October 2011
1 post
Civil-society Building, 'Advanced Liberal'... →
My contribution to the Working Papers series of the Oxford Department of International Development.
September 2011
1 post
"State Pride:" Politics of LGBT Rights and...
This is a pre-review, non-final version of a paper forthcoming in East European Politics and Societies.
“State Pride:” Politics of LGBT Rights and Democratisation in “European Serbia”
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May 2011
1 post
The Distant Democratiser: Representations of the...
Here comes the first version of my paper to be presented in the RRPP Annual Conference in Montenegro.
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February 2011
1 post
FIELD NOTES FRAGMENT: PERFORMING STATEHOODS IN...
On the Christian feast of Sretenje (The Presentation of Jesus at the Temple) in 1804, the First Serbian Uprising against the declining Ottoman domination began in Orašac, a village some 70 kilometres south of Belgrade in the Central Serbian region of Šumadija. The uprising was but the beginning of the wars of independence known as the Serbian Revolution (1804–1817) which prepared the ground for...
December 2010
1 post
The Distant Democratizer: Representations of the...
This is an abstract for a paper I will present in the forthcoming conference Social, Political and Economic Change in the Western Balkans on 25-26 May in Sveti Stefan, Montenegro.
The European project is ostensibly associated with democratization, but whether and how socio-political discourses and practices in countries aspiring to the EU accession reflect this link is often poorly ...
November 2010
1 post
FIELD NOTES FRAGMENT: EU TALK(S)
A few days ago, I travelled to Bruxelles for a presentation trip of the best grantee in the first cycle of the Slovak-Serbian EU Enlargement Fund, Stevan. Stevan, a journalist working for the Econom:east magazine, used the Fund’s grant to write a series of stories on the period of Slovak ‘structural reforms’ shortly before and after the EU accession - namely, the overhauls of tax, pension and...
October 2010
1 post
FIELD NOTES FRAGMENT: QUEERS AND PRIESTS
(…) As the second Belgrade Pride Parade approached the Vaznesenjska crkva (The Ascension Church) in Kneza Miloša Boulevard, mid-way to its destination in the Student Cultural Centre, the crowd got somewhat louder and rowdier. I soon learned what induced their derisive shouting and wolf-whistling. At the gate of the churchyard, behind the fence, a small group of mostly middle-aged men silently...
August 2010
2 posts
1 tag
WatchSong eulogising Radovan Karadzic as Son of Serbia. More pictures and videos taken by Jonathan Davis at a nationalist rally in Belgrade in July 2008 here.
July 2010
1 post
Marek Mikuš personal →
current research, CV, publications and past writings
December 2009
3 posts
1968 in Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia
Watching the 1984 Yugoslav film classic Varljivo leto ‘68 (Elusive Summer ‘68) made me realise how different the experience of 1968 events had been in Yugoslavia and, say, Czechoslovakia. The euphoria of Prague Spring, marked by a liberalisation drive in politics and public life supported by the highest echelons of the party, resulted in the traumatising occupation of...
prep essay 2: the context of Serbia –...
State reconfigurations: state-society relations, elites and informal economy In this part of the essay, I would like to move on to examine how the Serbian state and society, in an ongoing interaction with each other, were being reconfigured in recent history. The extent to which conventional transitology is misleading will become more than obvious in the case of Serbia, in which relatively stable...
prep essay 2: the context of Serbia –...
In his monograph on the 1990s ethno-national wars in former Yugoslavia, Hayden (1999) emphasises their constitutional rationality and an almost mechanical logic of the seemingly grotesque acts of violence, while van de Port (1998) finds it more interesting to juxtapose how the worlds of Gypsy-bar festivity and war both serve as the symbolic repositories of vague, inchoate truths that Serbs (and...
November 2009
4 posts
Turning Points in Fieldwork
In his book Gypsies, Wars & Other Instances of the Wild, Mattijs van de Port alludes to the difficulties that the outbreak of war in 1991 in what was then the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia brought for his ethnographic research in Novi Sad. In this capital of the Autonomous Province of Vojvodina, the local bourgeoisie showed every sign of inclination to the modern Western European...
Transnacionálne siete a diskurzy v participatívnej...
Pre slovensky a česky hovoriacich - môj príspevok a prezentácia z konferencie AntropoWebu “Elektronické sociální sítě”, ktorá prebehla minulý štvrtok v Plzni. Príspevok vyjde aj na papieri v špeciálnom čísle AntropoWebu.
prep essay 1: anthropology of postsocialist...
I began writing a series of preparatory essays for my research proposal… Here’s the first one.
The Cold War is not yet over. Its influence is felt even now. How else does one understand the importance accorded by both scholars and policy-makers alike to “privatization,” “marketization,” and “democratization”—that troika of western self-identity so insistently being imposed on others...
October 2009
2 posts
A thumbnail of my research
My research will critically examine and compare two development initiatives implemented in Serbia by East Central European non-governmental organisations and their local partners. It seeks to contribute insights from the previously unexamined postsocialist-to-postsocialist relational setting to anthropologies of development and postsocialist social transformation. The envisaged research focus is...
September 2009
1 post
Work is done...
The thesis is finished, proofread, submitted, but perhaps there will be another/more article-like version later. Check on this one for now. Thanks to C-3 for all their help and time.
ABSTRACT
This work examines how ‘participation’, one of the guiding concepts of contemporary ’discourses of development’ with a manifold ideological genealogy, materialises in the ethnographic and...
August 2009
5 posts
Not much news
to report for the last week… On Monday, most of us hiked the whole day via Hamba and Miringoni to Ouallah 2 and got to see the rest of the southwestern region of the island (in fact, the only part I hasn’t seen yet is the southeastern tip, i.e. Itsamia and its surroundings). In Ouallah 2, we stayed in the bungalows for two nights and celebrated Ruth’s birthday: we found a...
On sociability and doing anthropology
I’ve gradually come to realise that the Comoros, or rural Mohéli to be precise, are a perfect place for some often awkward but essential anthropological soul-searching. (I know, as an introduction to a blog posting this almost screams ‘boring – skip me!’, but perhaps those who know me personally and/or engage with anthropology will find this at least mildly interesting.) Shortly...
Essence est arrivée!
Clearly more relevant in Mohéli than new Beaujolais… Fingers crossed the electricity situation is finally going to get more stable now, at least for a while.
Sunday seems to have become my unlucky day. A week ago, Ruth and I have decided to hike across mountains to Nioumachoua on the south coast, with its beautiful islets and tourist facilities which seem almost luxurious in Mohéli terms...
July 2009
11 posts
A super-quick update:
I know I haven’t made one for quite a long time, but there hasn’t been much electricity around lately and according to the gloomy talk of the island, it’s not going to get much better next two weeks. I’m currently blogging from a make-shift ‘conference hall’ of the Comores Telecom building in Fomboni - one of the few visibly prosperous institutions here - where...
Greetings from Hoani, Mohéli
…three days after my arrival on Monday. After a half-day trip on Sunday to the tourist Eden of Maloudja near Mitsamiouli in the north of Grande Comore, I took the short hop by plane from Hahaya to Bandaressalam airport near Fomboni (whose truly impressive edifice is pictured above). The flight was, fortunately, quite uneventful, although the small Russian plane of Comores Air Service with...
Finally, greetings from the Comoros!
It took me a while because it turned out there is no internet connection in C-3’s headquarters in Iconi where I’m currently staying - locally, an overpriced and slow mobile connection for about 100€ a month is the only option. Besides, electricity is more often out than on (and often comes up just for a few hours in the middle of the night), and the same applies to drinking water. So...
on move
It’s gonna take a while before I’ll fully recover from this long, long trip…
Bangwe - urban public spaces
“In the urban areas of the Comoros, the squares called bangwe structure spatial organisation. They are privileged places where social activities unfold, organised by a complex hierarchical structure and taking into consideration many categories such as clans, neighbourhoods and age groups, which even today govern public life.
The bangwe is an enclosed space which is accessed by two gates,...
L'environnement aux Comoros →
News and information on environment in the Comoros at MweziNet. In French and, to a limited extent, English.
Iain Walker on Comorian nation and state (or lack...
I’ve just finished reading an intriguing 2007 paper on the failure (or, more accurately, material absence) of the nation and the state in the Comoros by Iain Walker, social anthropologist whose doctoral research on Ngazidja focused on mimesis, custom and belonging. Walker’s central argument is that while there is an apparent socio-cultural (linguistic, religious, customary) unity in...
Airplane with 142 passengers crashed near Grande... →
…and I’m really glad to be flying on a different craft and with different airlines next week. On a slightly cynical note, I reckon bad fortune will find the idea of striking at the same place and situation so soon again too boring to bother.