Ruins and Precarity in European Peripheries

Theory from the Peripheries: What Can the Anthropology of Postsocialism Offer to European Anthropology? published in the Anthropological Journal of European Cultures was the most popular Berghahn Open Anthro article from 2020. We asked Ognjen Kojanić to reflect further on what it means to develop theory from the peripheries within European anthropology.

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Studying political economy forces us to confront uneven development (Gill and Kasmir 2016; Kasmir and Gill 2018; Smith 2008) and the class relations, power differentials, and discourses of difference that accompany it. My article “Theory from the Peripheries: What Can the Anthropology of Postsocialism Offer to European Anthropology?” (Kojanić 2020) is grounded in such a dynamic and relational understanding of space in capitalism. In the article, I highlight analyses of the discursive construction of places as peripheral and the political-economic processes of peripheralization, showing how they often intersect. Based on an extensive literature review I argue that studies of those two topics within the anthropology of postsocialism can be a starting point for developing theory from the peripheries within European anthropology.

Recent work on ruination dovetails with some of the interests I pursue in the article and provides a different conceptual entry point for considering my argument. By now, a significant body of work in anthropology has touched on the issue of ruins, material and metaphorical. The idea that ruins are objects that used to be glorious, but are no longer so, has profoundly shaped the cultural history of Europe since the onset of the early modern era. Critiquing this modernist idea is a through line in anthropological approaches to ruins. Similarly, in the discursive construction of some places as peripheries and others as centers, the contemporaneous uneven forms are often understood to belong to different temporalities, a phenomenon which anthropologists have critiqued as “the denial of coevalness” (see Fabian 1983).

Stoler’s (2008) consideration of ruins in the context of colonialism and Navaro-Yashin’s (2009) reflections about ruination that results from conflict have influenced much of the work that employs this concept. Anthropologists have expanded the scope of inquiry to address ruins in the contexts of state socialist projects (Ssorin-Chaikov 2016), capitalist development (Molé 2012), heritage-making (Muehlebach 2017), and mundane infrastructure breakdown (Schwenkel 2015), among others. As opposed to modernist ideas of progress, this body of work broadly investigates the possibility of living in debris and forming lifeworlds in the detritus of that which is gone and yet still persists under the surface producing consequences (Tsing 2015).

Paying attention to ruins is a critical project with important political stakes. The word “ruin” has a double meaning: it can refer to physical remnants that endure as well as an active and violent process of ruination (Stoler 2008, 194). The creation of ruins goes beyond material destruction and decay to encompass a discursive production of places and projects as ruins. In this process, old forms come to be understood as outdated and uninhabitable, rather than worthy of maintenance and reconstruction (Schwenkel 2012; Ssorin-Chaikov 2016). Questions of affect, materiality, infrastructure, and temporality intersect in the focus on peripheral ruins. Three recent articles employ the concept of ruins with regard to empirical material from European peripheries and I see them as brilliant contributions to what I described under the rubric of theory from the peripheries.

In her article on the unfinished retirement home in Bihać, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Azra Hromadžić describes “new vulnerabilities and spaces of exclusion” that emerge in the postsocialist political and economic transformation (2019, 116). Instead of war destruction, Hromadžić describes the process of shady post-war privatization that brought to the fore unresolved claims of land ownership and arrested the development of the retirement home. The unfinished building was boarded up and continued decaying, but it became a site of congregation, first for the disillusioned youth of Bihać and later for migrants passing through Bosnia seeking better life in the European Union. The project that had intended to provide pensioners with the good life of old age in Yugoslav socialism was interrupted by war, then consigned to ruination by post-war political-economic processes, and yet given new life by “uninvited citizens.”

Similar to Hromadžić, Larisa Kurtović (2020) moves away from the themes of ethnonationalist conflict that used to dominate scholarship on Bosnia. In her article on a dilapidated Bosnian detergent factory, Kurtović follows the workers who saw capitalism as bringing about ruination, from which they sought to salvage the aging machines by making them productive again (see also Gilbert and Husarić 2019; cf. Kojanic 2020). Wider public sometimes derogatorily described Dita as a dead horse “that, according to a Bosnian proverb, ‘could not be flogged back to life’ ” (Kurtović 2020, 236), but the workers persisted in their struggle to breathe life into their decayed factory. The outcome of the Dita workers’ struggle is debatable, given that the company was eventually sold to a supermarket chain notorious for precarious labor conditions that is unlikely to provide a respite from the depredations of postsocialist privatization. And yet, however briefly, the workers of Dita managed to remake themselves into productive subjects by repairing machinery and caring for their factory grounds (Kurtović 2020, 234).

In a different part of Europe, Dace Dzenovska (2020) focuses on emptiness in rural Latvia as a consequence of deindustrialization and outmigration. Buildings constructed during the Soviet period and decaying in the present are reminders of Soviet modernity. Be they sights of abandoned factories and uninhabited homes or the smells of damp basements and doors creaking after years of disuse, examples of ruination abound. Some residents of the places Dzenovska describes see emptiness as a tragic occurrence, while others focus on it as an opportunity for individual entrepreneurship. She shows how those two are not mutually exclusive, but rather coexist as novel expressions of the unevenness of capital accumulation.

By engaging with ruination in these three examples, the authors reveal abandoned “futures past” that linger in contemporary ruins: plans for retirement in the case of Bihać workers, hopes that the factory will provide productive employment in the case of Dita workers, or expectations that villages will remain inhabited. And, perhaps more important, they uncover how despite abandonment and destruction, various forms of life persist in the present and allow the articulation new futures. Focusing on what Tsing has called “pericapitalist spaces,” sites that are “simultaneously inside and outside of capitalism” (2015, 63), these authors show how the capitalist system produces debris in which people find possibility to live, endure, and sometimes thrive. The three cases examined by Hromadžić, Kurtović, and Dzenovska shed light on shifting relations between centers and peripheries in the context of deindustrialization, disinvestment, and migration, and the consequent transformations of places and persons. Peripheral vision (Nash 2001; Shore and Trnka 2015) is crucial for the approach that aims to grasp how people live in ruins and peripheries, as well as how ruination and peripheralization unfold. Theory from the peripheries pays attention to the forms that are struggling due to their peripherality in order to offer the possibility to better understand the functioning of capitalism and its remaking.

References

Dzenovska, Dace. 2020. “Emptiness: Capitalism without People in the Latvian Countryside.” American Ethnologist 47 (1): 10–26. https://doi.org/10.1111/amet.12867.

Fabian, Johannes. 1983. Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object. New York, NY: Columbia University Press.

Gilbert, Andrew, and Haris Husarić. 2019. “Care, Publicity, and Worker Politics in Late Industrial Bosnia and Herzegovina.” Society for the Anthropology of Work, September. https://doi.org/10.21428/1d6be30e.e8c8d4dd.

Gill, Lesley, and Sharryn Kasmir. 2016. “History, Politics, Space, Labor: On Unevenness as an Anthropological Concept.” Dialectical Anthropology 40 (2): 87–102. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10624-016-9416-7.

Hromadžić, Azra. 2019. “Uninvited Citizens: Violence, Spatiality and Urban Ruination in Postwar and Postsocialist Bosnia and Herzegovina.” Third World Thematics: A TWQ Journal 4 (2–3): 114–36. https://doi.org/10.1080/23802014.2019.1646615.

Kasmir, Sharryn, and Lesley Gill. 2018. “No Smooth Surfaces: The Anthropology of Unevenness and Combination.” Current Anthropology 59 (4): 355–77. https://doi.org/10.1086/698927.

Kojanić, Ognjen. 2020. “Creative Destruction in Fits and Starts: Machinery Replacement in a Worker-Owned Company.” Anthropological Theory Commons (blog). 2020. http://www.at-commons.com/2020/02/21/creative-destruction-in-fits-and-starts-machinery-replacement-in-a-worker-owned-company/.

Kojanić, Ognjen. 2020. “Theory from the Peripheries: What Can the Anthropology of Postsocialism Offer to European Anthropology?” Anthropological Journal of European Cultures 29 (2): 49–66. https://doi.org/10.3167/ajec.2020.290204.

Kurtović, Larisa. 2020. “When All That Is Solid Does Not Melt into Air: Labor, Politics and Materiality in a Bosnian Detergent Factory.” PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review 43 (2): 228–46. https://doi.org/10.1111/plar.12380.

Molé, Noelle J. 2012. “Hauntings of Solidarity in Post-Fordist Italy.” Anthropological Quarterly 85 (2): 371–96. https://doi.org/10.1353/anq.2012.0024.

Muehlebach, Andrea. 2017. “The Body of Solidarity: Heritage, Memory, and Materiality in Post-Industrial Italy.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 59 (1): 96–126. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0010417516000542.

Nash, June. 2001. “Globalization and the Cultivation of Peripheral Vision.” Anthropology Today 17 (4): 15–22. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8322.00070.

Navaro‐Yashin, Yael. 2009. “Affective Spaces, Melancholic Objects: Ruination and the Production of Anthropological Knowledge*.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 15 (1): 1–18. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9655.2008.01527.x.

Schwenkel, Christina. 2012. “Civilizing the City: Socialist Ruins and Urban Renewal in Central Vietnam.” Positions 20 (2): 437–70. https://doi.org/10.1215/10679847-1538479.

———. 2015. “Spectacular Infrastructure and Its Breakdown in Socialist Vietnam.” American Ethnologist 42 (3): 520–34. https://doi.org/10.1111/amet.12145.

Shore, Cris, and Susanna Trnka. 2015. “Peripheral Vision as Anthropological Critique: How Perspectives from the Margins Can Illuminate the Exploits of Twenty-First-Century Global Capitalism.” Focaal 2015 (71): 29–39. https://doi.org/10.3167/fcl.2015.710104.

Smith, Neil. 2008. Uneven Development: Nature, Capital, and the Production of Space. 3rd edition. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press. http://site.ebrary.com/lib/alltitles/docDetail.action?docID=10367034.

Ssorin-Chaikov, Nikolai. 2016. “Soviet Debris: Failure and the Poetics of Unfinished Construction in Northern Siberia.” Social Research: An International Quarterly 83 (3): 689–721.

Stoler, Ann Laura. 2008. “Imperial Debris: Reflections on Ruins and Ruination.” Cultural Anthropology 23 (2): 191–219. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1360.2008.00007.x.

Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. 2015. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.