Anthropology at Borders: Power, Culture, Memories
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Anthropology at Borders: Power, Culture, Memories Barbora Spalová, Jakub Grygar (Eds.) Anthropology at Borders: Power, Culture, Memories Barbora Spalová, Jakub Grygar (Eds.) Anthropology at Borders: Power, Culture, Memories Editors: Barbora Spalová Department of Sociology, Charles University Department of Religious studies, University of Pardubice Jakub Grygar Department of Sociology, Charles University Department of Sociology, Masaryk University Peer- review: Fiona Magowan, Josef Kandert, Peter Vermeersch key words: anthropology; borders; power; culture; social memory Layout and graphics: Ondřej Pospíšil Proofreading: Jan Synek, Benjamin Cope Cover: Photographs were taken at PL-UA border crossing in Hrebenne (title page) and in Medyka (back page) by Marek Čaněk and Iva Voldánová. © 2006 Multicultural Center Prague, www.mkc.cz Th is publication and its individual contributions may be cited or briefl y quoted in line with the usual academic conventions. It can be downloaded for your own personal use but it must not be published elsewhere without the authors’ explicit permission. Th e publication cannot be used for commercial purposes or gain in any way. Conventions of academic citation should be observed similar to the following example: Bauer, P. (2006). Revisiting Territorial Memories in North Bohemian Borderlands. In Anthropology at Borders: Power, Culture, Memories ed. by Barbora Spalová and Jakub Grygar. Praha: FHS UK a MKC Prague, published at www.migrationonline.cz. ISBN 80-239-8391-1 Contents Acknowledgments.......................................................................................................... 5 Introduction................................................................................................................. 7 Barbora Spalová, Jakub Grygar Power of /at borders 11 Enacting borders: power at interstitial places.............................................................. 13 Jakub Grygar Roma nation and excluded individuals: transformation of European initiatives in Czech Republic......................................... 25 Hana Synková Borderland memories 37 Revisiting territorial memories in North Bohemian borderlands................................ 39 Paul Bauer Troubled spiritualities and contested christianities: what should be uprooted to become rooted in Czech borderlands............................. 47 Barbora Spalová Borderland cultures 59 Representation of the region of Trojvsí (a unit of three villages) in the Beskydy mountains in the Czech – Polish – Slovak borderland........................ 61 Eva Kočárková Th e passage of a cigarette package: a border crossing observation............................... 75 Zuzana Novotná - Petr Gibas - Štěpán Ripka About the Authors....................................................................................................... 87 5 Acknowledgments Th is publication is composed of papers written for Anthropology of Borders course off ered at the Charles University in Prague during 2004-2006. We are greatly indebted to a number of people who took part in the course. We would like to thank all the guest lectures: Wolfgang Aschauer, Grzegorz Babiński, Hastings Donnan, Henk van Houtum, Jan Kajfosz, Ondřej Soukup and Eunice Blavascunas. Hastings Donnan not only participated as a guest lecturer who provided us with an important intellectual guidance but also as the author of books which inspirited the very formation of the course. It was also our great pleasure to meet with Fiona Bowie; her incentive comments and participation on fi eld trips we really appreciated. Warm thank you goes also to all the students of anthropology, sociology, and ethnology who enrolled in the course and who helped us and motivated us to improve our understanding and knowledge of the fi eld. Not being native English speakers, we had to rely on our friends to revise drafts of this manuscript. Jan Synek and Benjamin Cope were most patient in revising the earlier drafts. Ondřej Pospíšil is responsible for the layout and graphic design of the book. Th e Anthropology of Borders course was announced for graduate students of anthropology, ethnology, and sociology. Th e course and fi eld trips to the borderlands were possible thanks to the patronage of Marek Halbich from the Department of General Anthropology at the Faculty of Humanities and thanks to the willingness and support of the Department of Sociology at the Faculty of Social Sciences. Th e realization of the course and the publication of the book were graciously sponsored by the Jan Hus Educational Foundation. Part of the work for this book has been supported by a grant from the Józef Mianowski Fund: A Foundation for the Promotion of Science. A warm thank you once again to all of you who devoted your time and energy to help us make the course possible. 6 7 Introduction Barbora Spalová, Jakub Grygar Th is book addresses three questions about state borders: How historically established must the borders be in order to have infl uence? How homogeneous – encapsulated by state borders – are national cultures in character? How does one account for the changing regulatory capacity of transnational ties in the contemporary world? Th ese queries arise out of a fundamental divide in the literature on state borders and borderlands between those who regard spaces drawn and delimited by state borders as essentially modern constructs and those who argue that they rest on a deeper – for all human beings common – substratum: an ability and necessity to categorize and organize world by social boundaries and material and symbolical borders. Our position is that this basic either-or point of view is neither ethnographically relevant to the everyday life, practices and self-understanding of borderland-dwellers nor intellectually stimulating for those who are dealing with the topic of anthropology of borders. Th e issue is not whether state borders are an artifi cial construction or simply naturally given. Th ere is nothing natural or artifi cial about state borders; however, at the same time, to say that state borders are a construction does not say anything about the power of borders to organize and discipline a space neither about the options of borderland inhabitants and migrants to resist state practices. Th e issue we raise in the book is how state borders and borderlands act and how they become taken-for- granted, how they perform, how they are negotiated, discussed, invented, and/or, at the same time, how they are undermined, dismantled, de-constructed, and bridged over. Th us, the objects of our interest are not the state borders themselves. We are rather interested in situations which co-create borders understood as taken-for-granted. Our approach can be described as a focus on everyday life and constructions which give the borders a meaning: meaning which can, but also might not, be congruent with the intentions and expectations of the actors. Th e debate about state borders in anthropology is represented by a discussion of the relationship between social boundaries and territorial borders [Evans-Pritchard 1940], discussion of the character of social boundaries and the character of social groups [Barth 1969; Vermulen and Govers 1994], and topics of social boundaries, identity, and community [Rosaldo 1988]. Th e work of Cole and Wolf [1974], which on the case of Tyrol showed how cultural borders can resist shifting of state borders, motivated anthropologists to study formal and informal ties between local communities and wider political units. Some of these works study infl uence of state borders on local culture [Douglass 1977, 1998; Kavanagh 1994], other focus on ways by which borders aff ect social organizations of borderland communities [Alvarez 1991, 1995; Price 1974], on nation-building and state-building [Aronoff 1974; Pettigrew 1994] and on creation of national ties and identities [Sahlins 1989], or on motivations of migrants crossing the borders [Alvarez and Collier 1994]. Wide range of literature is written also about symbolism of state borders [Lask 1994; Shanks 1994]. Monothematic issues of Ethnologia Europaea [2000] and Focaal [2003] on borders and borderlands of states in Europe or international projects such as Border Identities (www.borderidentities.com) then only demonstrate how established the topic of borders is in today’s anthropology. Many of these topics we discussed at the Anthropology of Borders course off ered at Charles University in the years of 2002-2003 and 2004-2006. Inspired by a book of the same title written by Hastings Donnan and Th omas M. Wilson and by our own research we had conducted at Czech-German-Polish and Czech-Polish-Slovak borderlands, we focused on production of space and space-place politics, on 8 Barbora Spalová, Jakub Grygar practices of legitimization and reifi cation of these policies and on constructing and de-constructing of internal EU borders. Later, after the expansion of the EU by ten post-communist states and in time of increasing discussion about the newly established eastern border of the EU, we concentrated also on the Polish-Ukraine and Polish-Belarus borderlands. Articles presented in the book refl ect topics of the course and fi eld trips which were its integral part. Although it is not easy to highlight some key words at the expense of others, we have decided to divide the publication into three thematic chapters according to what we recognized as the most important subjects. Power of/at the borders We open our collection with Jakub Grygar´s refl ection on how external borders