Call For Papers: the first conference of the Association of Anthropology of the Balkans (AAB), September 1997
 

Editors Notes:
Robert Rotenberg
DePaul University

Ann Graham and Joanna Regulska
Rutgers University

Do Polish women continue to reject politics or does politics continue to reject women? The dirty game of traditional politics appears to be for men, and the lives of women today are molded by conventional female roles of keeping families together, managing the household, and caring for children. Throughout Polish history, behavior similar to the selfless image of the "Matka Polka" or Polish Mother rewarded invisibility in women's behind-the-scenes support of the political struggles of more deserving male heroes (Penn, 1993). Such anonymity and idealized selflessness do not encourage avenues for and acceptance of open participation in the political process. Yet, Polish women do employ a variety of strategies in their attempts to enter political space and to participate as political actors.

The key variables influencing participation are gender and political culture. Analysis of the political, economic and social dimensions of past and current regimes point to a tightly woven legislative, institutional and social norms matrix organized to prevent women's entry into the political sphere. For women in Poland, neither the official sameness imposed by the communist political culture nor the difference engendered by democratization liberates women as fully participating citizens. Evident through years of totalitarianism, Poland's patriarchal political culture has not diminished during democratic transition, and its manifestations emerge in different patterns throughout the country. In short, Polish women did not have political power under communism, did not share it during the early years of transition, and remain marginalized even today.

Incorporating gender issues into the "political" demands redefinition of the latter. What becomes less obvious is how the project of reconstituting the political will be carried out, and how and where political space for women will be created. As the legacies of the past confront the forces of liberalization on the one hand, and the renewed strength of centralism attempts to diminish new initiatives on the other, the outcomes of these debates will have long term consequences for how group interest is articulated and how women will be represented. What rules and norms will be set and how will they affect women's ability to act; what rights will be guaranteed, to what extent will they be reinforced; and what strategies need to be employed to overcome women's passivity?

The project of reconstituting the political must look as well to the behavior and attitudes of women to discover what has political meaning and what works for them. Their words, actions, and viewpoints, in turn, must be examined within the context of the political culture in which they occur. The relevance of a political or "civic culture in which the importance of orientations to politics and experiences with the political system" (Almond and Verba, 1963) cannot be overemphasized. Political culture influences individual attitudes and behaviors toward government, and individual capacity to participate in community decisions.

It is our contention that women in Poland have rarely been regarded as actors with individual or collective agency to direct their own lives. A new democratic, political state in itself will not make a difference. Neither state structure-totalitarian or democratic-has supported the right of women to "translate individual experience-of male oppression and conflicting interests between women and men - into collective action as women" (Eduards, 1994). Political equality will only be achieved when women themselves grasp the necessity to act collectively as women.

It has been argued that despite existing local barriers and constraints that restrict women in their attempt to become political actors, it is local action in which women are most effective (Regulska, 1994, 1995; NGO Beijing Committee, 1995). What makes the present research differ from previous studies is its focus on localities which are themselves marginalized within the national political, economic and social context. Activities of women in small and medium-size towns is unrecognized. Little is understood about local barriers and challenges that need to be overcome by women who wish to engage in political activism. Equally little is known about attitudes and strategies women use to turn passivity into action.

Comprised of three sections, the paper focuses on the ignored context of women's activism and analyzes three approaches used in three different Polish communities. First, the paper examines the political culture of women's participation under communism. Second, it discusses new barriers that emerged during the transition period. Third, the paper links the larger national/central context with local expression and discusses the empirical evidence of the behaviors and challenges women face when organizing in small communities. The paper concludes with a call for women's collective action.

Women's Participation During the Communist Era or the Inequality of Sameness?

The former totalitarian state's exclusive control of all spheres of public life permitted no political space for women and, in fact, for the majority of men. Communism's elimination of an open, active public sphere encouraged the development of a "private society" in which the world of friends, family, and close work colleagues were the extent of social life, as "official" politics became the exclusive domain of authorities (Marody, 1992). Its make-believe social contract (Di Palma, 1990) belied the promise of socialism which, for women, promised equality with men, emancipation, and participation in the labor force not as a means of subsistence but as a "good" worker or professional (Petrova, 1994: 268).

The very nature of real socialism in Poland ensured the abrogation of political rights for all persons-especially women- by the monopoly of an omnipotent state. Despite Watson's assumptions of socialism's "political unity" (Watson, 1996) in which all persons were excluded, and an official doctrine which claimed "sameness" for all, emancipation for women neither included equal political rights nor, by extension, membership in the elite political cadre which promised them. Espousing equality for women, and promulgating policies and programs to ensure it accomplished two purposes from the state's point of view: 1) legitimation; and 2) control. By fulfilling socialism's promise of (official) full equality, the state legitimated its claims of a true socialist state to its citizens and the outside world. Claims of legitimacy, in turn, provided credibility for the state to exercise its control over the lives of women for the purposes of the state.

Policies formulated to formally satisfy the socialist pledge to women-- maternity leave, child care, medical care, employment-- were not used to liberate women, but were developed for instrumental reasons significant to the state. In actuality, the system liberated women not so they could choose their work and interests, but so they could more easily contribute to the "common good" as dictated by the totalitarian political system.

Paradoxically, however, Poles justifiably came to believe that the government is "responsible for assuring general prosperity for the country, but also for guaranteeing employment and the basic material needs of individual citizens (Millar and Wolchik, 1994: 16). Reversing the traditional Anglo-American expectation of rights proffered as individual rights first, the Eastern European understanding is that social rights or the state's duty to guarantee material rights precede the former. Comprehension of such rights is conditioned by what comes first, and, in Eastern Europe, collective identities are more powerful. Collective identification, therefore, and its assumptions of basic material security are well ingrained.

Control, however, did not rely completely on amorphous ideology or anonymous leadership. The communist social order transformed the pre-socialist, traditional social structure into one which depended, despite its new ideologies of social justice and central planning (Mokrzycki, 1992: 271), on a system of "distribution of privileges". The distribution of privileges and the awarding of collective rights were used by a state to reward, punish, and manipulate for its own ends. These ends were determined primarily by an elite cadre of men.

Under communism, women did not occupy positions of power. As noted by Regulska, communism promoted its own "particular notion of equality" (Regulska, 1994: 5). In both politics and industry, the more powerful the political body or industry, the lower the representation or employment of women. This absence of women in high political and industrial managerial positions restricted severely the access of women to levels of power in which decisions were made. The entrance denied to higher levels of power also prevented the acquisition of political skills and resources necessary for political participation. Forced further into the private space of a closed society, open discussions and actions validating women's issues were not permissible behaviors. Organizational activism occurred only within the narrow boundaries of state-sanctioned activity.

Participation During Transition: The Liberation of Difference?

Past legacies cannot be easily overlooked during the transition to democracy. In Poland, these legacies have negative consequences for a participatory society. Watson's assumption that the "mobilization of the very differences which under communism had been a matter of political irrelevance" (Watson, 1996) is only partially correct in its understanding of the forces unleashed by the transition to democracy. The problem is that these differences were only a matter of official political irrelevance. The rights, privileges, and benefits awarded by the communist state were not equal, and the problems they generated are still relevant today. Women are now officially and unofficially different as citizens. Public policies and public discourse which espouse this difference hold "the ominous threat of women's exclusion from political activity, that is from the active and conscious organization of social relations" (Eduards, 1994).

The push toward difference reveals a number of practical effects for women in the region. Increased nationalist sentiments, the strong influence of the Roman Catholic Church, decreased state- guaranteed employment, unstable benefits, the emergence of formal party politics which favor the interests of men are each converging to submerge the role of women in rebuilding the Polish state. Wolchik's research further highlights problems significant to the implementation of democratic institutions, and the barriers they pose to women:

National non-governmental organizations which address women's needs (at least 50 created since 1989) and managed by women represent a new avenue of women's political organizational activity. There are, however, some weaknesses and some questions about their political effectiveness. The accumulated experiences over the last six years point to limitations of the abilities of NGOs to overcome the following barriers: "the lack of information about NGOs focusing on women and their unclear purpose hinder their influence and growth. NGOs also suffer from larger structural constraints such as unclear tax laws, ambiguous legal regulations and cumbersome financial stipulations" (Regulska, 1995: 10).

Equally important is the lack of power of NGOs to influence the policy-making process. The sector's ability to work for women's interest is compromised both by the weakness of NGOs in general and their image as organizations which serve primarily women. NGOs are not regarded as equal players in the political process, and, therefore, are viewed by men as less attractive avenues of political participation. The political implications of this "empowerment" are paradoxical. While an entry point has been created, the formal definition of the political rejects women's collective action through NGOs.

Reorganization of the bureaucratic machinery of the central and local state also erects barriers to the participation of women in public life. Many of the benefits received under the previous government are now embedded in the socioeconomic system. Although Mokrzycki believes that fear of the disintegration of the old system will ultimately preserve some of its characteristics creating an odd combination of what cannot be discarded and what one would like to have (Mokrzycki, 1992: 281), continuation of paternalistic patterns has consequences for how group interest is articulated. The assumption of group rights as "natural" rights awarded through the "natural" duty of the communist state diminished the need to learn group negotiation and interest articulation skills necessary in a pluralistic society. Group interests are more easily resolved by favors, personal pleas, and informal, personal ties. Development of and adherence to rules of procedure and regulations for citizen access to the political system are not clearly understood or perceived as advantageous. Furthermore, group behavior is characterized by its members' eagerness to discount and distrust activities of other groups rather than to work together constructively to empower civil society.

The beneficiaries of this unstable, transition period are men. As women's interests were manipulated by the instrumental needs of the totalitarian state, they are now submerged in the collective identity of male interests. As Schepple notes, "when an empowered group claims a large share of scarce resources for itself, it may be leaving with nothing individuals who do not have such groups to argue on their behalf (Schepple, 1994: 26). As men learn new political rules within formal party and interest group structures, women's capacity to emerge as an effectiveness political voice within the NGO sector is still unknown.

Local Reality

Although researchers have discussed the barriers to women's political participation in a national context, women and their attempts at community organization have not been the subject of empirical inquiry in Polish small and medium-sized towns. The following case studies represent three distinct examples of attempts by women to claim political space. In each case, women did not influence local public policy decisions and were affected adversely by local and national political barriers to the participation of women. Their experiences resulted in the following: 1) the women of Jozefow complied with male authority and the local state; 2) in Biecz, after encountering resistance from the local state, the women retreated into the private sphere to reassess their agenda; and 3) the women of Skwierzyna did not become participants in the group. A few overall remarks about the study and its preliminary findings regarding participation will provide a context for the case studies.

Gap between Rights and Activism

Polish citizens in the study have idealistic expectations of democracy. These expectations are based on part on their strong belief in individual rights within the context of what is also best for the "common good." The participants in this project asserted the following rights:

1) women have the same rights as men;

2) free elections and the right to vote;

3) right to organize persons in my community to develop

alternatives to existing governmental policy;

4) right of ordinary citizens to bring to public arena

issues that they feel require public debate;

5) right to form non-governmental groups that focus on local

issues;

6) right to freely express their opinions; and

7) right to openly dissent from government policies and

actions.

The results of survey and interviews show that in the three case study towns support for rights grew stronger between 1994 and 1995. The responses to the following statements illustrate this point: 1) persons in my community have the right to organize to develop alternatives to existing government policy; and 2) the right to dissent from government policies and actions underpins democracy. For both men and women, the belief in the right to organize increased to nearly 100% in 1995 from 95% and 89% respectively. Conviction of the right to dissent from government policies, however, increased only slightly for men (74% to 78%), but jumped from 44% in 1994 to 77% in 1995 for women.

Stronger belief in democracy and rights have not translated into productive, practical action. Realism altered citizen expectations about participation in the political process, and differences emerge during the year of study between the perceptions of men and women. While the majority of all 1994 participants believed that citizen input into the decisions and activities of local government officials is important to local democracy, in 1995, the men dropped their support by nearly ten percent (64 to 55) and the women by 16 percent (56 to 39). In 1994, 61% of the men and 78% of the women supported the statement that community groups have the power to change local government policies. By 1995, the men maintained their support in the power of community groups, and the women reduced their support by 22%.

Interviews with group leaders and group members in study towns confirm that general discussions about the idea of democracy and its requirements are more abstract for men and more substantial for women who determined that their rights would be further diminished if they did not insist on basic rights of dissent. In actual community situations, however, women were more easily concerned about the impact of open criticism on jobs, inter and intra-group relationships, families, and support from city hall.

Although the results indicate that Poles believe strongly in basic rights, the concept is not tied solely to individual rights. Rights include the individual, but are related to community and family obligations. The current interest in community, however, may be only temporary as collapsing infrastructure, declining employment, and reduced social safety nets require immediate attention without which other family needs cannot be met. Further- more, gender analysis reveals that this initial interest and concern in collective community rights may disadvantage women when perceived community needs are met. At that point, individual interests of men may take precedence and further eclipse the needs of women.

In practice, however, belief in rights does not translate into political action. For both men and women, a gap remains between rights and actions. Data analysis reveals that, rather than a lack of conviction in their right to act, knowledge gained about local government and the political process ensured that both men and women are more realistic about what they can and cannot change. For women, however, the importance of the quality of life in their communities encouraged them to regard the acquisition of knowledge and skills as first, albeit insufficient steps, to community participation. For men, community activism was instrumental. They either failed or succeeded to achieve their goals and accomplish their tasks. Three Case Communities and their Subcultures

"Good Girls" Syndrome

A small community of 7,600 in southeastern Poland, Jozefow is tightly controlled by the local council and the mayor. Reflecting long-standing traditions of deference to authority imposed by Tsarist, noble family rule and the communist state, new community groups view their role as supportive of the wishes of local government. They believe that their goals must coincide with those already expressed by the mayor and council. At the same time, the mayor and gmina council are not supportive of independent citizen opinion or action.

The two community groups in Jozefow are divided by gender, and this difference distinguished both their activities and their outcomes. Under the leadership of a retired, strong willed woman, the primarily female group worked to buy equipment for the local health care delivery system, and the group of men hoped to build a sports center. The women achieved many of their initial goals and believed strongly that success is tied closely to their ability to work well with and anticipate the concerns of local authorities. As the leader stated, "All we do, we do with the close agreement of the mayor" (Interview with author, 1994). The group of men assumed that their "old boy" ties to the mayor and gmina council would certainly work in their favor. Depending on a few loose promises by officials, they failed to influence gmina council to allocate monies for a sports center, and the group no longer meets.

Because the expectations of and control by the local state had strong effects on the way the women's group perceived their role and judged their success, the group did not believe that the power of their non-governmental organization included challenges to local government policy. Thus, their ability to raise sufficient funds for an EKG machine simultaneously justified and diminished their existence. They were required to do no more than what was expected. The women's group support of citizen input declined by forty percent during the research period, and the belief in the power of NGOs was reduced by 30 percent. Although the women believed strongly in the necessity of group activity to assist the government, their role was not to challenge it, and citizen input was only needed when required. Failure, they insisted, would not occur as long as each issue was sanctioned by the local state.

Caught in the transition between old and new rules of the local power game, the sports group was humiliated by its failure. Their loss and subsequent embarrassment suspended their belief in the power of citizen activism which fell from eighty-eight percent to zero with fifty-seven percent claiming they were unsure of what to do next. Interviews confirmed that the local state did not support their project, and their belief in their capacity to influence official opinion in public as well as in private curtailed any expectations of future citizen involvement.

In Jozefow, gender differences strongly influenced group success. The independence of the men encouraged them to make assumptions about the support of local government for their activity. Women, however, were certain that they could not initiate or continue their project without government support. In other words, women's activities were framed by parameters of state- sanctioned (read: male) support. Compliance allowed group activity, but the activity did not independently influence local public policy. Although both groups suffered from a political subculture which did not reward independent action, the men openly threatened the system, but were forgiven. The women knew they could not.

From Public to Private

A sixteenth century rival of Krakow in the southeastern mountains of Poland, the town of Biecz has not thrived without its former royal patronage. Further neglected by the Austrian-Hungarian Empire which preferred to invest in its original territory rather than Polish lands, the future of the gmina's decaying Gothic and Renaissance monuments is one of the sore points between its rural residents and town dwellers. The town's five thousand inhabitants and council members support the renovation of the Gothic City Hall tower, and the construction of a bypass road to prevent its further erosion from the pounding of heavy trucks as they pass through the area's only east-west route. The twelve thousand rural inhabitants are minimally interested in these projects as long as the money is found outside the gmina. In Biecz, the majority is clearly in charge of public resource allocation.

Activism is led by a group of four women (with the sporadic assistance of two men) who live in the town and also work for the gmina. The minimal amount of activities undertaken through the citizen participation program closely parallels the responsibilities required for their jobs. Thus, distinctions between citizen activity and employment duties are ambiguous. In addition, feelings of outsider status and fear of official retribution for their community activity by an authoritative, vengeful mayor limit the degree of activity as well as their perception of what can be accomplished.

The local political culture did not support individual or group action which supplanted the priorities of the mayor and other local officials. Without support from the mayor who privately scorned it and despite their attempts to convince the mayor the success belonged to him, the women feared the attention the successful festival garnered from local officials.

The group's support of citizens' participation increased from 50 percent in 1994 to 67 percent in 1995, but their belief in the power of non-governmental organizations (their community group) to change local government policies declined by nearly 20 percent. The explanation for this apparent contradiction lies in their isolation. Belief in the overall benefit of participation failed to compensate for their lack of success as a group. As one member noted, "There is nothing to blame myself for. We just met resistance which was stronger than our group. The local authorities are threatened and perceive innocent activity as a threat to their power."

Failing to achieve its overall goal, the group dissolved and reformulated itself as a loosely-defined women's "consciousness raising" group. Although discouraged by their initial failure to influence local policy decisions, they now perceive their activism as behind-the-scenes networking. Talking to women and discussing ideas with friends are preferred rather than overt actions which may conflict with local authorities or the Church. Furthermore, the women members also felt more comfortable working among themselves in a collective atmosphere of deliberation rather than exposing themselves to the more hierarchical managerial and decision-making style required in city hall. Although uneasiness with the latter style certainly contributed to their lack of success, it also exhibited a style of decision-making which may empower women with one another but marginalizes them in association with men. In addition, their failure as a local community group cut off potential ties to regional and national groups which offered important moral, financial, and informational support needed to continue. This network was especially important as they became more isolated in their work.

Women without Group

The women in Skwierzyna, a former Prussian town near the German border, dropped out of group participation. In actuality, they barely joined. Citizen initiatives in Skwierzyna were controlled by three, task-oriented male activists who decided the agenda and did the work. Members of the Polish Democratic Party, the three men assumed leadership of community opposition to the post-communist party which holds the majority position in the town and on gmina council. Deep divisions between the two political spectrums contributed to diminished respect for the mayor and a growing number of post-communist city council members. The leaders' strong association with the opposition on gmina council and their meeting place in the political party headquarters strongly tie the development of grassroots activism with traditional, male-dominated party politics.

Although two women were interviewed and surveyed in 1995 (in contrast to six in 1994), their input into group activities was negligible. Men still believed in citizen activism (approximately the same percentage (57) in both years), accomplished many of their goals, but successfully manipulated the group to their own ends. In effect, three male leaders defined the agenda, did the work required, and consulted others on an as-needed basis.

The women were increasingly marginalized as the group of men became more efficient and eventually officially registered the organization. In fact, the male leaders in the region decreased their support of equal rights for women during the year of study. Although women admitted that their opinions were solicited occasionally, they were never invited to meetings or asked about their own agendas. They also rarely volunteered independent agenda items. Although the women claimed that lack of time and traditional responsibilities of home were responsible for their non-participation, they acknowledged no understanding or realization of how their participation was denied. In fact, it never existed. Potential grassroots activism was subverted into opposition party politics in which the male activists hoped to gain control of gmina council.

Conclusions

The research findings suggest that although national political culture is important for our understanding of women's political participation, it is the existence of political subcultures at the local level that provides us with insights of how politics affects the everyday life of Polish women. Analysis of the three case study communities points out the restricted meaning of the political and underscores the importance of the examination of participation of women in the context in which it occurs. This requires knowledge of the capacity of women at the local level to initiate and sustain new courses of action that result not only in the increased well-being of the community but also enhance their collective capability to influence public policy.

Five points merit emphasis from the results of this study. First, local strategies are influenced by local political culture. Issues such as attitudes of men in the community toward women- especially local government officials; attitudes of male local government officials toward citizen input into governmental decision-making; and the perceptions of women about their role in the community are each affected by the local environment. Secondly, women's issues tend to be marginalized prior to community discussion, and the form of group interaction and decision-making may have negative consequences for the continued participation of women. Community groups comprised initially of both men and women lost more women than men during the year of study. In these groups, women's issues were never brought to the table for discussion as problems to address.

Third, the participation of women must also be noted in the context of what they did. Most issues were defined by the state, acceptable to the state and/or male participants, or developed by male leaders who included women because their role as school teachers or friends of the family required their occasional input. Except for the women of Biecz who were isolated for their interest in the community, women's own interests and community needs were not placed on the local agenda.

Fourth, lack of time was a function of age and professional responsibility. The women of Jozefow consisted primarily of retired women who clearly relished the time available to work on health care issues. In their 30s and early 40s, the women of Biecz and Skwierzyna cared for husbands and children and worked full-time outside the home in professionally demanding positions that did not end at a certain time. They were tired and found it difficult to participate in additional activities. Indeed the double and triple burden represents a significant barrier difficult to overcome under current economic conditions.

Fifth, women did gain new understanding of their role in community participation. Although these cases reveal little independent action, the observed women did learn of their rights and responsibilities as citizens. Whether or not this knowledge will be translated into more effective future action is still unanswered.

While justifiable claims are made that women's participation often disappears when activism becomes institutionalized, different forms of participation may suit the requirements of women's activism in small communities. Furthermore, it is also true that formal mechanisms favor the experience of men. The absence of local action groups over the past four decades and their preliminary re- introduction as loosely-defined community groups and/or branches of national parties dominated by national and/or male interests leave women "with few mechanisms with which to promote policies, programs, or political people of their own" (Simpson, 1991: 127). In the observed communities, neither the context of the political nor women's space within it was altered during the year of study. How women understand and begin to challenge this problem will have direct consequences for the development of Polish civil society and the reconstruction of its political culture.

Notes:

The article was first presented as a conference Paper presented at the Tenth International Conference of Europeanists, Chicago Palmer House Hilton, March, 14-16, 1996. An expanded version of this paper was published in Communist and Post Communist Studies March 1997

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An Argument at the Monument Stone: Manipulation of Nationalist Linguistic Ideology in Identity Claims by the German Minority in Poland

Elizabeth Vann
University of Chicago

This paper is about the problems that multi-linguals in Europe may have in legitimating claims to national identity. The problem presented in this paper is that a particular group, in particular political circumstances, finds itself faced with an ideology of national identity which makes a two-fold demand of language, and the group can only meet one of them. How do they manage this dilemma?

The paper presents an informed reading of a recorded conversation which took place early in the morning in the woods near a village, here called "Ostr\w", in Opole Silesia, Poland. Opole Silesia, for historical reasons I will shortly explain, is the region of Poland where people of German national self-identification live in greatest concentration, and the stronghold of the politically organized Social and Cultural Society of the German Minority. I was in the woods near the village for the occasion of the dedication of a monument stone, marking the site of the so-called "Priest-hole," where the villagers and their priest had hidden themselves from the invading Swedes during the Thirty Years' War. The dedication of the stone was the morning kick-off to a day of festivities celebrating the seven-hundredth anniversary of the first written mention of the village in 1293. I had been invited by a historian, a native of the village who had been asked to give a lecture that afternoon. We were accompanied by another native of the village, a much less highly educated man who still lives there and is very grounded in local life. The morning's formalities were over, and we had returned to our car when a large tourist bus lumbered through the woods. From the bus emerged a group of German men and women, mostly in their fifties or older, and a group of girls dressed in folk costume. They had been specially invited. The girls were going to dance that afternoon. They wanted to know what was going on, and, told that a memorial had just been dedicated, they wanted to see it. The Professor and the Local Man, who as native Opole Silesians were able to converse fluently with the mono-lingual Germans, offered to show them the monument stone. When we reached it, one of the men in the group looked at the inscription, and asked belligerently, "Why is this written only in Polish? They spoke only German here!"

It is not true that the inhabitants of Ostr\w at the time of the Thirty Years' War spoke only German. In fact, at that time, it is possible that the only one who spoke German was the priest. The original inhabitants of Silesia were Slavs, and Silesia was first a province of Poland under the Piast dynasty. Passed to Czech suzerainty as part of a treaty in 1339, Silesia became Austrian with the other Czech lands in 1526 (Davies 1982:28 ff), and remained Austrian until Frederic the Second wrested the territory from Maria Theresa in 1742 (Davies 1982:507). Ostr\w, then, was under German-speaking administration from 1526 until 1945, but competence in German did not become widespread until the second half of the nineteenth century. The transfer of Silesia to Poland after the Second World War thus introduced standard Polish into a previous bi-lingual repertoire. But the language of local Ostr\w society -- of village society throughout Opole Silesia -- was and remains the Silesian dialect of Polish.

Why, then, were these particular Germans convinced to the contrary? The discussion that ensued lasted forty minutes, and became heated. Understanding what was at stake in it reveals much about the role of language in the European ideology of national identity. Specifically, the ideological "rub" here is that for these particular Germans, native language is an essential index of national identity, and, having been told that Ostr\w is 80% German, they assume that until 1945, German was spoken there as a native language. The Local Man, as a representative of the village, has a pressing interest in presenting Ostr\w as German to the Germans, who are not only guests but financial patrons, while the professor, as a historian who happens to identify with Polish nationality, is committed to introducing the Germans to the historical facts. What is interesting is that in this self-presentation, the Local Man is able to manipulate nationalist linguistic ideology. Although "native language" is important, language has another role in nationalist ideology, and the Local Man emphasizes that in one aspect, the village conforms to expectations, while diverting attention from the problematic issue of "native language."

The monument stone, then, not only served to focus memory of Ostrovians' being forced to hide from political struggles long past, but also became the locus of their role in a political struggle still actively playing itself out. Opole Silesia is the only corner of the territories transferred from Germany to Poland after the Second World War where the population was not expelled in entirety to the Occupied Zones of Germany through a series of military operations -- a process we now call "ethnic cleansing" (See Davies 1982:562-565 for a brief discussion, as well as Bahr, deZayas, Kaps, Paikert). The ideological reason for this is that according to the premise that native language is an essential index of nationality, bi-lingual Silesians constituted a Polish population who had been subjected to a centuries-long, but nonetheless artificial, process of Germanification (see Urban 1994:68 ff, Senft 1995). Yet the presence of this population gives Opole Silesia an important place in the irredentist hopes of the West German League of Expellees, the right-wing political organization of those expelled from the transferred territories. In the view of the League of Expellees, Opole Silesia is a privileged instantiation of the slogan "Silesia remains German," since there are still Germans there. In considering Opole Silesians Germans, they follow the philosophy of Article 116 of the German Federal constitution, that of ius sanguinis, the law of blood. For Article 116 grants automatic citizenship rights to all "ethnic Germans" in eastern Europe, the posterity of German emigrations centuries past. As Verdery describes, German ethnicity is taken as demonstrated when individuals belong to a German ethnic collectivity and express this identity through language and culture (Verdery 1985). Since the group of Germans at the monument stone were a contingent of the "Landesmannschaft Schlesien," the Silesian sub-group of the League of Expellees, they assumed that Opole Silesians are such a cultural and linguistic collectivity. What they fail to recognize is the implications of another clause of Article 116, which grants automatic citizenship rights to all the posterity of citizens of the German state in its 1937 borders regardless of their cultural and linguistic identity. Two different conceptions of what it means to be German -- the civil identity of citizenship, and the cultural identity of ethnicity -- do not go together in the historical experience of Opole Silesia. As we will see, this disjuncture has a correlate in nationalist linguistic ideology.

While the fall of Communism allowed for official interest on the part of the West German government and precipitated a wave of interest by various organizations and municipalities, the League of Expellees had already developed contacts with local village elite, and were positioned to actively support the initial organization of the Social and Cultural Society of the German Minority. Sub-groups of the organization entered into patronage relationships with individual villages, and the SCSGM village chairman of Ostr\w had established such a relationship early in the post-Communist period, in 1990. In the process, he had told the League of Expellees group -- the group representatives of which he had specially invited to the 700th anniversary celebrations --that "80% of the inhabitants of Ostr\w are German," referring to the village's indigenous population and the definitions of Article 116 of the German Constitution. Such statements have been standard SCSGM practice, and it has been standard practice also to neglect to flesh out the ethnographic picture of Opole Silesians' domestic language and Slavic cultural roots.¹

In the argument at the monument stone, the limitations of this strategy become evident. While some of the Germans from the League of Expellees group seem impervious to the Professor's patient attempts to present the historical facts, and their implications, one man paraphrased a fundamental question at several points during the conversation: "I don't understand how it can be that the villagers here could be Germans when Germans were expelled after the war, and it was Poles who were allowed to remain." (See Appendix for an edited rendition of the transcript.)

The Local Man, however, is not a member of the Village Council, but simply an aware citizen. As such, he knows that the national identification of Opole Silesians is contingent and not unitary. Historically, as Berli½ska reports:

Polish-oriented responses, both equivocal and unequivocal, account for about 20% of the total. German-oriented responses account for about 15%. Silesian-oriented responses account for about 65%. Furthermore, it is worthwhile to note that the question's construction invites respondents to differentiate between national identity and local group identity, and fully 50% rejected national identity completely in favor of considering themselves simply to be Silesian. This underlines the statistical preference among this population for the geographically local and culturally proximate option. What is key to understanding the position of the Local Man, however, is that the privileging of an identification with a nation-state breaks down generationally. 57.1% of those choosing the Polish option were under the age of 40 (and it's interesting to note that almost 40% of this group had a Polish spouse), while, dramatically, 72% of those choosing the German option were over the age of 56 (Berli½ska 1992).

As is the Local Man. And it is important to know that even among those of this generation for whom German national identity co-exists with Silesian identity, fieldwork has shown that the post-war experience had the widespread result of making German identity an emotionally dear one. Silesian identity is non-problematic; German identity fraught and highly defended.

The professor, on the other hand, belongs to that small segment of indigenous Opole Silesian society whose national identity is definitively Polish. His father fought on the Polish side in the Silesian Uprisings that occurred at the time of the Post World War I nationality plebiscite, and an uncle was later killed in Auschwitz as a Polish nationalist. He accepts the nationalist ideology of native language and culture indicating nationality, and accepts the logical conclusion that by this measure, Silesians are Poles, although he understands the historical complexities which have led some to reach different conclusions. Since he is a nationalist, then, what the Professor knows as a historian has consequences for identity, and he also knows that the Nazis, whose nationalism was similarly grounded, chose to misrepresent the historical facts to fit their convenience, which was to consider Opole Silesians as Aryan. He knows that, as one sixty-year-old explained to me, "We were always taught that we were a Volksstamm [racial branch]."

Thus it is understandable that the long discussion among the Professor, the Local Man, and people from the group of Germans focused on history, and especially the history of language use. Implicitly, it was an interrogation of the village's legitimate participation in the national community that the Germans represented. The issue was particularly acute in that the form of participation in question was the role of being worthy recipients of financial support -- support these particular Germans intended for fellow Germans only.

Before turning to how the Local Man manages to "finesse the situation" ideologically, let us consider the ideological assumptions apparent in the Germans' arguments. First of all, the question, "How many inhabitants does this village have, and how many of them are Germans?" was raised not only in this conversation, but repeatedly by Germans over the course of the day. Before the start of the argument at the monument stone, I recorded a conversation to this effect between a German free-lance journalist and an Ostrovian, and this conversation emerged at the end of the argument. Furthermore, it was posed later in the day in such a way as to foreground it extremely: at the formal ceremonies, those at which the professor also gave his lecture and at which various awards were bestowed and folk dances performed, one of the high officials of the Opole Silesian German Minority called this question out to the village council during a question and answer session. That he posed it in German, while the language of the proceedings was Polish, indexes to whom he expected the question and its answer to be meaningful. Ideologically, this question must assume that each individual has a single defined national identity on the basis of which he or she can be categorized. As discussed above, this is not the case in Opole Silesia.

Second, comments about the inscription reveal an assumption that historically, only such clearly defined Germans were members of the German nation-state. One man said, "I would disagree [with the inscription being only in Polish] because we've got to do here with the German people, and not the Polish people, right? The Thirty Years' War was a war with the Germans, and not with the Poles. And they've got that turned around here." Yet the Thirty Years' War was not simply a war with the German people in the sense of modern nation-state warfare, and the Austrian state of which Ostr\w was a unit at the time was avowedly multi-ethnic.

Another thrust of the conversation underlines that the League of Expellees group views language, especially in public, written-literally-in-stone use, as a primary symbol of identity. They spend some time discussing why a predominantly German village would have allowed such a monument to be inscribed only in Polish? Their conclusion is one often offered by the German Minority to cover the fact that this symbolic function is not meaningful to most Silesians: that the Polish authorities must not have allowed it.

All three of these assumptions reflect the image of a culturally and linguistically monolithic nation-state which can only accommodate two possibilities of individual national identity: either one is a member of the nation-state nationality, or one is a member of a national minority. Such membership is established on the basis of native language and cultural practice. Neither historical assimilation or "civilization," so important to the French model of nationality, nor "multi-culturalism," that important if problematic feature of the American model, counts.

The Local Man, then, is faced with the task of obfuscating the reality of his village's history in face of the Professor's attempts to clarify. For, lacking his companion's stake in the visitors' retaining their illusions, the Professor patiently offered historical examples and elucidation to the effect that the original inhabitants of the area are Slavs. Let us consider the beginning of the conversation¹:

I stated above that the language of village society in Opole Silesia is "the Silesian dialect of Polish." Is it then true that Ostrovians did not speak Polish?

What is at stake here is the relationship between ethnographic and linguisticographic fact and its ideological implications. If one believes that national identity can be inferred from the cultural and linguistic legacies of ancient history, then the facts of those legacies will inexorably lead to conclusions concerning national identity. Concerning the Local Man's argument, then, there is a parallel in my role as evaluator of the claim that "Silesian is not Polish" in this analysis of the argument and the role of the professor in the argument itself. For the professor was trying to convince the Germans that their conclusion that Opole Silesians are ethnically German is not supported by the facts, even against entrenched unwillingness on the part of some to believe it or even to let him finish a sentence (see, for example, the exchange at the beginning of Side II of the tape). Yet, beyond that, one can consider the following question: what is it about European nationalist linguistic ideology which makes this matter? It is the answer to this question which reveals the Local Man's adept manipulation of the ideology.

To consider first, then, the linguisticographic facts:

The grammatical structure of Silesian is Slavic. Silesian, like Polish, has a system of seven cases and nouns exhibit the same consonantal alternations as in Polish. Verbs occur as members of several conjugations, and tense, person, and gender markers may be suffixed to the verb stem in the past tense, as in Polish, although the Silesian past tense has the possibility of constructions (including analytic ones) not available in Polish. Silesian has a Slavic system of verbal aspect. Furthermore, in the semantic realm, Silesian and Polish have the characteristic relationship of "low" and "high" variants of a language, whereby cognates of semantically neutral Silesian words have derogatory meanings in Polish:
 

Silesian	Polish
cha»pa -- house	cha»upa -- hut
chop -- man, husband	ch»op -- peasant
ka»y -- mud	ka»y -- shit
»okropnie -- very	okropnie – terribly, awfully
pazur -- fingernail (human)	pazur -- claw (animal)
robiƒ -- to work (any work)	robiƒ -- to work (heavy manual work only)
gamba -- mouth	g"ba -- snout

There is no question of a Germanic origin of this dialect. The only serious question of its linguistic kinship is whether it ought to be considered a dialect of Polish or Czech. (See Nitsch 1939 for an argument ascribing it to Polish).

Taking a strictly synchronic view of lexicon, however, the picture is not so clear-cut. Silesian lexicon is cognate to Polish, Czech and German. Some Silesians claim that they can understand Czech television broadcasts more easily than Poles because of this. And German re-lexification of Silesian has been massive. Matuschek, who claims that this process was particularly rapid during the first decades of this century, describes the results as follows:

This is not to say, however, that Poles unfamiliar with the dialect can understand it. Indeed, for example, it should be self-evident that the utterance,

Jo» san richtig nie wia kaj jo» jes. (Silesian)

[I here really [negation] know where I am.]

will not be comprehensible to someone who would express it this way:

Ja tutaj na prawd" nie wiem gdzie jestem. (Polish)

[I here on truth [negation] know where ["be" in first person singular]]

Not all utterances are so different. Nevertheless, a degree of mutual incomprehensibility does obtain, and younger speakers, whose Silesian has moved in the direction of standard, can nevertheless manipulate their speech so as to exclude Poles from comprehension.

In conclusion then, while I can confidently assert that Silesian is a dialect of Polish, there is some sense to the Local Man's claim that it is not Polish. However, to be strictly fair, this is not a universal Silesian assessment of the dialect. A still older generation of Silesians has retained the dichotomy of "German/Polish" in thinking about their repertoire. In the first months of fieldwork, I often found myself listening with no comprehension to the broad Silesian of people in their seventies or older, only to have them say kindly, "Oh, can't you understand Polish? That's all right, I'll speak to you in German." My subjective point of view would tempt me to side with the Local Man, however: my ability to understand Polish was perfectly fine by that time.

There is thus a space between the statements, "Silesian is a dialect of Polish" and "Silesian is Polish." What remains unspoken, of course, is that Silesian Polish is certainly not a dialect of German, for all it's germanicization, and notwithstanding the "research" conducted during the Nazi era concluding the contrary, i.e.: "W. Mak 'proved' in 1933 ([published in] Der Oberschlesier, Opole) that the Silesian dialect is completely separate, having nothing to do with Polonica, being connected rather to the German dialects." (Rospond 1959:340) This is a lie. But it matters only insofar as native language is taken as a behavioral expression of essential national identity.

What then, of the Local Man's claim to the German language? He is echoing a sentiment I heard often from older Silesians in fieldwork: "Our language was German." They are expressing the folk belief, common throughout the world, that true languages are written and have a literary tradition. And it is perfectly true that in the immediate aftermath of the war, Silesians were often forced to use dictionaries to express themselves comprehensibly to Poles, and even if the first word that came to mind was in Silesian, the dictionary, of course, was a German-Polish one.

The tradition by which native language is taken as a behavioral expression of essential national identity is an old one. In the early nineteenth century, for example, Wilhelm von Humboldt asserted "that the structure of languages in the human race is different because and insofar as language is the spiritual distinctiveness of the nations themselves." (Humboldt 1830-1835, VII 43, quoted in Coulmas 1985:11. Translation mine.) But being a speaker of a national language has another function: it allows one to participate fully in the national community. The imagination of the modern national community, as Benedict Anderson has pointed out, depends on a "national print language" which allows all members of a nation to read and listen to a national media, and work in large-scale bureaucracies. Thus the second role of language in nationalist ideology is allowing the communication on which participation depends.

This role also has its ideological elaboration, its own nobility. One man of this generation describes this particularly well, explaining that he and his wife are "of German heritage." Having learned German culture in school, he said, he can't be easily re-oriented toward Polish culture. For example, what is Mickiewicz to him? Schiller is a poet closer to his heart; he feels familiar with Schiller's poetry, which he read as a schoolboy; he has a relationship with it. His wife added that it's different -- legitimately different -- for younger people, whose schooling was Polish. "Heritage" -- the artistic culture of literature and music -- is important, and the "heritage" of pre-war Silesians is that of German national culture.

Anderson's point, then, allows us to understand the two-fold demand of nationalist ideology on language. Language should both index commonality with the nation's past (a diachronic indexicality) and allow full participation in the nation's present (a synchronic pragmatic function). In the German ideology, there is an expectation that these will converge in the Romantic artistic expression of the nation's past in the standard language of the present. For individuals, then, the linguistic identity which most straightforwardly establishes a claim to national identity is that exemplified by the German visitors to Ostr\w: monolingualism in the state language. A native speaker of the state language has the hearth-and-home link to the historic development of the nation and, thanks to schooling, the ability to participate fully -- and read Schiller. In contrast, a domestic speaker of a dialect of that language has the link to historicity (for, after all, the nation as we know it grew out of its own past "folk culture,") but will have to acquire the standard language in order to participate, or risk being stigmatized, tellingly, as "backward." Immigrants fare even worse, since their language serves neither historicity nor participation: the national language must be acquired, and maintaining the immigrant language underlines foreignness. For German-identified Opole Silesians, the form of the problem -- that left unspecified by the Local Man -- is that they are domestic speakers of a dialect of the wrong language.

The Local Man finds some sympathy from one of the German women, who echoes his point, only to give opportunity to the Professor to counter it. Yet, as mentioned, most of the League of Expellee group seem quite determined to continue to believe that Opole Silesians are German, and yet another woman again comes down firmly on the side of the value and nobility of the literary language. Here is the exchange:

It is, as I've mentioned, the Germans in this episode who have the clear claim to German national identity. They are mono-lingual German speakers and life-long residents of the territory of the German state, even if some of them were militarily expropriated and forced to move in order to stay within it. They are also financially privileged, which helps in the Realpolitik of identity [C]onstitution (if you'll forgive the pun). Yet bilingualism, too, has its advantages in Realpolitik. In the final analysis, the most important ability of Opole Silesians to "finesse the situation" may not lie in the obfuscating emphasis on standard, literary language. During formal, indoor proceedings, the professor got his chance to give the historical lecture which had so often been interrupted in the woods that morning. He traced the village's original settlement by Slavs, the development of bilingualism, and concluded by saying, "It is thus evident that this is a Polish village." The League of Expellees group were all present in the lecture hall, seated in a row. Seated in a row also were various officials of the German Minority: the council chairman who had invited the Germans was there. But, then, why should these bi-linguals worry about this view being presented? This part of the celebrations was under official auspices of Ostr\w, a unit of the Polish state. The Professor gave his lecture in Polish, and none of the Germans understood it.

Endnotes

1. It should be noted that the possibilities opened by the "Treaty between the Federal Republic of Germany and the Republic of Poland on the confirmation of the borders existing between them," of November 14, 1990, and the "Treaty ... on good neighborliness and friendly cooperation" of July 17, 1991 have greatly increased the ability of Opole Silesian villages to establish positive working and patronage relationships with a range of West German municipalities and civic organizations. Many more recently established relationships allow Opole Silesians to be open and honest about their cultural practices and historical experiences. Indeed, Berlinska argues that overall, what drives West German interest in helping communities in Poland is the western borderland experience: a large proportion of such relationships are established between communities in the former German eastern territories, whether now inhabited by an indigenous or an immigrant Polish population, and communities in the historical western and northern borderlands of Germany. (Berli½ska in press).
2. Words printed in italics are translated from Polish; normal typeface indicates translation from German.

transcribed conversation, abridged.

May, 1993, in the woods near Ostr\w (a pseudonym), on the occasion of the dedication of an inscribed monument stone commemorating the "priest-hole" in which the village priest and his congregation hid from the Swedish army during the Thirty Years' War. The dedication was the first event in a day-long celebration of the 700th anniversary of the first written mention of the village's name.

A complete transcription in the original languages is available from the author upon request. Here, text is translated from German unless printed in italics, which indicate translation from Polish.

Excerpt 1:

The first segment of taped conversation takes place between a German free-lance journalist, a woman probably in her thirties, and a representative of the village, a man in his late fifties or sixties.

Journalist: And... can one say how many German families are still here, that is, real German families in Ostrau?

Village man: If one were going to describe them as German then one would have to talk about Germandom, no?

J: Uh-huh.

V: There are people who perhaps, although they were born here perhaps don't, ah, quite declare themselves as German, at any rate, at present one can say, because it, because of [tape distorted] that here many were re-settled from eastern Poland, perhaps from central Poland, as a workforce, so there were apartments built here [....] the possibility to settle here, that was one of the reasons that one got them here, because after all there were apartments to be found here, and so they came here specially, because there were apartments here, and then not much is lacking that there are....

J: Mixed marriages. Many mixed marriages.

V: Many mixed marriages, completely, if one were going to speak about families, families that, actually they come from the whole of Poland. From [?], from Warsaw, generally, from Chenstohova, so they settled here from all over Poland..., because of work and they were able to find apartments here because you know that the housing shortage here in Poland... there weren't enough apartments built.... (short pause)

J: But now one can after all say that two-thirds of the citizens of Ostrau have declared themselves for the German Friendship Circle, that is, for the German minority. Are there Poles among them, as you have now explained it, can one say somehow, yes there are these mixed marriages, that's totally normal, if two-thirds of the citizens say now that they're Germans....

V: When [?] said [....] he had in mind the people who are indigenous, who, ah, who have lived here generation apon generation, from long ago.

Excerpt 2:

The argument at the monument stone. See text.

(After the segment quoted in the text the conversation turns to translation and discussion of the inscription on the stone. After some explanation:)

2nd M, LE: I would argue with that because we're dealing here with the German people, and not with the Poles, right? The Thirty Years' War was with the German people, right? And not with the Poles. And here they've got that turned around....

(Woman interjected "yes" at appropriate points in preceding comment.)

3rd M, LE: How does it happen then that there are still 80% Germans living here today, despite the Expulsions, although Germans were expelled and Poles were not expelled. I don't get it. And in the nineteenth century industrialization began. There were practically only Germans living in Upper Silesia but then the Poles came in through industrialization, and the Prussians were so generous as to let them all in, whoever worked, whoever was hard-working, didn't ask about religion....

(This is historically inaccurate).

4th M, LE: No, at that time Poland didn't exist! After 1815 there was no Polish state.

(The group attempts to get straight the facts of the Polish Partitions.)

Side II of the tape begins with the professor's voice:

P: But in an ethnic sense they were Slavic, in an ethnic sense. That's something one has to take into consideration here! (Laughs briefly)

M, LE: In an ethnic sense they were not either Slavic, right? (He continues, but the professor drowns him out with another example of the history of village settlement.)

M, LE (coming admirably to the point): In that case the 80% of villagers would have to at one point have been Poles, they would have to have all been Germanized, and that's not the case at all! By whom then?

P: Well, by the Prussians of course! Not by the Austrians! It was, there was only a German school! And it was already, as Uliczna writes, from 1768 it was accredited as a German school, here in Ostrau. Already under the Austrians and under the Prussians of course because then there was compulsory schooling, that was it, and the people had to go to school, I also, I'll give you an example....

(The group attempts to get the facts of compulsory schooling straight, whereby members of the L of E group want to maintain that there had always been separate schools for Poles and for Germans in Silesia, which, the professor tries to explain, is wrong. In the middle of this:)

3rd M, L E: At any rate I don't get how, how the villagers... [over an interruption] can have been Poles and now suddenly they're all Germans, despite the Expulsions. I don't get it.

Another M, LE: Yes!

LM: At that time there lived in Ostrau, he [the professor] has said it, only a hundred people!

Other man: Scarcely a hundred!

LM: Yes, scarcely a hundred people, under a hundred!

Other man: Under!

Yet another man: And because, also because of the war, right?

LM: And the war, the Thirty Years' War, one has to think about it, some families had just come here, right? [This sentence exhibits syntactic interference from Polish]. There were French people!

(multiple overlapping comments, which the professor interrupts:)

P: Ehh (strong expulsion of breath seemingly expressing exasperation). Listen. In the Chronicle, there were lime kilns here, ok? Lime kilns. The f, the f, the farmers, and they couldn't, they couldn't get the lime any farther because they didn't, in the chronicle it's written that they did not know the German language and only a certain Gromutka, a village headman, he was capable of speaking German and he could do business [....]

M, LE: I don't get why here in a German, an overwhelmingly German community they didn't at least do this bi-lingually.

(general agreement and discussion)

Woman: It ought to be bi-lingual.

Other man: At least, yes.

P: But it was bi-lingual thanks to the German school, don't you see? It was simply because of the German school that the people here were bi-lingual!

Woman: No, the inscription ought to be bi-lingual!

(The anthropologist asks the professor if this had been discussed; it is established that this is an issue for an official of the village. From the general murmur emerges:)

M, LE: Not permitted, yes!

W, LE: Yes, not permitted, yes.

M, LE: That's the reason.

W, LE: Yes, that's the reason.

M, LE: That's the reason!

W, LE: Yes!

M, LE: Yes! They weren't allowed to!

W, LE: Yes.

(The professor's voice emerges with yet more historical elucidation. Into this comes the voice of a woman from the League of Expellees group who hasn't spoken before. She argues that Frederic the Second didn't concern himself with the religion or language of his subjects. Glensk comments that Frederic the Second is said to have said that he himself speaks "only French, and German only with horses." The new woman continues with the argument about dialect quoted in the text. The woman who made the comment about the Upper Silesian speaking pure, high German then turns the conversation again:)

W, LE: When Silesia was under Austrian dominion, they also spoke German here, the Austrians also speak German. (agreement) So how can one claim that only Polish was spoken?

P: But listen, in Austria there were other peoples! There were also there, there were Hungarians, there....

W, LE: That was off to one side! Here it was German!

P: (two attempts at interruption, then a change of tactic. He states that in the inter-war period there were representatives of the Polish minority in Silesia in the German parliament. The woman then erupts:)

W, LE: After the First World War? Yeah, that was crap anyway after Geneva and so on, the Versaille Treaty was just so much cheating! East Upper Silesia voted for Germany and was detached anyway, right? It was all crap!

(There follows something new in the tape: complete silence for several seconds. By this time, the group is walking back to the bus and car. I am walking beside the professor, and address him in Polish:)

EV: Better to give up at once, they see it as they see it and that's it.

P (laughs): They're always surprised, how can it be that these people speak Polish?

EV: I remember that it was you who first told me, two years ago, what the situation is here, because in the western press, you only get opinions like these.

P: Those are German statistics! [....] Really it was only the children of teachers and managers, those were the only Germans, the only ones who spoke German at home, yes!

EV: Except that you can't divide it, it was one society, a bi-lingual one. (We argue about this for several turns. The professor contends that bi-lingualism brought about by compulsory schooling is not really social bi-lingualism, while I believe that German schooling was positively embraced by many. Our voices get louder. Then:)

W, LE: Speak German, we are among Germans!

P: Yes, but this is an American!

EV: Yes, I'm an American! I can speak either Polish or German.

W, LE: Well, then, kindly speak German. In that case we can speak German.

P: But now she already speaks Polish a little better!

W, LE: In that case she would have to speak English....

(This line of talk, which effectively disrupts the professor's and my talking about the group behind their backs in their presence, goes on for several turns. Also heard were comments about how in a united Europe, only ethnic boundaries will remain. The new woman asked me if I were a journalist, and on learning that I was writing a dissertation, the other woman admonished me to "write what's right, not what's wrong -- and you can put in there that everybody was kicked out of Lower Silesia." We also hear another woman talking to the local man:)

W, LE: How many inhabitants are there in Ostrau?

LM: Three thousand five hundred, and we, ah...

W, LE: How many German and how many Polish inhabitants?

LM: Two thousand Germans in Ostrau.

W, LE: Yes, so...

LM: And a thousand five hundred are then German or Polish....

W, LE: I see.

LM: Right? One can't say. But two thousand are Germans. People of German origin. And the thousand five hundred, then, they consider themselves, perhaps there or they are, not so....

(This is drowned out by good-byes and thanks, as we reach our car. As the professor and I get in he says with a deep breath:)

P: Hard to explain how (breath)... At least three hours of lecture on the subject of history and only then...

EV: And do you think that that would help?

P: No.

Disconnected Landscapes: Ancient Sites, Travel Guides, and Local Identity in Modem Greece

Susan Buck Sutton
Indiana University - Purdue University at Indianapolis

A small upland basin administratively designated the Ancient Nemea Valley lies in the northeastern corner of the Peloponnesos of Greece, midway between the Corinth-Argos highway, and the rising mountains of the interior Corinthia.¹ In an intricate tale of movable names, this area has also been called simply the Nemea Valley or even the Koutsoumadhi Valley, depending on who was speaking and in what context. Depictions of the region have been similarly variable, and different viewers have constructed very different landscapes from the valley's visual evidence. This essay pursues such landscape dissonance as expressed in representations of the valley as a whole and the ancient site which stands within it. I begin with two portrayals which are at odds with each other and then reflect on what their contrast says about the relationship between foreign travelers and local residents, national imagery and daily land use.

Macneile Dixon Visits the Valley

In the spring of 1928, Macneile Dixon embarked on a journey made by scores of European travelers before him. He carried several books his English compatriots had written about such visits as well as the Description of Greece by Pausanias which they, too, had used. Like so many in the preceding two centuries, Dixon planned to tour ancient sites in the company of a few friends. In early 20th century fashion, Dixon was drawn to Greece as an appropriate destination for "lovers of the beautiful" (Dixon 1929:vii), and the Pausanias he packed was the version translated by James Frazer (Pausanias 1913). Dixon was accompanied by four men and two women, including a professor and a diplomat, and like many others, he inscribed the events of his tour in a book published a year later.

Landing in Athens, Dixon and his party took to the Greek countryside by a combination of automobile, railroad and sea. A steamer brought them to the town of Nafplio, where they began a drive northward toward Corinth. After stopping at Argos and Mycenae, they continued on through the Tretus Pass, then over an upland plateau to a vantage point on the eastern hills which rim the Ancient Nemea Valley. Dixon described what he saw at this moment as follows,

Indeed the only engraving Dixon included with this passage was done from a different position, lower down, after he descended into the valley for an hour before continuing on to Corinth (Fig. 1 at end of article). There, a companion sketched Dixon leaning against the temple, in a view conforming to what had, by then, become the canonical form for illustrating Nemea. Such drawings focused on the temple and were remarkably consistent in viewing the valley by looking upward through the columns which thus loomed larger than the surrounding mountains that would have dwarfed them from other perspectives (e.g., Chandler 1776, Williams 1829, Wordsworth 1840, Farrer 1882). Dixon's idiosyncratic twist on this motif was to place himself on the temple as sole proprietor of the moment.

Dixon's account acknowledged the presence of vineyards and wheat- fields in the valley but went on to state that "no human figures enlivened the scene on the day of our visit," while "the peace of the surroundings invited [me] to idle dreams" (1929:138). Continuing his homage to those who had preceded him, Dixon made no mention of the valley's present settlements, including the village of lraklio which by then abutted the temple lands, as seen in a photograph taken by archaeologist J.P. Harland during his excavations there in 1926 (Fig. 2).⁴

Fotis Hiotis Tries to Give Me New Eyes

Fotis Hiotis, the then 72 year-old owner of the main coffee house in Iraklio, also composed a portrait of the valley when he took me and a research assistant up its western slopes in July 1985. 1 was there in conjunction with the Nemea Valley Archaeological Project, an enterprise for which I have returned seven summers since.⁵ I was examining current patterns of migration and settlement and not at all sure how my work fit with the archaeological survey going on around me, despite mutual interests in building a comprehensive history of the valley. In a vague sense, I envisioned myself bringing into the project some understanding of contemporary life on its own terms. William Alexander was helping in these efforts and also came up the mountain with Fotis that day.

Fotis, a central figure in lraklio who carried much of its history in his head, had been both patient and intrigued by our questions on the village. It was he who suggested there was much to learn by climbing the promontory known as Vayia which rises 450 m. above the valley floor.⁶ We set out at 6:30 the next morning, following a dirt road southwest out of the village through rows of currant vines. At the base of Vayia, the road turned abruptly upward and then ended altogether as we came to the last vineyard. From there, we continued on what my fieldnotes describe as a "faint footpath." I was humbled but not surprised that Fotis moved more quickly up the mountain than 1, despite his not having done this for many years.

It was tough going, but suddenly the path gave out, and we were atop Vayia, amidst low, scrub vegetation and able to walk easily in all directions. Fotis identified this as the border between the lands of lraklio and those of the westward market town to which the name of Nemea had officially migrated in the early days of the Greek state. The wind was bracing, the swallows were crying, and I felt like a new person. The valley below was leafy green in a way to which I was unaccustomed in Greece. The columns of the temple were barely distinguishable at this altitude, and the valley floor a velvety carpet of vineyards. Fotis began to direct us to see its landmarks and divisions.

As we walked around Vayia, Fotis pointed out, of course, the two contemporary villages on which my eyes were rather narrowly focused. Fotis' landscape, however, was broader and more textured than this. It spoke of community history through the eroded mud brick foundations of the old hillside village which had been replaced by new ones on the valley floor a century ago, and the ruined animal folds (galaria) reminding him of shepherds who once pastured flocks on Vayia. The valley's greenery was not nondescript to Fotis, but a quilt-like record of familial properties and cash-cropping strategies, dotted by many small churches built by families near their major land holdings in the early 20th century.

Looking at my notes for that day, I am also struck how many times Fotis used the mountaintop as a means of surveying the valley's connections to other areas, including the nearby market town, the more distant city of Argos, and the westward mountains. Where Dixon had looked inward and encircled the temple with an isolating wall of hills, Fotis spoke as much of the other communities we could see from Vayia, and the ties which local residents had with these areas.

During our time on Vayia, Fotis repeatedly mentioned how much he had enjoyed coming up here as a young man when his family still kept sheep. While he had disliked the drudgery of the work, he had relished the chance to look around. Like many others, however, his family completed their gradual transformation from herding to farming around 1928, and he has climbed the mountain only sporadically since that time. In all this discussion, not once did Fotis mention the temple.

A Silent Dissonance

In a very Foucauldian sense, both Macneile Dixon and Fotis Hiotis recognized the power of panoramas for rising above, changing perspective, and mastering an area ⁷. Both also created landscapes in the sense that these are, as Meinig has phrased it, "defined by our vision and interpreted by our minds" (1979:3). The difference in their two depictions was not, of course, a matter of eastern and western views. For over two centuries, this valley has been construed as two different landscapes by travelers visiting its ancient remains and farmers living there. This has produced an often silent dissonance masked by assumptions of speaking about the same place. Out of this have come confusion, contention, and long-term habits of speaking past each other, points to which I will return after reaching some general understanding of each of these two disconnected landscapes.

Near-sited Journeys

Dixon's description was not anomalous. Travelers have visited Nemea with some frequency since the late 18th century, when the Grand Tour of Greece first found its place on the itineraries of northern Europeans and Americans. I have identified 58 accounts of the valley published between 1766 and 1890, roughly one every year and a half. Such narratives have been replaced in the 20th century by dozens of general guidebooks for Greece, most of which accord Nemea a paragraph or two.⁸

Over time, these narratives and guides built an increasingly formulaic discourse reducing the valley to a single emblem, the temple's three remaining columns, which, in turn, were treated as a portal to reverie on an ancient Greece as much 19th century in origin as 4th century BC The various forms of classicism and philhellenism prominent in the early 19th century were enfolded in a running critique and commentary on contemporary life. Travel to ancient sites was intended for personal contact with this imagined past, and until the 1870s, most travelers to Nemea omitted local residents from their accounts even as the valley's population and vineyards steadily grew. These visitors had not come to see such things at Nemea and turned instead to ways in which a few moments at the temple could evoke a sense of isolation, melancholy, and the silence of centuries.⁹ This characterization was reinforced by repeated mention of a solitary tree near the temple, the mountains cutting the valley from the outside world, the time and distance necessary to reach it, and the rough upland plateau crossed in the approach from the east. Fewer than half the travelogues between 1770 and 1870 mentioned seeing any people at all, and then usually a single shepherd conveying picturesque effect.

While Dixon followed in the tradition of these early writers, by the time he visited Nemea, there were other narrative possibilities available. Greater numbers of foreign visitors annually came to Greece, staying less time, seeing fewer places, and retaining an interest in ancient sites not so much as social commentary, but as signifiers of beauty, the glories of western civilization, and an appropriate journey for those of education and class (Eisner 1991:244). Village Greeks played more prominent roles in the travelogues and guides emerging from this new tourism.

Indeed, partially due to the peasant philosophers who were deemed to live there, the Greek countryside and seacoast were by then generally perceived as places where the worries of urban life could be temporarily suspended, a perception as strongly held by many urban Greeks as foreigners.¹⁰ To this day, the ruins at Nemea have remained the primary attraction drawing travelers to the valley, but since the 1870s, they have been surrounded by eternal villagers whose mute presence aids the process of leaving ones concerns behind. The valley was thus quickly peopled with farmers who appeared to have been there from time immemorial. While the Nemean wine sold at roadside stands has come to evoke enduring peasant life and the pleasures of travel, in no guides is it ever portrayed the way local farmers see it: an expanding cash crop destined for national and international markets. The valley remains a place primarily defined by its antiquities,¹¹ and local residents are a silent, supportive backdrop, as evidenced in this passage from a 1994 guidebook,

Such characterizations were also supported by an implicit belief that ancient sites existed outside normal political and economic relations. In elevating visitors above the concerns of modern life, trips to such sites masked connections between the travelers' home places and rural Greece. The Nemea Valley presented abundant evidence of increasing commercial ties between Greece and the West, the countryside and Athens, yet few travelers or guides mention anything connected to this. As Pratt (1992) and van den Berghe (1 994) have elsewhere discussed, such travelers neither challenged nor reflected on the conditions of economic and governmental dominance which framed their visits. The 18th century growth of northern European-eastern Mediterranean trade and the simultaneous initiation of widespread travel to Greece were probably not, however, merely coincidental ( Droulia 1968:7; Eisner 1991:50; Spencer 1954).

National Lands, Family Lands

The landscape seen by Fotis Hiotis and many residents of the Ancient Nemea Valley stands at odds with that of the travelers. For many who live there, the valley is filled with tangible markers of familial property, community history, and commercial agriculture. While people do not regularly climb to the top of Vayia, their frequent trips to the westward market town provide similar panoramas at only slightly lower elevations. These overviews now afford an almost daily means of taking stock of the valley. What appears is a record of generally successful familial efforts to settle and cultivate the area.

The local history I have come to understand over the last ten years from family narratives, public records and other archives (Sutton 1994, Wright et al. 1990) flies in the face of what might have been assumed from traveler’s accounts. When travel to the area began in the l8th century, there were several small settlements on the western hills, and a settled population of l4O, amplified in the winter by transhumant shepherds. After Greek independence from the Ottomans in the 1820s, the valley's population grew as settlements and fields spread across its floor in a pattern common for the Peloponnesos. Formerly vacant areas became part of the National Lands now open to Greek smallholders (McGrew 1985). By 1907, the valley's population had reached 490, and two new villages had been founded along the main road through it. The area's production of wine must (mousto) for sale in Argos had expanded, and currant vineyards had been planted for export to northern Europe.

The ancient Nemea Valley today remains an active cash-cropping area of some 700 people, whose economy rests very little on the tourists who visit its ancient site for an hour or so, something giving it a particular ability to elucidate the nature of such sites in Greece. There are no souvenir shops, cafeterias or snack bars. Tourists rarely enter the nearby village. The site and museum remain physically and conceptually a world apart, controlled and visited by outsiders, and now buffered by an official archaeological zone of some 40 acres.

The temple is thus mentioned surprisingly little in local stories about the valley. Many Nemeans take general pride in the presence of a major site, but it figures little in local histories except for stories of working on the excavations and land negotiations. In discussing antiquity, residents more often mention another place which they have endowed with significance. A rocky overhang in the eastern hills is often identified as the cave of the Nemean lion of Herakles' first labor. While guidebooks discount this as folk legend, it remains a touchstone of antiquity for local residents, and a direct way in which they have claimed part of the valley's past. The temple itself, however, evokes mixed feelings.

Ancient Sites and Local Residents

The landscapes built by travelers and local residents for the ancient Nemea Valley thus have only a seeming congruence. In many ways they operate as separate tectonic plates. They generally float independently, hovering near one another without touching. Sometimes they crash into each other in violent upheavals, and only occasionally do they meld together.

This landscape dissonance is illuminating. Local indifference toward what visitors see as the only thing of interest, the temple, reveals how much the construction of ancient sites in Greece has played into national and international imagery, but not necessarily local (see also Leontis 1995). Indeed the site at Nemea was created by sundering it from the people around it, a condition which explicates the disinterest and resentment which some inhabitants of the valley have expressed toward the site, and exposes the appropriating quality of those travelogues which remarked that local residents did not understand the temple.

This analysis also speaks to the bewilderment experienced by some current visitors to the valley. They are prepared neither for present settlement patterns nor the dusty expanse left by recent archaeological work. Confusion reigns ironically supreme in the fact that the town in the next valley westward is now called New Nemea, or even simply Nemea. Tourists using the public bus system often disembark there only to declare that this cannot be Nemea (e.g., Serstevens 1961:59). Certainly it does not look like what they expected to see. Neither, however, does the present condition of the site back in the Ancient Nemea Valley. It is now a network of archeological trenches and labels which confounds those who came simply for a contemplative experience.

Archaeological work conducted at Nemea since 1884 (Blegen 1925, Stephen Miller 1990, Wright et al. 1990) has thus not occurred in a neutral setting. It has sometimes directly participated in the travelers' landscapes, and even when this has not been the case, it has been understood in terms of them. While recent excavations and surveys have been particularly careful to involve villagers in more than digging, and to develop a complex and even critical understanding of the area in antiquity, they have still operated on a conceptual minefield. Archaeologists and travelers are both interested in sites. Unexamined assumptions that both mean the same thing by this term, however, has sometimes taken archaeological statements into unintended territory (Fotiadis 1992, Dunnell 1992). Creation of the protected archaeological zone has also played into the disjunction of past and present in clear and obvious ways.

Ethnographers also move across these landscapes. The recognition that we, too, are topographers is not lost on many of us these days. While my early writings on the modern valley ignored the temple, I now see this as reinforcing the separation of these two landscapes, and missing an power relation which operates at Nemea, even if more opaquely than areas marked by tourism. Herzfeld (1991) and others have revealed the contestations between national and local perceptions in places under the grip of preservation laws and tourist development. This may be an equally important endeavor for places like Nemea where such dissonance also occurs but lies masked and muted, beneath the surface. ¹⁴

Endnotes

1. The valley measures roughly 4 km. by 8 km. (peak to peak), and its floor stands at 310 m. above sea level on the average. It contains the remains of an ancient religious/athletic sanctuary named Nemea in antiquity. In the 18th century, the valley as a whole bore the same name as the main village and river through it, Koutsoumadhi, and the next basin westward was called the Ayios Yeorgos valley after its market town of that name. After creation of the modern Greek nation, these two valleys were placed in the same demos (local administrative unit) in 1834 (Vayiakakos 1975: 68-69). In a national effort to emphasize Greek antiquity, this demos was named for the most prominent ancient site within it, Nemea. When the demos split into several separate koinotites in 1912, the name Nemea stayed with the large market town in the Ayios Yeorgos valley, and what is here called the Ancient Nemea Valley became the koinotis of lraklio after what had become its main village. In local discourse, however, the market town was still known as Ayios Yeorgos for the first half of the 20th century. In 1958, the town was officially renamed New (Nea) Nemea, and the koinotis of Iraklio became Ancient (Archaia) Nemea. At present local residents generally use the term Nemea for the market town, and Iraklio or Ancient Nemea for the valley discussed in this paper. Travelers and guidebooks, on the other hand, have consistently referred to the latter simply as Nemea.
1. Frazer's translation of Pausanias' passage on Nemea (Description of Greece, XV, lines 2-3) is as follows: "In Nemea there is a temple of Nemean Zeus, which is worth seeing, though the roof had fallen in, and there was no image left. The temple stands in a grove of cypresses; and it was here, they say, that the serpent killed Opheltes, who had been set down by his nurse on the grass. The Argives sacrifice to Zeus in Nemea as well as in Argos, and they choose a priest of Nemean Zeus. Moreover they announce a race to be run by armed men at the winter celebration of the Nemean festival. Here is the grave of Opheites enclosed by a stone wall, and within the enclosure there are altars. Here, too, is a barrow, the tomb of Lycurgus, the father of Opheltes. The spring is named Adrastea, perhaps because Adrastus discovered it, or perhaps for some other reason. They say that the district got is name from Nemea, another daughter of Asopus. Above Nemea is Mount Apesas, where they say that Perseus first sacrificed to Apesantian Zeus." (Pausanias 1913:93).
2. The 1928 national census conducted shortly before Dixon's visit, counted 499 inhabitants for the village of Iraklion and 172 for the village of Koutsoumadhi, both located in the Ancient Nemea Valley.
3. This photograph comes from the Harland Archives at the Archaeological Museum at Nemea.
4. I came to Nemea to direct the ethnological component of the multidisciplinary, multi-institutional Nemea Valley Archaeological Project which was pursuing the settlement history of the valley from prehistoric times to the present. The project has been funded by grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Geographic Society, and the Society for Aegean Prehistory.
5. The highest point on Vayia is 721 m. above sea level. It is also known as Mt. Daouli.
6. See Pratt(1992) and Mills(1991:78) for general discussions of the use of panoramas in travel narratives.
7. A more detailed analysis may be found in Sutton (1995).
8. See Stella Miller (1983) for a parallel account of this imagery for Nemea.
9. See Urry (1990) and van den Berghe (1994) for general discussions of this aspect of contemporary tourism.
10. Nemea has thus not become the kind of quaint peasant site sought after by those who come to Greece with the goals of "ethnic tourism" as discussed by van den Berghe (1994),
11. The passage continues on, "time telescopes at Nemea, where a modern threshing floor and massive sixth-century AD Christian basilica and cemetery site beside the fourth-century BC Temple of Zeus."
12. Urquhart's description (1839) provides one of the few exceptions for Nemea.
13. Landscapes can, of course, be reconstructed. Fotis Hiotis lifted my eyes from too narrow a focus on village rather than valley, and in so doing led me to reconsider what Greek villages signify in a very general way (Sutton 1988, 1994). lnl994 and 1996, Stephen Miller, director of current excavations at the temple, worked with local leaders to re-enact the ancient athletic games at the newly excavated stadium (Marker 1996). This effort met with a remarkable response, as some villagers entered the site for the first time, and others said they felt connected to it in a way they never had been before. I heard not a single negative comment. Many local villagers now belong to the Society for the Revival of the Nemean Games which has 1000 members in 15 nations. Indeed I now wonder what might result if tourists were also encouraged to look across landscapes and make sense of the villages and vineyards that surround the site in the ways that local residents understand them. This might be an endeavor worth pursuing for perhaps it is our job to make connections as well as expose separations.

Reflections of Consistency and Projections of Ease in Russian Teenagers' Life Stories¹

Fran Markowitz
Ben-Gurion University of the Negev

You do not have to take my word for it that Russia has been going through great transformations. Scores of Western, Eastern European, and Russian social analysts have noted - sometimes with pleasure, sometimes with alarm - the sweeping political changes, alterations to the economy, and stunning developments within the public media and information networks that accompanied first perestroika, then the raspad [dis-Union], and now the move toward stabilizatsiia [stabilization] in Russia. Daily newspaper articles, television broadcasts and ordinary conversations among middle-aged and elderly Russians all hinge on this theme of change.

I arrived in Moscow in September 1995 to research the lifeworlds of young people who were growing up in the throes of such political and economic uncertainty.² But as I began interviewing 16 year-olds about their years in school and the changes they witnessed there and in the wider world I was surprised, to say the least, to hear them reject my definition of their lives as characterized by change. Instead, as they told their life stories, they stressed predictability, continuity and sameness. Teenagers, the one group about which I was certain would be acutely conscious of their country's transformations, were the only Russians who did not couch their own experiences in these terms.

My bewilderment was compounded by the fact that virtually all psycho-social and cultural theories about adolescence describe this life phase as one of impermanence. Dubbed "a labyrinth of difficult and confusing choices" (Czikszentimihaly and Larson 1984:20) and "a phase of imminence that is not quite imminent enough" (Modell and Goodman 1990:93), adolescence is usually conceptualized as "a fascinating transitional period" (Harter 1990:354) during which teenagers try on and test out identities (Erikson 1963, 1968) as they prepare for the future. Certainly I expected Russian teenagers to think of themselves from within this perspective, and to narrate their life histories as exciting stories of change. But instead, in interview after interview as they first reviewed their past and then turned to the present they used idioms and images of continuity and sameness. Even when they spoke of their plans and hopes for the future they sounded convinced that these paths were already pre-paved. While usually ending their narratives on an optimistic note, hoping "to live well, to live at ease," hardly anyone linked their individual lives to the events and broader processes that changed their country or the choices and dilemmas that they confront as adolescents preparing themselves for an as yet unknown post-Soviet adult world. This paper is a first attempt to grapple with the puzzle of why.

Methods

In September 1995 I arrived in Moscow to spend 6 months with teenagers in a variety of schools. While Moscow was my base--the site of participant-observation and the majority of my interviews (61 in six different school settings)--I made field trips to St. Petersburg and Dzerzhinsk where I visited three schools in each city and interviewed 42 teenagers (28 in St. Petersburg, 14 in Dzerzhinsk). I made every attempt to talk with young people from different rungs in the social scale, while avoiding both extremes. ³

The Soviet school system, and its present day descendant, the Russian school system, has three kinds of (secondary) educational facilities: the eleven-year school complex,⁴ the specialized technikum, and the vocational high school (PTU). Some school complexes have devoted grades 8 or 9 through 11 to an enriched secondary education in which students are directed onto a humanities track or a natural sciences track as they prepare to attend a VUZ (a university or institute of higher education) in the years to come.⁵ In Soviet times, except for some special schools, all students took the same course of studies to qualify for the attestat zrelosti [secondary school diploma].

Not all children, however, complete 11 grades in school. At the end of 9th grade, exams are given to determine which pupils will continue in the academic schools, and who will take a vocational program. Towards the end of 9th grade, the school administration and the students--or more precisely, the students' parents--determine who remains in school and who transfers to a technikum or to a vocational school.

I spent much of my time in Russia in these various educational settings, watching teenagers in interaction with each other and with their teachers. I was part of many animated and several dull conversations between classes (and sometimes during them!) and on the steps of the school at the end of the schoolday. In addition, I went to the theater with a group of girls and joined a few small celebrations. I also made several visits to teen hangouts in Moscow--Gorky Park and on the Arbat--and watched groups of young people travel together by bus, tram and metro.

All told, I took life history interviews from 103 young people, all conducted in Russian, of course, except for four cases. Two boys at a classical gymnazium in St. Petersburg took the opportunity of the interview to "practice English," while at another gymnazium in Moscow, one girl, who wants to become an English-Russian translator, spoke to me in stilted, almost Dickensian 19th century English. The fourth, also a Moscow gymnazium pupil, gave me the conversational pleasure of her near-native, colloquial American English which she had attained the year before as an exchange student in the United States. In St. Petersburg and Dzerzhinsk I conducted all of the interviews in the students' schools in empty classrooms or the teachers' room. The majority of Moscow interviews occurred in the schools too; however, I was invited home by 14 Moscow students, and five teenagers (of the ten I interviewed from the school right across the street from where I lived) came to my apartment. The interviews lasted from 30 minutes to four hours, averaging at about one hour each.

Narrating Life Histories

I sat individually with over 100 teenagers in order to hear them speak about themselves without the usual audience of several classmates (the kollectiv). I wanted them to feel free to construct their life stories, tell about their families, portray themselves as personalities, and offer their opinions on the world around them. I was eager to know how they situate themselves as young people in Russia, and to grasp how they make sense of their development from child to adolescent on the verge of adulthood (see Watson and Watson-Franke 1985).

As I sat with these young people in their schools, in their homes, and in my little apartment, it became clear that I was one of very few, if not the only adult who had ever asked them to talk freely about themselves and to give their opinions of the world. Many of the teenagers did not know how to tell their stories, although they wanted to.⁶ They kept asking me to ask them more questions--to narrow down and define the fields of inquiry. I, however, wanted the interviews to be as open as possible so that the teenagers could present themselves in their own way, according to their personal style.

Typically, the teenagers had difficulty getting started. Most began their narratives on shaky ground, having a hard time remembering anything they deemed worthwhile to tell about their childhood. Many claimed to have no memories prior to age 7, their first year of school:

Those who did portray themselves as out of the ordinary were teenagers who recalled childhood illnesses or disabilities. Some called attention to the fact that they had been "sickly" children, who easily caught cold and consequently spent more time at home than in kindergarten; others told of periods of hospitalization for weak lungs, poorly functioning kidneys, or thin blood. Four boys told me about attending a special kindergarten for children with speech problems because they could not pronounce the rolling Russian /r/ correctly. But even they followed the implicit rule of describing their early childhood as a time of carefree regularity, conformity, and predictability.

While most of the teens skipped over their early childhood, giving but a brief description of kindergarten attendance, a small group focused their reminiscences on homeplace. Some, like Olga, directed attention to their native cities and to the fact that they are permanently rooted there:

A few girls described how they loved to dance and sing around the house, and Anton told of his "striking feature: I always had a blanket with me, a little one. And if I lost it, I burst out crying. I always walked around with that little blanket, everywhere." But in the main the teenagers omitted descriptions of their personalities and depicted their early childhood as "ordinary," concentrating their reminiscences on the day-care institutions in which they spent the better part of their time.

Another noticeable feature of the majority of these life history accounts is the teenagers' frequent use of the passive voice, especially when describing moments of transition. Rather than "I began kindergarten at age 3," or, "I started school when I was seven years old," or, "I became an Octobrist in second grade," or, "I joined the Pioneers Organization at the end of third," they told me: roditeli menia otdali detskom sadu [my parents 'gave me out' to kindergarten]; kogda mne bylo 7 let, shkola nachilas' kak u vsekh [school started for me at age 7 like for everyone else]; nas prineli v Oktiabriatakh/Pionirskoi organizatsii [we were taken into the Octobrists/Pioneer organization].

This use of the passive voice, I would argue, is not simply a linguistic convention but a reflection of these young people's experience. Several teens told me how teachers in early grades urged pupils to do well because if they did not, they would not be accepted into the Octobrists and Pioneers. And no one could not be accepted. In Katya's words, "It was very important for everyone. You could not, you dared not have even imagined that someone would not become a Pioneer. It was just a disgrace."

The teenagers talk of becoming a Pioneer in the passive voice because the process was passive. They portray their moments of pride at the ceremony that transformed them from little children-Octobrists to older, more responsible Pionners as deceptive for everyone was inducted into the Pioneers sooner or later, and no one changed. It was a normal, necessary part of being a child in the USSR,⁸ not a personal or special achievement. Oxana sums up the sentiment: "Yes, I was an Octobrist. I was a Pioneer. We were all very proud when we first became Pioneers. We all wanted to be taken into Pioneers, to wear the red tie. Everyday I washed and ironed it - it became simply a ritual. And then, well after we were brought into Pioneers, we didn't do anything. It was just, absolutely, the name."

Perhaps this view of their non-change into Pioneers explains the almost universal answer to my question about the transformations they witnessed in their schools: What changes? I was certain that as they thought about the centrality of Lenin in the stories and verses they had learned in the first grades, the integral role that Octobrists and Pioneers had played in the school routine, and the omnipresent symbols of the Soviet regime and the Communist Party that had once decorated classrooms and corridors, eleventh graders would have much to say about changes in their school over the past ten years. The initial reaction of just about everyone, however, was to assert that there have been no changes.

The only change that the teenagers unanimously note is the abandonment of school uniforms that occurred around the time that the Pioneer Organization was disbanded (1990-1991). Boys, girls, those in Soviet polyester, those in made-in-China sweaters and locally-produced jeans, those in flashy colors or those in dull greys, as well as the tiny minority who look like they stepped off the pages of Cosmopolitan magazine (a Russian language edition is very popular among school girls) without exception spoke of the transition from school uniforms to free-style dressing. A few insightful gymnazium pupils in St. Petersburg exclaimed that this was their first step out of chustvo stada, the "herd mentality" that they had experienced all their lives.

Paul Willis (1990:85) notes that "Clothes, style and fashion have long been recognized as key elements in young people's expression, exploration and making of their own individual and collective identities. They remain amongst the most visible forms of symbolic cultural creativity and informal artistry in people's lives in our common culture." While reflecting about their school years, teenager after teenager noted that this most basic of outlets had been denied to them and to previous generations. Being able to wear their own clothes, to make decisions about how to present themselves in public, marked an important moment in their lives. It, more than induction into Pioneers, or even the political changes of perestroika and dis-union, was the most important--and permanent--transition in their lives. And the teenagers discussed it in the active voice.

The passive voice returned, however, in regard to higher education and career goals. And it is not only the young people who pursue less prestigious educational options who discuss their futures as if they are narrowly defined and pre-determined. A large plurality of 11th graders (33 of the 75 I spoke with) want to become "economists" or "lawyers," but they have hardly a clue as to what economists or lawyers do. The teenagers do know, however that these jobs (1) are located indoors in offices where they can sit comfortably throughout the day; (2) are prestigious and place them automatically into the country's "intelligentsia";¹⁰ (3) carry good salaries, and (4) are in demand. All the pupils who aspire to these careers attend preparatory courses at institutes or universities in the hope of improving their chances for admission.

In the main, Russia's teenagers have geared their education and career choices to professions that are in demand and/or to where they have family connections. Unlike previous generations who went into engineering in droves, these young people have witnessed the crumbling of the Soviet infrastructure and massive layoffs that have occurred in the military-industrial complex. They are preparing for jobs in newly important professional spheres - like business and law - but with a fatalism similar to that of their parents as they entered various technical fields or the scientific study of Marxism-Leninism.

Finally, I ended each interview with the question: What are your hopes, dreams, expectations? What do you want for yourself? Typically the answer was: "To get into institute, complete institute, find a good job, have a family. To live well, to live at ease [zhit' khorosho, zhit' spokoino]." The teenagers' projections for the future did not go beyond age 25: a good job, a spouse, a child or two - modest ambitions and aspirations. To ask for more is to tempt fate; to ask for less is not to live.

Some Brief Conclusions

Adolescence in Russia is more a time of being than a time of becoming. Whereas in the West, "youth is frequently seen by sociologists as being in the forefront of social change...the advance party where innovation or alteration in the values of society are concerned" (Coleman & Hendry 1990:202; also Esman 1990:85), Russian teenagers view their final years in school, and even their program of study at a VUZ, as the last time to enjoy their state of dependence and protection, not as an important moment for taking direct action to change their country and change themselves.

In its time, the Soviet government issued child support and student stipends to assure that children--including adolescents--be (dependent) children, free of problems better handled and resolved by adults. It seems that most contemporary Russian parents and their teenage sons and daughters agree for it is rare to see students working part-time or during the summers (German, et al. 1994)¹¹ although the child support and student stipends issued today by the Russian Federation are far from adequate. Veronika, in summarizing her plans for the next five years, emphasizes that youth is and should be a carefree time, unburdened with social or familial responsibilities:

Unlike the richly experimental moment during perestroika when Russia's youth was engaged in a plethora of subcultural activities (Cushman 1995; Easton 1989; Frisby 1989; Pilkington 1994), in the mid-1990s they are putting their energies into individualistic pursuits--first their schooling, and then their hobbies and friendships. And despite dire warnings that emerged as Russia embarked on its transition to a free market economy, teenagers are not, in the main, dropping out of mainstream society, or seeking instant monetary gratification by peddling souvenirs, cigarettes, tomatoes or themselves for they have seen this trend come and go. Hoping to acquire professions that pay well and that are in demand, Russian teenagers are pragmatic (Korzheva 1995) and even-keeled. They most certainly do not want a return to Communism, and they are repelled by the radical nationalism of Vladimir Zhirinovsky. Even as they look at their changing bodies and sharpening analytical skills, they admit to being tired of change, and especially of the rhetoric of change, a rhetoric that has pervaded their entire lives. Having witnessed the political and economic ups and downs of perestroika and Soviet dis-Union, and the paucity of tangible transformations that these "changes" brought to their lives, they use their adolescence as a time to be: students, children, dependents, taking change in stride as a normal part of their everyday life. Rather than making more waves through identity experimentation and subcultural production, they want nothing more from life than to "live well, live at ease" in what they hope will be a calm and prosperous twenty-first century for Russia.

Notes

1. This is a revised and abbreviated version of my article, "To Live Well, To Live at Ease": Life course Reflections and Projections of Post-Soviet Russian Teenagers, that I presented at the 1996 annual meetings of the American Anthropological Association in San Francisco, and that is scheduled for publication in Adolescence. The research upon which this paper is based was supported by a 1995/96 Individual Research Opportunity grant from the International Research & Exchanges Board (IREX) with funds provided by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the US Department of State. None of these organizations is responsible for the views expressed.
2. My grant proposal to IREX was informed by this conventional wisdom, gleaned from journalistic accounts (especially from the New York Times and OMRI reports), academic articles (especially from Slavic Review and Refuge), verbal reports from friends in the immigrant community in the US and Israel, two visits I had made to Russia in 1994 following my first one in April 1993, and from Russian academic colleagues.
3. There is more material on super-rich "New Russians" (including the Mafia and businessmen) and on the dispossessed, homeless than there is on the vast majority of Russia's population. I wanted to avoid falling into the trap of concentrating on the triumphs of Russia's new elite and/or of following homeless teenagers through their scams and struggles.
4. Until 1989 the general secondary school offered a ten-year program of studies. Since 1989 it has become an eleven-year program. All the 1995/96 eleventh graders (who started school in 1986) skipped fourth grade and went directly into fifth. Thus their eleven year program actually consisted of ten grades.
5. Private gymnziums and lycees have sprung up in Russia's major cities, but since I did not visit any of these schools for the (new) economic elite, I will leave them out of the discussion. I did, however, visit three gymnaziums (one each in Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Dzerzhinsk) that are under the aegis and funding of the Russian Federation's Ministry of Education.
6. All the kids in Moscow, and Dzerzhinsk were volunteers. In fact, I had more volunteers than I knew what to do with. The gymnazium pupils in St. Petersburg were all volunteers as well, but homeroom teachers in the two St. Petersburg schools I visited recruited pupils for me. They too reported having trouble selecting from among all the kids who wanted to have an opportunity to talk about themselves to "our American guest."
7. In fact, I was surprised when I took my first interview from a girl who recalled the kommunalka she lived in until age 10, 1989!! Any and all of my friends/informants in New York and Israel - immigrants from the Former Soviet Union - told me in 1984, 85, 87, 88 about moving from communal to state-owned or cooperative apartments no later than the early 1960s, during Khrushchev's regime, the very latest was in the early 1970s (see Markowitz 1993). I had been under the (false) impression that no one in the major cities of Russia lived any more in communal apartments. Of the 103 teenagers I interviewed, two boys - one in St. Petersburg, and one in Moscow, presently live in communal apartments.
8. Of the 103 teenagers I interviewed and several dozen more with whom I had informal conversations, only one boy, Aleksei, never "made it to Pioneers." I was shocked! How could he not have been a Pioneer? He explains:

I didn't like participating--in the old newspaper drives, and in the scrap metal drives, And all kinds of plays that were put on. See, I like them, I just didn't want to participate. I wanted to sit on the side and watch...They just told some of us: Do better in your schoolwork or you won't get into Pioneers. Therefore, therefore, I didn't...See, they took us in on how well we did [in school], our behavior, and desire. And I had no desire.

9. I observed in most if not all the classes I attended that the teachers read lectures to their students and had them copy their words verbatim. Each week or so the teachers collected students' notebooks and checked that lecture notes were properly recorded. When students were called upon to answer questions, they were expected to deliver memorized passages from lectures or textbooks; several kids kept their books open and read from them in order to get an excellent grade for the day's class recitation.

In a few history and literature classes, however, I noticed teachers encouraging their pupils to express their opinions. Some teachers told me that they now have the freedom to prepare lessons as they see fit, to incorporate "new" (i.e., recently revealed and/or permitted material such as statistics about Stalin's repressions, and the poetry of Mandelshtam) material into their course outlines, and to present their material in an innovative fashion. Yet students complained to me that while their teachers may tell them to express their own opinions, they are penalized if they do not include in their compositions exactly what they are told.
10. In the USSR and today's Russia, all "scientific workers," administrators, and educators are classified as "intelligentsia." The designation of "white-collar," or managerial-administrative, simply did not exist. Today's businessmen, bankers, marketing and management personnel elicit ambivalent reactions; on the one hand, their elegant offices and large salaries are held in high esteem, but on the other, many see them as modern-day speculators whose wealth is ill-gained (Smith 1990).
11. In my sample of 103, only 3 girls and 5 boys told me of the jobs they hold. Olga works off-the-books as a janitress five nights a week; Lena pastes up advertisements, and Marina sells "shampoos and such that Papa brings home from work" outside a metro station a few mornings a week. Maksim works after school in a produce base; Aleksei worked last summer in the factory that employs his parents; Dima distributes video cassettes for his uncle, and Ippolit worked to get signatures ($1 per signature) for the political candidate who employs his mother. Sasha boasted that he is a racketeer, and stressed to me that this is good training for becoming a businessman.

László Kürti
Eötvös Loránd University

Studies in Roma (Gypsy) Ethnography, No. 2. Zsuzsanna Bódi, Ed. 1994.

Din Traditiile Populare ale Romanilor din Ungaria, No. 9, Alexandru Hotopan Ed., 1994.

Beitrage zur Volkskunde der Ungarndeutschen, No. 11, K. Manherz Ed. 1994.

Národopis Slovákov V Madarsku, No. 11, A. Divicanová and O. Krupa Eds., 1995.

Etnografija Hrvata U Madarskoj, D. Frankovic Ed., No. 1. (1994) and No. 2 (1995).

The Hungarian Ethnographic Society, a prestigious organisation with an over one hundred year history, has embarked upon a monumental undertaking: to document, preserve and analyse the changing traditional world of Hungary’s nationalities. This task is being supervised by the Editor-in-Chief, Ernõ Eperjessy, an ethnographer of considerable reputation for being the spokesman of interethnic life and culture in Hungary. It is a commendable job and he has done an excellent service not only in political correctness in being the editor of this series, but also as the editor who oversees the actual material being presented. The volumes are full of minute details of traditional life and long-forgotten practices; maps, pictures and musical texts often illustrate the point made. The books are handsomely designed and carefully edited.

The latest addition to this growing scholarly volume are the five books under review here which deserve to be known outside the confines of the Hungarian state. All the monographs under review are carefully edited, taking into consideration specifics of minority languages, e.g. diacritical marks. Scholarly in tone and depth, all chapters include foreign summaries and many are supplemented with maps, diagrams, musical selections and black-and-white photos. The main language in each is the language of the minority in question with occasional German and English contributions.

Perhaps one of the most exciting volumes is "Studies in Roma Ethnography," a volume following the successful already sold out first volume. Many of the chapters are written in Romany which is itself a great achievement, even though one may argue that such a practice only serves intellectual pursuits and does not necessarily benefit Gypsy populations at large.

Edited by Zsuzsanna Bódi, this volume is drawn from papers presented at the First International Conference on Gypsy Ethnography held in Budapest in 1993. The collection deserves special attention not only of Romanologists but those ethnographers, ethnomusicologists, folklorists, linguists and cultural anthropologists who are interested in larger issues of interethnic relations, identity and cultural borrowing.

The chapters by the Hungarian P. Szuhay and his Czech colleagues E. Davidová and I. Láznicková, for example, illustrate the problems of placing Roma artefacts in museums. Trying to visualize Roma traditional ways of life -- whether of the blacksmiths or tub-makers -- and the questions of museum exhibits which purport to represent them are important and deserve to be discussed in greater detail. Whether the attempts in Budapest and Brno, the latter the proposed site for an independent Roma Museum, will be successful will be eagerly waited by the international scholarly community. The question of funding is, of course, crucial. International help may pave the way for such museums.

The historical chapters of D. Kendrick and Z. Zsupos provide interesting insights into less known aspects of Romany past. Kendrick’s study addresses the sad period of the Roma holocaust. He argues that the total number of Roma executed in nazi camps cannot be higher than 250,000. Yet, there are many unknown facts about Gypsy arrests, collaboration, and forced labor camps in the west as well as the east. Zsupos focuses on eighteenth-century sources to trace the settlements and migration of Gypsy tradesmen and craftsmen. By citing early documents from Transylvania we learn about an important name-changing institution which forced thousands of Gypsies to change their names, and, thus, we may suppose, their identities as well.

In several chapters we learn useful details about the Romany language (M. Kakuk, J. Saip, A. Lewkowicz), its diversity, structure and loan-words; others discuss folkloric and traditional aspects of Romany culture (Zs. Bódi. G. Balázs, J. Faragó, V. Görög). These latter are perhaps the most well known to scholars of Romany culture: singing, dancing, and traditional crafts. Th. Acton and B. Mihok both discuss the difficulties Gypsies face when trying to adapt to the majority culture and the ways in which members of dominant culture treat Gypsies. Clearly, this volume represents a major step in Romany studies, an area of investigation which by its very nature must work across boundaries, a phrase which could equally be used for the Romany subjects as well.

"Din Traditiile Populare ale Romanilor din Ungaria" (Ethnography of Romanians in Hungary), is the 9th in the specific series dealing with Romanians in Hungary, a group representing a few thousands citizen. This slim volume contains articles on traditional aspects of Romanian culture in the communities of Chitighaz (Hungarian Kétegyház) and other less well-known Romanian settlements. Mostly focusing on folkloric elements -- ballads, songs, buildings, costumes, and dancing -- the authors (M. Bucin, A. Hotopan, E. Martin, A. Hotopan) are all Romanians themselves, all involved with trying to preserve, if not recreate Romanian village culture in Hungary. Issues of identity and assimilation are at the heart of such undertakings. Especially interesting are their attempts which aim at understanding cultural heritage common to Hungarians and Romanians alike, as opposed to simply seeking specific "ethnic" traits of one group or another without an understanding of cultural sharing, co-existence and dependence.

Voluminous are the monographs printed in the series dealing with Germans living in Hungary ("Beitrage zur Volkskunde der Ungarndeutschen"). Volume 11 brings together studies on German peasant house-building (E. Hajdú), naming practices (J. Pintér), bilingualism as expressed in ethnocentric practices (M. Erb), religious life (K. Wild), German pilgrimages (S. Pfiszterer), and folk healing (E. Brettner-Szántó). It should be mentioned here that in Hungary the German-speaking "Sváb" (as they are called by Hungarians) culture is perhaps one of the better known and documented minority cultures. One reason for this is the fact that the Germans themselves have been acutely aware of their minority status, privileges and peripherialization (especially by the Stalinist regimes right after World War II). This forced many German intellectuals to turn inward and search out, preserve and document those aspects of their culture which remained intact. Needless to say the German community in Hungary is flourishing even though forced repatriation, emigration and assimilation has taken its toll: although their number has been steadily decreasing, during the 1995 local elections Germans were able to set up thirty-eight local government on an ethnic basis nationally.

Less successful as a political force, but perhaps even more successful than the German minority is the cultural revival with which Slovaks living in Hungary have approached their own culture. The eleventh volume "Ethnography of the Slovaks in Hungary" (Národopis Slovákov V Madarsku") is a storehouse of information on Slovak ethnography and folklore. This particular collection traces problems concerning Slovak identity (A. Divicanová), urbanization and assimilation (J. Örsi). The other chapters are more traditional: logging as an occupation among Slovaks (T. Petercsák), settlement patterns (I. Gráfik, J. Ando), life histories (O. Krupa, S. Lami), and folk medical practices (M. Ziláková). The volume closes with an homage to Stefanovi Lami, a Hungarian-Slovak ethnographer, who celebrated his seventieth birthday in 1995. Lami is well-known not only in Hungary but also in neighbouring Slovakia for his excellent research monographs and published studies on Slovak culture in Hungary. With his adamant meticulousness he paved the way for the scholarly tradition of studying minority Slovak culture. His achievement is a testimony to the viability of Slovak culture as well as to the practice of living both as a minority member and a scholar.

Volumes 1 and 2 in the "Ethnography of Croatians in Hungary" are gems of ethnographic and folkloristic information for students of Croatian culture. In Volume 1 most chapters deal with traditional life from the vantage point of (mostly) native scholars. From S. Horváth’s study we learn of religious-magical customs of the Croatians who speak the "kaj" dialect: in specific the "nedelica" or "New Moon Sunday" magical worship cycle. R. Begovac, E. Szojka and A. Vizin deal with two lesser known aspects of traditions: Begovac highlights changing aspects of Croatian weddings from her own field experiences; Szojka and Vizin discuss the Whitsuntide Queen custom among the "Bunevaci" of the city of Baja, an article with many archival photos. Other chapters deal with gold-digging along the Mura and Drava rivers (E. László), biblical themes in Croatian peasant oral literature (D. Frankovic), children’s socialization (Z. Fehér), and calling as a signalling device among villagers.

Volume 2, also edited by D. Frankovic, deals solely with folk ballads. It attempts to give a comprehensive picture of folk ballads of Croatians living in Hungary, a task not easily achieved. Long in the making, this collection treats folk ballads not according to standard divisions used in South Slavic folkloristics -- i.e. heroic songs, laments, women’s songs etc. -- but categorizes them according to themes. This practice makes it rather easy to identify ballads according to fantastic songs, maidenhood, blessing songs, hopeful songs, soldiers’ lifeways songs, and outlaw songs. Perhaps one hiatus is the missing musical texts, which one often finds in other collections. However, such printing would have made the volume too costly for this series. Also the Croatian texts make the volume useful only for Croatian specialists who speak the diverse Croatian dialects. Perhaps another volume could present both the music and translations for wider scholarly availability.

All in all, we can say with certainty that these volumes represent a growing library of minority literature in Hungary. In fact, the real success of these books beyond their stated aims of preserving and documenting disappearing folk traditions, is that they open a new avenue of dissemination of heretofore little known aspects of traditions for majority and minority cultures alike. Furthermore, I wish to stress that the minority cultures in question are able to utilize these source materials in their own relationship with their respective motherlands whether Slovakia, Romania, Croatia and Germany. One only hopes that the other minority cultures will receive the same attention from ethnographers and folklore specialists in Hungary as well as the other East Central European states.

The volumes or the whole series may be purchased from the Hungarian Ethnographic Society:

Magyar Néprajzi Társaság
Kossuth tér 12
1055 Budapest, Hungary
Tel/Fax: (36)1-269-1272

Book Review: Chris Hann’s The Skeleton at the Feast: Contributions to Eastern European Ethnography.

Krista Harper
University of California/Santa Cruz

Hann, Chris, 1995, The Skeleton at the Feast: Contributions to Eastern European Ethnography. Canterbury, UK: University of Kent at Canterbury. Center for Social Anthropology and Computing Monographs 9. 265pp. $15.

If Chris Hann's monograph, The Skeleton at the Feast: Contributions to Eastern European Ethnography was to be marketed by a record label, it would fall into the "B-sides and out-takes" genre, an LP crammed with experimental pieces of abandoned projects, underplayed nuggets, and alternative versions of hit songs. Record collectors delight in the unusual, if sometimes patchy, offering because the compilation provides a look at their favorite artist at work and because it brings to light works that have less commercial appeal. Likewise, scholars of Eastern Europe will delight in Hann's monograph's idiosyncratic essays on his better-known ethnographies in Polish and Hungarian villages, his reflections on fieldwork in Eastern Europe and the rise of "transitology," and excerpts from a textbook project that was never completed.

In Part One, Hann presents five chapters that he had originally written for a textbook on Eastern European ethnography that was to be a collaborative project with Steven Sampson but was never published. These chapters discuss borders and histories, peasant ethnography, religion and ritual, ethnicity and nationalism, and kinship and the family. The bibliographic materials alone are a valuable resource for scholars of Eastern Europe. Hann provides an overview of ethnographic literature in English on Eastern Europe, and also includes works by ethnographers and historians writing in Polish, Russian, Czech, and Hungarian, although some well-known ethnographers, such as Tamas Hofer, are given a more cursory treatment.

Highlights of Part One include the chapter on boundaries and histories, which covers the relationships between "European-ness," "Eastern-ness," and political economy from the Middle Ages through the present transformation from state socialism. The chapter on religion and ritual treats both the secular rituals of state socialism and the relationship between religious groups and the state, investigating the

Greek Catholic, or Uniate, Church at length. One of the oldest of anthropology's fields of study, kinship, gets a fresh spin as Hann details the ways in which ethnographers of Eastern Europe have traced the changing roles of women and household units since the advent of state socialism. Although the sections on peasants and nationalism and ethnicity are well-written and reasonably thorough as entries in a textbook, these areas of the anthropology of Eastern Europe are better fleshed-out in other works, including Hann's ethnographies.

In Part Two, Hann presents three essays based on his ethnographic research on Hungary's Great Plain and in a southeastern Polish village, and four essays which touch upon themes of self-reflexivity, the emerging discipline of "transitology," privatization, and

Orientalism. Originally published in Hungarian journals or presented at various conferences in Eastern Europe, these essays strive for a more complex picture of the transformation from state socialism and suggest that ethnography as an alternative to the more triumphalist accounts provided by economists and political scientists within and outside of the region. Rather than merely rehashing Hann’s ethnographies, the three ethnographic essays take experimental approaches to familiar issues: a rural community on the Hungarian

Great Plain is treated as an example of Frederick Jackson Turner’s frontier hypothesis, Polish Solidarity is viewed from the peasant perspective, and ethnic consciousness in Lemkovina meets Soviet ethnos theory. Perhaps the most thought-provoking are the chapters on privatization in Hungary, new forms of Orientalism on the Turkish-former Soviet border, and the emerging specialization of "transitology.

Chapter Nine, "A Critique of Anthropological Self-Contemplation," intended as a polemic against "navel-gazing," unintentionally makes a rather persuasive case for more self-reflexive ethnographies. Although Hann argues that the persuasive and scientific properties of ethnography are not enhanced by self-reflexivity, he portrays moments of confusion and disgust when confronted with alcoholism and wife-beating over the course of his research. Hann did not include these instances in his ethnographies, sensing that to do so to pander to readers baser, sensationalistic instincts. Yet Hann’s discretion in this matter surprised me: in a book that celebrated the particular attention paid to women’s roles in the family system in recent ethnographies, I would have expected Hann to give more serious consideration to the very real problems, which he encountered first-hand, of Hungarian and Polish women.

Overall, The Skeleton at the Feast offers readers a rewarding collection of essays. Part One is a pleasure to read and would serve marvelously as a textbook for a course on the ethnography of Eastern Europe. Part Two makes a persuasive case for the enduring importance of ethnography in analyzing the cultures of state socialism and postsocialism. Like a "B-sides and outtakes" LP, The Skeleton at the Feast is full of surprises which reward any reader who unearths it from the "rare import" bin at the store.

Course Syllabus: Social Science Modeling of a Complex Industrial System: Anthropology of the Former Soviet Union

David Lempert
George Washington University

Short Description

The course is designed to expose students to a series of fundamental theoretical problems in social science analysis and to use the former Soviet Union (the Russian empire and the Newly Independent States in its orbit) as a case study.

Much of Soviet Studies in the past projected character traits on the peoples in the Soviet empire's sphere of influence through quotation of formal ideology (citation of Marxist Leninist doctrine) or projections that served particular interests in the United States. Since students will be unable to conduct their own observations without being in the Soviet Union itself, the goal of this course is to train students in ways of thinking and methods of observing and analyzing reality that are basic to social science research and analysis, rather than in remembering a series of recorded observations that others have made.

The course will focus on:
-- Macro models of the former Soviet Union (the Russian empire and the Newly Independent States), their strengths and weaknesses;

-- Methods of conducting social science research in the former Soviet Union or from the U.S. using materials available here.

-- Biases in previous studies conducted on the former Soviet Union; the scholarly community of Sovietologists in the U.S., their funding and outlook;

The emphasis of this course will be on the Russians, comprising more than 50% of the population of the Soviet Union, with only lesser attention paid to the other ethnic groups in the country.

Grading and Projects

Students will be required to complete the following projects:

1. Design an anthropological field study (or an historical study of the former Soviet Union using an ethnographic approach) which could be conducted by either a single anthropologist or a small team of social scientists in any part of the former Soviet Union for six (6) months.

Specify theoretical assumptions, methods, goals, and hypotheses, with specific explanations of the types of measurements to be taken (particular variables.)

You may think first of a study which could be conducted in the United States and then note all of the differences which would need to be taken into account given the peculiarities of the societies in the region. (Note that if your hypotheses and measurements cannot be translated to uncover similar principles in the U.S., your topic is probably too narrow.)

2. Conduct a short ethnographic study on cultures from the region, here in the U.S., using whatever resources are available here. For example, study a Russian (Russian-Jewish, Russian-Annenian) émigré community to reveal aspects of Soviet culture and subculture strategies as they become apparent here.

Or, read (or glance through if you do not read Russian/other Slavic or regional languages or cannot find English translated versions) publications of some sort and find some of variable to measure. (You may also look at television or films from the region.)

Or, conduct a small "experiment" on a group of émigrés from the region (e.g. a Stanley Milgram experiment on response to authority, a Cole-Scribner type experiment on cognitive approach, or a legal/Socratic case method study) in order to discover what strategies Soviets are trained to use in approaching new situations. (Use an appropriate control group and make sure to consult with me closely so that it is clear you will be following all of the appropriate ethical guidelines for research with human subjects.)

Alternatively, you may choose to study American "Sovietologists" and area development specialists or actors in government, military, business, academia, (These categories are not mutually exclusive) and private citizens with regional contacts, as a subject of anthropological research.

Course grade will be based on the following:

Much of the material for this course is now available in the first complete ethnography of the Russians and the Soviet Russian Empire, though it should be noted that the work focuses specifically on the Russians rather than on the many minority groups still in the Russian sphere of influence or which were previously part of the Soviet Empire.

Daily Life in a Crumbling Empire: The Absorption of Russia into the World Economy

A complete ethnography of contemporary urban Russian political and legal culture. Three books prepared in two volumes - 1,800 pages, with photographs. Columbia University Press/ Eastern European Monographs, 1996.

The course is divided into two major sections: one on theory and one on specific aspects of Soviet society and culture. The sections on theory take an holistic view of the study of an industrial society, looking at various methods of characterization or prediction. The second section works on an implicit structural functional model, splitting up Soviet society into various sectors for study.

1. Theory

The first three subsections of the course present some theoretical problems on doinganthropology of the region.

Overview

Models of (what was) Soviet Society and History: Goals of Models -

The course begins widi an overview of the various models which have been used to describe what was Soviet society (totalitarian, bureaucratic, convergence theory, etc.), with Tolstoy's classic discussion of the causes of history, and with debate on the use of the concept of "state and society" (which fields much of the social science literature,) along with a piece on the social organization/ bureaucratic - cybernetic type models of the 1950's (Firth.) The goal here is to introduce students to the ideas of social modeling and the general issues of usefulness and methods of modeling which can be done on large scale industrial societies.

Anthropology of the Peoples of the Soviet Union

There is still little existing body of field ethnographies or ethnographic analysis of Russia or of the Soviet Union. The course begins with some examination of work which has been done (Mead, etc.) and discussion of the issues of doing anthropology without being able to do fieldwork or with severe restrictions on field work.

Controllers of Access

One of the keys to interpreting social science data is to understand the biases of the observer. Much of what is written or taught about the Soviet Union in the academic community in the United States is directly or indirectly tied to military or governmental objectives. This section of the course looks at American Sovietologists as an organizational culture with ideological predisposition as well as the ideological purging of American Universities during the cold war in order to promote ideologies.

Models in Detail

Seeking Strategies or Finding "National Character Traits"

Much of Sovietology and now, current studies of the region, include the projection of generalized character traits on the Russians as explanations for their behavior. By contrast, a more precise and thorough anthropology defines cultural strategies in dealing widi specific types of circumstances. This section of the course deals with path breaking work in the field (Ned Keenan's piece) and with basic methodological issues in looking for characteristics of an industrial culture.

Convergence Theory Industrial Society

This part of the course looks at one of the explanatory models in detail -- that of convergence theory -- its strengths and weaknesses; and the advantages of looking at Russian and formerly Soviet society through comparison with the U.S. The use of a convergence theory model is that it stresses similarities rather than differences of industrial societies as a basis for understanding those societies, though not necessarily distinguishing their peculiar characteristics.

Geography or Ethos

One great tension in cultural explanations is between environmental determinism and the importance of ethos. This section presents the various theoretical explanations (including excerpts from Weber's work on the Protestant ethic as a counterpoint to ideological explanations of the Soviet Union,) followed by specific examples of explanations of what was Soviet culture, which explain behavior in terms of communist ideology or geography/climactic factors.

A subsection looks at the special issue of the revolutionary and Stalinist periods and looks at potential biological-demographic explanations.

Internal Relations Ethnic Stratification

As a multi-ethnic society, the Soviet Union and now, Russia and many of the Newly Independent States, faced and face many of the same internal conflicts as many developing nations trying to integrate various groups into an integrated system. While there are too many ethnic groups to study in the country in this course, to understand the complexity of interethnic relations Oust to do so in a superficial way would require another complete course) it is interesting to look at the models of ethnic relations in pluralist societies to see how they fit in the Soviet case. It is also interesting to consider the dependency and center/periphery models used to describe first world-third world relations in capitalist countries, to see how the model might work in Russia or the former Soviet Union (a potential case of intemal colonialism.)

Social Structure

The segment on social structure touches on the theoretical issues of how to define it (given that "class" has a different meaning and manifestation in the USSR than in the U.S.) and whether it is inevitable for maintaining a social order (doing a critical reading of Marx's The Communist Manifesto.) Works on the Soviet Union than explain the nomenklatura system and the existence of various social classes.

Socialization and Education

The Workplace Economic Administration

The Home Male Female Relationships and Family

Political System

Justice System and Criminality

Each of these sections is somewhat more informative than theoretical. Where possible, I have tried to find some Russian theory which explains other potential alternatives for types of structures (different educational approaches, different types of workplace management or organization) which have a basis in Soviet thought even though they do not reflect the reality of the current system. Again, there is an emphasis in these weeks of the course on measurement issues -how to do good social science when looking at these particularized areas -- as well as on the use of anthropology as cultural critique (pushing students to look at other methods of social organization which are possible in industrial societies.)

Social Problems Social Pathology

Although a category of social "problems" or "pathology" implies that certain cultural phenomena (alcoholism, delinquency, crime) can or should be eliminated from a culture and are not an integral part of it, is conclusory or judgmental, such phenomena are important aspects of the Soviet system and merit special attention.

Television and Media

There is a tradition of recent scholarship in the U.S., attributing cultural change to new forms of media -- television and computers -- both through content analysis (propagandizing) and neurological effect. Propaganda as a tool of social change has always been an important element of the Soviet system. The effect of the recent spread of television on the Soviet Union is as yet a relatively unexplored phenomenon.

Rural Russia

As a counterpoint to the study of the cities of Russia, it is important to look at the rural areas and their relation to the city, both as part of the economic system and as a source of migration and two directional diffusion of values.

Religion and Leisure

Cultural Symbols

Not only is the relation of cultural symbols and ideas to social activity an important anthropological issue, but the tradition of Russian literature is itself an intrinsically beautiful form of creation, expression and meaning revealing not only Soviet thought, but basic human conflicts and ideals.

Soviet View of Anthropology (Ethnology)

For the serious student interested in conducting anthropological field work in the former Soviet Union and engaging in productive exchanges with colleagues, this section of the course includes a short survey of trends in field work in the former Soviet Union. For those without a professional interest, this section provides a short case study on the production and transmission of new knowledge in Soviet Institutes of higher learning; useful in the context of theoretical materials on the production and exclusivity of certain knowledge in the U.S. in the "Controllers of Access/Information Filters" section at the beginning of the course.

Topics

1. Theory:

Overview

Models of Soviet Society and Histga (General)/Goals of Models

Soviet /Russian-

Tolstoy, Leo, War and Peace (epilogue)

Bell, Daniel, "Ten Theories in Search of Reality: The Prediction of Soviet Behavior," The End of Ideology, 1960.

Inkeles, Alex, "Models and Issues in the Analysis of Soviet Society," Survey, July 1966, pages 3-18.

Theory -

Firth, Raymond, "Some Principles of Social Organization," Essays on Social

Organization and Values, 195 1.

Alrnond, Gabriel, "The Return to the State," American Political Science Review 82: 3, September 1988, pages 853 - 901, and critiques.

Doing Anthropology of the Soviet Union - Theory

Barry, Donald D., and Carol Bamer-Barry, Contemporary Soviet Politics, Chapter 15, Prentice Hall, New Jersey, 1982.

Nader, Laura, "Up the Anthropologist: Perspectives Gained from Studying Up," Reinventing Anthropology, Pantheon Books, New York. Custine, Marquis de, Journey For Our Time, 1839, translated by Phyllis Penn Kohler, Pefligrini and Cudahy, New York, 195 1.

Mead, Margaret, Soviet Attitudes Toward Authority: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Problems of Soviet Character, Rand Corporation, 1971. Fainsod, Merle, Smolensk Under Soviet Rule,

Controllers of Access/ Information Filters Cold War

Theory

Meyer, Alfred G., Paper Delivered at AAASS Conference, Fall 1990

Mills, C. Wright, The Power Elite, Oxford University Press, 1956.

Mills, C. Wright, The Sociological Imagination, Oxford U. Press, London, 1959. Domhoff, William, Hilher Circles,

Blake, Robert, and Jane Srygley Mouton, "Comprehension of Own and Out group Positions under Inter-group Competition, Journal of Conflict Resolution 1961, 5: 304 - 310.

History

Davies, Joseph, Ambassador to Moscow,Life Magazine, 1943

More Recent

Hough, Jerry, The Soviet Union and Social Science Theory, Harvard University Press, 1977, pages 1 - 10.

Atkinson, Dorothy, "Soviet and Eastern European Studies in the United States,Slavic Review, Fall 1988.

Elen Schrecker, No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities, Oxford University Press, 1986.

Packard, Vance, The Naked Society, David McKay Company, 1964, Chapter 7.

Models in Detail

Seelcin L- Strategies or Finding "National Character Traits"

Keenan, Edward, "Muscovite Political Folkways," The Russian Review, vol. 45,1986.

Solzhenitsyn,Alexander, "Misconceptions About Russia," Foreign Affairs, Spring 1980.

Brzezhinski, Zbigniew, "Soviet Politics: From the Future to the Past," in Cocks, The Dynamics of Soviet Politics, 1976 or, alternately, "The Nature of the Soviet System," Slavic Review, 20:3:351-369.

Convergence The@ Industrial SociM

Theory (excerpts only)

Kerr, Clark, The Future of Industrial Societies: Convergence or Continuing Diversity?, Harvard U. Press, 1983.

Malinowski, Bronislaw, A Scientific Theory of C@, University of North Carolina Press, 1984.

Durkheim, Emile, The Division of Labor in Society: Study of the Organization of Higher Societies, 1893.

Whyte, William, The Organization Man, Doubleday Anchor, 1986.

Galbraith, John Kenneth, The New Industrial State, Houghton Mifflin, 1967.

Dimock, Marshall, Free Enterprise and the Administrative State, University of Alabama, 1951.

Yablonsky, h , Bobbs Merrill, 1972.

Bell, Daniel, "Technocracy and Politics," Survey, 16:1, Winter 1971.

Toffler, Al, The Third Wave, William Morrow and Co., 1980.

Orwell, George, Animal Farm (final chapter).

Soviet

Lempert, David, "Golem Ink: The Power of Trust," 1987

Rogers, Everett M., Diffusion and Innovations, Free Press, New York, 1983.

Sakharov, Andrei, "Progress, Coexistence and Intellectual Freedom,"

Sakharoy S@, p. 97 - 106.

Inkeles, Alex, and Raymond Bauer, The Soviet Citizen, 1959.

Meyer, Alfred G., "USSR Incorporated," Slavic Review, 20:3:369-376, 1961.

Granick, David, The Red Executive, Anchor Books, 1960.

Zaslavskaya, Ile Neo-Stalinist State,

Geography or Ethos

Theory/Ethos

Evans-Pritchard, E.E., The Nuer, Oxford U. Press, 1940.

Weber, Max, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Scribner, 1958 (1904).

Bell, Daniel, "The Post Industrial Society: the Evolution of an Idea," Survey, 17:2, Spring 1972, pages 102-168.

Rigby, T.H., "Stalin and the Mono-Organizational Society," in Robert Tucker, ed., Stalinism,

Walder, Andrew, Communist Neo-Traditionalism,

Geographic/Climactic/ Environmental Psychology Explanations

Holahan, Charles J., "Performance in Learning and Work Environments," Environmental Psychology, Random House, New York, 1982, pages 123 - 155.

Balzak, S.S., V.F. Vasyutin, and Y. G. Feigin, Economic Geography of the USSR, The MacMillan Company, New York, 1961 [1949.]

Stalinist Periods

Davies, James, "Toward a Theory of Revolution," American Sociopolitical Review, 6 (1), p. 5-19, February 1962.

Gurr, Ted Robert, Why Men Rebel, Princeton U. Press, 1970.

Walliman, Isidor, and George Zito, "Cohort Size and Youthful Protest," Youth and SociM, 16:1, p. 67 - 81, 1984.

Barth, F., "Introduction," Ethnic Groups and Boundaries, p. 9-38, 1969.

Internal Relations/ Ethnic Stratification - Internal Colonialism* Social Enp-i

Theory

Gunder Frank, Andre, Doendence and Underdevelopment: Latin America's Political Economy, 1972.

Wallerstein, Immanuel, "An Historical Perspective: The Emergence of the New Economic Order," The Capitalist World Economy, Cambridge U. Press, 1979.

Marx, Karl, "Progressive Production of Relative Overpopulation or an Industrial Reserve Army: Modem Theory of Colonialization," Capital,
Lenin, V.I., Imperialism, excerpts.

Shibutani, Tamotsu, and Kian Kwan, Ethnic Stratification: A Comparative Approach, MacMillan Co., New York, 1965, pages 168 - 198.

Practice

Clem, Ralph S., "The Ethnic Dimension of the Soviet Union" in Parkhurst, Jerry, ed., and Michael Paul Sacks, Contemporary Soviet Society, 1980, Praeger Publishers, pages 11 - 62.

Kolarz, Walter, Russia and Her Colonies, George Philip and Son, Limited, 1952. intro. and pages I - 31.

Massell, Gregory, The Surrogate Proletariat: Moslem Women and Revolutionary Strategies,, 1974.
111, Aspects of Former Soviet Society and Culture

Social Structure

Theory

Marx, Karl, The Communist Manifesto,

Bames, J.A., Class and Committees in a Norwegian Parish, Human Rel 7:39-58.
Goffman, Irv, Asylums,

Netten, Norman, "Strategies of Adaptive Mobility in the Colombian-Ecuadorian Littoral," American Anthrolpologist, 7 1: 1, February 1969, p. 228-242.

Domhoff, William, Who Rules America Now?. 1983.

Reality

Voslensky, Michael, Nomenklatura,

Wilkes, David K, Klass: How Russians Really Live,

Amahik, A., Will the Soviet Union Survive Until 1984?, 1970.

Socialization and Education

Theory

Tolstoy, Leo, Yasnaya Polyana, 1853.

Geiger, Kent, "Changing Political Attitudes in Totalitarian Society," World P , January 1956, 8:2:187-205.

Sutton-Smith, Brian, Toys as Culture, Gardner Press, Inc., NY, 1986.

Practice

Bronfenbrenner, Two Worlds of Childhood, U.S. and USSR, Touchstone, 1970.

Barry and Barry, Contemporary Soviet Politics, Chapter 4.

The Walacel Economic Administration

Theory

Marx, Karl, "Alienated Labor," Collected Works,

Lenin, V.I., "Better Fewer, But Better," March 2, 1923, Collected Works, Volume 33.

Practice

Moskoff, William, Labour and Leisure in the Soviet Union, St. Martin's Press, 1984

Morton, Henry W., "The Contemporary Soviet City, (in Morton and Stewart, The Contemorary Soviet City), M.E. Sharpe, Inc., Armonk, N'Y 1984, p. 3-24.

Bater, James H., The Soviet City: Ideal and Reality, Edward Arnold, London,1980, pages 134-162.

Barry and Barry, CSP: Al, Chapter 10.

Domar, Evsey, "The Blind Men and the Elephant: An Essay on Isms,"

MIT Working Paper, Department of Economics, January 1988. Simis, Konstantin, USSR: 'ne Corrul2t Society: The Secret World of Soviet Capitalism, Simon & Schuster, NY, 1982.

The Home/ Male-Female Relations and Family

Juvelier, Peter, "Soviet Families," Survey, July 1966, pages 57 - 62.

Mamonova, Tatyana, ed., Women and Russia: Feminist Writings from the Soviet Union, Beacon Press, Boston, 1984, pages 1 - 50.

Stem, Philip, and August Stem, Sex in the USSR, translated by Mark Howson and Cary Ryan, The New York Times Book Co., New York, 1980.

The Political System

White, Stephen, "The USSR: Patterns of Autocracy and Industrialization," in Archie Brown and Jack Gray, Political Culture and Political Change in Communist States, Holmes & Meier Publishers, New York, 1979.

The Justice System and Criminality

Berman, Harold, and Donald D. Barry, "The Soviet Legal Profession," Harvard Law Review, November 1968, Vol. 82: 1, pages 1-41.

Feifer, George, Justice in Moscow, Simon & Schuster, New York, 1964.

Shelley, Louis M., "Urbanization and Crime: The Soviet Experience," pages 113-126 in Morton and Stuart,

Social Problems

Theory

Calhoun, John B., "Population Density and Social Pathology," Scientific American, Goodman, Paul, Growing lb Absurd. Vintage, 1956.

Soviet

Chalidge, Valery, Criminal Russia: Essays on Crime in the Soviet Union, Random House, New York, 1977, Chapter 1.

Powell, David E., "Alcoholism in the USSR," Survey, Winter 1971, 16: 1, pages 123 - 138.

Keller, Bill, "Russia's Restless Youth," New York Times Magazine July 24, 1987.

Television and Media/ Social Change

Theory

Handwerker, W. Penn, "Population, Power and Evolution,"

McLuhan, Marshall, Understanding the Media

Soviet

Hollander, Gayle Durham, Soviet Political Indoctrination: Developments in M-MMedia and Propaganda Since Stalin, Praeger Publishers, 1972.

Mickiewicz, Ellen Propper, Split Signals: Television and Politics,

Rural Russia

Laird, Roy D., and Ronald A. Francisco, "Observations on Rural Life in Soviet Russia," in Parkhurst, M, pages 138 - 154.

Kaplan, Cynthia S., "Use of Leisure Time and Changing Values in Rural Areas of the USSR," paper delivered at 1987 AAASS Convention, Boston, November 8, 1987.

Humphrey, 'Me Karl Marx Collective, Cambrige University Press, 1983.
Religion and Leisure

Starr, S. Frederick, Red and Hot: The Fate of Jazz in the Soviet Union, 1917-1980, Oxford University Press, New York, 1983, pages 316-321.

Cultural Symbols

Theory

Marx, Karl, Structure and Superstructure

Tolstoy, Leo, "What is Art?" Collected Works,

Hofstader, Douglas, G6del, Escher Bach, "Ant Fugue", "One to One Mapping,"

Literature (Brief excerpts)

Chulkov, M.D., The Comely Cook or the Adventures of a Debauched Woman,

Karamzin, N.M., Poor Liza

Pushkin, Tales of Belkin, History of Gorjaxina

Gogol, Nikolai, The Nose, The Overcoat, Dead Souls

Dostoyevski, Fyodor, The Idiot, The Double, Crime and Punishment, Notes from Underground,

Tolstoy, Ana Karenina, Kreutzer Sonata, Death of Ivan Illich

Goncharev, Ivan, Oblamov

Zamyatin, Eugene, We

Krylov, Fables

Mayakovsky, The Bedbug

Bulgakov, Mikhael, The Master and Margarita, Heart of a Dog

Abuladze, Repentance (Film)

Recent Films -- "We Can't Live Like This", "Inter-Girl", "Burnt by the Sun"
 

Book Announcement: Daily Life in a Crumbling Empire: The Absorption of Russia into the World Economy

David Lempert
George Washington University

Daily Life in a Crumbling Empire: The Absorption of Russia into the World Economy. 1,800 pages in 2 volumes, case bound. Cloth: ISBN: 0-88033-341-3. Columbia University Press. (136 S. Broadway, Irvington, NY 10533, Fax: 1-800-944-1844) $168.00 list.

This is the first comprehensive ethnography of urban Russia and its political, economic, legal, cultural, and social system and reforms. Modeled on de Tocqueville, Warner and Gibbon, it details the collapse of the Russian Empire and described the political social and cultural processes which have been underway this century in Russia. The work provides a model for other complex industrial societies, while providing insight into changes underway in Russia and the world economy.

Book Announcement: Kirin and Povrzanovic, eds., WAR, EXILE, EVERYDAY LIFE. CULTURAL PERSPECTIVES

Maja Povrzanivic
Zagreb Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Research

Renata Jambresic Kirin and Maja Povrzanovic, eds., WAR, EXILE, EVERYDAY LIFE. CULTURAL PERSPECTIVES, Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Research, Zagreb 1996, ISBN: 953-6020-07-6 ; 13,6 x 21,4 cm (paperback)

Following is the information on the new book published by the Zagreb Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Research:

WAR, EXILE, EVERYDAY LIFE. CULTURAL PERSPECTIVES includes articles based on the papers presented at the international conference "War, Exile, Everyday Life", Zagreb 1995. It reveals not only the scholarly and ethical concerns of the associates of the Zagreb Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Research who organized the conference, but also the growing academic interest among scholars throughout Europe in various cultural phenomena provoked by the war in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina. The book includes not only anthropological, but also other perspectives crucial in delineating a wider frame of refugees' political, legal, social, and cross-cultural positions. The authors' efforts are directed towards a better understanding of actual refugee situations in several European countries, and to the causes and consequences of the global humanitarian problem. They are also concerned with the focal position of ethical issues, political standpoints and methodological contingencies encapsulated in the modes of ethnographic representation of the lived experience beyond the portrayals of refugees used in the public sphere. We hope to contribute to the debate on research methods and anthropological authority as well as to show that - when it comes to the hardships and perplexities of everyday life in exile - neither research nor activism benefit from being held separate.

INTRODUCTION

Maja POVRZANOVIC and Renata JAMBRESIC KIRIN (Zagreb):
Negotiating Identities? The Voices of Refugees between Experience and Representation

AID STRATEGIES THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS

Barbara E. HARRELL-BOND (Oxford):
Refugees and the Challenge of Reconstructing Communities through Aid

Paul STUBBS (Leeds):
Creative Negotiations. Concepts and Practice of Integration of Refugees, Displaced People and Local Communities in Croatia

Sanja MARTIC-BIOCINA (Zagreb):
Cross-Cultural Misunderstandings: Examples of Providing Health Services to Refugees from Bosnia-Herzegovina in the Netherlands

FACING DESPAIR BEYOND NARRATIVES

Mirna VELCIC-CANIVEZ (Lille):
Through the Eyes of the West: Intellectuals between War, Exile and the Press

Renata JAMBRESIC KIRIN (Zagreb):
Narrating War and Exile Experiences

Ines PRICA and Maja POVRZANOVIC (Zagreb):
Narratives of Refugee Children as the Ethnography of Maturing

MEMORY AND EXPERIENCE - PAST AND PRESENT

Pamela BALLINGER (Baltimore):
The Istrian Esodo: Silences and Presences in the Construction of Exodus

Natalija VRECER (Ljubljana):
The Lost Way of Life: The Experience of Refugee Children in Celje from 1992 to 1994

Ger DUIJZINGS (Amsterdam):
The Exodus of Letnica - Croatian Refugees from Kosovo in Western Slavonia. A Chronicle

Nives RITIG-BELJAK (Zagreb):
Croatian Exiles from Vojvodina: Between War Memories and War Experience

Marina PETRONOTI (Athens):
Greece as a Place for Refugees. An Anthropological Approach to Constraints Pertaining to Religious Practices

From Therapy to ART

Lada CALE FELDMAN (Zagreb):
Theatrical Metamorphoses: Turning Exile into a Fairy Tale

Kjell SKYLLSTAD (Oslo):
Music in Conflict Management - New Avenues for Research

Svanibor PETTAN (Zagreb):
Making the Refugee Experience Different: "Azra" and the Bosnians in Norway

Albinca PESEK (Ljubljana):
Music as a Tool to Help Refugee Children and Their Mothers: The Slovenian Case

Anne-Marie MIORNER WAGNER (Graz):
Overcoming Despair and Identity Crisis through Music and Dance

CHALLENGES FOR ANTHROPOLOGY

Dunja RIHTMAN-AUGUSTIN (Zagreb):
People Cheated by History Live on Both Banks of the Drina River

Ina-Maria GREVERUS (Frankfurt am Main):
Rethinking and Rewriting the Experience of a Conference on "War, Exile, Everyday Life"

Hermann BAUSINGER (Tubingen):
Concluding Remarks

Peter LOIZOS (London):
Perspective from an Earlier War

ORDERS: Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Research, Kralja Zvonimira 17, HR-10

000 Zagreb, P.O. Box 287, Croatia

Fax: +385 1 44 08 80, E-mail: institut@maief.ief.hr

PRICE: $ 17 + postage/handling costs: $ 4 (surface) or $ 8 (air mail)

A convenient way to pay is directly to: ZAGREBACKA BANKA DD, Zagreb account #: 3724042-7026

Book Review: Ethnography of European traditional cultures: Their role and perspectives in a multicultural world.

László Kürti
Eötvös Loránd University

Ethnography of European traditional cultures: Their role and perspectives in a multicultural world. European Seminar - Proceedings. Ed. E. Karpodini-Dimitriadi. Athens: Centre of Vocational Training - Institute of Cultural Studies of Europe and the Mediterranean, 1995. 305 pp. Figures, Plates, Photographs, Paper bound.

The chapters in this edited volume were all papers presented at the European Seminar, organized by the volume's editor, and held in Athens, Greece, in March 1-31, 1995. It is an exemplary volume for students and scholars alike for what an international seminar ought to be; how it should be structured, by relying on local as well as international experts; how a multicultural student body can be gathered; and, finally, how, with the financial assistance of the European Commission, material presented there should be edited for a successful volume. The volume is handsomely crafted, full with drawings, maps and photos, with most of the articles are printed in their original English version; three are, however, in French.

The book contains five separate thematic sections, each containing several chapters of meticulous and well-researched subjects. After the shorter introductory "Methodological Approaches," more specific issues emerge which could be of interest to European scholars and researchers alike. Titled "Cultural Identity: Cultural Heritage, Contemporary Life," this section contains fine descriptions of masked rituals in Greece (Karpodini-Dimitriadi, Ekaterinidis), music and dance (Loutzaki, Mavroeidis), costumes and ancient heritage (Tsaves, Kouria, Valsamaki), the role of nutrition (Polymerou-Kamilaki) and the meaning of Mount Athos, a holy Greek place of present-day monasticism (Lavas).

The third and fourth sections concerns with the definition of cultural heritage, both movable and intangible, and ask specific questions as to the current nature of museum management, safeguarding of archeological and local artifacts, and by what means legal uses may provide protection on an international level. Interestingly all authors in this section are Greeks, which reveals the seriousness with which Greek scholars approach this subject.

Three "western" organizations are discussed in detail which stand out specifically to creating a unified working method and legality in the protection of cultural heritage: the Council of Europe (D. Therond), the European Union (A. Bouratsis), and the UNESCO (A. Schina). In discussing the latter, the author provides a brief but faithful and useful advertisement of the European Centre for Traditional Culture (ECTC), which was in its formation during the time of the European Seminar, a nice gesture which is much appreciated.

The final section contains the papers given by the students who participated in the Athens seminar. Clearly, this volume functions best at this level: on the one hand, we are provided with glimpses of what European scholars are concerned with at this moment; and, by allowing the students to present their own materials in a written form, what the future generation of ethnologists, anthropologists, folklorists and musicologists will be in the coming decade on the other. There is no doubt in my mind that most of these chapters would be bettered detailed and analyzed if their approaches to their topic would have been benefiting from closer scholarly scrutiny. Yet, as they are, most of the chapters are much better than the average student paper one reads as seminar papers. This is so, no doubt, because of the editorial care which went into making this volume.

The book closes with a short section discussing the "Identity of the Participating Museums," seven Greek institutions which all were visited by the seminar participants. These vignettes are useful in highlighting what these museums have to offer to the visitors, but, at the same time, how they may be utilized for international educational purposes. I only hope that the European seminar will become a European institution of its own kind, with many more seminars to follow; moreover, that its proceedings will provide the solid foundation for the subsequent issues to come.

Music Review: "Bosnia: Echoes of an Endangered World", "King Ferus: Ferus Mustafov, Macedonian Wedding Soul Cooking", and "Gaida Orchestra: Bagpipe Music from the Rhodope Mountains"

Lynn Maners
Pima Community College/University of Arizona

"Bosnia: Echoes of an Endangered World" Music and Chant of the Bosnian Muslims." Smithsonian Folkways CD SF 40407

This CD is an excellent compilation of the musical performance, both religious and vernacular of the Muslim population of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Using both commercial sources and field recordings (from 1984-5), Ted Levin and Ankica Petrovic (the latter formerly of the University of Sarajevo's Music Faculty) illustrate a variety of Bosnian musical forms, both urban and rural. Field recordings (1989-90) by Mirjana Lausevic, (currently a graduate student at Wesleyan), also appear in this collection.

Tracks one and two are sevdalinkas, or love songs, and represent an urban Muslim musical style, based on a Turkish model, but modified by contact with Western musical practice. Track one, "Kad ja Podjoh..."(from a commercial recording) was and is practically the national anthem of Sarajevo, as it spoke of walking to Bembasa, a popular section of town. In my experience of listening to sevdalinkas, and their darker variant, the kara sevda, in pre-war Bosnia, sevdalinkas often contributed to the creation of an emotional tone called ceiff signifying a state of relaxed intimacy.

Tracks three and four represent two popular rural musical styles found in northern Bosnia, that of the sargija (long necked lute) and violin duet, performed in relatively close musical intervals and zurna (a double reeded instrument) and davul (drum) ensembles.

Tracks six and seven are typical Bosnian gangas, sung respectively by men and women. Ganga are considered as the most typical form of unaccompanied mountain music and are characterized by a loud, almost shouted performance and are typically melismatic (more than one note per syllable).

Tracks seven illustrates an evolving musical style called becarac, which is sung by both men and women. Incorporating elements of both Western and Eastern practice, the becarac in this recording opens like a ganga by a single singer who is then joined on the last word of the song by an Eastern influenced polyphony.

Track eight returns to the sevdalinka form for a lovely unaccompanied performance of "II' je vedro, il' oblacno" ("Is it clear or cloudy?")

Tracks nine through eleven represent the Muslim religious experience in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Track nine is the ezan, or call to prayer, while tracks ten and eleven are chanted excerpts from zikrs, or Sufi religious rites, in Bosnian dervish orders.

The final selections on this CD, tracks twelve through fourteen return us once again to that musical form most associated with Bosnia and Herzegovina, the sevdalinka. Track twelve, "Saraieveski Pocetak/Sarhos Aljo", is a remnant of an older urban style in which the singer is accompanied on saz, a larger version of the more rural oriented sargija. The song itself is preceded by a long instrumental introduction which sets the emotional tone for the song to follow. This introduction may be a reflection of the Turkish musical practice in which the makam, or scale, in which the song is to be performed is established. Track thirteen is a very commercialized, studio recorded version of a sevdalinka, here accompanied by accordion-the instrument ethnomusicologists love to hate for its habit of displacing traditional instruments. The final track, ""Voljeli se Mujo I Nizama" ("Mujo and Nizama fell in love") returns to traditional instrumentation, albeit studio recorded, and a traditional theme, albeit shortened from its vernacular performance.

In summation: I highly recommend this CD for those seeking a broad overview of Bosnian Muslim musical practice. While I might have chosen different selections or performers (notably, I prefer Himzo Polovina's interpretation of "Kad ja Podjoh..."over that of Nada Mamula's used here), most styles and genres are well represented in this collection. The CD is also accompanied by a useful booklet on Bosnian history and musical practice by Levin and Petrovic.

"King Ferus: Ferus Mustafov, Macedonian Wedding Soul Cooking" Ace/GlobeStyle CD# CDORBD 089

From a reviewer's or even casual listener's point of view, this CD presents an interesting challenge; the music is so compelling that it's almost impossible to sit still and simply listen to it! If you play this CD for a class as an example of Macedonian Gypsy wedding music (although some tunes are pop or jazz), you'd better be prepared to teach them to cocek, because they won't be able to sit still. (Cocek is generally an up tempo melody in asymmetrical meter, typically 9/8 or 9/16 and is associated with the Rom or Gypsy population of former Yugoslavia and especially Macedonia).

Ferus Mustafov is an extremely talented musician on saxophone and clarinet and brings this talent, along with those of other musicians, to interpretations of traditional pieces, such as his track five,, "Staro Cunovo O.-o/Velesko,Oro" whose roots in the traditional dance tune "Cupurlika" most folk dancers will recognize, likewise track seven "Romankso Gajda" is recognizably the folk dance tune "Ravno Oro".

Many of the other cuts on this CD exemplify the cultural borrowing from many regions and peoples both inside and outside Macedonia. Notable in this instance are track six ' "Turska Igra" in a style known as Arabesk, track 11 "Dada Sali" for its Albanian influence, and track 14 for its Bulgarian influenced "Kocovo Oro". Other tracks reveal a much stronger pop and jazz influence and are not rearrangements of traditional tunes.

In summation: a wonderful piece of modern Balkan popular dance music, with a strong influence from both indigenous jazz and contemporary musical practices. I wouldn't recommend it to those seeking traditional Macedonian Gypsy music, but it does demonstrate the viability and adaptability of some traditional forms of Balkan folk music. The liner notes for this CD are also interesting and descriptive. Those interested in more Balkan jazz are encouraged to seek out the CDs of Ivo Papasov, notably "Balkanology" on Rykodisc.

"Gaida Orchestra: Bagpipe Music from the Rhodope Mountains" JVC CD # VICG 5224

Part of the "World Sounds" series from Japanese JVC (the liner notes are in Japanese and English) this "Bulgaria" collection will answer the musical question for you-just what is that instrument playing over the opening credits of the syndicated, and silly but fun television series, "Xena, Warrior Princess"? It is of course, a gaida or folk bagpipe from Bulgaria. As most readers of this journal will be aware, some form of the single drone, single chanter bagpipe is found almost everywhere in our region of study, from the dudy of Poland and Hungary to the cimpoi of Romania and the gaida of (former) Yugoslavia, Macedonia, Albania, Bulgaria and Greece.

This CD is a collection of one specific type of gaida music, that of the kaba (low) ga-ida from the Rhodope mountains in Western Bulgaria. Tuned lower than its smaller brother the Thracian gaida which if often used to accompany dancing, the kaba gaida is occasionally featured in mass unison ensemble playing ( the so-called sto gaidi, or 100 gaidas-though no more than 18 kaba gaidas are heard performing in ensemble on this recording) or used as a single instrument in accompanying singers.

The fourteen tracks on this CD were recorded for Japanese JVC by members of youth and a "veteran"' ensembles from villages in the region around Smolyen in the Rhodopes. Presented are examples of the various performance forms in which kaba gaida is found, the solo (two examples), duo (two examples), solo accompaniment of a singer (three examples) and mass performance (seven examples). One tune is presented by both the youth and veteran ensembles.

As a somewhat lapsed kaba gaida player myself, I found this CD a useful reminder of the complex aesthetics of the kaba gaida, especially when used as an instrument to accompany a female singer. Although somewhat hampered by fairly minimal liner notes, there is enough information presented to act as a useful introduction to this specific variant of a widely practiced Eastern European musical tradition. In summation: I recommend this CD to those who might wonder if there are more than just "mysterious voices" coming from Bulgaria.

Conference Report: Ideology in Balkan Anthropological Research.

Paul Nixon
University of Cambridge

Ideology in Balkan Anthropological Research. Conference of the Association for Balkan Anthropology. August 29 - 31, 1996, Sofia - Bankya, Hotel Zeravna. Director: Asen Balikci, assisted by Marianna Draganova and Radoslava Geneva. Sponsors: Wenner-Gren Foundation (New York), Open Society (Sofia), Goethe Institute (Sofia), American Cultural Center (Sofia), Oesterreichisches Ost- und Siidosteuropa-Institut (Vienna and Sofia), Canadian Cooperation Fund.

Professor Balikci's pioneering Association for Balkan Anthropology is receiving growing support in difficult circumstances. As convenor of a stimulating conference, he and his capable assistants are to be congratulated. They deserved the success their hard work brought. Through their efforts, several scores of participants gathered to debate the challenge of social-scientific research, past, present and future, across the greater Balkan region, Underlying questions were: What paths might social scientific inquiry take in the coming years? What are the options? How best can we draw upon regional antecedents, neglected intellectual heritages in all their shades?

My fourth opportunity to engage with Bulgarian specialists at home, on this occasion I enjoyed the involved presence of many younger scholars. Conversely, I register my regret at a general absence of staff from Sofia's powerful Institutes. Why did elder statesmen not respond to the call for papers - and personal invitations - addressing so important a topic as ideology in regional research? What could be more timely, informative and constructive? Their absence was indeed our loss; there were many occasions when State Ethnologists could have added fruitfully to discussions focused upon ethnographic work carried out at the behest of Bulgaria's deposed ruling establishment. Forty years of monopolistic control, Party domination of research findings, rigid interpretation of moral structures past and present, merits informed analysis especially from those who survived the preemptive system and its collapse. Layers of Western assumption and indiscriminate blame do not take us very far in understanding how things got to be as once they were, and how they have come to be what they now are. All anthropologists could have learned from Academicians prepared to address their former involvements. Manipulation of folklore, inculcation of socialist patriotism, de-religionized ethnography and redesigned customary rituals imposed severe strains on many research staff as well as Bulgarians at large, as we heard several times at this meeting; and not least among those who with difficulty occasionally defied Cultural Management strategies by exploring empirical data from standpoints other than state-ideals of Marxism vs. Capitalism which dominated the Cold War period for everyone, East and West.

Recovery from decades of theoretical restriction constituted a regular talking point during three days of tightly-packed presentations when over forty papers were scheduled for delivery. As emerged with great poignancy in several exchanges, like citizens of many neighboring countries, Bulgarians face frightening problems in the 1990s; however, dogmatic research and teaching programs and the severe command-and-obedience structures they served are not recalled with any nostalgia. I witnessed one Stalinist outburst only, its proponent vociferously defending centralist cultural designs, 'scientific' banishment of 'bad old ways', furtherance of a fixed conception of society rather than the study of developing social relations with all their untidy contentions. From others there was a healthy wish to understand national and transnational processes which had generated dogmatic pasts and coercive administration. Given encouragement - and economic survival which allows time for calm reflection - East European sociological enterprise may get beyond simply debunking variants of national image-making and Leninist dreams, discredited as hard-line tactics now are. Understanding how one's past and present has been shaped is an important part of personal, professional and national self-knowledge.

Delegates with plenty to say both in and out of study sessions represented Albania, Australia, Austria, Britain, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Romania, Serbia, Sweden, Switzerland and the United States. Reflexive observations were offered by several Westerners who have undertaken extensive fieldwork in southeastern Europe. Sadly, a group of Macedonians, its members set to deliver timely material on area tensions, was not allowed to travel to Sofia. Likewise, specialists from a few regions of former Yugoslavia sent word to say that they would not attend any 'Balkan' conference: they regard the appellation as humiliating, hopelessly compromised in political discourse. Everyone's loss, once again. That said, I perceived a broad concern of scholars from former Communist countries to develop research paradigms which illuminate changing social relations and new potentials for jealousy, belligerent nationalism or inter-group conflict, to explore research methods which penetrate philosophical ideals and help explain shattered employment expectations, which recognize the advance of global interdependency among other empirical realities, which recognize the impact of communication by electronic media answerable to no government. For many, these things take some getting used to; their processes need to be studied by teams of anthropologists.

In parallel, Western conferees could occasionally appear less earth-bound when they expressed postulates smacking of Marxist idealism untempered by empirical experience; or when, in relativist here-and-now mode, they presumed their audience conversant with the latest 'post-modern' confabulations. Terminological and conceptual niceties are evidently important to skilled practitioners but it was occasionally sobering to hear the unbedazzled of Eastern Europe submit that basically we are (or should be) talking about dynamic aspects of an inexorable general trend: speeded-up social convergence and structural differentiation, diminishing contrasts and increasing varieties of lifestyle as more people are linked to each other in denser chains of interdependence which nowadays include Balkan villagers, the World Bank, multinational companies, the European Union, NATO, Human Rights agencies and consciousness-raising pressure-groups. Life is not so calculable as once it seemed to those who ruled. Structures have changed, as have people's expectations. The hope is that anthropologists will not get arrested by their own wish-driven idealism or excessive description of brightly-colored butterflies (to paraphrase Edmund Leach), which can easily obscure the absence of inquiry into power-tussles which are taking place whether anyone likes them or not. It was certainly recognized that the growing tempo of technological and social adaptation in south-eastern Europe makes inter-generational differences more pronounced; greater pressure now bears on the individual who has to be capable of meeting new challenges, taking on new role definitions, adapting to new functional identities and perhaps irretrievable loss of former status. Current shifts are extremely fast, radical, dramatic, hectic. Many individuals have not had time to get used to fundamental upheavals, which are often accompanied by stress and anxiety. A citizenry psychologically unprepared for legal-institutional and socioeconomic transformations on such a scale easily perceives change in general as negative and threatening.

Anthropological research can be of service here. We can report suffering wherever it is found so that others may hopefully plan for a better future; we can monitor the pace at which flexible individual identity may perhaps emerge from once-stable social identity; we can help assess whether learned helplessness is to any extent engulfing the potential for self direction; we can report the pace at which those who of late enjoyed special group privileges make room for or block the quest for individual rights as Bulgarians and neighboring peoples assert and redefine their conception of self. Role conflicts there will be as fresh standards develop and are unevenly taken into personal make-up and public sentiment. These processes merit impartial ongoing study, a huge challenge to us all. The problem is not simply to report which side is 'wrong' and which side is 'right' but to analyze structural characteristics of developing relationships so that we all may understand them better.

A substantial amount of time was devoted to ethnographers and geographers of the Balkan peninsula, important map makers of an earlier generation such as Jovan Cvijic, Dinko Tomasic, Milan Ü ufflay, Baltazar Bogi¥ i ¦ , Slobodan Jovanovic. North of the Danube, Romulus Viua and other specialists from Cluj were acknowledged for their achievements, as was the outstanding Romanian school of sociology led by Dimitrie Gusti and many colleagues until house arrests, exiles, labor camps and deaths strangled an internationally-respected enterprise soon after the Communist takeover in the late 1940s. By extension, outside of formal sessions, opportunity was taken to discuss important 1930s-40s documentation by American scholars such as Philip Moseley, Charles Ellwood and Joseph Roucek; these writers, neglected today, drew attention to serious work being done and waiting to be done in Balkan territories.

Nineteenth century legacies of state-making and regional historiography received a great deal of attention in numerous presentations, as did the influence of German folkloristics. Long-run patterns of settlement, regional sentiment and customary celebration were discussed with the benefit of detailed local knowledge. Problems faced by minority and migratory groups were identified, as were challenges faced by all researchers in reporting the relationships of villages with bigger and bigger units of administration in increasingly complex societies; and changing family structures in zones of Europe where most people have lived on the land and worked close to their homes until very recent times.

Good things to come? I hope so. Asen Balikci's wider project was furthered by the appointment of an international steering committee, by its commitment to publish a regular newsletter, an undertaking to hold next year's conference in Bucharest, and consolidation of collegial operations with the Oesterreichisches Ost- und Sudosteuropa-Institut at Vienna. Congratulations are in order once more. Further information may be obtained from P.O. Box 175, Sofia 1000, Bulgaria.

Call For Papers: the first conference of the Association of Anthropology of the Balkans (AAB), September 1997

After its first meeting in Bankya (Bulgaria) in 1995, the AAB organizes its first conference in Bucharest (Rumania), 4-7 September 1997. The main theme of the AAB conference is Identity, migration and boundaries in the Balkans .

The intention of the conference is to bring together a large number of scholars doing thematic and/or regional field work in Balkan countries in order to provide a better understanding of this 'mythical" region as well as a better cooperation between (in and out-side) anthropologists involved in its study.

Proposed sections of the conference:

• plenary sessions (invited lectures)
• work-shops proposed and organized by participants
• fieldwork reports(posters section)
• meetings 4 la carte (small informal meetings organized by request during the conference)
• video section

Call for papers

We invite papers and anthropological films based on Balkan field work. Please let us know by 31 May if you intend to present a paper, a poster, a film or to organize a work-shop (in this case, please let us know the topic of the work-shop as well as the name of at least five scholars who confirmed their interest in participation).

A second letter with more details will be sent during the month of June 1997 to all those who acknowledged their intention to participate at the AAB conference.

Please send all correspondence to:

VINTILA MIHAILESCU

Str. Sf Elefterie 22

76211 Bucharest (RUMANIA)