23.
Encounters of the post-socialist kind: The movement of goods and identities
within and beyond the former socialist world
Convenors:
Lale
Yalçın-Heckmann, Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology,
Halle/Saale
Hülya
Demirdirek, University of Victoria, British Columbia
Discussant:
Frances Pine, Max
Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle/Saale and University of Bergen
The socialist
markets involved the delivery of goods and the movement of people across huge
distances, but they were centrally organised and had clear rules and norms
which could be circumvented in equally well-defined ways. The emergence of
post-socialist markets entails new forms of encounters, risk taking, knowledge
and relationships. The distances may still be as vast and the journeys as
cumbersome, but the paths of relationships have changed - as have the
connections, the goods that are exchanged and the people. Azerbaijanis, for
instance, participated in vegetable trading for a while within the Soviet
Union, but now their trade has become transnational, relations international,
their identities non-citizen, encounters multinational and racialised. This
workshop seeks to ask the following kinds of questions: to what degree are new
types of knowledge necessary in these new markets and new market relations?
What sorts of values and norms are being created, reshaped or challenged
through these new encounters within and beyond the post-socialist markets? How
are new identities and communities created through the goods exchanged,
encounters made and relations formed? With which theoretical and methodological
frameworks can these new relations of exchange and identities best be
understood?
"Nothing
has changed, it just turned illegal": discourses of justification of
illegal trade and immigration in the Moldovan Republic
Monica Heintz, Max
Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle/Saale
Maids of
education, entrepreneurs of margin: Class and gender between Moldova and Turkey
Hülya
Demirdirek, University of Victoria, British Columbia
The
Coca-Cola Kashkaval network: Idioms of belonging and business in the
postsocialist Balkans
Georgios
Agelopoulos, University of Macedonia, Thessaloniki
Branding the
Nation: Corporate Governmentality and National Identity in Latvia
Dace Dzenovska,
University of California, Berkeley
Commodification and Changing Outdoor Culture in the Czech Republic
Tomás
Kvasnicka, Lancaster University
Creating the Homo
Europeanus through Consumption
Zsuzsa Gille,
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
From brands to
nations: Consuming goods in late-socialist Vietnam
Elizabeth F.
Vann, Lehigh University, Pennsylvania
I sell, therefore I am: Commodity-person interfaces on the Ulaanbaatar market scene
Morten Axel
Pedersen, University of Copenhagen