03 mai 2018
9h - 18h
Louvain-la-Neuve
Salle Lecl 93
Vivre au quotidien
Les frontières visibles et invisibles en Europe
La prochaine journée thématique sera consacrée aux frontières. Sous l’intitulé « In & Out : vivre au quotidien les frontières visibles et invisibles en Europe », elle questionnera la matérialité et la symbolique des frontières. Virtuelles ou concrètes, fortes ou ponctuelles, reconnues, méconnues ou déclarées illégitimes, les frontières séparent et rassemblent. Elles composent un lieu de la distinction ainsi qu’un espace de transgression et d’hybridité des identités. A la fois de lieux de contrôle, mais aussi espaces de fluidité et de transgression, les frontières sont ambigues. Les frontières sont aussi des processus. Souvent associées aux périphéries, elles constituent un espace de construction des identités. Les habitants participant souvent au maintien d’une séparation, d’une démarcation peuvent être choqués par la mobilité de la frontière ou sa disparition tandis que régulièrement, ils la franchissent pour de multiples raisons ou encore la font ressurgir de façon éphémère et inattendue par certaines pratiques à saisir contextuellement. Notre intérêt est donc de comprendre comment les frontières prennent formes et quelles sont les implications de ces formes sur la vie culturelle, politique et sociale dans une diversité d’espaces concernés.
Pour comprendre le vécu quotidiens de ces frontières multiples en Europe aujourd’hui, nous recevrons, le 3 mai prochain, à l’UCL:
- Andrew Asher, Adjunct Associate Professor, Indiana University Bloomington, USA:
An Exclusionary Europe? Citizenship Regimes in Schengenland.
This presentation examines the experience of European Union (EU) citizenship by “third country nationals” living as non-citizen residents in the transnational urban space of Słubice, Poland and Frankfurt(Oder), Germany. Because of the cities’ unique border location, the residents of Słubice/Frankfurt(Oder) demonstrated the development of unequal citizenship regimes for EU citizens and non-citizens, in which each group was extended differential access to the entitlements, privileges, and rights of citizenship. By exploring how third country nationals’ ability to exercise citizenship rights were structured and constrained by EU laws and regulations, this article documents the emergence of one instance of illiberality within the EU’s ostensibly democratic economic and political projects, and brings into sharp relief the central role the right to free movement plays in the exercise of full citizenship within the EU.
- Dimitris Dalakoglou, Professeur, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Pays-Bas:
Which Refugee Crisis? On the Proxy of the Systemic Euro-Crisis and its Spatialities
- Melissa Fisher, The Laurits Andersen Professorship with Special Responsibilities in Business and Organizational Anthropology; Department of Anthropology; University of Copenhagen, Danemark:
Notes Toward Businesses in Europe and the United States Re-imaging the Construction of Bodies, Workspace, and Markets to Re-Draw Visible and Invisible, Intra and Extra European Borders:
This paper draws on historic and ethnographic research among business communities negotiating borders in Europe and the United States. I argue that professionals in a range of industries are re-imagining material and symbolic bodies, workspaces, and markets, in order to draw and re-draw visible and invisible, intra and extra European borders in the context of rapid cultural, economic, and political global change. Danish banks create bridges to the business community in Silicon Valley by sending Scandinavian high net worth investors to the Valley by plane and bus. Berlin sustainable fashion designers remain “local’ by buying fabric in nearby Poland, rather than China; they also try to become more cosmopolitan and “European” by opening flagship stores in nearby Copenhagen, as well more global by collaborating with US actresses to wear their designs at world film festivals in, for example, at Sundance, Utah. And the Copenhagen Institute for Future Studies conducts scenario modeling and cultural analysis to identify international and global trends in work. All of these actors are actively rethinking time, space, and borders in relation to the future of business, workers, and the workspace.
- Sarah Green, Professor of Social and Cultural Anthropology at University of Helsinki, Finlande,
European money in a time of separation: an ethnographic note from the Greek front.
Money has been likened to an acid in classical political economy, corroding the ties that bind people together in mutual obligation. Yet the euro was supposed to do the opposite, tying the peoples of the eurozone’s member states together in mutual obligation, through tying their economies together. The financial crisis in Greece, initially supposedly providing an opportunity to demonstrate that mutual obligation, in the end severely challenged it, generating a sense of deep hostility between all sides involved. The accusations of bad faith were sent in all directions. And then, in the middle of that trouble, people who needed help and shelter began arriving in Greece in large numbers from the east, and they kept coming, week after week, month after month. The idea of moving them on from financially crippled Greece, as part of a mutual obligation to house such people within the European Union region, fell on deaf, and then increasingly hostile, ears. This presentation considers value of both European money and its implicit ideals in this moment of things coming apart.
- Béatrice von Hirschhausen, CNRS UMR Géographie-cités, Paris; Centre Marc Bloch Berlin
Penser les différences géoculturelles : conclusions de deux études de cas sur une « frontière fantôme » en Europe /Thinking geocultural differences: Lessons from two cases studies along a « Phantom border » in Europe
The notion of « phantom border » is a metaphor that asks about the historical remanence in contemporary territories. These borders do no longer exist today, but they appear in the heritage of the old times, as well as in social behaviour and different practices carried out in the specific regions. Ongoing on two examples I will explore the heuristic of this metaphor to inquire about the construction of differences in time and space, between European societies, and specifically central and east European societies. The presentation will be held in French.
- Karri. Kiiskinen, postdoctoral Researcher, Turku University, Finlande:
Borders as routes: Insights on borders with bicycles will concern European borders mainly (but not solely) in the Finnish context based on a largely autoethnographic materials gathered between 2015 and 2017 in Finland, Sweden, Germany and Poland. The focus will be on understanding borders in motion, borders as routes and locations in the context of cycling mobility, the meaning of physical experience of borders by own means and as collective doing, to provide insights to the working of many senses and affects around borders, as well as the events and practices of border visibility/invisibility there arises.
- Ullrich. Kockel, professor at the Heriot Watt University, Ecosse, UK:
Finding a Heimat Europa in the frontier: Lithuania’s Memelland
Borderlands as sites of memory, identity and multi-valent cultural heritages are notoriously difficult to comprehend, requiring inter- and indeed transdisciplinary dialogues across varied fields, and ‘critical imagination’ (Watson and Waterton 2013) on the researcher’s part. Taking the multiple ethnic frontier of Lithuania Minor as an example, this paper explores the complex interplay between planned and unplanned heritage spaces in a region of historically dislocated and partially re-placed identities. The popular Memeler Dampfboot and the more academic Annaberger Annalen offer a media background to the analysis of more or less spontaneous memorialisations and diasporic engagements based on ethnographic fieldwork. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, new heritage spaces have emerged in the region, including the UNESCO WHS Curonian Spit, straddling the Lithuanian-Russian border. Located within the site are a range of heritage places, such as the publicly-run international cultural centre Thomas-Mann-Haus, the privately-owned Hotel Bode Museum, and the curiously named Ethnographic Graveyard, developed by the local community and visitors following an initiative by a resident artist, manifesting as ‘loose places’ that have been emerging through the performances of people. Significant actors as well as commercial targets in this context, German Heimwehtouristen [homesickness-tourists], who trace their cultural roots to this region before 1945, have shaped these heritage performances both directly and through local perceptions of which aspects of German culture and history should be designated as local ‘heritage’ through events and material displays. As a region that has suffered multiple displacements and where many of the locals are such only in the second or third generation, homelands are continuously lost and found - and often contested. Local planners have tried, collaborating with various interested groups, to negotiate such contested heritage in interesting ways, such as the recreation of a destroyed German military cemetery in the city of Klaipėda as a work of public landscape art. Sites like this illustrate a gradual retelling of the local story and a repositioning of the different communities of belonging vis-à-vis received narratives. Feeding into that storytelling is the growing popularity of claiming German heritage, while the local German minority, which some say no longer exists, is well able to sustain a secondary school of its own - just some of the contradictions that constitute Memelland heritage today.
The paper, based on recent ethnographic field research as part of the Horizon2020-funded CoHERE project, also draws on the author’s work on the Curonian Spit WHS (Kockel 2012) and his theoretical research on different forms of performing identities in heritage contexts (Kockel 2007; 2010), and queries whether a Heimat Europa[homeland Europe] is indeed being created, as some interviewees claim, by performative discovery of lost homelands in this historic European frontier.
- Justyna Straczuk, lecturer, Institute of Philosophy and Sociology
Polish Academy of Sciences, Varsovie, Pologne:
The centre on the periphery.
Frontiers, borderlands and relational locations on the eastern border of the EU
The Eastern border of the EU visualised as a line on the map marks the end of a certain world. By virtue of its political and economic power it also cuts off or severely limits multifaceted relations on both sides of the border. However, its symbolical effectiveness is still rather weak leaving a barely discernible trace in people’s imagination or identity. Perhaps because of the specific character of this region, which for centuries was the periphery of various empires and intersected by various imaginary boundaries in constant motion, this new border of the EU is also seen as something abstract and arbitrary.
On the basis of my long-term ethnographic research on the Belarusian-Polish borderland, I would like to show how various "location regimes" (using the term of Sarah Green) - such as separate church structures and denomination options, social meanings of the use of different languages and their variants (diglossia), memory and practice of maintaining old class divisions, history of settlement and migrations - shape local ideas about cultural cohesion and identity of this region and how they resonate with the current border of the European Union and a sense of belonging to Europe.