Troublesome Temporalities Europe between Nostalgia and Promise Cris Shore
The three articles published in this Forum section were all finalists for the Graduate Student Prize of the Society for the Anthropology of Europe (SAE), which met at the American Anthropological Association’s 2013 meeting in Chicago. While they deal with different parts of Europe (Bulgaria and Romania and Spain, respectively), what unites them is a shared interest in issues of loss, social memory, identity, agency and death, and, in particular, the way people experience temporality and change (see Connerton 1989; Forty and Küchler 1991). The authors brilliantly capture the mood of uncertainty and anxiety facing Europeans in a period of unprecedented uncertainty, insecurity and austerity. What they also show is how Europe’s poor and marginalised are both shaped by and, in turn, try to shape or subvert the national and European policy regimes to which they are subjected. Elana Resnick uses powerful and haunting ethnographic vignettes to show us what life is like for Sofia’s street sweepers, junk collectors and bus drivers who live on the margins of post-Socialist Bulgaria. Her study cleverly weaves together an analysis of the circulation of objects, particularly waste, with a study of how people experience time (i.e. as ‘actual’, ‘historical’ and ‘expected’). In doing so, she highlights four key issues that seem to characterise everyday life in contemporary Bulgaria: 1. Loss: The first concerns the overriding sense of disappointment that pervades the country following Bulgaria’s accession to the European Union (EU). People were promised prosperity and democracy, but these never materialised. Like the characters in Coetzee’s novel Waiting for the Barbarians, they wait and wait, but with growing apathy and resignation. 2. Mobility: The only real beneficiaries of EU membership were the affluent and mobile but this has resulted in an exodus of Bulgaria’s most economically able while the poor and vulnerable (particularly the Romani population) have been left behind to eke out a living by recycling waste. ‘Waste’ has also become a metaphor for their own sense of self and feeling of worthlessness. Anthropological Journal of European Cultures doi: 10.3167/ajec.2015.240108
Volume 24, No. 1 (2015): 120-122 © Berghahn Journals ISSN 1755-2923 (Print) 1755-2931 (Online)
TRoUBLESomE TEmPoRALITIES
3. Debt: We see what happens when people are forced to take out loans from unscrupulous moneylenders. In this respect, Bulgaria serves as a warning to the rest of austerity-burdened Europe. 4. Transition: As Bulgaria’s transition to capitalism renders large parts of the economy – and population – obsolete, it has also alienated many from the welfare safety net previously provided by the state. Thus Bulgaria, like much of Eastern Europe, appears caught in a liminal zone between nostalgia for the past and the security that ‘actually existing Socialism’ provided, and the unfulfilled promise of a better future under capitalism and the EU. In similar vein, Jonathan Stillo’s article explores the lives of another group of victims of the transition to capitalism: patients in a Romanian Tuberculosis Clinic. Like Thomas mann’s famous novel The Magic Mountain, his study offers a potent metaphor of Europe on the cusp of historical transformation. And like Resnik, his ethnographic vignettes powerfully illustrate the themes of personal loss, nostalgia (for the security that state Socialism provided), and temporality (peoples’ sense of being caught ‘out of time’). If the sanatorium patients experience themselves as abandoned, unwanted ‘trash’ it is because they have been abandoned: the state they worked for no longer exists and therefore has no obligation to fulfil its duties to its erstwhile citizens. This raises interesting but unexplored questions about the continuity of the state in Eastern Europe. As Stillo shows, a new form of ‘grievance-based citizenship’ has emerged where the past becomes a reference point for claiming entitlements for welfare support in the present. People want social justice but the tragedy of their situation is that the social sphere, as previously constituted, has disappeared. The irony is that the state appears to have ‘withered away’, but not as Communist theory anticipated. Rather, under neoliberalism it has performed a kind of disappearing act in which the state’s duty of care towards its citizens has been replaced by an ethic of neoliberal responsibilisation in which rational, calculating, self-managing individuals are expected to care for themselves. Johan Rubin’s article introduces a further type of engagement with the past, this time in the exhumation of mass graves from the 1936– 1939 Spanish civil war and the 130,000 or more civilian victims murdered during the Franco dictatorship. The televised exhumation of the body of Severallano Gonzalez provides a canvas for deeper reflection on the relationship between past and present and nicely illustrates the point made by Katherine Verdery (1999) and others about the 121
CRIS SHoRE
political lives of ‘dead bodies’. The symbolic power of corpses and human skeletal remains lies precisely in their materiality and, in this regard, dead bodies speak loudly to the living. However, since the dead cannot speak for themselves they are invariably spoken for by particular political interests. As Stillo shows, the political narrative that emerges from the public exhumation of Gonzalez’s bones is ambiguous and the attempt to film the whole process as if it were from the point of view of the corpse adds further layers of complexity. What else is being exhumed besides Gonzalez’s bones? For some Spanish observers the answer is ‘the rotten soil in which the roots of our democracy are buried’ as democracy in Spain has yet to be resurrected. But when the assembled crowd shout, ‘viva la Republica’, is this an endorsement or criticism of the current political system? These three articles are wonderfully well-crafted, succinct and evocative pieces of ethnographic analysis. What they capture most powerfully is the sense of movement and change that is sweeping across Europe, but also the mood of insecurity and the experience of marginalisation these processes are creating. This is anthropological writing at its best. These articles provide exemplary illustrations of the continuing relevance and vitality of European ethnography today.
Cris Shore, Department of Anthropology, School of Social Sciences, The University of Auckland, New Zealand (
[email protected])
References Connerton, P. (1989), How Societies Remember (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Forty, A. and S. Küchler (eds) (1991), The Art of Forgetting (oxford: Berg). Verdery, K. (1999), The Political Lives of Dead Bodies: Reburial and Postsocialist Change (New York: Columbia University Press).
122
