Suchergebnisse

In eleven ethnographic chapters of Rethinking Ethnography in Central Europe examines how issues of global economic and cultural dependencies, mobilities, citizens activism, social movements, and socio-political aspects of post-socialist modernities articulate on the level of everyday discourse and practices

In this paper, I am interested in exploring citizenship regimes as they emerge from the interplay of neoliberal and neoconservative developments in contemporary Europe. I am particularly interested in the connections between different types of contemporary precarity and citizenship imaginaries as they transpire at the historical nexus of a transition between state socialism and neoliberalism. I will use Poland as an example of a post-transition neoliberal economy, where the new political leadership took up criticism of precarity, making it an important public idiom through which the interplay of predatory neoliberalism and national neo-conservatism can be viewed. I will address implications of these trends for education.

In this paper, I draw on the approach to the study of "actually existing liberalisms" with an example from contemporary urban east-central Europe. I focus on the city of Wroclaw, a success story of Poland's economic urban transformation, and consider the symbolic politics embodied in the city's promotional strategy as a tool of ongoing neoliberal restructuring. I argue that an important feature of the city's symbolic politics is the commodification and fetishization of dwarves, the historical symbols of an antitotalitarian movement that used the image of a dwarf as a means for people's deliberative and performative action that helped lay foundations for democracy. Today, the historical legacy of dwarves as a means of associational and performative action has been disguised in the city's promotional strategy, which has turned dwarves into commodities that help sell the city on the global neoliberal market of intercity competition. I call this process of contemporary fetishization, the kidnapping of Wroclaw's dwarves. Kidnapping refers to the process whereby the symbol's meaning and historical legacy is turned into a commodity, disempowering it by depriving it of its meaning for social action. At the conclusion of my paper, I offer a critical ethnographic and pedagogical perspective focused on symbolic politics as a venue for understanding and inspiring critical action in the context of these urban neoliberal developments.

In this paper, I describe our ongoing international project in engaged educational ethnography and participatory action research with young adults and consider its relevance for a discussion on the community-building role of adult education in a globalized context. I use the example of our case study to suggest that adult educators can generate viable communities by creating learning spaces that nurture critical consciousness, a sense of agency, participation and social solidarity among internationally and culturally diverse young adult learners. Furthermore, I argue that participation in international learning communities formed through this educational process can potentially help young adults become locally and globally engaged citizens. International learning communities for global citizenship thus present a proposition for conceptualizing the vital role of adult community education in supporting democratic global and local citizenship in a world defined in terms of cross-cultural and longdistance encounters in the formation of culture. (DIPF/Orig.)

The article is based on the author's ethnographic fieldwork in the Czech Armed Forces (2001-2002) in which she focused on the process of military professionalization--a set of extensive institutional reforms initiated upon the Czech Republic's accession to NATO. She shows that these reforms were not limited to the military sector and involved efforts on the part of the state officials and the media to change the position of the military in the public sphere and culture. The goal of these changes was to bring the image of seriousness to the discredited Czech military, a process that demanded the obliteration of the cultural idiom of Svejk -- a literary hero of the 1920s novel by Jaroslav Hasek and the representation of a peaceful resistance to war and military violence. In the course of the twentieth century, Svejk has become one of the most pervasive cultural references of the popular laughter at oppressive military power and has been a leading cultural idiom for the Czechs during the 30 years of German and Soviet military occupations. The article shows how the current official efforts at changing the image of the Czech military focus on the obliteration of Svejk's cultural idiom, bringing him so frequently to the public discourse that they produce a phantom-like effect in which Svejk has come to haunt the process directed at his expurgation. The established cultural idiom of skepticism toward the army and military bureaucracy thus challenges the transition from communism to democracy and questions the reliance on military force, the imagery of violent conflicts, and just wars as necessary tools of politics. Adapted from the source document.

In Poland, anthropology has never been taught as a mandatory or optional course outside university education. Some attempts to introduce anthropology at a level of secondary school were made at the beginning of the 1990s by the late Krzysztof J. Brozi, university professor of philosophy and cultural anthropology. In his arguments in favor of anthropology Brozi insisted on the general humanistic value of anthropology as a discipline studying cultural diversity, and its popularity in the West, particularly in the United States. He trusted that in the period of enthusiasm for sweeping revolutionary changes in all domains of social life this move would bring expected results, however it was an illusory hope. As far as we know, these attempts did not reach beyond discussions in small academic circles and did not reach the governmental level essential for anthropology to be introduced in the country. Furthermore, most policy makers and representatives of educational institutions in the central administration, independently of their political orientation, probably saw philosophy as the humanistic subject that should be taught in secondary schools rather than anthropology. Instead, it is religion and not anthropology that is offered as an elective subject in schools (Buchowski, Chlewińska 2011).