Findet im Rahmen des normalen Lehrprogrammes am Institut für Europäische Ethnologie statt, ÜWP Studierende können zusätzlich teilnehmen.
This seminar will scrutinise anthropological perspectives on memory in Eastern Europe. Through a range of regional case studies, it will discuss ethnographic approaches to analysing individual, vernacular, family, social, and cultural memory. We will explore how people embody, perform, feel about, and struggle over different pasts, with a focus on how these practices and affects are instrumentalised by political actors and how such instrumentalisations are resisted.
Thematically the seminar will concentrate on (post)socialist, (post)colonial, and (post)national pasts and presents, and geographically on Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine. Participants will discuss how people in these three – as well as a few other – Eastern European countries engage in ‘past presencing’ (Macdonald 2013), that is, making fragments of the past part of the present. At the centre of the discussion will be the role of various pasts in the current Russia–Ukraine war, which gives the seminar an acute urgency. Topics covered will include borderland identities, Holodomor, Joseph Stalin and the Gulag, World War Two, nostalgia for the Soviet Union, the 1990s, the Belarusian protests of 2020, and the ‘Leninopad’ (the demolition of monuments to Vladimir Lenin in 2013–2014) and ‘decommunisation’ in Ukraine. Participants of the seminar will examine manifestations of these pasts and presents in people’s everyday lives, artistic practices, and political resistance efforts.
The seminar will comprise inputs by the instructor and as well as students, joint engagement with an artwork, a film or a literary work, regular guest speakers, and meaningful discussions in various formats.
Sprache/Language: Beiträge in deutscher oder englischer Sprache sind willkommen. Contributions in English or German are welcome. Special needs: Please feel free to raise with me anything that can help your participation in the seminar.
Chari S, and Verdery K (2009) Thinking between the posts: Postcolonialism, postsocialism, and ethnography after the Cold War. Comparative Studies in Society and History, 51(1): 6–34.
Etkind A; Blacker U; Fedor J (eds) (2013) Memory and Theory in Eastern Europe. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Fedor J, Kangaspuro M, Lassila J, and Zhurzhenko T (eds) (2017) War and Memory in Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Macdonald S (2013) Memorylands: Heritage and Identity in Europe Today. London and New York, Routledge.
Oushakine SA (2021) The colonial scramble and its aftermath: Writing public histories of the postcolonies of socialism. eSamizdat, XIV: 19–43.
Pakier M, Wawrzyniak J (eds) (2015) Memory and Change in Eastern Europe: Eastern Perspectives. New York and Oxford, Berghahn Books.
Rutten E, Fedor J, and Zvereva V (2013) Memory, Conflict and New Media Web Wars in Post-Socialist States. London and New York, Routledge.
