Eastern Europe has “long ago been imagined, discovered, claimed, and set apart” (Wolff 1994: 143). The East-West division of Europe, rooted in the logic of the Western Enlightenment, has framed the region and affected livelihoods throughout the Cold War, the post-1989 transformation, the EU enlargement and more recently, during the Covid-19 outbreaks among Eastern European workers in Germany. This course will address this ‘invented’ yet ‘lived’ cartography and reimagine Eastern Europe through anthropology of material and visual culture, and gender studies.
The module will be structured thematically. It will focus on pressing contemporary social issues, including mobilities and borders, memory and heritage, architecture and everyday life, consumption, nationalism, racialisation and racism, and sexuality and gender politics. With examples based in the region, the course will deploy ethnographic cases, film, media, urban and curatorial methods. Although the ethnographic focus is on Eastern Europe, the material culture approaches are very relevant for the wider research areas of European Ethnology, Gender Studies and social sciences and the humanities.
The course will be taught synchronously on Zoom with a possibility of some sessions taking place in class. The seminar will be in English as will be the readings. However, students are welcome to speak German in class as well as submit their course requirements as well as their MAPs in German. Lecture slides and notes will be available to course participants.
Students are encouraged to contact the lecturer about additional learning needs: Magdalena.buchczyk@hu-berlin.de
Findet im Rahmen des normalen Lehrprogrammes am Institut für Europäische Ethnologie statt, ÜWP Studierende können zusätzlich teilnehmen.
Dzenovska, D. (2013). Historical agency and the coloniality of power in postsocialist Europe. Anthropological Theory, 13(4), 394-416.
Koobak, R., & Marling, R. (2014). The decolonial challenge: Framing post-socialist Central and Eastern Europe within transnational feminist studies. European Journal of Women's Studies, 21(4), 330-343.
Lewicki, P. (2020). Struggles over Europe: Postcolonial East/West Dynamics of Race, Sexuality, and Gender.Intersections. East European Journal of Society and Politics,6(3).
Murawska-Muthesius, K. (2021). Imaging and Mapping Eastern Europe: Sarmatia Europea to Post-communist Bloc. Routledge.
Wolff, L. (1994). Inventing Eastern Europe: The map of civilization on the mind of the Enlightenment. Stanford University Press.
