Volume1•Number1•November2011
2239-5725
Editor:
Ilka Thiessen (Vancouver Island University, Canada)
Assistant Editor:
Goran Janev (Max-Planck Institute, Goettingen,
Germany)
Scientific Board:
Michael Fischer (University of Kent, UK)
Christian Giordano (University of Fribourg,
Switzerland)
John Gledhill (University of Manchester, UK)
Shahram Khosravi (Stockholm University, Sweden)
Jerome Krase (Brooklyn College, City University, New
York, USA)
Alena Ledeneva (School of Slavonic and EastEuropean
Studies, UCL, UK)
Gustavo Lins Ribeiro (University of Brasilia, Brazil)
Fernando Monge (UNED, Spain)
Italo Pardo (University of Kent, UK)
Jonathan Parry (LSE, UK)
Giuliana B. Prato (University of Kent, UK)
Ljupcho S. Riesteski (Sts Cyril and Methodius
University, Skopje, Macedonia)
Andrew Mugsy Spiegel (University of Cape Town,
South Africa)
Davide Torsello (University of Bergamo, Italy)
Joan Weibel-Orlando (University of Southern
California, USA)
Alex Weingrod (Ben Gurion University, Israel)
Copyright © 2011 Urbanities
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products advertised.
Urbanities is the Journal of the IUAES Commission on
Urban Anthropology.
The Commission on Urban Anthropology (CUA) is a
non-profit association. It was founded in 1982 and
acquired full affiliated status within the IUAES
(International Union of Anthropological and
Ethnological Sciences) at the XI ICAES, held in
Vancouver in 1983. The CUA’s major goals are: 1) To
organize international scientific symposia; 2) To
encourage networking among worldwide scholars with
and interest in urban research; 3) To encourage
regional working groups.
For more information, or to become a member of the
CUA, please visit: http://urban.anthroweb.net
Graphic design: Carmine De Falco & Tonino Ferro
Front cover copyrights:
Bronze Sun © 1997 Lello Esposito
Cityscape © 2011 G.B. Prato
Table of Contents
Welcome Letter from the Chair - Why the CUA Journal, Urbanities 4
Giuliana B. Prato
Editorial - Inaugural Issue: Urbanities 1 6
Ilka Thiessen
Articles
An Ethnography of Land Market in Albania’s Post-Socialist Informal Areas 11
Nebi Bardhoshi
Olympicization: Growing for Gold 21
Iain Lindsey
YouTube and the Urban Experience Embodied 32
Lesley Braun
The Pastoral, Nostalgia, and Political Power in Leipzig, Germany 43
Amitai Touval
Environmental Activism, Corruption and Local Responses to the
EU Enlargement: Case Studies from Eastern and Western Europe 54
Davide Torsello
Guest Article
After the Murdoch Affair: A Better Ethics? 60
Alfonso Ruffo
Research Report
Immigrant Women and Entrepreneurship in Greece 66
Marina Petronoti
Review Article
Multiculturalism: Theoretical Challenges from Anthropology 70
Rosemary Harris.
Book Review
I. Pardo and G.B. Prato (eds), Citizenship and the Legitimacy of Governance:
Anthropology in the Mediterranean Region. Farnham: Ashgate. 2010. 76
Wolfgang Kaltenbacher.
Completed Doctoral Dissertations
Memory, Oblivion and Imaginary Realms. Study of two Centres of the Communist Memory
in East Berlin: The Palace of the Republic and the Stasi Museum. 79
Marie Hocquet
Making Video Games and Microcomputers a Cultural Heritage – Online and Offline
Ethnography of a Hobbist Community. 80
Jean-Baptiste Clais
Modernization and Change in China: Anthropological and Social Stakes: The Renovation of
the Residential Districts lived by a Community of Dwellers in Harbin. 81
Kamel Labdouni.
Conference Report
Report on the 2011 CUA Conference, Market vs Society? Human Principles
and Economic Rational in Changing Times 82
Manos Spyridakis
Forthcoming Events 84
Urbanities, Vol. 1 · No 1 · November 2011
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A Welcome Letter from the Chair – Why the CUA Journal, Urbanities
The project of establishing a journal of the Commission on Urban Anthropology was discussed at
the CUA Business Meeting during the Commission’s 2010 Annual Conference in Gioiosa Marea,
Sicily. Senior scholars who attended that meeting paid tribute to the CUA’s many
accomplishments; among them, the expansion of the international network of scholars actively
engaged in urban research, the publication of the Newsletter – later replaced by the Bulletin – the
establishment of the website, the successful Conferences and Symposia, some resulting in the
publication of edited volumes, and the many academic events to which the CUA, or its members,
had contributed. It was also felt, however, that the Commission could do more to bring out the
relevance of urban research to the discipline as a whole, as well as to the broader society. Italo
Pardo suggested the establishment of an ‘interactive’ Journal; that is, an academic peer-reviewed
journal organized in such a way as to offer both a forum for analysis and debate among young and
established scholars and a platform for anthropologists to communicate and share their research
findings with the general public, particularly with professionals who operate outside academia and
are involved in key decision-making processes that directly affect people’s lives. The Journal
would, therefore, carry short articles and other contributions in order to explore new trends in urban
anthropology, thus promoting critical scholarship in international anthropology while highlighting
the relevance of anthropological urban research in understanding the social, cultural, political,
economic and environmental changes of today’s world.
The suggestion was enthusiastically received by the meeting, though all were well aware that
establishing a journal raised many practical issues with which the Commission had to cope. As
Jonathan Parry pointed out, the CUA did not have a budget. Having the CUA no paid membership,
all its initiatives have been made possible by the active involvement of its members in seeking
funds, particularly for the organization of conferences and seminars. Joan Weibel Orlando
suggested that the Journal could be on-line, at least at an initial stage. The pros and cons, and the
actual implementation of the project, were carefully discussed, and useful suggestions were made
about international scholars who might be interested in joining the Journal’s Scientific Committee.
It was also agreed that Ilka Thiessen – who had efficiently edited the CUA’s Bulletin over the past
two years – should be asked to take up the Editorship of the Journal. We left with the feeling that
establishing such a Journal would not be easy, but could be done.
Urbanities, Vol. 1 · No 1 · November 2011
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Ilka Thiessen was both enthusiastic about the new Journal and somewhat timid about serving as its
Editor; the professional quality of the first issue testifies to the fact that such timidity was wholly
unjustified. Dr Thiessen suggested the title Urbanities, which was later adopted for the Journal.
Urbanities’ cover image intends to convey an informed positive message; it is a modern,
multifaceted cityscape dominated by an enlightening sun – reproduced from a bronze sculpture by
Lello Esposito. The centre of this sun is an egg, representing fertility, rebirth and, of course,
knowledge.
Following several discussions and proposals, an agreement was reached with Il Denaro Group, an
independent Publishing Company based in Italy that, among other initiatives, promotes non-profit
the pursuit of cultural and economic development goals. Their technical team have efficiently
designed the website and the format of the Journal. We owe them a debt of gratitude.
I would like to acknowledge the engaged collaboration of the CUA members who have contributed
their ideas and suggestions, of the many colleagues who have supported us in this endeavour both
joining the Scientific Committee and in other, complex ways and of all the people who have freely
given their time and expertise to help bring this project to life.
I wish Urbanities well in developing as a forum for intellectual debate and the exchange of ideas,
and as a useful research tool. I hope that the international community of scholars engaged in urban
anthropological research will support this endeavour.
Giuliana B. Prato
Chair, IUAES Commission on Urban Anthropology
Urbanities, Vol. 1 · No 1 · November 2011
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Editorial
Inaugural Issue: Urbanities 1
In recent years urbanity as a concept has gained vigour, importance and interest, moving away
from locality as a fixed place of identity. Social scientists have analysed urban localities as places
of strife, destruction of social relations and isolation, or as melting pots of different cultures. For
the most part, however, anthropologists shied away from such localities and urban issues,
regarding them as the traditional field of sociology. Anthropologists were to focus their efforts on
the exotic, the ‘unknown’. When I first suggested, in my Ph.D. proposal, to study the life of a
small group of female electrical engineers in the city of Skopje, Maurice Bloch, the head of my
anthropology department at LSE, bluntly said to me that a city, particularly a Western city, was
not a place where anthropologists did research; it was the prerogative of sociology.
Anthropology, with its emphasis on long-term qualitative ethnographic field research, could
only be practised in small, circumscribed places: that is, villages or tribal societies. It was only
with the support of Peter Loizos that I was allowed to go and carry out fieldwork in Macedonia.
He was interested in social change and international development and looked at dislocation and
political uncertainty, studying how his informants drew on their experience of war strategies in
developing their political and social relations. In my research I looked particularly at how
individual actors moved from a Yugoslavian identity to a new identity in the Republic of
Macedonia. I chose to apply participant observation as my main research method, which turned
out to be both possible and very useful, even in the multifaceted scenario of an urban setting such
as Skopje. My approach privileged qualitative as opposed to quantitative data, looking at the
interactions between social actors and the broader context of the Yugoslav War and the
establishment of the EU Maastricht Treaty in 1993. I was able to bring out the multitude of
economic, political and cultural connections my informants built around themselves and to study
how their lives were contextualized in the dynamic of war and in the creation of a nation-state
ideology. While my informants stressed their urbanity and EU identity, they now lived in a newly
established country where national processes drew on the rural and ethnic elements to create a
Nation-State based on a grand historical rural past; at the same time resenting the EU, and
especially its acceptance of Greece’s opposition to recognizing Macedonia’s national identity in
the EU. Today an ever-increasing number of holistic ethnographic studies are carried out in
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European cities using participant-observation and the collection of case material. In British Social
Anthropology, this trend was pioneered by Italo Pardo’s seminal work in Naples in the mid-
1980s.
The difficulties in identifying and delimiting the field of study in the city lies at the heart of
the discomfort some anthropologists continue to feel with urban research. Urbanities will
endeavour to address such difficulties and their implications with the aim of making
anthropology more comfortable with research not on ‘the city,’ but in ‘the city,’ envisaging
urbanity as a concept that engenders meaning well beyond the mere definition of space as
expressed by borders on a map. Urban space might create meaning for our informants; however,
as the articles in this journal show, such a meaning is not necessarily bound to specific spaces and
activities. As a concept, urbanity suggests distinctive means to express and give form to
expectations and needs that are shared anywhere in our global world, in New York as in Brasilia,
in Skopje as amongst the Merina of Madagascar.
Urbanities invites authors to engage with the concept of urbanity to demonstrate the
relationship between micro- and macro-level processes that link individual and collective agency
to the broader social system. The contributions that we seek should, therefore, contextualize
social agency, urbanity and history.
This Journal is not interested in categorical assumptions, or in looking at changes
associated with globalization and democratization through a dualistic and moralistic stance – the
urban standing for the familiar, exploitation and colonization; the rural for the exotic and the
purity of an untainted past. Urbanities encourages, instead, a more differentiated approach. The
contributors to this first issue recognise the complex ways in which urban life is transformed and
that such changes are not necessarily specific to given localities or to ideas of the exotic in the
familiar versus the familiar in the exotic. Locality has long been recognized as a contentious
concept in anthropology; the focus on urbanity highlights the tangled, unstable, shifting and alltoo-often
impromptu dynamics of power, as opposed to casting power and people as fixed in one
location. We can find the rural in the urban and the urban in rural locations. Is the distinction
between the rural and the urban still sustainable? Is the distinction between the exotic and the
familiar still useful? Do we not, perhaps, need to try to reach much further than what we have
been taught to see as the city proper, recognizing that urban life is not, nor can it be seen or
portrayed as fixed into a location, that it can be virtual space, sometimes even without a place?
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We need to take into account that urban life can be found in the virtual world of avatars,
Wikipedia and YouTube, as Lesley Braun so graphically show in this issue. These reflections
bring our analysis very far away from the diverse anthropological interest in urban research
initially stimulated by the Chicago and Manchester Schools, or in the opposition originally
expounded by mainstream British anthropologists.
Urbanities’ objective is to step away from such straitjackets. Instead, we need to ask such
questions as, for example, does inequality of globalisation reinforce the interdependence of rural
and urban communities? Since anthropologists will be reluctant to give up the strict microdemarcation
of the ‘people’ whom they study, which is distinctive of research in ‘developed’
societies, Urbanities may play a leading role in understanding ‘the urban’ as a field for the
detailed ethnographic study of critical, and often ignored, aspects of our 21st
century world.
Urbanities will encourage reflection on the vantage point that Urban Anthropology can provide
in understanding the complexity of today’s, greatly and ever increasingly urbanized, world.
There are questions that urban anthropology needs to address. Can we define urbanity if we
include virtual space in our definition? Is the city always, or merely, a place of oppression,
neglect and misery, a world of corruption and endless consumerism? Can it, instead, be
something marvellous, beautiful, despite pollution, urban sprawl and the deterioration of the built
environment? The bizarre and the mundane, the mystical and the corrupt can be found in any
form of associated life; none is idiosyncratically urban.
The entwinement of past and present rural-urban and urban-rural migrations linked to
changes associated with globalization and democratization has reinforced the interdependence of
rural and urban communities. This Journal will encourage reflection on the spatial multiplicity of
urbanity as a way to approach difference and power. The articles published in this issue take on
such a theoretical challenge discussing, among other things, website broadcasting and
transnational complicities and conspiracies. Ruffo’s article on the Murdoch affair has been
included, as a special contribution by a non-anthropologist, because it addresses this complex
issues in the media, a problem all anthropologists face in the preparation and execution of their
field research and in writing up their material. Ruffo’s article eminently helps to point out the
intertwinement of academic study and the professional world, a key element in researching and
discussing urbanity.
The notion of land as a means to ensure solidity, as found in traditional anthropological
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theory on rural or small-scale societies is a theory that Urbanities will question. Bardhoshi’s
article encourage the reader to reflect on the creation of informal areas in the quest to secure
legitimacy, which does not suggest fluidity versus solidity, but solid fluidity or the fluid solidity
of space. Bardhoshi points out that the state no longer seems to be seen as a ‘reified’ power but as
a solid human with a face and a name. As I have mentioned, Braun’s article looks at the
‘YouTube phenomenon’ and at the possibility that it offers to embody urbanism in the most
remote places. Lindsey’s article looks at a phenomenon that he calls ‘Olympicisation’, offering
an examination of the social implications of an Olympic-related urban regeneration. He argues
that the Olympicisation of space focuses upon transforming and, subsequently, controlling a city.
Lindsey contends that Olympicisation needed community solidification during the bidding phase
and then required the dismantling of such a community during the delivery phase. In her research
report, Petronoti views transnational migration as instrumental in understanding the creation of a
Greek national identity based on the ideal of a solid and local Western lifestyle. Torsello helps us
to understand transnational institutions, such as the EU, and environmental organisations and
their interaction with local people and space. He addresses the challenges faced by the
sovereignty of the state’s policy-making and development plans under the broader influences of
neoliberal capitalism and global governance. He demonstrates how these influences, via direct
political intervention, lead to a decreasing mobilisation from below, which is often characterized
by personalised and informal strategies and by the transposition of public and private interests.
These contributions indicate progress in the study of urbanities, at the same time raising question
whether the urban-rural differentiation is more apparent than real, amongst many other very
current under-theorised and under-portrayed nodes of action. These concerns point to intensifying
disagreements about the utility of ‘the urban’ as a concept. The contributors offer a variety of
refreshing views which invites debate. Some seem prepared to discard ‘the urban’ as an analytical
notion, while others try to pin down the paradigm of urbanity and inequality.
The current challenge to anthropology and its holistic claim is to develop an understanding
of the macro processes that mark the context in which people live and operate according to
different but distinct micro processes. As Touval shows, a direct path to such an understanding is
to seek out the connecting links, real and symbolic, among the various aspects of the urban
system. I would advocate an analysis of symbols and actions that addresses the ways in which
they are used to separate or join individuals and groups. Petronoti alludes to these issues in her
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contribution. The point of departure for Urbanities is to acknowledge the multidimensional
character of urban life. One issue that requires debate is the urbanity of the anthropologists
themselves. I think it can be said that anthropologists introduce urbanity into the localities were
they carry out their research. We, as anthropologists, have come a long way from the idea of an
objective representation of the life ‘they’ live, widely acknowledging that our research is based
on the social encounters we have in ‘other’ spaces. We recognize that our research is subjective,
and that it is influenced by our own urbanity. The question is how can we acknowledge this in
our research?
We invite researchers to address the issue of urbanities as well as to acknowledge and
reflect on urbanities as they exist and are represented, in the fieldwork site and by the researchers
themselves.
Through field research, anthropologists acquire specific knowledge of the world of their
informants. We need to draw lessons from such knowledge, which should be reflected in the
critical analyses that we develop. The emphasis should always be on combining critical theory
with sound ethnographic evidence from the urbanities that we enter, live in and re-enter.
Urbanities will offer a platform for intellectual discussion and exchange of new ideas, as they are
developed through the work of junior and established anthropologists, as well as through doctoral
research, letters and comments. This Journal will endeavour to help to secure urbanity as a field
of anthropological investigation. I hope that Urbanities will serve anthropology as a generator of
in-depth, informed knowledge and stimulating thinking.
Ilka Thiessen, Editor
Announcement from the Editor
The first issue of Urbanities is being published too close to the established deadlines. Therefore,
it has been agreed to extend the next deadline for major contributions, such as articles and review
articles, to 30th
January 2012. Other contributions should be submitted by 30th
March 2012.
Urbanities, Vol. 1 · No 1 · November 2011
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An Ethnography of Land Market in Albania’s Post-Socialist Informal Areas.1
Nebi Bardhoshi
(Institute of Cultural Anthropology and Art Studies, Tirana)
nedeba@yahoo.com
This article analyses the creation of informal areas at the periphery of Tirana, Albania’s capital city. I argue that
these urban informal areas are sites of fluid uncertainties and appear to be the product of people’s distrust of the
state law. In post-Socialist Albania, the land market has operated in a ‘legal vacuum’ and has acquired legitimacy by
drawing on a system that has enabled the circulation of property as capital through adaptations of the local tradition
of customary law. In such a situation, while national processes may follow a neoliberal approach, what occurs at the
micro level would be more appropriately described as a ‘kanunisation of the free market’.
Key words: Albania, land market, informal areas, legitimacy.
Introduction
In its commonly accepted logic, neo-liberalism regards market exchange as an expression of
individual freedom to satisfy rationally given needs through selling and buying any kind of
commodity, from land to human labour. Referring to Hungary, Chris Hann has argued that the
process of de-collectivization in post-socialist settings brings out a number of competing
perspectives on the notion of property, especially the way in which people operate, manoeuvre
and use competing ideologies in order to legitimize their claims on land property (Hann 1993:
299-320; see also Scott 1998). The complexity and fluidity of post-socialist realities suggests that
there are no durable certainties. In such a scenario, the notion of land as subject of position plays
an important role in people’s lives as a mean to ensure solidity against the uncertain future
(Verdery 1996: 135).
Although the market of land in post-socialist Albanian is supposed to be open to the
international one, it seems that foreigner buyers are not only restricted by the ‘ethno-cratic’ legal
logic (see Vedery 1998) but also by the rules set by the Kanun law on land. In broad agreement
with the suggestion that in a ‘mobile world’ people deal with a very dynamic and plural legal set
up (see Benda-Beckmann F., Benda Beckmann K. & Griffiths 2004: 6, 7, 10), the following
ethnography shows how a contemporary version of Kanun law has shaped the land market
1
I would like to thank Giuliana Prato (University of Kent, UK) and Olsi Lelaj (Institute of Cultural
Anthropology and Art Studies, Albania) for their valuable comments and for helping with editing the
English.
Urbanities, Vol. 1 · No 1 · November 2011
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in post-Socialist Albania’s informal areas. The Kanun law is a kind of customary law, a non-state
law. Roughly speaking, all matters solved through the Kanun are legally unacceptable and thus
illegitimate for the Albanian state (Bardhoshi, forthcoming). The Kanun law possesses all the
characteristic of Khnotic Law as described by Glodsmith and Patrick Glenn (2007).
This article is based on ethnographic research carried out in Albania’s urban informal
areas, which developed as a consequence of internal migration. Most of the people living in these
areas are originally from the North-East; a region that was considered a ‘Kanun area’ even
during communism (Bardhoshi 2009, 2010a). The creation of informal areas appears to be
connected to the political élites’ continuing quest to secure legitimacy. However, in terms of
formal market they can be seen as ‘dead capital’ (de Soto 2000), because they have no legal back
up. As we shall see, the ethnography tells a different story.
Map of Tirana, showing the informal areas.
The land market has operated in a ‘legal vacuum’. It has drawn on a system that enabled
the circulation of property as capital through adaptations of the local tradition of the Kanun to the
new socio-economic and political environment of post-socialism. The Kanun legal system
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legitimates actions on the basis of the ideology of blood relationships, including economic
transactions relating to property.
Towards an ethnography of land market in Albania
According to official statistics, in Albania 6 out of 7 buildings are constructed without formal
permission from state authorities. These buildings are located in the informal areas that sprung
all over the country during the first years of the post-socialist period.
Uniformity between houses: a sign of equality and solidarity between brothers.
Alia observes that ‘Over 350 thousand Albanian families, or at least 50% of country’s
population posses in a way or another extralegal asset, and almost 80% of all business companies
are in nature partially extralegal’ (Alia 2008: 230).
The expression ‘informal area’ has emerged as an official legal category in late postsocialist
Albania (See Law No. 9482/03.04.2006). These areas have all the characteristics of the
informal settlements created throughout Eastern Europe after socialism (Tsenkova 2009: 1-23).
They emerged following the internal migration of people who were escaping poverty and hoped
to find a better life in the big cities. There have been several waves of migration, two of which
were major and are particularly significant in post-socialist Albania. The first big wave took
place in 1992, when the political opposition first rose to power; that political leadership
originated from the Northern areas of the country. The second big wave of migration toward the
cities took place in 1997, coinciding with the failure of the Albanian state and the Democratic
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Party (DP) leadership to run the country following the collapse of the pyramid schemes and the
subsequent violence that pushed the country to the edge of civil war. Elections were held and a
new government was formed by a coalition led by the Socialist Party (SP), whose leadership
mainly originated from Southern Albania. What unites these important moments of Albania’s
recent history is that in both cases different politicians resorted to the mechanism of exchanging
land rights for votes; in order to consolidate their political legitimacy in ruling the country, they
allowed people to settle in the fields of the former state socialist farms.
Ordinary Albanians widely believe that the land of the former state farms has been
occupied by the newcomers. Such belief is partially true, as in the cases when ‘the law of the
strongest’ has prevailed in occupying the land. In many cases, however, the occupiers were
representatives of the former state farms, who seized the land and then sold it to new comers. In
doing so they used their power and knowledge of the legal status of the land, benefiting at the
same time from a lack of sanction from state institutions. For example, while he was in office,
the former chairman of a commune sold almost all the land of the state farm under his
jurisdiction to the new comers in the early 1990s. Before becoming chairman of the commune,
this man was the director of that specific state farm; now that land is called ‘informal area 52’. It
has also often happened that the same plot of land has been sold to several people. Sometimes
politically connected individuals who lived in the neighbourhoods near the former state farms
occupied the land and bullied the new comers to buy the land from them. They used their
political connections as a protection mechanism or as a guarantee for the transactions. Inevitably,
the widespread use of political connections has strongly influenced the public image of the state,
which has become especially evident in the processes of negotiation and delegitimization of state
law. The ‘privatisation’ and use of the state’s public power for personal interest by politically
well-connected individuals seems to be symptomatic of Albania’s post-socialist society. The
state seems to be no longer a ‘reified’ power; it has become human with a face and a name.
Often, these politically well-connected individuals are identified by their community with the
state and the law. They are addressed in the street with phrases like ‘you are the state’ (ti je shtet)
or ‘you are the law’ (ti je ligji).
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Main square of Kamza Town, representing the etalon of the informal area.
Many people whom I have interviewed on the issue of land transactions possess a handwritten
document which includes details of the land that has been purchased, the position and
size of the land in square meters, the property’s borders and the name of the seller. In several
instances these documents include also the names of state representatives, for example the name
of the Reeve (kryplaku),2
or of the chairman of the commune. Sometimes, these documents
clearly state that the transaction was done in the presence of officials. In a number of cases the
transaction occurred and was signed in the offices of state institutions. Nevertheless, a good
number of transactions, particularly during the first phase of migration, were based on verbal
contracts stipulated in the presence of witnesses and carried out in public spaces, such as coffee
houses. In most cases, the buyer asked the seller to guarantee that the land was state property
and that it did not have any other owner besides the state. Beyond that, to buy a land that had a
prior owner was not considered wise because this would inevitably generate future conflicts of
ownership. It seems that people believed that in the near future the state would, in one way or
another, recognize their right of ownership. According to an Albanian proverb, the ‘State will
never be old’, meaning that the state will never die. This belief has been endorsed by the
promises regularly made by both right- and left-wing parties at electoral times (de Waal 2005).
2
The Albanian word kryplaku means ‘chairman of the village’; literally, this word could be translated
into English as the ‘elder’. In this case, however, it is used in accordance to the meaning provided by state
law, that is, to indicate a local government institution.
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The above processes are not exactly in tune with the Kanun and, therefore, with
traditional land transactions as they, for example, take place in the villages. According to the
Kanun, the act of land selling is very much part of a kind of social continuity, as defined by
Gluckman (1965: 115, 116.). ‘Ideal types’ of Kanun land transactions could be briefly described
as follow: 1) The land to be sold should be offered first to patrilineal close kin; 2) If none of the
patrilineal kin wants to buy the land, or is unable to buy it, then the offer should be made to the
neighbour whose property borders the land: thus, from jus sanguinis to jus vicinities; 3) If the
neighbour is unable or does not want to buy the land, efforts are made to find a buyer within the
village, thus preventing the land being sold to someone from outside the village. Both the land
market and the distribution of immobile wealth and livestock are controlled by patrilineal males
(de Vaal 2005).
The newly formed neighbourhoods of the informal areas appear to have ‘inherited’ some
of the traditional relationships commonly found in the villages of origin of the new urban
settlers. This does not mean that the new settlers reproduced in exactly the same way the social
and economic life of their villages (see Prato 2011 on avoiding cultural determinism, p.135-36);
of course there are important changes that need to be mentioned. First, in the new settlements
exogamic rules of marriage are less relevant; second, there is not communal property; third, and
most significantly, although a good part of the settled families are linked by blood, the new
neighbourhoods are not patrilocal. The new social environment displays new forms of vicinities,
where the new neighbours might be brother and sister, brothers-in-law or father-in-law and sonin-law.
The traditional organization of the village was not based on this kind of relationship;
neighbourhoods were patrilineal and patrilocal.
The changing significance of blood relations in the informal areas
The settlers in the informal areas have a distinguishing relationship with the land. First, many did
not give up their land in their villages of origin. It is worth noting that, in some cases - like in the
case of the Brut village in the Has region (Northeast of Albania) – the village as a whole no
longer existed or its borders may have shifted.3
Even in such extreme situations, however, the
3
This process may be due to various reasons, which would need a separate article to be properly
explained.
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settlers retained ownership not only over their land but also over the village’s communal land.
Second, in the city, the newcomers have created new socio-economic relations through which
new conceptual maps on ‘property’ have been elaborated and which are defined by the reality of
the so-called informal areas. The new urban dynamics can be explained by the way in which a
family gained de facto the property in the informal area, which in turn is very much related to the
history of how that family came to establish itself in that specific informal area (for further
details, see Bardhoshi, 2010b). It is important to note that this new ‘conceptual map’ continues to
stress the relevance of blood relations. This deserves some explanation.
When selling a property in the informal area, usually a first offer is made to the
neighbour. It is often the case that the neighbour is also related to the seller by blood. In this new
context, a ‘reformulated’ morality of exchange still obliges the seller to make the first offer to the
person with whom he has blood relations and who is also his neighbour. Significantly, in the
context of the informal area land transactions are no longer strictly patrilineal – that is, brother
selling to brother, or nephew buying from his paternal uncle, or vice-versa; in fact, land
transactions also occur between brothers and sisters and between a maternal uncle and his
nephew, and so on. The relevance of blood relations is made visible by the uniformity among
neighbouring houses, which also represents a clear material sign of equality and solidarity among
siblings. Furthermore, often brothers and sisters live in the same building, each having their own
apartment. In such cases, the market is restricted to the members of the close family.
The importance that continues to be attached to reciprocal help accounts for another
strong reason why, in the informal area, a property should be first offered to the neighbour. The
way in which help is reciprocated is not limited to the construction of the house, but includes
support provided throughout the time of residence in the area. Such a support extends to relations
in the village of origin. Should a neighbour – who might or might not be a blood relative – show
no interest in buying the land on offer, the seller usually makes an offer to kin who live outside
the neighbourhood. Furthermore, following the ‘hierarchy of offers’ demanded by the Kanun’s
moral regulation of the land market, the sellers feel obliged to offer the land they want to sell in
the informal area to the kin or the neighbour who is taking care of their property in the village of
origin. Should they contravene this moral obligation, the sellers would be sanctioned and the kin
or the neighbour would not longer look after their property in the village.
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Concluding remarks
This ethnography points to the continuous tension between the moral crisis of legitimacy of state
law – which is inevitably reflected in the way in which the state is perceived and trusted – and
the local logic of land transaction that seems to draw on the ‘sanctity of tradition’. In the
Albanian crisis of state authority, which is intrinsically linked to an ‘economy of uncertainties’,
the ‘Kanun Man’ is faced with, and participates in the creation of, a new socio-economic and
legal reality; the reality of the informal areas. This new socio-economic and legal arena reflects
the clash between the ideology of ‘possessive individualism’ and what Gellner has defined as the
communitarian ideology of ‘the dictatorship of cousins’ (but, see Prato 2011: 136-37 and 139).
Such a communitarian ideology has taken many shapes, changing from patrilocal kinship to a
more inclusive typology of kinship ties and networks that recognizes the matrilineal line (see
also the case of Bledar asking help of his mother’s brother’s son, in Prato 2011: 146) and
‘fictive kin’, and extends to other neighbourhood relations.
When it comes to the land market in the informal areas it is observable that the value of a
given property or land derives not only from its market price but also from kin relations, the
personal and ‘family’ sacrifice and the work invested in it. Nevertheless, it should be underlined
that, in spite of the new dynamics displayed by the land market in informal areas, in all the cases
that I have observed, land transactions are male-only run businesses.
To put it briefly, informal areas are sites of fluid uncertainties; they appear to be a
product of people’s distrust and mistrust of the state law (Pardo 2000), a result of the state’s
failure to implement the law. It could be argued that this empirical reality is also a by-product of
the neo-liberal ideology, challenged (Giordano and Kostova 2002) – as the state and its laws are
often challenged – by a morality deriving at times from tradition, at times from failed political
promises and often from the daily struggle in pursuing security and happiness in the postsocialist
situation. If, following Gledhill (2004: 332-348), at national level what is occurring in
Albania can be described as a process of neoliberalised legal systems, at micro level it would be
better described as a process of ‘kanunisation of the free market’.
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References
Alia, B. (2008). Misteri i gjashtë. Tirana: Co-Plan Publications.
Bardhoshi, N. (2009). ‘ “Njeriu i Kanunit” në një shoqëri Post-socialiste’, (‘Kanun Man’ in a
Post-socialist Society), Polis (Tirana), 8: 114-132.
Bardhoshi, N. (2010a). ‘Në mes ideologjisë së Tregut të Lirë dhe Diktaturës së Kushurinjëve’
(Living Between Free Market Ideology and Dictatorship of Cousins), Jus&Justica,
Journal of the Faculty of Law, Tirana: European University of Tirana, pp. 56-67.
Bardhoshi, N. (2010b). ‘The “Citizen” and the “Transformation” Period in Albania: The case of
Tirana’s Periphery’, in I. Pardo & G.B. Prato (eds.), Citizenship and the Legitimacy of
Governance: Anthropology in the Mediterranean Region. Farnham: Ashgate Publishers,
pp. 115-132.
Bardhoshi, N. (2011). ‘Family Property in Albanian Customary Law’, in G. Hemming (ed.),
Albania, volume I (forthcoming).
Benda Beckmanns, Franz, von, Benda Beckamanns, Keebet, von, and Griffiths, Anne (2004).
‘Mobile People, Mobile Law: An Introduction’, in Mobile People, Mobile Law:
Expanding Legal Relations in a Contracting World. Farnham: Ashgate, pp.1-25.
De Soto, H. (2000). The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails
Everywhere Else. New York: Basic Books.
De Vaal, C. (2005). Mbijetesa: Shqipëria në post-komunizim. Tirana: Botim i Insitutit të
Studimeve Ndërkombëtare.
Gledhill, J. (2004). ‘Neoliberalism’, in D. Nugent D. and J. Vincent (eds) A Companion to the
Anthropology of Politics. London: Blackwell Publishing, pp. 332-348.
Giordano, C. and Kosotova, D. (2002). ‘The social production of mistrust’, in C. Hann (ed.)
Post-Socialim. London & New York, Routledge, pp. 74- 91.
Hann, C. (1993). ‘From Production to Property: Decollectivisation and Family Land
Relationship in Contemporary Hungary’, Man, 28 (2): 299-320.
Pardo, I. (2000). ‘Introduction – Morals of Legitimacy: Interplay between responsibility,
authority and trust’, in I.Pardo (ed.) Morals of Legitimacy: Between Agency and System.
Oxford: Bergahn Books, pp. 1-26.
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Prato, G.B. (2010). ‘The “costs” of European citizenship: governance and relations of trusts in
Albania’, in I. Pardo & G.B. Prato (eds.) Citizenship and the Legitimacy of Governance:
Anthropology in the Mediterranean Region. Farnham: Ashgate Publishers, pp. 133-51.
Scott, J. (1998). ‘Property Values: Ownership, legitimacy and land market in Northern Cyprus’,
in C. Hann (ed.) Property Relations: Renewing the anthropological tradition. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, pp. 142-159.
Tsenkova, S. (2009). Housing reforms in post-socialist Europe: Lost in transition. Heidelberg,
Springer-Verlag, Series: Contributions to Economics.
Verdery, K. (1996). What Was Socialism and What Comes Next?. Princeton: Princeton
University Press.
Verdery, K. (1998). ‘Transnationalism, Nationalism and Property: Eastern Europe since 1989’,
American Ethnologist, 25 (2): 291-306.
Other sources:
Law No. 9482/03.04.2006, Law for the Legalization and Urbanization and Integration of
Informal Settlements.
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Olympicisation: Growing for Gold
Iain Lindsay
(Brunel University, London)
iainlindsay1981@hotmail.com
This article offers an analysis of the social implications of Olympic related urban regeneration. This paper argues
that the creation of urban Olympic cities necessitates a programme of regeneration that is fundamentally
undemocratic and often unrecognizable to the process delineated during its conception. This paper draws upon
empirical ethnographic research, represented here as a case study of an urban social movement, that highlights the
form, function and impact of Olympic delivery. It argues that the process of being an urban Olympic host – as
opposed to a suburban Olympic host that utilizes out of town appendages - is underwritten by totalitarian
mechanisms. Moreover, this process ensures an Olympic City model that delineates, marginalizes and ultimately
cleanses an area of any perceptible threats to its utopian vision. This process is defined here as Olympicisation.
Olympicisation implements a spectrum of controlling mechanisms within its unique brand of urban regeneration. The
conceptual framework of the Olympicisation of the spatial realm focuses upon the act of transforming and,
subsequently, controlling a city. The imposition of the Olympic city can be seen to perform a primary cleansing
function, whilst concurrently minimising and marginalising opposition. The underlying initial processes of
Olympicisation necessitate community solidification during the bidding phase and then requires the subsequent
dismantling of this community during the delivery phase. This iniquitous practice and its symbolic and instrumental
processes are the primary concern of this paper.
Key words Environmental activism, corruption, Eastern and Western Europe
Urban Regeneration: The Great Gold Rush
The fates of individual cities are no longer determined by national
economies. Instead, cities increasingly must forge roles for themselves in
an international division of labour. At the same time globalization has
heightened the sense of cities as actors on the world stage (Smart and
Smart, cited in Low 1999: 171).
The evolving autonomy of the contemporary city has necessitated great modification to
regeneration policies since the beginning of the twentieth century. Policies governing urban
regeneration following this period have undergone a transformative journey from functionality, to
aesthetics, via social modification and urban cleansing. David Harvey purports that aesthetic
urban design involves an understanding of space ‘as something independent and autonomous, to
be shaped according to aesthetic aims and principles which have nothing to do with an
overarching social objective’ (1990: 66). However, it can be argued that this view does not
consider that the aesthetic ambitions of regeneration facilitate the achievement of its social
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objectives. Aesthetically transforming the physical environment can be regarded as the first and
most important step toward achieving social objectives:
Physical renewal is usually a necessary if not sufficient condition for successful
regeneration. In some instances it may be the main engine of regeneration. In almost all cases it is
an important visible sign of commitment to change and improvement (Jeffrey and Pounder 2000:
86). The act of demonstrating a visible commitment to change, whilst, systematically, providing
global standardization that is permeated with a locally themed and aesthetically pleasing
uniqueness has necessitated a new wave of urban regeneration. This new wave often utilizes
aesthetics in combination with spatial actions (Lefebvre 1991) to make change palatable yet
progressive. To achieve such proliferation of cultural and sociological modification a distillation
of social diversity is often accompanied by the minimization and marginalization of objection.
The use of spectacles and events that promote collective, commercialized forms of enjoyment are
habitually implemented to achieve this aspiration. ‘A spatial action overcomes conflicts, at least
momentarily, even though it does not resolve them, it opens a way from everyday concern to
collective joy’ (Lefebvre 1991: 222) and there is no bigger, more transient, spatial action than
that of the Olympic Games. Moreover, critical commentators claim the range of spatial practices
in regenerated environments are restricted to those that provide passive social contact and passive
experiences such as rest, contemplation, eating, sitting - in other words quiet consumption
(Crilley 1993; Talen 1999). The primary exemplar of which is, again, the Olympic Games.
Trickling towards 2012
‘After major disinvestment in European cities during the 1970s, the late 1980s witnessed the
beginning of a radical redesign, refurbishment and renewal of the urban landscape’ (Degen, 2008:
6). Articulations of these reinvented or rediscovered cities are customarily dominated by
embodiments of wealth, branding and power such as London’s Canary Wharf or Times Square in
New York. Those that do not fit this model are often perceived as in need of modernization. The
east London of the early 2000’s was perceived as the domain of the unsafe, the criminal, poverty,
immigration and deprivation. It was the backside of the City and according to Olympic Park
Legacy Company (OLPC) head Andrew Altman it was London’s gash and it needed healing.
Arguably, it always has, Dench, Gavron and Young (2006) illustrated, as the City of London
began evolving over six centuries earlier into a hub of global capitalism, the east evolved too,
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albeit in symbiotic differentiation. At first the east supplied food to the emerging urban
community. Then, as the City concentrated increasingly on the pursuit of profit, its less valuable
and more polluting trades were relocated to the east. As the City became wealthier and more
important its contrast to the East End became more pronounced. Together, they became the hub
of the British imperial trading system. They were inextricably linked and yet paradoxical
narratives of the same story; one clean, wealthy and powerful and the other dirty, poor and
powerless. In this pursuit of wealth the city bought, sold and financed, whereas east London took,
stored and transported. This unequal partnership transformed east London into the largest
impoverished urban enclave in the world that was ‘abandoned entirely to the working class’
(Sanders 1989: 91). It has, by and large, remained this way ever since.
After decades of stagnation and decline British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher
instigated a neoliberal policy of deregulation. The neoliberal ‘trickle-down’ policy she
implemented justified private developments that were, fundamentally, profit orientated ventures,
fortified with righteous intentions. As David Harvey (1990) suggests, during this period
neoliberalism prevailed, consequently, free enterprise and private ownership were considered
fundamental to a progressive society. Planning and control were considered threats to this
freedom and effectively castigated as disguised slavery. The regulations that were intended to
protect society were now considered to be exacerbating sociological problems as a result of
unnecessary authoritarianism. Consequently, the legacy of this era was the removal of many of
the regulatory restrictions placed upon regeneration. This unregulated methodological baton for
dealing with east London’s urban tribulations has now been passed to the 2012 Olympic
regeneration.
London 2012: Taking the bait
David Stubbs was employed as London 2012's Head of Environment to assess the practicalities
of the London 2012 bid. In 2005,1
he stated that to be a creditable candidate, London had to
‘engage with the community so that they felt part of the process. Public Support was critical.’
Stubbs explains that his advisory group made of representatives from NGOs, public authorities,
1
See http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4299714.stm
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academia and business, ‘did a lot of work with the voluntary groups to get them involved in the
process. By the end, they were really championing the whole thing’ (Kinver 2005).2
The London 2012 bidding committee approached The East London Communities
Organisation (TELCO) to contribute to this process. TELCO are a social movement that acted on
behalf of London’s citizens in negotiations with the Olympic delivery team. Telco encompasses a
diverse alliance of active citizens and community leaders that promote democratically selected
causes intended to benefit the local community. Over thirty-five institutions including faith
groups, schools, student organisations, union branches and charities, across five London
boroughs constitute its membership. Moreover, they form an integral part of a London-wide
social movement, London Citizen’s (LC) affiliated with the nationally recognized Citizen’s
Organising Foundation (COF), who, in turn, are affiliated with the internationally recognized
Industrial Area Foundation (IAF) based in the United States. All of these movements interact and
share advice, resources and methodologies.
TELCO felt that such support should be conditional upon certain guarantees to benefit the
East London populace. These guarantees included employment opportunities, affordable housing,
greater sporting provisions and educational opportunities. Consequently, an agreement was put in
place to delineate the rewards for public demonstrations of support for Olympic hosting. This
became known as the Ethical Olympic Charter. This charter consisted of six key points:
Affordable homes were to be built for local people and managed through a Community Land
Trust where the value of the land is removed from the property price making homes more
affordable.
Olympic development monies were to be set aside to improve local schools and health
services.
The University of East London was to be the main higher education beneficiary of the
sports legacy with a view to becoming a sporting centre of excellence.
At least £2m would be set aside immediately (upon winning the bid to coincide with the
first building phase), for a construction academy in Leyton to train local people in employable
trade.
2
See http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4299714.stm
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It was determined that at least 30% of construction jobs would be set aside for local
people, which, would require the implementation of a 30% local labour clause with the
contractors responsible for construction.
The Lower Lea Valley made to be designated ‘living wage’ zone with all jobs in the
defined boundary guaranteed to pay a ‘living wage’ (Set at £6.70 per hour in 2004).
The proposed benefits were agreed upon between the community leaders and the Olympic
bidding team. This agreement was publicly solidified during its signing in 2005. It was signed on
behalf of the Olympic Bidding Team by the Chairman of the Olympic Bidding Committee Lord
Sebastian Coe, by Ken Livingstone, then Mayor of London and by John Biggs, Deputy Chair of
the London Development Agency (LDA). As a result of this shared commitment Lord Coe stated
that the Games were now ‘eminently more winnable’ (Lydall 2005).3
This act of unifying the community through a written agreement between Olympic
deliverers and TELCO solidified the boundaries and expectations of the local community. This
unifying charter was an agreement that instilled hope, promise and expectation. It created what
Benedict Anderson (1983) referred to as an ‘imagined community.’ Anderson’s definition of
imagined communities relates to nationalism where citizens unite despite being unfamiliar with
each other by virtue of shared characteristics and criteria. It is argued here that these principles
are applicable to more than nationalism. Furthermore, that throughout an individual’s life they
will become part of many such identity defining, imagined communities, often concurrently. In
this instance as the community became unified through hope and promise, they became such an
imagined community. The assurances made to them instilled a sense of ownership of place, and
of resources therein, during Olympic delivery and beyond. The promises instilled a sense of right
and entitlement into this community that were previously non-existent in this transitory,
impoverished deprived location.
This community was assured that because they would be most affected by the upheaval of
delivery that they would benefit commensurately. This definition allowed the community to
reconstitute and solidify its boundaries and its expectations in relation to identity. As Anderson
contends for an imagined community to exist there must be other communities against which
self-definition can be constructed. This community became delineated during the bid and,
3
Evening Standard, 10th November 2004, p.12.
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consequently, anyone from outside this delineated community became part of the group against
which their self-definition was constructed.
Reality bites
The 2012 Olympic Games are principally concentrated across five London ‘Olympic Boroughs’:
Newham, Waltham Forest, Tower Hamlets and Hackney in the east of the capital, and the more
prosperous Greenwich in the south.4
Post-industrialism impacted upon this part of the capital
particularly hard. A 2007 report by the Department of Communities and Local Government
(DCLG) found that ‘[t]he north east quarter of London remains particularly deprived with
Newham, Hackney and Tower Hamlets continuing to exhibit very high levels of deprivation’
(DCLG 2007: 40). On the bases of an averaging of rank over 50 different indices of deprivation,
England’s three most deprived local authority areas were the Olympic Boroughs of Hackney,
Newham and Tower Hamlets (respectively) with the fourth East London Olympic Borough,
Waltham Forest, placed fifteenth (DCLG 2007). This deprivation fulfills all the criteria for urban
regeneration and the area has long been earmarked for such. This regeneration was expedited
enormously following the success of the bid.
Theoretically all local Government councils should be accountable for everything that
occurs within their designated region. The Olympics necessitated the removal of much of this
control from the local councils. The Olympic Delivery Authority (ODA)5
is responsible for
4
As Olympic organisers have been at pains to point out, Olympic events will also take place in other parts
of the country, including football at Coventry, Manchester, Newcastle, Cardiff and Glasgow. However,
the vast majority of events will take place in London with 61% hosted by Newham.
5
The Olympic Delivery Authority (ODA) is the public body responsible for developing and building the
new venues and infrastructure for the Games and their use post 2012. The ODA was established by the
London Olympic Games and Paralympic Games Act, which received Royal Assent in March 2006. The
Act was passed to ensure the necessary planning and preparation for the Games can take place. It allows
the ODA to buy, sell and hold land, make arrangements for building works and develop transport and
other infrastructure, develop a Transport Plan for the Games, with which other agencies must cooperate,
and make orders regulating traffic on the Olympic Road Network and be the local planning authority for
the Olympic Park area. See http://www.london-2012.co.uk/ODA/
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delivering the 2012 Games and is accountable only to central Government. This not only
removes any notion of being accountable to local people, it also alleviates local authority
planning controls and regulations.
After London won the 2012 Games the ODA would not interact with TELCO on the issue
of the Ethical Olympics. The ODA claimed the Ethical Olympics proposal had nothing to do with
them and refused to honor them. TELCO decided that to achieve ODA interaction organized
collective action was required. They decided that the most appropriate course of action was to
demonstrate their ability to mobilize and ambush the, then chairman of the ODA, David Higgins
who was known for high-powered breakfast business meetings at London’s top hotels. TELCO
attracted significant media support and through their lobbying they established their credibility
with the ODA, which led to an on-going series of meetings.
These meetings were intended to establish the implementation and progress of the
TELCO Ethical Olympics, which included discussing the living wage and the promise of hiring
of local residents. As Srnivasa (2006) purports that to use information most effectively the
selective release or withholding of information is crucial and the ODA consistently achieved this.
They maintained that 95% of the workforce was earning over and above the living wage.
Furthermore, guidelines were in place, such as the necessity for proof of residence for
construction workers to ensure local employment. One member challenged this point by
commenting that, because there was no limit upon how long potential employees needed to be a
resident this guideline was surely just a method to placate rather than actually improve the
employment prospects of Londoners. This challenge was deflected and never returned to during
the course of the time-limited meetings. Fundamentally, these negotiations were taking place
during the building phase and, consequently, the window of Olympic delivery employment was
rapidly closing with migrant workers filling these positions.
The conceptual vagueness surrounding accountability within Olympic delivery proved
problematic. The repetitive act of replacing short-term, unaccountable hegemonic structures with
other short-term, unaccountable hegemonic structures appears to be intended to deliver the most
valuable commodity possible in time-limited social change scenarios – more time. In a
Durkheimian sense, the processes involved in Olympicisation appear to hold functionality that
augments the position of those imposing order, rather than the publically articulated beneficiaries
of such processes, widely assumed to be the residents of regenerated communities.
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Olympicisation
The contestation for resources between global cities necessitates an unrelenting frenzy of urban
regeneration. Olympicisation provides a boost to any city that is engaged within this global
commercialization contest. It is a process that satiates both pursuit and demand for
standardization and provides arguably the greatest example of Lefebvre’s spatial action to
overcome conflict and objection - the Olympic Games. Olympic redevelopment also provides a
strict time frame that permits the circumvention of democratic process that is imposed upon other
urban creation or regeneration projects.
The commercialization of the city ensures ‘city space and architectural forms become
consumer items or packaged environments that support and promote the circulation of goods’
(Boyer 1988: 54). This commercialization habitually replaces heritage with mythology that
circumvents ‘the negative iconography of dereliction, decline and labour militancy associated
with the industrial city’ (Hall and Hubbard 1998: 7). This ‘production of image and discourse is
an important facet of activity that has to be analysed as part and parcel of the reproduction and
transformation of any symbolic order’ (Harvey 1990: 255). This process re-emphasizes the cleanslate
potential of Olympicisation, complete with its associated rich and historic Olympic
mythology. Consequently, urban managers increasingly perceive Olympic hosting as a once-in-alifetime
opportunity for the large-scale redevelopment and rebranding of a city.
Olympicisation is the pursuit of lifestyle branding, inclusive of place, people and
existence. The initialization of which instigates cross-border economic processes of flows of
capital, labour, goods and services, raw materials and tourists. It is a finite process and only one
city can become Olympicised every four years. This limitation increases hosting desirability and
exclusivity and further enhances the willingness of a host to become subjugated by the movement
because it is perceived as something to aspire towards. Furthermore, because a host is selected,
only, after demonstrations of widespread public support all objections and objectors have been
minimized and marginalized before the outset of the process. This prerequisite subservience
ensures the process will flourish whomever the contemporary host nation.
Olympicisation permits its deliverers to design and implement clean-slate regeneration of
entire urban areas to facilitate the creation of globalized utopian hubs. They utilize huge budgets
to accomplish this goal with the new city designed for an idealistic future populous rather than
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considering the existing one. The entire process circumvents democratic rules and regulations and
is, for the most part, above rebuke and public scrutiny, and offers little or no chance of
accountability. Furthermore, local communities that had voraciously demonstrated their
willingness to become Olympicised, if they somehow survive the transition, are often left unable
to exist in these new utopias for any extended period of time. Eventually, most are forced to
move elsewhere, making way for a more suitable Olympicised populous to fill their void.
Conclusion
Perceptions of the virtues of Olympicisation are readily apparent within wider society. However,
this research has found that the representations of this phenomenon have proved at odds with the
local communities’ experiential perspective. This study examined the genesis of a new Olympic
city and how the characteristics of this informed community identity. The TELCO case study
demonstrated the complex, inconsistent interplay between ideology and implementation during
the evolution of Olympicisation.
Hosting the Olympic Games has altered the process of identity formation in East London.
In terms of composition, time, space and place. The communities willingness to accept that the
much-anticipated benefits of Olympic hosting will never materialize to the anticipated levels
resulted in the breakdown of the Olympic imagined community that was delineated during the
bidding phase. This attitude of acceptance appears systematic of the original processes of this
highly transitory, low ownership, diverse location.
The key difference between the period before the imagined unification of this community
and the period after its dismantling is that within the communities systems of meaning and
identity which have changed immeasurably. This is perhaps best symbolized by considering that
the biggest surges in new national insurance numbers, necessary for legal employment in the UK,
are from within the Olympic borough of Newham since the success of the 2005 bid. Furthermore,
more than 51,000 migrant workers have surged into this area, the vast majority of which came
from Eastern Europe (Pierce 2008).6
To put that into context official statistics demonstrate that
6
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/olympics/london-2012/3453006/More-than-50000-migrant-workers-
move-into-Olympics-borough.html.
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the borough had a population of 246,200 before the bid.7
Therefore, previous articulations of
identity have been systematically taken apart during Olympic delivery as the community attitude
towards this appears limited to apathetic acceptance. This apathy more than most defines the
identity of members of this transitory community. It is the characteristic that leads to the
inescapable question: Is ownership of time, space and place a domain reserved only for the rich?
7
http://resources.cohesioninstitute.org.uk/Publications/Documents/Document/DownloadDocumentsFile.as
px?recordId=105&file=PDFversion.
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References
Andersen, B. (1983). Imagined Communities: Reflexions on the Origins and Spread of
Nationalism. New York: Verso.
Boyer, M.C. (1988). ‘The Return of Aesthetics to City Planning’, Society, 25 (4): 49-56.
Crilley, D. (1993). Megastructures and Urban Change: Aesthetics, Ideology and Design.
New York: Prentice Hall.
DCLG (2007). The English Indices of Deprivation 2007. London: HMSO.
Degen, M.M. (2008). Sensing Cities: Regenerating Public Life in Barcelona and Manchester.
Oxon: Routledge.
Dench, G., Gavron, K., & Young, M. (2006). The New East End: Kinship, Race and Conflict.
London: Profile Books Ltd.
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Fussey, P., Coaffee, J., Armstrong, G., and Hobbs, D. (2011). Securing and Sustaining the
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Hannigan, J. (1998). Fantasy City. London: Routledge.
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Doctrine of New Urbanism’, Urban Studies 36 (8): 1361-89.
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YouTube and the Urban Experience Embodied1
Lesley Braun
(Université de Montréal, Canada)
lesnbraun@gmail.com
While abstract anthropological concepts such as the ‘urban feel,’ ‘urban spaces’ and ‘urban imaginaries’ are difficult
to wrestle with, I would nevertheless like to introduce a new perspective of ‘urban-ness’. By focusing on the recent
explosion of home-made, worldwide dance videos on YouTube, I will illustrate how, in the search for ‘otherness’,
young people are now motivated primarily by a yearning for cosmopolitanism and urban-ness. I will explore how
that desire has taken hold, as well as how it is disseminated. Furthermore, I will examine how this yearning for
otherness is shaped by the very vehicle that disseminates it. Specifically, I will explore dance culture that as it has
emerged trans-locally from dance clips on YouTube-particular local places. I will highlight several different dance
genres, all of which emanate from urban centres. The platform YouTube provides facilitates and disseminates these
expressions – ones which, in turn inspire new dance expressions and genres.
Key words: urban alterity, youtube, dance, globalization, internet.
Charles Beaudelaire’s flâneur figure has historically been important to the discussion of the
modern urban experience. Walter Benjamin characterized the Parisian arcade flâneur of the 19th
Century as a figure who ‘plays the role of scout in the marketplace. As such, he is also the
explorer of the crowd’ (Benjamin 1999: 21). YouTube audiences may be seen as virtual flâneurs,
traveling virtually to burgeoning cities, exploring new dance forms and where they are being
created.
Benjamin’s analysis of Beaudelaire’s flâneur reveals a character who is at once a dispassionate
member, and observer, of the city’s crowd. In other words, the flâneur is both producer and
consumer — not dissimilar to the role of the YouTube user. The virtual flâneur surfs the Internet,
observing other people’s activity, sometimes commenting, other times becoming the activity by
producing content. With the help of YouTube, the virtual flâneur is afforded the possibility
inclined to of embodying an urban alterity, as well as the opportunity to participate in the online
communities of urban dance aficionados. YouTube allows people to self-publish videos for
potentially huge online audiences, which has prompted new forms of sociality to emerge (Lang
2007; Boellstorff 2008). In addition to providing a video sharing platform, YouTube also enables
its users to construct their own personal profile page — called a ‘channel page,’ where people can
‘friend’ other users. The study of how young people project identities affiliated with particular
1
I would like to thank my advisor Bob White for all his helpful advice and support and to Emily
Wilkinson for her editorial help.
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social groups by using YouTube’s video sharing and commenting features is one that merits
attention.
As well as offering these new social tools, YouTube has also become a new pedagogical
tool. In a non-institutionalized way, individuals can now produce ‘how-to’ videos and tutorials,
the sole aim of which is to instruct others, for example videos produced by young Jamaicans
about how to perform the latest Dancehall steps. Rather than just filming themselves performing
a dance, they break down its movements and articulate the best execution. By focusing on dance
performed on YouTube, I will examine some of the ways in which young people are currently
copying, performing, and embodying and mimicking urban-ness. One only needs to do a simple
search on YouTube to discover the profusion of dance videos that people post of themselves
emulating urban dance genres from around the world — ones depicting cosmopolitan scenarios. I
will also consider how global urban-ness, as well as knowledge of particular local urban-ness, has
become cultural capital for young people around the world. The emulation and appropriation of
dance forms new to one's own repertoire is a cross-cultural phenomenon that is equally present
among youth in the West as well as the global South.
Not just a Western thing
Although there have been exciting advancements in technology and Internet expansion, my
attempt at analyzing the new international public spheres created by the Internet does not
discount the fact that access to Internet technology remains uneven. However, it must be said that
dance videos posted by young people from a wide-range of socio-economic classes in the global
urban Africans South from a wide-range of socio-economic classes are proliferating. We know
this in part because YouTube has a built-in feature to track the number of people watching each
video, as well as their respective countries. It is not uncommon to find videos of urban youth in
cities in the developing world posting videos of themselves performing dance to European-style
techno music.
One particular video that comes to my mind of people looking ‘further abroad’ is of a
group of young boys in the streets of Harrare, Zimbabwe. Positioned in a semi-circle around the
trunk of a car, listening and dancing to fast-paced techno, dancers are clearly performing for the
camera, each taking turns showing off their own moves and dance steps. Posted in February of
2010, the dance video has since been viewed 75,000 times. This is a prime example of the ways
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in which YouTube has penetrated communities and cultures globally; not only are these
Zimbabweans publicly displaying local popular dance expressions, but they are also using
European music, though their exposure to this musical form may or may not be a direct result of
their YouTube use. The YouTube viewer is afforded the chance to get a glimpse of city-life in
motion within urban popular dance videos. There is a sense in which city-living and traveling
have become synonymous, and it is apparent that ‘virtual tourism’ is not unique to the West. On
YouTube, viewers are not just exposed to other forms of dance expression, but also often imitate
them. When these viewers become producers of content on YouTube, others can then view and
become inspired by their dance performances.
A shift in values: Privileging the city and the new
In the exploration of cultures different from one’s own, many have found it important to feel as
though they were getting an authentic representation of that culture. However, as far back as the
Romantic era, and as recently as the 1990s, the authenticity of an exotic cultural encounter was
determined by how pristine and isolated from modernity that culture was. This was often
characterized by a rural or pastoral setting, untouched by technology or other civilizations.
Though the search for authenticity remains, it is now qualified differently. Increasingly, people
no longer expect that reality to be one of closed-off village life, and instead seek ‘real’ urban
expressions. YouTube reflects as well as reinforces this new sentiment.
YouTube urban dance viewers are engaging with current forms of expression, privileging
the new, and the future. Michael Wesch (2008), who released a video about conducting
anthropological research with YouTube, suggests that, with the increase in commercialization,
we see a longing for authenticity. Young people are yearning for something (specifically urban)
that is more real than what is being produced by the culture industry, and they are finding this on
the Internet.
In the 1990s, the body of literature documenting ‘World Music’ shed light on the way it
was romantically marketed to Western audiences as an ‘authentic’ product of non-Western music
from often ‘traditional’ rural settings (Erlmann 1996; Taylor 1997). In contrast to the Romanticera
traveller or the World Beat aesthetic of ‘rural’ and traditional folk music, YouTube dance
clips often portray young dancers in urban settings, such as parking lots, rooftops, apartment
courtyards, and crowded streets. For the most part, popular dance genres crop up in large urban
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centres. For example, kuduro is a music and dance genre that chronicles daily urban life in the
slums of Luanda, Angola. Dancers who have been victims of Angola’s civil war feature
prominently in YouTube videos, making use of their crutches and missing legs in their dance
performances (Brown 2010). In addition, technology, such as cell phones, is celebrated by being
incorporated into dance choreographies. Mixing elements of techno, hip-hop, and reggae, kuduro
is at once an Angolan and a global music — a bricolage of musical cultures. This is but one
example of an authentic dance expression from a culture that has been touched by technology and
has been influenced by other popular culture genres.
British/Sri Lankan musician M.I.A. has been instrumental in bringing kuduro to the
international mainstream. There is something about dance music coming out of an urban context
that resonates with young audiences. The widespread popularity of music and dance forms
emerging from poor urban centres is in itself a testament of young people's favouring the urban
over the rural when it comes to cultural consumption.
Like the travels of the 19th Century Romantic tourist, there is an element of romance in
watching dance from different international cities on YouTube. The experience is like an
adventurous journey into a new land, with the hope of discovering something new and inspiring.
However, instead of journeying into the jungle or some wide-open rural space in search of
‘tradition,’ the YouTube explorer travels through cyberspace to new cities in search of new
‘authentic’ expressions. Unlike the 19th Century Romantic tourist, or to the consumer of World
Beat music, the YouTube dance tourist considers technological change, digitized music, and the
grittiness of urban life as marks of authenticity.
A moment to shine
With the conclusion that contemporary popular expressions from the global South are not
necessarily bound to traditional village life, it is important to consider YouTube's role in this shift
in understanding. YouTube now gives young, poor people in urban centres an opportunity to
showcase their own popular expressions as well as to view those of others. These expressions are
often considered ‘authentic,’ as opposed to what the music industry presents because they come
from the ‘source’ and have not yet been commodified.
Young people living in non-Western urban centres, despite their increasing numbers, find
themselves at the margins of the economic, political, and public spheres in their own nations.
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Despite this marginalization, the Internet has allowed them to make their presence known on the
international stage as social actors in the field of popular culture. Getting famous over the
Internet is not unique to the West; young people in the developing world are also aware of the
potential technology potential offers to one’s quest for fame, and they are taking advantage of it.
Young dancers from the global South who would likely not have been seen in the West until the
advent of the Internet are now being imitated by dancers all over the world, including in the
West. As the access to technology increases in cities throughout the world, young people have
begun to represent themselves and disseminate their urban experiences on the Internet (Spitulnik
2002).
Internet technology has become a primary means for young people to sidestep the
obstacles set up by the culture industry and to showcase their expressions. In her chapter entitled
‘To Survive and To Shine’ (2000), Janet MacGaffey addresses some of the ways in which young
Africans in both Kinshasa and France have done this. In the case of music and dance,
technological advancements have contributed to the creation of new mediums through which
young people can shine. For example, in many countries in the global South, musical instruments
are now more expensive than some forms of computer technology, like drum machines and
synthesizers. Young people are now equipped with cheaper means of producing music, which
consequently has birthed new genres of music and accompanying dance forms.
Music industry tourism
The music industry is aware of the shift in values and in what it means to be authentic. And it
understands that what is ‘cool,’ as defined by what is ‘real,’ is no longer a pristine, untouched,
and pastoral ideal but, rather, is urban, and affected by industry and technology. The culture
industry is presently attempting to capitalize on this YouTube phenomenon, as is illustrated by
one of Beyoncé’s music videos. Marketing herself as an ‘urban music’ artist, Beyoncé's team has
used YouTube videos as dance inspiration. The Mozambican kwaito dance group Tofo Tofo
recently served as inspiration for the pop star’s 2011 music video ‘Run the World (Girls)’. Posted
by a Swedish tourist in Mozambique, Tofo Tofo’s YouTube video shows the threesome dancing
clad in matching outfits in a local bar. Beyoncé’s team’s interest was subsequently piqued after
viewing the video. According to one of the members of Beyoncé’s team, it took them four
months to track down the group in Africa. Tofo Tofo was then flown to the United States to help
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create the choreography for the dance video. The video evokes a kind of post-apocalyptic
scenario in which people from diverse backgrounds are now living together in an ambiguous,
dilapidated, urban African shantytown.
Bob White (2011) writes about the ‘personal listening utopias’ that can arise from world
music consumption. He questions whether these cosmopolitan yearnings are symptomatic of the
anxieties associated with global capitalism. The contemporary consumer of popular music no
longer wants to buy into the old utopic ideal of the noble savage living in a pristine natural
environment. Today’s music industry is responding to this trend by glamorizing the grittiness of
urban poverty instead.
Embodying urban fantasy
Given how urban-ness is now being privileged, even within the music industry, it is useful to
explore YouTube as a platform that reflects and disseminates that attitude. It does this in several
ways. As I previously showed, YouTube helps people to showcase their own local experiences,
and allows others to learn about those new dances. But YouTube also allows people to go beyond
that, by embodying the urban fantasy. People can take what they have learned viewing other
dances and perform their own version, again using YouTube as a platform to showcase that
knowledge. This participatory and transformative act of becoming the ‘other’ contrasts with
cultural flâneury, which is passive and observing. This active participation can be expressed
through mimicry.
Brian Larkin notes that ‘people consuming popular media participate in the imagined
realities of other cultures as part of their daily lives’ (1997: 406). Picture the following scenario,
of which there are many variations on YouTube: A young man in Stockholm is intently watching
a YouTube clip of another young man in Chicago’s SouthSouth Side, who is performing the
latest hip-hop dance, called the dougie. The Swede may be watching the video to get an idea of
what an inner city looks like and how young people there behave, but he may also be watching to
learn the dance. Perhaps this young Swede will later perform his own version of the dougie on
YouTube himself. With diverse socio-economic classes gaining greater access to the Internet,
urban dance has been brought to a large international audience. Even First Lady Michelle Obama
was recently filmed doing the dougie at a public school in Washington D.C., an event that was
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widely circulated over the Internet. The dichotomy between ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture today is
being dissolved by a new sense of ‘urban-ness,’ which is being facilitated by the Internet.
Whereas the example of the Swede watching the Chicago dancer is an isolated instance of
one individual observing another, there are cases of entire subcultures being transplanted via
YouTube to other parts of the world. For example, Japanese youth are consuming massive
amounts of YouTube video clips of Jamaican Dancehall, which emerged from Kingston’s urban
shantytowns. Thousands of young Japanese dancers are performing Dancehall moves, perfectly
reproducing the mechanics of the dance. There is even an increase of Some Japanese are even
traveling to Kingston to compete in dancehall competitions. Marvin Sterling writes about the
Japanese engagement with Jamaican Dancehall, explaining that during his fieldwork in 1998 and
2001, many young Japanese dancers learned to dance from DVDs of parties and events filmed in
Kingston. ‘These individuals seek in various ways to deepen their subcultural identifications with
Jamaican popular culture, to come into intimate contact with — to ‘touch’, so to speak — the faraway
Caribbean island as authentic source of dancehall reggae music’ (Sterling 2001: 54). Now,
with the prevalence of young Jamaican DJs and dancers posting videos of themselves, Japanese
dancehall aficionados can keep privy to the new developments within this popular cultural form.
Even for people who do not live in urban settings, YouTube can facilitate their
imagination of the urban, keeping them abreast of current trends, so that they acquire a kind of
cosmopolitan competence, or what Bourdieu (1984) calls ‘cultural capital’. Being ‘in the know’
is an important part of being young, but in our contemporary world, knowing about one’s
immediate community is not enough. ‘Being in the know’ now encompasses popular urban
culture on an international scale. Young people are not only observing what urban-ness can be
like elsewhere on the planet, but are also attempting to feel that difference. In the case of dance,
that difference is literally embodied. Until recently, people’s choices of cultural roles have been
relatively limited. But now, in the comfort and privacy of our homes, we can watch and learn
foreign urban dance genres, and imagine ourselves as part of an urban sensibility.
Mimesis: An expression of cosmopolitanism
Michael Taussig’s (1993) exploration of the ‘mimetic faculty’ might help us to better understand
people’s participation on YouTube. For Taussig, the mimetic faculty is described as ‘the nature
that culture uses to create second nature, the faculty to copy, imitate, make models, explore
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difference, yield into and become Other’ (1993: 25). In studying the Cuna in Colombia, Taussig
discerns the ways in which people from one group adopt the nature and ‘culture’ of another group
while maintaining distance.
Through the act of mimicking, the copier brings the copied into the physical world. This
not only fosters empathy but allows for an experience whereby the relationship between subject
and object is blurred, enabling identity experimentation. Furthermore, through mimesis, the
individual absorbs influences from the Other without having to compromise his or her own
identity or value system — that is, without having to become what is being imitated. Paul Stoller
furthers this discussion by positing that ‘one sometimes copies otherness to make partial sense of
it, to master it’ (1995: 87). In other words, one copies or mimes something — in this case, urban
dance genres performed on the Internet — to comprehend and master it. Hannerz proposes that
‘genuine cosmopolitanism is first of all an orientation, a willingness to engage with the Other. It
entails an intellectual and aesthetic openness toward divergent cultural experiences, a search for
contrasts rather than uniformity’ (1996: 103).
An example of such cosmopolitanism in dance would be Urban Tribe, a female
Norwegian dance group whose most popular YouTube video shows them performing Congolese
ndombolo dance with recorded music by Werrason, one of the Congo’s most popular bands. Clad
in short shorts and bikini tops in an Oslo park, the young women are mirroring the costumes of
Congolese dancers, who were themselves originally mirroring American fashion. It is interesting
that most videos featuring ndombolo dancers in Africa generally take place in urban settings,
while Urban Tribe intentionally sets their dance performance in the more bucolic setting of a
park, among fields and flowers. Perhaps what is demonstrated to YouTube audiences is the extent
to which Urban Tribe is ‘in the know,’ by being capable of physically moving like urban African
women they see in YouTube dance videos. Dance — in this case, YouTube dance — has the
potential to kinetically assemble multiple spaces at once.
Conclusion
In this article I have posited that YouTube has become a wellspring of culture, one which that
merits further attention. Dance videos posted on YouTube represent a virtual terrain where the
urban imagination is embodied. On YouTube, people demonstrate their mastery and knowledge
of popular culture around the world. It is also a site where scenarios of urban-ness are played out,
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and where travel, both real and virtual, contributes to the ongoing negotiation of urban identities
among youth around the world. YouTube is a new public sphere where this ‘urban’ ideal is
expressed and disseminated. Furthermore, it satisfies a yearning to better understand urban-ness
and to be ‘in the know.’ Finally, it allows people to immerse themselves in, and even embody an
urban otherness through dance expression.
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References
Anderson, B. (1991). Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of
Nationalism. London: Verso.
Benjamin, Walter. (1999). The Arcades Project. Translated from French by H. Eiland &
K. McLaughlin. Cambridge & London: Belknap Press of Harvard.
Boellstroff, T. (2008). Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the
Virtually Human. NJ: University of Princeton Press.
Bourdieu, P. (1984). Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, trans. R.
Nice, 1984. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Erlmann, V. (1996). ‘The Aesthetics of the Global Imagination: Reflections on World Music in
the 1990s’, Public Culture, Spring 1996 8(3): 467-487.
Hannerz, U. (1996). Transnational Connections: Culture, People, Places. London: Routledge.
Lange, P. G. (2007). ‘Publicly private and privately public: Social networking on YouTube’,
Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 13 (1), article 18.
Larkin, B. (1997). ‘Indian Films and Nigerian Lovers: Media and the Creation of Parallel
Modernities’, Africa, 67 (3): 404-40.
MacGaffey, J. and Bazenguissa-Ganga, R. (2000). Congo-Paris : Transnational Traders on
the Margins of the Law. University of Indiana. Indiana.
Sterling, M. (2010). Babylon East. Performing Dancehall, Roots Reggae and Rastafari in Japan.
Durham, N.C. : Duke University Press.
Stoller, P. (1995). Embodying colonial memories: spirit possession, power, and the Hauka in
West Africa. London and New York: Routledge.
Taussig, M. (1993). Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses. London and New
York: Routledge.
Taylor, T.D. (1997). Global pop: world music, world markets. London and New York:
Routledge.
White, B. (ed.) (2011). Music and Globalization: Critical Encounters. Bloomington: Indiana
University Press.
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YouTube Videos Cited
Beyonce (Songwriter and Performer), 2011 Girls (Run The World).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VBmMU_iwe6U.
TheYoungTurks (Channel) (2011, May 4). Michelle Obama Does The Dougie. Retrieved from
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lbUcuLywZts.
UrbanTribeOfficial (Channel) (2011, April 24) CONGO MUSIC-WERRASON AND FALLY
IPUPA by Urban Tribe. Retrieved from
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WXsIdjFySl4&feature=fvsr
Wesch, Michael (Producer). (2008, July 26). An Anthropological Introduction to YouTube.
Retrieved from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TPAO-lZ4_hU.
zimbo4live (2010, February 9) Zimbabweans dancing to DJ Cndo`s Terminator. Retrieved from
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=raJDRlZyKME&feature=channel_video_title.
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The Pastoral, Nostalgia and Political Power in Leipzig, Germany1
Amitai Touval
(School of Management, Metropolitan College of New York,
and the Zicklin School of Business, Baruch College)
Amitai.Touval@baruch.cuny.edu
In Leipzig, restorative nostalgia reasserted itself in the 1990s after being eclipsed by the pastoral in the 1960s and
1970s. The re-emergence of restorative nostalgia does not mean that the pastoral has fallen into disuse. Socialist-era
politicians draw on the pastoral when they discuss their housing situation, and express their misgivings of the
changes that the current administration has initiated since 1990. They invoke the suburbs and countryside as sites of
self-renewal, idealized spaces in which they can express their values. At a deeper level, the pastoral charters
socialist-era politicians’ relocation from the city to the periphery, mirroring their marginalisation in the aftermath of
unification. In contrast, Leipzig’s current politicians have an affinity for restorative nostalgia, and attempt to restore
Leipzig’s alleged golden age, its character and energy before World War II. Restorative nostalgia implies criticism of
socialist-era development, and, by extension, the contribution of socialist-era politicians. Restorative nostalgia also
makes it seem as if the city’s development plans are the outcome of tradition, rather than politics. Tracing former and
current politicians’ affinity for the pastoral and restorative nostalgia, this article provides insight into the relationship
between the pastoral, nostalgia and political power.
Key words: East Germany, politicians, city planners, elite, legitimacy, pastoral, nostalgia, power.
A city is at least three things. It is a phenomenon that emerges as the result of many actions and
interactions, a setting that shapes different ways of life by accident and by design, and a multifaceted idea
that individuals invoke in the course of discovering and expressing their identity and power.2
In this
article, I am interested in the latter meaning of the city, the city as an idea. Specifically, I aim to
understand how deposed and current elites in post-socialist Europe represent the city, and how do their
representations of the city align with their identity and power. Previously, I examined Leipzig’s former
1
I would like to thank my dissertation advisors Drs John Eidson, Bill Beeman, Marida Hollos, and David
Kertzer for their guidance and support. I’m also in debt to the DAAD, Brown Graduate School, and the
Watson Institute for supporting my research. I was first introduced to the pastoral by Prof. William C.
Watterson. Dr Josué Ramirez provided very helpful comments and encouragement. All mistakes or errors
in interpretation are completely my own.
2
The three aspects of the city—as an emergent phenomenon, a setting, and an idea—align with three
underlying assumptions: The city as an outcome, cause, and object of reflection. For a definition of the
city, I turn to George Cowgill. The city is ‘a permanent settlement within the larger territory occupied by a
society considered home by a significant number of residents whose activities, roles, practices,
experiences, identities, and attitudes differ significantly from those of other members of the society who
identify most closely with ‘rural’ lands outside such settlements’ (Cowgill 2004: 526).
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politicians’ maligned reputation and their accounts of their employment, social life, and housing situation
(Touval 2000). Before Germany’s unification, Leipzig’s socialist-era politicians attended city council
meetings, served on committees, and, in some cases, worked fulltime in city hall or the regional party
administration. In the course of the peaceful revolution, however, they were, for the most part, discredited
and removed from power (Welzel 1996: 28). Here I return to the issue of housing with a fresh perspective,
analyzing how they represent the city, and how their representations of the city relate to their downfall
from power. I compare their idea of the city with current politicians’ perspective, noting how their
respective ideas of the city mediate their contrasting circumstances.
Different stakeholders, including scholars, reach for reality-framing tropes such as time and space
to capture the changes that have taken place over the past two decades in post-socialist Europe, and my
informants are no exception (Weszkalnys 2010: 16). Socialist-era politicians draw on the pastoral to
displace themselves in space, while current politicians draw on restorative nostalgia to displace
themselves in time. They invoke the city’s spatial and temporal aspects to comment on the city as a
setting.3
How good is the city to its residents? As one might imagine, former and current politicians
provide very different answers. When Leipzig’s socialist-era politicians draw on the pastoral, they are not
merely comparing the city with the suburbs and countryside; they are also dramatizing the current
administration’s flawed policies, and creating particular physical, social, emotional, and moral
juxtapositions between the centre and the periphery which resonate with their loss of power. In contrast,
current politicians have an affinity with nostalgia, particularly restorative nostalgia. They locate Leipzig’s
unique energy in the pre-socialist past, and aim to bring back features of the urban landscape that recall
the city’s true identity. Restorative nostalgia implies disapproval of East Germany’s imprint on the urban
landscape, and the contribution of the city’s socialist-era politicians. Restorative nostalgia also masks
current politicians’ policy initiatives, making their projects seem grounded in tradition, rather than power.4
A contested issue in Leipzig since at least the early twentieth century, housing, and related
attributes of the city as a setting, such as neighbourhood development and urban policy, inform the context
of former politicians’ affinity for the pastoral and current politicians’ affinity for restorative nostalgia. In
the late nineteenth century, urban migration changed the power structure in the city, and by the 1920s
housing policy was determined by the socialist parties and the lower-middle class. Seeking to remedy the
3
Some ideas of the city address the city as an emergent phenomenon. Faced with a declining population
base, Leipzigers debate the conditions that allow typically urban attributes to surface. This is a topic for a
future article.
4
Current politicians’ emphasis on citizen participation in urban planning further masks the power
dynamics behind urban policy initiatives (Weszkalnys 2008: 255).
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housing shortage, in which several families, including boarders, occupied one apartment, the city
government created a municipal building company, which aimed to make housing more readily available
(Shäfer 2007: 110). Another response to industrialization and overcrowding was the desire to bring nature
into the city (Hennecke 2011: 75). When animated by a critique of the city, this desire is an example of the
pastoral.5
Leipzig contrast
After the destruction of World War II, ‘improving people’s homes—and delivering ever more badly
needed worker accommodations—emerged as a central plank of every SED party congress and was a
perennial subject of great anxiety’ (Betts 2008: 115). Concurrent with the effort to address the acute
housing shortage, there was an attempt early on to recover the traditional flair of the inner city (Jürgens
1994: 302). In the 1960s, however, historic reconstruction was confidently rejected in favour of a new
socialist style. Socialist architecture was financially feasible, and aligned with the prevailing ideology of
utopia, a total break from the past, a new Germany. While there was an ongoing effort to maintain and
improve old apartment units, the authorities emphasized new construction. Historic buildings that survived
the war, including St. Paul’s Church, which dates to the twelfth-century, were razed to give way to cubelike
office buildings and apartment blocks (Gormsen 1996: 14).
The demise of restorative nostalgia in the 1960s was followed by the emergence of the pastoral as
a template for housing development, evidenced, for example, by the large housing estate of Grünau.
Deriving from the German word for green (Grün), Grünau is a neighbourhood of prefabricated high-rises
designed to accommodate 85,000 people (Kabisch et al. 2008: 12). Built in the 1970s and 1980s, and
located in Leipzig’s southwest corner, Grünau’s apartment buildings are surrounded by green lawns and
trees, a far cry from the open-pit mines to the south, and Plagwitz’s smokestacks and poorly-maintained
accommodations to the east. Grünau’s carefully landscaped surroundings imply a critical stance toward
5
Because social actors attribute different meanings to the urban landscape at different points in time
(Rotenberg 1995), one should be careful when interpreting the meaning that different stakeholders
attribute to parks and garden development in Leipzig.
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typical city living, revealing the pastoral as its source of inspiration, and conjuring a historical sequence in
which restorative nostalgia gives way to the pastoral.6
Interestingly, while it served as an inspiration for residential development, East German
authorities perceived the pastoral as potentially subversive. Romanticism, in which the pastoral features
prominently, was rejected as a threat to modernity. ‘Romantic artists’ were seen as ‘disengaged, retreating
to the past and indulging in alternative realities, in nature, religion, and the exotic’ (Kelly 2009: 200).
Georg Lukács located ‘the origins of socialism … in the rationalism of the Enlightenment,’ and argued
that the ‘romantic school’ led to ‘bourgeois capitalism and fascism’ (quoted in Kelly 2009: 199).
However, the reception of the romantics in East Germany evolved over time. In the 1960s Georg Knepler
legitimated romantic composers by classifying them as realists, who engaged ‘with the world around
them’ and ‘explored alternative modes of society’ (Kelly 2009: 200). There was a rising interest in
romanticism in the 1970s (Leeder 1990: 214), and in the 1980s the pastoral featured in oppositional
discourse. ‘Trenchant “civilization critiques”… sprang from the strong sentiment that the GDR had
become too modernized and that more traditional elements—Christian faith, love of nature, and so forth—
had to assert themselves...’ (Pence and Betts 2008: 14).
Restorative nostalgia re-emerged in the post-unification era, with city planners compensating for
the destruction of Leipzig’s architectural heritage by reinstating features of the urban landscape that are
allegedly emblematic of its true identity. The re-emergence of restorative nostalgia, however, does not
mean that the pastoral has fallen into disuse. The pastoral’s subversive reputation and its association with
East Germany’s housing development efforts align with former politicians’ marginal position and personal
history. In the next section, I present the accounts of socialist-era politicians whom I met while conducting
fieldwork in Leipzig between October 1996 and August 1997, attending public events and interviewing
people who were active in various associations and political parties. Although anthropologists in the field
assume several roles, including that of interviewer and participant-observer, enabling them to probe the
gap between what their informants say and do, my analysis of former politicians derives from what they
told me in an interview setting, and limited participant-observation. Also, due to the limitations of space, I
present here the two former politicians whose accounts evoke the pastoral most fully.
6
Admittedly, in the 1980s there was an effort to integrate new socialist-style buildings into the preexisting
street pattern, even when this pattern required that the buildings be laid out at an unusual angle to each
other, such as at the eastern end of Kreuz St., a few minutes walk from downtown. Another design choice
that suggests the pull of the past (though not restorative nostalgia) is the design of slopping rooftops in
Dorotheenplatz.
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Leipzig courtyards, old and new
Former Politicians’ Accounts of Their Housing Situation
Ms Haussmann was born around 1940, and spent her childhood in Engelsdorf, a town bordering Leipzig.7
She has a degree in engineering, and worked as a site engineer constructing chimneys all over East
Germany. As a member of the Socialist Unity Party (SED), she served as Leipzig’s deputy mayor and
chair of the planning committee from 1983 until she was let go in May 1989. After the peaceful
revolution, she was hired by a West German real estate firm, and later became an independent real estate
agent. Between 1992 and 1997, she shared office space in Gholis with a lawyer. By the time I met her in
1997, she no longer needed to rent office space because she was always in her car, or as she puts it, immer
im Auto unterwegs.
After the peaceful revolution, she invested money that she inherited in real estate, purchasing
several acres of land just north of Leipzig. Keeping a parcel to herself and her husband, she sold another
parcel to her brother and his wife, and the rest to people who became her neighbours. In the aerial
photograph of the housing development that she shares with me, the streets twist and turn, giving the
impression that her neighbourhood developed slowly over time. She likes the fact that her new home is
close to natural springs and a forest. On weekends, she and her husband travel to their vacation home in
Dübener Heide, a wooded area where they have a vacation home, and where they can let their dog run
around without a leash.
Following an initial conversation at a café, we walk through an arcade in downtown. While she
finds that it has been beautifully redone, she does not feel safe in this space anymore; she is afraid that
someone will grab her handbag. Furthermore, she does not like the other arcades that are dressed up to
look like nineteenth-century pubs. Later that afternoon, when we drive through Grünau, she points to
7
All names are pseudonyms.
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parking spaces overgrown with weeds. She explains that the neighbourhood associations which were
responsible for maintenance before 1989 were dissolved, replaced by crews of makeshift workers. As
makeshift work is cut back, the neighbourhood deteriorates further.
Her preference for suburban and rural environments and dislike of the changes that have taken
place in Leipzig suggest a pastoral pattern, in which the suburbs and countryside are idealized to the
detriment of the city. East Germany, she says, invested money so kids could be kids; sports, art and
culture kept them busy. Youth centres were among the very first things to be constructed in Grünau. Now
youth centres are eliminated—she uses the word abgeschafft—and the youth are on the street. Every
society, she muses, has its own form of violence. People strive for more and better things; whatever they
do not already have. When she looks at it logically, it will overflow its banks, es ufert alles aus.
‘It’ refers to society’s dire situation. The social situation in downtown Leipzig and Grünau is
deteriorating, and society is not investing enough resources in its youth to properly reproduce itself over
time. The reference to a flood in her account implies that the city will not be able to overcome its troubles.
Meanwhile, she describes her freestanding house in the suburbs and her rural vacation home as places for
family, self-renewal, and freedom.
Born in 1952 in Pomerania (northern East Germany), Dr Block joined the Socialist Unity Party
(SED) in 1975. She worked as a biologist at the university, and is currently employed by a health
insurance firm, evaluating drugs. Between 1984 and 1989, she was a delegate to the City Council on
behalf of the Cultural Association (Kulturbund), leaving her position in May 1989 to protest election
fraud. Between 1993 and 1995, she returned to elected office, this time as a delegate to the City Council
on behalf of the Green Party. She resides in a large draughty apartment in an old building with her
husband and two children. Right after the peaceful revolution her building was claimed by the descendants
of the original owner, who, in turn, sold the building to a West German real estate investment firm. The
firm failed to solicit bids from the current tenants, inviting West Germans to come and look at the property
instead, because they assumed that people in the East do not have a bank account. The real estate firm
started to renovate the building, and then stopped halfway, and now the roof is covered with plastic. Her
rent is still low, but once the work would be completed, her apartment would become very expensive. It is
very large—one hundred and fifty square meters—which means that the rent will be somewhere between
2,000 and 2,500 DM per month (excluding utilities). This level of rent, she says, is fair, yet there are no
tax benefits for paying rent.
Alongside her building, her immediate neighbourhood has been undergoing change. She dislikes
the contemporary architecture, the new buildings of glass and concrete. Although there are meadows close
by, they are not sufficiently close to improve her quality of life, and there are no trees in the vicinity of her
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building. Her neighbours have already left, and she and her family are planning to move out as well; she
and her husband are building a new house in the suburbs.
Although she and her family will benefit financially from building a new house, the project upsets
her environmental sensibility. She explains that if everyone were to do what she is doing, there will be
little open space left. Although environmentally speaking she is making a mistake, there are mitigating
factors. The new house is in an area zoned for housing, and the neighbourhood is accessible by streetcar.
While the neighbours are building houses which are not ecologically sound, her architect is designing an
Ecohaus, a house with good materials that follows strict environmental standards. She hired former East
Germans to build the house, and purchased building materials that are produced in eastern Germany. She
has lived in East Germany for almost forty years and is, as she puts it, an ‘Ossie,’ an East German.
Like Ms Haussmann, Dr Block draws a contrast between the city and its periphery. Her new home
in the suburbs represents an idealized, environmentally friendly modernity. Unlike her future neighbours,
she follows strict environmental standards and sources materials locally. Defining herself as an
environmentalist and a local patriot, she invokes a self-conscious pastoralism that is carefully orchestrated
against a backdrop of environmental degradation and the diminishing power of city dwellers—former
citizens of East Germany—within united Germany.
The pastoral, nostalgia and power
I define the pastoral as a pattern of meaning in which the urban, as the site of a dominant yet ill-conceived
way of life, is criticized by juxtaposing it to the rural, the site of renewal, nature, peace, and tranquility.
My informants pattern their accounts of their housing situation along pastoral lines. The pastoral is
entangled with their attempt at self-renewal, their interests and values, as well as their predicament as
former politicians, individuals who have lost power and personal prestige in the aftermath of the peaceful
revolution. Dr Block imbues the pastoral with post-industrial values, particularly environmentalism, while
Ms Haussmann, who is twelve years her senior, with the pride of launching a successful career in real
estate. In their discussion of urban living, Dr Block and Ms Haussmann invoke rent, maintenance,
ownership, and the immediate neighbourhood, attributes which the pastoral dramatizes as flawed. Because
housing is a politically-charged issue, and the pastoral has had a subversive subtext in East Germany, their
accounts are more critical than they might seem to someone who is not familiar with the local context.
To understand better the relationship between the pastoral and political power, I would like to
explore Leipzig’s current politicians’ affinity for restorative nostalgia. However, before I do that, I would
like to acknowledge that the evidence and its context of elicitation make the comparison between the
pastoral and nostalgia rather tenuous. My evidence of the pastoral is based on personal interviews, while
the evidence of nostalgia is based on attendance in public events in which city planners discuss housing
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projects in front of an audience. Nevertheless, the comparison is productive of further thoughts about how
deposed and current political elites employ pastoralism and nostalgia to signify their identity and relations
to power.
Current politicians’ personal commitment to revitalizing Leipzig’s urban core is reflected in their
choice of residence. A number of high-ranking politicians, including the former mayor, live in old
neighbourhoods within walking distance of downtown and the beautifully restored arcades mentioned by
Ms Haussmann. While restorative nostalgia is not the only template for urban development after the
peaceful revolution—there are other influences in Leipzig besides restorative nostalgia, such as glass and
steel buildings—the city invests great care in historic preservation. When the head of the city’s planning
authority communicates to Leipzig residents the concept guiding the development of the inner city, he
displays a photograph of pre-World War II Leipzig, featuring a narrow street lined with buildings with
elegantly-textured facades (event observed on 1.15.97, Saal der Alten Nikolaischule). At another event, he
explains that with the exception of cases in which they hinder functionality, the city uses historical
materials for the roads, sidewalks, and lighting fixtures (2.5.1997, New City Hall). These materials recall
the past and reflect nostalgia for a bygone era.
Current politicians’ restorative nostalgia is different and distinct from Ostalgie, or the longing to
some aspects of the East German past, which has been documented in eastern Germany by Daphne
Berdahl. Ostalgie changed over time, comprising initially ‘unnamed acts of minor resistance’ in the face
of rapid change in the aftermath of the peaceful revolution. It was then ‘mobilized’ by ‘the capitalist
market to validate and re-narrate the daily experience of East German life,’ and finally consisted of
‘reflexive commentary’ about East Germany’s demise (Keenan 2011). Though an important phenomenon,
current politicians’ restorative nostalgia is better understood with reference to Anna Seghers’ sense of
nostalgia than Ostalgie. Drawing on The Future of Nostalgia by Svetlana Boym, Stacy Hartman contrasts
Anna Seghers’ restorative nostalgia, with its aim of restoration and revival, to Christa Wolf’s reflective
nostalgia, in which longing has a dream-like quality without the goal of return (Hartman 2009: 31). Within
an abstract and context-free typology of nostalgia, current politicians’ nostalgia is comparable to
Seghers’.8
But how are the pastoral and restorative nostalgia related to political power? Current politicians’
restorative nostalgia implies that Leipzig will reassume its prominent role when features of the urban
8
Seghers and Wolf are prominent East German writers. The generational shift from Seghers to Wolf
roughly coincides with the demise of restorative nostalgia and the rise of the pastoral. However, other
varieties of nostalgia, such as reflective nostalgia, may well have been important in different spheres of
life in East Germany during the 1970s and 1980s.
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landscape that symbolize its past glory will be restored. At a deeper level, restorative nostalgia suggests
that current politicians locate the city’s creative capacity in the pre-socialist past. They seek to displace the
city in time, and capture its special spirit and energy by bringing back the qualities that it possessed before
World War II. In contrast, former politicians employ the pastoral to displace themselves in space. They
imply that life and creativity are found in the periphery, safe from the ills of a decaying city.9
Ms
Haussmann establishes her home in a new suburban division that she helped develop near natural springs
and a forest, and bemoans the dire consequences of discontinuing East Germany’s investment in children
and youth, as well as other changes that erode Leipzig’s urban fabric. Dr Block builds an environmentally
friendly home in the suburbs, while the building in which she lives in in the city is in a state of half-repair.
While the pastoral invokes sites of self-renewal where people can express their values and thrive, it is also
employed to critique Leipzig’s deterioration, showing the city’s alleged decline to be the result of
misguided policies.
The pastoral and restorative nostalgia mirror former and current politicians’ distinct positions.
Former politicians have an affinity for the pastoral, because the pastoral is a pattern of meaning that
charters movement from the centre to the periphery, movement which mirrors their change of status, their
relocation to the political margins. Conversely, current politicians have an affinity for restorative
nostalgia, because it legitimates and naturalizes their hold on power. Restorative nostalgia makes their
actions seem as if they are anchored in the past, rather than the product of an alignment of power which
favours them and their policies.10
The contrast between former and current politicians provides insight into
the relationship between the pastoral, restorative nostalgia and political power, at a time in Leipzig’s
history when restorative nostalgia has become prominent again, after being eclipsed by the pastoral in the
1960s and 1970s. It also highlights how deposed and current elites’ distinct ideas of the city mediate their
identity and power. Their ideas address the urban setting—the current political elite intends to change the
urban setting, while the deposed elite finds it flawed and plans an exit—and reveal their understanding of
who they are and the scope of their influence.
9
Writing about myth and ideology in Madagascar, Maurice Bloch (1986) analyses how creativity is
attributed to a transcendent realm rather than the individuals who are engaged in productive labour. Here I
argue that former politicians imply that creativity is located outside the city, while current politicians
locate this capacity in Leipzig proper.
10
To follow Robert Paine (1981), the political opposition employs metaphors, while office holders,
metonymy. In Leipzig, former politicians draw on the pastoral, conjuring a negative metaphor between the
city and its periphery, while current politicians draw on restorative nostalgia, creating a metonymic order
among different features of the urban landscape.
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Environmental Activism, Corruption and Local Responses to EU Enlargement:
Case Studies from Eastern and Western Europe1
Davide Torsello
(University of Bergamo, Italy)
davide.torsello@unibg.it
This article addresses the transformation of environmental activism in relation to EU policies. It is argued that new
environmentalism stems from several tensions in the economic, social and political spheres. The discussion draws on
case studies from Eastern and Western Europe to address the ways in which environmental activism has been
inspired by the ideological, programmatic and policy objectives of the EU enlargement.
Key words: Environmental activism, corruption, Eastern and Western Europe
Scholars who have studied the transformation of environmental activism in recent years, although
they take different perspectives, agree on one point: it is increasingly difficult to characterise
green movements nowadays (Dobson 1990; Norton 1991; Milton 1996; Mol 2000). Some
approaches focused on how these movements shifted towards becoming main political actors,
others saw a binary distinction between those movements that lost their ecological character to
become increasingly institutionalised (Gerlach 1991; Milton 1993) and the movements which
have taken radical positions, and have been labelled as ‘eco-terrorists’.
New environmentalism stems from several tensions in the economic, social and political
spheres. One is the tension between the local nature of these movements, their ties with the social
and ecological environments of the region in which they evolve, and the global arena in which
they interact with transnational institutions, such as the EU and other environmental groups. The
second tension has to do with the challenges facing the sovereignty (in policy making and
development plans) of the state under the influences of neoliberal capitalism and global
governance (Pardo and Prato 2010). The third concerns the above mentioned tendency of the
movements to seek more direct political intervention and at the same time to have to deal with
decreasing mobilisation from below. The fourth is the need to maintain the appeal of the
ecological discourse in a context of increasing politicisation of their actions. The fifth, in the
European case, is the sharp differences between Eastern and Western European concepts of
1
This article draws on the argument that I have developed in my volume, The New Environmentalism.
Corruption and Civil Society in the Enlarged EU, in publication with Ashgate Publishers, 2011.
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mobilisation, ecological awareness, institutionalisation and political participation. All these
tensions are, to different extents, present in new environmentalism.
New environmentalism has been inspired by the ideological, programmatic and policy
objectives of the EU enlargement. The five ethnographic case studies I have recently analyzed are
all examples of to what extent the project of a well-connected and cooperative EU can become
stained by the emergence of a number of economic and political bottlenecks. These bottlenecks
are not simply ‘unintended consequences’ or effects of NIMBY (Not in my backyard) protests, as
some analysts have hastily declared. They constitute the prices that each member state, and
within them each regional government, has to pay for the realisation of the idea of an efficiently
enlarged European community. The gap between East and West, manifest from these case
studies, is increasingly evident in the modalities in which the projects of infrastructural
development are being planned, implemented and managed. However, the differences between
East and West are not only in the ‘cultural’ perspectives on the assessment of environmental
hazard. These differences can be interpreted from two perspectives: the top-down and the
bottom-up approach. In the top-down approach, EU enlargement policies and EU-funded
development projects, although built on the common notion of a well-connected Europe, still
work along very different institutional and economic tracks. When local government institutions
are plagued by widespread corruption, clientelistic practices, a high prevalence of personalised
and informal strategies and the transposition of public and private interests, political bottlenecks
can make the Enlargement project a highly costly one. Similarly, in the economic sphere, the
aggressive intrusion of (mainly Western European) corporate business investments in Eastern
Europe have tended to preclude the positive results of environmental protests not only because of
their strong influential power over local political decisions, but also due to the hard-to-die
development rhetoric.
In my current research I take a new perspective to the anthropological study of
environmental activism in Europe by looking at the impact of corruption in EU-funded
development projects. I analyze forms and contexts of environmentalism drawing on an
ethnographic and comparative approach based on case studies in Eastern Europe and Western
Europe. The case studies are drawn from projects of transport development (TEN-T) and waste
management. The projects share the common point of bringing a potentially harmful impact on
the environment which evidently collides with the legal prescriptions under which they were
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planned. I argue that protection of the environment constitutes the ideological basis on which
civil society is built at local and trans-local levels. However, on the long run it is corruption that
is the key issue which contextualizes the protest in all the case studies, although with notable
differences. Corruption becomes a crucial discourse when the configurations of power emerging
from the interplay between the local, national, and transnational (EU) levels increasingly alienate
citizens from political participation, decision making and even resistance.
In order to deal with the complex interplay of these levels I find it necessary to bring
together three major theoretical frameworks with which anthropology has been engaging in the
last three decades: environmentalism, civil society and corruption. Environmentalism is tackled
by focusing on the social and political aspects of the opposition movements originating from the
need to denounce development projects with a high potential of environmental damage. Civil
society is product of local, national and transnational forms of environmental activism. Departing
from the historical conditions that have rendered problematic the analytical use of the notion of
civil society in contexts as different as Italy and Central Eastern Europe, this research traces a
significant link between the EU enlargement project and the strengthening of civic participation
from below. Civil society, in its local and trans-local manifestations, is the response to blindness
of the structural development projects to problems that arise from their implementation at local
level in the range of environmental sustainability, transparency of governments and business
integrity.
The ethnographic part of my research analyses five case studies: the Povaská Bystrica
highway, in Slovakia; Vienna-Brno highway; M0 Budapest ring road; TAV fast railway in the
Susa Valley, Northwestern Italy; illegal shipments of waste from Western to Eastern Europe. The
ethnographic data of this book contribute mainly to build an innovative, bottom-up approach. The
new environmentalism benefits from a polyfunctional set of strategies devised by the different
types of movements, both in their practices and in their discourses. This research demonstrates
that the two fields (practices and discourses) cannot be looked at separately, they constitute a
meaningful continuum that finds shape in the changing spatial and temporal conditions of the
lives of these movements. Eastern European environmentalism is revitalised by the negative
impacts of the EU enlargement policies. This stands alone as a demonstration that a genuinely
local civil society can originate from globalising and homogenising trends. However, the novelty
of the Eastern European environmentalism lies in the ways in which political discourses
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intermingle with environmental practices. The space to consolidation of corruption, lack of
transparency and ‘lower’ quality of governance, being enlarged by the political and economic
factors mentioned above, strongly influence the perception of the utility and harm of the
development projects. As soon as these projects manifested their devastating potential, not only
of an environmental but also of a political, economic and moral entity, the civic movements tried
to inform the local public of the whole range of possible damage.
The crucial issue is that corruption in state and local governments has provided legitimacy
to the environmentalist discourses, helping them to remain closer to the people through the use of
a common language. This tendency is unique in the Eastern European cases (and partially for
Italy) for three reasons. First, the new civil society has assumed, as expected, different tones in
these countries compared to Western Europe. This is due to the conditions under which civil
society emerged during the last years of socialism: as an anti-political movement, and yet not
definitively separate from the state, in symbiosis with which it often continued to exist. Second,
corruption is present and widely exposed to the public by the media in these countries. This is not
to argue that Eastern European countries are more corrupt than Western European ones, as the
Italian case eloquently proves. It infers that when generalised ‘corruption talk’ becomes a social
norm, than this can be used as a powerful discursive tool to communicate the harm that may be
caused by these environmentally, politically and socially intrusive projects. Third, Eastern
European environmental movements are characterised by a high degree of dualism between
formal and informal practices. This aspect could be seen as a liability rather than an asset.
However, I believe that I have provided enough empirical evidence to show that by seeking a
balance between formal and informal practices, the environmental movements have contrasted
that excessive institutionalisation and de-mobilisation which has been lamented in their Western
European counterparts. Corruption is very much part of this attempt to bridge formal and
informal strategies, since discourses on corruption are built mostly informally (Slovak and
Hungarian cases). When, as in the case of waste import, corruption becomes a formally
communicated issue, the perceived effectiveness (by the environmental movements) of this
communication decreases. Instead, as can be seen in the Czech and Italian cases, using the
language of corruption remains a fruitful way of transmitting to local inhabitants the risks,
allegations and informal aspects of local politics.
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Corruption is not only about discourses, it is a practice, as emerged from all the case
studies. I have been concerned to show how the discursive use of corruption can become one of
the ‘hands’ through which environmentalism operates, under particular conditions of global
institutional transformation. Investigating the practices that underlie the emergence of corruption
in the TEN-T transport projects as well as in the waste imports from Western to Eastern Europe,
would have required a different methodological and theoretical angle that this book cannot
provide.
The final point is on the use of the idea of civil society. I agree on the problematic use of
this notion, both on epistemic and on heuristic bases. I am aware of the uneasiness of social
scientists, and among them notably anthropologists, to parallel civil society in Western with
Eastern European social contexts (Comaroff and Comaroff 1996; Gellner 1994; Hann and Dunn
1996). I also accept the stance that in order to deal with an alleged ‘re-vitalisation’ of civil society
in Eastern Europe, attention needs to be paid to the historical trajectories underlying this
phenomenon from the late 1980s onwards. I have continued to use the notion of civil society
mainly because this was communicated to me by the interviewed activists. In my empirical data
civic movements were defined emically as ‘civil society’ by the actors themselves. I have never
attempted to impose such a ‘Western-centred’ notion on them. What can be inferred from the
analysis of these case studies is that civil society in Eastern European contexts has been
strengthened by the EU enlargement process. This is a different kind of civil society compared to
the one described by Gramsci, Tocqueville and Hegel (see for instance Keane 1998). There are
many differences: the changing role of the state, the influence of the socialist experience, the
global conditions of governance, the influence of neo-liberalism, changing perceptions of social
justice, legitimacy and the public good. Nonetheless, it still makes sense to deal with civil society
in the peculiar conditions of the post-socialist and EU enlargement experiences. This notion is
undermined or exalted (according to the cases) by discourses on corruption and by the alternation
of formal and informal practices. Hence, through its analytical use it is possible to test the
validity of the idea that changing historical (and geographical) conditions permanently affect the
relationship between state and society.
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References
Comaroff, J.L. and Comaroff J. (1999). Civil Society and the Political Imagination in Africa:
Critical Perspectives. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
Dobson, A. (1990). Green Political Thought. London: Unwin Hyman.
Gellner, E. (1994). The Conditions of Liberty: Civil Society and its Rivals. Allen Lane: Penguin
Press.
Gerlach, L. (1991). ‘Global thinking, local acting: movements to save the planet’, Evaluation
Review, 15 (1): 120-48.
Hann, C.M and Dunn, E. (eds) (1996). Civil Society. Challenging Western Models. London:
Routledge.
Keane, J. (1998). Civil Society: Old Images, New Visions. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Milton, K. (ed.) (1993). Environmentalism: the View from Anthropology. London: Routledge.
Milton, K. (1996). Environmentalism and Cultural Theory. Exploring the Role of Anthropology
in the Environmental Discourse. London and New York: Routledge.
Mol, A.P.J. (2000). ‘Globalization and environment: between apocalypse-blindness and
ecological modernization’, in G. Spargaaren, A.P.J. Mol and F.H. Buttel (eds.)
Environment and Global Modernity. London: Sage, pp. 121-50.
Norton, B.G. (1991). Toward Unity Among Environmentalists. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Pardo, I. and Prato, G. (2010). ‘Introduction: disconnected governance and the crisis of
legitimacy’, in Pardo, I. and Prato, G. (eds) Citizenship and the Legitimacy of
Governance. Anthropology in the Mediterranean Region. Aldershot: Ashgate, pp. 1-24.
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GUEST ARTICLE
After the Murdoch Affair: A Better Ethics?1
Alfonso Ruffo
(Il Denaro Group, Italy)
ruffo@denaro.it
‘Trying to determine what is going on in the world
by reading newspapers is like trying to tell the time
by watching the second hand of the clock’.
(Ben Hetch, quoted in the Associated Press)
The wiretapping scandal that overwhelmed Rupert Murdoch’s News of the World in the United
Kingdom raises the unanswered question, what is the true nature of news reporting? More
specifically, are reported news a commodity or a cultural product? Therefore, should reported
news respond to strictly economic principles or to something else?
If news reporting is a market product whose ultimate aim is to sell newspapers, then one
of the most important criteria will be its ability to attract readers and boost sales, the priority
being to capture readers’ favour by meeting their expectations and preferences. The yardstick
changes if, on the other hand, news reporting is aimed at spreading information and improving
knowledge, and at offering professional, in-depth investigation. In the latter case, news reporting
no longer has to dazzle or amaze no matter what; it must stick as much as possible to facts, even
when they are unglamourous; the reporter’s task is to make such news understandable and
complete.
There are, of course, many gradations between these two extremes, but the key question
stands: to which of these two poles, should the nature of news reporting be closer? To rephrase,
which goal should the good publisher, the good editor, the good journalist aim: to ever-increasing
1
I wish to express my gratitude to Francesca Pardo, who greatly helped to put right the English
and copy-edited the manuscript.
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sales or to striving to contribute to public knowledge and civic consciousness and to strengthen
the readers’ ability to understand and interpret events and their complexity and ramifications?
The difference between these two extremes is all too evident. In the first case, the news
will take their own independent life, regardless of the facts; or, in a more refined version, one true
aspect of the story will be embellished and blown out of proportion to construe some appealing
theory that catches the audience’s imagination and makes people rush to the newsstand to buy the
paper. In the opposite case, the news will respond to facts and possibly include in-depth analyses,
expert opinions and comments that will contribute to understanding and will help to bring out
meanings and to widen the scope of the analysis. In this second case, sources must be consulted,
the findings compared and their accuracy verified. In short, hard work must be done not simply to
please readers but, above all, to honour the loyalty pact signed with them when the journalist
decided to embrace this profession.
So, which of these two conceptions is more rewarding in terms of consensus? As the
statistics clearly show, definitely the first one. In terms of circulation, newspapers that publish
rumours and fantasies far oversell others, which in many cases, to keep sales up, appear to
increase the amount of superficiality in their reporting at the expense of good journalism. As a
consequence, gossip becomes paramount, engendering a vicious circle (for some virtuous)
whereby gossip and wild speculation encourage further rumours in competitive pursuit of
circulation, sales and advertising contracts; a race fully justified, after all, precisely by this kind
of journalism as it does, in fact, pay in terms of audience and income. More explicitly, the use of
immoderate gossip becomes a mighty weapon as it gives increasing power to make instrumental
choices. Once on this path, it becomes difficult to get out.
According to Forbes, Murdoch is the world’s richest and most powerful publisher. He is
the 122nd richest man in the world with a fortune estimated at $7.2 billion and the capacity to
reach 4.7 billion people (three quarters of the world population) every day. In order to maintain
such primacy and continue to beat competitors, he has chosen to push the game to the extreme.
The name ‘Murdoch’ encompasses all his decision-making staff. There is an ongoing
judicial process and we will have to let the British judiciary do its job. Still, it is clear and
indisputable that, regardless of individual responsibilities, the tycoon’s group has stepped far over
the line in order to give its readers what they wanted. In this affair the audience has played a
specific role, which is not necessarily that of the victim. It could even be said that Murdoch’s
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readers have been his accomplices for, by showing their interest through circulation, they have
encouraged the paper to pursue the wildest kind of journalism. Readers were crazy about the
News of the World’s scoops. In order to remain faithful to its fame and give its paying pets new
emotions, the paper did not hesitate to tap thousands of phones and private mails, including those
of politicians, actors, sports personalities and ordinary people who had had the misfortune to
become newsworthy. The whole affair involved a network of complicity that the current
investigation is gradually unravelling, in the process making the upper floors of many respected
and important institutions shake.
The Murdoch system functioned like a perfectly tuned clockwork. No part of the system
could complain, for each got what it wanted- money, fame, power, access to intimate secrets
otherwise unobtainable, according to the self-combustion principle by which success feeds itself.
And yet, under such conditions the risk is to lose control over one’s own actions. Perhaps this is
what happened to Rebekah Brooks, Murdoch’s red-maned proconsul in the UK; his seventh
daughter, as the tycoon loved to say triggering jealousy among his family. To please her
publisher-mentor, Brooks, as managing director, signed off on increasingly aggressive stories
stuffed with confidential information and published under sensational headlines. The competition
was in despair, until the unavoidable showdown.
It does not really matter whether the tycoon was aware of the methods used, whether he
prompted or just approved them. The craving for indiscretion, the need to delve into private lives
regardless of any principle of privacy, giving preference to the crowned heads who provide the
highest reading statistics in the UK, arose from a competitive environment and a drug-like
addiction to flattery. After all, it must be not easy to meet the expectations of ‘the Shark’, the
nickname by which Murdoch is commonly known to emphasize his inclination to attack, tear
apart and swallow his enemies, with no qualms whatsoever. It takes a strong stomach to digest
the junk food involved in the task, and Brooks proved to possess an iron one. Where others did
not dare to dwell, Brooks was at home. She imposed a distinctive professional style, skirting
which brought exclusion from a winning team that ‘taught’ journalism to competitors, who bit
the dust working for papers that seemed written for lilywhites and showed pathetic budgets in
red. The formula worked, thrilled and induced admiration, and, more often than not, awe.
One does not get to be number one by chance; it takes guts, and to hell with good manners, ethic
codes and professional rules. Besides, I stress, in this case readers got exactly what they wanted;
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a keyhole through which to look at the world and its protagonists who, unprotected, show as
much fragility, insecurity and sometimes ridicule as their ordinary secret watchers, who thus take
revenge on the celebrities’ luck.
Having inherited the Melbourne Herald and the Adelaide News from his father, the
Australian-born Murdoch quickly increased his reach buying the Sun and the News of the World
in the UK; the delight, that is, and then burden in his adventure. He also acquired the New York
Post and the New York Magazine in the US. He imposed his methods and belief-system, sinking
his teeth into every medium that belonged to him. He replaced executives, trampled established
procedures and then proceeded to enrich his collection with the Times and the Sunday Times,
flagships of the British press. He established Sky Television, which later merged with British
Satellite Broadcasting into BSkyB. Then, the 20th Century Fox, Metromedia, Harper Collins
Publishers and the Fox Television Network joined his empire too. He bought Star TV in Asia and
then the social media My Space, which became the most used web-site broadcasting music and
songs. To top it up, he bought the Dow Jones and the Wall Street Journal from the Bancroft
family, one of the most titled in the publishing world.
In Italy, Murdoch is active through Sky Italy, born from the merger of Tele+ and Stream a
venture that has made a marked difference in terms of information liveliness and timeliness.
Under the direction of Emilio Carelli, attracted from Silvio Berlusconi’s Mediaset, SkyTg24 has
won twice the accolade of best newscaster in the country. Through the broadcasting of football
matches, the company has attracted huge subscription, substantially threatening the Berlusconi
primacy.
The tycoon’s private life also appears to be affected by his exuberance. Born in 1931,
Murdoch graduated at Oxford, married three times and fathered four daughters and two sons,
who have been involved in his activities with ups and downs and lack of continuity. At present,
the star is his last wife, the Chinese Wend Deng who, much younger than him, has proved to be a
true fighter in the face of investigators’ questions.
Used to soaring to the stars and sinking to the gutter, to sell family assets to secure debts
and to get the most beautiful and expensive houses when fortune smiled back, the Shark knows
how to sail in all seas moving unscathed between Republican and Democrat support, while
playing with relish and ruthlessness his king-maker role and taking advantage of the complexities
of bi-polar political systems.
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Presidents, chancellors, prime ministers and royalty have all bowed at least once to the
wrinkled, fake friendly figure who controlled the most popular papers and the most watched TVs
networks. Throughout, Murdoch cleverly selected staff who were always up-dated, extremely
well informed and privy to what goes on in the secret corridors of power, as if they were
physically there. In a way, that is precisely where they were. Taking full advantage of state-ofthe-art
technological gadgets and with the complicity of key people in power, the electronic ears
of the News of the World – and, many suspect, of other authoritative media – captured private
conversations, secret communications, confidential briefs, angry outbursts, hopes,
disappointments, joys and sorrows; it all was then used to satisfy an increasingly demanding
audience.
Where should the limit be in all this? Who should sets such a limit, and according to what
criteria? What should be punished, unlawful action or the intrusion into people’s lives? How far
can and must go the right, and the duty, to inform the public? Where, in the democratic system,
lies the antidote to intrusiveness? Who is capable of using such means timely, before injustice is
done, and without fear of retaliation?
This story, packed with incredible developments, is marked by society’s slow, almost
slothish reaction. Had it not been for the competitive scoop by the Guardian’s journalist Nick
Davies, author of past brilliant investigations full of scandalous implications, probably no one
would have switched off the disreputable machine driven by the News of the World. Indeed, as
complicities developed increasingly higher and wider, there was an ever diminishing hope that
somebody would disclose the sources of so much vaunted (alleged) journalistic skills. The
system’s antibodies did not work or, perhaps, were neutralized by an illness that had become too
pernicious to be defeated physiologically; that is, by actors’ conscience, by the machine’s drivers’
rethinking or by action by the authorities. Instead, it was an equal and opposite thrust that did the
job; a thrust authored by a professional rival most likely annoyed by the success of its competitor
and unwilling to accept that that intrusive information resulted from appropriate investigations.
All those thorny details, so voluptuously devoured by the public, could only come from
espionage. So, the Guardian published the indictment on its front page, scoring a damaging hit to
the great satisfaction of its editor Alan Rusbridger. It would be interesting to know what makes
Rusbridger tick; would it be a commitment to justice and to protect the audience from this kind of
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journalism, would it be sympathy with the victims or would it perhaps be revenge and the
pleasure in hunting a powerful rival into the dust?
The News of the World’s talented, and for so long unbeatable, journalists were bested by
someone who managed to uncover the technological tricks at the root of their professional
success and who happily stripped naked the publishing world’s king. The apparently granitic
building from which Murdoch built his victories began to unravel at unexpected speed, indicating
that the time was ripe for revenge.
Can we be happy with this epilogue? Can we always say that all is well that that ends
well? Apart from the fact that this story’s ending has not yet been written, the way in which it has
unfolded so far leaves much to be desired; too many unanswered questions are left hanging.
Missing, critical elements in this affair are a sense of proportion, before and after taking the lid
off, and a definition of the dividing line between bad and good journalism. There has been a
remarkable lack of measure in the News of the World’s staffs’ ambition, in the conspiracy chain
that helped and protected the paper, in the readers’ greed, in the widespread deference to the
holder of editorial power, in the complicit network of flatteries, in the advertisers’ opportunism
and in the hypocrisy of those who cried scandal for moralistic reasons. What happened was
bound to happen. It was the unavoidable consequence of unscrupulous hands treating the
journalistic product as a commodity. One cannot help wonder whether, given the chance, many
harsh critics would have been more than willing to sit in the place of the winning Murdoch. Now,
they rub their hands toasting the tyrant’s fall. And yet, do they care about the presumably restored
ethics and perhaps cleanliness of the profession?
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RESEARCH REPORT
Immigrant women and entrepreneurship in Greece
Marina Petronoti
(National Centre for Social Research, Athens)
marinap@ekke.gr
This ethnographic research on immigrant women and entrepreneurship was carried out in Athens and addresses the
growing interest of Greek people in immigrant women’s skills and services, particularly African hairdressing. The
interaction between immigrant hairdressers and Greek customers appears to be instrumental in understanding how
national identity constructs articulate with Western debates and lifestyles.
Key words: Immigrant women, national identity, consumerism, self and the other.
This research focuses on Greek women’s interaction with African hairdressers who run small
salons in Athens. Given that hairstyling is both an aestheticized commodity and an embodied
dimension of identity carved out in self-care regimes of body culture, immigrant entrepreneurs’
narratives enhance our reflexivity on the ways with which the Self and the Other are re-created in
contexts of consumption. Moreover, such narratives illustrate that while Greek customers include
elements of local African traditions in their stylistic choices, such choices do not reflect on their
social views and perspectives; that is, the ways in which they perceive cultural difference and
think of and deal with immigrants in general and African hairdressers in particular.
The ethnography suggests that hairdressers’ shift from employment to business ownership
is consistent with the accelerated pace with which ethnic goods and traditions are incorporated in
Western fashion and with the lax market system and expanded sectors of informal labour
prevailing in Greece. The appeal exerted by African hairdressers on Greek customers also relates
to generalized perceptions of black women as ‘naturally’ resourceful in body decoration. By
extension, salon owners decorate their small premises with meticulous care – for example, with
posters depicting African landscapes and black fashion models – making them spaces in which
Greek customers have access to ‘authentic’ hair arrangements; these spaces satisfy curiosities
about unfamiliar customs and weave imaginative bonds with the world beyond their geographical
borders. Advertising ‘Africaness’ as ‘authenticity’ works as a strategy that bestows notability to
African entrepreneurs as holders of particularly desirable cultural properties and places them in
the interstices between modernity and tradition.
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In their daily life, entrepreneurs try hard to safeguard the delicate balance between
economic needs, rigid migration policies and the benefits (symbolic and material) drawn from
ownership. To achieve this, they resort to self-discipline and intensive labour, adapting their work
schedule to domestic and family obligations. The most significant device with which they
reinforce salons’ maintenance is anchored, however, on the diversification of their economic
activities. In addition to hairstyling, most of them sell a broad range of jewellery and cosmetics
products, face and body creams which are manufactured abroad in keeping with African people’s
taste. The crucial point is that by importing such goods to European cities, entrepreneurs retain
networks that extend beyond national borders and, at the same time, trade ethnic goods in the
national markets. They also enrich and promote their activities by training immigrant and Greek
apprentices. Undoubtedly, culturally specific coiffures are conceptualised as tokens of a global
fashion world, in which these entrepreneurs transmit their skills to ‘hosts’ who otherwise look
down upon immigrants’ cultural heritage as ‘lower’ to the Greek one.
It seems reasonable to say that the experiences of African hairdressers dispute the
assumption that immigrant business ownership is little more than an innovative way to confront
unemployment. The dynamics of their pursuits supersedes economic factors; it brings out the
perplexity of their attributes as women, wives, mothers and formally unqualified albeit unique
providers of ‘authentic’ services. As dynamic agents, these hairdressers have a remarkably good
grasp of how to cope with shortcomings and they take immense pride in eliciting modernity out
of a repertoire of culturally inherited aptitudes. More significantly, they realize that by arranging
Greek customers’ hair they channel informal but nonetheless meaningful processes of integration
in key sectors of Greek society; namely, consumption and body culture.
By all accounts, the most interesting finding of this research concerns the variable
meanings that entrepreneurs attach to the relationships that they develop with their Greek
customers. In spite of the indispensability of their skills and of the trust and physical intimacy
involved in the act of hairdressing, essential ties and communication with the Greek clientele are
virtually absent. As a consequence of the different access immigrants and nationals have to civic
and social rights in Greece, in addition to the reinforcement of intense dislike of ‘others’, the use
that Greek women make of African coiffures intensifies rather than eliminate cultural hierarchies
and discriminative attitudes. In other words, the fact that both Greek and African women assess
modern aesthetics in relation to ethnic workspaces by no means counteracts the representation of
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Greek national culture as devoid of foreign influences. Instead, ethnic hairstyles as fashion icons
serve the dual purpose of projecting Greeks’ standards of consumption as an irrevocable part of
Westernization and as culturally ‘pure’, prior to immigration.
However, it is important to note that the antinomies that mark the interaction between
Greek nationals and immigrants include the potential of their resolution. The potential of defining
Greek customers’ tastes and looks amidst restrictive policies and values is an accomplishment
with major symbolic beneficial implications for African entrepreneurs. African entrepreneurs use
this potential reflectively and for their benefit.
It should be stressed that, although Greek women who step into African salons are
relatively few and differ in age, education and social and occupational status, the aspiration they
all share ‘to look different’ is pertinent to the way in which socially and politically marginalized
immigrants are empowered by their encounters with privileged members of the host society. By
advocating the transformation of an ethnic hairstyle into a constituent of mainstream fashion,
while at the same time maintaining ties with their cultural history and performances, immigrant
entrepreneurs mediate between different social and cultural settings, re-contextualise the meaning
attached to African legacies and contribute to the amalgamation of ethnic with global imperatives
of fashion. Combined, these processes operate as an instrument with which entrepreneurs
‘correct’ wider asymmetries and cast strong links between the new environment and the world
left behind.
In view of the above, immigrant entrepreneurs intuitively and critically understand that
Greek women’s fascination with elements of ethnic cultures is not conducive to openmindedness;
instead, Greek women remain conditioned by stereotypical representations and are
unable to modify or free themselves of their stereotypical attitudes towards immigrant producers
of difference and modernity.
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Bibliography
Appadurai, A. (1996). Modernity at Large. Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. London:
University of Minnesota Press.
Banks, I. (2000). Why Hair Matters. Beauty, Power, and Black Women’s Consciousness. New
York and London: New York University Press.
Featherstone, M. (1991). ‘The Body in Consumer Culture’, in M. Featherstone, M. Hepworth and
B. S. Turner (eds) The Body: Social Processes and Cultural Theory. London and
Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, pp. 170–196.
Giddens, A. (1991). Modernity and Self-identity. Stanford, CA: Stanford California Press.
Hatziprokopiou, P. (2008). ‘The Institutional Framework of Migrant Entrepreneurship in
Greece’, Revista Migracoes 3: 73–84.
Kaneff, D. and King, A. D. (2004). ‘Introduction: Owing Culture’, Focaal, European Journal of
Anthropology 44: 3–19.
Karapostolis, V. (1983). Consuming Behaviour in Greek Society, 1960–1975. Athens: EKKE [in
Greek].
Mavrommatis, G. (2008). ‘Types of Ethnic Entrepreneurship in Athens’, in J. Kavounidi, A.
Kontis, T. Lianos and F. Rossetos (eds) Immigration in Greece: Experience, Policies,
Prospects. vol. A. Athens: IMEPO, pp. 228–246.
Petronoti, M. (2010). ‘Weaving Threads: Between the Ethnic and the Global. African Women’s
Entrepreneurial Ventures in Greece’, Anthropological Journal of European
Cultures, 19 (2): 129-148.
Petronoti, M. (2011). ‘Disguising the Sense of Insecurity in Multicultural Greece’, in Μ. Lianos
(ed.), Insecurity and Otherness. London: Routledge [forthcoming].
Schneider, A. (2003). ‘On “Appropriation”: A Critical Reappraisal of the Concept and Its
Application in Global Art Practices’, Social Anthropology, 11(2): 215–229.
Zdatny, S. (ed.) (1999). Hairdressers and Fashion: A Hairdresser’s History of Paris, 1910–20.
Oxford and New York: Berg.
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REVIEW ARTICLE
Multiculturalism: Theoretical Challenges from Anthropology
Rosemary Harris
(University College London)
John Nagle, 2009, Multiculturalism’s Double Bind: Creating Inclusivity, Cosmopolitanism &
Difference. Farnham: Ashgate.
and
Giuliana B. Prato (ed.), 2009, Beyond Multiculturalism: Views from Anthropology. Farnham:
Ashgate.
Both these books are published in the Urban Anthropology Series. Both are concerned with
examining multiculturalism from an anthropological viewpoint ˗ that is, from the close study of
particular situations ˗ but otherwise they are remarkably different publications. John Nagle’s
book is primarily concerned with minorities in a ‘global city’ seeking to take advantage of statesponsored
multiculturalism, through grants to people organizing ‘ethnic’ arts festivals etc.. The
irony is that ethnic groups are encouraged to make their cultures inclusive and accessible in order
to contribute to a ‘liberal-pluralist celebration of cosmopolitan diversity. Yet, at the same time
they must maintain their ethnic differences in order to maintain their rights to maintain their
claim as a distinctive group to resources. Nagle looks particularly at those claiming an Irish
identity in inner London Boroughs, such as Camden, particularly during the ’80s and ’90s as
leading members sought to move ‘the Irish’ into the category of a recognised ‘ethnic’ group.
Beyond Multiculturalism, on the other hand, is a collection of papers dealing with ethnographic
accounts ranging from Europe, with papers on a wide variety of topics that, amongst other things,
examine immigration of outsiders from many areas into Southern Italy, and Vienna, to the
analysis in China and India (Calcutta), of the influx, within a single state, into urban areas of rural
peoples with very different cultures. There are also papers on particular situations in Canada and
Argentina; and also on the migrant family as a cross cultural kin-based organisation.
The most challenging essay is the Introduction to the latter book by the editor, Giuliana Prato, in
which she confronts key important issues. Multiculturalism is widely seen as ‘benign’. It is
widely assumed amongst the intelligentsia of the democratic west that it is indisputably a morally
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good thing for states to be ‘multicultural’ for this term assumes that an underlying ‘philosophical
good will’ translates ‘into policies that truly promote pluralism, the peaceful coexistence of
diverse cultures and equal citizenship’. In relation to each of these assumed results, she raises
questions.
Writing this in the week that has seen the Norwegian massacres carried out by a selfproclaimed
opponent of multiculturalism, I understand the difficulty of publicly doubting
whether multiculturalism is benign, but Prato, confronting detailed analyses of the consequences
of so called multicultural policies, has the courage to raise doubts, and in doing so raises also
fundamental issues. She doubts whether the assumptions behind the multicultural project can
stand up to analysis. A common assumption is that the host society is an undifferentiated cultural
entity, and that a minority group, moving into it, presents an unchanging cultural object that
needs to have its culture protected. Both assumptions, she thinks, are faulty because they make
false judgements about the very nature of culture; ‘culture’ refers to learned behaviour and is not
genetically inherited so it is inherently malleable. The indigenous population of a ‘host’ society
normally manifests different cultures; and an incoming group changes culturally even when
shown toleration. Multiculturalism is, moreover, an obstacle to integration because ‘[by]
celebrating diversity in the form of group membership, [it] does not break down cultural barriers
but reinforces them’. And, fundamentally, she posits an irreducible dilemma between individual
and group rights on two counts. Positive discrimination on the basis of membership of a minority
group in effect means that the state empowers the leaders of such groups to which privileges have
been granted, to define the rights of their individual members, and this may have the effect of
confining them within the group instead of granting them equality of opportunity in the society as
a whole. Positive discrimination by the political class, also, on the other hand ‘grants privileges to
selected minorities (and) creates new forms of inequality’ that commonly further disadvantage
sections of the host society that were already disadvantaged – Thus the ultimate question is raised
‘is multiculturalism compatible with equal citizenship for all?’. Prato confronts these
uncomfortable ideas and introduces examples of a variety of types of multicultural situations
presented in this book and musters the empirically based insights of ethnographers into the
increasingly complex and ambiguous concept of multiculturalism. For reasons of space I can
comment on only a selection of the papers here presented.
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In relation to Southern Italy, Pardo builds on his very fine earlier studies of the
‘popolino’, the ‘little people’, of Naples, the very disadvantaged local inhabitants, historically
and in contemporary society the abused targets first of the aristocracy and in recent years of
corrupt politicians, to show how the ordinary citizen continues to lose out. He examines the
situation in Naples from this viewpoint and places the lack of integration of non-E.U. immigrants
in the context of the failed integration of the indigenous Neapolitan. He sees the irony in the
multicultural demand made on them today that those who have never been respected by others
should now show toleration and respect for the cultures of immigrants even when some of the
latter make no secret of their own lack of any respect for the culture either of the popolino or of
Italians generally.
Fong, writing on Canada presents the dangerous slope that had to be negotiated when an
apparent simple initial decision in the post 1945 era, to grant equal status to Francophone and
Anglophone rights was taken up by those who promptly demanded equal rights for the speakers
of indigenous languages, to be followed by the claims of immigrants from a range of other areas,
that their languages too should be respected. The question is raised – does all this ultimately
promote the equality of citizens?
A chapter on the influx of an indigenous ethnic group into Rosario, a large urban area in
Argentina previously devoid of native South American inhabitants, shows the complexity of the
problems that arise when a population accustomed to exercising special rights as indigenous
inhabitants expect to translate such rights into their new urban environment. These rights include
linguistic and educational priority; control of land and the right to have their indigenous medical
practices recognised. Should their demands ‘involving the presence of aboriginal medical
practitioners in the public hospitals’ be accepted as their multicultural right?
A chapter that discusses the structures of immigrant families in multicultural societies
raises other very significant issues that have implications for integration. It has been generally
assumed by ‘host’ governments that in two to three generations, the children of the original new
arrivals will cease to have linguistic problems, and in general families, even while retaining
elements of their original culture, will in fact be in many respects ‘acculturated’. But in the
modern era of easy communications such assumptions may be false. Mobile phones and emails
can mean daily contacts between family members resident in different parts of the globe.
Relatively cheap flights may mean frequent visits as those who have gone abroad for economic
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reasons return ‘home’ for holidays. Rubel and Rosman look at the ‘transnational’ family ‘as it is
manifested by the Tongans and the Dominicans and south-east Asian Indian families in the USA,
the Pakistani family in Britain and Sikhs in many areas.
As I have seen it, the transnational family is of great significance amongst the
Bangladeshis in London. This is evident at two levels. The father of a family in the East End may
have his interest so fixed on raising his status in Bangladesh that he ploughs his savings (that may
come in part from family welfare payments, at cost to his wife and children) into buildings in his
home village. At the same time he may strengthen alliances with important people there by
negotiating marriage alliances for his children with families in his home village. In fact it is still
not the norm for marriages to be contracted between young people already resident in the U.K.
Such traditional contracts demand not only that individuals should be of the right caste, but also
be actual cousins.
Interestingly, the custom of arranged marriages may involve the confrontation of the state
with the fundamental multicultural rule, that immigrants’ cultural practices be respected. As Prato
points out this rule can lead, via political correctness, to moral relativism. This demands that the
indigenous population must not object to cultural practices that offend their moral norms; and the
organs of the state must not object either. Certainly this was until recently the case in places like
the London Borough of Tower Hamlets, where social services have been reluctant to notice the
problems of women generally, and in particular of young teen-age girls forced into unwelcome
marriages. In recent years, however, there has been a growing awareness of the fact that such
girls, taken by their parents ‘on holiday’ to Bangladesh, may have their passports removed, be
browbeaten (if nothing worse) into accepting the father’s choice of husband, and then be allowed
to return to the UK only with husband, and hopefully baby, in tow. When I asked a girl to tell me
what she most hoped for in marriage she answered promptly: ‘a husband who sees me as more
than a travel ticket’. More recently so called ‘forced marriage’ has been identified as a public
service scandal because the institutions that should protect British youngsters fail them (and these
teenagers, boys as well as girls, are especially valued as marriage partners in Bangladesh
precisely because they hold British passports that entitle them to enter the U.K. accompanied by a
spouse).The result has been direct conflict between two opposing principles – the right of
immigrants to pursue their own cultural practices, and the rights to protection of all British
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citizens. In a few extreme cases, the state has imprisoned, to their considerable indignation, male
immigrants who have killed or injured recalcitrant female kin.
Against such complex backgrounds showing the varieties of multiculturalism, it is
instructive to return again to the London of the 1980s onwards, and the very detailed study by
John Nagle of the environment of state-sponsored multiculturalism and the endeavours of some
Irish leaders to benefit from the advantages to be gained from achieving an ‘ethnic minority’
status. He shows with meticulous detail, the very tangible benefits that the Greater London
Council, under the leadership of Ken Livingstone, who was aiming at ‘municipal socialism’
based on a network of sub-group alliances, was making available to those it classified as
disadvantaged ethnic minorities. Unsurprisingly, the aim of these Irish leaders was to reap the
reward such a status would bestow on the organisations they represented. It seems that particular
official encouragement was given to the Irish organisations, possibly linked to the fact that
Livingstone was nursing a parliamentary seat in Brent with a very high Irish population. Cynics
might say that the programme, unconstrained, would have taken a significant step in the direction
of pork-barrel politics. From my own experience in Camden at this time, I know that the greatest
advantage was gained by those groups classified as ‘Black’. Extra funding for example was made
available to schools with a high percentage of ‘black’ pupils, and the local authority instructed
them to classify Greek Cypriot children as Black. Various Irish organisations, I was told made an
understandable, but ultimately unsuccessful, bid for this classification; but Nagle documents the
successes they achieved, even against the opposition of many middle class Irish immigrants, of
whom there were an increasing number, in their striving for ‘ethnic minority’ status. The greatest
achievement of the leaders was the attainment of a separate, Irish, category on the 2001 and 2011
U.K. census forms. On this, people were invited to tick the 'Irish’ box if they ‘regarded
themselves as of Irish cultural background’, even if they were not born in Ireland and could not
show evidence of Irish ancestry. (The leaders seem not to have been outstandingly successful in
getting people to adopt this identification since in the event those who ticked this box were fewer
than those known to have been born in Ireland.)
It has been difficult to review together two books that, despite both dealing with
multiculturalism and both doing so from an explicitly anthropological basis, are so very different.
Beyond Multiculturalism suffers from the problems inevitable in a book based on a wide range of
papers. In comparison the narrative of Multiculturalism’s Double Bind, that considers in depth
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the case primarily of a group of leaders, is easy to grasp as they seek to take advantage of statesponsored
multiculturalism, to raise the profile of their social network and turn it into a
recognised ethnic group. The story, well handled, is a remarkable tale of what may prove
ultimately to have been a unique situation. It is undoubtedly a good read. I would not say that of
the other volume, but ultimately Beyond Multiculturalism is the more rewarding as it bubbles
with ideas and challenges readers to think seriously about multifarious social situations, all of
them labeled ‘multicultural’.
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BOOK REVIEW
Italo Pardo and Giuliana B. Prato (eds).
2011. Citizenship and the Legitimacy of
Governance: Anthropology in the
Mediterranean Region.
Farnham: Ashgate Publishing.
Since its beginnings anthropology has
constantly developed new methods and
paradigms, responding to new historical
situations or to theoretical debate. Urban
anthropology as a relatively new specialism
has the ambition to bring innovation to
anthropology in general as well as to urban
studies in particular. One of the most
interesting aspects of urban anthropology is
the attempt to apply the classic
anthropological methods also to research in
Western urban settings, thereby strikingly
transcending the traditional disciplinary
borders of anthropology. High expectations
have accompanied one of the major recent
publications in this field: Citizenship and the
Legitimacy of Governance, edited by Italo
Pardo and Giuliana B. Prato, two pioneers in
the field of urban anthropology.
The collection contains ten essays on
urban ethnographies from some EU member
states and post-Communist and MiddleEastern
countries in the Mediterranean
Region. The empirically-based comparative
studies focus on the problem of the critical
relationship between citizenship and
governance. The volume documents in-depth
case-studies from Albania, Greece, Israel,
Italy, Lebanon, Portugal, Slovenia, Spain,
and Turkey. The North-African countries
were excluded from these researches for
methodological reasons.
At least since the 1980s we have
observed that the gap between the rulers and
the ruled has continuously widened. Political
parties have failed to reorganize themselves
and to counteract the growing disconnection
between citizenship and governance.
Particularly impressive are the confirmations
that the analysis presented in this volume
have found in the case of Italy (Pardo). The
difficult relationship between politics, law
and the broader society has further
deteriorated and has become untenable in the
context of the international financial crisis.
Formal citizenship does not automatically
entail other political or civic rights. In most
of the countries examined in this volume a
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discrepancy has emerged between the formal
political rights and their actual
implementation. Alex Weingrod has studied
the unequal ‘citizen rights’ in two Israeli
coastal towns (Haifa and Jaffa-Tel Aviv),
analyzing the relations between Jews, Arabs
and foreign workers from Eastern Europe,
Asia, Africa and Latin America. Weingrod
illustrates why the ethno-national rhetoric
does not work in Israel’s ‘mixed cities’. A
similar situation of interethnic relations with
unequal rights is investigated by Mateja
Sedmak in the Mediterranean part of
Slovenia. Whereas the small autochthonous
Italian minority enjoys a legally
acknowledged minority status, the
immigrants from former Yugoslavia have no
specific political and civil rights.
Margarida Fernandes and Teresa
Morte have documented how Portuguese
media contribute to foster racial tensions,
reinforcing the negative image of the black
population. To conform to the European
Community policies the Portuguese
government has legislated on immigrants
and ‘ethnic minorities’, but the legal norms
on non-discrimination have not been
effectively implemented. The State is
perceived as ineffective both by the
autochthonous population and by
immigrants.
In times of surprising changes in
citizenship urban authorities and cityplanners
need to develop a new
understanding of public space, argues
Fernando Monge, illustrating how Barcelona
succeeded in promoting its image but failed
to respond to new emerging social identities.
While Barcelona’s port can be read as a
global phenomenon, it is deeply rooted in a
‘local, social and cultural situation’.
Nebi Bardhoshi has dedicated his
article to systems of ‘regulation’ in postSocialist
settings. Land occupancy in the
informal zones of Albania’s great cities is
interpreted as a completely new reality
which has no point of reference in previous
systems. As has been highlighted by other
contributors of this volume, essentializing
interpretations of cultures must be overcome,
but it would be a mistake to consider the
culture of informality as a complete new
phenomenon. Giuliana B. Prato, which has
undertaken a long-term research on regime
change and legal reforms in Albania, is more
cautious when she writes about ‘new
applications of people’s appeal to reciprocal
help and family obligations’, arguing that the
traditional system of reciprocity seems to be
moving towards a system of ‘exchange of
favours’, thus indicating a development that
necessarily starts from a point in the past.
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The connection between the international
pressure on nation-states and the crisis of
legitimacy, studied by Prato in Albania, runs
across the case-studies of Manos Spyridakis
(Greece), Kayhan Delibaş (Turkey), and
Marcello Mollica (Lebanon).
The aspiration of this book is to
supply extensive ethnographic material for
an analysis that should help towards ‘an
informed knowledge of how people actually
respond to macro policies’. In their
introduction Italo Pardo and Giuliana B.
Prato announce a forthcoming publication
that will address the methodological and
theoretical issues of urban anthropology.
Wolfgang Kaltenbacher, Istituto Italiano
per gli Studi Filosofici, Naples, Italy
w.kaltenbacher@iisf.it
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COMPLETED DOCTORAL DISSERTATIONS
Marie Hocquet
hocquet.marie@gmail.com
Doctor in Sociology and Politic Anthropology
Université Jean Monnet Saint-Étienne
Centre Max Weber – UMR 5283
PhD defended on 29th September 2011
Memory, Oblivion and Imaginary Realms, Study of two Centres of the
Communist Memory in East-Berlin: the Palace of the Republic and the Stasi
Museum
Berlin spawns an impressive imagery related to the history of the 20th century. Few other cities
contain so many landmarks of the great events that shaped Europe and the world. From the ruins
of the past century, Berlin is trying to set itself up as the German capital, a centre of political and
economic power which embodies German democracy and sees itself as modest and exemplary.
The collapse of the Wall has led to a break of intelligibility for those who lived within it. The
stigma that made Germany an exception amongst the nations of the world has been swept away
with the wall. However much it opens de facto new prospects for the future, this break of
intelligibility also foreshadows a radically new relationship with history. In the reunified
Germany, and especially in Berlin, a large scale re-evaluation of the past has begun, aiming at
bringing sense to the new historical, political, economic and social order born from the events of
1989. The treatment of the high places of Communism, in conjunction with an extensive work on
the past of the GDR, addresses multiple requirements formulated in political and economic terms,
as well as in terms of identity. The discussion focuses on how the construction of official
narratives of the communist past is part of an overall dynamic of incorporation of narratives of
the new Germany in the urban space of the capital, paying special attention to the ways in which
these reconstructions of the past are received in Berlin’s ‘public arena’. The thesis analyses how a
common history of the GDR is taking shape and how, in turn, alternative narratives of the city
and its past contradict the, sometimes homogenizing, interpretations proposed by the ‘New
Berlin.’
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Jean-Baptiste Clais
jbclais1@hotmail.com
Ecole Doctorale en Sciences Sociales ED 483,
Université de Saint-Etienne, France
Doctoral dissertation defended on 14th October 2011
Making video games and microcomputer a cultural heritage - Online and offline
ethnography of a hobbyist community
This dissertation focuses on a community of 300-to-400 hobbyist-collectors of micro-computers
and video-games from the 1970s to the 1990s, which they call ‘vieilles machines’. The collectors
are mainly from France, but also from Belgium and Switzerland. Fieldwork was carried out both
‘on line’ and ‘off line’, mainly in Paris.
The community members communicate through online forums which belong to local
offline associations. These forums are mainly used to exchange objects and information among
collectors. The discussion looks at the rich and complex system of values and representations that
regulates social relationships among the collectors. The main points are: a love for the vieilles
machines; the will to use them; the idea of sharing knowledge and the rejection of monetary
speculation. Sharing is the very basis of the daily behaviour and social imaginary of the
community. Sharing is not, however, the rule in neighbouring economic systems (eBay, garage
sales, other online auction websites). During the initial stages of the formation of this community
– around 1998 – when these machines were seen as just obsolescent technical rubbishes, as
opposed to collectible items, the community members could collect them for free or at very little
cost. Thus, when an outside market developed and prices increased, they felt as if the vieilles
machines had been stolen from them. As a reaction to the increase of prices caused by the outside
market, the collectors changed the social norms and rules of exchange inside the community, so
that at least they could mitigate the internal price increase. In particular, they promoted the idea
of mutually satisfactory exchange as opposed to the idea of profit, and developed a ‘taboo
system’ on the object’s real price, using the stance of major online opinion leaders whose
expertise had contributed to give the community the status of main promoters of video games and
microcomputer heritage. These collectors have, thus, managed to create a niche economy; a low
price market in which one cannot integrate easily but in which, when fully integrated, anybody
can benefit from an extended system of generosity and mutual aid.
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Kamel Labdouni
k.labdouni@gmail.com
Clersé Laboratory-University of Lille 1
Doctoral dissertation defended on 4th November 2011
Modernization and change in China: Anhropological and social stakes: The
renovation of the residential districts lived by a community of dwellers in Harbin
In China, the phenomenon of new building work has increased since the end of 1990s, raising
issues of the implications and consequences of urban modernization in people’s life. Questioning
locally the process of urban modernization, this thesis is mainly the result of an investigation
conducted in the city of Harbin, in the northeast of China (Heilongjiang Province). The thesis
offers a comprehensive ethnography of a community in the ‘Gu xiang’ district, in the western
part of the city.
The renovation of the district activated anxiety and fear in the community. The thesis
offers a description of the context in which conflicts and negotiations between residents and
authorities took place. The ‘dwellers movement’ was formed following the eviction of residents
and the destructions of their houses. The discussion addresses the emerging nostalgia and the
mourning, and its symbolic expressions, which followed the transformation of residents’
lifestyles. When residents returned, they attempted to re-appropriate the new houses and to
redraw the urban space as a synthesis between their past and their future.
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CONFERENCE REPORT
Report on the 2011 CUA Conference
Market vs Society? Human Principles and Economic Rational in
Changing Times
Manos Spyridakis
(University of the Peloponnese)
maspyridakis@gmail.com
The annual conference of the IUAES Commission on Urban Anthropology was organized in
collaboration with the University of the Peloponnese, Department of Social and Educational
Policy. The conference was held in Corinth, Greece, between 27- 29 May 2011. It addressed
the changes occurred in the international economy after the 1970s and the ensuing shift
towards neo-liberalism in the 1980s that brought out a ‘rediscovery’ of the ideas of Friedrich
Hayek. The view was put forward that the concept of liberalism was the ideological guise of
economic globalization. Thus, the liberalization of market forces, as an ideological and
economic project, has imposed a model of compliance through employment flexibility, the
minimisation of social security, the fragmentation of social solidarity and the
conceptualisation of the economy as money exchanged in the market rather than as an
efficient management of resources.
Within this framework, the Conference’s task was to point out that states and policy
decision-making are evaluated according to criteria related to the severity of macroeconomic
strategies aiming at reducing fiscal deficits and cutting welfare and social benefits. Karl
Polanyi’s claim has been confirmed that the economy has gained an independent life. Thus,
the concepts of economy and society seem to be defined in terms of conflict rather than of
harmonious coexistence. As a consequence, social life has become increasingly insecure and
individualistic, the natural environment is being destroyed and the markets have changed into
arenas of unfair competition and opportunistic speculation, while the unrestricted movement
of capital jeopardizes the economic bases of the welfare state internationally and its
subsequent ability to sustain full employment policies.
In addition the view emerged that for many people it has become gradually impossible to
make the connection between impersonal market institutions and the reality that they
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experience in their daily life. As anthropologists have shown, although people try to resist,
explicitly or implicitly, ‘self-regulating’ economic processes, they would appear to play no
role in the calculation of economic theory and practice.
The Conference’s basic aim was to address the complex connections between society and
economy taking into account the processes that mark this often uneasy relationship in key
social and political fields. Such aim was achieved satisfactorily by the large number of
contributions. The participants were of a mixed origin mainly from European Countries, such
as Greece, the U.K., Italy, Germany and Austria. The keynote speakers of the Conference —
Dr Rosemary Harris, Emeritus Reader in Anthropology at the University College London and
Mr Apostolos Ioakimides on behalf of the European Commission — offered acute
discussions of the listed topics and of the issues and problems raised by policies and
measures taken at national and European Level.
The organization of this Conference benefited greatly from the efficient and effective
cooperation of the CUA Chair, Dr Giuliana B. Prato and of the local Organizing Committee.
The Conference was sponsored by the Postgraduate Program ‘Institutions and Health
Policies’ of Department of Social and Educational Policy at the University of the
Peloponnese, the Greek Ministry of Labour and Social Insurance (European Social Fund Human
Resource Development), the Municipality of Corinth and by the publishing
companies Papazissis Publishers and Ashgate Publishing Limited.
On behalf of the local Organizing Committee
  84
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