— Polakkene . Both kinds of habitus include living intensively mobile lives between Poland and Norway, yet differ in the degree of emphasis on transnational ties and embeddedness in the localities “here” and “there.” The interplay between Polakkenism and cosmopolitanism reveals varying ideological strategies of national identity construction, negotiation, and contestation. The category of “Polishness” seems to be a significant context of identity struggle within which othering takes place. 32 ● Marek Pawlak

When I spoke with Piotr about his experiences of Norway and about the advantages and disadvantages of living mobile lives, he replied:

Piotr : [ . . . ] You know, when I first came here, I don’t know why, but I had this feeling that I’m in hospital. And wherever I’m in hospital I feel uncomfortable, I’m trying not to touch anything, because of bacteria or whatever. This was my reflection when I came here, and I felt like this for two weeks or so. It was odd, and I have to say, I feel better when I’m in Poland. And when I’m in Oslo longer than a month, it really gets my goat. Marek : And why is that do you think? Piotr : Don’t know, just a general feeling. I prefer to be in Poland rather than here in Norway. I come here only when money runs out, or if [my] job is at risk and I have to manage that [ . . . ] I felt more relaxed in Poland, I have money, don’t have to think about [my] job, fully relaxed, you know. But on the other hand, I must say that in Poland I’m not as free as here, you know, my wife is always nagging and I’m under control. Here, I’m free and I can do whatever I want, so I think there are pros and cons of being either here or there [ . . . ].

Such a contradictory comment is not unusual among Polish migrants, especially among Polakkene . Poland is home, while Norway is work. However, residing permanently in just one place is not entirely s atisfactory—the “best” option for Piotr is to stay mobile as long as this is possible and profitable. On the other hand, during a conversation in one of Oslo’s café s, Kuba started to make some comparisons between Poland and Norway, and concluded with the following line:

[ . . . ] Polish culture is generally very self-oriented and Poles who go abroad have this natural tendency for cocooning and not giving away any secrets to others, to strangers [ . . . ] This cocooning, for example, you can find it in this thinking here among them [co-nationals], that Polish food is the best [ . . . ] and also, there is this working on the black market, which lowers the status of every Pole here. [ . . . ] Generally, all of this is inscribed in what really pisses me of in Poland and among Poles—no one talks about this cocooning, they only talk about Polish heroism and heroic emigration and that everyone has to be grateful for it. [ . . . ] Frankly, in Poland everything is just a pretence , the government, the law, and everybody is living by their wits. The whole of Poland is just a pretend country [ . . . ] and here is totally different.

Kuba’s emotional comment about Poland and Polish migrants (to whom he refers using the pronoun “them”) mainly builds upon Othering the Self ● 33 his experiences with his co-nationals (like Polakkene ) in Norway. Obviously, he is not one who practices “cocooning” and who avoids interacting with Norwegians. On the contrary, he prefers Norwegians and “Norwegianness” to his co-nationals and “Polishness.” According to Kuba, his way of migratory life is not a pretence as it is among other Poles living in Oslo. The comments of both Piotr and Kuba refer to the national and should be juxtaposed to as well as supplemented by a wider context, in order to analyze the process of othering among co-national migrants. The most visible distinction between Polakkene and cosmopolitans is the difference in everyday practices. The lifestyles of Piotr and Kuba differ in various small, yet significant ways: from mundane activities, such as grocery shopping, to leisure time and personal relations with Norwegian society. For example, Kuba bought an old sailing boat, which he restored, and he now spends most of his free time sailing “just like the Norwegians do.” Interestingly enough, it is not only the “visible” capital (e.g., boat) that distinguishes the lifestyle of cosmopolitans from Polakkene . Sunday hiking into the woods or attending cultural events like concerts and theatrical plays also provide a strong sense of distinction. Moreover, cosmopolitans avoid buying groceries in the so-called Polish shops, which offer national products like cottage cheese or pierogi. Rather, they prefer often more expensive products offered to them by stores such as ICA or discount chains such as Rema1000. For Polakkene, on the other hand, all these mundane distinctions are of secondary importance and, because of the pragmatics of their migratory lifestyle, they do not want to experience any attachments to Norwegianness. Their lifestyle consists of spending most of their time on working and saving. The most profound distinction between cosmopolitans and Polakkene , however, can be seen as underpinned by four national identification and anti-identification strategies: talking the nation, choosing the nation, performing the nation, and consuming the nation (see Fox and Miller- Idriss 2008).4 F o r Polakkene , nation and nationhood seems to be the “natural” template of reference in migratory situations, while cosmopolitans evoke the national in order to criticize its contents. Moreover, they also attempt to conceal or reject the idea of national belonging, because in this migratory context, it reminds them of Polakkenism. In other words, cosmopolitans—as opposed to Polakkene—try not to talk, choose, perform or consume the nation, and feel embarrassed if they are recognized by others as Polish. Arguing against a neocommunitarian approach, Triandafyllidou (2009) says that national identity is a “double-edged” relationship in 34 ● Marek Pawlak which similarity and difference play a dynamic role. However, one needs to realize that difference (the Other) does not signify merely other nationalities or the host society, but may also imply those whose belonging seems identical in terms of nationality. In other words, the practice of constructing differing kinds of habitus by Polakkene and cosmopolitans exemplifies the othering employed by the latter toward the former. As Eriksen (1995) points out, group identity is more complex than solely an “us” versus “them” opposition; rather, in order to understand identity dynamics, one needs to explore the group’s intrarelations based on selective ideologies, sociocultural categories, and rhetorical practices. Eriksen (1995: 427) introduces “we-hood” and “us-hood” as vehicles for group identification, arguing that experiencing the we cohesion depends on the existence of a mutually shared task, while us “signifies cohesion by virtue of an external agent, which is frequently a real or imagined enemy.” The intrarelations between Polish migrants pose an interesting context for analyzing practices of othering, in which us is a predominant form of diasporic practice. The differing kinds of habitus and distinct lifestyles of Ania, Marta, and Kuba (cosmopolitans) on the one hand, and Krzysztof, Piotr, and Tomek ( Polakkene ) on the other, are clearly based on the intersections between national identity and social class. On the margins of “Polishness,” the self-positioning and the dynamic of us and them reveal ideological implications and identity struggle grounded in social class differentiation. I do not, however, use the terms ideology and social class in the traditional Marxian understanding of these terms. The former is not “false consciousness”; it does not conceal any “truth” or “objectified reality” in order to intentionally manipulate i ndividuals. Rather, ideology implies the existence of global imaginaries and representations that are played out in local contexts and individual lives (cf. Rabinow 1986). Moreover, instead of the singular “ideology,” I prefer to use the word in its plural form. Individuals experience multiple ideologies and use their particular contents in various situations and identification strategies (see Eriksen 1992: 50). For example, in the case of Polish migrants in Norway, it is noticeable that people select various elements from different ideologies such as nationalism, cosmopolitanism, or neoliberal capitalism, with its emphasis on individualism and flexibility. It is, therefore, crucial to follow analytically the contextual and selective usage of ideological contents, which often show migrants as individuals located between agency and structure. In a similar way, one may consider today the concept of social class, which also goes beyond a Marxian conceptualization. Social class is not a static phenomenon, Othering the Self ● 35 which implies unequal access to resources and, ipso facto, the power. As Reay (1998) puts it, class does not solely involve different incomes but “is rather a complicated mixture of the material, the discursive, psychological predispositions and sociological dispositions being played out in interactions with each other in the social field” (cited in Eade et al. 2007: 25). In the case of Polakkene and cosmopolitans, it is not income that differentiates their lifestyles, since the salaries of the two groups do not vary significantly; in fact, it is often Polakkene who are better off economically. Therefore the concept of class instead needs to be understood within the complex realm of “individualized hierarchies of difference” (Eade et al. 2007: 25), which reveal not only socioeconomic, but also cultural distinctions between different groups in a particular society (cf. Buchowski 2001; Garapich 2009). Different social classes intersect with national identity, thereby transforming and reproducing cultural practices, which results in the othering of the self as well as co-national migrants. Cosmopolitans appropriate symbolic power, which gives them a self-imagined position to decide who, among co-nationals, fits the idea of having “proper values” and behaving in a “proper way.” Obviously, the adjective “proper” does not signify “cultured” and “well-mannered,” but instead is related to the valorization of particular mobilities in the context of “global hierarchy of value” (see Herzfeld 2003). Cosmopolitans other themselves as the ones who possess a habitus that is suitable for the imagined idea of the West, perceived here as a sole point of reference. Consequently, they feel superior with regard to Polakkene, who, in their opinion, bring a sense of embarrassment for essentialized “Polishness.” It is difficult, therefore, to imagine any substantial collaboration between cosmopolitans and Polakkene , since the former tend to identify with Norwegians, while the latter have closer relations with, for example, Lithuanians, who also work in the construction sector. Thus, national belonging gives way to the social and cultural differences of everyday life. This identification mechanism is similar to what Caroline Oliver and Karen O’Reilly describe as “defining the right culture” by particular migrants in the context of interactions with other co-nationals in a diasporic situation. The “right culture” and the distinction between co-national migrants seem to be significant factors of othering when economic conditions do not vary significantly. In such cases, “people veer more towards (re)producing dominant cultural tastes, styles and habits: linguistic capital, education, knowledge and practice of works of art, music, theatre, aspirations [ . . . ]” (Oliver and O’Reilly 2010: 59). The “right culture” is a vehicle for a hegemonic struggle over the 36 ● Marek Pawlak

“visible” sociocultural practices of everyday life in a migratory situation. It emphasizes the class division in a particular nation, which often are “erased” or neglected by nationalistic discourses constructed within the borders of a nation-state. The process of othering among co-nationals living in a migratory situation is quite common, but it is particularly strong among Polish migrants. It surely is related to different ethnic and national discourses produced by “old” (before 1989) and “new” (after 2004) migrants (see Garapich 2012). Michał Garapich, in his interesting article on cooperation and hostility among Polish migrants in the UK, argues that although Polish migration is usually based on social networks and transnational connections, there is a paradox of trust and mistrust between them. Poles’ attitudes toward each other often includes a sense of antagonism and enmity. Garapich quite rightly explains it by juxtaposing and analyzing hegemonic national symbols embedded in the official discourses of the intelligentsia on the one hand, and in everyday life on the other. However, there is yet another analytic dimension of such phenomena. Due to the fact that the antagonism and othering appear also among “new” postaccession migrants, one may argue that the explanation needs to be supplemented by referring to the East–West divide and the sociocultural imaginaries that it entails. 5 Many Poles seem to be caught in a sort of evolutionary understanding of political, economic, and cultural progress, which constitutes a significant template for group identity and becomes perceptible in the international context. It is as if social class differentiation, a feature that is common to every nation- state, serves as a constant reminder of the interplay between inferiority and superiority in the realm of global imaginaries and representations. National identity reveals various contradictions and gaps, which compose a context of complex intersections between national phenomena and social class belonging. The process of negotiation and contestation of borders and boundaries inside the group and among the migrants goes beyond nationhood; rather it is embedded in migrants’ daily loyalties and intimacies. Although social class is obviously a category as heterogeneous as nation, it becomes a similarly essentialized identification factor employed by co-nationals while facing migratory situation.

Conclusions In this article, I have argued that, in the context of migrants living mobile lives between Poland and Norway, the process of othering involves the intersections of class distinctions and the particularities Othering the Self ● 37 of experience shaped by interactions between co-nationals in a migratory situation. Starting with problematizing the use of the concept of othering in migration research, I then considered two different kinds of habitus— Polakkenism and cosmopolitanism—constructed within the group of Polish migrants, which are driven not by national identity but rather by social class differentiation. As a result, while experiencing a migratory situation, many Poles tend to anti-identify with co-nationals and other them as socially and culturally inferior. The dynamic character of power relations inherent in the processes of othering, differentiation, and interaction resides in the global imaginaries that valorize one type of mobility at the expense of others. Cosmopolitans contest the “visible” (statistical) domination of Polakkene in Norway through the discursive usage of a strong, yet symbolic and self-imposed sociocultural hierarchy based on their understanding of the “right culture.” They assume that Polakkene are morally and culturally inferior because they do not fit the ideological context of contemporary neoliberal capitalism and all the values that it entails. Therefore, Polakkene are discursively deprived of agency and power while, at the same time, cosmopolitans other themselves as those whose habitus is suitable for the essentialized Western way of life. However, there is an interesting paradox in such othering and deprivation of agency. In many ways, the mobile lives of Polakkene are quite similar in form (but not content) to the lives of “analytic symbolists” (cf. Hannerz 1996) who constantly move between countries and display a neoliberal flexibility and lack integration with the receiving society. However, despite this fact, Polakkene are “in a specific way” (social class, the East–West divide) perceived as unwanted, unnecessary, and embarrassing.6

Notes * This chapter was supported by funding from Jagiellonian University within the SET project. The project is cofinanced by the European Union. I would like to sincerely thank Jessica Robbins-Ruszkowski for proofreading the chapter. 1 . In 2009 I was a visiting researcher (FSS and EEA Norway Grants) as part of the CULCOM project (Cultural complexity in the new Norway) funded by the Research Council of Norway. I was affiliated with the International Cultural Centre and Museum in Oslo (IKM) and collaborated with anthropologists from the Institute of Social Anthropology at the University of Oslo. 2 . All the names have been changed to protect confidentiality of my field collaborators. 38 ● Marek Pawlak

3 . The term Polakkenism derives from Polakkene, and is contrasted with cosmopolitanism and cosmopolitans in the analysis. It must, however, be added that by cosmopolitanism I do not mean to refer to any structural transformation of social organization, but rather to paraphrase Michael Billig’s concept of banal nationalism, a sort of banal, even na ï ve, thinking about cultural differences. 4 . In this interesting chapter, the authors explored a vast literature on national identity and nationalism, arguing that there are four basic strategies that evoke national belonging. Talking the nation concerns discursive markings of national belonging as a “natural” form of identification. It includes not only talking about the nation, but also talking with the nation. The latter concerns nation not as the subject of conversation, but as an unconscious structure of national order (Fox and Miller-Idriss 2008: 538–542). Choosing the nation relates to individual choices, which might be driven either by the national scheme of reference or the pragmatics of mobile life (Fox and Miller-Idriss 2008: 543–545). Performing the nation is inseparably related to national symbols and rituals that produce a sense of the perennial aspect of a nation and a feeling of national cohesion (Fox and Miller-Idriss 2008: 545–549). And, finally, consuming the nation involves playing the “national card” in capi- talistic market and competition, consumption, and popular culture (Fox and Miller-Idriss 2008: 549–553). 5 . The East–West divide is a strong ideological factor that differentiates states and societies not only in terms of economic or political conditions, but which also has a great impact on social and cultural realms. Much has been written about how this division produces imaginaries and representations that evoke a sense of superiority and inferiority, progress and stagnation, exclusion and inclusion, hierarchies and stigmatizations (see, e.g., Buchowski 2004; Herzfeld 2003, 2005; K ü rti 2008). It must be emphasized, however, that the East–West divide, although essentialized and imagined, generates the presence of difference that implies hegemonic relations and a sort of evolutionary framework of reference. 6 . I have intentionally started and finished this chapter with a reference to Michael Herzfeld’s concept of “cultural intimacy.” In my opinion, the paradox of othering, the interplay between national identity and social class as well as the valorization of one mobility at the expense of others that is based on global imaginaries and the East–West divide, are related to the idea of “rueful self-recognition” and all the consequences that it entails (cf. Herzfeld 2005). This aspect of analysis, however, is still a “work in progress” and needs to be explored in another chapter.

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CHAPTER 2

Renegotiating Symbolic Capital, Status, and Knowledge: Polish Physicians in Sweden

Katarzyna Wolanik Bostr ö m and M a g n u s Ö h l a n d e r

Introduction What happens when well-educated, highly skilled professionals leave their country of origin to work abroad? How do they make use of their skills and competences in another organizational framework and cultural context, and do they experience any limits regarding the acknowledgement of their seemingly transnational competences and diplomas? What kind of obstacles do they meet and what are their strategies for reestablishing professionalism and status in a new setting? In this chapter, we present the results from our ethnographic study “Polish Doctors in Swedish Medical Care” 1 as a point of departure for a Bourdieu-inspired discussion on negotiations regarding symbolic capital in another national medical field (cf. Bourdieu 1984, 1988) and the conditions and limitations of transnational mobility of symbolic capital. The study “Polish Doctors in Swedish Health Care” was conducted between 2010 and 2012 and based primarily on extensive narrative interviews with 20 Polish physicians currently living and working in Sweden. Some of our interviewees have previously worked in Great Britain, the United States, Canada, Israel, France, and Norway. Some of them may be characterized as more permanent migrants and others as professionals with a tendency to be mobile in the globalized health care market. 42 ● Katarzyna Wolanik Boström and Magnus Öhlander

Swedish health care is increasingly reliant on physicians recruited from abroad; in 2011 24 percent of doctors practicing in Sweden were educated in another country (Socialstyrelsen 2014) and Polish doctors constitute one of the largest non-Scandinavian groups. Transnational mobility among doctors and nurses, mostly from South to North and East to West, is an increasing phenomenon globally (cf. Connell 2008; Socialstyrelsen 2014). One way to label the globalized medical labor market is to call it an overarching transnational medical field, to use a broadened version of Bourdieu’s (1984, 1988) concept. A field is a social space related to joint professional interests and formed by shared norms, hierarchical positions, and struggles over symbolic capital. The term “transnational medical field” may thus summarize internationalized medical research, transnational professional networks, and the possibility for health professionals to work clinically or in research all over the world. This field relies heavily on a vision of uniform medical knowledge and values, and a practice that is universal and easily movable between different cultural contexts and health care systems (cf. Harris 2014). However, in reality medicine is still characterized by diverging practices (e.g., Berg and Mol 1998; McKinlay et al. 2006). There are cultural differences regarding the organization of health care or norms for social behavior in the medical professions, for example, how to perform properly in physician’s role (Geest and Finkler 2004; Wolanik Bostr ö m and Ö hlander 2011a, b, forthcoming.). Visions of transnational medical competence and mobility as an unproblematic means of knowledge practice and knowledge transfer meet obstacles in the shape of persis- tent national cultural differences (Williams and Bal á z 2008: 1932), for example, medical subcultures, health care models, patients’ expectations, and so on. A lot of social labor is thus required by medical staff to adjust to the various contexts of practice (Harris 2014). In our study, the transnational ideal of mobile knowledge and practices is nuanced and contested by the mobile and migrating2 Polish doctors, who relate their different paths, status negotiations, tribulations, and successes abroad. The overarching, “transnational” medical field seems to interact with many national and local medical fields (or “subfields”), with somewhat differing norms for professional performance and specific kinds of networks and systems of cooperation (cf. Wolanik Bostr ö m and Ö hlander 2012, forthcoming). Crucial to our question about what happens when Polish doctors make use of their skills and competence in another (Western) country is the concept of symbolic capital. Physicians’ professionalism, status, and identity are, to a large extent, a question of possession of knowledge Symbolic Capital, Status, and Knowledge ● 43 and skills. Following Bourdieu (1984, 1988), in the field of medicine, a specific set of knowledge and skills may be a source of symbolic capital, but only insofar as they are recognized and acknowledged by a relevant social group, such as the staff at a medical clinic. Without recognition and acknowledgment, the specific knowledge and skills fail to qualify as symbolic capital and the doctor cannot use them as a marker of status or professionalism. This concerns all types of symbolic capital, such as cultural capital (degrees and diplomas, eloquence, proficiency in aesthetics, appropriate body language), and social capital (contacts, networks, connections). In different combinations and to a different degree, all types of symbolic capital constitute the doctor as a professional and as a member of the upper middle class. What can the experiences of Polish doctors tell us about moving symbolic capital from Poland and reinvesting it in the Swedish medical field? A vital aspect of occupational migration/mobility is the expectation of converting the acquired capital and maintaining its exchange rate in a new social, organizational, and cultural setting (cf. Kelly and Lusis 2006; Nowicka 2013). This expectation goes for all migrants but is perhaps most evident among the highly skilled, and obviously predominant in the transnational medical field. Still, as Nowicka (2013), for example, shows, the possibilities of transferring and exchanging capital are to a great degree structured by nation-states (e.g., the labor market), and some sorts of capital prove to be more or less transnational than others, that is, more or less easily converted and valorized across countries (Nowicka 2013: 41ff). The interviewees who have worked in Sweden for several years talk about a predominantly successful occupational migration, although, as we will show, the interviews contain narratives that could be classi- fied both as success stories and stories of struggle. The doctors refer to experiencing stereotypes and prejudices about Poles and “Eastern Europeans” and we suggest that such stereotypes have an impact on their possibilities of reinvesting symbolic capital. We shall also provide examples of what we call “cultural frictions” (see Wolanik Boströ m and Ö hlander 2011a, b, 2012, forthcoming) and doctors’ strategies to overcome the frictions, for example, by giving proof of their competence or making themselves “pass” culturally. We conclude that these confron- tations and strategies constitute an important aspect of reestablishing cultural capital in the context of international mobility. However, before we come to the processes of reinvesting symbolic capital, we will begin with a short overview of how migrant doctors have experienced their working life in Poland and their different motives for 44 ● Katarzyna Wolanik Boström and Magnus Öhlander migration. Why are highly skilled professionals leaving their country of origin to work abroad and thereby risking the value of acknowledged symbolic capital?

Working Life in Poland and the Migration Decision In their narratives, the doctors speak of their working lives in Poland as both highly satisfying and problematic, and they point out the various reasons for their decision to move. For doctors migrating before 1989, when Poland was still ruled by one-party regime and was a part of the Soviet political sphere, the reasons to migrate could be summarized as economic—pointing out the low income levels in the socialist economy; political—referring both to the overall political situation in Poland and people’s dependency on social and/or political capital to get a reasonable employment (nepotism); professional—the desire to develop as a professional; as well as a general desire to improve one’s quality of life and experience the world outside of the (rather closed) Poland. The interviewees who migrated after 1989 give similar reasons, but they no longer mention politics as a decisive motive. Some doctors, however, complain about confronting unembellished nepotism of social networks. And although they acknowledge that the overall economic situation has become better for physicians, they also tell stories about intolerable discrepancies between state-employed doctors’ wages and the possibilities of achieving a decent life standard, resulting in the stressful necessity to take on more than one job. The reasons for leaving Poland are often connected to the quality of life outside work, mostly time available to spend with the family. As we interpret it, the quality of (family) life is presented as the most important and legitimate factor in the decisions to leave Poland. Sweden is chosen because of the good opportunities to support one’s family with only one job per person and excellent working conditions, in combination with well-developed daycare for the children. And, of course, the possibilities for professional development and the desire to experience life outside of Poland are still significant. Even when curiosity about life in other places or seeking adventure are initially named as a motivation for working abroad, more “serious” reasons are promptly presented and elaborated. The doctors seem to be talking not only to us, but also—indirectly (cf. Pripp 2011)—addressing the brain-drain anxiety framed in Polish media during the first decade of the 2000s. Polish newspapers reported on specialists leaving the country, choosing an easy way to better-paid jobs in the West, while the Polish state had borne the costs of their education and was left with Symbolic Capital, Status, and Knowledge ● 45 shortages of specialists. This kind of public discourse might be the reason why the doctors try to relate to a potential critique and invest a lot of narrative energy in explaining the decision to leave Poland (Wolanik Boströ m 2014; Wolanik Boströ m and Ö hlander 2011b, 2012). They describe themselves as hard-working and committed to their profession, which gives them a lot of satisfaction and personal development, but simultaneously they describe problems that just could not be solved otherwise. To illustrate these issues, let us bring in some examples. Robert says that in the 1990s, “interpersonal connections” were still imperative to get a decent job:

It was impossible to find a job in the city where I lived; you had to have connections, incredible connections. Even though there was a free position where I wanted to work, I did not get it because it was supposed to stay free and wait for somebody.

Antoni tells a similar story; he was supposed to work on good social relations with the town mayor but he did not like it at all and was trying to keep out of such entanglements. Antoni’s wife, though she knew that her own university degree would not be recognized in Sweden and she would have trouble finding a job, supported the decision to move to Sweden.

Antoni : [My wife] saw that I wasn’t there for the family, that I was burning myself out with the town mayor and others, my energy was drained by meaningless fights. [ . . . ] I was never drinking vodka with the town mayor, it gave me no pleasure, it is something I do with my friends and he was my boss, whom I respected, well more or less, so i t f e l t w r o n g .

Bogdan and Aneta, both of whom are specialist physicians, tell us how they came to realize that their job was taking too much time and energy from family life. Bogdan says that, after he completed his PhD, it was impossible to stay at the university without connections, so he chose to work as a “contract doctor” and was hired by different health centers and clinics. This kind of employment was rather insecure, especially with the recurrent Polish health care crises; he had nine different employers, lots of patients every day and hardly any possibility of taking a holiday. True, the accumulated salary was pretty good, but he came home late in the evening and was generally exhausted. Bogdan says half-mockingly that his children would say: “Well, daddy is nice, but we don’t really know him.” His wife Aneta worked primarily at a research institute and 46 ● Katarzyna Wolanik Boström and Magnus Öhlander on her dissertation, so in order to have more contact with the patients she used to work on an emergency ward during weekends, and one afternoon at a health care center. She says she did this only so as to keep developing as a doctor, as her accumulated salary was still basically pocket money. The children complained about their parents’ perpetual absence and about spending too much time with a babysitter. One day, their daughter told them in desperation that she wanted to have a life as an ordinary child.

Aneta : We were horrified that we were working our guts out, and the children did not appreciate it at all, so something was just wrong with the situation.

In Aneta’s and Bogdan’s narrative, the children’s unhappiness was an eye-opener; it made them realize that their efforts to be good doctors and to provide a decent living standard did not work; the children longed for their presence and attendance. Just at that time, they happened to read a medical bulletin and found an article, written by a former colleague of Aneta, who was working in Sweden and who praised the amount of time he had at his disposal—time for patients, time for family, and time for hobbies. In the bulletin there was also an advertise- ment for preparatory language courses and three-year work contracts in Sweden. On an impulse, they decided to give it a chance. Eliza says that she worked at a state hospital and, though she was a young doctor, she felt both respected and popular, with a lot of friends and social contacts in the hospital. The hospital was functioning quite well, the equipment was not exquisite, but proper, and the necessary medicines were available. She loved her work and the social life of the ward. But in relation to her level of education and in comparison with many other occupations in Poland, her salary in the hospital was “ridicu- lous,” so she and her husband had to rely on their parents’ help to support their everyday economy. And when they wanted a mortgage loan to buy a flat, the bank refused because her salary was too low. With her particular specialization it was impossible to start a private practice and she felt there was no way to combine career development with a decent life standard.

It was a kind of blue-eyed activity, you had learned so much and started to work, and then you felt a little naï ve—you could not help getting engaged, you could not let it go, and for such a salary it was . . . embarrassing. [ . . . ] I thought that if I was a good doctor, then I should be able to live decently, but it was not possible to achieve that in Poland at the time. Symbolic Capital, Status, and Knowledge ● 47

She remembers going to a meeting where the doctors who were considering a contract in Sweden had a chance to meet some of the Polish doctors who had already been working there for some time. The working conditions they were describing seemed fabulous.

[In Sweden] the doctors had four weeks of holidays in a row; it felt out- of-this-world compared to Poland, impossible at my workplace! And such long maternity leaves . . . That your employer would listen to you wishes and take them into consideration ( laughing), nobody paid much attention to such things in Poland, for example that you should have a comfortable chair, a pad for the computer mouse . . . It was quite abstract for me to see that somebody could care about your needs or treat you like a human being, who had needs, and not just a doctor who was there to work and treat people, and was generally there for someone else, for the patients.

Eliza said that she was genuinely tired of the continuous health care reforms in Poland and was attracted to the peace and quiet of living in Sweden and the stability of the Swedish health care system, which felt well tested and reliable. “Everything is ordered and planned and you are an important person amidst it,” she said. The overall message in the interviews was that the doctors were really devoted to their work and good at it—in Bourdieu’s terms, they had no trouble with the kind of symbolic capital labeled as cultural capital, necessary to be an acknowledged and well-respected doctor (cf. Wolanik Boströ m 2005, 2008). Still, they experienced deficiencies and incongru- ences in their class-specific position in society: being underpaid (their devotion to work not translating adequately to economic capital) and lacking or refusing to use social or political connections and networks (social capital) to further their career. Many interviewees told us that doing a decent job meant being stressed and overworked, so that other areas in their life, especially family, were neglected to an unacceptable level. In their view, moving abroad was the only way to find balance between work and family, and thus to establish the desired quality of life.

Negotiating Knowledge and Status in a New Medical Field Getting to know a new medical field, a national health care system, and a local medical setting with specific social codes may be a challenge. The doctors are confronted with the “familiar unknown,” as Harris (2014) labels it. Mobility and migration spark de-familiarization; the previously taken-for-granted is suddenly not so obvious, which may result in insecurity but also give interesting perspectives (cf Wolanik 48 ● Katarzyna Wolanik Boström and Magnus Öhlander

Bostr ö m and Ö hlander forthcoming). Boleslaw, who has worked in several countries, compares Sweden to Poland:

In Sweden, there is much aiming towards organizing, written rules, and it suits me. Poland is working towards it, but we are individualists, like a micro-USA, you invest in yourself and your own development in order to be a star. It is quite typical for the culture of my homeland. There are some enthusiasts who are really good; if something works well it is thanks to some of them. In Sweden, system-based solutions prevail, so even if someone is less capable and clever, it is a part of the system and it still should work all right.

Magdalena makes a similar point, but her opinion of the system is rather negative. She complains that the Swedish system dominates over personal initiatives; you are supposed to do things in certain ways and you are never encouraged to make any exceptions. This is especially true of the tedious and ineffective administrative practices at her hospital. Even the nurses’ schedule, including coffee breaks, is quite strict and not easily changed, which annoys Magdalena if a patient is kept waiting. “One nurse tells me that she has finished for today or has a coffee break now, another has something else . . . ” She says that in all her former Polish workplaces the personnel used to be more flexible. “Why is there no goodwill, why are people working as if they were clerks ?” Some of the interviewed doctors describe how unaccustomed they are to the informal social interaction at work. The hierarchies among different positions and occupational groups are not as easily visible in Swedish health care as they are in Poland. At the Swedish workplaces, everyone addresses each other by their first name and titles are not used. And you are expected to talk to everyone, irrespective of position or titles. When the specialists talk about their career development in Sweden, the nature of their specialization, and the possibility of proving one’s value seem of importance for how their professional knowledge is recognized. In medicine, knowledge is not just theoretical; it also encom- passes embodied skills, professional “intuition,” the “right” ways to talk, proper body language, knowledge, or administrative procedures, among others (cf. Harris 2014; Williams and Bal á z 2008). Some of these competences were more or less difficult to prove in a new setting. In the narratives of Polish doctors, proving medical competence is a long-time performance (Harris 2014: 273) and diplomas and titles are just not enough. The physicians speak about their strategies for reestablishing their professionalism and negotiating status and knowledge in a new setting. They present their medical knowledge as both transnational Symbolic Capital, Status, and Knowledge ● 49

(e.g., theory or embodied skills) and as more culturally and nationally situated (e.g., linguistic skills or social competence). They also complain about stereotypes concerning the former “Eastern Europe,” according to which their diplomas and competences are less trustworthy. Boleslaw says that it was initially difficult to even get the chance to prove his skills in Sweden, since Poland was considered as “absolutely the Third World.”

I sent my paperwork to different recruitment companies. They did not respond, even though my Swedish colleague encouraged me and gave me recommendations. I applied online and they did not respond. After a couple of days, I did it again, to the same company, but without letting them know I was Polish. Just “a specialist with a PhD, with extensive work experience.” They answered the same day. So it was an interesting piece of research.

After these initial difficulties, Boleslaw established himself, and he appreciates that he had this chance to prove his worth and to be acknowledged as a competent doctor:

But if you quickly prove that you really can do something, then you get accepted. In Germany it is not the same, I have friends who work in Germany and it is no fun. No matter how good you are, first of all you are a damn Pole, and then maybe a doctor who—surprisingly enough— manages something. It is different in Sweden. First you are met with distrust, but then you are accepted.

Some people testify that the whole span of their medical and organizational knowledge was neither respected nor asked for in the new s etting—they were just supposed to carry out rudimentary tasks. Antoni says that he had extensive experience in family medicine, which is a well-established specialization in Poland, but in Sweden his skills were met with distrust, “as if I came from some obscure land”:

The Swedish looked at us [Polish doctors] like: “Oh, some exotic doctors are coming and they will learn medicine from us!” They think they are the center of Europe, while I think that we have much wider experience in Poland. Of course they have a lot of positive things in the doctors’ training here, but we have nothing to be ashamed of! When I discussed things with my Swedish colleague, it turned out that I was often right. You shouldn’t generalize, but it is quite common that they have a hard time acknowledging that somebody else may be right, at least in medicine, that there may be better systems, other solutions. 50 ● Katarzyna Wolanik Boström and Magnus Öhlander

Robert works in the very international environment of a hospital clinic, with doctors from different parts of the world. He says that the Swedish head of the clinic is fantastic in supporting younger colleagues and their further training. Robert is happy with the working conditions and the generous and open atmosphere. When he was recruited to the clinic, he almost immediately had the chance to prove his value by promptly giving a correct diagnosis in a very vague case. After that, his good reputation was quickly established. A similar situation is recounted by Magdalena. To begin with, she was met with some distrust and not allowed to do much, but soon there was a difficult case and none of the doctors who were present dared to perform the required surgery. She volunteered and performed it excellently. After that, she had won the trust of her colleagues and other personnel. Doctors whose specializations were not of the sort that could yield quick and spectacular results talk about their long path to winning trust. Alina, who used to occupy a leading position at a clinic in Poland, was shaken by the fact that in Sweden she suddenly was new, “the last name on the employee list,” and not fluent in Swedish.

There were situations when nurses did not want to listen to me; they wanted confirmation from someone else. It took me almost four years before I got established and strengthened my position, so now they want to work with me.

Getting established and self-confident was also a prolonged process for Eliza. In her employment at a Swedish health center, the verbal communication with patients and personnel was crucial. Even though her medical knowledge was valid and she took an extensive language course before she came to Sweden, she felt very inadequate initially talking to patients, writing journal notes, or following the correct administrative procedures (e.g., performing competence). Intensive daily communication with patients, nurses, and secretaries was an absolute requirement and the first months were highly stressful: “It was terrible, it was hell!” She strove to do a really good job and she could always ask her mentor or the nurses if she did not know some of the procedures or Swedish expressions, and they were all very helpful and supportive, but the daily work constantly brought new demands.

It was terribly frustrating! As a doctor, you must be an authority for the person coming to see you, and it is difficult being an authority if you Symbolic Capital, Status, and Knowledge ● 51

cannot speak properly. Jesus, in Poland I was brilliant, the conversation just flowed, I decided what I wanted to know and sorted it out if there were too many loose ends . . . and here I talked, well, just as well as I could.

Since Eliza regarded herself as energetic and self-assured, the shift from being “brilliant” to just understandable was mortifying. It took some years for her to become confident enough with both the language and the administrative procedures of the Swedish health care system. Even though she is now often praised for her language skills, she feels that expectations are rising every year. Elderly professors have hard time believing that somebody who does not speak “fine” still may be a clever and competent person, though the younger ones are more used to foreigners “abusing” the language. Still, the linguistic and cultural competences are crucial, especially in higher positions:

Eliza : Here [in Sweden] you don’t feel all the subtleties and nuances. And it does matter in higher positions; communication with people, the kind of relationships you establish, the authority you acquire, the charisma you have; and all this has to do with language, with political and social knowledge, with the feeling for subtleties.

In the narratives, migration is often the point of initial deskilling, when even the previously self-assured and well-established specialist may find himself or herself reduced to a novice. The possibility of showing some impressive results (in diagnosis or surgery,) seems to be helpful in the process of reestablishing a professional reputation. However, not all specializations allow for such quick results, and sometimes the process is more laborious and stretched out over time, especially when there are high requirements for nuanced communication with patients and personnel. But we want to underline that all the doctors interviewed have succeeded in their professional role in Sweden and they are recollecting their initial difficulties in the retro- spective interview process.

Renegotiating Class and Gender in the Professional Role The differences between medical cultures may be subtle, as in body language, tone of voice, and myriad other details constituting a “proper” professional performance (cf. Harris 2014) but those nuances mark the proper performance of class, gender, and ethnicity. Bogdan talks about 52 ● Katarzyna Wolanik Boström and Magnus Öhlander his first encounter with the head of the clinic where he and another male Polish doctor had just been employed:

Bogdan : A standard for us, it was a newly ironed shirt and jacket and tie. But when we both came to Sweden, we received our doctors’ coats, which were just roughly ironed by the hospital laundry. [ . . . ] And when the clinic chief met me for the first time, he wore a creased working T-shirt with the text COUNTY COUNCIL on it, totally creased, and over it a doctor’s coat with rolled-up sleeves. I thought: “What kind of boss is this?”

After some time, Bogdan adopted the more leisurely style himself as he came to consider it wonderfully practical. He recalls, however, that one of his Polish male colleagues never gave up, keeping an entire collection of conspicuous ties and jackets under his doctor’s coat, a custom that was actually appreciated by colleagues and patients, because he looked like a doctor from the (American) mass media. Learning the codes of clothing is an example of a cultural domain where cultural capital may be at stake and where a doctor may choose to make himself or herself “pass” culturally—or to be a colorful (but foreign) exception. But there is also an additional gender aspect to making oneself “pass” culturally. Several interviewees ponder the issue of doctors’ performance in Sweden as more or less gender-neutral, in contrast to the much more gendered standards of medical performance in Poland. The evaluations of these different expectations are both positive and negative. Antoni says that relations between men and women are flattened. He approves of the ideal of equality but not of striving toward uniformity in male and female physicians’ behavior and conduct. Edyta, on the other hand, is thrilled that gender is toned down at work. She says that as a young physician in Poland she was expected to “massage the male doctors’ egos,” to admire their work, and be “sweet” if she wanted to be allowed to do any interesting medical work. It was much better in England; if you were really good at your job, then your gender was not important. In Sweden, it is a welcome rule of behavior:

Edyta : I was shocked [in the Swedish clinic] that the colleagues of my age did not treat me as a woman; they just didn’t seem to see my gender. In every other place [in Poland, England], when I was talking to a man inside or outside the workplace, gender was of importance for how we treated each other. And here I noticed that they talked to me in the same way that they talked to each other, they don’t differentiate. And it was so great: so it is really possible, they talk to me as to a human being! Symbolic Capital, Status, and Knowledge ● 53

Aneta and Eliza give examples of how their usual style of clothing suddenly was perceived as improper upon migration, signaling a less intellectual and unprofessional kind of femininity, unsuitable for the doctor’s role.

Aneta : I have no longer the habit of wearing high heels! Before, when I worked at the university clinic in Poland, you had to wear high heels and a suit, it was a standard—an elegant short skirt, high heels, a little cleavage, not like a uniform but more elegant. And here, my mentor corrected me . . . She said: “You know, it is how secretaries may dress, maybe not even them, and absolutely not a doctor.” As a doctor you should not show your calves or knees, it is not proper. [ . . . ] At first I thought “Why should I act silly and change myself? They can dress as they want, but I am from Poland and I will dress as I used to.” But after a while, when I received some glances and small comments, so . . . Alas, when in Rome, do as Romans do.

In Aneta’s story, the embodied cultural capital of being elegant and “feminine” was an undisputable asset in Poland. In Sweden, this kind of performance becomes declassing, negative capital, something that should be modified toward a more discreet performance in order to signal the right social stratum. Aneta speaks about it in an amused but also slightly irritated tone, as one of the many unexpected complications of migration. In Eliza’s story, the requirement of not marking gender at work led to “an identity crisis.” In Poland, she was very particular about being elegant at work, with fine makeup and nice clothes; wearing an open doctor’s coat on top of it. Compliments from her male colleagues were natural, expected, and appreciated. Sophistication in dress and makeup was for her an indispensable sign of being professional; it gave her self- respect. Then she came to work in the north of Sweden, where the style was much more laid-back, with sensible clothes and comfortable boots outdoors and just a doctor’s uniform at work. She was appalled at how her own style was suddenly “totally different” and wrong.

Eliza : You know, what shocked me in the beginning [in Sweden]—that I lost my female identity at work! [ . . . ] Nobody here expected me to be a woman but only a doctor, and the less of a woman and the more of a doctor, the better! (laughs). And those unisex uniforms, same for men and women . . . if you are a nurse you may have a skirt, if you are a doctor you may not. [ . . . ] These are unimportant nuances and details, but they do matter for how you see yourself. 54 ● Katarzyna Wolanik Boström and Magnus Öhlander

Eliza’s own style is much more discreet now, though she still cares about her clothes, to preserve a kind of “inner personality.” She also thinks that nowadays it would irritate her to receive “cheap compliments.” As her previous gendered performance became a liability, she tried to adjust to the “Swedish way” of doing things. In the following quotation, Eliza reflects on how difficult it may be to move what may be called embodied cultural capital between two countries:

It weighs heavily to move from one country—where you feel easy-going, where you form the rules and conditions and have a certain identity and personality, where you don’t have to strive to establish it, because you have comprised it since your birth—to a country where you have come as a complete person, but where you are new.

In the examples above, the doctors talk about the implicit expectations on how to perform as a professional, including the “right” performance of gender and social stratum. You become a subject by “doing” class and gender in specific, culturally approved ways (Butler 1990; cf Wolanik Boströ m 2014; Wolanik Boströ m and Ö hlander, forthcoming), and these approved ways sometimes differ between Poland and Sweden.

Conclusions In this chapter, we have taken our interviews with Polish doctors as a point of departure for the discussion of the different reasons for which highly skilled professionals leave their country of origin to work abroad. We have also analyzed what the migration experiences of doctors may tell us about moving symbolic capital from the Polish medical field and reinvesting it in the Swedish medical field. The doctors in our study migrated for various reasons, such as political ones (before 1989), economic, professional, and personal ones (e.g., more time with the children, more time for hobbies). As our interviews imply, migration meant putting a well-established symbolic capital at risk. One crucial condition for transnational mobility among physicians is the possibility to reinvest their symbolic capital. The competence of Polish doctors has to be recognized by relevant groups in the Swedish context; in other words, it must be possible to adapt and reinvest the capital in the new national and local medical fields. This is a double movement. Polish symbolic capital—exams, medical knowledge, signs of professionalism, etc.—has to be acknowledged in the Swedish medical context. At the same time, the symbolic capital has to be made Symbolic Capital, Status, and Knowledge ● 55 recognizable to the “Swedish gaze,” which means that it has to be performed in a way that fits in the everyday medical workplace cultures. The material analyzed contains stories of both success and struggle. Some of the doctors interviewed describe the process of reinvesting symbolic capital as quite fast and smooth, accompanied only by minor obstacles. Others struggled longer to make their reinvestments work. Notwithstanding the degree of struggle, all the doctors interviewed tell us about some obstacles to reinvestment. This is not uncommon among highly skilled migrants and is described in literature as the process of deskilling and reskilling (e.g., McNeil-Walsh 2008). In the migration process, theoretical knowledge and hands-on skills are more transnational and thus much more easily transferred than the nationally and locally specific workplace customs and practices (cf. Berthoin Antal 2000). Some of the interviewees mention negative stereotypes about former Eastern Europeans and Poles, which suggests that such stereotypes may have an impact on the possibilities of reinvesting symbolic capital in the Swedish context. An important part of symbolic capital is education. Polish education is exchangeable in Sweden, but exchange rates vary. An element of classic or liberal arts education may also be required of a highly skilled person, and this type of education is always partly connected to nation- building standards (e.g., literature canons and the cultural heritage of a country). This means that capital based on Polish education does not automatically translate according to the same exchange rate in Sweden, especially since it is tied to language in which it takes time to attain fluency at a sophisticated level. In addition, the exchange rate of Polish symbolic and cultural capital could be affected by the often negative stereotypes about Poles and Poland that some of the doctors speak about in the interviews. The stereotypes should be understood in the larger context that includes the Swedish debate on “the Polish plumber” (Zaremba 2006), and the historical residues of the stereotypes concerning “Eastern Communist Europe” and “the East European.” Another part of cultural capital is embodied dispositions, such as refinement and decorum. It is noteworthy that the doctors often ponder differences in cultural traits and describe their efforts to make themselves “pass” culturally as professionals. The process of becoming able to pass culturally is strongly connected not only to medical competence but also to the ability to perform social class and gender in a proper way. Polish doctors in Sweden may feel the need to change some of their embodied dispositions, such as how to behave, dress, and talk in a correct and sophisticated manner. It may take time to learn how to perform 56 ● Katarzyna Wolanik Boström and Magnus Öhlander authority or what kinds of gendered expressions are (im)proper in the professional role. The initial revision and renegotiation of the symbolic capital may result in the experience of deskilling and uncertainty. The interviewees’ goal was not to become completely assimilated to the Swedish workplace culture, but rather to understand and become pro- ficient in different cultural traits in order to be able to negotiate status, improve everyday cooperation, and make knowledge transfer more mutual (cf Wolanik Bostr ö m and Ö hlander forthcoming). Still, as so much of the professional role is embodied and performative, some attuning is usually required in order to gain respect and appropriate status in the specific medical field. To conclude, the process of negotiating symbolic capital in a new field may be complex and challenging, in spite of the seemingly “transnational” competence and skills of the highly skilled professionals.

Notes 1 . For our other articles originating from the study of Polish doctors in Sweden, see also Wolanik Bostr ö m and Ö hlander (2011a, b, 2012, forthcoming 2015; Wolanik Bostr ö m (2014) 2 . We use the terms “mobile” and “migrating” interchangeably.

References Berg, Marc and Annemarie Mol. 1998. “Differences in Medicine: An Introduction.” In Differences in Medicine, edited by Marc Berg and Annemarie Mol. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Berthoin Antal, A. 2000. “Types of Knowledge Gained by Expatriate Managers.” Journal of General Management 26, 2: 32–51. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1984. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste . London: Routledge. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1988. Homo Academicus. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge. Connell, John. 2008. “Towards a Global Health Care System?” In The International Migration of Health Workers, edited by John Connell. London: Routledge. Geest, Sjaak van der and Kaja Finkler. 2004. “Hospital Ethnography: Introduction.” Social Science & Medicine 54, 10: 1995–2001. Harris, Anna. 2014. “Encountering the Familiar Unknown: The Hidden Work of Adjusting Medical Practice between Local Settings.” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 43: 259–284. http://jce.sagepub.com/content/43/3/259 . Kelly, Philip and Tom Lusis. 2006. “Migration and the Transnational Habitus: Evidence from Canada and the Philippines.” Environment and Planning 38: 831–847. Symbolic Capital, Status, and Knowledge ● 57

McKinlay, John, Carol Link, Sara Arber, Lisa Marceau, Amy O’Donnell, and Ann Adams. 2006. “How Do Doctors in Different Countries Manage the Same Patient? Results of a Factorial Experiment.” Health Services Research 41, 6: 2182–2201. McNeil-Walsh, Colleen. 2008. “Migrant Nurses and the Experience of Skill: South African Nurses in the UK Health Care Sector.” In The International Migration of Health Workers, edited by John Connell. London: Routledge. Nowicka, Magdalena. 2013. “Positioning Strategies of Polish Entrepreneurs in Germany: Transnationalizing Bourdieu’s Notion of Capital.” International Sociology 28, 1: 29–47. Pripp, Oscar. 2011. “Reflektion och etik.” In Etnologiskt f ä ltarbete, edited by Lars Kaijser and Magnus Ö hlander. Lund: Studentlitteratur. Socialstyrelsen. 2014. Nationella planeringsst ö det 2014. Tillg å ng och efter- fr å gan p å vissa personalgrupper inom h ä lso- och sjukv å rd samt tandv å rd . Stockholm: Socialstyrelsen. Retrieved from http://www.socialstyrelsen.se/Lists /Artikelkatalog/Attachments/19347/2014–1-32.pdf. Williams, Allan M. and Vladimir Balá z. 2008. “International Return Mobility, Learning and Knowledge Transfer: A Case Study of Slovak Doctors.” Social Science & Medicine 67, 11: 1924–1933. Wolanik Bostr ö m, Katarzyna. 2005. Ber ä ttade liv, ber ä ttat Polen: En etnologisk studie av hur hö gutbildade polacker gestaltar identitet och samhä llet . Umeå : Umeå University. ———. 2008. “The Hard-Working Hero/ine among Phantoms, Donors and Dark Forces: On Mythical Features in Polish Organizational Imagination.” In Organisational Olympians: Heroes, Heroines and Villains of Organisational Myths , edited by Monika Kostera. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Monika Kostera. 2014. “Migrationsber ä ttelser i samspel.” Kulturella Perspektiv nr 4 /2014 Wolanik Boströ m, Katarzyna and Magnus Ö hlander. 2011a. “A Doctor’s Life- Story: On Professional Mobility, Occupational Sub-Cultures and Personal Gains.” In Selling One’s Favourite Piano to Emigrate: Mobility Patterns in Central Europe at the Beginning of the 21st Century , edited by Jakub Isanski and Piotr Luczys. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars. ———. 2011b. “Polska lä kare i Sverige: Om lä karroll, status och kulturella pro- cesser.” Socialmedicinsk tidskrift 88, 3: 273–281. ———. 2012. “A Troubled Elite? Stories about Migration and Establishing Professionalism as a Polish doctor in Sweden.” COMCAD Working Papers 110. General ed. Thomas Faist. Retrieved from http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn: nbn:se:sh:diva-17333 . forthcoming 2015. “Mobile physicians making sense of culture(s). On mobile everyday ethnography”. Ethnologia Europea 45:1, 2015. Zaremba, Maciej. 2006. Den polske rö rmokaren och andra berä ttelser frå n Sverige . Stockholm: Norstedts.

CHAPTER 3

Mobile Entrepreneurs: Transnational Vietnamese in the Czech Republic

G e r t r u d H ü w e l m e i e r

Introduction This chapter focuses on transnational Vietnamese in Central Europe, in particular on the cross-border ties established by former contract workers from Vietnam in postsocialist countries such as the eastern part of Germany, Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Hungary.1 After the breakdown of communism, thousands of Vietnamese stayed in these countries rather than return to Vietnam. Most of them managed to survive economically only by engaging in retailing or whole- saling and therefore started careers as petty traders. A considerable number of these Vietnamese traders have become successful entrepreneurs in recent years, with business networks that extend across national borders. The entrepreneurs travel regularly between various Central European countries, but also foster and maintain connections with China, Vietnam, and other states. Local markets in former socialist countries, increasingly comprising diverse peoples, play key roles in postsocialist economic development while transnationally linking a variety of geographical and sociocultural spaces. Based on multisited ethnographic fieldwork with transnational Vietnamese in “Asian” bazaars in the eastern part of Berlin, Prague, and Warsaw, as well as in various marketplaces in Hanoi, this chapter addresses questions of (1) socialist pathways of migration, (2) the establishment of bazaars by migrants in Prague, and (3) diversity and encounters between locals and migrants in contemporary Central Europe. 60 ● Gertrud Hüwelmeier

Postsocialist mobilities, as I will argue in this chapter, are based on socialist migrations, and the postsocialist period was, when it comes to this group of migrants, characterized not by a rupture in the social relations, but rather by continuity and the re-creation of long-lasting ties. Some forms of these socialist mobilities started already in the 1950s, and were extended in the 1970s through the sending of students from one country, such as Vietnam or Cuba, to “socialist brotherlands,” including the German Democratic Republic (GDR) or the Soviet Union. Finally, in the 1980s, an increased migration from Vietnam to Central European socialist states took place as a result of economic agreements between governments. The first section of this chapter deals with socialist pathways of migration, grasping different kinds of cross-border ties between Vietnam and former socialist countries. The second section explores the founding of “Asian” bazaars in Central European countries after the breakdown of communism, with a particular focus on the establishment of the SAPA market on the outskirts of Prague in the late 1990s. This is one of the largest wholesale markets in Central Europe managed by Vietnamese and one involving traders from many other Asian countries. Finally, the chapter draws attention to the ambivalent relations between locals and Vietnamese in Prague-Libus, a semiurban space, where thousands of Vietnamese have settled over the last few years due to their engagement in the SAPA bazaar.

Socialist Pathways of Migration: Vietnamese Arrivals in Central Europe By the second half of the 1990s, an estimated 2.3 million Vietnamese were living outside their home country, with around 1 million in the United States, 300,000 in France, 200,000 in Australia, 150,000 in Canada, and 115,000 in Germany (Baumann 2000: 38). With regard to the two Germanys, the situation was more complicated, as Vietnamese boat refugees had arrived in the Western Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) after the end of the American–Vietnamese War, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, while tens of thousands of Vietnamese contract workers, mainly from North Vietnam, had arrived in socialist East Germany (GDR) between 1980 and 1989 (H ü welmeier 2008: 133, 2010, 2011: 440). After World War II and the creation of the “Soviet bloc,” thousands of people from different places all around the world, such as Chile, Cuba, Algeria, Mozambique, North Korea, Vietnam, and others, entered socialist countries in Central and Eastern Europe in order to study or work. Mobile Entrepreneurs ● 61

Most of the scholarly work on Vietnamese in the socialist and postsocialist diaspora was carried out with a focus on particular countries, often as part of government-sponsored research on migration (Szymanska-Matusiewicz 2014). Moreover, part of the existing literature focuses on issues of integration and assimilation in the host country. As a result, theoretical questions of diversity (Vertovec 2007), transnationalism (Glick Schiller et al. 2006), and the global flow of people, money, and goods (Appadurai 1996), the role of media connecting Europe and Vietnam (Hü welmeier 2015a), and the importance of second-generation migrants, have lately become part of scholarly work on the socialist and postsocialist Vietnamese diaspora. Hence, topics closely connected to Cold War mobilities, such as “socialist cosmopolitanism” (Hü welmeier 2011) and an “international socialist ecumene,” 2 only recently came to the fore at international conferences 3 and are by no means part of the construction of old binaries between the West and the rest. On the contrary, these global perspectives on local issues give insight into a “living socialism” or “every day socialism,” often conceptualized quite differently from the “official interpretations provided by state rhetoric” (Yurchak 2006: 8). Ethnographies of an “enduring socialism” (West and Raman 2009) and, for example, fieldwork with East German architects, who were sent to Vietnam in the 1970s to plan and build the socialist city (Schwenkel 2012), are part of exciting new research results. During the socialist period, interactions between peoples and states were based on the idea of “internationalism” and everyday practices (Hü welmeier 2014, H ü welmeier 2015b; Schwenkel 2014). Therefore, and this is quite important in terms of continuity, Vietnamese socialist networks, created long before the fall of the Berlin Wall, are, in many cases, still of great importance today. They survived political transformations and have been strengthened over the past 25 years.

Transnational Vietnamese in the Czech Republic While I was participating in a huge wedding ceremony in Hanoi in 2009, attended by about 2,000 guests, I was sitting at a table with a group of government officials, including a minister who introduced himself to me in perfect German. He told me that he had studied in Czechoslovakia and that he had greatly enjoyed this period of time in his life. In the late 1950s, the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (the communist north) established diplomatic relations with Czechoslovakia. As a result, numerous Vietnamese students, like the minister, lived in the country during the socialist period to attend universities there, and 62 ● Gertrud Hüwelmeier

Vietnamese experts were trained in Czechoslovak schools and later in state-run companies. By the early 1980s, more than 35,000 Vietnamese, two-thirds of whom were workers, were living in the socialist country (Martinkova 2011: 133). By 1967, 2,100 Vietnamese had arrived in Czechoslovakia for training (Alamgir 2014: 138). Engineers and skilled blue-collar workers worked with Czechs and Slovaks in factories in order to gain skills that were needed in their home country. Due to bilateral agreements between the governments, the Czechoslovak state covered all costs except transportation. The program was deemed successful and as a result was expanded through another agreement signed in 1974. More than 5,000 Vietnamese arrived in Czechoslovakia during the 1970s, spending up to three years as apprentices in vocational schools, then another two years as qualified laborers. The development of this program was based on ideas of “socialist internationalism” and was continued due to a labor shortage from 1980 onward. Based on an agreement from November 1980, “tens of thousands of Vietnamese eventually arrived in Czechoslovakia for work” (Alamgir 2014: 140). Today, more than 30 years later, about 90,000 Vietnamese are living and working in the Czech Republic, according to unofficial estimates. Based on the 2011 national census, only about 53,000 of them have a valid residence permit (Szymanska-Matusiewicz 2014). As has become clear through my research, those Vietnamese who arrived during the socialist period have accrued a large number of “connections,” and created and maintained networks within the host country and across borders. Hierarchies among Vietnamese in the Czech Republic are shaped by these former students and contract workers, whose Czech language skills are quite advanced and who have “good relations” with Czechs, in particular with those in high-ranking political positions. Some of these early arrivals are today responsible for the operation of large bazaars and inhabit positions of power within the Vietnamese diaspora. Another group among the Vietnamese is important as well: businessmen and traders who operate quite independently, such as shop owners who only in the past few years have reopened small shops in the capital city of Prague as part of their social mobility. Some of them complained about the hard work in the bazaar, withdrew from trading in the wholesale market, and established businesses in the city center. These shops, called ve č erky in the Czech language, are mainly operated by Vietnamese and are open until late at night. Therefore, Vietnamese are quite visible in the inner city of Prague. When I talked to shop owners, I found that some of them had previously worked in Mobile Entrepreneurs ● 63 the SAPA market and then decided to become independent, while others moved here from Germany in the 1990s due to the legal problems they faced there. These stores are to be found in many areas of Prague and local Czechs that I spoke with were happy to have these businesses located near their houses. They told me they prefer to buy fresh food, fruit, and bread in the ve č erky run by Vietnamese just around the corner, instead of hurrying to the supermarket late in the evening. Small shops of this kind were also established in the eastern part of Berlin after 1990. In Germany, these places are called Sp ä ti (based on the term Sp ä tkauf , “late shop”) and they did not exist during the socialist period. As in the Czech Republic, many are operated by the Vietnamese, in particular in areas such as the gentrified neighborhood of Prenzlauer Berg. A third group of Vietnamese living in Central Europe are migrants who started to arrive in the last few years, the majority of them coming via human trafficking routes. Some of them can also be found in Germany (H ü welmeier 2013b). If they are lucky, these Vietnamese citizens, most of them from rural regions in the middle of Vietnam, will find a job in a restaurant, or work as porter or dish-washer. They have to pay around $8,000 for the transfer from Vietnam via Moscow and Hungary to Slovakia before they finally reach the Czech Republic (Martinkova 2011: 140). As I was told by Czech specialists on migration issues in Prague, some of the mediators recruiting poor people in Vietnam are those who came to the Czech Republic before 1989. Although more research is required on this topic, based on my observa- tions so far, I would argue that this situation reflects the influence and continuity of socialist networks on postsocialist migrations. The number of Vietnamese living in the Czech Republic has been noted not only in the national census, but also in studies conducted by supranational entities. According to a report by the International Organization for Migration, by the end of 2005, Vietnamese represented the third largest group of foreigners living in the Czech Republic (36,832), after Ukrainians (87,789) and Slovaks (49,446) (IOM Prague 2006).4 However, the numbers cited in this report should be treated with considerable caution for several reasons. First, this material does not include nondocumented migrants or migrants who became naturalized citizens of their host country, as many Vietnamese in Germany have done. Furthermore, many Vietnamese are mobile migrants, willing to relocate from one host country to another, in particular after Central and Eastern European countries joined the Schengen area. This last point was confirmed during my fieldwork in huge Asian-run bazaars 64 ● Gertrud Hüwelmeier in Wolka Kosowska near Warsaw in Poland in 2012, where Vietnamese shop assistants reported that they had moved from the Czech Republic to Poland as business in the Czech Republic had become slow. Some gave up their small shops in the Czech Republic to come and work in the huge bazaar near Warsaw, while others keep residence permits for the Czech Republic, but live and work in Poland (H ü welmeier 2015b). Many Vietnamese experience the migration policy in the Czech Republic as more relaxed, in comparison to Germany. For example, a trader whom I met in the SAPA bazaar in Prague-Libus told me that he came to East Germany as a contract worker. After 1990, he married and had two kids. In addition to his job in a sausage factory in Germany, he was involved in illegal cigarette smuggling, and was caught by the police. A few days before he had to go to prison, he went underground and decided to live in the Czech Republic. He had no problems in getting “papers” for himself and his family and became a successful entrepreneur in one of Prague’s Asian bazaars. As this example illustrates, some Vietnamese, like many other migrants, cross borders and move between various nation-states. However, it is important to note that “free” movement only became possible after various nation-states joined the Schengen area, as the Czech Republic did in 2007 (Szymanska- Matusiewicz 2014). For a number of Vietnamese traders, these new regulations were crucial for their economic activities, as their business is always organized across borders.

From a Slaughterhouse to the Global Bazaar Vietnamese participation in retailing in Central and Eastern European countries predates the fall of the Berlin Wall. Already in the 1980s, a number of Vietnamese were engaged in trading in Czechoslovakia (Martinkova 2011: 135), while Vietnamese contract workers in the GDR were quite active in the informal economy. Parallel to their jobs in state companies, they produced blue jeans and other textile items in the workers’ residence halls in which they were housed and sold the goods to locals (H ü welmeier 2013b). While open-air markets were to be found in many socialist countries (Hann and Hann 1992; Sik and Wallace 1999; Hohnen 2004; Nyiri 2007; Marcinczak and van der Velde 2008; Nagy 2011), and were established in the communist economy as important places for the distribution of goods, the type of wholesale market set up by migrants in former factory buildings, with a huge offer of cheap products made in China, Vietnam, or Thailand, did not exist in the socialist period. Mobile Entrepreneurs ● 65

Due to the “chaotic” situation after the breakdown of communism, markets sprang up in various places. In some places in Eastern Europe, such as the Jarmark Europa, a former stadium in the center of Warsaw, thousands of people met in open-air markets on a daily basis. The Jarmark Europa was the melting pot of the Polish capital after the fall of communism. Similar to multiethnic bazaars in other locations, it was mainly Vietnamese, Poles, and Russians who sold goods in this market after the breakdown of the socialist economy, yet Africans, Chinese, Indians, and Central Asians were also represented among the traders. This trading location has since been transferred to the suburbs of the city as the market was closed down in 2008 in order for the stadium to be rebuilt for the UEFA European Championship in football in 2012, which took place in Poland and Ukraine. As a result, Chinese, Vietnamese, and Turkish investors purchased huge areas of land in a small village about 20 km south of Warsaw, literally in the fields, and built new global trade centers, with several hundred people now trading in each one of them (H ü welmeier 2015b). In Prague, Vietnamese entrepreneurs established several global trade centers after 1990. According to recent research (Martinkova 2011 155), the first market was built around a former residential home for foreign workers in Prague 4—Chodov—but this was closed by the local authorities in 1996 due to its gradual expansion. Market Petis, also located in Prague 4, in the Modrany neighborhood, was moved to a former meatpacking plant in Prague-Libus because it lacked an official permit. This venue burnt down in 1996, and another market was established in 1998 near the same place, in Prague 4—Kunratice—in the form of a partly illegal wholesale market Bokave, called “little Hanoi” by the police. This bazaar was also forced to close due to the intervention of local authorities. Then, a Vietnamese joint stock company bought the site of the former meatpacking company in Prague-Libus. This bazaar was named SAPA, after a small mountain town in northwest Vietnam. As the market manager explained in our encounter, it was quite difficult to find a Vietnamese name that was not too difficult to pronounce for the many clients from various countries. He made jokes about Russians, for example, who could not pronounce Dong Xuan Center, the name of a huge bazaar in Berlin, but were constantly referring to the Don Juan market, a name nobody understood. The SAPA market is located on the outskirts of the city and covers 350,000 square meters. It is the largest and most famous migrant-run market in the Czech Republic. The majority of traders have a Vietnamese background, while about 20 percent of the traders are Chinese, Turkish, 66 ● Gertrud Hüwelmeier

Indian, and Pakistani. Located in the Libus district of Prague 4, about 15 km from the city center, the bazaar was built on the grounds of a former poultry processing enterprise and a meat company. According to the Czech gatekeeper of the SAPA bazaar, the locality, which opened in 1977, was one of the most modern slaughterhouses in Europe in the socialist period. Even delegations from France came to visit this place due to its modern technology. Tens of thousands of chickens were slaughtered, and thousands of pigs and cows died in this place every day. The business closed after 1990 and the grounds were purchased by Vietnamese investors in 1999. Who exactly the investors are, whether they live in Vietnam or elsewhere, was not easy to find out. Therefore, in this chapter, I refer to the “management level” when talking about my contacts among market representatives. Contrary to the “wild” markets that had sprung up at the beginning of the 1990s, the “new” bazaars in Prague, Warsaw, and in the eastern part of Berlin, are organized by a market management team on property that was purchased by foreign investors. The market management represents the bazaar externally, negotiates with state authorities such as the mayor of the district, the police or the fire department. Inside the market, the management collects rent from the traders and guarantees security by hiring personnel. They also expel from the site people who sell products without having a market license, as I was able to observe in the SAPA market in Prague-Libus.

Diversity in the Marketplace The last section of this chapter deals with diversity in “Asian” bazaars. There is no such thing as “the” Vietnamese market or “the” Chinese market, as marketplaces are spaces in which a whole range of people encounter each other. As in any other place where various groups come together, conflicts come up and have to be negotiated, whether between local authorities and market management, among traders of various ethnic and national backgrounds, between clients and traders, tourists, and other people interested in bazaar life. Constructing “the” Vietnamese community, which “is often characterized as closed, self-sufficient, without a manifest need for integration into the life of a majority population” and “as such really demonstrates tendencies towards ghet- toisation” (Martinkova 2011: 186), means ignoring the manifold interactions of migrants with locals. Such an approach also neglects ongoing debates on ethnic, linguistic, and religious diversity and “methodological nationalism” (Wimmer 2009). Mobile Entrepreneurs ● 67

As bazaars are characterized by the involvement of multiethnic groups, transnational networks, and global flows of goods and money, we have to take into account new theoretical concepts such as diversity or “superdiversity” (Vertovec 2007), differentiations of class and gender (Leshkowich 2011), as well as problems related to cross-border trade, and even the performance of religious practices in the bazaar (Hü welmeier 2008, 2013a). Ethnographic fieldwork in a particular locality interpreted and analyzed through a global perspective on trade and transnational practices, on bargaining and credit-giving, on trust and solidarity in the bazaar will help us to understand issues of agency and social and economic practices. Therefore, postsocialist marketplaces are conceived as research sites in which hierarchies and power relations generate not just cooperation between people from various backgrounds, but are also sources of conflicts, stereotypes, and misunderstandings.

Encounters between Locals and Migrants Relationships between locals and migrants, in particular in these bazaars, are characterized by mutual encounters. During my fieldwork in various migrant-run bazaars in Central Europe, traders had relaxed and polite relations with each other and with their clients. Retailers and wholesalers chat with each other, clients are invited to drink a cup of tea, and there are a number of regular customers who are embraced in a privileged way vis- à -vis new clients. Even with clients with whom a trader does not share the same language, communication takes place in a particular way. Mr. Tung, who manages a stall in the SAPA market, told me that he had no problems making a good deal with clients from Ukraine, for example, who come to buy his T-shirts on a regular basis. Over the years he has learned to speak Czech, but his clients very often do not know a single word in Czech, while they might know Russian. So Mr. Tung has learned some words in Russian, German, and English, enough to say “hello” (ahoj in Czech), “good bye” and “how are you?,” and, in particular, to use numbers in various languages. The most important thing is the calculator, he says. With this medium, communication and bargaining proceeds quite easily. Another Vietnamese shop owner, Mr. Hai, who trades in Asian herbs, vegetables, and fruit, became quite successful as some of his clients are members of Southeast Asian embassies, such as the Indonesian embassy in Prague. Several times a week, in particular when there is a reception at the embassy, staff of the embassy will come to his shop and ask for fresh Asian produce and herbs. Besides 68 ● Gertrud Hüwelmeier these clients from various backgrounds, many Czechs also visit the SAPA market for economic and leisure purposes. Simultaneously, huge bazaars are places of rivalry, misunderstandings, and tension. In the following, I will not focus on inner market conflicts (Hü welmeier 2013b), but on a kind of stereotyping discourse vis-à -vis “foreigners,” Vietnamese in particular, partly promoted by government officials. Various tensions characterized the relationship between the market management and the mayor of the district in Prague-Libus in the past. For a long time, there was almost no contact between people working in the bazaar and locals living in the neighborhood, including state representatives. However, when Vietnamese began purchasing houses or apartments near the bazaar during the last few years, they made contacts with neighbors and institutions such as schools and kindergartens. According to Vietnamese traders, today relationships with Czech neighbors are friendly and unproblematic. However, some local politicians are still quite critical toward the bazaar and the people working there. The bazaar became a big issue in the Czech press, with negative reactions from some locals, in particular due to a large fire that occurred there in 2007. As the new mayor told me, since then the bazaar has begun slowly to open its doors to the public, as a form of damage control in the face of a negative press. Some events, such as the “children’s day,” are organized collectively by the market management and politicians for residents and traders in Prague-Libus. During my fieldwork in the SAPA market I was invited to participate in a ceremony that was organized for immigrants who had successfully completed an EU-financed economics course. This course was provided by the district of Prague-Libus together with staff responsible for integration issues. By teaching knowledge about how to open a business, how to follow Czech rules regarding matters such as hygiene, and how to deal with tax issues, immigrants were to be enabled to widen their perspectives about trading and economic integration into the host country. All courses took place in separate language groups, for Vietnamese, Chinese, and Russian speakers, respectively. During the ceremony, participants, mostly traders, received their certificates of course comple- tion. Representatives of the SAPA market, the mayor, representatives of embassies, other officials, and the media participated. Each of the participants in the course I spoke with appreciated their participation and reported that they had learned a lot about trading rules in the Czech Republic. Beside these efforts to foster smooth relationships between representatives of the city and immigrant entrepreneurs, there are other people Mobile Entrepreneurs ● 69 in Prague who do not support positive ties between immigrants and local authorities. The deputy mayor had been removed from office just two months before my visit to the SAPA market because of xenophobic comments she had made. As this woman lives in the district where the SAPA market is located, she was quite influential as a politician and is part of a group of residents who critically observe activities of “foreigners” such as gambling. In addition, according to the mayor of Prague-Libus, an increasing number of locals in his district complain about the noise and fumes from the many cars and trucks driving through the area to and from the market on a daily basis. As a consequence, the municipal administration is planning a new bypass road in order to avoid these kinds of problems in the future.

Images and Voices from Vietnam While I was carrying out fieldwork in Hanoi in 2012 and 2013, I noticed a soap opera that was being broadcast once a week on the best time-slot on Vietnamese state TV. The locality of the soap opera, titled hai phia chan troi (literally: “two directions beneath heaven”) was a huge bazaar in Prague. The content of the drama consisted of difficult life trajectories of Vietnamese in the bazaar and in the Czech Republic in general, including economic crises, problems with drugs and alcohol among second-generation migrants, difficulties in taking care of aging parents in Vietnam, complicated love affairs between Vietnamese and Czechs, and many other topics. The serial TV drama featured stories and life experiences of multiple characters, such as the protective and patriarchal role of the Vietnamese market director, who traveled between Vietnam and the Czech Republic, always supporting other Vietnamese and solving problems for people in need. Focusing on emotions such as loss, loneli- ness, uprooting, love, and care, this soap opera clearly had a political message, namely to prevent Vietnamese in Vietnam longing for a life in the Czech Republic, while pointing to the difficulties and hardships of bazaar life abroad. I visited the filmmaker in Hanoi and, while we were discussing various topics of this TV drama, he admitted that during the shooting of the soap opera, which had taken place in the SAPA market in Prague, among other places, he learned many emotionally touching life stories. When I asked why the full scope of the ethnic and national diversity of people in the bazaar was not included in the drama, he answered that this was not part of the script. The soap opera, like all TV shows on Vietnamese television, is financed by the Vietnamese government, and thus falls under its editorial control. 70 ● Gertrud Hüwelmeier

Conclusion Postsocialist bazaars are places where trade and economic exchange takes place. Moreover, the SAPA market in Prague, like other migrant- run bazaars near Warsaw or the Dong Xuan Center in eastern part of Berlin, are places of encounters where restaurants, mediation services, travel agencies, tax offices, hair cutting, and other services are offered. Wedding parties, celebrations of international women’s day, and gath- erings on the occasion of school enrolment are performed in market restaurants. But, as this chapter has illustrated, marketplaces are not just places of “rubbing along,” of encounter and social and economic exchange (Watson 2009). While marketplaces in postsocialist countries are localities of intense social interaction (Humphrey and Skvirskaja 2009), they are simultaneously sites of conflict where power relations among various groups emerge, localities where citizens with and without a migrant background encounter Vietnamese, Chinese, Pakistanis, Indians, Turks, and other people with manifold interests, a place where tensions and frictions are negotiated (H ü welmeier 2013b). Global bazaars are multiethnic localities where the everyday life of transnational religious, social, and economic practices is performed and where anthropologists will hardly find “the” Vietnamese community.

Notes 1 . This chapter is based on my research project “The Global Bazaar,” funded by the German Research Foundation (HU 1019/3–1). Multisited ethnographic fieldwork was carried out in Berlin, Warsaw, Prague, and Hanoi in 2012 and 2013. Parts of this chapter were presented at the conference on “Post-Socialist Bazaars. Markets and Diversities in ex-COMECON Countries,” organized by Steven Vertovec and Gertrud Hü welmeier at the Max-Planck-Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, G ö ttingen, Germany, February 23–24, 2012, and later that year at the EASA conference in Paris. In 2014, I presented parts of my research results at the international conference “The Global Vietnamese Diaspora: Transnational Ties, Cultural Flows and Political Entanglements” in Warsaw. 2 . Defined by Bayly (2009: 126) as a “worldwide fraternal community forged by both states and individuals on the basis of enduring revolutionary solidarities and socialist ‘friendships.’ ” 3 . In March 2014, an international conference on the global Vietnamese Diaspora, held in Warsaw, brought together scholars from the United States, Vietnam, Germany, Poland, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia, to discuss the maintenance of economic, political, and social ties of Vietnamese dispersed around the world. 4 . For the case of Ukrainians, see Uherek (2009). Mobile Entrepreneurs ● 71

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CHAPTER 4

Pavlivka Iodine Spring Water: Transnational Entrepreneurship in Post-Transition Contexts

Z d e n ě k U h e r e k a n d V e r o n i k a B e r a n s k á

Introduction1 Transnational migration and transnational entrepreneurship are increasingly important aspects of the contemporary world, whose spread is perhaps surpassed only by the growth of electronic communication (Giddens 2002). Despite their global dimension, transnational migration and transnational entrepreneurship are also firmly grounded in local experience and contexts in which they take on diverse and sometime unexpected forms. In the case of Central Europe, these transnational phenomena are deeply influenced by international state linkages from the socialist past (see Hü welmeier, chapter 3, this volume), which are being reinvented today by people who often have little personal experience of them. In this chapter, we would like to focus on a group of immigrants to the Czech Republic who are of Czech origin, but who were born in the Ukraine not far from the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. The group moved to the Czech Republic in 1991 and their members soon acquired Czech citizenship. We have been studying their life history for more than 20 years and followed the story of their complicated integration process—the process of learning how to live in the Czech Republic and, importantly, how to live in the world of the market economy. This integration process continues now with the second generation of these immigrants. 76 ● Zdeneˇk Uherek and Veronika Beranská

In this chapter, we will focus on one particular family and their business ambitions. We will show how, in their business activities, family members utilize their family’s experience of the Chernobyl nuclear catastrophe, associated folk prevention practices against radiation, and their social contacts in the country from which originally migrated. We focus on their story, which we see as the symbolic journey of many postsocialist immigrants from the former Soviet Union to Central Europe, and their path from socialist to “neoliberal” business activities. Through this account, based on our longitudinal ethnography of migrant families living in the Czech Republic, we want to illustrate how people with fluid social statuses and complicated identities navigate the global challenge of living lives in changing political systems and uncertain economic conditions.

New Migration Systems and Old Migration Bridges The period of postcommunist transition, with its changes to the political system and the introduction of economic “shock therapy”—which included decentralization, privatization, elimination of the system of central planning, and the introduction of the principles of the market economy and neoliberal policies (Rothstein 2004; Buyandelgeriyn 2008)—also created a new Eastern European migration system (Massey et al. 1998). The system is based on specific principles of international relations and international economic exchange, and reflects the growing permeability of the state frontiers as well as the existence of social institutions facilitating international transfer. People who migrate taking new routes nevertheless logically utilize their knowledge, experience, influential connections, and material resources gathered over their lifetime, and sometimes those inherited from their ancestors, reaching back to the socialist period, as well. Therefore, while the Central European postsocialist migration system seems to be quite new, some migration bridges have carried over from the socialist period. This is true, for example, for the frequently utilized bridge between the Czech Republic and Vietnam, which was opened in the 1960s; the migration bridge between the sub-Carpathian Ukraine and the Czech Lands (i.e., Bohemia, Moravia, and Czech Silesia) that goes back to the interwar period (Uherek et al. 2006, 2008a, b); and also the bridge eventually utilized by the family from the Chernobyl region, who form the focus of our chapter, established originally in the 1860s when peasants and craftsmen from the Czech Lands resettled in Ukraine in search of affordable farming land (Val áš kov á et al. 1997). Pavlivka Iodine Spring Water ● 77

International migration shares many common traits all over the world. Economic migration is explored with the help of the whole range of methodological instruments that enable comparison between single cases. Using comparative measures we can, for instance, assume economic migration from the Ukraine to the Czech Republic is an example of an East–West migration model. However, ethnographies of the transition period suggest that market rules and the neoliberal economy do not work the same everywhere. Following Michael Burawoy and Katherine Verdery (Verdery 1996; Burawoy and Verdery 1999) we can state that transition from socialism did not lead directly to Western- type capitalism but instead created a new social environment built on global, European, and local values, norms, social institutions, and people’s skills and knowledge. The study of these original and unre- peatable social and economic forms, and their global influence, is the primary task of post-transition anthropology in and of Central and Eastern Europe.

The Ukrainians and Compatriots from Ukraine in the Czech Republic The compatriot migrations constitute a specific phenomenon of the transition period. The nationalization of cultures and newly emerged possibilities of amelioration of the quality of life and economic conditions triggered the movement of hundreds of thousands of Germans in Romania, Hungary, Ukraine, Russia, and Kazakhstan, and thousands of Jews and also some Poles in those countries. They began to move to the countries of origin of their ancestors—to Germany, Israel, Poland, and to other developed countries or countries in the Western part of the world, including Central Europe. Czech minorities in eastern and southern countries also strove to return to the country of their ancestors. One of the largest groups of migrants from Ukraine to the Czech Republic were residents from the vicinity of the Chernobyl power plant, who moved for health reasons. About 2,000 people arrived at the beginning of the 1990s and settled in different areas in the Czech Republic. British sociologist Claire Wallace referred to the postcatastro- phe movement of people from the Chernobyl area as “ecological migration” (Wallace and Stola 2001). The community was predominantly of rural origin; roughly a quarter comprised university-educated people and half were people with a secondary-school education. The Ministry of Interior of the Czech Republic ensured that the group had the possibility of moving into renovated flats and helped at least one family 78 ● Zdeneˇk Uherek and Veronika Beranská member find work, which nevertheless often did not correspond to their qualifications. Their lack of language skills and different behavior patterns prevented them from finding good jobs for many years (Val áš kov á et al. 1997). Adapting to employment that required lower qualifications, and to a lower-class environment, was a traumatizing experience for many of these migrants, and it slowed their integration into the Czech society. This migration group, which is distributed all around the Czech Republic, continues to meet whenever possible, which reinforces their former status and values from their birthplace. Some of them compensate for the loss of social position by sharp criticism of the Czech society. If we were to apply Hofstede’s concept of culture shock (Hofstede et al. 2002: 20–27), in the case of numerous well-educated families the period of (honeymoon) euphoria arising from the new situation ended relatively soon after their arrival, and the stages of disorientation and then irritability were long and deep (Hofstede et al. 2002: 23). This was also the case for Vjenceslav 2 and his family.3

Vjenceslav and the Obstacles to Him Doing Business in the New Milieu Vjenceslav was a member of one of the privileged, successful, and well- situated families from Kiev. He had university education and, at the time of the existence of the Soviet Union, he was a high-ranking military officer. After resettling in the Czech Republic, he stayed with a part of his family in a small town located not far from the capital city of Prague and the regional capital of Hradec Krá lov é . He assumed that his status and education would help him in obtaining quality position, but he was mistaken. He and other family members ended up as construction laborers and experienced deep frustration. Compensation for their lost status was evident first in their private life: an emphasis on cleanliness and the furnishing of the flat, and on the children’s results in school; an enormous interest in education and developing skills of children was very common in this group of migrants. Gradually, some family members managed to compensate at least partially for the loss of status. Vjenceslav could never return to serve in the military, but after some time he moved from being a laborer to a bouncer, and later to work in a security company, where he continued working until his retirement. He came to the Czech Republic with the intention of setting up a business but had to wait for an opportunity for 11 years. Pavlivka Iodine Spring Water ● 79

The neoliberal postcommunist economy formally welcomed new businessmen but usually it did not offer assistance in acquiring the necessary knowledge for running a business, or facilitate access to business activities. In the chaotic business milieu, enterprises could usually be launched if people had access to sufficient money to cover legal and logistical services, or if they had previous experience or the assistance of social networks comprising acquaintances, former schoolmates, or other families. We follow Dita Č erm á kov á , So ň a Schov á nkov á , and Kl á ra Fiedlerov á in identifying a common trait of the majority of businessmen, namely “a certain quantity of social capital based on personal informal networks” ( Č erm á kov á et al. 2011: 445). The saying that Czechs are a nation of schoolmates illustrates the situation well. Due to this specific economic and cultural trait, it is very difficult for a lone foreigner without the required social capital to launch a business in the local milieus of small towns and villages. 4 It is important to note that it is not only corruption as “an indication of the lack of the institution- alisation of capitalism and democracy in transition societies” (Wallace and Haerpfer 2000: 1), but predominantly the opaque legal and social context that contributes to the specific impermeability of the local environment. To overcome this barrier, immigrants to the Czech Republic often specialize in one specific branch of economy—the same as that engaged in by their compatriots and relatives. Immigrants from the Ukraine do not have a clearly assigned business area. They usually sell their labor power in the fields of construction, mechanical engineering, agriculture, and the food industry, often through the illegal or semilegal š varc (or Schwarz [black]) system (Drbohlav 1997; Uherek et al. 2008; Drbohlav and Dzú rov á 2013), occupations that do not lead to an increase of social status for a university- educated family. The family of the former military officer from Kiev, Vjenceslav, like many others, could hardly enter the network of a business economy surrounded by employees just like themselves. Thus Vjenceslav, who could not find any supportive network, had to work for a security agency until his retirement.

Business Activities and Individual Experience It took almost 11 years before Vjenceslav could take the first steps to establish his business. He was helped by his son, who in the meantime had finished studying at the law faculty in the Czech Republic and acquired knowledge of how to start a company. The crucial question for any businessman is the choice of the field of business and Vjenceslav 80 ● Zdeneˇk Uherek and Veronika Beranská decided to found his business on his most striking experience before coming to the Czech Republic—the Chernobyl nuclear catastrophe. During our research in the Ukraine, in the villages affected by the Chernobyl catastrophe, we were able to verify that people continue to be confused by what had happened. A high mortality rate, low life expec- tancy, particularly malignant tumors attributed to radiation—these are elements of fear and push factors, which stimulate the population in these areas to emigrate (Val áš kov á et al. 1997). On the other hand, habit, owning property in the contaminated zone, and additional allowances for staying in an area where increased radioactivity is assumed— the so-called funeral allowances—are the pull factors, which encourage people to stay. People produce statements that indicate resignation, but at the same time they are naturally interested in how, with the least investment possible, they can best improve their situation and protect their health (Phillips 2002; Beransk á 2013: 268). Immigrants from the Chernobyl area to the Czech Republic have similar experiences; they and their children suffered from various chronic problems, malignant tumors, particularly problems with an enlarged thyroid gland, for a long time after their exposure to radiation (Nesvadbov á and Rutsch 1995; Nesvadbov á et al. 1996). Apart from other measures, Ukrainian physicians prescribed increased doses of iodine for them. Therefore, in the Ukrainian villages in the Chernobyl area, we find a generally held conviction that it is iodine that effectively eliminates the negative results of increased radioactivity, a belief that generated increased demand for this substance that eventually led to shortages of its availability in the area. Iodine is mined in several places in the Czech Republic, including areas where spring water with increased iodine content can be found—a naturally iodinized mineral water. Thus the knowledge from the Chernobyl area inspired Vjenceslav’s business efforts in the Czech Republic. But the Chernobyl experience could not have direct effects on his business in the Czech Republic. Czech society is aware of iodine’s beneficial effect, but it does not attribute great significance to this knowledge. There are also many other substances with which water can be enriched, such as iron, magnesium, or other minerals that appear in Czech mineral waters. The possibility of purchasing and consuming iodinized water could therefore be of interest to Czech consumers, but was not in itself sufficiently inspiring as an incentive to buy the product. On the other hand, for members of a community that suffers from problems of radiation, including long-term problems with the thyroid gland, the phenomenon of iodinized water takes on a different and Pavlivka Iodine Spring Water ● 81 more intense meaning. For the majority society in the Czech Republic, the main marketing thrust is that drinking iodinized mineral water resolves problems with being overweight, while for people resettled from the Chernobyl area iodinized water predominantly means elimination of problems caused by increased radiation—a strong incentive, which does not interest the majority of Czech society unaffected by the Chernobyl catastrophe. For respondents from the area afflicted by the Chernobyl nuclear catastrophe now living in the Czech Republic, iodine, its presence, and the possibilities of its increased consumption, including information concerning deposits of iodine and the location of iodinized mineral springs, was of great interest. Respondents who had entrepreneurial ambitions also noted that existing sources of iodine in the Czech Republic are not sufficiently utilized. In the Czech Republic, a large number of strong companies control the market for mineral waters. Trade in mineral waters is lucrative there. A new brand of iodinized water could certainly appear on the market, but it would hardly arouse great interest, perhaps only among the compatriots from the Chernobyl area living in the Czech Republic, and that would be too small and scattered a group to ensure commercial success. In planning their business, our respondents therefore gradually focused on the possibility of exporting iodinized water to Ukraine. They based their marketing concept on the claim that iodine in the Czech Republic is not only accessible but also of higher quality than that found in Ukraine. They stress the advantages of the Czech iodinized water, which consists in providing consumers with iodine in a safe form (that does not clash with other substances) and as a table food supplement, while the iodine concentrate, they claim, evaporates, since a characteristic of this element in its solid state is sublimation.5 By putting the iodine concentrate into table water, the producers thus ensure regular intake without the need to provide and deal with the concentrate.

Transnational Entrepreneurship in the Czech: The Ukrainian Way As already mentioned, it is a widespread conception among the resettled Ukrainians in the Czech Republic that regular intake of iodine is very important, particularly in the areas affected by the Chernobyl nuclear catastrophe, because it can ameliorate illnesses of the thyroid gland. Vjenceslav therefore expected consumer demand for iodinized water without taking into consideration the changing conditions and the time 82 ● Zdeneˇk Uherek and Veronika Beranská that had passed since the Chernobyl catastrophe. However, he did not have enough know-how to start his own business. His son, who had completed his legal training and, unlike his father, had sufficient credit rating in the Czech Republic (the father was already of pension age), and helped his father to start the business. Thus the father, along with his son and several other relatives, founded a Czech company named Č esk ý jod spol s.r.o. (Czech Iodine Co., Ltd), whose object of activity was the production and sale of food products, letting and management of their own real estate, and technical tests and analyses.6 T h e r e p r e s e n - tatives of the company, three family members, are each based elsewhere. One lives in Prague, another in Milovice, and the third in Jarom ěř ; they thus connect with an imaginary triangle the three towns where we find communities of people resettled from Ukraine. The company was officially founded on April 15, 2002, and is headquartered in the Czech Republic, the district of Prague 6. This is, however, only a correspondence address. The company never regularly mined or produced mineral water in the Czech Republic. In their search for a market for their mineral water, the family of immigrants to the Czech Republic utilized their own contacts in Ukraine. Vjenceslav based his business plan on the importance of the product in his country of origin, utilizing his personal credibility, which he retained in Ukraine and which he failed to bring with him to the Czech Republic. The Czech firm he founded thus became a partner of a brewery in the little town of Pavlivka in the Volhynia county of Ukraine that produces beer and mineral waters. 7 In the implementation of the business plan of iodinized mineral water, it became clear that to transport water from the Czech Republic to Ukraine would not be profitable, and the company could not secure such transport. The company’s shareholders therefore decided to produce the water in the Ukrainian Pavlivka Brewery. They only transport the iodine extract from the Czech Republic to Ukraine, where it is added to water, which originates in Ukraine. The water is also bottled there and uses the trademark Iodanka, which is the trademark of mineral water of the Pavlika Brewery that has been produced since 1998. 8 Based on personal accounts, the Volyn Oblast (Volhynia Region) seemed to be a good consumer of the iodinized water. While the water is produced only in Ukraine, up to 2012 it was also mentioned on the company’s Czech Web pages. The Web site of the company provided the reader with a detailed description that draws attention to the beneficial effects of the water, including for illnesses of the thyroid gland, and gave further advice on health and ecology in Pavlivka Iodine Spring Water ● 83 the Ukrainian language. In the Czech language, there was only a short note on the water next to the name of the company, and a reference to it helping to maintain a slim figure. In 2014, the Web pages added adver- tisements for the water in Ukrainian, Russian, and English, with texts giving more general information about the health benefits of iodine.9 When we asked Vjenceslav why the company does not distribute the iodinized mineral water in the Czech Republic too, he replied that production in Ukraine is easier for him and he is not sure how much interest exists for this product in the Czech Republic. He mentioned a similar firm in the Czech Republic in Luha č ovice, which added iodine to the water, which, however, went out of business.

Conclusion The case described is an example of a transnational business realized under the specific post-transformation conditions of the Central and East European economy. It is an illustration of transnational trade activities, which, on the one hand, cross the borders of the state and the European Union and, on the other, indicate the limits of a small supranational business in the Central and East European region. The business could be seen as an expression of immigrants’ effort to integrate in the new host society, and the new market economy milieu, while it is realized through networks and discourses partially built in the socialist past and partially accommodated to new conditions. In 1991, when he moved from Ukraine to the Czech Republic, Vjenceslav wanted to overcome two insecurities: the insecurity of the effects of the Chernobyl nuclear catastrophe and the insecurity of economic and political development in Ukraine. He intended to transfer in space not only his body but also his social status, abilities, and beliefs, and to integrate them into new conditions of the capitalist state and market economy. This intention appeared to be unrealistic. Migration of bodies follows different rules than migration of statuses, skills, and education. The status of a high-ranking Soviet army officer from the Ukraine cannot be replicated in the Czech Republic, where the military—including army officers—do not have a good reputation, 10 and the former Soviet army is considered an army of occupation and an institution exercising the power of the communist regime. Vjenceslav’s prestigious former qualification became totally useless, his credibility dubious, and his education incompatible with the new setting. He transferred to Czech society only his body and his ability to do unqualified work, while his status, prestige, and skills were continually honored 84 ● Zdeneˇk Uherek and Veronika Beranská only among compatriots in the Czech Republic and among majority inhabitants in the area of origin. Vjenceslav’s case confirms “the conventional wisdom that labor migrants from non-EU countries tend to cluster in the ‘lower’ labor market segments[,] often taking marginal low-skilled, low-paid, and low-prestige jobs” (Leontiyeva 2010: 18). It also exemplifies how the complications related to the transfer of status through space and time in postsocialist countries are frequently a cause of nostalgia, “an emotion that emerges again and again in accounts of the post socialist world” (Heady and Gambold Miller 2006: 34). Vjenceslav’s communication with the majority inhabitants in the Czech Republic assumed a new quality only when mediated by his son, a young lawyer educated in the Czech Republic, who built up his status in the new conditions in the destination country. His case supports our experience that the second generation of this ecological migration is relatively successful in the Czech milieu (Val áš kov á et al. 1997). Differences between this type of migrant and the majority population are quickly overcome when it comes to school children, but only partly and with difficulty among adults (Uherek 2009: 290). The example takes into consideration human health and people’s need to improve it. A means for this venture is developed in the newly inhabited destination, while the possibility of its application is found in the source country. The founders of the iodinized water project had already lived in the Czech Republic for 11 years when they finally founded the company. Despite that, their efforts to do business could not succeed in the Czech Republic. Instead, their knowledge of the context and discourse allowed them to conduct business on the territory of Ukraine and not of the Czech Republic, that is, once again, in their source country. Our example of conducting a business selling mineral water demonstrates not only how hard it is to implement a business plan considering the difficulties of orientation in a new local discourse, but also how hard it is to penetrate the Czech market with a new plan if it is not implemented within the ethnic economy—“the schoolmate network” to which we referred at the beginning of the chapter—or in connection with existing global customer demand. We could also find examples of businesses run by immigrants who started new companies in the Czech Republic, but these too are often somewhat paradoxical in nature. Examples include a small Russian furniture company working almost exclusively for Russians in Prague, with all material, tools, and equipment being transported from Russia, which seems quite uneconomical Pavlivka Iodine Spring Water ● 85 to outside observers. Similarly, we could name a Ukrainian businessman operating restaurant services who had the whole restaurant building sent in a container from the Ukraine. The recruitment of employees from the ranks of compatriots sometimes seems similarly paradoxical, as the labor force can be recruited in the Czech Republic. These phenomena show the complicated routes to integration, and the barriers immigrants encounter after passing through state frontiers. Our case shows us that the most important factors influencing the decision making of migrants include the circumstances of the migration, barriers in the labor market, the abilities and experiences of the individual acquired in the country of origin and the target country, and the social networks created throughout the immigrant economy. Migrants who come from countries where they had already gained experience of doing business, or where conducting business was normal, are in a different situation from migrants who come from countries with no experience of private business and who have to go through a difficult process to arrive at a decision to set up a business due to the barriers they encountered in the labor market. This applies to examples that are not confined to the ethnic economy and explains the differences among particular national groups of immigrants setting up businesses in the Czech Republic, which were identified by Dita Č erm á kov á and her research team ( Č erm á kov á et al. 2011). Once Vjenceslav and his relatives encountered difficulties in entering into the primary labor market, the business project offered them an alternative solution of starting a transnational business. Transnational trade and transnationalism follow the process of economic diversification in postsocialist states. The immigrant economy forms interesting transnational ties, whose effects may have both positive and negative consequences. The ethnographic example, which was the subject of this chapter, also relativizes the concept of the postsocialism in general. It shows us that the epoch of postsocialism is not simply a period of time span but also involves social memory and experience. Some generations in the Czech Republic intensively live postsocialism in their everyday lives, especially those whose personal lives were seriously impacted by the social changes of 1989/90, while younger generations never experienced this period, to which they lack ties.

Notes 1 . The chapter was created with the support of the E Ú AV Č R, v. v. i. RVO: 68378078. 2 . All names of interviewees used in the article are pseudonyms. 86 ● Zdeneˇk Uherek and Veronika Beranská

3 . Vjenceslav and his family were contacted soon after their arrival in the Czech Republic in 1991, and then several times during the 1990s and 2000s. The last contact with the family was in 2013. 4 . Inverse examples, however, are also described in the anthropological literature. Maruš ka Svaš ek, for instance, analyzed the social situation in a Czech village where a Dutch foreigner successfully expanded his business (Sva š ek 2008). 5 . That is, the evaporation of a solid substance without transition to a liquid state; this process is observable with the naked eye: if you leave iodine in the air, in a few hours everything in the area is covered with a yellow tinge. 6 . See: http://www.detail.cz/firma/26692929-cesky-jod-spol-s-ro-irska-796–1 -praha-6/, accessed July 17, 2014. 7 . For more about the brewery (JSC Pavlivka Brewery), see: http://www.bpart .kiev.ua/eng/cat2004/?s=1&i=153, accessed July 17, 2014. See also (Pro nas 2013): http://navolyni.com/projekt.php?projekt=mineralna-voda-yodanka -pavlivska&m=1 , accessed July 17, 2014. 8 . S o u r c e : Ukraine Today. Catalogue of leading enterprises of Ukraine. http:// www.rada.com.ua/eng/catalog/13987/ , accessed May 22, 2014. 9 . See Jodanka Pavliska: http://jodanka.com/uk , accessed July 17, 2014. 10 . For more on this see, for instance, Č ervinkov á (2006).

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CHAPTER 5

Giving Birth in Berlin: Reproductive Experiences of Polish Migrant Women

I z a b e l l a M a i n

Introduction Marta, 1 a 31-year-old Polish woman who had been living in Berlin for more than seven years and was married to a German coworker, was 32 weeks pregnant when it was confirmed that her baby boy was in the breech position. It was Marta’s first pregnancy. The child was very much anticipated by the couple, who were very aware and reflective, and put in a lot of effort to make the pregnancy safe. Marta spoke very good German yet she was concerned about communication with medical personnel so she decided to find a “Polish midwife.” By “Polish midwife” she meant Polish by origin, yet with practical experience in health care in Berlin. Marta met with “Pani Krystyna” several times and discussed which of the possible places where the child could be born best matched the couple’s expectations and how to prepare for the birth. Pani Krystyna was expected to take care of Marta and her baby before and after the birth, as is usual in Berlin. Different midwives, employed by a hospital, would be in charge during the birth, which was planned to be in hospital. The couple chose a small hospital near their home. When the couple learnt about the breech position they consulted Pani Krystyna, an obstetrician, and the hospital’s head ob-gyn consultant and decided to go for moxibustion, 2 a Chinese traditional way of turning the baby, but it was not successful. Marta and her husband decided to try a vaginal birth (rather than the more common cesarean section 90 ● Izabella Main in cases of breech babies), which was supported by Pani Krystyna and the hospital’s medical director. When they arrived at the hospital after strong contractions a young doctor in charge was in favor of doing a cesarean section, but the couple were convinced there should be a vaginal delivery and asked for an experienced midwife. The situation was tense, consultation with the hospital’s medical director took place over the phone, and the mother was allowed to try the natural way. With the support of an older midwife the baby was born vaginally. Marta remembered that she and her husband were very annoyed about the situation of their decision being questioned. The story of Marta, a young educated Polish migrant woman living and working in Berlin exemplifies a reproductive experience within the German health care system. This chapter aims to analyze women’s situation at the intersection of two aspects: migration and reproductive health. The leading questions for the research and analysis were how Polish migrant women described their experiences of giving birth in a culture other than their own, what challenges they faced, what strategies were used to adapt to local medical cultures, and how migration changes perspectives on reproductive health and rights. The other set of questions concerned the access of Polish migrants to health care in Germany: who had access, what strategies were used to obtain it, and how access was negotiated. I argue that, in spite of various difficulties resulting from migration, around issues such as access to health care, knowledge of the local medical insurance system, knowledge of specific vocabulary and different cultural patterns, the majority of young migrant women interviewed in Berlin had positive experiences of the German system of reproductive care, and held positive opinions about it. Many women compared their experiences with stories they heard from friends and family in Poland, and some had practical contact with health care system in Poland. The migration of a large number of Poles to many European countries has been analyzed in a great number of publications, yet the issue of their access to health care and experience with different medical systems is hardly addressed. One of the exceptions is study by Goodwin et al. (2013), which examined perceived changes in health and access to health care services in the UK among Polish migrants. The issue of reproductive care of other ethnic groups of migrants was addressed in several studies concerning diverse aspects of pregnancy among women coming from non-Western to Western countries. A study of Iranian women residing in Sweden focused on their dietary practices during pregnancy and lactation (Ahlqvist and Wirf ä lt 2000). Giving Birth in Berlin ● 91

Pregnancy planning and a strong family orientation among Mexican immigrant women in North Carolina was described by Wilson and McQuiston (2006). Risk profiles and birth outcomes of immigrant women—Mexican in the United States and North Africans in France and Belgium—were also compared to those of native populations (Guendelman et al. 1999). A study of Bangladeshi mothers in London pointed out how their experiences of pregnancy and birth were mediated by power relations among family members and medical personnel (Griffith 2009). These studies compared migrant and native populations and centered on the position of women and the family. The reproductive situation of Polish migrant women in Ireland was studied by Wę grzynowska, who pointed out that their expectations of the medicalization of birth resulted from knowledge about health care in Poland (Wę grzynowska 2012). The issue of migrants’ access to health care in Berlin and their antenatal and birth experiences has not yet been addressed in literature to my knowledge. This article is based on ethnographic research among Polish migrant women living in Berlin, conducted since 2011. A few interviews were also carried out with two Polish midwives working professionally in Berlin. The women interviewed about reproductive care arrived in Berlin and gave birth during the last decade, while the midwives arrived in the late 1980s and were asked about their professional experiences. A few expert interviews were conducted with members of Polish organizations in Berlin. Additionally, Internet fora for Poles in Berlin, Poles in Germany, and Polish mothers abroad were read to better understand the challenges faced by migrants in accessing health care abroad. I decided to focus on antenatal and birth experiences, hence other reproductive issues, such as family planning, abortion, contraception, sexual life, and the menopause are beyond the scope of this chapter. Reproductive health has been scrutinized by anthropologists for decades (Jordan 1978; Sargent 2004; Martin 2001; Inhorn 2006), documenting that “birth is globally a culturally marked life crisis event that is socially patterned as well as being a biological phenomenon” (Sargent 2004: 224). Pregnancy and birth change women’s status within the family and society. Therefore I was interested in how pregnancy and birth change relationships, the family situation, and the legal situation of women. What were differences in patterns of birth between German and Polish health care, and how was German health care experienced by Polish women. I start my analysis by presenting the situation of Polish migration to Berlin. This is followed by a description of access to health care in Germany, strategies of accessing health care without insurance, the 92 ● Izabella Main midwives’ perspective, conflicts around entitlements, and transnational pregnancy care. In the second section of the chapter, I address the position of doctors and midwives in birth practices in Berlin, location of birth, and power relations during birth.

Recent Polish Migration to Berlin Berlin was already a common destination among Poles before 1989, and the number of Poles in the city has constantly increased in recent decades (Prasza ł owicz 2010; Nowosielski 2012). There were 43,984 Polish citizens registered as residents in Berlin in December 2011, 3 y e t unofficially as many as 100,000 Poles might live there. Many Polish Berliners are circular and seasonal transnational migrants, working in Berlin and usually living in western regions of Poland. The number of Poles settled in Berlin is constantly increasing and many Poles come to study and to work. In 2012 the number of Polish students in Berlin was about 1,500, and many also study at the Viadrina European University, commuting from Berlin (Hreczuk 2012). Nearly half of foreign students decide to stay in Germany after their studies and this tendency applies to Poles as well (Fuchs and Mierzwiń ska 2013). Since May 1, 2011, the German labor market has been open to Poles with no restrictions, which has had two consequences. First, there were expectations of a larger inflow of Poles, yet, as scholars pointed out, the potential of migration to Germany had been realized in earlier years by other forms of legalization of residence and work (Frelak and Ł ada 2011: 17), and the increase was gradual but smaller than expected. Second, the Poles who already lived in Germany could legalize their stay and work situation. Many Polish migrants worked as self-employed entrepreneurs, which helped them to legalize their stay and work (Miera 2008). A characteristic of Polish migration to Berlin is the geographic proximity to Poland, which contributes to Poles sustaining strong transnational connections. Polish migration to Berlin is balanced in terms of gender, yet Polish women are a majority in Polish–German couples (Jaroszewska 2003). In my study I focus on 30 migrant women who lived in Berlin during the time of the interviews in 2011–13, and who plan to stay there longer or permanently. Many of the women came to Berlin either for higher education or to join a German partner whom they had met previously in Poland or other locations. They often have good or very good knowledge of the German language as result of their studies and family situation. As shown by Miller-Idriss in research about young generation Giving Birth in Berlin ● 93 of Germans, German identity is determined by cultural assimilation to a German way of life more than by “blood-based criteria” (2009: 173) and competence in German language was mentioned as the primary means of integration for foreigners and “one of central ways in which they [foreigners] identify with Germany” (2009: 156). I argue that good knowledge of German language, together with a German diploma and working experience in Berlin facilitated the employment of many of the women interviewed. The common perception of Poles in Berlin is that many are “invisi- ble” (Szostak 2014). Such an image of the Polish community also results from diverse migration stories related to different waves of migration: some of my respondents presently holding German citizenship came in the 1980s, benefiting from German ethnic origin ( Sp ä taussiedler), marriage migration, and political migration, other women came as children in the 1990s, and other group came as adults in the past two decades, mostly for education, relationships, and employment.

Access to Health Care in Germany I begin by making the point that health care is both a right—a ccording to the World Health Organization (WHO) constitution—and a c ommodity—profit takes priority and cost-effectiveness becomes a key mission (Waterson 2014; Rylko-Bauer and Farmer 2002; Sienkiewicz 2010). Access to health care results from individual actions, policies of the state, and Germany’s insurance system regulations. Health insurance in Germany is either granted within the statutory system or through private health care insurers, both depending on employment status and income. Health care for circular and temporal migrants coming from European Union (EU) countries is provided only in emergency cases abroad when the European Health Insurance Card (EHIC) is issued. European health systems are gradually adapting to the needs of migrants (Spallek et al. 2010), yet the situation of unauthorized or uninsured migrants is not addressed in any systematic way (cf. Casta ñ eda 2012; Huschke 2014). It is not possible for undocumented migrants to sign up for health insurance because they usually lack a passport with a valid visa, proof of address, and/or an official registration with their local registry office. Citizens of EU countries reside in Germany legally, yet some are not entitled to insurance and rely on informal networks and humanitarian organizations (Huschke 2014; Irfaeya et al. 2008). On January 1, 2009, health insurance in Germany became obligatory for residents, including those from EU countries. Polish circular 94 ● Izabella Main migrants mostly relied on EHICs issued in Poland as long as they were entitled to health care there (which was not always the case, since to get it one needed to work or register as unemployed or as a family member of an employed person). According to information from the Polish Social Council in Berlin (Polnischer Sozialrat), Poles without German insurance used health care only in emergencies, after accidents and injuries, and had to pay for it themselves, or they were referred to a few charity clinics and centers. Migrants appear to have a worse objective and subjective health status overall than the general population in Germany, yet this varies a lot, depending on ethnic group, social situation, length of migration, German language acquisition, health condition, religion or Weltanschauung (Knipper 2011; Casta ñ eda 2012; Irfaeya et al. 2008). Research also shows that maternal mortality rates of migrants have almost come down to the same level as the German rate; however, infant mortality is still higher, particularly among recent migrants (Spallek et al. 2010). Maternal health care of immigrants was addressed in a report by the International Organization for Migration, which described the present policies of several countries, including Germany, and made recommendations (Machado et al. 2009). Irregular migrant women in Germany might have access to antenatal and postnatal health care under the condition of accident and emergency treatment, but depending on assessment of medical staff. Furthermore, public officials are obliged to report undocumented migrants, which creates a conflict between the right to health and migration control4 ( M a c h a d o et al. 2009: 13–14; FRA 2011: 16, 23; Chauvin et al. 2009: 9). Casta ñ eda, in a study of a Berlin hospital admitting unauthorized and uninsured migrants in the years between 2004 and 2008, listed Poles among 55 other nationalities. The most common reason to visit the hospital was to obtain antenatal care, yet Poles were not using it. Antenatal services were mostly used by Ghanaian and Vietnamese women, since it was not possible to travel to their home countries for delivery (Castañ eda 2009: 1556). Practices of negotiating access to health care in Berlin are connected to increasing mobility and fluidity of migration. While the majority of Polish women interviewed were insured in Berlin as result of their student status or employment, it was clear that circular and temporary female migrants looked for ways to access health care in Berlin, which was seen as much better than in Poland. Women obtained local insurance by marriage, signed up with private health insurers, paid their own expenses, or used personal connections to access the care system in Berlin during pregnancy or birth. Giving Birth in Berlin ● 95

To give birth in Germany was an appealing option for some Polish women living in Poland who had no health insurance in Germany yet had family members or other networks there. They learnt from friends and the media about positive personal experiences and higher standards for no fees. The most famous were the cases of “sudden birth” in Schwedt and Passewalk, small towns near Szczecin, common between 2004 and 2007: Polish births were the majority of births in two hospitals, which also employed Polish doctors, midwives, and nurses.5 S u c h cases were also mentioned by a few women interviewed in Berlin. The National Health Fund in Poland had to pay the costs of these births, which were much higher than in Poland and the prosecutor was noti- fied of this. The media reported that women had to pay the costs of the birth on their own. There was much media coverage of the possibility of suits and invoices for the individuals involved, which led to a decrease of birth-related cross-border medical travels. As shown in the literature, medical cross-border travels to receive health care of better quality and expertise are a common global phenomenon (Runnels et al. 2014; Carrera and Bridges 2006: 449; Whittaker et al. 2010: 337; Main 2014). The EU treaty of 2008 states that the main competence over health services lies with member states, though there are actions and initiatives to increase access to health services, such as the Cross-border Health Care Directive (Stankiewicz 2010). It was only in October 2014 that the Polish parliament and the president signed the law on transborder care (the EU directive was passed in 2011), which gave the patients the right to receive reimbursement for health care abroad, but only up to the level of Polish expenses.6 This change of law has encouraged patients to access mostly Czech health care for some ambulatory treatments, but the cost of treatments within the German health care system are too high and discourage medical travels.

Strategies of Accessing Health Care without Insurance Among the women interviewed in Berlin a few had problems with health insurance. In some cases it was pregnancy that forced women to clarify their insurance situation. When Zofia (pseudonym) learnt about her pregnancy, she became interested in her insurance situation and she found out that her type of contract actually did not provide her with health insurance in Germany. Zofia and her Polish husband lived in Berlin but paid the taxes in Poland.

It was a difficult journey, people were nice but it was really complicated, we were in the dark . . . we had to take a long path, I went here and there 96 ● Izabella Main

and nobody could tell me, but we signed and signed and signed papers, finally a representative of a private insurer met us but we wanted the state insurance . . . shortly before the birth we decided to pay on our own for antenatal care and birth, it was too stressful to take care of insurance.

Since both future parents were migrants they were in a particularly difficult situation as neither knew the local system. During the first months of pregnancy, Zofia visited a gynecologist privately in Wroc ł aw, where she lived before, yet because she and her husband lived in Berlin she wanted to give birth in Germany. They decided that she would give birth in a Geburtshaus (a house of birth), because it was financially a smaller burden than going to a hospital. She said “To be honest it was the main reason: that it was cheaper.” After the birth she claimed that it was only because of her insurance situation that she made the choice, but actually she was very satisfied and would choose it next time. A few months later her insurance situation was clarified, she learnt that she was insured and claimed back the money she paid. Another Polish women, Ewa, also gave birth in Geburtshaus for financial reasons since she had no health insurance, yet after a few years, when she got state health insurance, she preferred to deliver next child in a hospital. The reason was that she felt more secure there. Alicja joined her German partner in Berlin when she was already pregnant. She had previously lived in the United States—they met there and had a long-distance relationship. Her partner was insured with a private health insurer in Germany and she remembered that it was difficult to get permission for her to join in. She had no employment history in Germany so was not entitled to join a state insurer. Finally, shortly before the birth, the problem was solved and the cost of her delivery was partly covered by the private insurer but partly by her. A quickly arranged marriage was a solution for another Polish– German couple after they found out about their pregnancy. Jola lived in Berlin with her German partner, yet worked in a Polish–German border town, S ł ubice, and had Polish health insurance. The pregnancy was threatened and Jola was hospitalized in S ł ubice. She remembered that doctors were not very helpful, the standard of the hospital was poor, and she felt hopeless. The couple wanted to be together in Berlin during the pregnancy, so Jola resigned from her job in S ł ubice and they married, so she was covered by the state insurance of her husband. She said: “We got married just so I immediately had the German insurance. It does not sound romantic or sentimental but such was the situation.” Giving Birth in Berlin ● 97

Jola found a gynecology doctor in Berlin, pregnancy continued well, and she gave birth in a hospital which she had chosen. A few other Polish–German couples had similar experiences of getting married in order to have health insurance. While in the late 1980s and early 1990s Polish women got married to German partners to legalize their stay in Germany, in recent decades health insurance has become one of practical reasons for marriages. This change shows that, after EU enlargement, migration became much easier for Poles, yet access to health and social insurance is a challenge. Apart from marriage, another strategy to get access to health care in Berlin was to use personal connections. A sister of one midwife came to Berlin as a medical traveler to give birth in a private clinic in Berlin where the midwife worked in 2000. The midwife said:

My sister checked in her home town about the expenses, and it was a lot to pay, for a single room, for a company at birth, for a nurse . . . her husband was traveling a lot, and she really wanted to give birth with my assistance, so I just arranged it with my boss.

Everything was prepared in Berlin, and the delivery went well. The problems started when the young mother with a child returned to Poland and visited the local health center: the child had no immuniza- tion, which is ordinarily given in Polish hospitals right after the birth but much later in Germany. This issue was resolved, yet her case was seen as exceptional by medical personnel in her home town. Such reproductive travels were quite rare since they required personal connections to use private health services free of charge to give birth in Berlin. There is no data on how common it was for Poles living in Berlin to be uninsured. On the Internet forum Netkobiety.pl (net women.pl), in a subsection called “Pregnancy in Germany—What Formalities Are Necessary?,” 7 many Polish women asked about arranging their birth in Germany when they were not insured but their Polish partners lived and worked there. As mentioned earlier, it has been obligatory to have insurance in Germany since 2009, yet some Poles were still working without contracts or on contracts with companies registered in Poland. Differences in the quality of pregnancy health care paid for by statutory and private insurers between Poland and Germany resulted in attempts by Poles to use health care abroad when their partners lived there, in spite of nationally organized systems of care and limitations on health care access in foreign countries. 98 ● Izabella Main

Midwives’ Perspective: Conflicts around Entitlements Two Polish midwives whom I interviewed in Berlin mentioned that they had often been contacted by Polish women in Berlin seeking prenatal care without health insurance. They did not examine the details of personal situations, yet they supposed that these women were circular migrants or unregistered migrants who moved after becoming pregnant and wanted to stay in Berlin and benefit from high-quality care. The midwives provided care to a few women whose insurance situation was unclear, and got no compensation from the insurers. They both had a few cases of women paying their own for care, but tried to avoid such situations. It was less comfortable, since fewer visits were planned due to the expense. Such a situation shows the involvement of pregnant women without insurance, who had to choose the scope of antenatal and postnatal care, and sometimes restrict it in the politics of entanglements. The concept of the politics of entanglement refers to women striving for the best health care, yet subordinating their own health, as well as that of their baby, to financial considerations. It was their free choice to receive care, yet sometimes situations were unclear and women were not sure about their entitlements (e.g., Zofia—mentioned earlier—was misinformed, paid for her own care, and later claimed it back). Such situations were difficult for the midwives as well, since they wanted to provide the best possible care but were restricted by the insurers and state regulations. One midwife said: “I am surprised by the attitude of Polish women who live here but do not work and think that they have a right to use everything.” She explained that some women thought that she was obliged to take care of every woman who was Polish, whereas she was self-employed and needed an income. She opposed requests for support based on common nationality and felt it was unreasonable to expect her to provide special treatment for Polish women. Several women interviewed in Berlin mentioned getting a lot of support from local migratory (and Web) female networks of Poles. Therefore, they expected more support from midwives of Polish nationality, though, at the same time, it has been said that Poles do not support other Poles (cf. Irek 2011). Besides, these women also had problems with covering hospital expenses and midwives were not willing to mediate in such situations. Unclear health insurance situations, as well as lack of insurance, led to tensions between midwives and pregnant women involving caring and financial aspects. Furthermore, midwives could act either as supporters within health care system, facilitating access to hospital or birth house Giving Birth in Berlin ● 99 care, or as gatekeepers. At the same time, dissatisfied pregnant women had the possibility to spread negative opinions, for example, on Internet fora, and negatively influence midwives’ future self-employment.

Transnational Pregnancy Care A few migrant women had used health care both in Poland and Germany as result of their transnational way of life and/or lack of insurance in Germany during (part or all) of their pregnancy. For Zofia and Jola, mentioned earlier, transnational care was not a matter of choice and double checking what medical staff have said, as in the case of Polish migrant women in Dublin (W ę grzynowska 2012: 261), but resulted from their lack of insurance and their financial constraints. They talked about it as a difficulty which they encountered, yet without larger negative consequences. Another experience was recalled by Helena, who lost her baby shortly after birth in a hospital in Berlin due to a severe genetic illness, which was not diagnosed before the birth. She had actually had the prenatal tests in a private medical practice in Poland and omitted one diagnostic screening. She said:

My doctor reassured me that my pregnancy was so much “by the book” that the tests were not so important. He was so wrong. But even at the later checks he missed it. And the problem was so obvious to doctors in Berlin.

Her migratory circular experience—living in Germany but working in Poland—influenced access to pregnancy care. Helena was working in Poland and had the Polish national insurance, yet—like many Polish women—she preferred to visit a private gynecological practice8 t h a n doctors working within national health insurance system. Private health care was seen by her as better, more reliable, and safe. Since the genetic illness was fatal, it was more a question of awareness and knowledge than of prevention. Still Helena was regretful about her choice of a doctor and believed that he made several mistakes in antenatal care. During her next pregnancy Helena relied entirely on doctors in Berlin. When I asked why she preferred to used expensive care in Poland during her first pregnancy instead of the German system, she admitted that Polish care was familiar to her and in Berlin everything was new; she spoke hardly any German and there were administrative problems about her insurance in Germany. I argue that she is an example of 100 ● Izabella Main a position in which pregnant migrant women lacking insurance have a double negative status: as migrants they have often less knowledge and access to information (due to the language barrier, and the different structure of the insurance system and health care), and less support from their family and social network. And, as pregnant women they have new needs for care and experience worse well-being, as well as changing employment situations and/or more dependency on partners. In the situation of transborder and transnational care these challenges were often reinforced.

Doctors and Midwives during Birth Practices in Berlin In this section I describe the pregnancy experiences of Polish women in Berlin to explain the reasons for the high valuation of local health care. I focus on structural and personal aspects. Health care during pregnancy in Berlin is provided by a gynecology doctor and a midwife, both chosen by the pregnant women. Many women found their doctor in the neighborhood, often asking friends and coworkers for sugges- tions. Language preferences were hardly mentioned; only one woman searched for a Polish doctor and, after a few visits, changed because she was not satisfied. On the Internet fora, however, there were many entries about finding a good Polish-speaking doctor in Berlin. In Germany pregnant women are entitled to several visits from a midwife, before and after the delivery, all paid for by the insurer. Midwives were usually chosen from those available in the district, and several pregnant Poles looked for Polish midwives. Marta, mentioned in the introduction, stated:

I looked for a Polish midwife, this situation was new to me, I did not know how I manage, new vocabulary, new situation, stressful situation [ . . . ] it took me a while to find a Polish midwife who agreed to take care of me.

Pani Krystyna visited Marta three times before the delivery, daily after the delivery for two weeks, and later less frequently; she stayed one hour on average, consulted on phone and came whenever needed until the baby was eight months old. This strong supportive position of midwives is characteristic also of the Netherlands and Sweden (Jordan 1993), while in Poland midwives’ assistance is very limited. Such assistance was present over recent decades in Poland, and the new regulations in 2012 introduced the right to four postnatal visits by a midwife (the Giving Birth in Berlin ● 101 majority of women only choose their midwife, but never use their services due to lack of knowledge or access). The availability of such intense and long-term help in Berlin was a surprise to all the interviewed women and most were very content with it. Midwives differed not only in terms of language competence but also in what they offered. Jolanta was less satisfied with the care of her midwife; she found her too alternative and nature-oriented, and would have preferred a more biomedical approach. Almost all the women interviewed in Berlin knew a lot about health care available to pregnant women in Poland from previous personal experience and family and friends; many also used private gynecology health care before migration. This previous knowledge also shaped their perceptions, expectations, and actions (Akrich and Pasveer 2004: 81). Whereas they expected to visit doctors during pregnancy, they were surprised by the wide range of support offered by midwives both before and after the delivery. The nursing profession has a strong position in German health care system, and it has been gradually incorporating a multicultural approach, resulting from both curricula changes and an influx of health professionals from other countries, including a large number of nurses and midwives (Castañ eda 2012: 833–834). Castañ eda stressed this aspect because of the emphasis on “holistic biological, social, and mental health, nursing has readily viewed patients’ life histories and culture (whether German or foreign) as central to care” (2012: 834). In Jordan’s classic study, midwives played the role of “a competent person” providing services, for example, administering a pudendal nerve block; their function is to “stand by, watch for complications, give encouragement” (Jordan 1993: 63). In West Germany, the status of midwives decreased after World War II in parallel to increasing medicalization of birth, and it was only in the 1990s that this tendency began to be reversed (Sandall et al. 2001: 124–5). The legislation passed in 1997 by German parliament substantially broadened responsibilities of midwives and raised their salaries (Sandall et al. 2001: 127). They work as independent or hospital midwives, and their role increased in both settings. The midwives see the women as not a patient but as a person who is capable of giving birth, and such a view results from a philosophy of birth as a natural event in contrast to medical event (Jordan 1993: 53; Graham and Oakley 1991: 101). Strongly medicalized birth is characteristic of the Polish birth culture (similar to Lithuanian practices described in Chalmers and Jeckaite 2010). It has been questioned as a result of a social campaign of a foundation called “Childbirth with 102 ● Izabella Main

Dignity” 9 (women have more choices in private hospital health care, which is available only to very few).

Territory of Birth The second major difference between Polish and German health care was related to the issue of “location of birth.” The choice between hospital, Geburtshaus , and a private house was a novelty for Polish migrant women in Berlin; it is also relatively new phenomenon in Germany. The first Geburtshaus was opened in West Germany only in 1985, in Giessen; in 2012, around 1.5 percent of children were born outside a hospital setting in Germany (10,734; in Berlin: 1,488) (Loytved 2012). Homebirths are completely marginal in Poland (around 120 cases in 2011), 10 and the last free-standing birth center in L ę dziny (Silesia) was closed in 2008 (after 57 years). The majority of women interviewed in Berlin had chosen hospital for the delivery of the baby, yet three had decided on a Geburtshaus , and for two of the already mentioned women (Ewa and Zofia) the choice was based on financial reasons. Another women, Helena, chose to deliver in Geburtshaus for ideological motives (interestingly her husband was a doctor), yet she had to be moved to a hospital during the birth due to medical complications. Zofia described her experience of birth in Geburtshaus : “It was a normal house, there was an intimate atmosphere, my husband and mum were with me, and a midwife, just this . . .” Her birth was “a great and natural experience,” “one of my best memories in life.” The discourse of natural birth was very present in several stories of the women; they mentioned the emphasis on it during antenatal classes, doing yoga and other exercises, learning natural ways of dealing with pain, and support for natural, vaginal birth. Many women stressed that they were encouraged to give birth naturally, unless a cesarean section was necessary. Births in Geburtshaus and homebirths took place in more natural setting than a hospital, reflecting a philosophy of a natural event in women’s life as well as women’s agency. A strong position on natural births also goes in parallel with high acceptance of complementary and alternative medical practices and natural healing in German health care system (Maretzki 1989; Frank and Stollberg 2004).

Power Relations during Birth An important issue mentioned by women interviewed in Berlin was their agency and decision-making power. An example of Justyna is very Giving Birth in Berlin ● 103 telling: she gave birth first in a large town in Poland and second in Berlin, in both cases by a cesarean section. She said that she was in a privileged position in Polish hospital since her close relatives were well-respected doctors and professors in the local medical school. Still, Justyna claimed that it did not help and her birth in Poland was the worst possible experience:

Coarse doctors and midwives, very oppressive treatment of me, silly bans, for example against wearing panties, resulting in lots of blood everywhere, and nobody cleaned it up. They explained this ban by the necessity to be ready for medical examination. Once I was asleep and a doctor made a gynecological examination, without even saying hallo or asking. There was a sudden decision about cc [cesarean section] and when I asked why, there was no explanation. It was a huge stress, experience of fear. I was under a tyranny, in complete control of an institution which took over me, my body, my baby . . . The only nice people were medical students, trainees, who knew who I was, and the exam session was just ahead, but they had no knowledge, experience or power.

Justyna stated that after this experience she was negative about another pregnancy and birth in Poland. It has been argued by Lorentzen (2008: 52) that women are “active participants in medical power relations as they attempt to achieve particular health states.” For Justyna negative experiences and lack of power resulted in a strategy of avoidance; she decided not to become pregnant and give birth in Poland again. This changed after migration to Germany. Her story of birth in Berlin was very different. Her doctor suggested a cesarean section due to her previous experience, but advised her to consult another doctor to get a second opinion so she “will be able to reach a decision.” Justyna had the right to decide, without any financial payments, how she was going to give birth; the doctor said that the decision was hers, because it was her who was deciding about lives of her and her baby. The second consultation reassured her about the cesarean section and the date was set. In the hospital her experience was very positive:

I was well informed about the procedure, a doctor came to my room, said his name and explained that he would carry out the surgery, another [doctor] came to explain a short delay and apologized for it. I knew they remembered about me, everybody was really nice, they had this constant smile, you know, I know it is a question of training, but it was so 104 ● Izabella Main

nice . . . I could always call for a midwife and when I apologized once for calling she said: but it is my job. I could see they were grey because of overload of work but they still tried and were really really nice.

Justyna repeated several times that main difference was the attitude of medical personnel, treating her as a person, and giving her the right to decide. This issue of giving power to women was mentioned by several Polish migrants who talked about their birth experiences. It has been shown by Jordan (1993) that women who are empowered during the process of birth perform much better: the birth was faster with fewer interventions and complications. Jordan formulated the concept of authoritative knowledge based on the observation that

for any particular domain several knowledge systems exist, some of which, by consensus, come to carry more weight than others, either because they explain the state of the world better for the purposes at hand (efficacy) or because they are associated with a stronger power base (structural superiority), and usually both. (Jordan 1997: 56)

Authoritative knowledge is exercised by medical personnel in the situation of birth, especially when the birth takes place in a hospital, under the control of doctors and midwives (midwives often being in an inferior position to doctors). Sargent and Bascope (1996: 2016) extended the concept of authoritative knowledge to include shared experience and social position; reconfiguration of power might lead to trust or obedience. While in Polish birth culture the authoritative knowledge combined with power of medical personnel leads to obedience, experiences of Polish migrants in Berlin show that their authoritative knowledge is as valid, leading to trust in the health care system. Power relations at birth are negotiated, and women might be experiencing both benefits and costs. Since they were making the decision about their birth, they might feel more responsibility for the out- come. The case of Marta, described in the introduction, exemplifies a decision to give birth in natural way when a doctor recommended a cesarean section. She emphasized how important it was for her and her husband to follow their own decision and how annoyed they were when a doctor challenged it. She also mentioned the burden of responsibility: how would they feel if something went wrong? Finally, another cultural aspect characterizing birth culture in Germany was efficiency, mentioned by a few migrants. Helena stated Giving Birth in Berlin ● 105

“We, the Poles talk about dignity, respect, and other fuzzy concepts, and the Germans talk about efficiency. This counts. The better they take care of you sooner you are fine. So simple.” Migrant women connected the high quality of health care with efficiency (Payer 1996: 77) and a practical approach that led to careful support for a pregnant women and her baby. The benefits were seen on the side of women, family, and medical personnel. Efficiency in structural terms was introduced after health care reforms in Germany in 2003, which included paying according to diagnosis-related groups (Busse et al. 2011). The interviewed women had yet no knowledge of health care system reforms, and they referred to the stereotypical image of Germans as being more efficient and practical.

Conclusions An Internet article published online at a Polish Internet forum mypolacy.de on December 24, 2014, was titled: “Do You Give Birth in Germany? You Just Entered the Paradise, It Is Another Fairytale Here.” It describes many cost-free medical services and conveniences within the German pregnancy care. It is no surprise that, for Polish migrant women living and working in Berlin, giving birth there is an obvious choice, and that irregular migrants lacking German insurance also try to get free-of-charge access to pregnancy health care. Some uninsured women gained access as result of marriage (when statutory insurance was at stake), private payments, or even through personal connections (such as being the sister of a midwife). Transnational health care of pregnant women in a situation of increasingly transnational ways of life is also on the increase. Health care is both a right and a commodity, yet even more so in the situation of migration. State and insurers’ regulations, as well as power relations within the health care sector, affect the position of women, who have to learn a new medical system, and sometimes experience negative consequences and unnecessary costs. The analysis of pregnancy and birth experiences of Polish migrant women in Berlin shows that migration led to spatial, social, and cultural, but also body-related changes in their lives. Women’s move to another society and culture influenced their daily routines, but also rites de passage —“crisis moments,” such as birth. Even though Poles, as EU migrants, seem to share many similarities with Berliners in a globalized world, their local experiences within the German health care system were new, surprising, and “other.” Polish migrant 106 ● Izabella Main women who previously gave birth in Poland discovered other phi- losophies of health care and birth, based on agency, involvement, and co-responsibility. Several major differences analyzed in this study, contributing to “otherness,” were connected with the location of birth, the position of midwives and doctors, and the agency and power of women. Polish young women moved to country practicing Western medicine (as in Poland), yet with high acceptance of alternative and complementary medicines, as well as natural healing. Hence the discourse of natural birth and the holistic approach to pregnant women. The possibilities of making decisions and choices during the antenatal period and birth may be seen as result of this holistic approach, but perhaps also of the democratic values dominant in society. It seems that human dignity, so much present in (Catholic-dominated) discourse in Poland, is more respected in daily practices within the health care sector in highly secu- larized Germany. The presence of plural authoritative knowledge on birth, practiced in Germany and perceived positively by Polish migrants, might also influence expectations of the health care system in Poland in the world of moving ideas.

Notes 1 . All names of interviewees used in the article are pseudonyms. 2 . Moxibustion is a traditional Chinese technique using burning herbs to stimulate acupressure points. To turn a breech baby, pressure is applied to a pressure point, located on the fifth toenail. It should increase the baby’s activity level and encourage him to change to the vertex position. In case of Marta the cost of procedure was covered by health insurance. 3 . Office for Berlin’s statistics: https://www.statistik-berlin-brandenburg.de /produkte/Jahrbuch/jb2012/JB_201201_BE.pdf , accessed December 12, 2014. 4 . In Germany, because of police reporting requirements linked to non–emergency health care reimbursement, only migrants with a toleration permit (Duldung ) can, without fear, access health care services during and after pregnancy. However, this status is granted only for a limited time period, when the woman is considered “unfit for travel”—generally six weeks prior to and eight weeks after delivery (FRA 2011: 25). 5 . S e e : h t t p : / / w w w . b l o g . p r z e d p o r o d e m . p l / c z y - t o - k o n i e c - p o r o d o w y c h - w y j a z d o w -do-niemiec/ , accessed November 20, 2014. 6 . The president signed the directive yet there are still no administrative regulations. See http://prawo.rp.pl/artykul/757952,1152945-Prezydent-podpisal-tzw -ustawe-o-leczeniu-transgranicznym.html?referer=redpol , accessed November 20, 2014. Giving Birth in Berlin ● 107

7 . See: http://www.netkobiety.pl/viewtopic.php?id=30512&p=4 , accessed November 18, 2014. 8 . The private health sector has been developing since the 1980s in Poland. The private hospital sector is small—the number of beds is around 7 percent of total hospital beds—yet private practices are very common (Szetela, www .nowoczesna-klinika.pl , accessed December 20, 2013. 9 . The first media action “Childbirth with Dignity” took place in 1994, and the foundation was established in 1996. It organized several media campaigns, conferences and published reports. Only on December 20, 2012, the Ministry of Health approved the document “Standards of Perinatal Care.” The com- mentary stated that the time of introducing this document would be long and not all medical practices will follow it but women are advised to refer to it to receive proper care. http://www.rodzicpoludzku.pl/standard-opieki-okol oporodowej/do-czego-mam-prawo-nowy-standard-opieki-okoloporodowej .html , accessed December 15, 2014. The issue of lack of respect for women during birth, lack of privacy and agency is also inked to the position of women in terms of reproductive rights after 1989 and in particular restrictive anti- abortion regulations. 10 . The article described home births in Poland http://www.rynekzdrowia.pl /Moim-zdaniem/Bezpieczenstwo-porodow-domowych-w-statystyce,124385 .html , accessed December 16, 2014.

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PART II

Contesting Transition: Activisms and Expert Knowledge

CHAPTER 6

New Urban Activism in Slovakia: The Case of Bansk á Bystrica

A l e x a n d r a B i t u š í k o v á

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has. —Margaret Mead

Introduction I choose Margaret Mead’s words to introduce my study of urban activism and urban grassroots movements in Slovakia. 1 I will argue that it is exactly small and rather informal groups of committed citizens or even individuals who try to make a difference in Slovak cities. Urban activism covers a range of formal and informal activities initiated by individuals and collective players who focus on improving the quality of urban environment and space, urban society, and urban life. Urban activism can be understood as a collective action aimed at sustainable urban development in its broad understanding of environmental, economic, social, and cultural contexts. This understanding of activism is wider than older meanings of social movements associated mainly with protest mobilizations related to social or political problems and aimed at changing state policies. I follow Jacobsson and Saxonberg’s approach to studying urban movements in Central and Eastern Europe and see urban activism as a collective action of groups of people in order to accomplish their goals, while employing a variety of strategies (Jacobsson and Saxonberg 2013: 255). Urban activism has been a neglected topic in urban anthropology and ethnology in Central and Eastern Europe, while it has attracted 116 ● Alexandra Bitušíková attention of human geographers and sociologists from the region and elsewhere (e.g., Fagan 2004, 2005; Gliń ski 2002; Cí sa ř 2010, 2013a, b; Navrá til 2013; Navrá til and Pospíš il 2013; Ivanou 2013; Jacobsson and Saxonberg 2013). These scholars focused particularly on big cities (often capitals) in several countries of Central and Eastern Europe (mainly Poland, Russia, Czech Republic), while smaller cities have been left outside the analysis of activism and movements. This chapter presents an ethnographic study of local forms of grassroots activism in a medium-size city of Bansk á Bystrica, Slovakia, focusing primarily on activism that relates to urban affairs, urban communities, and governance. I look at the role and practices of urban activist groups in local as well as global contexts, and their impact on empowering citizens and strengthening civil society. I challenge some previous theoretical discourses and empirical research carried out by Western scholars that described civil society in Central and Eastern Europe as weak and undeveloped. My study is based on 20 years of participant observation and on numerous informal interviews and dozens of in-depth qualitative interviews conducted in 2012–14 with local activists as well as on data gathered from local newspapers, social networks, and Web sites.

Theoretical Framework The research on urban activism and movements draws on interdisciplinary body of literature. Activism is usually studied as a part of urban social movements. Manuel Castells, in his 1983 definition, describes urban social movements as “urban-oriented mobilizations that influence structural social change and transform the urban meanings” (Castells 1983: 305). In his later work he suggests that “grassroots movements will continue to shape cities, as well as societies at large” (Castells 2002: 402). According to Susana Finquelievich, urban movements “deal with new conflicts, social bases and social forces,” and they have “their own and unique field of action because they deal with urban matters, urban affairs” (Finquelievich 1981: 239). Researchers studying urban movements (especially those that came into existence after the 1990s) agree that these movements have become more heterogeneous and their growing emergence can be explained as a consequence of new urban policies and neoliberal restructuring in the new millennium (Mayer 2006, 2007). The different characters and roles of urban movements in contemporary processes of societal change have also been broadening. These movements are now characterized by local–global interconnections, transnational urban contexts, and a closer relationship with the state New Urban Activism in Slovakia ● 117 and local governments (Pink 2009: 453) and, as such, they increasingly attract the attention of urban anthropologists. In 1992, social anthropologist Arturo Escobar (1992: 396) criticized the invisibility of social movements in anthropology and the absence of anthropologists in this field. Since then, several anthropologists have joined urban scholars in studying urban social movements (see, for example, Pink 2009, 2013; Salman and Assies 2010 Sch ö nw ä lder 2002; and others) with a specific focus on anthropological analysis of urban movements, mainly from the bottom-up perspective focused on key actors, participants, and leaders interpreted and analyzed through wider local–global contexts. Urban activism and urban social movements in Central and Eastern Europe have often been studied in relation to civil society. The initial interest in civil society in the region came from Western scholars. Older literature commonly presented civil society in Central and Eastern Europe as weak, undeveloped, lacking capacity, and incapable of enhancing civic engagement at the grassroots level (e.g., Howard 2002, 2003; Rose, Mishler and Haerpfer 1997. This weakness was explained as a result of a low number of social and political organizations, high level of distrust in them, weak civic infrastructure, the lack of membership or employment in civil society organizations, or low individual civic activism. These statements have been challenged and revised by a number of authors (e.g., C í sa ř 2010, 2013a; Ekiert and Foa 2011; Navr á til and Posp íš il 2013; Petrova and Tarrow 2007; and others). One of the misleading conceptions of some Western scholars was the assumption that there was no civil society in Central and Eastern Europe during the period of state socialism. However, numerous anthropological studies demonstrated a broad range of associations and civil activities in the region in the pre-1989 period (Buchowski 2001; Hann 1990, 1992, 2002, 2003; Hann and Dunn 1996). In addition to politically controlled institutions and affairs that people were forced to participate in, this scholarship shows that there was a parallel “civil society” consisting of semiformal and informal networks, groups, and associations that were not necessarily of a political nature (Torsello 2012a). Buchowski suggests that this unofficial civil society took on various forms, including informal interest groups and even extended kin groups and networks (Buchowski 2001: 123–24). These semiformal and informal networks became the main “circles of trust” in society. The ideological control of the state and the strategy of enforced collective participation in public affairs led to profound individualism, atomism, and “familism,” and to deep distrust in public institutions. Personalization and individu- alization of social relations became an important element in building 118 ● Alexandra Bitušíková trustworthy relations among individuals in Central and Eastern Europe (Giordano 2003: 13). Rebuilding a new post-1989 civil society has been highly dependent on strengthening social trust and empowering citizens in their civil engagement. Ond ř ej C í sa ř suggests at least two reasons for lower civic participation in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe in the first years after the fall of communism: (1) since the old regimes identified with a ritualized version of political mobilization and activism, any collective action continued to be viewed as part of communism, even after its fall; (2) political freedoms acquired in the new democracy were not viewed as an opportunity to express social needs, but as an opportunity not to participate at all. For citizens, new freedom literally meant the liberal notion of “freedom from politics,” not a republican concept of freedom to “take part in politics” (C í sa ř 2013b). To sum up, lower civic participation in Central and Eastern Europe during the first few years following the end of state socialism was, to a great extent, a consequence of strong distrust of the people in public institutions and public affairs, and can be considered one of the major legacies of communism. This legacy seems to have a long-term impact on levels of civic engagement and the ways people get involved in public affairs in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe. Martin Raiser et al., analyzing the results of the World Values Survey of 1995, show that the interest of citizens from Central and Eastern Europe in politics and the needs of others (altruism) was not much different from other Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries; trust and confidence in public institutions, however, differed considerably, and political interest did not correlate with political participation in these countries (Raiser et al. 2001: 14). Because of very different historic contexts and experiences, indicators measuring the strength of civil society according to membership, employment, and engagement in civil or political organizations have to be treated with caution when making comparisons between “Western” and Central and Eastern European countries.

Local Context: Urban Activism in Bansk á Bystrica According to Pink, studies of urban activism and movements focus on big cities and megacities and very often neglect smaller cities and towns, although it is particularly smaller settlements that offer good data for the analysis of global issues through the study of small places (Pink 2009: 452; see also Eriksen 2001). Bansk á Bystrica is a medium-sized New Urban Activism in Slovakia ● 119 city of 80,000 inhabitants. It is located in the middle of central Slovakia and therefore builds its self-image as “the heart of Slovakia.” It is the administrative center of the largest of eight self-governing regions in Slovakia—the Bansk á Bystrica Self-Governing Region—the seat of two universities, numerous secondary schools, and a large number of mainly small to medium-sized enterprises. The city is suffering from the collapse of several large industries that used to play a key role in the local economy during the state socialism period. It is based on the periphery of global urban networks, but is significantly influenced by processes of globalization. Following Short, cities like Banská Bystrica can be considered a transition space for globalization, and as the focus of the relationship between the global and the local (Short 2004: 45–46). Banská Bystrica is a “typical” globalized and globalizing city that wants to attract foreign developers, investors, businessmen, and tourists in the context of the neoliberal agenda, in order to increase economic growth and progress of the city. These policies are accompanied by the increase of social and spatial polarization and power struggles for public spaces. The impact of the 2008 economic crisis has led to a decrease in the standard of living for many inhabitants, and numerous families have found themselves in a vulnerable situation due to growing unemployment in the city and the region. At the same time, citizens’ awareness of global changes and challenges (such as environmental problems, consumption patterns, or migration) and of their impact on local affairs has been increasing. This has been a consequence of more publicly accessible information, and partly also of generational change. Young people who have no memory of communism and who have a chance to travel, study, and work abroad and build transnational connections, form their collective identities on different realms than their parents. Bansk á Bystrica is home to more than 160 nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). The majority of them are formal nonprofit organizations devoted to sports, culture, social services, education, the environment, or human rights. A few of them (Community Foundation Zdrav é mesto Bansk á Bystrica—Healthy City; the EKOPOLIS Foundation; the Center for Community Organizing, and the Center of Volunteering of Bansk á Bystrica) focus on the development of local social capital, on the mobilization of local residents, and on building bridges between various actors in the city. In addition to these organizations, new types of grassroots groups and movements have emerged in the second decade of the twenty-first century. They are mainly informal activist groups established by young educated professionals as a silent reaction or 120 ● Alexandra Bitušíková protest against global neoliberal urban policies and practices. As Pink indicates, “contemporary activists are often middle class, competent in their engagements with bureaucracy and involved in legalised activities” (Pink 2008: 163). Some of them are partly related to formal nonprofit organizations. In a medium-sized city, most people who are involved in any type of activism know and support each other, as they face common problems and often share common values. In the next section of the chapter, I will focus on grassroots activism initiated and practiced by small informal groups or individuals. This activism has an impact on citizen mobilization and empowerment; however, it is often neglected in research.

Three Stories of Grassroots Urban Activism The literature on contemporary urban movements directs attention to urban activism that aims at principles of environmental, economic, and social sustainability in the city: improving quality of urban life; strengthening the local economy; sustaining environmental quality for future generations; and local community empowerment through equality for all. As Castells notes, the global–local nexus is essential to the capacity of urban social movements to make change (Castells 2002: 39). Activism in Bansk á Bystrica is primarily locally oriented; however, it derives from global themes related to environmentalism, sustainable ways and patterns of living, cultural heritage preservation, or global social and political movements.

Story no. 1: Z á hrada (The Garden)

Z á hrada (The Garden)—the Center of Independent Culture—started in 2010 as an informal civic initiative of several young people. It is a multifunctional meeting place that offers space for various activists, artists, and communities in the city. It is located in an old warehouse in the backyard of a historic house in the city center, which a local businessman and a philanthropist let to Z á hrada for ten years for no payment. The empty and heavily damaged warehouse was reconstructed by volunteers, who also did fund-raising and managed to get several small grants from local foundations to buy building material. They built a simple stage suitable for various performances and a meeting place with a small bar and Wi-Fi connection. The center is run by a group of volunteers, educated young professionals who are self-employed or have no formal jobs. Their main activity is to plan and coordinate a monthly program New Urban Activism in Slovakia ● 121 that covers artistic performances, informal civil and youth education, as well as workshops on various societal and political topics. Zá hrada hosts the Theater from the Passage, a professional community theater working with actors with mental disabilities, and partly also with the Roma girls from orphanages, senior people from homes for elderly people, drug addicts, and refugees. Regular monthly “afternoon tea meetings” (Č ajovni č ka ) are organized in Zá hrada for the public, who can meet actors from the theater, which helps to strengthen social cohesion and integration. This activity is part of the project Active Citizenship and Inclusion, funded by the EKOPOLIS Foundation based in Banská Bystrica. The afternoon tea activities are highly valued by citizens who take part in them: “A precious wonderful event in all aspects. A diamond. I wish all people in Bansk á Bystrica touch it with their ears, eyes and souls. I am happy I can be there . . .”2 The Z á hrada Center also includes a park that is managed by volunteers. In 2013, they established the first community garden in the city (for more on this see Bituší kov á 2013). The garden, based on a permaculture ecological design, is tended to by 20–25 people, most of them families with children and young couples; one garden plot is managed by children from a nearby ecologically oriented kindergarten. The initiator of the community garden, a young mother of two, explains her motivations:

My engagement in building a community garden was not so much about the garden itself, but about the social aspect of it. It is important that people get out of their gated communities and do something useful and joyful together, meet and talk to each other. (Sonja)

The Z á hrada activists support alternative and sustainable patterns of living that oppose the globalization trends of the neoliberal economy and consumerism, as the titles of some of their activities demonstrate: “Private Strategy of Sustainability,” “Healthy Day,” or “Zone Without Money” (regular barter fairs). The program often covers new and publicly controversial topics [for instance, debates or performances on lesbian gay bisexual transgender (LGBT) topics, gender (in)equality, neo-Nazi extremism, or environmental problems]. Z á hrada activists collaborate closely with similar independent cultural centers in other cities and countries (Czech Republic, Hungary, Italy). They build broad transnational connections and offer space to numerous artists or activists from abroad. One of their long-term projects, based on collaboration 122 ● Alexandra Bitušíková with Czech partners, focuses on empowering young people and making them engaged in democracy through art. Although Z á hrada started as an informal initiative based on volunteering, in order to sustain and develop diverse activities, it now operates mainly on the basis of projects with the support of foundations. This has had consequences on the formal status of the center although the activists still continue to work as volunteers. As one of the founders said:

We started as an informal initiative of a group of volunteers. However, in order to develop further activities and to be able to apply for funding, we had to formalize our initiative and to establish a non-profit organization. In a way, we lost our independence. (Martin)

The Zá hrada Center has become the common home for various communities and also activists from other groups and movements in the city. It offers a broad range of interactive cultural and educational programs to diverse audiences and contributes to strengthening civic participation and engagement. It shows the interconnection of local activism with global agendas and demonstrates the ways in which these activities are practiced and perceived locally. Stuart Hodkinson and Paul Chatterton call groups like Z á hrada “social centres.” They emerged first in the 1980s and reemerged in the 1990s as anticapitalism and later anti-neoliberal city groups and movements, occupied abandoned and emptied urban places, and regenerated them into free noncommercial places or hubs for politics, meetings, and entertainment, where activists and concerned citizens can meet and organize. These places “bring various fragments of social movements together under one roof where a process of a dialogue, contamination and greater unification can take place” (Hodkinson and Chatterton 2006: 310). Anti-neoliberalism activism is at the heart of the Zá hrada Center although it is not a radical activism, but a silent and more pragmatic one that connects various people and communities, and contributes to empowering and mobilizing citizens.

Story no. 2: Forum BB

Forum BB is a one-man initiative based on social network interaction. The digital era introduced new means of communication that have had a profound impact on civic engagement. Although participation of urban residents in social network discussions or blogging can be hardly New Urban Activism in Slovakia ● 123 considered part of urban activism, it may grow into various actions and mobilizations, which can take on both ad hoc or long-term forms. There are at least five active Facebook groups devoted to life in Bansk á Bystrica, each of them having 500 to 1,500 followers. Discussions in these groups reflect negative and positive opinions of citizens mainly concerning the quality of life in the city, urban spaces, or urban heritage. Forum BB goes beyond these discussions. It uses a social network as a platform for mobilizing citizens to action. This initiative was established in January 2013 by one man, Pavol, as “a reaction to what was going on in the city under the Urp í n hill.” 3 The successful former manager decided to change his career:

I was disillusioned by politics in Slovakia so I left the country and took a job in Prague. Slowly, slowly I started to follow the development in Slovakia again and that (and some personal reasons) brought me back to my roots. Finally I made a decision to return to Slovakia with a clear aim to do something positive for the society. I have not done anything like that before, I was not an activist. I was earning a lot of money in a transnational company in Prague and was interested only in my job and my bank account.

Pavol’s objective was to build a bridge between citizens and city representatives, to open space for discussions, and to become a watchdog.

I established Forum BB as a civil initiative and organized four public debates during 2013 on the hottest topics in the city. I became rather unpopular with several people because I was not afraid of naming problems. I think the added value of Forum BB is that people representing the city woke up and became more careful about their decisions and actions.

Pavol, as Forum BB, has been attending all city council meetings since the beginning of 2013. He organized a series of thematic public debates on the use of public spaces (the main city square) and transportation with representatives of the city and other stakeholders. He mobilized citizens to join “Green Watch” (a Slovak-wide initiative to mobilize volunteers to clean various urban areas). According to his words, his personal challenge has been to involve more citizens in urban governance, and at the same time to persuade city council members about the importance of listening to citizens’ voices. These day-to-day efforts led to one particular success. At the beginning of 2014, the city council agreed to dedicate almost € 20,000 to participatory budgeting. 4 T h e C o o r d i n a t i o n 124 ● Alexandra Bitušíková

Committee for Participatory Budgeting was created, a concrete plan was prepared, and a public announcement was published:

We, the citizens of Banská Bystrica, older than 15 years of age, have an opportunity to propose and decide on how to use almost € 20,000 for participatory budgeting in 2014. The objective is to use the mechanism of participatory budgeting for democratic, open, and shared use of public sources for the creation and realization of our own proposals that will lead to improvements in our city, its self-government, and community. We have an opportunity to: – initiate innovative civic projects and services; – propose priority topics; – propose and vote on investment proposals—primarily strategic investments of our city. The objective is not only to be active and participative in the creation of the budget, but also to be interested and to learn about urban mechanisms and care about urban investments and projects.5

The project attracted broad public interest. Thirty-one projects were submitted by various groups of citizens by the end of April 2014 and published online. The final public voting took place at the end of May. The City Hall meeting was attended by about 200 people who took part in direct voting for the projects that were presented. Citizens who could not attend the meeting had a chance to vote at the municipality Citizens Center for the following two weeks. The story of Forum BB is an example of how the information society can give rise to new forms of individual and collective action. This form of activism can be very effective in engaging local inhabitants in urban governance, and should not be neglected in our research.

Story no. 3: Not in Our Town (Nie v na š om meste)

Not in Our Town (NIOT) is a grassroots movement that originated in the North American city of Billings and has since spread to many other US cities and further, to some other continents and countries (including Hungary). The key message of NIOT is expressed in its official statement: “Not In Our Town is a movement to stop hate, address bullying, and build safe, inclusive communities for all” (see: www.niot. org ). NIOT was created in US cities and communities as a response to hatred and violence riots related to racism, anti-Semitism, xenophobia, or other types of bullying. New Urban Activism in Slovakia ● 125

Until recently, Bansk á Bystrica residents had never heard of NIOT. The city is quite homogeneous, with a limited number of minorities, but the Bansk á Bystrica Self-Governing Region covers areas with a significant presence of minorities (mainly Roma and Hungarians). The regional election in November 2013 brought a result that shocked Slovakia and Europe more widely: Marian Kotleba, a former leader of the banned far-right organization and later a leader of the ultranational- ist “Our Slovakia” party has been democratically elected as head of the Bansk á Bystrica Self-Governing Region. Kotleba had been known for organizing marches against Slovakia’s Roma minority, for expressing views supporting the World War II Nazi Slovak state, and for referring to the European Union and North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) as terrorist organizations. The first postelection reaction of Banská Bystrica activists (light- ing candles as a protest against the election result) did not have much impact. At the beginning of 2014, several concerned community leaders started looking for strategies to engage their community in resistance activities against intolerance and public silence. The idea of NIOT was first introduced informally by the Center for Community Organizing to a number of activists and groups in the city. Participants agreed to establish a grassroots movement “Nie v naš om meste” [Not in Our Town (NIOT)]. The core group of the movement consisted of about 15–20 people (NGO activists; academics; artists; religion, church and minority representatives; and committed individuals). Within a few months in 2014, the NIOT has expanded and organized several public actions (including educational events on the Jewish and Roma Holocausts, and formulated a value statement of the NIOT local movement called “Breaking the Silence”:

Nie v na š om meste (Not In Our Town) is a platform that was established in Banská Bystrica by people who support tolerance in the city. We believe that Banská Bystrica is a place whose inhabitants share and protect values of humanity from violence and hatred. While respecting the diversity of opinions, we support collaboration and community building through strengthening the following values: solidarity, responsibility, loyalty, tolerance, respect, honesty and wisdom. We do not agree with silence as a response to the present political and economic situation. We do not agree that extremist opinions should become tolerated and accepted by society. We believe that silence is not the right response to hatred and violence. Sometimes it is enough to break silence and start talking. We invite everyone to support this initiative. 126 ● Alexandra Bitušíková

The Bansk á Bystrica NIOT activists organized a two-week study visit of Peter, one of the founders of NIOT in Charleston, the US sister city of Bansk á Bystrica. His visit covered a series of meetings with various groups of citizens (religious groups, Roma minority members, academics, students, human rights activists, among others) and city leaders, and its results challenged the assumed possibilities of direct transnational transfer of local practices, in this case the transfer of local practices from US cities to the Slovak city of Banská Bystrica. Numerous and intense discussions revealed a number of issues, for instance, different meanings of “community” or “neighbor” in different cultural contexts or the need to use different methods to engage citizens. The first efforts at getting signatures from supporters demonstrated persisting legacies of communism: even those who fully agreed with the initiative and its value statement were very cautious and hesitated to support the initiative with their signature. The fear of putting their signature on a public initiative with a political background was still present. This was a surprising experience for Peter who described it in his report:

The challenge of organizing citizen action in Slovakia is complicated by a national experience which makes folks especially leery of speaking out or standing up. Citizen action had not been a feature of Slovak life during the period of domination by the Soviet Union. Most Slovaks are wary of standing out, much less speaking up, and although this is changing, it is changing slowly.

In addition to the legacy of communism, there are also other legacies that prevent people from supporting the initiative that celebrates tolerance for all. Some members of religious groups refused to sign the value statement because they did not want to support rights of the LGBT community. However, the mayor of the city publicly supported and signed the initiative. Two months after the launch of the NIOT movement, more than 200 people had signed it. New activities, including educational activities at schools, an international congress, and a concert are planned for the next period. The NIOT grassroots movement in Banská Bystrica is still launching its activities and it is too early to make any general statements about its prospects. Based on the transfer of the idea and practices from a very different environment, it reflects increasing transnational, national, and local connections and networks in facing and fighting problems that are global but experienced and practiced as local, while at the same time showing how difficult such transfer may be. New Urban Activism in Slovakia ● 127

Conclusions In this chapter, I explored urban grassroots activism in a medium-sized city, Bansk á Bystrica, using three different examples that have impacted citizen mobilization, empowerment, and engagement. Activism described in the study is not so visible as that of formal organizations or large movements; it is not based on membership and it does not have formal structures. However, I argue that it is exactly this type of activism that has been increasing in the city in recent years and positively impacting citizen empowerment. This activism involves various concerned citizens and communities that are interested in the developments in their city and society and want to contribute to the improvement of quality of urban life by being involved in diverse nonviolent activities and campaigns. The increase of this type of activism is a reaction to neoliberal urban policies and globalization. Activists and citizens clearly feel the need to act against privatization of public spaces, political corruption, consumerism, environmental problems, or inequality, even if they are unable to articulate and theorize it according to political and ideological rhetorics. The rise of informal grassroots activism can be seen as a sign of strengthening civil society. The legacy of communism has been slowly weakening, and citizens in a postsocialist city have become more mature and open to participation in various civil activities. The “silent” citizen engagement, in the form of event and governance participation, volunteering, advocacy, financial giving, blogging, or contributing to social network discussions is significant, but also difficult to measure by quantitative methods. According to Cí sa ř (2013b), civic self-organization, consisting of collective action mobilized without the involvement of a formal organization, constitutes one of the common types of activism in Central and Eastern Europe. The study of grassroots activism in Banská Bystrica demonstrates that the strength of civil society cannot be measured only by quantitative indicators such as membership, numbers of participants, or voters. A qualitative analysis of diverse forms of activism, and of civil participation and engagement, is equally important. It can reveal different dynamics and patterns of activism. This activism is based on less formal structures and practices, low importance of or even resistance to membership, and more individual civil engagement. This observation was confirmed to me in an interview with an American, a community leader who has been living in Bansk á Bystrica since the early 1990s. He noticed that “any civil and community organizing in Slovakia is 128 ● Alexandra Bitušíková based primarily on informal ‘initiatives’, without any formal status or structures.” Research on contemporary informal grassroots urban activism in Central and Eastern Europe has been rather neglected in the social sciences. Social anthropology, with its qualitative methodology, can contribute to the study of grassroots activism in the region and to the understanding of civil society that has been developing in different ways and at a different pace due to different historic experiences.

Notes 1 . This work was supported by the grant agency VEGA, project No. 2/0024/14 Obč ianske aktivity ako determinant udrž ate ľ n é ho rozvoja mesta (etnologický poh ľ ad). All names of interviewees used in the chapter are pseudonyms. 2 . S e e : h t t p s : / / w w w . f a c e b o o k . c o m / Z a h r a d a C N K . 3 . Bansk á Bystrica is a city situated in the mountains and the Urpí n hill lies in the territory of the city. It is a place of walks and promenades, and its name is used as one of the symbols of the city. 4 . Bansk á Bystrica is the third city in Slovakia to introduce participatory budgeting. The other cities are Bratislava-Nové mesto and Ruž omberok. 5 . h t t p s : / / w w w . u t o p i a . s k / l i f e r a y / w e b / b a n s k a - b y s t r i c a / d o m o v .

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CHAPTER 7

Feminist and Queer Sex Therapy: The Ethnography of Expert Knowledge of Sexuality in Poland

A g n i e s z k a K oś c i a ń s k a

Introduction In Poland, there is a single official path to becoming a certified sexologist. This involves experience as a physician or therapist, attending courses at a state-sponsored center for medical education, frequenting approved conferences, publishing in select journals, basing one’s knowledge on several canonical textbooks, and serving as an intern at accepted sites. My research on this educational process (participant observation during classes and conferences, analyses of the textbooks, interviews) reveals that it centers on a heteronormative and male-oriented understanding of sexuality and gender. Transgressing the rules or introducing new concepts to the field is difficult as those who criticize trainings and books might experience problems in gaining the required certificates, since the authors, lecturers, and members of certification committees are the same people. Therapists and physicians who do not share the views on sexuality imposed by mainstream sexology organize themselves into informal networks, exchange information, offer courses away from certified educational centers, and conduct treatment without sexological certificates. They also work to bring changes to mainstream sexology. These networks rely heavily on the inclusion of the achievements of feminist and queer theories in therapeutic practice. This chapter analyzes the ways in which feminist and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer 132 ● Agnieszka Kos´cian´ska

(LGBTQ) ideas influence mainstream Polish sexology. It also points to the interdisciplinary character of Polish mainstream sexology as a factor that contributes to this process and makes the Polish situation distinct. This chapter focuses on Polish sex therapy and education, informed by feminist and queer theories, as well as the informal networks through which this knowledge and practices are distributed: What are the ways in which feminism and queer perspective develop in the field of Polish sexology? Can they reshape the construction of sexual counseling in Poland? Is there anything specific about the Polish situation? In Poland, as well as in other parts of postsocialist Central and Eastern Europe, the West—especially the United States—constitutes the most important point of reference for contemporary local medicine, including sexology. Sexological textbooks refer broadly to North American research and theories. In their lectures and in the interviews I conducted, sex therapists presented North American sexology as a perfect model to be followed. 1 But does this mean that feminist and queer sex therapy are developing in Poland in the same way as in the United States? Medical sociologists Adele Clarke and other authors argue that in North America, a process of “biomedicalization” can be observed. Biomedicalization denotes “the increasingly complex, multisited, mul- tidirectional processes of medicalization2 that today are being both extended and reconstituted through the emergent social forms and practices of a highly and increasingly technoscientific biomedicine” (Clarke et al. 2010: 47). As a part of this process in the United States, the achievements of social health movements such as women’s health movements, as well as other heterogeneously produced knowledge, have been appropriated by medical discourse as a part of the biomedicalization process: “Another transformation of knowledge constitutive of biomedicalization is the co-optation of competing knowledge systems and the reconfiguration of healthcare provision and organizations in ways originally proposed and implemented by social movements” (Clarke et al. 2010: 75). Clarke and others argue that in the United States what was developed by feminist or gay and lesbian rights movements is now administered by the Food and Drug Administration (e.g., HIV programs) while medical and pharmaceutical discourses appropriate the achievements of feminism (Clarke et al. 2010; Fishman 2004). In the field of sex therapy, biomedicalization led to the pharmacologization of sexual treatment. As a result, feminist ideas are used by pharmaceutical companies to promote not only drugs for female sexual dysfunctions Feminist and Queer Sex Therapy ● 133 but also certain ideas about “normal” and “healthy” sexuality within which orgasm and sexual desire are presented as almost obligatory for women, without any consideration of social, cultural, or economic factors. This model of sexuality can be summarized in the following way: no matter how hard your life is, a wonderful drug will give you sexual desire and orgasm, and bring you happiness and emancipation as a woman (Fishman 2004; Tiefer 2000, 2004). This chapter asks: is the same process of co-optation of feminist ideas by medical discourse and pharmaceutical industry under way in Poland as a part of globalization and the global flow of ideas (Clarke 2010). Or—perhaps—can Polish feminists and queer sex therapists and educators reshape mainstream medical sexology? This chapter is based on the results of my research on Polish sexology conducted in the period 2008–12. I used both ethnographic (participant observation during classes for further sexologists and educational conferences, in-depth interviews with therapists and educators [35 interviews]) and archival (analysis of sexological publications and press) methods. I focused on both mainstream (medical and psychological) and alternative (feminist, queer) sexology, and tracked its development since the 1970s to the present. Since the focus of this chapter is on the analysis of feminist and queer-informed sexual science and therapy, I rely mostly on interviews with therapists and educators from these circles, and participant observation conducted during trainings and public events in major Polish cities. However, historical research is crucial for my ethnography: studying the past of Polish sexology has allowed me to understand these contemporary processes of change. The specific development of sexology in Poland is key to showing the interaction between contemporary mainstream sexology and feminist and queer sexology and, in turn, their reactions to the global flows of knowledge.

Sexology in Poland: Background Information and Official Professional Training Although Polish sexology dates back to the second part of the nineteenth century, its contemporary tradition builds mainly on the developments of the 1970s and 1980s, partly reshaped during the postsocialist restructuring in the 1990s. Sexology in the 1970s and 1980s3 developed as an interdisciplinary field: purely medical treatment was combined with psychotherapy and sexologists were trained in other disciplines such as sociology, history, pedagogy and education, cultural 134 ● Agnieszka Kos´cian´ska anthropology, or even theology, based on the underlying assumption that sexuality was a complex issue, which required a complex approach (Ko ś cia ń ska 2014a, b). Kazimierz Imieli ń ski, who in the 1970s and 1980s was the primary author and organizer of sexological research and therapy centers, and who created the educational system for sexology specialists, believed that sexuality and sexual dysfunctions should be contextualized within culture, society, religion, and other sociocultural aspects (Imieliń ski 1982). Principally, he therefore disagreed with William Masters and Virginia Johnson (Masters and Johnson 1966; see also Irvine 2005) who perceived sex as purely a physiological phenomenon and who stood behind mainstream North American sexology in the 1970s and 1980s. Imieliń ski argued that physiology alone could not explain the complexity of human sexuality. Therefore, science and medicine had to be put into dialog not only with psychology, but also with the humanities and the social sciences. In this period, sexological books became very popular in Poland—in a country with limited access to erotic images due to the communist censorship (Nijakowski 2010: 211–212), these books constituted the main source of discourse on sexuality. Sexological publications, such as Sztuka kochania (The Art of Love) by Michalina Wisł ocka (1978) or Seks partnerski (Sex on Equal Terms) by Zbigniew Lew-Starowicz (1983) gained astonishing popularity. Sex on Equal Terms was published in four editions and sold 100,000 copies in each edition in the 1980s. Wis ł ocka claimed in an interview that her book sold 7 million copies (Zaborek 2004). Even if this number is an exaggeration, there is no doubt that the book was highly popular.4 These books, along with other sexological publications from this period, argued that a satisfying sexual life is an important element of marital happiness and individual self-realizatio n for both men and women. At the same time, they stressed the importance of traditional gender roles for proper sexuality and claimed that sexual problems are often related to women’s emancipation (which was institutionalized in Poland under socialism). They advised women not to communicate their sexual needs in a straightforward manner. They also perceived homosexuality as unhealthy and abnormal. This understanding of sexuality reflected in many ways the anxieties about sexuality and gender in Polish society of this time (Ko ś cia ń ska 2014a; Marody and Giza-Poleszczuk 2000; Szpakowska 2003). The interdisciplinary and “culture-oriented” model of sexology facilitated the interplay between scientific knowledge and sociocultural understandings of gender and sexuality (on the construction of science, see, e.g., Fleck 1979; Oosterhuis 2000; Oudshoorn 1994). Feminist and Queer Sex Therapy ● 135

In the 1990s, as a result of the rise of the free market economy and the appearance of the pharmaceutical industry, sexology became more medicalized and mainstream medical sexology in the United States became a crucial point of reference (on sexology in the United States, see e.g., Fishman 2004; Irvine 2005; Tiefer 2000, 2004). Nevertheless, some elements of the Polish interdisciplinary sexological tradition are still important, and official trainings still consist of the same elements of interdisciplinary knowledge. Furthermore, similarly to the 1970s, sexology is a very popular discipline in Poland, although there are many other sources of knowledge on sexuality available now, since socialism ended, pornography was legalized, and sexualized images in the media became commonplace. Officially, there is one way to become a sexologist in today’s Poland. To begin with, candidates have to be either physicians or psychologists. Furthermore, they must have a medical specialization (e.g., gynecology, urology, psychiatry) or, in the case of psychologists, they must also be certified therapists. Candidates should complete special training in sexology (classes, internships, conferences, publish in sexological journals) and pass an exam (different for physicians and psychologists). Candidates aiming to become sexologists should be members of the Polish Sexological Association. After completing all these requirements, physicians receive their certificates within the national system of medical education, and psychologists receive certificates from the Polish Sexological Association. As a part of my fieldwork, I conducted participant observation at a medical education center during classes for future sexologists and at educational conferences. These trainings are usually (with some exceptions discussed below) based on a heteronormative and traditional understanding of sexuality in terms of gender roles. The materials presented reiterate the images of gender and sexuality in sexological books from the 1970s and 1980s. Here again, a satisfying sexual life is connected to traditional gender roles. In this view, women who are dedicated to their careers and men engaged in childcare might experience sexual problems. This view can be found in new books by the author of Sex on Equal Terms (e.g., Lew-Starowicz 2011). Moreover, the reading list for the sexology specialization exam consists, among others, of materials (Lew-Starowicz and Lew-Starowicz 1999) that present homosexuality as pathology, although the World Health Organization (WHO) removed homosexuality from its International Classification of Diseases in 1990. Furthermore, people who are lecturers in these classes are the same people who decide who gets the certificate. As a result, candidates who are considered troublemakers (ask improper questions, 136 ● Agnieszka Kos´cian´ska publish articles criticizing the views of older Polish sexologists) might experience problems in gaining certificates and even in becoming members of the Polish Sexological Association.

Informal Education and Uncertified Therapy What happens if somebody is refused the certificate or purposely resigns from pursuing it? Is there any space for any other form of education at this level? Usually those therapists and educators act within informal networks connected to feminist and LGBTQ movements and, within these networks, they exchange knowledge, educate themselves, and offer their services. But they also go beyond those networks, offer sex education classes in public schools, counseling, and try to educate other sexologists and psychology students. What are the educational paths of therapists and educators from these circles? For instance Anna, 5 a 37-year-old therapist, began her education in a very conventional way. She graduated in psychology and started training in order to receive her sexologist’s certificate. She took several courses at a state-sponsored educational center and was an intern at a hospital sexological unit. She was very dissatisfied with the training. The internship taught her “how not to proceed with her patients,” as she puts it. At the same time, she became interested in queer theory and started to study it on her own and by participating in seminars and conferences organized abroad. 6 She was still taking classes at the state- sponsored education center but she began to ask questions, which were not appreciated by her lecturers. She also wrote articles criticizing one of the major figures of Polish sexology for his approach to homosexuality. She pointed out that some of his writings on sexual orientation violate the WHO standards. 7 The criticized professor tried to block publication of her articles. Finally, although she fulfilled all the requirements, she decided not to receive the certificate of the Polish Sexological Association. (The professor whom she criticized is an important figure in the association.) When I interviewed her, she told me:

I rebelled, I didn’t want to have the certificate because of the content of the knowledge required to gain the certificate . . . I didn’t want my name to be linked to the Polish Sexological Association because not all knowledge required by the association reflects my view on sexuality.

She opened her own sexological therapeutic practice. She could do this because she is a trained psychologist and therapist, but she calls Feminist and Queer Sex Therapy ● 137 herself a sexologist somewhat illegally.8 Furthermore, she is a university professor and presents to her students her views on sexuality. In recent years, she has become the director of a new educational program, training sex therapists and educators. Zofia, a 45-year-old educator, also started in quite a traditional way. She was the assistant of a well-established professor, an important figure in Polish mainstream sexology. However, she started to seek knowledge on her own. She also developed an interest in nonhetero- sexuality, and later her focus moved to disability and sexuality. She says that the Polish interdisciplinary tradition in sexology pushed her to such an interest. In the early 1990s, she received a fellowship in a major Western European center of sexuality studies to learn more about queer theory and feminism. Although she still works at the same university department as her mentor, her approach to sexuality, deeply informed by feminism and queer theory, is very different from his. She is very active in feminist circles offering training for young men and women who are interested in sexuality but are not satisfied with the official training. She facilitates a lot of workshops on sexuality, which are called sex education workshops, but in fact are focused on therapy. As an educator, she is not allowed by Polish law to be a therapist. Although her views are far from the mainstream understanding of sexuality, recently she has been teaching a number of classes that figure in the official training curriculum. Her lectures present, among other things, some elements of queer theory to future sexologists, both physicians and psychologists. It would not be an exaggeration to say that these two women are almost role models for a younger generation of feminists and LGBTQ activists who are interested in sex education and therapy. Thanks to them, the younger generation has some possibilities of a more or less official sexological training that moves away from heteronormativity. However, self-education—crucial for the two women—is also important for the younger generation. Many sexology students compose their own knowledge by appropriating some elements of the official education and attending classes offered by Anna and Zofia. Moreover, they usually have their master’s degrees in psychology or pedagogy and education, while also attending courses at gender studies programs and doing additional degrees abroad (e.g., at the Institute for the Advanced Studies of Human Sexuality in San Francisco). Furthermore, they exercise what might be called peer training. As one of my informants, a 27-year-old sex educator, puts it: “Sisterhood is the source of my knowledge.” She has no formal education in either sexology or even gender 138 ● Agnieszka Kos´cian´ska studies. In following the most popular pattern of gaining knowledge in these circles, psychology or pedagogy and education are combined with some sexology classes, gender studies, and self- and peer-training. Another informant explains:

The gender studies program was very important for me as a feminist, but also as a woman, as a sexual self. I think it was important for other girls . . . After classes we used to meet and talk . . . I stayed over at a class- mate’s apartment and we talked about masturbation for many hours.

Women from these circles organize events such as “Pussy Days” or “V-Days.” During these events they talk with other women about sexuality (these conversations are often organized as group therapy workshops), attend lectures with experienced educators like Zofia and Anna, or feminist workshops about sex toys. There are also educational and counseling websites 9 with a lot of articles about female sexuality, explaining how to achieve pleasure and overcome problems (i.e., sexual dysfunctions, but this term is hardly ever used) administered by women from these groups and feminist sex shops. Many of them work or volunteer as sex educators in schools. 10 The same people who are interested in developing their careers as feminists or queer sex educators and therapists are also involved politically as feminist and LGBTQ activists. They construct their identities and their networks based not only on their profession (in contrast to the medical milieus) but also on their political involvement. What are the basic differences between mainstream and feminist or queer sexology? Although both approaches are internally diverse, they share some assumptions. My ethnographic and discursive research shows that major differences are related to the issue of biomedicalization, gender roles and women’s emancipation, understanding of female sexuality, methods of communicating sexual needs, understanding of sexual orientation, and (non)heteronomativity. Mainstream sexology is more (bio)medicalized than it was in the 1970s and 1980s and often it perceives sexuality as related to the physical, with little space for the psychosocial, not to mention the cultural. However, psychology still plays a relatively important role in Polish sexology in comparison to mainstream North American sexology, for instance. It could also be concluded that cultural, social, and economic factors are taken into account to a greater extent in Poland than in the United States (Tiefer 2000). However, feminist or queer sexology Feminist and Queer Sex Therapy ● 139 goes much further in emphasizing nonphysiological factors. It perceives sexuality as socially constructed: culture, society, economy, religion, and power relations between partners play essential roles in this process. According to the first viewpoint, sexual orientation is given and stable; in the latter approach the medical term “orientation” is replaced with “identity” and seen as fluid (“people are straight till they are not,” Anna says in English, referring to a phrase often heard in queer milieus in the United States). Moreover, for mainstream sexology the hetero- sexual couple is a focal point, while the feminist or queer approach goes beyond heteronormativity and monogamy and presents them as constructed in order to maintain patriarchy. When it comes to relationships and gender, mainstream sexology sees traditional gender roles as key to good sex and identifies problems related to changes in those roles. Furthermore, in this view men and women should not communicate their needs too directly, as sex is seen to require secrets that compose a special atmosphere around it. On the other hand, feminist or queer therapists and educators argue for direct communication among partners and for equality between men and women. Finally, feminist therapists and educators focus on female pleasure as autonomous, achieved by women themselves and for their own satisfaction, while mainstream sexology sees female pleasure within a relationship. Although feminist or queer sexology operates on the margins, it influences the mainstream to some extent, rather than being co-opted by medical discourse and the medical industry, as in the case of North America (Clarke et al. 2010; Fishman 2004). As mentioned above, Zofia teaches classes that figure in the official sexological education program. Furthermore, this influence is also a result of the activities of the feminist and LGBTQ movements. Since the late 1980s feminists have discussed issues of female sexuality with sexologists and invited them to feminist conferences (Polskie Stowarzyszenie Feministyczne 1993). They also informally wield influence through unofficial conversations, making mainstream sexologists more and more open to some elements of queer or feminist knowledge. Moreover, sexological circles in Poland have been open to this viewpoint due to their general openness to nonmedicinal knowledge prompted by Imieliń ski. For instance, recently the possibility of same-sex partners appeared during official classes: while talking about erectile dysfunctions the lecturer repeat- edly said that a patient suffering from this dysfunction “should talk to his female, or male , partner about his condition” (original emphasis; 140 ● Agnieszka Kos´cian´ska in Polish all nouns are gendered). This is a very new development. In 2008 when I started my fieldwork, nobody ever mentioned homosexuality, while today adding a same-sex partner to case studies is a common practice, and it constitutes a linguistic problematization of heteronormativity. Furthermore, three years ago a new class was introduced within the official training. The class deals with issues of sexual orientation with some references to queer theory, for instance the concept of sexual fluidity is discussed. Moreover, in my interviews, some sexologists representing the mainstream argued that the emancipation of women contributes to women’s pleasure. Feminist influence is visible also in new publications by mainstream sexology authors. For instance, Lew-Starowicz recommends feminist porn or Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues as important tools in developing female sexuality (Lew-Starowicz 2012). Moreover, during conferences and other public events organized by mainstream sexologists, feminists are invited to give expert talks (for instance, during the National Debate on Sexual Health, November 23, 2011).11

Conclusion In Poland, due to the different historical development of medical sex science and therapy (interdisciplinary, taking into account cultural, social and economic factors), the achievements of feminist and queer therapists might not share the same fate as the North American health- related achievements of feminism and the LGBTQ movement. They have the potential to change mainstream sexology instead of being co-opted and transformed. The Polish interdisciplinary tradition of sexology facilitates the influence of feminist and queer studies and the knowledge heterogeneously produced and transmitted within informal feminist and LGBTQ networks on the discipline of medical sexology. In the 1970s and 1980s, Imieli ń ski, the founder of contemporary medical sexology, created space for cultural, social, and economic settings in understanding human sexuality and sexual dysfunctions, and allowed sociology, anthropology, psychology, and other disciplines to influence medicine. Today, this tradition, along with some systemic factors such as the social perception of the medical system as being rather poor, which facilitates the development of unregistered, informal, or alternative therapeutic practices, makes it possible for feminist and queer educators, scholars, and therapists to influence mainstream sexology in Poland. Thus, instead of contributing to exerting control over women’s bodies, informal feminist or queer networks, and the political Feminist and Queer Sex Therapy ● 141 activism of therapists and educators, may lead to further emancipation of women and LGBTQ people in Poland through medical and therapeutic discourses.

Acknowledgments This research was supported by a Marie Curie International Outgoing Fellowship within the 7th European Community Framework Programme. Earlier versions of this chapter were presented at the conferences New Socialities and Subjectivities in Health Care in the Twenty- First Century (University of Amsterdam, Medical Anthropology at Home Research, Driebergen, the Netherlands, June 22–24, 2012) and Rethinking Anthropologies in Central Europe for Global Imaginaries (Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, Prague, May 26–27, 2014). I am grateful to all participants for their remarks and questions. I would like to thank Hana Cervinkova for her encouragement and editorial comments.

Notes 1 . This Western orientation in the field of sex therapy is a part of a broader process. As Buchowski (2006) argues, in the process of the postsocialist restructuring of knowledge, behaviors, and models associated with “the West” are presented as more desirable and valuable than those associated with the socialist past. 2 . They define it as “the processes through which aspects of life previously outside the jurisdiction of medicine come to be construed as medical problems” (Clarke et al. 2010: 47). 3 . In the Polish context, the term “sexology” covers both research and treatment. 4 . The popularity of sexological books shows that in the Polish context sexuality cannot be explained only by the influence of the Catholic Church, as it is usually presented in the majority of feminist, queer, and sexuality related writings (e.g., Ś roda 2007; Zielinska 2000). There is no doubt that the Catholic Church is a powerful institution in the country and has influenced legal regulations concerning sexuality-related issues such as abortion (criminal- ized in 1993, Zielinska 2000) or civil unions for gay people. It also wields considerable influence on sex education in Polish schools and beyond them (Ponton 2009: 6–9; see also Federacja na Rzecz Kobiet i Planowania Rodziny 2013; Kojder 2008; Peperkamp 2008). Nevertheless, I would argue that the influence of Catholicism on sexuality is rather limited. For instance, survey research shows that use of contraception methods not approved by the Church and premarital sex are widespread and socially acceptable (see e.g., Izdebski 2012: 253). Furthermore, the Church is internally divided as it represents 142 ● Agnieszka Kos´cian´ska

various approaches to sexuality-related issues, including issues such as homosexuality (Ko ś cia ń ska 2012). I am not denying the influence of the Catholic Church, but it is more complex than how it is presented in popular, feminist, or social scientific literature. 5 . All names are pseudonyms. 6 . Similarly to medical sexologists, women from these circles make frequent references to “Western knowledge” and they value it highly. 7 . These writings were from the 1980s or 1990s, but they are still on the required reading list for future sexologists. 8 . Informal or not fully certified therapeutic practices are supported in a systemic way. Poland has a developed public health care system. In principle, almost everyone who has medical insurance is entitled to unlimited health care services. The insurance system is public and covers the majority of Polish inhabitants. Additionally, there is a large network of private clinics and hospitals that offer a private insurance system. However, public opinion surveys show that Poles consider the health care system in Poland to be poor and inaccessible. Around 70 percent of respondents say that the health care system does not function well (CBOS 2009). These answers have not changed since the early 1990s. Although research shows that patients acknowledge improvements regarding some aspects of the health care system, stable dis- satisfaction characterizes the assessment of medical services in Poland (CBOS 2009). This situation has contributed to the flourishing of various alternative medical and healing practices (e.g., religious healing, both Catholic and New Age, self-help groups, home- or community-based healing) and a growing role of the Internet as a source of medical counsel and information concerning health (Internet use concerning health matters is a global trend, which might be seen as the democratization of access to medical knowledge, but it is also part of the more complex process of biomedicalization; see Clarke et al. 2010: 54). In effect, the medical system leaves space for sex treatment beyond the mainstream. 9 . S e e : f o r e x a m p l e , h t t p : / / m o r e l o v e . e u , h t t p : / / s e k s u a l n o s c - k o b i e t . p l , h t t p : / / b a r barella.pl/ . 10 . Polish schools are supposed to teach a class titled “Preparation for Family Life.” However, this class is often taught by unqualified staff or is not taught at all (Ponton 2009). This situation means that the main sources of knowledge of sexuality and sexual health are the Internet and peers. It leads youths, on the one hand, to self-education through porn, but on the other hand it creates space for the development of feminist and queer informal or semiformal education (for instance, volunteer sex educators, who are sometimes invited by schools to conduct workshops on sexuality), which is often but not exclusively peer education, as in the case of the Ponton (a group of sex educators, http:// ponton.org.pl/en/strona/about-us , accessed May 16, 2014), founded by the major feminist and reproductive rights oriented organization—the Federation for Women and Family Planning. 11 . See: http://www.opzs.pl/aktualnosci/id/37/pokaz.html (accessed May 16, 2014). Feminist and Queer Sex Therapy ● 143

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CHAPTER 8

Civil Society and EU Integration of Serbia: Toward a Historical Anthropology of Globalizing Postsocialist Europe*

M a r e k M i k u š

Introduction Few would dispute that the eastern enlargement of the European Union (EU) has significantly transformed much of “(East) Central Europe.” 1 However, the scope of anthropological inquiry into this process did not correspond to its practical significance. Moreover, what work there is examines the region’s integration mostly through the prism of identity, focusing on issues such as dynamics and interplay of local, national, and European identities (e.g., Bitu ší kov á 2002; Golanska-Ryan 2006; Hor á kov á 2009; Obad 2010; Straczuk 2012; Vidmar Horvat 2012). 2 This idealist scholarship tends to study integration solely in terms of nesting or crosscutting meanings of identification and belonging, treating these as if they existed in isolation from power relationships and systems of domination with which they are mutually constitutive. Such analyses also neglect politicoeconomic, institutional, and governmental forms and practices through which the integration process operates and which it engenders. We learn much about the semiotic histories of identities (for instance, socialist or imperial) and their transformations and role in the present context of an attempted European identity construction, but what seems inadequately addressed is the history of European integration itself—as a power-laden, evolving material and discursive practice with social causes and outcomes. Even if we focus on identity, 148 ● Marek Mikuš this necessitates asking why certain forms of identification are invoked or promoted in a historical conjuncture, by whom, through what kinds of practices, for what purposes, and with what outcomes. The attempts to discuss the EU’s eastern enlargement in terms of “empire” and “colonialism” (B ö r ö cz 2001) began to go in this general direction, but these categories come with historical connotations that usually do not account for the present context very well. These limitations mirror those of the anthropology of the EU in general whose overriding concern was with the symbolic aspects of integration and its relationship with national, ethnic, political, and other identities (Bellier and Wilson 2000; Borneman and Fowler 1997; Demossier 2007; Goddard et al. 1994; Wilken 2012). Anthropologists studied cultural policies through which EU institutions struggled to engineer an European identity (Shore 2000) as well as the (non)emergence of such an identity among the elites in central EU institutions (Ab é l è s 2004; Bellier 1997; McDonald 1996; Shore 1995). They also documented how various groups of people, such as neonationalists (Holmes 2000; McDonald 2006) or immigrants (Moutsou 2006; Nic Craith 2009), identify themselves in relation to the integration project. There are exceptions from this orientation, for instance, Shore’s (2006) more recent analyses of the emergent EU statehood, which laid the foundations for studying the EU in terms of governmentality and sovereignty. However, Shore remains rather narrowly focused on central EU institutions and has little to say about the expansion of the union. Finally, similar limitations also characterize the broader anthropological literature on postsocialist Europe that has mostly focused on “themes like memory, consumption, identity, nationalism, etc.” (Tulbure 2009: 4). This work was often preoccupied with deconstructing teleological and normative narratives of “transition,” which expected ex-socialist societies to undergo a predictable and rapid conversion to liberal capitalism and liberal democracy. Anthropologists described the diverse and unforeseen outcomes of postsocialist trajectories in which socialist-era concepts, expectations, and resources were often reconfigured through everyday practices to achieve present ends (Bridger and Pine 1998; Burawoy and Verdery 1999a, b; Hann 2002; Mandel and Humphrey 2002). But while this scholarship captured the path-dependent histories of postsocialist transformation, especially at the micro level of social practice and experience, it neglected an analysis of the “spatial inter-linkages and social relationships that define territories and communities” (Kalb 2002: 323). The lack of interest in EU enlargement, a key form of globalization in the region, is illustrative of this neglect. Civil Society and EU Integration of Serbia ● 149

As an alternative to the existing scholarship, I will outline a “historical anthropology” of EU integration and employ it to analyze my own material on Serbian “civil society.” I will first define, in terms of both theory and methodology, what I mean when I talk about historical anthropology. I will then show how a focus on the social origins and shifting practices of Serbian “civil society” can shed light on European integration as a power-laden, path-dependent process of social transformation and, building on Shore’s insights, an experimentation with new forms of statehood and transformation of the existing ones. My analysis will therefore focus on the linkages between individual life trajectories, organizational practices, political struggles, and economic transformations in Serbia in the post–Cold War global order, and the co-evolving material forms and discursive constructions of EU integration. I will conclude by considering the possibilities of a more critical and anthropological rethinking of the very concepts of civil society and European integration.

Toward a Historical Anthropological Theory and Method I think of historical anthropology as an anthropology that rejects the idealist preoccupation with language and identity, and the treatment of places, cultures, and communities as bounded and static semiotic universes. Instead, it puts forces of history—broader social and political dynamics and translocal linkages—back in the spotlight (Kalb and Tak 2005; Narotzky and Smith 2006). 3 It does not ignore political discourse and identitarian categories; but it does approach them in their inherent relation to the practices, relationships, and collective struggles of historically and socially situated subjects. And it is fundamentally interested in global forces invested with what Wolf (1990) has described as “structural power.” Distinct from “tactical power,” which controls how subjects can act and interact within particular settings, be they territorial jurisdictions or other kinds of arenas, this is power that pressures and constrains these lower-level units themselves. But it cannot eliminate either historical contingency or the agency of subjects. To think about these relationships in a nondeterministic way, I find it useful to conceptualize them as “critical junctions,” understood as dynamic “multi-level relational mechanisms that link the global levels of structural power with the respective institutional fields of ‘tactical power’ on the scale of the nation-state and with the spaces of agential power of ‘common people’ in situated everyday circumstances” (Kalb 2011: 12–13). Critical junctions include relations through time, 150 ● Marek Mikuš relations in space, relations of power and dependency, and the interstitial relations between domains typically reified as separate, such as the state, the market, or the family (Kalb and Tak 2005: 3). They are overdetermined by systemic relationships of power and inequality and have a path dependency, as a result of which they keep pushing in a particular direction (Kalb 2011: 13). I will shortly sketch an analysis of the EU integration of Serbia as one such critical junction. The focus will be on the causes, modalities, and consequences of the crucial role of individuals and organizations populating Serbian “civil society,” and the very idea of civil society as mobilized in Serbia, in furthering the process. But understanding this particular nexus will require extending the analysis to, on the one hand, political and social developments in postsocialist Serbia in their transnational context, and, on the other, central tendencies of the EU project in the relevant period. A key methodological challenge for historical anthropology is to capture the constitutive continuities and tensions between the experiences and practices of individual people and those larger-scale levels of tactical and structural power. It is for that reason that I used the extended case method that builds on preexisting theory and employs ethnography “in order to extract the general from the unique, to move from the ‘micro’ to the ‘macro,’ and to connect the present to the past in anticipation of the future” (Burawoy 1998: 5). Therefore, during my fieldwork in Serbia in 2010–11, I studied how a set of interventions, aimed at transforming the governance of society and individuals, unfolded in time, connected many diverse actors, and related to broader processes of nation-state and social transformation. Perhaps inevitably, then, my research was also an instance of multisited ethnography (Marcus 1995) that tracks translocal relationships “upwards and outwards” through a combination of participant observation, discourse analysis, analysis of secondary sources, and interviewing (Kalb and Tak 2005: 18–19). Finally, inspired by the actor-oriented anthropology of development, I studied practices, interpretations, biographies, interactions, and relationships of individual actors (Lewis and Mosse 2006; Long 2001). I understand these as con- strained or enabled, but emphatically not determined by institutional, legal, political, economic, and social structures, and ideological and cultural narratives. Following this research design, I conducted participant observation in governmental and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), public, semipublic, and private meetings, debates, training sessions, parties, protests, and other kinds of contexts in Serbia and abroad; collected and analyzed diverse textual, visual, and audiovisual discursive artifacts; and interviewed around 100 individuals who were Civil Society and EU Integration of Serbia ● 151 in different ways involved in the processes under study, including NGO workers, nationalist leaders, members of associations of disabled people, government officials, politicians, academics, and civil servants. In the next section, I will present brief life stories of two such individuals, initiating my analysis at the micro level of individual experiences and life trajectories, and subsequently showing how the critical junction of European integration connects these to conditions and developments at the national, regional, and transnational level.

EU Integration and “Boundary Crossing” between Civil Society and the State Ana, 4 a hip Belgrader in her thirties, had studied theatre, art history, and cultural management, but spent most of her career working in what is typically understood as “civil society” in Serbia—“nongovernmental organizations” 5 established from the 1990s onward, funded by Western donors, and pursuing antinationalist, antipopulist, liberal, cosmopolitan, and pacifist agendas. In the early 1990s, Ana’s late mother, a successful artist, cofounded an important antiwar NGO, one of the first NGOs in Serbia. Ana was active in this organization as well as the anti-Milo š evi ć Otpor movement. Through the 2000s, she worked as a project manager or coordinator in various NGOs, the most recent of which happened to be one of my field sites. A few months into my fieldwork, Ana told me in the office that she was about to switch to a reform-oriented body of the central government, which focused on “Europeanizing” Serbian social policies and implementing projects funded by the EU and other foreign donors. Then she turned to a female colleague and said, only half-joking, that she would not be wearing jeans and rubber boots any more (as she was on that particular day) since she was “going to the state”! One of Ana’s new coworkers, whom I had interviewed for unrelated reasons earlier, described this government body to me as a “project” in its own right, since it was fully funded by two foreign donors. The hybrid character of this and some other recently established reform-focused state institutions, which combine statal and NGO elements and are simultaneously accountable to the national government and foreign sponsors, reveals how the EU and transnational integration more broadly contributed to the emergence of new institutional forms and practices of the state. When I interviewed Ana on her new workplace, she told me that almost all of her colleagues had a civil society background and that the “system of work” was very NGO-like. Since they work on “topics” that are related to what NGOs 152 ● Marek Mikuš do, they involve NGOs in all their activities. However, a few weeks later I overheard Ana telling a former NGO coworker that everything was “different” about her new job and implying that there was a dearth of “concrete” tasks for her to work on. The particular nature of Ana’s new workplace might make her transition to state employment less of a rupture than in other similar cases, but it still clearly involved some important changes. Before the fall of Miloš evi ć in 2000, however, such a career shift would have been practically impossible, since civil society emerged in direct response to Miloš evi ć ’s regime and the state apparatus that it controlled. But after Miloš evi ć was overthrown and the opposition came to power, facilitated to a large extent by their close cooperation with civil society (Bunce and Wolchik 2011: 85–113), it became the new normal. Many NGO people went into politics or joined public administration (Vetta 2012). By the late 2000s, this movement was also driven by EU integration, which has been picking up speed due to foreign-policy shifts since 2008. EU-sponsored reforms created opportunities for NGO workers as professionals who had knowledge and skills that were lacking in public administration, such as project management skills or familiarity with EU language and institutions. Their participation, in turn, was likely to further accelerate the integration process. Their typical destinations were ministries relevant to common NGO agendas (e.g., education, or labor and social affairs) and other central government bodies implementing EU-related reforms, such as the one where Ana worked. NGO workers also offered their services to local governments eager to access EU project funding. This was the case of Uroš , a student of economics in his thirties and a project coordinator in the administration of one of the municipalities of Ni š , the third largest city in Serbia. Uro š used to formulate and manage projects, especially EU-funded ones, for a large NGO in the city of Ni š . Together with his brother, he later founded a consultancy that provided the same services to NGOs, local governments, and businesses. Then a friend recommended him to some officials of the municipality who needed help with a project proposal, and he has been working for them ever since. Uro š told me that his case was far from exceptional. Serbian municipalities see EU projects as an increasingly important source of much-needed revenue, but because they typically lack capacities for developing and administering EU projects, they engage young NGO workers. It is important to note that most NGO workers whom I interviewed told me, in response to my direct question, that they would consider Civil Society and EU Integration of Serbia ● 153 offers of state jobs. Some immediately added that they would hardly accept them “now,” with “this kind of state”—unreformed, full of incompetent and uneducated party nominees, and so forth. However, the readiness to become a labor force of “reform” was clearly there, and some of my interlocutors told me that a greater ability to “change something” than in the NGO sector—in Wolf’s (1990) terms, to increase their own agential power—motivated them strongly. Those NGO workers who went into public administration tended to see themselves or their particular teams as drivers of change in the otherwise stagnant state apparatus. For instance, Uro š told me that his team at the municipality is quite “flexible” but often held back by the “inert structures” and rigid bureaucratic rules of the government of the city of Ni š . As the brief examples above show, the EU was a major force stimu- lating this intersectoral migration. Using Lewis’s (2008) terminology, such “boundary crossing” could be “consecutive” (consisting of a single move) but more often “extensive”—individuals extended their activities and networks to the state while maintaining their original base in the NGO sector. Especially the latter pattern of growing state–civil society imbrication was likely to compromise the traditionally critical stance of civil society toward the state and its policies, including of course the EU integration itself. However, this individual boundary crossing was just one of the ways in which the resources of civil society were enlisted in support of the EU integration of Serbia. The next section will shift the focus from individual strategies to the arena of tactical power in which they unfolded: Serbian civil society understood as an institutional field at the scale of the nation-state. This section argues that the discourse and practice of EU support for civil society shaped the political economy of the NGO sector in a manner conducive to its participation in, or at least passive consent to, EU integration. It will become apparent that both the structure and the meaning of civil society, and its boundaries and relationships with the state, were being transformed in the process, thereby revealing the central importance of such interstitial relationships to EU integration.

The EU as a Donor and the Rise of “Partnerships” By 2005, the EU had become one of the biggest, if not the biggest, of all multilateral, bilateral, and private donors supporting Serbian civil society (BCSDN 2012). From the perspective of NGO workers, this was a mixed blessing as they expected other donors to conclude that NGOs in a country approaching the EU did not need their funding any more. 154 ● Marek Mikuš

Moreover, the EU’s growing dominance as a donor deepened already existing inequalities in the NGO sector. Since the EU grant application process is administratively difficult and substantial co-funding is required on the part of the grantee, it is only well-established, large, and rich NGOs that stand a chance. The EU does not support re-funding (a practice when a large NGO acquires a grant and redistributes it to a number of smaller NGOs), supposedly since large EU funds earmarked for re-funding had been embezzled in Romania and Bulgaria in the late 1990s. NGO workers also complained that consultancy companies (rather than civil society) captured much of the EU funding. In various meetings that I attended, they referred to the experiences of the NGO sector in neighboring new EU member states as a gloomy forecast of their own likely future. I heard an NGO worker telling an audience of colleagues that she had recently learned from some Romanians and Bulgarians that “the EU has killed our sector” in those countries. All the EU money had gone for state-building rather than building civil society and the result was that only a handful of the strongest NGOs remained in each country. The expectation was, therefore, that the advancing EU integration would lead to the shrinking of the sector, which would hit small, community-based organizations more severely than large and professionalized NGOs. The drop in available funding, leading to inadequate and unstable finances of many NGOs (and hence low and irregular wages), was probably an important push factor in the boundary crossing of NGO workers to the state, in addition to the pull factors described above. Apart from administrative and financial resources, NGOs’ access to grants is also conditional on their conforming to the EU’s instrumental approach to civil society as service providers and suppliers of policy- relevant information, documented in studies of EU civil society assistance to postsocialist countries (Fagan 2006; Kutter and Trappmann 2010). Indeed, particularly well represented in the list of NGO projects funded by the EU Delegation to Serbia in 2003–11 are projects on various “European” themes (with titles such as Communicating European Security Policies or Implementation of EU Values, Policies and Standards ), well-established and professionalized NGOs, and openly pro-EU organizations (EU Delegation 2011, n.d.). The latter category is exemplified by the European Movement in Serbia (EMinS), an NGO that repeat- edly succeeded in the delegation’s tendering competitions. EMinS pur- sues Serbia’s EU membership as its key objective and is a member of the European Movement International, a Brussels-based lobbying association that promotes the deepening of EU integration. Numerous EMinS Civil Society and EU Integration of Serbia ● 155 officials were leading politicians or officials of successive post-Miloš evi ć governments, including Tanja Mišč evi ć , currently the Vice President of EMinS and Serbian Chief EU Negotiator. Since 2000, EMinS and another NGO called the First European House Č ukarica (established by EMinS) have been awarding the annual “Greatest European of the Year” ( sic ) prize for “strenuous and successful work oriented to a faster and more comprehensive integration of our country to Europe” (EMinS n.d.). 6 A number of politicians, typically incumbent government officials, received the award. Linkages to institutional politics were also prominent in the Center for Democracy Foundation (CDF), another of my field sites and an NGO with a high rate of success in the delegation’s competitions. Its history is closely entangled with the biography of Dragoljub Mić unovi ć , its president from the start and a constant presence in Serbian politics— he has been a member of the parliament without an interruption since 1990. A dissident intellectual under socialism, Mi ć unovi ć became one of the founders of the Democratic Party (DP) in 1989 and its first president in 1990. However, following an intraparty conflict, he resigned in 1994 and founded the Democratic Center Foundation (later renamed as the CDF), together with a group of intellectuals and/or his supporters in the DP. Nata ša Vu č kovi ć , the daughter of one of the founders, became the foundation’s general secretary. When Mi ć unovi ć established a new party, the Democratic Center, some two years later, he recruited its leaders from among the founders of the CDF. The foundation, mean- while, implemented foreign-funded projects and became one of the most influential NGOs in Serbia. It came to play a key role in the regime change when, together with some other NGOs, it directed the “get out and vote” campaign—a joint effort of opposition parties and civil society to mobilize voters for the September 2000 elections. In parallel with this, Mić unovi ć initiated a series of roundtables that led the fragmented Serbian opposition finally to unite in order to defeat Milo š evi ć . After the regime change, the CDF continued to implement projects with the support of foreign donors. The Democratic Center merged into the DP in 2004 and Mi ć unovi ć continued his political career in its ranks. Since 2007, Vu č kovi ć has also been a DP member of parliament. Both held important party offices while also keeping their leading positions at the CDF. At the time of my fieldwork, Vuč kovi ć was the factual boss; Mi ć unovi ć used a room on the foundation’s premises as his personal office but was not involved in the CDF’s day-to-day work. A number of former or current Democrat figures sat on the CDF’s management board. 156 ● Marek Mikuš

These political associations influenced the EU-funded project that the CDF was implementing at the time of my fieldwork. The key activity was a series of trainings on “European standards” for members of local governments, business people, and NGO activists in two districts in south Serbia. A CDF member of staff told me that most of the local politicians came from the Democratic Party, although there were some exceptions. She gave a number of reasons for this: Vuč kovi ć ’s “political interest” (presumably in the sense of strengthening her position in the party); the fact that a CDF representative could always contact local Democrat leaders and introduce themselves as somebody from Mić unovi ć ’s “office” (kabinet ) to facilitate cooperation; and, finally, that people from other parties knew who the CDF were and were therefore not interested in participating anyway. While the latter explanation might sound plausible, the fact remains that it was mostly members of a party close to the CDF that benefited from the project in the form of education and social and cultural capital. Apart from EMinS and the CDF, a number of other NGOs with publicly known links to political parties have received funding from the EU Delegation, such as the Belgrade Fund for Political Excellence, Civic Initiatives, the Helsinki Committee for Human Rights in Serbia, the MilenijuM Center for Civil Society Development, or the Center for Liberal Democratic Studies. The links in question were almost invari- ably to the parties of the former anti-Miloš evi ć opposition, such as the Democratic Party or the Liberal Democratic Party, which are also known as “pro-European” ( proevropske) because of their long-standing support for the integration of Serbia in the EU. The not insignificant presence of these NGOs among the delegation’s grantees hints at the influence of political considerations on the distribution of EU civil society funding, which, of course, is not openly acknowledged. It further suggests that another likely effect of the EU’s dominant role as a donor, apart from the structural changes noted earlier, is a growing closeness between the NGO sector and the state and institutional politics, though this development was also driven by the political shifts after 2000. The combined result was increasingly blurred social boundaries of the nominally distinct “state/government” and “civil society.” In this context, it is also important to note the EU’s involvement in promoting the idea of “partnerships” between the state and civil society. This refers essentially to civil society’s involvement in the performance of state functions, such as public service delivery or policy making. In 2011, the government’s newly established Office for Cooperation with Civil Society and the EU’s Technical Assistance for Civil Society Civil Society and EU Integration of Serbia ● 157

Organizations, together with other bodies, co-organized the first conference on such partnerships in Serbia. The participants stressed the need to both expand and “formalize” partnerships, reiterating similar calls that the EU had made in various reports and recommendations on EU integration of Serbia (EC 2009: 15, 2010: 14; EESC 2008: 1–2). The EU has supported the growth and formalization of partnerships materially as well, for instance by funding the Office for Cooperation with Civil Society. The rise of partnerships and EU integration were thus mutually reinforcing, as illustrated by a 2005 memorandum on cooperation in which the government’s European Integration Office and a group of NGOs pledged to “cooperate in organizing activities whose goal is to promote [ . . . ] the European integration process” (SEIO 2005). The government’s Strategy for Communicating the Accession likewise expects civil society organizations to participate in “communication activities” (GRS 2011: 13). Partnerships have made their way into other governmental policies as well, such as civil society development policy (OCCS 2011) or social protection policy (GRS 2005: 37). Combined with the politically induced rapprochement between the state and civil society after 2000, but also the gradual departure of foreign donors from Serbia, the partnership boom has led to an increasing reliance of civil society on public funds. State funding for civil society has been growing steadily since 2003, except for the crisis years, and averaged € 40–70 million per year (EurActiv 2013). By 2012, the state had started to provide the co-funding that NGOs needed to apply for EU projects. NGOs, together with representatives of both central and local governments, also participated in the mushrooming of all kinds of consultative and planning bodies, often working on EU-related reforms. In sum, the effect of the EU’s donor and “partnerships” policies was to promote an increasingly instrumental, service-oriented, and state- and EU-dependent civil society.

Pro-EU Civil Society in the Historical Context As the preceding discussion indicates, civil society has been closely involved in advancing and legitimating Serbia’s integration in the EU. But to understand the causes and path dependency of this link, it must be seen in a historical context. While in the previous section I focused on the relations of tactical power involved in, and resulting from, the transformation of civil society by EU policies and practices, in this section I turn to broader political developments in postsocialist Serbia and the transnational relations of structural power informing them. This 158 ● Marek Mikuš section also looks at the discursive construction of EU integration as an important part of this larger context and ties it back to the dominant emic meaning of civil society in Serbia. In the 1990s, Miloš evi ć ’s nationalist policies turned Serbia into an international pariah both politically and economically. The sociopolitical coalition that ousted Miloš evi ć in October 2000 comprised oppositional politicians, business elites, much of the middle classes, and parts of the state apparatus. While the living conditions of the middle classes had become intolerable to the point where a regime change was a condition of their continued reproduction, the new capitalist class, originally created by Milo š evi ć ’s clientelistic privatization, came to see the deepening economic crisis and isolation as a threat to its business interests. The “tycoons” therefore started to support the opposition, which they expected to embark on a path of economic liberalization and internationalization (Gagnon 2004: 128, 185; Gould and Sickner 2008; Lazić 2011: 65). The promise of reintegrating Serbia into the transnational order also enabled the anti-Miloš evi ć bloc to gain the backing of Western powers. Western involvement was part of the “development– security nexus” (Duffield 2001)—the policies and interventions to establish “liberal peace” in the problematic peripheries of the transnational order, including former Yugoslavia (Baker 2012; S ö rensen 2009). Both in the run-up to regime change and its aftermath, Western intervention—material as much as ideological—was to a great extent mediated by civil society, leading to a particularly fast expansion of the NGO sector in this period. Establishing and working in NGOs was an economic and political strategy of the former socialist middle class of professionals and intellectuals, especially those who were younger and fluent in English, who had been severely impoverished by Milo š evi ć ’s war economy and corrupt privatization (Miku š 2015). Logically, then, they saw a divorce from the legacy of Milo š evi ć and the so-called return to Europe as being in their vital interest. The experience of the 1990s and the alliances made at the time of regime change proved to have a decisive influence on the general orientation of the country’s foreign policy. Already the first post-Milo š evi ć government had defined EU integration as its priority (Kostovicova 2004). Much has been made of the nationalist tendencies of the governments in 2004–7 and 2007–8, but the goal was never formally abandoned and no meaningful alternatives were offered. The integration process has significantly accelerated since 2008. At the same time, neoliberal policies such as price and foreign trade liberalization, privatization, internationalization, and tax cuts have been implemented (Uvalic 2010). They Civil Society and EU Integration of Serbia ● 159 enabled a reintegration of Serbia into the global economy in a highly peripheral position, manifested in a falling industrial output, persis- tently high unemployment, swelling trade and current account deficits, and growing public debt. When the impact of the global crisis revealed the limits of this model, the calls for deeper neoliberal reforms ensued. In terms familiar from other cases of such reforms at the times of crisis, the media, economists, politicians, and many NGO workers I talked to evoked the need to reduce the “huge,” “cumbersome,” and “inefficient” public administration. The drive toward state–civil society partnerships must be seen in relation to these calls. Official documents (OCCS 2011), but also government officials and NGO workers I interviewed, argued that transferring state functions to NGOs represented a more flexible, competitive, and generally cost-efficient alternative to the public sector, thus effectively equating partnerships to marketization. A rich literature focuses on analyzing this redrawing of the boundaries of the public and nongovernmental sectors around the world in terms of the neoliberal transformation of the state (Ferguson and Gupta 2002; Hemment 2012; Mercer 2002). From the perspective of the NGO middle-class fraction, partnerships might also hold a promise of its own continued reproduction in the face of diminishing funding opportunities. The link between EU integration and neoliberalization is further documented by the fact that the main demands of the EU toward Serbia, apart from demanding Belgrade’s cooperation with Pristina, included the liberalization of trade and capital movements. Serbia seems set for a rerun of the EU’s eastern enlargement, characterized by focus on neoliberal restructuring of the new internal peripheries at the expense of “social cohesion” goals (Bohle 2006; Drahokoupil 2008; Holman 2004). What this shows is that the EU project itself has undergone a thor- ough neoliberalization since the late 1980s that steered it away from the alternative neomercantilist and social-democratic concepts (McNamara 1998; Scharpf 2010; van Apeldoorn 2002). However, the Serbian government, media, and NGOs interpreted EU integration in radically different terms: as all-round social, political, economic, and even cultural modernization. The promise of a “modern, European Serbia” has become a cliché of political rhetoric. This interpretation, which I call the narrative of Europeanization-as-modernization, is enabled by an entire series of far-reaching but usually implicit and unno- ticed semiotic operations. First, the EU is equated with “Europe” (despite the fact that not all European countries are EU members and that all kinds of differences and inequalities persist within the EU), and EU integration with “Europeanization.” This extension effectively grounds the narrative 160 ● Marek Mikuš in the time-honored and, in Serbia, largely internalized ideational frame of Balkanism, which constructs the Balkans as Europe’s backward Other whose only possibility of development is to imitate a supposed “European” model (Todorova 1997). For instance, Serbian media is full of talk about how “European values” are being, or more often failing to be, adopted and accepted by the incorrigible ordinary citizens. That these alleged values are either unspecified or evoked in an extremely generalizing and idealizing manner shows that “Europe” stands for a higher state of civilization tout court . Second, Europeanization is rendered as synonymous with “reform” as such; by way of example, Serbian policy circles like to describe integration as the “engine of reform” ( motor reformi ). This allows an association to be made between Europeanization and another kind of broader spatiotemporal imaginary—the one of “transition,” which in Serbia’s case is not only postsocialist, but also postauthoritarian and postconflict. As anthropologists (e.g., Burawoy and Verdery 1999a, b) have noted, the idea of “transition” is essentially a teleological and evolutionist assumption that all postsocialist (or otherwise “transitional”) countries inevitably move toward a single destination: Western-style liberal democracy and liberal capitalism. In postsocialist Europe, this expectation has been specified as entailing a political and economic integration with the EU. In the particular case of Serbia, the ruin to which Milo ševi ć ’s nationalist policies had brought the country seemed an additional confirmation that this was the only progressive option left. The dominance of the Europeanization-as-modernization narrative, therefore, rests not only on the more or less obvious propaganda efforts by the state and the EU, but also the narrative’s capacity to play on the deeply ingrained ideational frames of Balkanism and transition. These frames also underpin the dominant idea of civil society in Serbia and the subjectivity of those who self-ascribe as its members. The “return to Europe,” and the building of liberal democracy and capitalism, have been their key goals from the start and part and parcel of the very meaning of their “civility” (Mikuš 2013). In the conditions of Miloš evi ć ’s Serbia, their references to “Europe” were, of course, mostly objects of hope and broad declarations of oppositional alignments, rather than detailed visions of social restructuring, and the EU itself was rather different from what it is now. Still, with hindsight, these routinized invoca- tions put in place the basic terms of a long-standing “civil” discourse in which any serious questioning of EU integration amounts to heresy. To conclude, then, the transitional and Balkanist imaginaries are likely to constrain the cognitive potential of civil society members for a critique of EU integration as well as the social acceptability of such critique. Civil Society and EU Integration of Serbia ● 161

Conclusions: Rethinking “Civil Society” and European Integration This chapter argued that the existing anthropological scholarship on EU integration—both in general and in the case of postsocialist countries—has tended to privilege the concept of identity as the main lens for examining the process. The result was mostly idealist, ahistorical, and apolitical analyses. As a counterweight to this scholarship, I proposed a historical anthropological approach to European integration as a deeply political, path-dependent, and simultaneously material and discursive process of social restructuring that connects multiple levels of social organization and political struggle. I suggested that the concept of critical junctions allows one to approach EU integration in a historical anthropological manner, and examined various aspects of the central role of Serbian civil society in advancing the process. To conclude, I will consider some of the theoretical, methodological, and political implications of my analysis. First, I hope to have demonstrated that EU integration is far from being simply, or primarily, a semiotic process of identity construction. It involves, at the very least, substantial reforms of institutions and reg- ulative practices with significant material effects. These reforms require passive consent or active participation of many individuals and organizations, as well as the creation of new institutions and agencies. The EU supports these processes by supplying ideas, rhetorical devices, and narratives, but also by using its extensive institutional structures and material capacities, often in concert with state elites eager to employ state resources to deepen integration. The particular modalities of such resource mobilizations may dovetail with (and further intensify) other simultaneous processes, such as, in the case of Serbian civil society, the departure of other foreign donors, to make consent and/or cooperation ever more likely and resistance difficult. Of course, both individuals like Ana and members of organizations like the CDF pursue their own strategies and exercise their capacities of learning and critical reasoning. However, no matter how it might superficially appear to contradict our commitment to “agency,” this happens not in a vacuum but always within, and in response to, wider structural and ideational frameworks. But all of this is still a relatively narrow sense in which integration is political. All reforms of governance have political implications, and EU integration, which actively promotes the dominant neoliberal forms of globalization and economic restructuring, is no exception. As such, 162 ● Marek Mikuš it necessitates a construction of a sociopolitical coalition at the level of the nation-state that is able to present its agenda as being in the general interest and enforce it against those actively resisting. The construction of such a coalition is, in turn, conditioned by the balance of social forces and the structural conditions in which they operate, including the dominant mode of accumulation and the form and capacities of the state. In Serbia, the decisive turning point at which such a coalition was constructed was the defeat of Milo š evi ć in 2000. The coalition encompassed not only middle classes impoverished by Milo š evi ć ’s regime, including the NGO sphere, but also the political and economic elites who favored a transition to a more liberal and internationalized form of capitalism. To broaden this analysis further, these developments in Serbia were crucially influenced by the wider transnational context. Among the relevant factors is the flow of foreign resources to “pro-European” forces, much of which was mediated or absorbed by NGOs both before and after the regime change. One should also mention the peripheral position of postsocialist countries in the post–Cold War order, in the case of Serbia further aggravated by the long history of Balkan marginality and by the interactions between the Milo š evi ć regime, foreign governments, and multilateral organizations. Once all these power relationships and forces operating at various scales are taken into account, it becomes clearer why the course toward the EU, once taken, was maintained and increasingly difficult to change. This path-dependency does not manifest only at the level of the nation-state but also at that of individual and organizational histories such as Ana’s or the CDF’s, which speak of a long-term involvement in struggles and mundane tasks promoting Serbia’s transnational integration. My second theoretical point concerns the idea of civil society. So far, I used the term in its usual emic sense in Serbia. While embedded in the local social and cultural setting, it was decisively shaped by the globally dominant liberal theory of civil society. Also evoked in EU discourse, this theory constructs civil society as an apolitical sphere, or political only in the sense of pursuing universal liberal values and defending them from the state’s authoritarian tendencies. It is open to everybody—a forum for the “articulation of citizens’ interests,” as the common phrase goes—but distinct and autonomous from the state. The evidence and analysis presented in this chapter show what has become of these ideas in practice. Under Miloš evi ć , civil society emerged as a profoundly partisan force with a limited social base; these social origins and political alignments shaped its development after the regime change, while its boundaries with the state became blurred. Civil Society and EU Integration of Serbia ● 163

These findings are broadly in line with Hann’s (1996) influential program for an anthropological approach to civil society. He suggested that anthropologists particularize the Western notion of civil society and trace its transformations when exported to non-Western settings, without assuming that it completely displaces equivalent local meanings and practices. However, where I part with Hann is his suggestion that the concept should be made to refer “more loosely to the moral community, to the problems of accountability, trust and co-operation that all groups face” (Hann 1996: 20), and ideas and practices deployed to solve these problems. Hann describes this as a “positive” definition of civil society, as opposed to a “negative” one that highlights its supposed opposition to the state (Hann 1996: 22). While the idea of opposition is indeed simplistic, my concern is that Hann’s expansionist approach downplays the fact that the rise of a centralized political authority was a key historical precondition for the concept’s emergence (Karlstr ö m 1999). Hann refers to issues of social cohesion and moral community that can be analyzed with a range of more specific concepts, whereas the entanglement of civil society with the state makes it a concept well- suited for thinking about the social embedding of state formation and transformation. Finally, Hann’s one-sided emphasis on trust and cooperation risks obscuring struggles permeating civil society. I suggest that Gramsci’s thought and its reception in anthropology can provide a productive inspiration for an anthropological conceptualization of civil society in a dynamic, dialectical relationship to the state (e.g., Buttigieg 1995; Chandhoke 1995: 149–156; Crehan 2002; Gramsci 1971; Smith 2004). Gramsci saw the difference between the state and civil society as purely analytical and implicated the two in a joint enterprise of political and cultural domination. For him, the form of the state was a reflection of the resources and will to power of the ruling classes “whose historical unity [ . . . ] is realised in the State” (Gramsci 1971: 52). However, the unity of the ruling classes is a political and juridical challenge as well as an issue of moral, cultural, and ideological hegemony—domination by consent—negotiated in the sphere of civil society. Building on these insights, I conceptualize civil society as a set of ideas and practices that continually reconstitute and mediate the relationships of “state,” “society,” and “economy,” and reproduce as well as challenge hegemony (Gramsci 1971: 12). Hegemony is always fragile and contested—hegemonic projects rather than achievements (Roseberry 1994). The integration of Serbia into the EU is one such hegemonic project, a political and cultural process of persuasion unfold- ing in civil society. Here, broad consent for neoliberal globalization 164 ● Marek Mikuš and restructuring is being built by articulating this transformation as a comprehensive modernization in the general interest. While this chapter has focused on the role of the NGO sector in supporting this project, Serbian civil society in a broader, anthropological sense also contains a range of forces developing subhegemonic and counterhege- monic alternatives. Moving on to methodology, the distinctiveness of an anthropological approach to globalization rests in “on the ground,” immersive, and longitudinal inquiries into local interpretations, responses, and outcomes. While this is valuable in itself, not least because it is too often missed or downplayed by other disciplines, I believe that empirical concerns such as mine reveal starkly the theoretical inadequacies and epistemological limits of an uncritical focus on a spatially bound “local community” (Gupta and Ferguson 1992), sometimes coupled with a fetishization of participant observation as the only legitimate source of anthropological knowledge. My research design did involve long-term participant observation in two NGOs, which gave me a deeper insight into their organizational histories, politics, and cultures. However, these sites, together with theory-driven research questions, also served as my starting points for an exploratory and improvisational mode of multisited fieldwork in which I followed networks and, more generally, translocal social connections “upwards and outwards.” This led to one-off or repeated visits and shorter bouts of participant observation in a number of other sites, as well as greater use of other data collection techniques, especially interviewing and the study of a large number of documents and visual and audiovisual artifacts. This has allowed me to gain a broader perspective on the Serbian state and civil society, and to access data that might have been impossible to obtain by participant observation alone, concerning, for instance, past events, development of institutional and legal frameworks, organizational practices (as opposed to stated norms), discursive genealogies, long-standing informal networks, or simply information from people too busy to be available for “hanging out” with an anthropologist. The final point I wish to make is political. The dominant mode in which EU integration is politicized in public discourse centers on the opposition between nationalism and (supposed) cosmopolitanism. Exploiting this framework is the bread and butter of right-wing political entrepreneurs—hardly a new phenomenon in Europe but, as the 2014 elections to the European Parliament revealed, one that is worryingly on the rise in the setting of de-democratization and failure of the EU to even conserve existing levels of social welfare. But it is also a favorite Civil Society and EU Integration of Serbia ● 165 device of EU elites who routinely portray any dissent from their policies as inevitably nationalist and reactionary, thereby conveniently obscuring similar foundations of the EU’s very own migration and enlargement policies. By privileging the identitarian framework in their studies of EU integration, anthropologists might unwittingly contribute to the reproduction of these terms of debate. I believe that one of the benefits of a historical anthropological perspective rests precisely in expanding the scope of public deliberation about the currently dominant mode of EU integration, including a deeper and more critical focus on its “socio-economic content or underlying social purpose” (Jessop 2009: viii, original emphasis).

Notes * I thank the editors, the anonymous reviewers, and the participants of the Prague conference for their helpful comments on various drafts of this chapter. I reserve special thanks for my research participants and my doctoral mentors, Deborah James and Mathijs Pelkmans, for their close involvement with the earlier versions of this work. Research for this chapter was supported by the London School of Economics and the International Visegrad Fund. 1 . These are no innocent cultural-geographic categories. Rooted in symbolic geographies of Europe, they are variously mobilized and manipulated by many actors, including the EU with its own extensive range of geopolitical constructs. We should be particularly wary of the ways in which the tropes of Mitteleuropa justified bestowing a higher civilizational status on some countries relative to those east and south whose Orientalist and Balkanist representations were thus solidified. This is why I prefer to speak more inclusively of “postsocialist Europe.” 2 . A number of these works used the concept of identity to study postsocialist EU borders and borderlands. Follis’s (2012) case study of the Polish– Ukrainian border in 2003–08 shows that this subject can be approached in a different and, in my view, more productive manner. Her focus is on the complex relationships between, on the one hand, changes in the border regime as a result of Poland’s EU accession and, on the other, spatial and social imaginaries, variegated citizenship, and the lived experiences of migrant workers. 3 . Narotzky and Smith (2006: 2–4) use the term “historical realism.” 4 . Research participants were anonymized wherever practicable. 5 . Legally speaking, Serbian NGOs are “associations of citizens” or, more rarely, “foundations.” Thousands of associations of citizens existed already under the socialist regime and some of them are still active. However, such organizations almost never self-ascribe or are described by others as “nongovernmental organizations”; the term “association (of citizens)” is used instead. What this shows 166 ● Marek Mikuš

is that the expression “nongovernmental organization” connotes the particular type of organization described above and is closely entangled with the postsocialist discourse of “civil society.” 6 . EMinS claims it pulled out of the project in 2008 as it was impossible to agree with the First European House on “clear rules, procedures and structure of organs which choose the awardees” (EMinS 2008). It is unclear who has been organizing the award since then and what the role of EMinS actually is (Ili ć 2014).

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PART III

Postsocialist M odernities

CHAPTER 9

On the Road: Polish Modernization from the Perspective of the Anthropology of the Motorway *

Waldemar Kuligowski and Agata Stanisz

Introduction On Wednesday, July 4, 2014, the A2 motorway connecting Warsaw with the Polish–German border was given the name of the “Freedom Motorway.” The official ceremony was attended by the Polish president Bronis ł aw Komorowski and the German president Joachim Gauck. The presidents unveiled a plaque with the motorway’s name and planted a tree—the Freedom Oak. In his speech, President Komorowski said that the Freedom Motorway “connects and will connect not only as a transport route, but also in terms of mutual friendship and respect.” German president Gauck described his visit to Poland as “a kind of pilgrimage,” serving as a reminder that “we regained our freedom and it all began here in Warsaw” (“Polish and German presidents . . .” 2014). The tree planted by both presidents—the “Freedom Oak”—marked the twenty- fifth anniversary of the fall of communism. Tolls for using A2 were symbolically waived on this day. Given this political context, investment projects related to the construction of the motorway carried a very strong symbolic meaning. Whenever a new section of the motorway was finished and being deliv- ered, a celebration of modernization would be held, with the motorway operating on several levels: as an infrastructure for mobility; as a 176 ● Waldemar Kuligowski and Agata Stanisz system of mobility; and as a medium of mobility (Normark 2006). In this way, the official discourse matched social expectations. A survey carried out by PBS DGA, at the request of On Board Public Relations ECCO Network (July 2012), shows that 75 percent of Poles considered investments in road infrastructure a priority for the coming ten years (Komu potrzebne są autostrady? 2012). And when, in 2014, the Wielkopolska branch of Gazeta Wyborcza, one of the most influential dailies in Poland, announced a poll that asked readers to select the most important event of the last quarter century (1989–2014), the first place was claimed by the construction of the motorway connecting Pozna ń with Berlin and Warsaw. The newspaper commented that “Pozna ń citizens waited almost 20 years to be able to travel smoothly from Pozna ń to both capital cities—finally, Poznań has been integrated with Europe.” “The motorway bestows upon us a special sense of being between the East and the West,” a local political scientist commented. “The motorway is of crucial importance to business,” one of the local businessmen claimed (Mazur 2014: 1). In this chapter we present our research project, which we conceptualize as an empirical reflection on Polish modernization. The main idea of our project is framed on the one hand by the concept of multisited ethnography and, on the other, by road studies. Our fieldwork is radically multisited because it includes the A2 motorway linking Berlin to Poznań and further to Warsaw and national road no. 92, formerly the main communication corridor between Poznań and Poland’s western border. We conduct our work in a variety of 22 towns, villages, and settlements in western Poland, approaching the motorway as a specific cultural landscape. As other authors have suggested (Tuan 1990; Schama 1995; Mitchell 2002; Fischer 2012), landscape represents a substantive material heritage and a rich source of ideas, values, emotions, perceptions, memories, and worldviews as well. Space is never ontologically given—it is discursively and corporeally practiced. Landscapes have specific cultural meanings for particular social groups and even for individuals in their respective environments. These meanings are usually culturally, economically, and socially founded, and are transformed especially in situations of rapid and sudden change (Kuligowski 2014). We aim to contribute to anthropological treatments of space:

For a subject whose central rite of passage is fieldwork, whose romance has rested on its exploration of the remote [ . . . ] whose critical function is seen to lie in its juxtaposition of radically different ways of being [ . . . ] On the Road ● 177

there has been surprisingly little self-consciousness about the issue of space in anthropological theory. (Gupta and Ferguson 1997: 33)

For us, multisited ethnography becomes a specific version of “spatial practices” (de Certeau 1984). We treat the motorway as a cultural landscape and “anthropological (multi)place(s),” and our research as anthropological spatial practices conducted in the postsocialist cultural landscape of western Poland. In the chapter, we refer to the complex phenomena arising from the construction and delivery of consecutive sections of Polish motorways as “modernization through the motorway.”

Multisited Modernization Recently, especially after the UEFA European Championship in football in 2012, the discourse on modernization has gained potency in Poland, dominated by announcements of “the end” of Polish modernization when it comes to infrastructure. The political dimension of this discourse was pronounced, and so it was not surprising that an interview with Polish president Bronis ł aw Komorowski, published by the most important Polish weekly, Polityka, in May 2014, was titled “There’s No Freedom without Modernization” (Paradowska and Baczy ń ski 2014). Without a doubt, infrastructural investments recently carried out in Poland are of massive symbolic and practical importance. Their value has been appreciated both at the level of governmental discourse (both at the central and regional level) and popular discussion. But the meaning of the A2 motorway is even more multidimensional. In this chapter, we refer to the complex phenomena arising from the construction and delivery of new sections of Polish motorways as “modernization through the motorway.” The modernization of Poland through the construction of motorways was to be Poland’s final stage in joining a united Europe. It was also supposed to provide an impetus for the economic and social development of the regions where the motorways were being built. After 1989 and the Central European “autumn of nations,” 1 a t i m e came when many social scientists were called on to participate in the various projects of modernization and development. As Anna Tsing said, modernization frameworks bring together scholars (including anthropologists), policymakers, politicians, and social activists in a work project of social betterment. “Only when the shine of modernization began to fade did scholars ask how it managed to capture the hopes and dreams of so many experts, how its formulas were 178 ● Waldemar Kuligowski and Agata Stanisz communicated to such a variety of social groups and within such a diversity of situations” (Tsing 2000: 329). The current anthropological debate on modernization in the European context depicts its many facets as well as a lack of continuity of the phenomenon (Kuligowski 2012). More and more voices are arguing that the practices omitted from the literature so far, such as “the ritual of withdrawal” and “the evidence of unsuccessful transformations” (Sulima 2003), “grouching” (Kę dziorek 1996), “bellyaching” (Buchowski 1996)—are essential elements of modernization, rather than simply its nonperfect reverse. There is no such thing as one “proper” transformation, and never has been; for it is a product of institutional and grassroots changes (Giza- Poleszczuk et al. 2000). Self-agency and subjectivity in the face of changes in living conditions assume various forms, including involvement in handicraft, semilegal trade, collection of waste materials, or gathering of the fruits of nature, spontaneous services, rental of land and buildings, etc. Localized modernization, at work in small towns and villages, has bred “a new poverty,” but also new entrepreneurship (Tarkowska 2000). Numerous ethnographic studies were carried out describing the rapid process of pauperization of large sections of Polish society (Buchowski 1996; Golinowska 1997; Tarkowska 2000; Rakowski 2009). However, a similar anthropological debate related to the motorway does not exist. The anthropology of the motorway is currently invis- ible; while we all use motorways, we do not research them. The most popular and even most dominating theoretical concept focused on the motorway remains Marc Aug é ’s idea of “non-places.” In his famous essay (first published in 1992 and reissued in 1995), the French anthropologist coined the phrase “non-places” and introduced it into the discourse of social sciences (Augé 1995). In general, “non-places” do not hold enough significance to be regarded as “places”; they exist beyond history, social relations, and the game of identity. A brilliant example of a non-place would be a motorway, but also a hotel room, an airport, or a supermarket. Augé said: “If a place can be defined as relational, historical and concerned with identity, then a space which cannot be defined as relational, or historical, or concerned with identity will be a non-place” (1995: 77–78). Aug é defined this term in opposition to the classical notion of an “anthropological place.” In a traditional sense—sometimes referred to as the “Malinowskian complex”—the anthropological place is a series of isomorphisms between culture, history, identity, space, and even landscape. Classical anthropologists identify people they study with On the Road ● 179 the landscape in which they find them. Traditional, closed, identity- defining places are

places of identity, of relations and of history. The layout of the house, the rules of residence, the zoning of the village, placement of altars, con- figuration of public open spaces, land distribution, correspond for every individual to a system of possibilities, prescriptions and interdicts whose content is both spatial and social. (Aug é 1995: 52)

Aug é suggested that “anthropological place” is the essence of “belonging,” the specific and real kinds of homologies between people, practices, and places. The notion of “non-places” describes the situation whereby people, practices, and places are dispersed and people act without reference to their common history or cultural experience. Paradoxically, in his work on the Parisian subway ( In the Metro), another brilliant example of a space used for transport, Augé does not describe it as a “non-place.” In Aug é ’s literary vision, the subway operated within a deeply embedded history and memory on a personal and social level. “As always, history came from elsewhere [ . . . ]. Subway stops were everywhere in my educational, professional, and familial life” (Aug é 2002: 5). From Augé ’s perspective, the subway, as opposed to the motorway, can be seen as an anthropological place. In consequence, Aug é defined “non-places” as having no identity, no history, and no urban relationships. Non-places are temporary spaces for “circulation, communication and consumption.” The distinctive examples of non-places—such a motorways, airports, duty free shops, motorway restaurants, large supermarkets, international hotel chains, shopping malls, gas stations, multiplexes, and so on—can be found in relation to travel as a main human activity. In an Augé an supermodernity, a person is reduced to a toll for mobility in a transnational space. “He becomes no more than what he does or experiences in the role of passenger, customer or driver” (Augé 1995: 103). In this context, we have a strong vision of a single person who occupies a discrete seat on an airplane or a lane on the motorway. In other words, a nonperson in a non-place. We want to argue that perceiving motorways as non-places is false. This view reduces their meanings, functions, and dimensions. Instead, we want to contend that motorways always existed in a multidimensional social and cultural context. People who use motorways are not only passengers, drivers or customers, but also inhabitants, migrants, workers, employers, owners of motels or hotels, hitchhikers, and others. 180 ● Waldemar Kuligowski and Agata Stanisz

In this chapter, we first want to suggest that the motorway is an anthropological place with its own sets of isomorphisms between culture, history, identity, economy, and landscape. Second, we want to examine some anthropological methods and techniques in relation to the motorway, especially those connected to the concept of multisited ethnography. A project called “multisited ethnography” first discussed by George Marcus in his article “Ethnography In/Of the World System: The Emergence of Multi-Sited Ethnography” (1995), refers to an ethnography that defines as its objective the study of social phenomena that cannot be accounted for by focusing on any single site. The “world system” was seen as a framework within which the local was contextualized or compared. The very essence of a multisited project is to follow people, connections, and relationships across space. The discussion on multisited ethnography can be viewed in the context of the changing realities of the world since the 1970s, commonly associated with terms such as the world system, transnationalism, globalization, and modernization (Falzon 2009; Coleman and Hellermann 2011). Marcus’s article breaks with the classic convention of ethnographic fieldwork. Looking at culture as embedded in macroconstructions of a global cultural order, his project uses traditional ethnographic methodology in various locations both in terms of space and time. In Marcus’s terms, multisited ethnography involves a spatially dispersed field; research tracks the subject across spatial and temporal boundaries. According to Marcus, multisited ethnography has emerged within the discipline in response to the emergence of a “more complex object of study” (1995: 95). These “complex objects” are cultural processes, identities, or objects. “Strategies of quite literally following connections, associations, and putative relationships are thus at the very heart of designing multi-sited ethnographic research” (Marcus 1995: 97). Another important element of Marcus’s project is an interdisciplinary approach to fieldwork, bringing in methods from cultural studies, media studies, science and technology studies, migration studies, and many others. As Marcus points out, multisited ethnography pushes ethnography to the limits of its classic professional aesthetic and “feel.” He argues that an unreconstructed “Malinowskian practice” does in fact form a part of the idea of “multisited” ethnographic research. Obviously, ethnography has always involved multiple sites—at the least, the field as a place of research and the academy as a place of interpretation. But today “[t]he place where one writes and makes sense is a heterotopic [ . . . ]. There field sites and the extended relations among them, our personal On the Road ● 181 pasts, and our academic sites are all drawn into a tangled web” (Marcus 2011: 39). This is how we approach multisited ethnographic strategies that we used in our study of the Polish motorway.

Moving Modernizations Project In January 2014, more or less at the same time that the A2 motorway took on its strong symbolic and political meaning, we started a project funded by the Polish National Science Center, titled “Moving Modernizations: The Influence of the A2 Motorway on Local Cultural Landscapes.” The main idea of the project is based on the assumption that so-called Polish modernization, especially in relation to the construction and beginning of the operation of new sections of motorways, has not yet ended and should be accompanied by ethnographic research focused on multi-dimensional transformations in local cultural landscapes. The “Moving Modernizations” research project can be placed within an empirical reflection on Polish modernization from below and is located in the transdisciplinary field framed by contemporary social and cultural anthropology, the idea of multisited ethnographic fieldwork as well as road studies. We consider our project innovative mainly because road studies are poorly developed in Poland and because there is an evident lack of recent anthropological research based on in-depth ethnographic fieldwork. We located our analysis and interpretations of the mechanisms of local modernization in a specific cultural continuum: from the new poverty to the new enterprise. In the research for this study, we focused on five central points located along the national road no. 92—each one is multisited in its character. The research area extends over two regions ( voivodeships ) (Greater Poland and Lubusz), four districts (Nowy Tomy ś l, Mi ę dzyrzecz, Ś wiebodzin, and Sul ę cin), and seven municipalities (Miedzichowo, Trzciel, Szczaniec, Ś wiebodzin, Lubrza, Ł ag ó w, and Torzym). The scope of fieldwork includes 22 towns, villages, and settlements that are related to the A2 motorway in various ways, and which cut across the national road no. 92—previously the main communication corridor between the city of Poznań and Poland’s western border. Initial findings showed the necessity of a multiphase, multisited, and mobile research through applying diverse methods and techniques (archival and cartographic research methods, survey and in-depth unstructured interviews, participant observation, visual ethnography, journalistic and audiographic methods), which we consider essential for the achievement of the defined objectives of the project, 182 ● Waldemar Kuligowski and Agata Stanisz such as: observation of direct and indirect relationships between hand- ing the A2 motorway over for use in 2011 and the sociocultural changes occurring in towns and villages lining the entire national road no. 92; defining the scope and dynamics of grassroots economic practices undertaken by local communities; identifying transformations in the landscape (in the broad sense of the term); displaying interconnections and feedback between local administrative, national, and international ideologies concerning socioeconomic development; analyzing discourses on modernization, “orientation to the West” in postsocialist Poland, and its impact on the local level; determining a correlation between economic and social modernization, regional communication systems, and cultural changes; following the dynamic development and transformations of spatial structures that so far have remained outside of the main areas undergoing modernization. The fundamental methodological assumptions of our work refer to the anthropological conception of multisited ethnography, which breaks with the convention of carrying out research located in one concrete place. The essence of the assumption of multisited ethnography is to follow people, connections, and associations (Falzon 2009). The main subject of research in the “Moving Modernizations” project cannot be seen as a single, one-site framework within which the local is contextualized or compared. Unfinished modernization processes evoked by the opening of the A2 motorway in the Nowy Tomy ś l- Ś wiecko is instead analyzed as integral to and embedded in multisited objects of study, requiring not only “horizontal movement” from one place to another, the implementation of different conceptual and theoretical perspectives or comparison of discourses, but, primarily, a study with different groups of people, including local authorities and activists, local entrepreneurs, and contractors who run motels, roadhouses, bars, brothels, or agritourism farms, drivers and tourists, owners of and workers at petrol stations and motorway service centers, as well as other inhabitants of chosen towns, villages, and settlements. The methodology of multisited ethnography allows for designing research as a series of juxtapositions, in which the processes of national and international modernizations are not seen as external, but integral, part of parallel, related local situations. As a result, multisited ethnography involves spatially dispersed fieldwork, a literal movement of ethnographers as well as techniques of juxtaposition of data collected within different social backgrounds. We consider this to be one of the most reasonable means of studying contemporary social phenomena related to the effects of the motorway on the locality. On the Road ● 183

From New Poverty to New Enterprise After completing the first stage, our project, which included an analysis of archival secondary sources, multisited introductory research (field visits and initial interviews with local authorities and entrepreneurs), and mobile motorway research with audiovisual documentation, we realized that there was an obvious discrepancy between the different levels of the discourse on modernization (official national and regional levels, and the level of popular discourse), the developmental imag- ery of the motorway, and everyday practices in particular parts of the research area. Due to logistics, we had to divide the field site of the three-year project into two parts, with each of us working in one of those parts. Today, we can conclude that there is a clearly visible clash between those parts, not only with respect to the ideological outlook on the motorway but, most of all, with respect to their local socio-economic contexts. These contexts are reflected in economic, business, and investment strategies. The first research area (1) comprises three municipalities Miedzichowo, Trzciel, and Szczaniec (all situated closer to Poznań ), whereas the second (2) comprises Ś wiebodzin, Lubrza, Ł ag ó w, and Torzym (situated closer to the Polish–German border). The distance between the towns where the research is being carried out (1 and 2) and the A2 motorway is basically very similar (2.9 km on average). Both areas of the field site have access to two A2 motorway exit ramps. 2 They are also characterized by a similar geography and history, but they also show significant differences, such as number of inhabitants, economic and infrastructural conditions, and so on. In the following section, we will illustrate some of our findings on the modernization through the motorway based on our research on the A2 motorway from Ś wiecko to Nowy Tomyś l. The investment project began in July 2009 with the objective of connecting Poland to the European motorway network (road E30 from Cork, Ireland to Omsk, Russia), at the same time becoming a convenient communication channel linking Berlin to Pozna ń , and further on to Warsaw. The operation of the 106-km-long section began on December 1, 2011. For the first six months, driving through this section was free of charge, which resulted in significantly busier traffic in the direction of the border with Germany. The opening of this motorway section caused a multitude of consequences—economic, cultural, social—that transformed the local cultural landscape. Major changes happened in two areas: (1) municipalities through which the motorway 184 ● Waldemar Kuligowski and Agata Stanisz was built; and (2) municipalities located within the area of road no. 92, which had lost its previous status. A dramatic qualitative transformation has affected the latter area. Towns that only recently had been located along a transit road, profiting from vehicle traffic in numerous ways, have now been deprived of this flow by the motorway. According to the concept of the “trauma of a big change” formulated by Polish sociologist Piotr Sztompka, the cultural sphere is most sensitive to traumatizing changes “because culture is a depository of continuity, heritage, tradition, and identity of human communities” (Sztompka 2004: 162). In his approach, Sztompka connected the concepts of cultural trauma and social change, and defined possible traits of traumatogenic change. According to him, any change that is traumatizing is characterized by speed. It has to be rapid, taking place over a very short period. In addition, change has to be sudden, taking people by surprise, and it must be unpredictable, making people realize that the change has brought unbearable results. “The trauma of a big change” related to modernization through the motorway took place on a local scale, consisting in an unexpected degradation of an externally imposed, complete, and rapid nature. Processes that have come to life through “the trauma” are both of a processual and a very ambiguous nature: “From the pole of triumph to the pole of catastrophe, the pendulum swings all the way,” as Sztompka suggested (2004: 157). The first stage of our research matches the logic of “the trauma of a big change.” In particular, this applies to small businesses operating in the vicinity of road no. 92, the former route to Berlin and Germany. In the narratives of the business owners, the particular morn- ing of the day of the opening of the motorway (which was at first made free of charge) is referred to the time of “great silence.” The owner of a hotel and a restaurant described the day in the following way: “40,000 cars would pass on this road before the motorway opened. Literally bumper to bumper. Then I woke up one day and only heard this terrible silence.” A woman living in one of the little towns along the route was equally vivid about this: “Once there were plenty of accidents here, now no accidents happen here, actually nothing is happening here. No traffic, no money.” The tale of the “great silence” is an introduction to numerous microstories that focus on the negative consequences of the opening of the motorway. The businessmen point out that they were expecting fewer customers and reduced income. They predicted the drop would be between 20 and 25 percent. They now estimate the actual reduction in trade is closer to 90 percent. Businesses either went bankrupt On the Road ● 185 or had to lay people off. Hotels are now kept mostly by families. Many original business ideas, such as dancing events for drivers, have failed. Importantly, almost nobody we interviewed saw any chance that the situation would improve. From the perspective of our narrators, the motorway seems to be a black hole that has swallowed the money and the customers, and consequently the energy and ideas of the local businesses. However, road no. 92 is still operating and the customers who make use of it prove to be very interesting. The main clients using its services are no longer truck drivers or passenger car drivers, but rather organized tour participants. When interviewed, the businessmen mainly name tourists from Eastern Europe: Lithuania, Latvia, Belarus, Ukraine, and Russia whose destinations are places like Berlin, Paris, or Brussels. Tourist traffic on road no. 92 is specific, comprising mostly of coaches run by travel agencies and carriers who save money by not paying motorway tolls. Apparently, their clients are not wealthy people. But even this kind of traffic is waning, which our respondents attribute to several factors: “Belarusians cannot leave their country. For five years they have been denied visas on Lukashenko’s orders. Ukrainians have stopped traveling because of their homeland’s internal situation. Russians have already switched to planes. And Lithuania and Latvia are just too small . . .” explains the manager of one of the largest local hotels. An important change also concerns the typical and formerly thriving trade in picturesque garden accessories and ornaments. These include plastic, metal, wicker, or wooden dwarfs, animal figurines, popular culture characters, elements of household architecture. In the past, German tourists were the best buyers for these items. The situation has now changed dramatically. With the German market saturated, only Eastern Europeans buy these products and since they are few in numbers and short of money, this branch of manufacturing and trade is also dying out. According to Ren é Girard, the modernizing trauma creates its scapegoat (Girard 1986). However, in our case, the motorway itself has not become this scapegoat. It is an artificial, inanimate object that generates no living stereotypes. Instead, it is Jan Kulczyk, the main private investor and builder of the A2 motorway who has become the living rich scapegoat who evokes emotions. Kulczyk is a successful Polish businessman from Poznań who has been active globally and who has been ranked by Forbes for many years as the richest Pole. The situation of crisis and disintegration caused by the motorway has produced 186 ● Waldemar Kuligowski and Agata Stanisz different forms of verbal aggression toward Kulczyk, including com- plaints, curses, and accusations of corruption and self-interestedness. The primary elements of the stigmatizing narrative about Kulczyk focus on his high social position and his fortune, articulating the trauma of the great change through the consciousness of class differences. On the other hand, there are positive “situations” related to the construction and opening of the motorway described by local people, especially those who live between Rzeczyca and Torzym villages. The process of modernization facilitated by the opening of this particular section of A2 was presented by the authorities and entrepreneurs in the municipalities situated closer to the Polish–German border as a “booster,” which will foster “a new way of thinking,” lead to the “appearance of new behav- iours,” and an “increase of local proactivity.” Some people say: “those who changed are doing fine,” “what counts is a direct contact with the client, a different approach,” “we would be completely screwed up if we weren’t happy about this motorway.” And what is even more important, they divide the world into “normal” and “postsocialist,” where “normal” equates with “European.” At first glance, the A2 motorway, as well as national road no. 92, is the main transport corridors from the East to the West. Long-distance transport (except for tourist transit) on route no. 92 remained at the same level after the A2 motorway had been opened. The area between Rzeczyca and Torzym is where truck drivers usually take breaks after 9–10 hours of driving from the East. 3 There are around 15 parking and service areas, some bigger and some smaller. It is worth looking more closely at the bigger ones, which meet European standards and, most importantly, “East European” standards, which means that they provide specific food (this is the last chance to purchase those products which “are not available in the West,” such as bread, vodka, cooked meats, or flavored water (Stanisz 2012: 7–18). The first company we want to mention that succeeded in business despite changing circumstances is Port 2000 in Mostki—a firm, which, in 2012, took first place in the ranking of big family companies in Lubusz Province (according to a Newsweek ranking), was named the “fastest developing family business in Poland.” 4 The company was established in 1998 and it has been systematically expanding beyond the borders of the local town of Mostki (they have five partner stations on the A2, the S3 route and national route no. 22), specializing in providing services for truck drivers: “With their needs in mind, we are trying to provide the widest range of services possible, coupled with On the Road ● 187 the greatest convenience and entertainment.”5 The company has also received other awards, such as The Station of the Year, Safe Parking Area, and Good Petrol. The Nevada Center in Po ź rzad ł o received a prestigious award as “The Best Petrol Station of the Year” in 2009. The contest is organized under the patronage of the most popular Polish magazine for truck drivers, mechanics, and carriers called, Polski Traker ( The Polish Trucker) and the Polish Chamber of Liquid Fuels. The Nevada Center complex includes two petrol stations, an exchange office, gift and hobby shops, a CB service shop, a shop with car parts and accessories, a hotel, a large supermarket, two restaurants, and two 24/7 bars. There is also free Wi-Fi access, and security is provided by a 24/7 electronic security system and monitoring. In the area, there is also one building of a very specific shape called a “Polish pyramid,” where a conference center is situated: “The pyramid has all the proper angles and propor- tions. It has been designed with respect to the four cardinal directions. It is made of stone. It is around 16 metres high while the floor area amounts to 918 square metres.”6 Another example of a “Polish pyramid” can be found in the center of Stok. It is a direct result of the A2 motorway construction. Stok used to be a village. In 2009, a homestead that used to be there was demolished and a hotel and service center was built in its place. It consists of a motel, a supermarket, and a petrol station. In the transport and service center in Boczó w, one can also observe other local businesses: local butchers trading their products (famous with drivers, recommended on many internet forums 7 ) and legal or illegal peddling (e.g., Roma people trading mobile phones, household appliances, etc.). Another economic strategy facilitated by the opening of the A2 motorway is supralocal investment. Local communities are not self- sufficient and the types of investment that are stereotypically associated with rural areas, such as investment in agriculture or forestry, do not provide enough jobs. Therefore, there has been an emphasis on attract- ing national and foreign investors, and developing the service sector. Since Poland joined the EU, the unemployment rate in this area has fallen from approximately 35 to 13 percent (Strategia miasta . . . 2005: 157–162). The most typical example of this trend is locating well-known supermarket chains on route no. 92 (French Carrefour, Portuguese Biedronka or Dino, mainly financed by Polish capital). Near Torzym and route no. 92, a new complex—Kownaty Park—will be erected by 188 ● Waldemar Kuligowski and Agata Stanisz a French investor who has already built a historical entertainment center, Puy du Fou, in France. The park is supposed to be created by 2017 and will cover an area of 207 ha (Ź ra ł ko 2014a). In October 2014, Torzym started to invest in maintenance works for route no. 92, and these will take a year to complete (Ź ra ł ko 2014b). A Ukrainian company has bought a complex of buildings that were formerly a granary. According to the mayor of one of the municipalities, foreign investments are positive because “companies with foreign capital bring advanced technologies and modern innovative production.” The town is trying to interest investors in buying the unused buildings of the Heart and Lung Hospital. There are also plans to modernize and adjust the hospital to the needs of the modern patient–client (mainly a Western one, because, according to the mayor, “the standards here are still lower than in the ‘old’ EU Member States, mainly Germany”) ( Strategia miasta i gminy Torzym 2005–2020). In this case, the local administration uses structural funds from the EU to attract investments. Ł ag ó w—seat of the Ł ag ó w municipality—is trying to make the state authorities build a motorway exit faster than planned (starting in 2017 instead of 2030) to enable traffic to access their town, successfully initiating negotiations at the Ministry of Infrastructure and Development. Importantly, another investor—a local one—has been found who is willing to earmark 10 million zlotys for that cause. These efforts of Ł ag ó w are fueled by the town’s successful application to the status of a health and recreation center, which will further increase its attractiveness for tourists and visitors. Being proactive and having a modern attitude toward new kinds of clients are mentioned as examples of positive business practices by the owners of hotels and catering industries. In the interviews, they refer to these practices as “revitalization” or “fighting for new clients” (mainly Ukrainians, Russians, and Belarusians). Indeed, hotels situated along the national road no. 92 are “the last inexpensive hotels of standards comparable to those in the West or even better.” Those entrepreneurs who “understand the changes” attend tourist fairs, repair and renovate their facilities, put more emphasis on the quality of food (they even feature organic, vegetarian, and vegan meals on their menus), offer competitive prices, and adjust their restaurants and bars to the needs of families with children. It is important to note that local businesses are very often family businesses whose functioning is regulated by the rules characteristic of kinship ties that are peculiar to contemporary Poland, referred to as “ familizm ” (Stanisz 2013; Su ł kowski 2004). Outside the hotel industry On the Road ● 189 already described, there are also commercial niches whose development can be considered to have been “boosted” by the opening of the A2 motorway. A family business—Lamus—from the village of Boczó w is a fabulous example. The company has been in operation since the late 1980s. Originally a single-store firm, it has developed into a complex of shops situated in every part of the village center, in which the family trades in antiques and other second-hand goods from the West (from Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, or France). 8 The other example is an agrotourism farm—Frank ó wka—whose owner previously lived in Belgium and advertises his business using his experience gained in the West.9 The A2 motorway provides a convenient route to towns and c ities located in municipalities through which the motorway passes. As a result, it generates internal migrations and new settlements. More inhabitants mean more taxes. Inhabitants are moving away from locations near route no. 92 to other areas. In consequence, this movement generates the need for infrastructure development, more efficient transport, broadband Internet, among others. Significant progress in creating areas of economic activity located near route no. 92 and the A2 motorway is coupled with a package of tax reliefs and preferential rates of taxes and local fees for companies registered in the area (“Autostrada dział a jak . . .” 2012). Service-providing small and medium enterprises (SMEs) are being established in order to cater to the motorway users near the exits and along route no. 92 between Torzym and Rzepin. We have mainly observed a general economic revival stimulated by the resources from the investment areas near the expressways and the A2 motorway, while the income generated from taxes is used to improve many public services in the community and to develop tourism. This development creates a fresh incentive for further investments, not only in business, but also in human resources, which helps to counterbalance the reported low birth rates and drain of people who decide to emigrate to Western Europe.

Conclusion According to Piotr Sztompka, “Ontologically, society is nothing else but change, movement and transformation, action and interaction, construction and reconstruction, constant becoming rather than stable being” (2004: 155). In this chapter, we focused on another (perhaps the last) stage of modernization, related to the construction of motorways in Poland, as a part of transformation processes launched in 1989. We 190 ● Waldemar Kuligowski and Agata Stanisz examined cultural, social, economic, and grassroots practices resulting from the experience of change brought about by the construction and opening of new Polish motorways. Our goal was to produce an empiri- cally based reflection on modernization through the motorway in the context of the various types of ongoing transformations of local cultural landscapes. In a metaphoric way, we operate in the frame of two formulas: (1) new poverty and new enterprise, (2) “trauma of big change” and chance of big change. As we showed above, modernization through the motorway has a multidimensional and ambiguous character. The motorway creates specific cultural, social, and economic systems, with their own norms, values, aesthetics, and practices. Motorways always exist in a particular social and cultural context. People who use them are not only passengers, drivers, or customers, they are also other active agents. In many cases, they are agents of modernization. We see that Polish modernization is still on the road. One of these roads is called the “Freedom Motorway.”

Notes * This chapter is based on research supported by grants from the National Scientific Center (Narodowe Centrum Nauki, NCN) grant no. 218958. 1 . The notion of “autumn of nations” refers to the so-called revolutions of 1989—part of a revolutionary wave that resulted in the fall of communism in the communist states of Central and Eastern Europe. 2 . In the section of the A2 motorway between Ś wiecko and Nowy Tomy ś l there are six exit ramps: in Nowy Tomy ś l, Trzciel, Jordanowo, Torzym, Rzepin, and Ś wiecko. See: http://autostrada-a2.pl/pl/dla-kierowcow/aktualnosci/152 /zanim-wyruszysz-w-podroz-autostrada, accessed June 27, 2014. 3 . See: http://www.csk.szczecin.pl/czas-pracy-kierowcow-w-pl-i-ue , accessed June 27, 2014. 4 . S e e : h t t p : / / w w w . p o r t 2 0 0 0 . p l / P L / s t r o n a _ g l o w n a / 0 / 1 5 0 / F I R M A _ P O R T _ 2 0 0 0 _WYGRALA_RANKING_DUZYCH_FIRM_RODZINNYCH_W _WOJEWODZTWIE_LUBUSKIM/, accessed June 27, 2014. 5 . See: http://www.port2000.pl/PL/414/O_nas/ , accessed June 27, 2014. 6 . See: http://www.nevadacenter.pl/kompleks_nevada_center_pl.html , accessed June 27, 2014. 7 . Exemplary discussion on local butcher’s products: http://etransport.pl /forum112221.0.html , accessed February 10, 2014. 8 . See: http://lamusboczow.cba.pl , accessed June 27, 2014. 9 . See: http://lamusboczow.cba.pl , accessed June 27, 2014. See: http://www.fran kowka.travel.pl/ , accessed June 27, 2014. On the Road ● 191

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CHAPTER 10

Ethnography of Postsocialist Rural Change: Social Memory, Modernity, Local Empowerment, and Internal Displacement

H a n a H o r ák o v á

Introduction Rural change in postsocialist societies instigated by the postproductivist transition (Ilbery 1998), accompanied by feelings of insecurity about the emerging new social order, has caused a crisis in many communities. Local structures have changed dramatically; social networks have become fractured, while new structures of inequality have emerged. In trying to understand the dynamics and complexity of this change in structures and processes of power, stratification, and contestation, we have chosen to focus on how social memory derived from the “socialist past” affects ongoing processes, practices, and relationships of empowerment on the one hand, and of exclusion and displacement on the other. The study on social memory not only casts light on the complexity of the (re)production of rural space, it also helps explain conflicts between diverse social groups. The aim of this chapter is to examine how social memory affects social interaction in the public space intersected by ongoing processes of transnational mobility. The study uses ethnographic methods and focuses on one of the rural areas in the Czech Republic—Lipno nad Vltavou—that has recently adopted the project of tourism as a key development tool. We argue that the ways local actors perceive, reflect, or perhaps subvert and respond to the challenges of recent socioeconomic and political 196 ● Hana Horáková transformation through tourism is largely contingent on the ways in which social memory conceptualizes society and social change. We ask how social memory derived from the “socialist past” affects ongoing processes and practices related to development through tourism, and how new developmental activities are affected by the legacy of socialism. In particular, we examine the contestation over the meaning of modernity in the rural area under study.

Conceptual and Methodological Framework Postsocialism What is the utility of the concept of “postsocialism”? Is there a need to reject or uphold the notion of “postsocialism” as Kü rti and Skalní k (2009: 9) suggested a few years ago? To answer these questions of the continued utility of the conceptual framework of postsocialism, we need to consider two mutually related issues: first, the potential utility of the past and, second, the nature of changes that are occurring in various postsocialist contexts. As for the former, the question is whether “socialism” still has a meaning in the postsocialist era. Some public commentators, especially neoliberal economists, imagine that the socialist past can and should be cast into oblivion. Their assumptions are based on a linear conceptualization of social change, which treats non-Western societies as “residual,” expecting postsocialist societies to inevitably embrace the logic of Western modernity and abandon the socialist past (Silova 2010). Advocates for radical and rapid social change tend to disregard the complexity of social and cultural worlds in which people live (Lampland 2002). On the other hand, institutional and evolutionary economists, historical sociologists, and anthropologists argue for the theory of path-dependency, based on the assumption that everyday practices and social relationships are rooted in the specifics of local paths of social change. They try to explain how and why memories, knowledge, and networks from the past are reconfigured in the present (Kalb 2002; Verdery 1996; Hann 2002). The latter point to the great complexity of overlapping and contradictory changes that have been taking place in Central and Eastern European countries since the collapse of state socialism. Anthropologists, as the “messengers of social and cultural complexity” (Kalb 2002: 321), are critical of theories based on the transfer of Western models, which tend to neglect the strong threads of continuity with the previous regime, and reject the teleology of “transition”—the assumption that Ethnography of Postsocialist Rural Change ● 197 the former socialist countries can follow the development path of Western capitalism (Verdery 1996). Unlike the “transitologists” (i.e., theorists of postcommunist transformation in Eastern and Central Europe), anthropologists argue that postsocialism is not dead. By pointing to the empirical evidence of the persistence of routines and practices, organizational forms, and social ties inherited from socialist times, they tend to view the postsocialist world as a “paradox of homo- geneity and difference” (Silova 2010: 8). The divergence and diversity of the postsocialist condition, and the dilemma of continuity versus discontinuity, is at the center of anthropological assessments of the dynamics of transformation. Twenty-five years after the collapse of socialism, postsocialist transformation processes (and their outcomes) are essentially ambiguous. Moreover, due to the nonlinear and often contradictory nature of postsocialist change, transformations remain unfinished, uncertain, unexpected, and unpredictable (Burawoy and Verdery 1999; Silova 2010). Furthermore, due to the deep-seated and habitual legacies of the socialist era, there is no clear horizon where the “transitionality” may come to an end, indicating that the complex syndrome of postsocialism will be present for some time while institutions are peopled by local actors for whom the patterns of thought and action characteristic of the former regime are “normal” (Lampland 2002: 32).

S o c i a l M e m o r y Having been driven by an increased concern1 with the “past in the present,” in which memory serves as the “contemporized” or “referential” past (Assmann and Czaplicka 1995: 129), the key question is how the socialist past is being “actualized” by local actors under postsocialism, and how this past is articulated, (re)interpreted, manipulated, or reinvented (Russell 2006). The notion of social memory (in the form of collective memory) has been used to denote different things, which nonetheless share a topical common denominator: the ways in which people construct a sense of the past (Confino 1997). It implies (1) the social nature of individual remembering and forgetting (it is a collective phenomenon but it only manifests itself in the actions and statements of individuals) and (2) continuity across time. We always see the past from the vantage point of the present, from its needs and conflicts. The contours of our appropriation or rejection (forgetting and/ or remembering) of the past change according to the present context (Benjamin 1968). Our research focus was placed on everyday forms of 198 ● Hana Horáková collective memory (as opposed to cultural memory, which is characterized by its distance from everyday memory and is stabilized in the longue duré e by cultural objectivation, as Kansteiner [2002] argues) manifested in everyday communication about the meaning of the past. The past is selectively brought into the present and different functions of remembering are identified: as Assmann and Czaplicka (1995) previously observed, one group remembers the past in fear of deviating from its model, the next for fear of repeating the past. Our anthropological approach to social memory based on an ethnography of socio- memorial discourses and practices helps shed light on the complexity of the multidimensional relations existing between memory and the current local development strategies through tourism. In accordance with Esbenshade’s (1995: 73) thesis that memory is by nature multiple and “there are as many memories as there are groups,” our research revealed parallel and competing collective memories revolving around the notion of modernity.

Methodology There are numerous conceptual models and theories that have attempted to explain the nature, magnitude, and type of social change induced by tourism. With respect to transition in general, and to postsocialist change in particular, work is often judged as outlining and illustrating general themes rather than developing new empirical knowledge and conceptual insights. To avoid this transitology trap, following the path of transition from state socialism to a capitalist market economy as if by simple deduction, we have decided to conduct ethnographic research, not only to better understand postsocialist change, that is social and cultural practices through which postsocialist transformations are lived and negotiated, but also to produce “new conceptual insights on the basis of engaging with empirical complexity” (H ö rschelmann and Stenning 2008: 339). Ethnography as a practice of intimate, long-term engagement with people’s everyday worlds and explanations (Appadurai 1997) continues to offer valuable inspiration for scholars who seek to construct more pluralistic accounts of postsocialist transformation while contributing to broader critiques of universalizing knowledge (Marcus and Fischer 1986). The chapter is based on data from an ongoing iterative ethnographic research (Burawoy 2003; O’Reilly 2005); a long-term research strategy based on systematic and focused revisits to the sites over the course of four years (2010–14), which helped to examine the complexity of rural Ethnography of Postsocialist Rural Change ● 199 space. It uses participant and nonparticipant observation, semistructured interviews, and long, in-depth conversations in order to understand the processes of constructing new networks of power, social, and economic relations. Participant observation was used in numerous social events organized by the community members, whereas nonparticipant observation aimed at monitoring of certain interest groups— such as visitors and guests, the local community, and so on—with the aim of recording the movement of those studied in and around the tourism resort and the village, to determine what they were doing at the time. Semistructured interviews were designed to investigate community attitudes toward the tourism resort (what the local people do to profit from the tourism development; how they are involved in the tourism development processes, etc.) Long, in-depth conversations and interviews were conducted with a wide range of people: officials, merchants, wage earners, owners of tourism enterprises, local government officials, local intellectuals (teachers, village librarian), and ordinary village residents. In order to understand the nature of social change during the postsocialist transformation, we used the life history method to gather data about people’s norms and values, as well as the types of social relations they maintained, and the way they behaved and acted in the public sphere (Ladkin 2004). This method helped us to uncover specific research problems, especially key aspects related to the social memory of local people, which facilitated understanding their contemporary attitudes to development through tourism, particularly their lack of engagement and “entrepreneurial spirit,” their indifference, and overall apathy toward public life. The data associated with social memory did not only derive from the life history method, that is, they were not thematized exclusively through “memory.” On many occasions the data were included in spontaneous utterances within informal conversations when informants themselves put emphasis on events, experiences, and practice in their past private, family, and professional lives, which they considered relevant in relation to the present (helping to illuminate the concept of the “past in the present”). As Small (2004) states, this spontaneous methodological attitude toward “how to work with the past,” which can be called memory-work, can be used to seek out authentic voices rather than to test a hypothesis. As memory-work provides a rich source of insights and concepts, it is suited to studying emergent themes, providing a creative, dynamic, and flexible framework that corresponds to the multilayered complexities of everyday life (Small 2004: 268). As 200 ● Hana Horáková an essentially nonhierarchical method, it is particularly suitable for the study of marginalized groups. We used it with different groups in the host community to explore their experiences of tourism development over time, helping to fill some of the gaps in existing knowledge gained from different stakeholders. Secondary data was drawn from the various reports and analyses of the current state of tourism development in Lipno ( Analý za 2013; Kalabisov á et al. 2013) obtained through the Czech Statistical Office and Infocentrum Lipno nad Vltavou. To understand the nature of change in the community’s life, and to find out how the legacy of the socialist history of Lipno has affected contemporary social relationships, we examined all issues of local newsletters dating back to 1989, and we drew relevant data from the printed village chronicle.

Continuity and Change in Rural Society Lipno nad Vltavou is a village in southern Bohemia situated near the lake of the same name on the left side of the Vltava (Moldau) river. Its political, socioeconomic, and cultural history was heavily influenced by the historical development of the twentieth century. Before World War II, the village was predominantly populated by German-speaking people who were displaced due to the postwar geopolitical arrangements after 1945. The landmark in the history of the village was the decision of the former Czechoslovak communist government to construct a dam on the River Moldau in the 1950s, which eventually flooded Lipno as well as some other small villages in this region. During the 1950s the area was gradually repopulated by ethnic Czechs and Slovaks, including Romanian Slovaks who came as workers within the organizational recruitment process to work in the power station and dam construction. Local life started to develop after 1958 when Lipno officially became a municipality. A new primary school opened in 1958, followed by a kindergarten. In 1960 the Board for Civic Affairs was established with the aim of organizing diverse social events, such as civil baptism of newly born babies, a ceremonial welcome of first grade pupils, educational events for local people, a pensioners’ club, among others. The community members used to meet in various public places and buildings, which were either renovated from the original workers’ lodgings, or newly constructed. The village hosted summer festivals, organized regular musical festivals, formal dances, and other cultural and sports events. Community associations, compulsorily organized under the umbrella institution called the National Front (N á rodn í fronta ), involved a local Ethnography of Postsocialist Rural Change ● 201 branch of the Czechoslovak Women’s Union, Czechoslovak Red Cross, Czech Gardening Club, Czech Breeder Club, and sporting organizations ( Lipno Newsletter 2011). Until the 1990s, Lipno was largely viewed as a peripheral area for many different reasons: its location (close to the border with Austria that was closed by the Iron Curtain during the socialist era), sparse and low-density population, and weak economy. Tourism is not a completely new phenomenon in the village, which has been a “popular recreational destination” since the 1960s (Z á loha et al. 1980). However, tourism used to be just a marginal source of income, since its development was restricted due to the proximity of the Iron Curtain borders with the West. Moreover, tourism activities, mostly related to the rural character of the setting, were of technologically low and economically noncompetitive nature. After 1989 the village faced an overall economic and social decline. The closures of state farm and traditional light industries were followed by the shutting down of other local industries. The old-established patterns of development were abandoned and replaced by tourism, which local authorities adopted to capitalize on their “underdevelop- ment.” Tourism was seen as a “clean” industry that could help peripheral countryside recover from social and economic decline. Uniquely preserved countryside and natural scenery, untouched by “progress” became an economic asset in their plans. Local authorities realized that their major chance for rapid economic improvement lay in specializing in tourism as the major “export” industry (Cohen 1978: 218). Tourism was seen as the only avenue of economic advancement, as a “passport to development” (de Kadt 1979). To facilitate this new strategy, local authorities in Lipno made a deal with a Dutch investor who, in 1999–2002 built a tourist resort known as the Landal Marina Lipno.2 This tourist resort, which includes a yacht port, covers an area of 13 hectares and offers over 306 studios and apartments with more than 1,600 beds. The investments focused predominantly on building recreational complexes, which made the contrast between the new and the old parts of the locality even more visible. A sharp difference between the “New Lipno” and “Old Lipno” (the original residential area) was caused not only by the construction of the vast recreational resort but also the creation of a new center of the village between 1999 and 2002, which had been moved from the “Old Lipno” to the zone along the main road, where a number of tourist-oriented infrastructural elements emerged— an information center, new tourist-oriented shops, new restaurants, 202 ● Hana Horáková caf é s, customer services, among others. Even though the “Old Lipno” remained dilapidated and neglected, lacking in community facilities, residents’ responses to the developments of that time were largely p ositive—people were filled with expectations, overwhelmed by the utter changes in their surroundings. Local residents appreciated the new look of their place and were proud of the overall positive image of the village, which the local government and cooperating businesses widely advertised. Most of the residents interviewed had originally welcomed the plans to construct the Marina, which they thought would improve the appearance of the village and change it from an “uncivilized landscape” to a “modern place.” As one of the informants said:

Lipno used to be like the bush but now it is being civilized. If we go “to town” (to the new center), one has to get dressed, not like in a village. Lipno links the village with the town. Our children won’t be country bumpkins any more.

The next phases of tourism development in Lipno (2005–present) were marked by rapid expansion. More lands were sold and leased to both foreign investors and Czech-based business corporations. Municipal grounds were used for various tourism-related activities. Local community properties were converted to leisure-related accommodation purposes. New amenities were constructed, financed partly by public resources, partly by private enterprise. Similarly to the first phase of tourism development, foreign investment (predominantly Dutch) was aimed at building new mass accommodation facilities, which emerged both in the central and peripheral parts of the village. The number of tourist overnight stays has increased ten times since 1997, reaching 400,000 per year (Anal ý za 2013). According to the data provided by the municipality, there has been an increase in the bed-numbers by 840 percent over the last 20 years, and still new beds are being built. By 2012 more than 100 accommodation facilities provide 4,978 beds ( Infocentrum Lipno nad Vltavou 2013). Lipno has turned into a full destination resort, which serves as a prime example of a large-scale, rapidly and extensively evolving, and largely exogenous tourism enterprise. Outdoor recreational activities, accommodation facilities, attractions, and scenic resources form the basis of the tourism industry. The area is host to an almost infinite variety of leisure activities that are, however, different and less complementary with the old patterns. They are active, highly competitive, fashionable, highly technological, and individualized. The simple traditional rural Ethnography of Postsocialist Rural Change ● 203 setting is no longer capable of meeting demands for the highly special- ized contemporary forms of tourism and recreation. As the tourism enterprise engulfs the rural community the result is (1) social disruption of the local community and (2) disruptive and irrevocable change of the physical environment (Jenkins et al. 1998). These two aspects are not mutually exclusive. The social can be exac- erbated by the physical aspect, as is the case in Lipno where unprecedented, fast, and massive construction of recreational units, second homes, and the development of tourist attractions heavily impacts the social dimension. The newly built tourist resorts and facilities have utterly changed the character of the local area, which has become a regulated tourist destination for sightseers (Cohen 1978: 219). The height, style, and material of buildings have contributed to the completely different visual image of the area. The environment is artifi- cially transformed and adapted to the tastes and desires of tourists. Dewailly (1998: 123) used the term landscape “under siege” to indicate rapid transformation processes, which no longer provide space for rurality, tranquility, and peace.

Contestation over the Meaning of Modernity There is a widely held assumption that no matter how fast and radical the changes induced by tourism are, effective community participation can mitigate potential conflicts over tourism development and help sustain a “balance” between various, often conflicting interests (Saarinen 2006; Brown and Schafft 2011). Communities that are endowed with a high level of social interaction (social capital and social networks) are usually better equipped to mobilize both internal and external resources to protect community interests and enhance their well-being. Social capital, both in the form of communication networks among relevant development actors, and as a high level of civic participation of local inhabitants, their mutual trust and sense of belonging to the locality, is a significant factor in endogenous rural development (Bernard et al. 2011; Á rnason et al. 2009). There is a whole host of factors that determine who gets involved, why, and in what ways: why and under what conditions local residents may choose, or may be driven to become involved in tourism (Stronza 2001), including tourism discourses, societal values, attitudes, past life experience, current knowledge, and priorities. These decisions are also associated with power relations constituted by different actors and discourses (Hall 1994). Many impact studies confirm that residents who 204 ● Hana Horáková benefit most from progress, and experience economic gains and sociocultural improvements, are more likely to support tourism (Butler et al. 1998; Chuang 2013). Our research outcomes, however, challenge this assumption by pointing to the contested opinions as to what is desirable in rural development in this specific place. Our data show that the rivalry between factions in the community is caused predominantly by the diversity of meanings of development and modernity. The perception of change varies according to different groups in the village community. For some locals, particularly elderly residents, the rural change of the 1990s was a traumatic event, the end of a certain era, accompanied by a loss of identity. They mention the loss of a vital rural life of the past based on the centrality of productive activities and community relations, and they express nostalgia for former social relations at the workplace. As one of the informants claimed, “[T]here was life under socialism. We would take part in Akce Z ,3 ha d f u n . B u t now there is just an economic self-interest everywhere.” Their view of the rural as a repository of moral and social values is in contrast to the new social order, which, according to them, has brought about a loss of the communitarian ethic and overall moral degradation. The rural ethos is contrasted with more business-like, individualistic, universalist, and cosmopolitan ethos. The new dichotomy between business and economic self-interest versus community interests is thus contested on moral grounds. Local people criticize the shrinking of the public sector and blame the new regime for not respecting entitlements to which they had become accustomed under socialism (Hann 2002). The large-scale development through tourism in Lipno is officially presented as a modernization project that will ensure the economic and demographic survival of the local community, and its prosperity and common good. In this sense it is shown as an instrument that serves a better and more modern future. At the core is the model of postsocialist modernity shaped by Western-oriented emphasis on a self-regulatory market economy, liberal democracy, and active civil society. It often seems that those who reject this postsocialist modernity are against modernity per se. However, when we look closely into the content of socialist ideologies, we will see that socialism, like capitalism, was also defined as a modernization project. These two large-scale projects of modernity, socialist and capitalist, while sharing a common goal—to construct a new social, political, and economic order, and to reorient society toward a future ideal by dislodging its past as a “negative other” (Brandst ä dter 2007: 134)—defined themselves in direct opposition to each other. Socialism legitimized itself as a more progressive, more Ethnography of Postsocialist Rural Change ● 205 genuinely modern project than capitalism, which was seen by socialist planners as backward and flawed (Bauman 1991). The same aspiration can be detected within postsocialism, whose aim is to replace a socialist modernity, which is viewed as outdate and obsolete (Brandst ä dter 2007). Postsocialism thus creates space for cultural struggles between two modernist projects that are based on two opposing ideologies—socialism and capitalism. These struggles are therefore over the meaning and ownership of modernity. Under socialism, the party’s goal to shape an appealing “socialist modernity” was made difficult by the available information about the affluent middle-class lifestyles of Western people. Only a small portion of the population believed in it, while others, confronted by an economy of shortages, mocked the system while trying to out- wit, subvert, or otherwise undermine it. The situation in villages was quite different. Shortages in consumer goods were felt less intensely. Village people were not forced to undergo humiliating practices such as standing in line to acquire both basic products (e.g., toilet paper, sanitary napkins) and luxury goods (bananas, nylon stockings) to the same extent as elsewhere, and they satisfied many basic needs through extensive self-subsistence. Moreover, public life in villages thrived and people were active participants in “building socialism,” no matter how convinced they were about the official socialist creed. Party-organized production rituals, such as work-unit competitions, voluntary work- days, or Z-activities were commonplace. Many of these expressions of supposed commitment to socialism were voluntary rather than coerced (Verdery 1996). The party’s village representatives were perceived less as political figures and more as people who had grown up in the same place and who were aware of the problems and ready to sort them out. The common split between “us” and “them,” workers and party leaders, was felt less intensively in small-scale municipalities such as the village under study. The gap between the proclaimed socialist modernity and the actual level of modernization was definitely much narrower in villages than in urban centers (Verdery 1996; Hann 2002; Bernard et al. 2011). The current contest over the concept of modernity is an unequal power struggle. The Western discourse of modernity is presented as “natural,” as an ideal to pursue, as is clear from the interviews with the local power elite, especially the mayor, from the analyses that were commissioned (Anal ý za 2013), and from media representation. The major master narrative is rooted in the teleology of “transition,” which assumes that the former socialist countries must follow the development path of Western 206 ● Hana Horáková capitalism (Verdery 1996). As such, it does not take into account any continuity with the former regime; neoliberalism is viewed as the sole source of social change and development (Kalb 2002). Such discourse of progressiveness silences any resistance. Any calls for a slower pace of “modernization” sound backward and obscurantist. Anything that does not fit into this perspective must be discredited and discounted. Those who actively support and participate in the new modernity are largely people for whom postsocialist modernism is “both an aspiration and a way of life” (Brandst ä dter 2007: 136). They are active participants who tend to benefit from the large-scale tourism and associated development. Their social capital, which is useful in new economic organizations and activities, is largely based on vertical networks. They involve various sections of the community, including active resource users, project planners and leaders, local merchants and businesspeople, and local politicians, especially the mayor, who ranks among the most active actors. Their aim is to improve living conditions on a “modernized” model of local society. Those who oppose this rapid tourism development reject the kind of modernity that is dictated by the hegemony of the market, which tends to destroy the preexisting balance of social life; they would prefer the “traditional” arrangements of the community and images of the countryside to be retained. Though many of them fully participated in socialist modernity, by actively building the “better socialist world” through their participation in communal associations, now they seem to retract from the making of “the other” modernity, despite the fact that they still may be endowed with social capital in the form of networks forged under socialism.4 Since the old pattern was unsettled, they have not been able or willing to adapt quickly to the new notions of modernity brought by the postsocialist discourse. The closing of factories and the withdrawal of the major sources of livelihood in the areas made these people think about today’s modernization as a “de-modernization of the country and their own selves,” a step backward (Pine 2002). The positive aspects of socialism, such as regular wages and full employment, are emphasized by different sectors of the local rural population: both by those who lived under socialism, and by the younger generation who are negatively impacted by economic liberalization and who participate in the distribution of this facet of social memory, favoring egalitarian society and certainties over freedom.5 Such remembering is contrasted with the current postsocialist situation, characterized by sharp social and economic cleavages, massive unemployment, and an overall atmosphere of uncertainty and instability. Ethnography of Postsocialist Rural Change ● 207

The attitude of the majority of locals toward tourism development is overwhelmingly characterized by passivity and indifference. These residents are not involved in tourism planning and control; instead, they seem to be passive objects, affected by the new modernization plans. Why are these residents inactive even though they are endowed with social capital inherited from the past? One of the reasons is certainly the negative impact of postsocialist economic changes on the utility of village social networks (Creed 2002). Their old social networks endowed with predominantly horizontal form of social capital have not been substituted by a new, modern type of civil society based on liberalization, privatization, and individuation. Today, active participation in the surviving community associations does not allow locals to influence the decision-making processes concerning rural tourism development in the villages, or to criticize current processes of development through tourism. As Lampland argues, “neither qualifications nor friendships from the socialist period are sufficient to ensure success” in the postsocialist environment. Social capital must be “renewed and enhanced” in order to be used as an asset in the new milieu (2002: 41). This out- come challenges Putnam’s assumption that (positive) social capital, in the form of civic engagement, is crucial to the success of democracy. It equally undermines the thesis that a high level of local civic participation correlates with the increased awareness of the need to control development (Bernard et al. 2011). The reduced value of village social relations, combined with socioeconomic problems, determines the extent to which local political and business elites assert the necessity of rapid change and disparage those who “lag behind.” In the language of the new managers, the “opponents and critics” are represented as “lazy and spoilt by socialism.” The elites argue that these people do not work properly, that some of them do not even want to work at all because “living on the dole suits their human nature better.” This argument is often used to account for the above-average rate of unemployment in Lipno: 13.4 percent.6 Kalabisová et al. (2013: 28) put it unequivocally: the main reason for such a high rate is a “long-term unwillingness of a narrow group of local inhabitants to work.” Such reasoning, however, fails to explain why the rate of unemployment before 2012 was much lower: it even dropped in the period 2006–2008, from 11.27 percent (in 2006) to 7.39 percent. Since then, there has been a steep rise, to reach the current level. It is obvious that “cultural” factors obscure the real reasons for this, which are embedded in the current economic crisis. Another reason why the former active members of village cultural associations are apathetic, lacking “entrepreneurial spirit,” and thus 208 ● Hana Horáková do not challenge the development plans and its implementation lies in the nature of rural public life under socialism. As Mandel (2002: 282) reminds us, all social activities had to be linked to the state ideology of socialism; there were no organizations functioning independently of the state. The socialist state monopolized formal organizational activity, attempting to direct and control cultural expressions for political purposes. Thus, all village cultural associations were forcibly placed under the patronage of the National Front, whose goal was to assist in creating a “better socialist present and communist future.” Such an ethos inherited from the socialist past does not enable the village people to interrogate publicly the decisions made by the power elite, though unofficially, in private, locals tend to be highly critical. Noninterference in local power elites’ development plans and decisions can be equally explained by the continuity in the mutual suspicion between society and state. It is a well-known fact that the gap between the power elite and the citizens in the socialist period was deep and has even widened under postsocialism. Forty years of socialism, when people were prevented from intervening in politics in general, and in the policies of their workplace, village, or region in particular, have resulted in a high degree of apathy, passivity, and unwillingness to engage in public affairs. Another factor that can contribute to explaining the lack of energy, activity, and overall incapacity of some of the local people to act in the current period is the lack of or limited information about the privatization and development processes; some locals confirmed that they feel they have been largely excluded from the economic transformation and its planning. As they bitterly admit, they are even discouraged from attending regular meetings of the local government to discuss the policies and plans for tourism, though access should be legally free to everybody interested. In fact, very few local people were informed of any plans or invited to participate in discussions concerning the launching of the tourism projects under study. Other factors include the loss of symbolic capital due to the expansion of information society and globalized culture; and widespread societal rejection of socialism and socialist categories voiced in major discourses.

Conclusion The Czech village that was a site of our fieldwork is unique in many aspects. First, its history is relatively short, covering “only” two historical periods, the socialist and the postsocialist, thus yielding a limited Ethnography of Postsocialist Rural Change ● 209 scope for social memory. In addition, it is one of the largest recreational resorts built in a rural environment after the demise of state socialism. Finally, development through tourism is largely exogenous, top-down, and fueled by rich foreign investment. The evaluation of the development project varies among different stakeholders as well as “ordinary” people. From the local power elite’s point of view, supported by two specially designed analyses of the tourism impact on Lipno (Kalabisov á et al. 2013; Anal ý za 2013), as well as by frequent media coverage, the tourism-related development in Lipno seems like a success story. The community budget is in the black, economic survival is secured, and the community seems demographi- cally stable. But, as Hall reminds us, increased consumption of capital, whether human or “natural,” does not necessarily imply better living conditions; in a similar vein, growth does not always mean development (Hall 2010: 140). Issues of rural tourism and recreation go beyond a conventional economic analysis, which needs to be balanced against the social, cultural, and environmental effects (Davis and Morais 2004; Holden 2000; Long and Lane 2000). In other words, we need to take into account how rural tourism development is integrated into the social, political, and environmental dimensions of rurality (Butler and Hall 1998: 121). The scale and pace of transformation through tourism in Lipno is unprecedented. It touches upon the patterns of economic livelihood, settlement patterns and spatial arrangements, choices of leisure activities, among others, in effect, all the dimensions of rural social organization. As one of the informants said (summer 2014):

The development in Lipno has gotten loose from the chain ( utrhl se ze ř et ě zu ), it’s out of control. In the beginning [in 1997 and 1998] it looked promising—the plan to revitalize the village as a platform for sports and recreation, especially yachting . . . But when the village authorities sold the majority of land, they lost control over the development. People used to go to Lipno because of nature (za pří rodou ). But today the concrete is everywhere, and it will be even worse. I saw development plans for the next ten, eleven years—concrete everywhere. It’s going to be a big business, business to be given out to friends. (k š efty jen pro kamar á dy )

Large-scale transformation through tourism has affected the fabric of the local community and the level of social coherence. The lives of residents have been dramatically altered. The rural society has changed 210 ● Hana Horáková significantly, shifting from an egalitarian to a “competitive” type of society, which brings about new power and social relations, competing social and cultural practices, and tensions in rural place-making. Various social actors experience the postsocialist transformation in different ways, ranging from willing participation to resistance. While some sections of the rural population are active agents who have benefited from the complex processes of transformation, others appear as losers in the general context of socioeconomic change, as mere “objects” of social transformation, unable to cope with or adapt to the pace and scale of change. Conflict over development basically takes place between the interests of the newly created middle class, which strives to increase the quality of life by creating the “new rurality,” often at any cost, and those who have failed to adapt to the new logic of Western-style modernity. A new hierarchy between central and marginal worlds emerges; these worlds intersect with both physical and symbolic zones, and are accompanied by distinct, often incompatible practices and lifestyles. Geographically marginal spaces translate into cultural marginality. The category of the newly created middle class includes individuals whose activities are dominated by a postproductivist vision and are associated with the exploitation of new economic opportunities (Galani-Moutafi 2013: 103). The category of those who have failed to adapt includes people whose marginality is more spatial, cultural, and symbolic, rather than expressed in economic terms: the differences in living standards between the two categories are not sharp, economic dis- parities are quite negligible. The major point of difference, highlighting social and cultural cleavages, emerges on a discursive level and revolves round the ambivalent narratives of the socialist past. The local people’s diverse accounts of the past, and the varied ways in which they bring the past into the present, are “used” not only as a way of resisting changes but also as a way of adapting to the new reality. As H ö rschelmann and Stenning (2008: 346) point out, references to past ideologies and practices represent a symbolic resource both for challenging the new status quo, and for establishing and maintaining power in the new social order. Hence, references to the socialist past are part of the negotiation of contemporary realities framed by two complementary social processes: local empowerment vs. internal displacement and exclusion. The former is typical for those who fully support the postsocialist, Western- oriented discourse on modernity, the latter is experienced among those who share largely positive memories of socialist modernization—both Ethnography of Postsocialist Rural Change ● 211 those old enough to have experienced “really existing socialism,” and younger people who did not live most of their adult lives under socialism but are severely afflicted by postsocialist modernization. Our research data illuminate a special layer of incapacitated residents within the latter category who oppose the hegemonic postsocialist discourse on modernity. This social group involves diverse individuals: those who have been impacted negatively by economic liberalization and privatization; those who miss the vital rural life of the past; those endowed with an obsolete form of social capital based on “particularized trust,” who are actively engaged in intra-community bonds and networks inherited from the past (Kov á cs 2012: 115). Lacking “effective” social capital, they cannot comply with the requirements of postsocialist discourse on progress and modernity. As neoliberal restructuring takes hold in the Czech Republic, these marginal people draw on memories to tie themselves to the socialist past and reimagine its positive attributes. Villagers’ narratives reflect an affirmation of collective belonging rather than an oppressive system of state socialism. They often feel nostalgic for the time when they were “at the center” of socialist society. Many identify with the ethos of socialist modernity, linking people with the state through their right to share in the redistributed social product. Thus dependency, rather than agency, informs their attitude to the current development project. Accounts of prevailing attitudes of passivity, indifference, and lack of agency are reflections of socialist paternalism, which implicitly viewed society as a family, headed by a “wise” party (Verdery 1996: 63–64). For those who have failed to catch up with the demands of the present, socialism is not dead in their social memory; instead it develops within capitalism, as the constant, necessary, critical accompaniment of capitalism (Caldwell 2013). The utopia-oriented language of state socialism, no matter how infamously it ended up, enables them to raise questions about “social justice”—housing, unemployment, overall economic insecurity, simply the most acute problems of everyday life. Socialism is evoked now and then as a kind of morality reservoir. Socialism, many villagers claim, would ensure wealth was distributed on ethical grounds and help to vitalize the community’s moral fiber.

Acknowledgment This work was supported by the Czech Science Foundation (grant number P404/12/1040). 212 ● Hana Horáková

Notes 1 . There has been abundant intervention, even invasion of the “past into the present” recently (Rousso 2013), as different catch-all phrases indicate: the present is “haunted”; scholars speak about the intensification of a “memory culture” (Mechoulan 2008), or of “memory boom” (Offenstadt 2013: 86). 2 . This involved private investment of CZK 1 billion by Landal Green Parks. 3 . Akce Z (Z-activities) refers to a common activity under socialism focused on constructing village infrastructure. The aim was to modernize a village. It was a voluntary activity and help was given for free. 4 . Local cultural life has not been by any means decimated under postsocialism. It still affects the perceptions of the quality of life. 5 . At the same time, the same people may mention less favorable aspects of social life under socialism: a questionable work ethic with a resultant lack of produc- tivity, dishonesty, and the expectation of receiving benefits for nothing. 6 . The current rate of unemployment in the region is 7.12 percent (Czech Statistical Office 2013).

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CHAPTER 11

Dalai-Lamaism: An Orientalist Construction of Postsocialist Consciousness

M a r t i n H ř í b e k

Introduction One of the rather striking elements of postsocialist discourse in the Czech Republic, which has a profound impact on domestic and foreign politics, is the deep fascination of politicians, media, and large section of general public with the personality of the Dalai Lama and the associated wide support for the cause of Tibet and human rights in China. It could be said that this fascination derives its roots from the legacy of the political thought of V á clav Havel, the first postsocialist president of Czechoslovakia and the Czech Republic. Both Havel and the Dalai Lama were shortlisted for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1989 and the latter won the award. Havel, in a gracious gesture, officially invited the 14th Dalai Lama to Prague in 1990 for a state visit, the first such official reception for the Dalai Lama by a state leader. Since this first visit, the Dalai Lama, with the support of Havel and his intellectual circles, numerous nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and religious groups, has become a cult figure in the Czech Republic. So much so that anniversaries of the Tibetan uprising of March 10, 1959, are remembered in celebrations throughout the country. In 1996, four Czech municipalities officially hoisted Tibetan flags. This number has been growing steadily and reached 599 towns and municipalities and over 100 schools and colleges in 2014. 1 I should emphasize that the Tibetan population in the country is negligible and that this is 218 ● Martin Hrˇíbek entirely a Czech game. Depending on the political constellation, these local initiatives are echoed on the state governmental level. When the former Czech prime minister Mirek Topol á nek of the conservative Civic Democratic Party 2 announced that he would attend the Beijing Olympic Games in 2008, he was wearing a Tibetan flag badge on his jacket, in an open provocation to the Chinese government (Leinert 2008), and his Green Party coalition partners used to hang the Tibetan flag on the buildings of the ministries of which they were in charge and in the Parliament (e.g., NOVINKY 2009). The positive image of Tibet and the Dalai Lama is complemented in Czech political science and in Czech media by the negative image of China (F ü rst 2011) as an oppressor of the rights of the Tibetans. More importantly, Czech political support for the Dalai Lama has resulted in strained relations with China. However, not everybody in this context shares the enthusiasm for things Tibetan. Havel’s successor in presi- dency Vá clav Klaus (in office 2003–13), along with a large section of the business community and many representatives of (mostly) left-wing parties prefer to see the economic growth of China. The idealism of the pro-Tibet camp clashes with highly pragmatic interests and therefore raises the question: Why is it still alive and well? Although the obsession with Tibet might seem to be a marginal issue within a broader picture of Czech politics, I propose to use it as a vantage point to examine Czech postsocialist consciousness through the lens of its neurosis. In this chapter I will argue that the discursive and ritual construction of an imaginary affinity between Czechs and Tibetans is a postsocialist avatar of an Orientalist element present in constructions of Czech national identity since the early nineteenth century. I will further argue that, in the continuous trajectory of Czech nationalist thought, an imaginary connection with the East has served to endow the Czech historical experience and national struggle with a universal—even transcendental—appeal. Therefore, I would like to argue that the Oriental element, which has been linked to the core of the national identity and national aspirations, cannot easily succumb to pragmatic interests. The tension between the competing priorities of trade on one side and concern for human rights on the other has been articulated in postsocialist Czech discourse on numerous occasions and regarding country-specific cases with varied intensity. In relation to China, the dominant pattern of presenting the problem in the media is that of the mutually exclusive binary—either trade or human rights (Fü rst 2010: 94–95). At a time when China is poised to become the world’s largest Dalai-Lamaism ● 219 economy and influential Czech circles widely engage in intensely self- referential expressions of solidarity with Tibet as a victim of China, such an either–or understanding of affairs makes a combustible, vola- tile mixture.

The Dalai-Lamaism Debate In early September 2012, former Czech prime minister Petr Ne č as of the conservative Civic Democratic Party made headlines with his speech at the International Engineering Fair in the second largest Czech city, Brno. 3 His central message was to highlight the role of industry as the driving force of the Czech economy. Neč as focused on the governmental strategy to diversify export territories beyond the EU markets and spoke harshly about those he suspected of being sabo- teurs of that strategy. It is essential, he said, to “prevent some fashionable political manifestations which, objectively speaking, affect our exports.” As examples, he used the “artificial and false adoration” of Pussy Riot, a punk-rock band described by him as “something which is a pinnacle of bad taste, not at all something which symbolizes freedom and democracy.” He held such “adoration” responsible for a negative impact in “actual export territories.” The other example he cited was “the modern political fashion of Dalai-Lamaism, that is, the worship of the Dalai Lama.” Although he denied that his proposition was to trade export for human rights, he did urge the audience to face the fact that the “worship of this political movement does not, in spite of all the sympathy for the cultural autonomy of the Tibetans, support freedom and democracy.” On the contrary, he considered it to be “a worship of a regime that would not be possibly democratic but rather semifeudal and theocratic in its nature with strong authoritarian elements.” Both examples were, in his view, unrelated to human rights and represented “just fashionable theories which we should not follow so foolishly” (Ne č as 2012). 4 The speech provoked a storm at the top level of politics as well as popular reactions. Cabinet ministers, shadow ministers, party leaders and deputies, candidates for the presidential campaign, numerous public personalities, and commentators, all felt the urge to clarify their position on “Dalai-Lamaism.” Journalists, in turn, actively sought to elicit such a position from the politicians they interviewed. The news-server Č esk á pozice (The Czech Position) had even carried out a poll among 120 “top managers,” asking whether they agreed with the prime minister that “false adoration of Pussy Riot and the Dalai Lama affects Czech 220 ● Martin Hrˇíbek exports.” According to the poll, 61.7 percent disagreed, 32.5 percent agreed, and 5.8 percent remained undecided (Bedn ář 2012). The reactions from top politicians, however, were more telling. Karel Schwarzenberg, the prime minister’s own minister of foreign affairs and a former close associate and erstwhile chancellor of V á clav Havel, termed the statement a “terrifying blunder” and distanced himself from the prime minister: “I am horrified. Regarding the Tibetan question he replicates the Chinese propaganda [ . . . ] That statement is like bowing in front of the regime” (Kř ivka 2012). The bowing in front of the, supposedly communist, Chinese regime was seen by many as a reversal of V á clav Havel’s entire political legacy. Senator for the Greens and former deputy chief justice of the consti- tutional court Eli š ka Wagnerov á said that Ne č as’s statement was “sad” as it was “destroying the legacy of Vá clav Havel.” The Czech Republic was, in her view, “established on the idea of supporting the oppressed” (MF DNES, 2012). Zuzana Roithov á , a Christian Democrat, former cabinet minister, member of the European Parliament, and presidential candi- date in 2012, criticized the notion of “Dalai-Lamaism” as an example of “Orwellian newspeak” vis-à -vis the historically committed atrocities and destruction of “98 per cent of monasteries” in Tibet (Roithová 2012a). In a text published later, she extended the issue of human rights in China beyond the question of Tibet and compared it to the disrespect of Chinese authorities for Chinese Christians, for the rights of Chinese workforce, for European trademarks, and pointed to the economic, social, and ecological dumping by China in general. She referred to the authority of Vá clav Havel and his human rights agenda and asked: “Should we trade our pride and our character for dubious economic benefits?” (Roithov á 2012b). One of her party colleagues added that “Vá clav Havel must be rolling over in his grave” (Svoboda 2012). The Green Party leader and former education minister Ond ř ej Li š ka criticized Neč as and his government, which “consistently ignored the human rights agenda, which has been a pillar of green politics as well as a token of gratitude for the help that Czechs had received from abroad before November 1989” (Li š ka 2012). Notice that “Czechs” in this comment are implicitly conflated with dissidents. Another Green Party critic considered the prime minister’s speech to be a symptom of a deep moral crisis and of the unfortunate fact that now that V á clav Havel was no longer in office, money and consumerism prevail over “real freedom and humanity” or “intrinsic human values” (Petrov á 2012). An opposition MP pointed to the prime minister’s inability to follow V á clav Havel in promoting “a deep compassion with the Tibetan Dalai-Lamaism ● 221 nation repressed for years by the Chinese government. [ . . . ] China plunders and violates small states and nations. What happened to our country happens to Tibet too.” The prime minister’s statement, according to him, shows that “the most serious problem of our society is moral decay” (Jarolí m 2012). A stronger version of the breaking-away-from-Havel’s-legacy line of argument linked the conservative prime minister directly to the communist Other of our past. Many commentators questioned his moral integrity, drew parallels in tone and content between the prime minister’s speech and public speeches of party cadres during communist rule, and castigated him heavily for his subservience to the communist Chinese government. The following are some of the media headlines that accompanied the affair: “By criticizing Tibet Neč as crossed the line” (Musil 2012), “Ne č as’ speech against Pussyriotism and Dalai-Lamaism is remi- niscent of the rhetoric of the communist period” (B. Dole ž al 2012), “To the great comrade Ne č as” (Dra ž an 2012), or even, with a more radical pun, “Let’s sell Neč as to the Chinese for organ harvesting,” as he is of no use to us any more (J. X. Dolež al 2012). More serious critics, such as the editor of the liberal left online Referendum Daily , spoke of “the end of the Czech conservative revolution” and compared the speech to inane public appearances of Communist Party representatives, which signaled the decline of the old regime in the late 1980s (Patoč ka 2012). Jiří Pehe, a political scientist and yet another representative of Havel’s inner circle, said that Ne č as would be remembered in history books as a “would-be conservative Prime Minister of a democratic country who reverted to the language and thought of the real-socialist period, which, as evident, must have influenced him heavily,” and as a right-wing zealot who “shares in some features of the Bolshevik mentality” (Pehe 2012). This view was further reinforced by the communists themselves, who expressed rare support for the conservative prime minister. The leader of the communist MPs contended that, on the Tibetan question, “circumstances forced Ne č as to finally agree with the Communist Party” (Zemanov á -Kopeck á 2012). He further said that Czech businessmen kept on asking the communist MPs to “do something about the fact that the Greens hang the Tibetan flag in the Parliament, which is detri- mental to their business” (Kopeck ý and Wirnitzer 2012). Another camp that supported the prime minister unconditionally on the issue was ultraconservative Christian circles. Michal Sem í n, the head of the DOST Action group, found Dalai-Lamaism, along with multiculturalism, to be examples of oikophobia , and questioned why 222 ● Martin Hrˇíbek postmodern humanists selected the Tibetan case as the symbol of their movement instead of the discrimination against Christians in the Muslim world (Semí n 2012). The DOST published a press release in support of the prime minister: “Very much like you, we feel apprehen- sive about the glorification of the Dalai Lama, a person who subscribes to Marxist socialism and, in the spiritual domain, to religious relativ- ism” (Semí n and Bahní k 2012). The Social Democrats for their part also expressed their cautious support for Ne č as when Michal Ha š ek, the deputy leader of the party, and leader of the Association of Regions in the Czech Republic called for the “upgrading of the Czech–Chinese relations at least to the level that other EU states enjoy” (Ha š ek 2012). Support for a pro-export China policy in the context of the Dalai-Lamaism debate was also echoed by former Social Democratic prime minister and the incumbent president Miloš Zeman (in office since 2013). At the peak of the election campaign in January 2013, when asked whether he would meet the Dalai Lama if he became president, he replied: “The Dalai Lama is without doubt a religious leader. If I were a religious leader it would be my pleasure to meet the Dalai Lama. [ . . . ] Another option would be if the Dalai Lama was a big investor . . .” (TN.cz 2013). In September 2013, a year after the debate kicked off, the Dalai Lama came to Prague on his tenth visit and was confronted with Dalai- Lamaism himself. His interview for the Hospodář sk é noviny newspaper, which in its very title highlights that the Dalai Lama has never heard of Dalai-Lamaism, presents an interesting comment on the Czech debate. The interviewer started:

You have come to the Czech Republic from Lithuania where you gave a speech in the Parliament and met the president of the country. In the Czech Republic no politician received you officially. How do you feel about the difference between the two visits?

The Dalai Lama’s reply, unsurprisingly, did not corroborate the local projections vested in him: “I do not feel any difference. My chief mission is the support of human rights, compassion, and harmony among people and the general public is more important in this respect than the politicians are.” Further, he said:

When there was a debate in the United States whether China should get preferential trade status, I voiced my conviction that China deserved it. China is important, it is the most populous country in the world with Dalai-Lamaism ● 223

1.3 billion inhabitants and it should not be isolated. There should be no embargo. (Ehl 2013)

Since the Social Democrats came to power in late 2013, they have consistently followed a proexport policy toward China in line with the intent of Neč as’s speech. Their government finally broke the ice with the Chinese when the Social Democratic minister of foreign affairs Lubomí r Zaorá lek made a trip to Beijing in April 2014—the first such visit in 15 years—and signed a declaration with his Chinese counterpart stating, inter alia, that

the Czech side respects the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the People’s Republic of China, acknowledges the importance and sensitiv- ity of the Tibetan question and reaffirms its commitment to one China policy as well as the fact that Tibet is an unalienable part of the Chinese territory. The Czech Republic does not support the independence of Tibet in any form. (MFA 2014)

The minister admitted that this part of the declaration was drafted by the Chinese. His landmark trip was followed by a string of high-level mutual visits promotion of business links widely covered in the media. Indeed, there should be no embargo. Moreover, the deputy minister of foreign affairs distanced himself with unprecedented openness from the human rights policy of Vá clav Havel and his followers, terming it “a false universalism,” which is “misguided and counterproductive” ( Š afa ří kov á 2014). Those statements provoked strong criticism, in much the same vein as in the Dalai-Lamaism debate. The former minister of foreign affairs, Karel Schwarzenberg, compared the new government’s policy toward China to prostitution: “Even when other girls lay down for money I still would not recommend my own daughter to do so as well.” He particularly objected that the Czech Republic agreed “not to meddle in China’s internal affairs” and not to support the independence of Tibet “in any form” ( NOVINKY 2014). On a more serious note, leading Czech sinologist Olga Lomová wrote an extensive critique of the new China policy. In a section of her article subtitled “The Question of Our Own Identity,” she asserts: “If we refute Havel’s presumably elitist policy of defending human rights we perforce refute the raison d’ ê tre of the post-1989 transformation as well as our very country which stands and falls with Havel and human rights.” She further argues that such rebuttals “resonate with the interpretation of 224 ● Martin Hrˇíbek our identity as presented by the Chinese government project called the 16+1 platform” (Lomová 2014), which is a framework for strategic partnership between China and 16 Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries initiated by the Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao in 2011. 5 The idea of such a platform, Lomov á points out, rests on the idea of an old friendship going back to the 1950s and on the view that the transformations of China and of the European postcommunist countries over the last 25 years are parallel developments. Against this Chinese “myth of a common post-communist identity which should be the foundation of our common future,” a myth that drives us more to the East than to the West, Lomov á (2014) reinforces the opposition between the authoritarian regime, which we shrugged off (but not yet the Chinese), and the democratic regime we gained. Beyond the political and expert level, a popular online petition for the continuous support of Tibet was supported by over 15,000 signa- tories in about two months following Zaor á lek’s breaking mission to Beijing.6 At the time of writing, the symbolic conflict within Czech society continues, and has the potential to escalate.

Genealogy of the Debate and Its Critique The presentation of the Czech Dalai-Lamaism debate shows that the Tibetan question—in terms of its presence in high-profile political statements, public discourse, and popular support for the Tibetan cause among the general public—is endowed with an importance dispropor- tionate to the actual relations that the Czech Republic enjoys with any Asian country involved. It further shows that the debate on the Tibetan question is of considerable significance to the self-understanding of Czech society and its political role in the world in the post-1989 period. We see here an Orientalist construction at work whereby the Czechs are associated with the Tibetans and their victimhood and “communist” China, the victimizer of the Tibetans, is associated with the “communists” who ruled the Czechs in the past. However, that thread of Czech postsocialist identity, spun out of the imagined identification with the Tibetans, is woven into much denser fabric of Western perceptions of the Orient, which also has its history. China and India, the two ancient civilizations beyond the Mediterranean horizon, have been an inspiration of powerful Western fantasies and projections, their past glorified and presence denigrated, as evidenced in large volume of scholarly literature following the publication of Edward Said’s work, Orientalism (1978). While ancient China Dalai-Lamaism ● 225 was often seen as an ideal of enlightened rationalism, India was construed as the site of the spiritual. The romantics, in particular, searched for a regenerative cure for the enervated materialist Europe in the spiritual traditions of India, especially the early Buddhist literature. Czech discourse on China, India, and Tibet developed in relation to the discourses on the Orient in Western European countries, not as a mere reflection but as an active contribution of indigenous nationalist thought to Western imaginations of the East. Constructions of the Czech collective self have contained an Orientalist element since the beginning of the Czech national revival in the first half of the nineteenth century. The Slavic nations of Europe that were asserting themselves against the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires looked partly to Tsarist Russia for support. This affinity with the Eastern power established a self-orientalizing strategy, expressed in the ideology of Slavness (Glanc 2009), which is present in the core of the nationalist imagination of many Slavic nations, including the Czechs. The idea of Slavness presents a geographic reorientation of Said’s scheme in which the Eastern Russian Empire looks at its potential Western colonies as the supplement of Russia. However, this supplement is not other but (almost) identical. Second, the Slavs construe themselves as external to, but at the same time, derivative of Europe and the West (Glanc 2009: 879–880). Another constitutive element of the ideology of Slavness is the image of Slavs as victims of oppression by the dominant Germanic and Romance powers (2009: 882). Interestingly for the Dalai-Lamaism debate, the ideology of Slavness had its economic component too, including the effort to open Eastern markets for Czech businessmen (2009: 883–884). Russia, however, was not the only East the Czechs looked toward for inspiration in the nineteenth century. They looked at the Orient proper too. Czech nationalist discourse was positioned against German cultural hegemony, but at the same time it derived inspiration from German sources rather than British or French ones. German claims for national unification and Germany’s future role in Europe were closely linked to a philologically and otherwise imagined affinity of the Germanic people with the Aryan makers of the ancient Indian civilization (see e.g., Cowan 2010). And the Czech revivalists, for their part, supported claims for Czech nationhood by claiming that the affinity between ancient Indians and Slavic peoples was even closer. This was primarily evidenced by the lexical and grammatical proximity of Slavic languages to Sanskrit, with the result that philological studies expanded into complex exercises, which included composing Czech poetry in classical Sanskrit meters or looking for similarities between 226 ● Martin Hrˇíbek the Vedic religion and mythology and pre-Christian Slavic cults and myths (Strnad 2007). As I have argued elsewhere (Hří bek 2011), Said’s notion of Orientalism (1978) as a discourse on the other and inferior subjects of the colonial empires has to be substantially modified to fit the Czech perception of India. While German authors differed from Said’s notion of Orientalism in that they construed an affinity with ancient Indians but, in the present, they considered themselves superior and more able civilization builders. The Czech nationalists went one step further in that they identified with both India’s past and present. From the middle of the nineteenth century, they began to notice the movement of the Bengali reformists and associated their struggle against the British dominance with the Czech national revival against German cultural hegemony and the rule of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The dominant Czech perception of India was based on an affinity thesis that involved not just common ancestry but also coeval nationalist struggle. This affinity thesis survived right up to the beginning of the Cold War, exemplified for instance in the Czech reception of the first Asian Nobel Laureate, Rabindranath Tagore, whose intellectual and spiritual influence on the European mind, as well as his celebrity status during the interwar period, was comparable to that of the Dalai Lama in present times. Czech authors, who never shrugged off the threat, whether perceived or real, of German domination, in line with the affinity thesis identified the Czech nationalist project (which resulted in independent statehood in 1918) with Tagore’s universal humanist project. Tagore was invoked to endow Czech nationalism with an aura of universal humanism (Hří bek 2014). With the advent of the Cold War, the new geopolitical situation of Czechoslovakia also found its position on the axis of the East–West imaginary. Building on the earlier ideology of Slavness, the slot for the Oriental brother in Czech national consciousness was occupied by Soviet Russia and, by extension, other brotherly nations in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republic (USSR) and beyond as well, in the growing communist camp in Asia. The Stalinist discourse, however, replaced the self-representation of a victimized minority with one of an assertive communist empire (Glanc 2009: 878). As a consequence of those developments, the perception of affinity and coevalness with India weakened and the universalist communist ideology was superimposed onto nationalism. China has not been as important for the development of Czech nationalism as India. Nevertheless, F ü rst (2005), in his study of Czech Dalai-Lamaism ● 227 perceptions of China, concludes that imagining China has also prevailed over matter-of-fact analysis. 7 In Czechoslovakia after World War II, F ü rst argues, the anti-Western orientation and inclination toward the Soviet East was complemented by the search for a closer connection with communist China, which resulted in the affirmation of and identification with the Chinese anti-Western nationalist agenda on part of many Czech authors. Focusing on the postsocialist period, F ü rst identifies three “unrealistic Czech perceptions” in relation to China, which, according to him, oscillate between Orientalism and Occidentalism. He divides the advocates into the fascinated (by recent economic progress of China), the romantics (either Sinophobes, troubled and moved by the human rights abuses in China and Tibet in particular, or Sinophiles, more deeply admiring the greatness, historical continuity, and supposed stability of Chinese civilization), and the extreme leftists (mostly the Communist Party members who see in China an alternative model to the post-1989 developments in the CEE). Later, F ü rst looks at “a particular Czech preoccupation with the protection of human rights in the PRC [People’s Republic of China]” (2010: 80) in the postsocialist Czech Republic with an emphasis on the Tibet region. He traces the roots of this preoccupation to the philo- sophical legacy of the interwar Czechoslovak Republic as interpreted by the dissident circles of the communist era. In his analysis

the Czech approach is also a projection of one’s own story in the process of the re/construction of social and political identity by identification with the ethos of the dissident tradition stemming from a different socio-political context than the one of the present day Czech Republic and still less the one of the present day PRC. (2010: 82)

The negative stereotype of China as “an evil state whose victims have to be protected” is part of “the reaffirmation of new [Czech] identity in a familiar theme of revolt against communism” (2010: 84). Prior to the so-called Velvet Revolution of 1989, Tibet played a small role in the construction of Czech identity. The image of Tibet as a backward area prevailed, but at the same time Tibet was a source of spiritual inspiration for a generation of Czech mystics (Rozehnalová 2005) who were able to carve out a niche for themselves even under the communist regime. The reason why an area of Asia heretofore only infrequently talked about has become a contested issue in Czech domestic politics will be best illuminated by looking at Western perceptions of Tibet, bringing us back to the disputed term—Dalai-Lamaism. 228 ● Martin Hrˇíbek

The term “Lamaism” (of which Dalai-Lamaism is a derivative) was coined by European authors in the late eighteenth century. According to the Tibetologist Donald Lopez (1998: 15–45) the term “Lamaism,” unlike Tibetan Buddhism (a variant of Buddhism as practiced in Tibet), is laden with negative connotations. It served mainly to contrast the “true” Buddhism of the Pali canon with its supposedly degenerate and corrupt form practiced in Tibet. Lamaism was also recurrently compared to and identified with Catholicism, namely as part of the Protestant critique of the latter, where it became a code word for Papism. The term “Lamaism” was probably inspired by the way Chinese refer to the religious practices of Tibet—as lama jiao or “the teaching of the Lamas” (as distinct from fo jiao—Buddhism)—first recorded in Chinese sources in 1775, at around the same time as “Lamaism” entered the European vocabulary (Lopez 1998: 17–20). The critique of the term as a European invention, which does not correspond to the perceptions of its supposed practitioners, had already been raised in the first half of the nineteenth century, 8 nonetheless the term has never quite died out. The image of Tibet, however, was transformed profoundly following its annexation by China. While the Chinese used the notion of degenerate Lamaism to justify the annexation to the West, Western authors revalued Tibetan Buddhism not as degenerate but rather as a pristine and authentic form of Buddhism preserved in a country that had neither been colonized nor substantially influenced by the West (1998: 42). In the words of Lopez:

During the nineteenth century Tibet and China were regarded by many European scholars and colonial officers as “Oriental despotisms,” one ruled by a Dalai Lama, an ethereal “god-king,” the other by an effete emperor. [ . . . ] After the success of the Communists in 1949, the image of the Oriental despot resurfaced and was superimposed onto Chairman Mao, not as emperor but as the totalitarian leader of faceless Communists. The Chinese invasion and occupation of Tibet was perceived not as a conquest of one despotic state by another, but as yet another case of opposites, the powers of darkness against the powers of light. [ . . . ] Tibet embodies the spiritual and the ancient, China the material and the modern. (1998: 6–7)

The nineteenth-century romantics sought to reinvigorate the Western materialist civilization by Eastern (Buddhist) wisdom from India. In the new geopolitical context the image of Tibet prior to Chinese annexation somewhat replaced, or at least complemented the image of ancient India as the site of that wisdom. The civilizational mission of the West in the Cold War era became to overcome the communist other. Tacit support Dalai-Lamaism ● 229 for the Tibetan cause9 served the agenda, as did the support to dissident groups in communist countries of Central and Eastern Europe. The notion of degenerate Lamaism entered the discourse of the communist countries (including the Czech press in the 1950s) while the West entered a period characterized by a broad interest in Tibetan Buddhism, which was further intensified by the Dalai Lama’s successful international pro-Tibet campaign in late 1980s. That campaign and the award of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1989 made the Dalai Lama a true celebrity. The growing number of Western Buddhists and rever- ence paid to the Dalai Lama provoked ire of conservative Christians, especially in German-speaking countries (Rozehnalová 2005: 56–59), who rekindled the notion of degenerate Lamaism. This brings us to the derivative term “Dalai-Lamaism,” which is a more personalized variant of Lamaism with still stronger negative undertones as it emphasizes the central agency of a king and God incar- nate. Occasionally used in older literature since the nineteenth century in place of Lamaism, the contemporary usage of the term aims exclusively at countering the popularity of the fourteenth Dalai Lama in the West—mostly by the Chinese, the conservative Christians, and those who want to contrast the original Buddhism with its later, supposedly degenerate, form which developed in Tibet. Nevertheless, the term is rarely used. A recent notable high-profile exception is a scathing feuilleton by a German author, Willi Winkler, for S ü ddeutsche Zeitung. He derides the Dalai Lama as an impostor who, in a sort of contemporary religious wellness center, sells banalities about life to a public that no longer has the patience to reflect on such things: “One does not have to think any more [ . . . ] the Dalai Lama has conveniently synthesized all religions into his. Islam, Christianity, Kabala, Taoism, Buddhism: all is present in Dalai-Lamaism” (Winkler 2008). One Czech journalist wrote a short article about this feuilleton in an Evangelical weekly magazine and gave it the subtitle “On So-Called Dalai-Lamaism” (Schilla 2008). Although direct inspiration from this source cannot be proven, the first to introduce the term into the wider Czech public discourse was not the beleaguered Prime Minister Neč as but the deputy head of President Klaus’s office Petr Há jek. In January 2012 he proclaimed that “the kitsch of Dalai-Lamaism has been reso- nating here for twenty years.” This statement was a part of his antime- dia tirade:

The media relativize and question the principles of religion, propagate atheism and support all kinds of deviations in order to make traditional 230 ● Martin Hrˇíbek

values erode. Media intentionally support homosexuals and other devi- ants in order to systematically undermine the foundational values of our civilization. (Haslingerová 2012)

H á jek, himself a member of the ultraconservative Christian DOST action group, often publicly expressed more extreme versions of views close to those of President Klaus. Klaus terms the beginning of the twenty-first century as “the era of massive emergence of post-democracy,” by which he means “attempts of manifold forces, structures and groupings (not of the state itself), which—without a democratic mandate—try to directly decide (or at least basically influence) various crucial and sensitive public issues.” He referred specifically to “various manifestations of NGOism, of artificial multiculturalism, of radical humanrightism, of aggressive environmentalism” as “new ways of endangering and undermining of freedom, which we—at least those of us who lived in the communist era—take very seriously” (Klaus 2005). In other speeches and writings he adds to this inventory of adversaries of freedom: Europeism, or the ideology of stronger EU integration (Klaus et al. 2006), feminism, homosexualism (see e.g., Kostl á n and Albert 2011), and global warming alarmism (for a short overview see e.g., Klaus 2011). In a 2009 interview for the Czech daily Mlad á fronta Dnes , President Klaus further elaborated that Czech politics 20 years after 1989 was becoming empty, opening up space for dangerous ideologies, or -isms, such as Havlism (Buchert 2009). He further elaborated the term four years later in an interview for the conservative Polish weekly Do Rzeczy when asked to compare his term in office (2003–13) with that of Havel (1990–2003) in terms of the philosophy of statehood:

V á clav Havel (and his specific ideology which I cannot term better than Havlism) represented a completely different world. He called the market a grocery store, he wanted to establish an elitist post-democracy instead of democracy and he supported the modernist destruction of the existing human order instead of conservatism and traditional values. It was an echo of French Jacobinism rather than the British conservative principle of classic liberalism. It was an extreme leftism. [ . . . ] I should probably also mention his cosmopolitanism in opposition to my trust in the state where we live. But it was also aggressive foreign-political interventionism (and humanitarian bombing), instead of respect for any country of the world. (Semka 2013)

Indeed, Dalai-Lamaism fits perfectly among the fragments of Havlism and V á clav Klaus made a point of never meeting the Dalai Lama. Klaus’s Dalai-Lamaism ● 231 views on Czech socialist and postsocialist history presents an antipode to those of V á clav Havel. Klaus’s idea of freedom from oppression by the communist regime centers on the economy, namely the restrictions imposed on private property and state control of markets and economic activity in general. A professor of economy and an admirer of Hayek and Margaret Thatcher, his idea of freedom centers on free enterprise, the multiparty system with political agency invested exclusively in the political parties, and the nation-state. Havel, on the other hand, wished to extend a universal and spiritual message based on local Czech experience. In his historic first annual new year’s address to the nation in January 1990 he said:

Our first president [Thomas Garrigue Masaryk] wrote: “Jesus, not Caesar.” Today, this idea is again alive in us. I dare to say that we may even have an opportunity to spread this idea further and introduce a new element into European and global politics. Our country, if that is what we want, can now permanently radiate love, understanding, the power of the spirit and of ideas. It is precisely this glow that we can offer as our specific contribution to international politics. (Havel 1990)

Conclusion The Dalai-Lamaism debate is a case of an Orientalist discourse whereby Tibet serves as a surrogate self in the construction of Czech postsocialist consciousness. The sudden eruption and continuing intensity of the debate is a testimony to its ongoing renegotiation. In the nineteenth century, Czech national identity was formed in opposition to German cultural hegemony and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. It was influenced by the ideology of Slavness on one hand and the German romanticist search for the Indian origins on the other. This is the root of the ever-present self-orientalizing strategy in the (re)making of Czech national consciousness. The slot for the Orient to identify with was occupied by various brothers over the course of the time: Tsarist Russia, colonized India, the USSR, Maoist China, occupied Tibet and, in the near future, perhaps the new China where communism and capitalism work in harmony. The Cold War insulated Czechoslovakia from the West, both geopo- litically and ideologically, in an historically unprecedented manner. In the process, Czech authors, willingly or not, identified with the Soviet East, whose rhetoric partly built on the idea of Slavness, and the identity thesis with India weakened. At the same time, the preoccupation with Tibet has displaced ancient India as the abode of the spiritual and 232 ● Martin Hrˇíbek the preserve of Eastern wisdom in the imagination of the West. The fall of the Iron Curtain in Europe coincided with the peak of the Dalai Lama’s international public relations offensive, and also with the violent suppression of Tiananmen Square protests, which buried the hope that China too would reform on the terms of the West. Moreover, Havel and the Dalai Lama were brought together fatefully for the Czechs through the Nobel Peace Prize selection of 1989. Havel, having inherited the traditions of the interwar Czechoslovak Republic, rekindled the received notion of Czechs as an oppressed minority with an Oriental connection. The minority in his imagination and life experience, however, was the minority of (Czech) dissidents struggling against the (Czech) communist regime, an experience that he thought carried a universal appeal. In an ingenious move, which allowed for an ideological reunion of Czechoslovakia with the Euro- Atlantic West, he transposed the Western oppressor onto the still communist-run China (as well as other places where the same imagining could apply, albeit with less importance for Czech self-perception, such as the regimes of North Korea, Cuba, and Burma). In this imagining, Czechs were identified with oppressed Tibetans, whose role in preserv- ing timeless spiritual Eastern wisdom was conflated, in the process, with the wisdom of Czech dissidents. Unlike other places in the world, which were either selectively ignored because the oppressor was not communist, or which were too analogous from a nationalist point of view in terms of a situation of native dissent against a native communist state, the Tibetan case allowed for an implicitly nationalist construction, which could be summed up as follows: the Tibetan people, small in numbers like us Czechs, have been victimized by a larger ethnic and cultural entity—as we were by the Germans and later by the Soviet communists. Hence, it is our historic mission to support the Tibetans. Hence our historic mission as a nation, in retro- spect, was the revolt against communism. For freedom, truth, love, etc. Needless to say, this revolt was in fact pursued by a determined and elite minority under the communist regime, but their story, its characters and ethos, opened up for the masses to identify with after the so-called Velvet Revolution. The mobilizing potential of the Tibetan cause lies precisely in the fact that it allows an influential segment of the Czech public to identify with the suffering of contemporary Tibetans, ritually and discursively, as with a surrogate dissident self in the absence of any real threat to themselves from a totalitarian power. The imagined affinity of the Czechs and the Tibetans is a postsocialist version of the same discursive strategy employed by pre-1918 Czech Dalai-Lamaism ● 233 revivalists and later nation builders. The construction of the affinity between Czechs and Indians served primarily to construct Germans (both within and without) as the other. By shifting the imaginary locale of affinity from India to Tibet, it became possible to imagine postsocialist Czech consciousness as anticommunist, thus merging the national with the (imagined and desired) opposition to the past regime. As a consequence, that regime and anything that could be identified with it was left out as the other of the post-1989 period. The Tibetan case, regardless of its geopolitical ramifications, served the purpose perfectly because its invocation integrated in a single ritual act the vanguard dissident with the nation, the local with the universal, and the temporal with the timeless. 10 The discussion on Dalai-Lamaism is unsettling precisely because it blurs a clear understanding of where, in terms of both time and space, the other and hence the self is to be located. In other words, who is the “communist” now: the Czech Communist Party or the right-wing conservative prime minister, the Chinese government or the Dalai Lama, industrialists or homosexuals? Furthermore, I would argue, the discussion on Dalai-Lamaism displays the cracks in the postsocialist consensus, which perhaps anticipates the reconfiguration of Czech national consciousness. When the dramatist and erstwhile scene-shifter Vá clav Havel assumed the role of president, he set the stage for postsocialist development in his country with Cold War pieces, which hung around for decades after the war was over. But a time has come when the scene is shifting once again.

Notes 1 . For detailed statistics by year and lists of participating municipalities see the Tibinfo.cz Web site at http://www.tibinfo.cz/clanek.php?id=515 . 2 . Since the dissolution of Czechoslovakia on January 1, 1993, the two major political parties in the Czech Republic have been the conservative Civic Democratic Party (Ob č ansk á demokratick á strana, founded in 1991 and long led by V á clav Klaus) and the Czech Social Democratic Party ( Č esk á strana sociá ln ě demokratická , founded in 1878 as part of the Austrian Social Democrats and independent since 1883; taken over by the Communist Party in 1948 and reestablished in 1989 with Milo š Zeman as its most visible and enduring leader). Other important long-term players are center-right Christian Democrats (founded in 1919, forcibly converted to communist ideology in 1948 and co-opted to the People’s Front, revived with a Christian Democratic profile after 1989, since when it has entered coalitions with both major parties) and the Communist Party (founded in 1921, rebranded and 234 ● Martin Hrˇíbek

partly reformed in 1990; never invited to be a part of any post-1989 coalition). A number of other center to right-wing parties who made it into the Czech Parliament were members of ruling coalitions with either of the two major parties. Most of them vanished, apart from the Green Party (founded in 1989) and TOP 09 (founded in 2009, breaking away from the Christian Democrats). 3 . For a telling review of the event, published in bilingual Italian and English edition see Kohoutek (2012). 4 . The news-server Č esk á pozice investigated the trigger for the prime minister’s unusual statement. They found that Michal Ž antovsk ý , the Czech ambassador to London and again a former close associate of V á clav Havel, met privately with the Dalai Lama in June 2012 to interview him for a biography on Havel that he was writing. The Chinese, however, noticed. The chief representatives of the Confederation of Industry of the Czech Republic (an influential body that officially terms itself as “representing those who create value”) learnt to their displeasure about the meeting from Chinese diplomatic sources. They believed the meeting was an obstacle in the Confederation’s lobbying with the Chinese authorities for a ministerial-level Czech delegation to China. The president of the confederation complained and the president of the republic Vá clav Klaus had a tough talk with the ambassador when he visited London during the 2012 Olympics (Shabu 2012). The speech at the trade fair was thus intended to appease the industrial community. 5 . The initiative involves annual high-level summits, a “China CEE Cooperation Secretariat” at the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and aims at increasing mutual trade volumes, Chinese investment in CEE, and a Chinese credit line to CEE countries (see e.g., EIAS 2014). 6 . See the website, “We support Tibet” at http://podporujemetibet.cz/ . 7 . One of the explicit aims of Fü rst’s analysis is to show how part of the Czech public “identify with views which go against their own values and traditions and [instead] cling to a distant idealized civilization” (Fü rst 2005: 25). 8 . By a German scholar Isaac Jacob Schmidt in 1835 (Lopez 1998: 35). 9 . Tacit support involved promises of political recognition and luring the Dalai Lama into exile in 1950s, financial assistance to the Tibetan government in exile, military aid and training to Tibetan guerillas (without seeking the approval of the Dalai Lama) in the late 1950s and 1960s, a period of neglect following the rapprochement between the United States and the People’s Republic of China in the 1970s and the greater part of the 1980s, Congressional support for the cause in late 1980s and early 1990s as part of the Dalai Lama’s pro-Tibet international campaign. See Goldstein (2006). 10 . The myth and ritual of this self-referential postsocialist fantasy about Tibet can be succinctly exemplified by words and deeds of one of its most ardent devotees, former head of the Green Party Martin Bursí k: The Velvet Revolution of November 1989 as well as the fall of the Berlin Wall is a great source of inspiration for the Tibetans. Similarly Dalai-Lamaism ● 235

to present-day Tibet, the situation of our country prior to November 1989 looked hopeless. And then, in a matter of days, the repressive communist regime broke down and the era of freedom and democracy for our country opened up. We have actually more in common with the Tibetans than we think. (Burs í k 2013).

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Afterword

Michal Buchowski and Hana Cervinkova

lot has been written about Central and/or East European anthropology before and after the political changes that took place in A the region in and after 1989. As we stated in our introduction, these ethno-anthropologies—a term which implies a combination of traditions of continental ethnology and Anglo-American anthropology (sometimes used by scholars in the region, but probably first applied in the English publication by Dunja Rihtman-Auguš tin in 2004)—have had different trajectories in different countries. They have been dependent on changing political and economic contexts, and they have grown out of national theoretical traditions. In many places, anthropological intellectual life was vibrant long before 1989. We want to state once again that there has never been a single Eastern European ethnology in Central European countries and the diversity of intellectual traditions lying behind the contemporary practices of ethno-anthropologists from the region is visible in the ethnographies collected in this volume. The texts also show the new impetus that this intellectual variety has acquired in the last quarter of a century. Geopolitical and technological changes have facilitated mobility of people and flows of anthropological knowledge. No doubt, this has led to the increased cross-fertilization of ideas and emergence of new concepts. Simultaneously, the introduction of a new economic order, with all its related phenomena, such as new border and migration regimes, movement of people and transfer of capital, have enormously affected the social and cultural landscapes. These processes have left an unavoidable imprint on anthropological topics studied and approaches applied. The results of these mutually dependent processes can be easily detected in the chapters presented. While our aim was not to redraw the foundations of anthropology, the authors of the ethnographies included in this book are indeed involved in the project of “rethinking” the anthropology in and of 242 ● Michal Buchowski and Hana Cervinkova

Central Europe. This is not because they would want to explicitly engage in debates about the politics of disciplinary practices in the region, or enter into an open polemic concerning the geographical provenance of their conceptual approaches. As we argued in our introduction, such positioning has characterized much of the post-1989 anthropological production that had Central and Eastern Europe as its focus. Instead, our authors, most of whom work in and on Central Europe, draw freely on different theoretical concepts and results of empirical research that help them understand the issues and people that are the focus of their work. Importantly, the very subjects of their inquiry require these anthropologists to move—physically and conceptually— across borders. These movements force them to bring research into conversation with concepts that originate in different national and intellectual contexts, often published in different languages. Through these linkages, while practicing anthropology in geographic areas that are seen as marginal to world knowledge production, they are engaged in anthropological work that is situated on the crossroads of global human and knowledge flows, generating what we term “cosmopolitan anthropologies in the peripheries,” or very promising “twilight zones anthropologies” (Buchowski 2014). This is made very explicit in the first section of the book that includes five chapters that deal with mobilities in the European context. Marek Pawlak’s study of the interplay between national identity and social class among Polish migrants who move between Poland and Norway shows how the migratory situation generates processes of othering. This traditional anthropological concept, rarely used in migration research, helps Pawlak distinguish two resulting categories of migrants— Polakkene , who are discursively deprived of agency and power and cosmopolitans who project themselves as suitable for an essentialized Western way of life. He shows how “power relations inherent in the processes of othering, differentiation, and interaction reside in the global imaginaries, which valorize one type of mobility at the cost of others.” Katarzyna Wolanik Boströ m and Magnus Ö hlander build on another classical concept—Bourdieu’s notion of symbolic and cultural capital—to argue against the generally accepted notion of the transnationality of medical knowledge through the analysis of interviews with Polish medical doctors who have immigrated to Sweden. The authors dislodge the vision of the “transnational medical field,” showing instead that the symbolic and cultural capital of a medical professional is not automatically translatable, and requires extensive negotiations in the process of reestablishing professionalism and status Afterword ● 243 in a new setting. By illuminating the cultural embeddedness of the professional situation of Polish doctors in a migratory situation, Wolanik Boströ m and Ö hlander are able to show “the conditions and limitations of transnational mobility of symbolic capital.” The authors of the following two chapters—Gertrud Hü welmeier, and Zdeně k Uherek with Veronika Beranská —address the much debated concept of socialist and postsocialist rupture or continuity through a study of traditional migrants into Central Europe: Vietnamese and Ukrainians. In both cases, the authors point to continuities of ties from dating back to the socialist era and their importance for generating the migrants’ imaginaries and existence in the era of late capitalism. Both studies show the close ties of Vietnamese and Ukrainian migrants to their co-nationals and the limitations to functioning in Central Europe where they have migrated and lived for many decades. Instead of debat- ing the relevance of the concept of postsocialism for studying the societies and cultures of Central Europe, the authors show the importance of practices and relationships from the socialism period to the immigrants’ lives in the present. Izabella Main makes an important contribution to research on women’s reproductive health in a migratory transnational situation. She analyzes this critical area of migrants’ lives by focusing specifically on the experiences of Polish women during the antenatal and birth period while living in Germany. Her study provides key insights into at least two areas of anthropological interest. First, it contributes to our understanding of how migrants navigate between different national systems of health care in the European context. Second, it shows how, in the process of seeking and obtaining care, women negotiate situations in which their expectations, tied to the culture of health care in Poland, clash with those present in the German system. In this way, and somewhat similarly to Bostr ö m and Ö hlander, Main points to the deep cultural embeddedness of health care—both at the level of the medical profession and personal patient–personnel relations. In her focus on knowledge (the cultural knowledge of Polish women vs. the expert knowledge of German medical personnel), Main’s ethnography provides something of a transition to the next section of the book, which is perhaps one most openly contesting East–West hierarchies in knowledge production. Alexandra Bituší kov á engages with scholarship that traditionally criticizes Central and Eastern Europe for the weakness of its civil society and civic engagement. Instead, she writes about grassroots urban movements (some of them transnational in inspiration and scope) through which people in postsocialist urban settings organize 244 ● Michal Buchowski and Hana Cervinkova and create spaces for action. Agnieszka Koś cia ń ska’s historically and ethnographically rich study of Polish sex education, shows how pre- 1989 traditions of Polish sexology as an interdisciplinary field that perceived sexuality as psychologically, socially, and culturally embedded makes it currently more resistant to the global biomedicalization of the field, and more open to influences of feminist and queer ideas. Marek Mikuš has developed an original and theoretically nuanced approach to studying transnational processes of change in Europe. In his historical anthropology of European Union (EU) integration, he illuminates the political and material project of Serbia’s integration into the EU as it comes about through the absorption and cooptation of Serbia’s NGO sector by the state. Modernization, mobility, activity, and identity are concepts that are the common denominator of ethnographies included in the final section of the book. Agata Stanisz and Waldemar Kuligowski focus on one of the dominant areas of European modernization, the implementation of an infrastructural project in the form of the construction of a motorway. New highway routes are associated not only with progress, but also mobility. An inherent effect of their construction is the creation of new multidimensional spaces and places that require anthropological research and interpretation. To use one of James Clifford’s famous met- aphors, routes are interconnected with roots; with their construction, new constellations of cultural features and practices emerge, involving diverse actors, both local and passers-by. Similarly, modernization becomes a point of reference for Hana Horá kov á . In the case of her study, the focus of postsocialist transformation and modernization involves the restructuring of agriculture— reforming “old” systems and practices into contemporary ones compatible with the new economic system. Tourism involves mobility, and local communities become a part of intricate social, cultural, and economic exchanges. In the background of this seemingly modern faç ade, cultural tensions appear, involving actors who draw on different values, some of them derived from the “past.” Hor á kov á shows how these values and symbols are utilized by actors struggling not only for symbolic, but also economic power. Postsocialist societies have attempted to adapt themselves to new realities at many levels and in many ways. One of the aspects of this effort is the reconfiguration of (national) identity through attitudes towards global issues. “Dalai-Lamaism” in the Czech Republic is a case in point. According to Martin Hří bek, taking a “progressive” stance on the issue and supporting the Tibetan cause allows Czechs Afterword ● 245 to imagine they have aligned themselves with the liberal and tolerant part of humanity. Becoming modern involves self-identification with an assumed transhistorical and transnational commitment to the eternal value of freedom, while at the same time allowing for separation from the communist past and imagining the postsocialist Czech collective identity as anticommunist. One of the major goals of this volume was to show that anthropology exercised in and of Central Europe is diversified, theoretically informed, and in many respects original. This short recapitulation of the major arguments was intended to emphasize this multiplicity and creativity. Of course, the “tip of the iceberg” selection presented here cannot be considered representative, but it is certainly illustrative. In the introduction we wrote that “The actual merging of horizons and flow of ideas is the best possible solution for world anthropologies, which are neither ethnocentric nor hegemonic. Anthropology that utilizes and mixes wisely theories originating in different places, while properly addressing local issues in a global perspective, is something we should constantly strive for.” Our sincere hope is that this volume comprises such an exercise, exemplifying the potential implicit in “twilight zone anthropologies.”

References Buchowski, Micha ł . 2014. “Twilight Zone Anthropologies: The Case of Central Europe.” Cargo 1, 2: 7–18. Rihtman-Augu š tin, Dunja. 2004. Ethnology, Myth and Politics: Anthropologizing Croatian Ethnology. Aldershot: Ashgate.

Contributors

Veronika Beransk á is a research assistant at the Institute of Ethnology of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic in Prague. She works in the Department of Ethnic Studies and is primarily concerned with the topics of folk healing, alternative medicine, migration, and integration. She is working on a PhD within the Historical Sciences Study Programme, Ethnology Specialization, at the Institute of Ethnology, Faculty of Arts, Charles University, Prague, which focuses on the theme of folk healing in the memories and practices of resettled compatriots from the former Soviet Union. Alexandra Bitu ší kov á is a senior researcher at the Institute of Social and Cultural Studies, Faculty of Arts, Matej Bel University in Banska Bystric á , Slovakia, and vice-rector for Research at Matej Bel University. She has been a visiting scholar at Cambridge University and University College London, UK, and Boston University, United States (Fulbright). Her main research interests include urban change and sustainability, diversity, identity, gender, social movements, and local activism in Central Europe. She has participated in several European Framework Programme projects, and has been a member of a number of expert groups in the European Commission. Katarzyna Wolanik Bostr ö m is an assistant professor and a senior lecturer in Ethnology and at the Department of Culture and Media Studies, Ume å University, Sweden. Her research interests are highly skilled professionals, occupational cultures, status, mobility, narrativ- ity, intersectionality, and family stories. She has written about Polish professionals’ life stories since the fall of communism, Polish physicians working in Sweden, and how Polish and Swedish journalists frame the topic of chemicals and the environment. She is currently working in a research project about transnational mobility and knowledge transfer among Swedish physicians, with a special focus on physicians working for international help organizations. 248 ● Contributors

Michal Buchowski is the chair of the Department of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology and director of the Center for Migration Studies at Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznan. He holds the chair of Comparative Central European Studies at the European University Viadrina in Frankfurt Oder. He is also the chair of the World Council of Anthropological Associations, president of the Polish Ethnological Society, and a former president of the European Association of Social Anthropologists. He is the author of many books and articles on postsocialist transformation, anthropology of religion, and anthropological methodology and theory. Hana Cervinkova is associate professor of anthropology and education at the University of Lower Silesia in Wroclaw, Poland, where she is also the dean for International Education and Research and the founding director of the International Institute for the Study of Culture and Education. She is a senior researcher at the Institute of Ethnology of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic in Prague and a member of the Executive Board of the European Association of Social Anthropologists (2012–16). She holds a PhD in anthropology from the New School for Social Research in New York (2004) and specializes in the anthropology of Central Europe, and anthropology and education. Hana Hor á kov á is associate professor of social anthropology at the Metropolitan University Prague, Czech Republic. She holds a PhD in African Studies from the Institute of the Near East and Africa, Charles University, Prague. She is president of the Czech Association for African Studies. Her research interests include the anthropology of tourism and rural studies, the anthropology of sub-Saharan Africa, focusing on the politics of identity and nationalism, and theories of culture. She has published, edited, and coedited several books and other texts in the fields of social anthropology and African Studies. Martin H ří bek is assistant professor in Bengali and Indian Studies at the Institute of South and Central Asia, Faculty of Arts, Charles University, Prague. Trained in both ethnology and modern Indology, his doctoral research was on the poetics and politics of Durga puja fes- tival in contemporary Calcutta (2009). His recent publications are on contemporary goddess worship in India, nature symbolism in Bengali literature, Czech Orientalism, and the reception of Rabindranath Tagore and his works in Czechoslovakia. Gertrud H ü welmeier , PhD and Privatdozent (Habilitation), is a social anthropologist and senior research fellow at the Humboldt-University Contributors ● 249

Berlin, and senior research partner at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, Department of Socio-Cultural Diversity, in Gö ttingen, Germany. She was director of the research project “Transnational Networks, Religion, and New Migration,” funded by the German Research Foundation, and is currently directing the research project “The Global Bazaar: Marketplaces as Spaces of Social and Economic Inclusion,” exploring cross-border connections among Vietnamese in Berlin, Warsaw, Prague, and Hanoi. Her research interests focus on transnationalism, postsocialism, gender, religion, and media. She has carried out ethnographic fieldwork in Germany, the Netherlands, Britain, the United States, India, and Vietnam. Agnieszka Ko ś cia ń ska is assistant professor and vice-director at the Department of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology, University of Warsaw. She was a visiting scholar at Harvard University (2010/11, Marie Curie fellowship), the New School for Social Research (2006), and the University of Copenhagen (2005). She is coeditor of Gender: An Anthropological Perspective (in Polish, 2007), Women and Religions (in Polish, 2006), and a special issue of Focaal (The East Speaks Back: Gender and Sexuality in Postsocialist Europe, no. 53, 2009). She is the author of The Power of Silence (in Polish, 2009), Gender, Pleasure, and Violence (in Polish, 2014), and the editor of a volume on the anthropology of sexuality (in Polish, 2012). Her research interests include gender, sexuality, and religion in Central Europe. Waldemar Kuligowski is head of section of Contemporary Cultural Studies and professor at the Institute of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań , Poland. He has conducted fieldwork in Poland, Germany, Uzbekistan, Spain, and Serbia. He is the author and editor of more than 20 books (including Art in Contemporary Cultural Systems: Central and Eastern Europe , Pozna ń , 2014; Sterile and Isolated? Anthropology Today in Hungary and Poland , Pozna ń , 2015) and of almost 200 articles (in journals including Anthropos, Antropologija, Cargo, Lietuvos Etnologija, Ethnologia Polona ). His essays and articles have been published in leading Polish newspapers and magazines. He has also created and hosted many television programs, including TVP, Poznan’s first talk-show. Izabella Main is assistant professor at the Institute of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology at Adam Mickiewicz University, Pozna ń , Poland. She is also a researcher at the Center for Migration Studies at Adam Mickiewicz University. Her interests include medical anthropology, 250 ● Contributors migration in Europe, and the anthropology and social history of communist Poland. Over the last few years she has been conducting research among Polish female migrants in London, Barcelona, and Berlin. Her publications include articles about foreigners in Poznań , refugees in Poland, Polish migrants in European cities, and medical anthropology, in the journals International Migration, The Czech Sociological Review, Lud, and in edited volumes. Marek Miku š is a research fellow at the Institute of Social Anthropology, Comenius University, Bratislava, Slovakia, and a member of the editorial board of New Perspectives: Interdisciplinary Insight into Central and East European Affairs. His PhD in anthropology (LSE, 2014) examines transformations of the government of society and individuals at the interface of the state and civil society in neoliberalizing and globalizing Serbia. Magnus Ö hlander is an associate professor in European ethnology, Stockholm University, Sweden. He has done research in different fields, for instance about elderly care, ideas about racism in Swedish public debate, and notions about immigrants as patients in health care. He has written about culture theory and ethnographic methods. Currently he is working in a research project focusing on transnational mobility among physicians, together with his colleagues Helena Pettersson and Katarzyna Wolanik Boströ m. This project is about migration among highly skilled professionals, knowledge transfer, cultural processes, and occupational culture. Marek Pawlak is a social anthropologist and postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology at the Jagiellonian University in Cracow, and a researcher of Jagiellonian Centre for Migration Studies at the Jagiellonian University in Cracow and the Centre for Migration Studies at the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań . His field of research includes transnational migration and mobilities, identity politics, globalization, and neoliberal capitalism. In 2009–11 he carried out research on Polish postaccession (to the European Union) migration to Norway, focusing on strategies, transformations, and reproductions of national identity. Agata Stanisz is an assistant professor in the Section of Contemporary Cultural Studies at the Institute of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology, Adam Mickiewicz University, Pozna ń , Poland. She is a field researcher and field recordist. Her fields of interest include: anthropology of roads and transportation, mobility and locality, the anthropology of sound, Contributors ● 251 and acoustemology. She is also a photographer, blogger, and spokesper- son for the idea of the Free Culture Movement. Zden ě k Uherek is director of the Institute of Ethnology of the Czech Academy of Sciences, president of the Czech National Committee of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences, president of the Czech Association for Social Anthropology, and the contact person for the UNESCO—MOST program for the Czech Republic. He teaches at the Faculty of Arts, Charles University, Prague, and the Faculty of Arts, University of Pardubice, and also supervises doctoral students at the Faculty of Humanities of Charles University. In his research he has focused on international migration, studies of ethnicity and nationalism, urban anthropology, and Roma Studies. Besides his work in the Czech Republic, he has also conducted research in the Balkans, Slovakia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and Canada.

Index

accession to the EU, 3, 15, 24, 26, of the motorway, 175, 178 165n2 post-transition, 77 activism social, 1, 3, 7, 128, 181 anti-neoliberalism, 122 urban, 115, 117 civic, 12, 117 Western, 3–4, 6–7, 9, 11–12 grassroot, 116, 120, 127–8 see also ethno-anthropology, political of therapists and educators, ethnography, ethnology 141 anticapitalism, 122 urban, 15, 115–18, 120, 123, 127–8 anti-identification, 30–1, 33, 37 activist assimilation, 61, 93 feminist, 137–8 Assman, Jan and John Czaplicka, 197, human rights, 126 198 LGBTQ, 137–8 Augé, Marc, 178–9 NGO, 125, 156 social, 177 Balkanism, 160 agency banal nationalism, 38n3 deprivation of, 37, 242 Banská Bystrica, 15, 115–16, 118–21, lack of, 211 123–8, 128n3 political, 231 Barański, Janusz (Polish cultural self-agency, 178 anthropologist), 9 and structure, 34 bazaars, 59–70 of subjects, 149 Asian, 59–60, 66–7 women’s, 102, 106 global, 64, 70 analytic symbolists, 37 “new,” 66 anthropological place, 177–80 in Prague, 30, 60, 63–70 anthropology soap opera locality, 69 Central European, 1, 3, 5–6, 8–9, and social interaction, 14, 67, 70 11–12, 241–2, 245 superdiversity of, 67 cognitive, 5 and tensions, 68–70 cultural, 3, 8, 134, 181 in Wolka Kosowska, 63–4 of the EU, 148–9 see also under individual names; historical, 14, 149–50, 161, 165 marketplaces and migration, 24, 27 see also market 254 ● Index belonging lack of institutionalization of, 79 to the academic world, 12 and a modernization project, 204 and anthropological place, 178 Castaňeda, Heide, 94, 101 collective, 211 Castells, Manuel, 116, 120 to the locality, 203 Center for Democracy Foundation national, 33–5, 38n4 (CDF) (a Serbian NGO), 155–6, social class, 36 161–2 Billig, Michael, 38n3 Chernobyl biomedicalization, 132, 138, 142n8, nuclear catastrophe, 14, 76, 80–3 244 nuclear power plant, 75, 77 birth, 89–107 Childbirth with Dignity campaign, and authoritative knowledge and 101–2, 107n9 control, 104, 106 China, 16, 59, 64, 217–28, 231–2, culture, 14, 101, 104 234n4, 5, 9 experiences of, 14, 90–1, 102–5 Císař Ondřej, 118, 127 location of, 92, 96–7, 102, 106 citizens patterns of in Poland and Germany, action, 126 14, 91 awareness, 119 power relations in, 92, 102, 104, 106 committed, 115, 125 and women’s status, 91, 101 concerned, 122, 127 see also Childbirth with Dignity and elites, 208 Campaign; health care; pregnancy and migrants, 14, 70 boundary crossing, 151, 153–4 naturalized, 63 Bourdieu, Pierre, 31, 41, 42, 43, 47 compare community Brubaker, Rogers, 29 see also under empowerment; Buchowski, Michał, 6, 38, 117, 141n1 mobilization Buddhism, 228–9 citizenship, 75, 93, 121, 165n2 Bursík, Martin (former head of the Civic Democratic Party (Czech), Czech Green Party), 234n10 218–19, 233n2 business, 14, 28, 59, 62–6, 76, 78–85, civic engagement, 117–18, 122, 176, 183–6, 188–9, 204 127, 207, 243. See also civic participation capital civic initiative, 120–3, 125–8 cultural, 43, 47, 52–5, 156 civic participation, 118, 122, 127, 203, economic, 47 206 –7. See also civic engagement embodied, 53 civil society, 147–65 Polish, 65, 187 anthropological approach to, 163 social, 43–4, 47, 79, 119, 156, 203, in Central and Eastern Europe, 15, 206–7, 211, 242 116–18, 243 symbolic, 13, 41–3, 47, 54–6, 209, and circles of trust, 117 242–3 EU, 154, 156 “visible,” 33 funding for, 157 capitalism, 34, 37, 77, 197, 148, 160, instrumental approach to, 154 162, 206, 243 new post-1989, 118 Index ● 255

parallel, 117 compare citizens, civil society in Serbia, 15, 149–53, 155, 157–8, see also under empowerment 160–1, 163–4 competences and the state, 151–3, 155–7, 159, cultural, 51 163–4 language, 93 transformation of, 157, 163 medical, 42, 48, 55 compare citizens; community performance of, 50 Clarke, Adele, 132–3 of Polish doctors, 13, 41–3, 54 class social, 49 lower, 78 transnational, 41–2, 56, 101 middle, 120, 158–9, 162, 205, see also professionalism 210 consumerism, 121, 127, 220 new capitalist, 158 cosmopolitanism ruling, 163 as a habitus, 34–5 upper-middle, 43 Havel’s, 230 see also social class as ideology, 34 cohesion, 24, 34, 38n4, 121, 159, 163 interplay with Polakkenism, 30–1, Cold War, 2, 61, 149, 162, 226, 228, 37, 3 8n3 232–3 opposed to nationalism, 164 communism socialist, 61 fall of, 8, 59–60, 65, 118, 175, compare Polakkenism 190n1 cosmopolitans legacy of, 118, 126–7 difference from Polakkene, 31, 33–5, memory of, 119 37 revolt against, 227, 232, 235 and habitus, 34–5, 37 compare socialism compare Polakkene see also communist regime; ideology see also migrants Communist Party Cotoi, Călin, 5 Czech, 221, 227, 233, 233n2 country Polish, 4 Central European, 8, 59–60, 63–4, communist regime, 12, 83, 220, 227, 77, 116, 118, 196, 224, 229, 231–2. See also communism 234n5, 241 community Eastern European, 60, 63–4, 116, ethnic, 5 118, 196, 224, 229, 234n5 inclusive, 124 European, 90, 159, 224 LGBT, 126 former socialist, 59–60, 197, 20 local, 120, 164, 182, 187, 189, 195, home, 11–13, 60, 62, 94 199, 202–4, 244 host, 61–3, 68 moral, 163 of origin, 13, 41–2, 44, 54, 77, 82, Polish, 93 85 rural, 16, 203–4 postsocialist, 14, 59, 70, 84, 154, transnational, 14 160–2 urban, 15, 116 receiving, 24, 26 Vietnamese, 66, 70 sending, 26 256 ● Index country—Continued Dewailly, Jean-Michel, 203 socialist, 60, 62, 64 discontinuity, 26, 197 target, 85 discourse “transitional,” 160 anthropological on Eastern and Western, 3–4, 42, 44, 77, 90, 118, 225 Central Europe, 10 critical junction, 148–51, 161 civil, 160 crypto-colonialism, 7–8, 12, 16n2 hegemonic, 6, 12, 211 cultural frictions, 43, 70 local, 15, 84 cultural intimacy, 24, 38n6 medical, 132–3, 139, 141 cultural objectivation, 198 of modernity, 205, 210–11 culture on modernization, 177, 182–3 birth, 14, 101 national, 15, 36, 183 of Central Europe, 243 of natural birth, 102, 106 exotic, 5 political, 16, 149 globalized, 208 postsocialist, 166n5, 206, 211, of health care, 243 217–18 medical, 61, 90 public, 26, 27, 29, 45, 164, 224, nationalization of, 77 229 “the right culture,” 35, 37 socio-memorial, 198 workplace, 13, 55–6 displacement, 195, 210 culture shock, 78 dispositions, 31, 35, 55 Czech Republic, 3, 14, 59, 61–5, 68–9, distinction, 30–1, 33, 35–6 70n3, 75–85, 86n3, 116, 121, diversity 141, 195, 211, 217, 220, 222–4, in bazaars/markets, 14, 59, 66, 69 227, 233n2, 234n4, 244. See also in migrant groups, 29 Czechoslovakia of postsocialist condition, 197 Czechoslovakia, 2–3, 5, 8, 61–2, 64, theoretical concept of, 61, 67 217, 226 –7, 231–2, 233n2. See also see also superdiversity Czech Republic doctors, 13, 41–5, 47–9, 51–6n1, 92, Czechs, 62–3, 68–9, 79, 200, 218, 220, 96, 100, 103–4, 106, 242. See also 224–5, 232–3, 244 under physicians DOST (Czech conservative Christian Dalai Lama, 217, 222, 229, 234n4, 9 action group), 221–2, 230 Dalai-Lamaism, 16, 217, 219–25, 227–31, 233, 244. Compare East, 2, 16, 176, 186, 218, 224–5. Buddhism, Lamaism Compare West de-democratization, 164 East-West divide, 13, 23, 36–7, 38n5, 6 de-familiarization, 47 economic activity, 64, 189, 231 deliberation, 165 economic crisis, 69, 119, 158, 207 democracy, 79, 118, 122, 148, 160, economic “shock therapy,” 76 204, 207, 219, 230, 235 economy Democratic Party (DP) (Serbia), 155–6 capitalist, 198 de-modernization, 206 Central and East European, 83 deskilling, 51, 55–6. Compare communist, 64 competences, professionalism Czech, 219 Index ● 257

ethnic, 84–5 Central and Eastern European, global, 159 4–12, 241 immigrant, 85 urban, 115 informal, 64 ethnoscience, 5 local, 119–20 EU integration market, 75–6, 83–5, 135, 198, 204 historical anthropology of, 15, 149, neoliberal, 77, 79, 121 161, 244 postcommunist, 79 as a material and discursive practice, of shortages, 205 147, 149 socialist, 44, 65 and neoliberalization, 159 see also business, entrepreneurship scholarship on, 161, 165 education of Serbia, 147, 150–60, 163–4, civil and youth, 121 244 classic/liberal arts education, 55 Europe and cultural/symbolic capital, 55 Central, 1–4, 6, 8, 10–16, 59–60, informal, 121, 136, 142n10 63, 67, 75–7, 115–18, 127–8, medical, 131, 135 132, 147–8, 190n1, 197, 229, migration of, 83 242–3 Polish, 55, 244 Eastern, 3–4, 10–11, 15, 49, 55, 60, self-education, 137–8, 142n10 63, 65, 77, 115–18, 127–8, 132, sex, 132, 136–7, 141n4, 244 147–8, 185, 190n1, 197, 229, EKOPOLIS Foundation (NGO in 242–3 Banská Bystrica), 119, 121 postsocialist, 10, 12, 147–8, 160, Elchinova, Magdalena, 4, 7 164n1 empowerment united, 177 of citizens, 116, 118, 120, 122, 127 Western, 10, 189 community, 120 compare European Union local, 195, 210 European Movement in Serbia of young people, 122 (EMinS) (a Serbian NGO), 154–6, entrepreneurial spirit, 199, 207 166n6 entrepreneurship European Union (EU), 3, 23, 37, 68, new, 178 95, 97, 125, 147–8, 150–62, 164–5, transnational, 14, 75, 81 187–8, 219. Compare Europe. see also business, economy See also accession to the EU, EU Eriksen, Thomas Hylland, 34 integration Escobar, Arturo, 117 Europeanization, 151, 159–60 ethnic lenses, 26 exchange ethno-anthropology, 8–10, 12, 241 economic, 70, 76, 244 ethnographism, 6 rate of symbolic and cultural capital, ethnography, 2, 4–6, 11, 61, 77, 198 43, 55 multisited, 150, 176–7, 180–2 social, 70, 244 visual, 181 see also anthropology, ethnology familiar unknown, 47 ethnology familism, 117, 188 and anthropology, 8–9 feminism, 132, 137, 140, 230 258 ● Index fieldwork groupism fallacy, 29 anthropological, 24 groupness perspective, 29 ethnographic, 1, 13, 59, 67, 70n1, 180–1 habitus, 30–1, 35, 37. See also under interdisciplinary approach to, 180 cosmopolitanism, Polakkenism multisited, 13, 59, 79n1, 164, 176, Hájek, Petr (deputy head of Václav 181 Klaus’s office), 220–30 Finquelievich, Susana, 116 Hall, Michael C., 209 First European House Čukarica Hann, Chris, 163 (grassroot movement), 155, Harris, Anna, 47, 48, 51 166n6 Hašek, Michal (deputy leader of Czech flows Social Democrats), 222 cultural, 70n1 Havel, Václav (President of global of goods and money, 67 Czechoslovakia 1989–92 and The global of people, 61, 242 Czech Republic 1993–2003), 2, of knowledge, 8, 133, 241–2 217, 220, 230–3 migration, 23, 26–8 health folklore studies, 5, 7–8 biological, 101 Forum BB (civic initiative in Banská as a commodity and a right, Bystrica), 122–4 93–4 freedom, 6, 118, 175, 177, 190, 206, and financial considerations, 98 219–20, 230–2, 235, 245 holistic, 101 Freedom Motorway, 175, 190 and migration, 77, 90, 94 Fürst, Rudolf, 226–7, 234n7 reproductive, 14, 90–1, 243 sexual, 140, 142n10 Garapich, Michał (Polish social see also birth; health care; health anthropologist), 36 insurance; pregnancy Geburtsahaus (“house of birth”), 96, health care, 41–51, 89–106 102 Cross-Border Health Care Directive, gender, 51–5, 67, 92, 121, 131, 134–5, 95 137–9. Compare sexuality German, 14, 90–1, 94, 99, 101–6, gender studies, 137–8 243 Germany, 2, 5, 49, 59–60, 63–4, 70n3, migrants’ access to, 90–1, 94–5, 77, 90–7, 99–106, 106n4, 183–4, 97–9, 105 188–9, 225, 243 Polish, 14, 45, 47, 90–1, 99, 102–4, Giddens, Anthony, 75 106, 142n8, 243 Girard, René, 185 Swedish, 41–2, 47–8, 51 Glick Schiller, Nina, 26, 28 transnational, 105 Glick Schiller, Nina and Noel B. see also birth; health; health Salazar, 27–8 insurance; pregnancy globalization, 119, 121, 127, 133, 148, health insurance 161, 163–4, 180 European Health Insurance Card, Gramsci, Antonio, 163 93 Green Party (Czech), 218, 220, 234n2, in Germany, 93–6 10 and migrants, 93, 95–8 Index ● 259

as a reason for marriage, 97 individual, 29, 31 see also health care as the lens for examining EU hegemony integration, 147, 161 cultural, 163 loss of, 26, 204 German cultural, 225–6, 231 national, 13, 23, 26, 31, 33–7, 38n4, 6, ideological, 163 147–8, 218, 231, 242, 244 of the market, 206 postsocialist, 224, 245 moral, 163 social, 227 reproduced and challenged, 163 see also identity strategies, identity Herzfeld, Michael, 7, 16–17, 24, 35, 38 struggle, intersections heteronormativity, 137, 139–40 identity strategies, 13, 23, 25–6, 31 historical materialism, 6 identity struggle, 31, 34 historical realism, 165n3 ideology Hodgkinson, Stuart and Paul communist, 205, 226, 233n2 Chatterton, 122 of development, 182 Hofstede, Geert H., 78 of EU integration, 230 Holý, Ladislav (Czech ethnologist), 7 Havel’s, 230 homosexuality, 134–6, 140, 142n4 Marxian sense of, 34 Hörrschelmann, Katrin and Alison national, 16 Stenning, 209 and social imaginaries, 34 Hubinger, Václav (Czech of socialism, 208 anthropologist), 4, 6–7 state, 204–5, 208 human rights imaginary as Havel’s agenda, 220 Balkanist, 160 issue of in China, 220, 227 collective, 24 as NGO agenda, 119 cultural, 25 in tension with trade, 218–19, 223 East-West, 23, 226 Hungary, 2, 5–6, 59, 63, 77, 121, global, 23, 34, 36–7, 38n6, 242 124 migrant’s, 13, 243 social, 25, 27, 165n2 identification sociocultural, 36 internal of migrants, 25 spatial, 165n2 practices, 26 spatiotemporal, 160 strategies, 26, 29–30, 33–4 of transition, 160 “we-hood”/“us-hood,” 34 see also imaginations compare anti-identification, othering imaginations, 16, 225, 232 identity Imieliński, Kazimierz (Polish collective, 119, 245 sexologist), 134, 140 construction of, 13, 24–5, 29, 31, immigrants 138, 147, 161, 227 to the Czech Republic, 68–9, 75, Czech, 218, 224, 227, 231, 245 79–80, 82, 84–5 European, 147–8 from the former Soviet Union, 14, female, 53 76, 79–80 German, 93 second-generation, 75 group, 34, 36 see also migrants 260 ● Index immobility, 27–8. Compare mobility recognition and acknowledgement India, 16, 224–6, 228, 230–1 of, 43, 48, 54 Indians on sexuality, 131, 134–5, 142n10 affinity with Slavic peoples, 225–6 sources of, 135, 137–8, 142n10, 154 the Czech’s imagined affinity with, and symbolic capital, 43, 54 233 transfer of, 42, 54 traders in bazaars, 65–6, 70 Komorowski, Bronisław (President of industry, 4, 79, 119, 133, 135, 139, 188, Poland, 2010–2015 ), 175 201, 219. See also under tourism Kotleba, Marian (head of Banská integration Bystrica Self-Governing Region, of foreigners in Germany, 93 2013– ), 125 of immigrants to the Czech Kremenšek, Slavko (Slovene historian Republic, 68, 75, 78 and ethnologist), 7 of Polish migrants, 26, 31, 37, 61 Kubica, Grażyna, 8–9 routes to, 85 Kulczyk, Jan (Polish entrepreneur), see also under EU integration 185–6 internationalism, 61–2 Kundera, Milan, 2, 12 intersectionality, 25–6 Kürti, László (Hungarian intersections anthropologist), 38 of migration and reproductive Kürti, László and Peter Skalník, 196 health, 90 of national identity and social class, Lamaism, 228–9. Compare Buddhism; 13, 23, 25–6, 34, 36–7 Dalai-Lamaism Lamová, Olga (Czech sinologist), 223, Jacobsson, Kerstin and Steven 224 Saxonberg, 115 Lampland, Martha, 207 Jarmark Europa (a bazaar in Warsaw), landscape 65 in classical anthropology, 179 Jordan, Brigitte, 101, 104 cultural, 176–7, 181, 183, 190 local, 177, 183, 190, 241 Klaus, Václav (Czech President 2001– “uncivilized,” 202 13), 218, 230, 234n4 “under siege,” 203 knowledge Leach, Edmund, 1 authoritative, 104, 106 Lévi–Strauss, Claude, 7 and business, 68, 79, 84 Lewis, David, 153 cultural, 14, 243 Lew-Starowicz, Zbigniew (Polish expert, 131, 243 sexologist), 134, 135, 140 feminist and queer, 139 LGBT, 121, 126 hierarchy of, 6, 8–10, 243 LGBTQ, 132, 136–40 ideal of mobile, 42 life histories, 75, 101, 199 and language, 90, 92, 93, 100 life history method, 199 medical, 42, 48–50, 54, 142n8, 242 life stories, 24, 27, 69, 151 from the past, 76, 80, 196 lifestyle production of, 7, 132, 142, 242 and habitus, 33–4 Index ● 261

middle-class, 205 Mead, Margaret, 115 migratory, 13, 23, 33 medical field mobility as, 27 local, 42, 54 sociocultural, 31 national, 41–2, 54 Lipno nad Vltavou, 16, 197, 200–4, Polish, 54 207 Swedish, 43, 54 Liška, Ondřej (Czech Education transnational, 42–3, 242 Minister 2007–9), 220, 221 medicine, 42–3, 48, 49, 106, 132, 134, locality 140, 141n2 here-and-there, 27–8, 31 memory and mobility, 27 collective, 197–8 multiethnic, 14, 70 of communism, 119 belonging to, 203 cultural, 198 Lopez, Donald (Tibetologist), 228 everyday, 198 Lorentzen, Jeanne M., 103 social, 16, 85, 195–9, 206, 209, 211 Lozoviuk, Petr (Czech anthropologist), 5 memory boom, 212n1 memory culture, 212n1 Malinowski, Bronisław, 4, 5, 7 memory-work, 199 Malinowskian complex, 178 Mićunović, Dragoljub (Founder of the Malinowskian practice, 180 Democratic Party DP, Serbia), Mandel, Ruth, 208 155, 156 Marcus, George, 180–1 midwives, 89, 91–2, 95, 100–4, 106 market migrants, 23–37, 59–70 and conflict, 70 and business activities, 14, 85 and encounters, 66, 70 circular, 92–4, 98–102, 104–6 of former socialist countries, 50, co-national, 26, 30–1, 33, 35–7 64–5 EU, 105 globalized health care, 41 and health status, 94 globalized medical labor, 42 highly skilled, 28, 43, 55 labor, 43, 85, 92 “old” and “new,” 35 postsocialist, 14, 67, 70 Polish, 13, 23, 27–30, 32, 34, 36–7, wild markets vs. new bazaars, 66 43, 242 see also under bazaars; marketplaces Polish female, 14, 90–2, 94, 98 Market Petis (a bazaar in Prague), relations among, 23, 25, 31–6 65 relations with the locals, 14, 24–5, marketization, 159 59, 66–7, 84 marketplaces, 59, 66–70. See also under seasonal transnational, 92 bazaars; market second-generation, 61, 69 Masaryk, Tomáš G. (President of social positioning of, 26, 31 Czechoslovakia 1918–35), 2, 231 Spätaussiedler, 93 Masters, William and Virginia temporary, 93–4 Johnson, 134 Ukrainian in the Czech Republic, Mazowiecki, Tadeusz (Polish Prime 76–8, 243 Minister 1989–91), 2 unauthorized and uninsured, 93–4 262 ● Index migrants—Continued mobility undecided, 28 Cold-War, 61 undocumented, 63, 93–4 and de-familiarization, 47 Vietmamese, 61, 63–4, 243 global, 12 see also under integration, migrants’, 26–7 identification occupational, 43 see also immigrant, migration postsocialist, 14, 60 migration professional, 13 to Central European countries, 60 regimes of, 27–8 compatriot, 77 settling in, 27–8 East-West model of, 77 socialist, 60 ecological, 77, 84 of symbolic capital, 41, 243 economic, 77 transnational, 13, 42–3, 54, 195 global, 27 valorizing of, 23, 27–8, 35, 37, and habitus, 31 38n6, 242 internal, 189 compare migration international, 77 see also under motorway intersectoral, 153 mobility turn, 27 marriage, 93 mobility-immobility analysis, 27–8 motives for, 44 mobilization, 115, 118, 119–20, 122–3, occupational, 43 127 of Poles, 26–7, 36, 44, 51, 53–5, modernity 90–2, 97, 103, 105 capitalist, 204 political, 93 contested meanings of, 196, 203–5 postsocialist, 63, 76 new, 206 as a profession, 27 postsocialist, 15, 173, 204, 211 socialist pathways of, 13, 59–60 socialist, 204–6, 211 as a socioeconomic phenomenon, 26 Western, 196, 210 stories of, 24, 30, 93 see also modernization and symbolic capital, 53–4 modernization transnational, 75 anthropological debate on, 178 Vietnamese, 14, 60 localized, 178, 181 compare mobility “Moving Modernizations” project, see also immigrants; migrants 181–2 migration policy, 64 Polish, 175–7, 181, 190 migration research, 23–5, 27 postoscialist, 211 Miller-Idriss, Cynthia, 92–3 socialist, 210 Milošević, Slobodan (President of Serbia, “through the motorway,” 15, 177, 1989–97, President of the Federal 183–4, 190 Republic of Yugoslavia, 1997– through tourism, 16, 204 2000), 152, 155, 158, 160, 162 see also modernity Mitteleuropa, 2, 11, 165n1 motorway mobile lives, 13–14, 23–4, 26–8, A2 in Poland, 175–7, 182–7, 189, 30–2, 36–7, 38n4 190n2 Index ● 263

as an anthropological place, 178, economic, 76, 258 180 urban, 120, 127 and business, 176, 182, 184–5, 187, neoliberal restructuring, 116, 159, 161, 189 164, 211 and cultural landscape, 176–7, 181 neoliberalism, 206 and mobility, 175–6 networks and a non-place, 178 feminist and LGBTQ, 140 as a scapegoat, 185 global urban, 119 see also under Freedom Motorway; informal, 15, 79, 93, 117, 131–2, modernization 136, 164 movement migratory female, 96 of capital, 54, 159 schoolmate, 84 fetishization of, 27 social, 16, 36, 44, 79, 85, 100, 116, free, 64 122–3, 127, 195, 203, 207 in migration, 26–8, 77, 241–2 from the past, 196, 206, 211 movements socialist, 63 anti-neoliberal, 122 transnational, 42, 67, 126 feminist, 132, 136, 139–40 Vietnamese, 61–2 gay rights, 132 new poverty, 178, 181, 183, 190 global, 120 nongovernmental organizations grassroot, 15, 115–16, 119, 122, (NGOs), 119, 125, 150–9, 162, 124–6, 243 164, 165n5, 217, 244. See also health, 132 under individual names LGBTQ, 136, 139–40 non-place, 178–9 political, 120, 219 Norway, 13, 23, 26–34, 36–7, 41, 242 research on, 116–18 Norwegianness, 33 social, 12, 115–17, 120, 122, 132 Norwegians, 30, 33, 35 urban, 15, 115–17, 120, 243 Not in Our Town (NIOT/Nie v našom meste) (a grassroot movement), nation 124–6 building of, 5, 11, 55 Czech, 79, 232 Office for Cooperation with Civil definitions of, 5, 29 Society (Serbia), 156–7 Slavic, 225 Oliver, Caroline and Karen O’Reilly, talking, choosing, performing and 35 consuming, 33, 38n4 Orient, 224–5, 231 Tibetan, 221 Orientalism, 224, 226–7. See also nationalism, 26, 34, 66, 148, 164, 226. Orient, self-orientalizing See also banal nationalism Other nation-state, 24, 36, 43, 64, 149–50, the Balkans as, 160 153, 162, 231 colonialized and essentialized, 25 Nečas, Petr (Czech Prime Minister communist, 221, 228 2010–13), 219, 221, 229 exoticization of, 25 neoliberal policies Germans as, 233 264 ● Index

Other—Continued Poles, 13, 27, 30, 32–3, 36–7, 43, 55, Oriental, 16 65, 77, 90–4, 97–8, 100, 105, the past as “a negative,” 204 134, 142n8, 176 the past regime as, 233 Polishness, 29, 31, 33–5 and the self, 24, 233 politics compare self citizens’ interest in, 118 see also othering Czech, 217–20, 227, 230 othering, 23–38 disillusionment with, 123 of co-nationals, 23, 26, 30–1, 33, of entanglement, 98 35–6 European, 231 in migration research, 23–5, 37, 242 global, 231 paradox of, 37, 38n6 and NGOs, 152, 155–6 of the self, 23, 26, 35 under socialism, 208 strategies, 25–6 Posern-Zieliński, Aleksander (Polish compare identification ethnologist and cultural see also Other anthropologist), 6 post-democracy, 230 participant observation, 116, 131, 133, postsocialism, 85, 196–7, 205, 208, 135, 150, 164, 181, 199 212n4, 243 participatory budgeting, 123–4, 128n4 power pass “culturally,” 43, 55 agential, 149, 153 past in the present, 197, 199 economic, 244 path dependency, 150, 157, 162, 196 elite, 205, 208–9 Pavlivka, 75, 82, 86n7 of medical personnel, 104 Pehe, Jíří (Czech political scientist), 221 structural, 149–50, 157 periphery, 6, 119, 158–9, 162, 201–2, symbolic, 25, 35, 244 242 tactical, 149, 153, 157 physicians, 13, 41–2, 44–5, 48, 52, totalitarian, 232 54, 131, 135, 137. See also under see also power relations doctors power relations, 13, 23–8, 30, 37, 67, Podoba, Juraj (Slovak ethnographer 70, 91–2, 102–5, 139, 147, 149– and social anthropologist), 5 50, 152, 162, 210, 242 Polakkene, 30–5, 37, 38n3, 242. Prague, 13, 59, 62–70, 70n1, 78, 82, Compare cosmopolitans 84, 123, 217, 222 Polakkenism Prague-Libus, 60, 64–6, 68–9 as a habitus, 30, 37 pregnancy, 89–92, 94–7, 99, 100–1, interplay with cosmopolitanism, 31 103, 105, 106n4. See also birth; compare cosmopolitanism health; health care Poland, 2–8, 13, 15, 23, 26–8, 30–2, privatization, 76, 127, 158, 207–8, 211 36, 43–55, 59, 64–5, 70n3, 77, professional performance, 42, 51. See 90–2, 94–5, 97, 99–103, 106, also professionalism 107n8, 10, 116, 131–5, 138–41, professionalism, 41–3, 48, 54, 242. See 142n8, 165n2, 175–7, 181–2, also competences 186–9, 242–3 Putnam, Robert, 207 Index ● 265 queer theory, 131–2, 136–7, 140 Polish, 15, 132–3, 135–8, 140, 132, 134–5, 138 Reay, Diane, 35 sexual orientation, 136, 138–40. reskilling, 55 See also sexuality Rihtman-Auguštin, Dunja, 241 sexuality rites de passage/rite of passage, 105, 176 anxiety about, 134 road no. 92, 176, 181–2, 184–7 and the Catholic Church in Poland, road studies, 176, 181 141n4 Roíthová, Zuzana, (Czech Senator culturally constructed, 139 1998–2004), 220 and gender roles, 134–5 Roma, 121, 125–6, 187 “normal” and “healthy,” 133 Romania, 3, 10, 77, 154 perceived as a complex phenomenon, rural change, 195, 204 134 rurality, 203, 209–10 proper, 134 understandings, of, 131, 134–5, 140, Said, Edward, 25, 224–6 138 SAPA market (a bazaar in Prague), 13, women’s, 138–40 60, 63, 65–70 compare gender Sargent, Carolyn and Grace Bascope, see also sexual orientation 104 Shore, Cris, 148 Sárkány, Mihály (Hungarian Short, John Rennie, 119 ethnologist), 5–6 Skalník, Peter (Czech ethnologist and Schengen area, 26, 63–4. Compare anthropologist), 4, 9, 11 European Union Slavness, 225–6, 231 Schwarzenberg, Karel (Czech Foreign Slovakia, 5, 59, 63, 70n3, 115–16, 119, Minister 2007–9, 2010–13), 220, 123, 125–7, 128n4 223 Small, Jennie, 199–200 sedentarist metaphysics, 27 social centers, 122 self, 23–4, 26, 30, 35, 138, 225, 231–3. social change, 85, 116, 184, 196, Compare Other 198–9, 206 self-orientalizing, 225, 231 social class Semín, Michal (leader of DOST as a heterogeneous concept, 36 Action, Czech Republic), 221 and identity struggle, 34 Serbia, 147, 149–63 performing, 51, 54, 55 sex therapy, 131–4, 136, 140, 141n1 renegotiating in professional role, sexological publications, 132–5, 141n4, 51 142n7 traditional concept of, 28, 34 sexology, 131–41 see also class; intersections alternative, 133 Social Democrats (Czech party), 222–3, (bio)medicalized, 135, 138 233n2 feminist and queer, 133, 138–9 social relations, 3, 14, 45, 60, 117, 148, interdisciplinary, 133, 135, 137, 140 178, 196, 199–200, 204, 207, mainstream, 131–5, 137–9, 140 210 medical, 133, 135, 140 social status, 76, 79, 83 266 ● Index socialism, 4, 6, 8, 61, 197, 222 and civil society, 151, 153, 156–7, legacy of, 196 159, 162– 4 as a modernization project, 204 neoliberal transformation of, 159, state, 117–19, 196, 198, 209, 211 163 compare communism suspicions of society toward, 208 see also socialist past; socialist period see also nation-state socialist past, 16, 75, 83, 141n1, 195–7, stereotypes 208, 210–11 auto-, 30 socialist period, 15, 61–4, 66, 76, of China, 227 207–8, 221 of Eastern Europe and Europeans, society 43, 49, 55 Central European, 12, 243 national, 30 competitive, 210 of Poland and Poles, 43, 55 Czech, 78, 80–1, 83, 224 Štuchlík, Milan (Czech ethnologist), 7 egalitarian, 206 subject, 6, 13, 54, 129, 176, 180 ex-socialist, 148 superdiversity, 67 host/receiving, 24–5, 31, 34, 37, 83 supermodernity, 179 information, 124, 208 Sweden, 13, 41–56, 90, 100, 242 Norwegian, 31, 33 Sztompka, Piotr (Polish sociologist), Polish, 134, 178 184, 189 postsocialist, 195, 244 rural, 200 Tagore, Rabindranath, 226 socialist, 211 Tibet, 16, 217–21, 223–5, 227–9, 231, transition, 79 233, 234n8, 9, 235n10 urban, 115 Tibetans compare community the Czech’s imagined affinity with, see also civil society 232 Sokolewicz, Zofia (Polish identification with, 224 ethnographer), 4–5 tourism, 195–211 Soviet Union, 2, 15, 60, 76, 78, 126, as a “clean” industry, 201 226, 231 as a context of mobility, 28 space development through, 16, 195–6, in anthropological theory, 176–7 198–9, 201, 204, 206–9 geographic and sociocultural, 59 enterprise, 199, 202–3 and non-place, 178–9 as an “export” industry, 201 public, 119, 123, 127, 179, 195 transformation rural, 195, 199 economic, 149, 208 transfer through, 83–4 in local cultural landscapes, 181, 190 transnational, 180 political, 61, 195–6 urban, 115, 123 post-1989, 189, 223 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 25 postcommunist, 197 state postsocialist, 15, 148, 197–9, 210, apparatus, 152–3, 158 244 building, 154, 163 social, 148, 150, 210 Index ● 267

socioeconomic, 195–6 as mobile migrants, 62–3 see also transition see also bazaars, SAPA market transition, 76–7, 113, 119, 148, 150, Volkskunde, 11 152, 160, 162, 195–6, 198, 205. Vučković, Nataša (General Secretary See also transformation of the Center for Democracy transitology trap, 198 Foundation, Serbia), 155–6 transnational ties, 31, 70, 85 transnationalism, 61, 85, 180 Wagnerová, Eliška (Czech senator), 220 trauma Waligórski, Andrzej (Polish of a big change, 184–6, 190 anthropologist), 7 of migrants, 78 Wallace, Claire, 77 modernizing, 185 West, 2–3, 6–9, 35, 44, 61, 132, 141n1, travel 176, 182, 186, 188–9, 201, 224–5, cross-border medical, 95 228–9, 231–2. Compare East as a main human activity, 179 Winkler, Willi, 229 and non-places, 179 Wisłocka, Michalina (Polish reproductive, 97 sexologist), 134 Triandafyllidou, Anna, 33–4 World Health Organization (WHO), 93, 135–6 Ukraine, 14, 63, 65, 67, 75–7, 79–85, World War II, 2, 12, 60, 101, 125, 200, 86n8, 185 227 Ukrainians, 3, 14, 70n4, 77, 81, 185, 188, 243 xenophobia, 69, 124 United States (the USA), 10, 41, 60, 70n3, 91, 96, 126, 132, 135, Yugoslavia, 5–6, 158 138–9, 222, 234n9 Záhrada-Center for Independent Velvet Revolution, 227, 232, 234n10 Culture (a civic initiative), 120–2 Verdery, Katherine (American Žantovský, Michal (Czech Ambassador anthropologist), 10 to the USA 1992–7, Israel 2003– Vietnam, 59–61, 63, 69 9, and London 2009– ), 234n4 Vietnamese, 59–70 Zaorálek, Lubomír (Czech Foreign in Central Europe, 14, 60, 63–4 Minister), 223 in the Czech Republic, 61–6 Zeman, Miloš (Czech Prime Minister diaspora, 13, 61–2, 70n3 2013– ), 222, 233n2