CARGO Journal for Cultural and Social Anthropology ISSN (print) ISSN (online) Publication Frequency: biannually

Editorial Board CARGO – Journal for Cultural and Social Anthropology ISSN 1212-4923 (print) ISSN 2336-1956 (online) Publication Frequency: biannually Symmetrical Anthropology

Tatiana Bužeková (Comenius University in Bratislava) Hana Červinková (University of Lower Silesia, Institute of Ethnology, The Czech Academy of Sciences, v. v. i.) Jakub Grygar (Charles University in Prague, Institute of Ethnology, The Czech Academy of Sciences, v. v. i.) Ema Hrešanová (University of West Bohemia) Bob Kuřík (Charles University in Prague) Adéla Souralová (Masaryk University) Edit Szénássy (Charles University in Prague) Zdeněk Uherek (Institute of Ethnology, The Czech Academy of Sciences, v. v. i.) Technical Editor

Cargo is a peer-reviewed journal published by the Czech Association for Social Anthropology (CASA). Cargo focuses on theory-and-practice of ethnographic research, critical discussion of anthropological theory, and on ethical issues of producing anthropological knowledge. The journal publishes academic articles, interviews with key scholars in anthropology, and texts debating methods of teaching anthropology. Cargo seeks to present materials that are innovative, challenging, and sometimes experimental. As a journal publishing texts in Czech, Slovak, and English, Cargo aims to reach scholars whose fieldwork and topics are close to geographical area of Central and East Europe.

Cargo is listed in the European Reference Index for the Humanities (ERIH), category NAT. This issue is supported by the Council of Scientific Societies of Czech Republic.

Anežka Jiráková (Charles University in Prague) Proofreadinig Benjamin Cope (European Humanities University) Editorial Advisory Board Michał Buchowski (Adam Mickiewicz University of Poznań and Europe-University Viadrina, Frankfurt / Oder) Chris Hann (Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology) Haldis Haukanes (University of Bergen) Krista Hegburg (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum) Martin Kanovský (Comenius University in Bratislava) Marcin Lubaś (Jagiellonian University, Krakow) Janusz Mucha (AGH University of Science and Technology, Krakow) Alexandra Schwell (University of Vienna) Maruška Svašek (Queen‘s University Belfast) Cargo Website Manager

Contact Editorial Office

Jan Beseda (Charles University in Prague)

Cargo Na Florenci 3 110 01 Praha 1

Cover

[email protected] http://cargojournal.org www.casaonline.cz

Matěj Macháček, http://matejmachacek.com/ Layout Dušan Růžička, Nová tiskárna Pelhřimov, spol. s r. o.

Issue 1, 2 / 2016 appears in May 29th, 2016. Number of copies: 300 / Náklad: 300 ks.

Editorial

Vážení čtenáři, předkládáme vám dvojčíslo časopisu Cargo, které tentokrát není tematické, ale bylo sestaveno výhradně redakcí z textů jí průběžně zasílaných. Z toho pramení i tematická pestrost, která však redakci nezabránila udržet žánrovou čistotu a publikovat kvalitní antropologické příspěvky založené na terénní a materiálové znalosti. Děkujeme tímto všem autorům, kteří do časopisu Cargo píšou, a ubezpečujeme je, že jejich rukopisy jsou dobrou službou nejen časopisu, ale také i jim samotným. Nejen, že časopis je stále součástí databáze ERIH, je dostupný ihned po vydání online a je snadno dohledatelný pro veškeré potenciální zájemce o citování, ale dbá o kvalitní recenzní řízení, které pomůže autorům vytvořit dobrý článek, za nějž se nemusí po několika letech s větším odstupem stydět. Velká část textů vychází v angličtině, která je opět kvalitně redigována a dosah publikovaných textů je tudíž širší, než u řady srovnatelných časopisů. V Cargu publikovala už řada světových antropologických špiček a navíc se jedná o časopis, který vychází pravděpodobně ve srovnatelné kategorii s nejmenšími náklady na jedno číslo. Za dvojčíslo 1/2 2016 je třeba především poděkovat Jakubovi Grygarovi, který se už sice v minulém dvojčísle se čtenáři rozloučil, přes to ale v redakci naštěstí setrval i v roce 2016. Dále je třeba poděkovat technické redaktorce Anežce Jirákové, která se s námi tímto též loučí a v příštím čísle budete moci posoudit práci nového technického redaktora. Poděkovat se též sluší Radě vědeckých společností, která každoročně na publikování časopisu přispívá a samozřejmě i všem členům CASA, z jejichž příspěvků jsou hrazeny některé náklady v případě, že nedostačují externí finanční zdroje. Nevím, zda se sluší děkovat též čtenářům, že časopis čtou a používají ke své práci, ale bez jejich existence by opravdu nemělo smysl cokoli podnikat. Doufáme proto, že si i tentokrát v Cargu najdou text, který je zaujme. Zdeněk Uherek, předseda CASA

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Obsah / Contents

Stati / Articles Jakub Grygar: Geopolitics in the Forest: A Border of Wilderness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 Tomáš Samec: Housing and Moralities: Construction of Home and Middle-Class Identity in Post-Socialist Context . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25 Marie Heřmanová: Imagining the West: (Im)mobility, Social Media and Indigenous Youth in Chiapas, México . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55 Grażyna Kubica: How “Native” Is My “Native Anthropology”? Positionality and the Reception of the Anthropologist’s Work in Her Own Community – A Reflexive Account . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81 Iveta Hajdáková: Zažívání: role afektu v zážitkové gastronomii / Digesperience: the Role of Affect in Experiential Gastronomy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101

Rozhovor / Interview Jaroslav Klepal, Edit Szénássy: From Barefoot Anthropologist to Global Watchdog: An Interview with Nancy Scheper-Hughes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 125

Recenze / Book Reviews Kristián Šrám: Food Consumption in Global Perspective . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 135

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Stati/Articles

pp. 5–23

Geopolitics in the Forest: A Border of Wilderness Jakub Grygar Abstract: Based on ethnographic sketches from the Białowieża National Park (Poland, Belarus) between 2005 – 2009, the paper explores the EU external border in this region focusing on the mutual interconnection between the process of the Europeanization of Poland and its eastern border and the simultaneous othering of Belarus and the exotization of its local population. Belarus and its present political regime stand in juxtaposition with the image of Białowieża as the last European natural forest. In the eyes and practices of visitors of the Białowieża National Park, the forest is not only an area of pristine nature, but it is also an important witness of the recent political history of Poland. The juxtaposition of the political regime in Belarus and the ancient character of the locality is dynamically used by local population for establishing alliance with, or subversion of, the state. The paper discusses different ways in which international borders are established through controversies and negotiations that concern the Białowieża National Park, including the politics of park entry, material barriers, EU standards, global and local arguments about how to protect nature, political tensions between Poland and Belarus, and divergent political interests. Thus, the paper explores the international border as a conservation border involving different schemes of protection within the Polish side of the forest. Keywords: borders, Białowieża Forest, identity, Europeanization, environmental movement

“Save the Białowieża Forest,” people chanted in early March 2006 in front of the Polish Embassy in Prague, as well as other Polish embassies across the world.1 It was not the first time that voices of environmental activists concerned about the Białowieża Forest had been heard. Previous occasions included the September and December 1994, and April 1995 protests and demonstrations of activists and supporters of Greenpeace in Warsaw, Vancouver, New York, Ottawa, London, Edinburgh and Copenhagen against plans to upgrade infrastructure and establish new logging sites in the heart of the Białowieża Forest. In the spring of 2006, top representatives of the Polish government received five-and-a-half thousand letters expressing opposition to the current method of national park management. 1

This article was developed with institutional support RVO: 68378076.

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Geopolitics in the Forest: A Border of Wilderness

The Białowieża National Park is considered unique. Allegedly, it is the oldest lowland forest in Europe and the only region in the world where you can meet wild herds of bison. Both claims are sometimes questioned and believed to be more myth than truth. The forest bears significant traces of human economic activity, so the idea of it being untouched by humans, an argument often used by environmentalists, does not necessarily correspond with reality (Franklin 2001). A similar situation concerns the herds of Żubr, the European bison, which are the symbol of the Białowieża Forest. Their population in Białowieża has not in fact been continuous, since there was a brief period between 1919 after the last bison was shot and 1921 when two new animals were imported into the forest in order to restore breeding. Moreover, the last ten years have witnessed increasingly frequent introductions of bison into the wild outside the area of the Białowieża Forest: in the Bryansk region of the Russian Federation (on the border with Belarus and Ukraine), in the Bieszczady Mountains (Poloniny National Park) in Slovakia or in the Rothaar Mountains in the German North Rhine-Westphalia. For the residents of Hajnówka, the administrative centre of the Polish part of the Białowieża Forest, the municipality of Białowieża and other local municipalities, as well as the national park’s scattered settlements, this inconsistency is not important, just as it is not important for hundreds of biologists and botanists, whose scientific institutes are located in the Białowieża area, or for hoteliers that every year accommodate thousands of tourists visiting the Białowieża National Park. In addition to the originality, antiquity and complexity of the preserved flora and fauna of the forest, there is one other thing worthy of attention. The state border that divides the Białowieża Forest runs between Poland and Belarus. A smaller area, about 40% of the total area which equals 1500 km² of the forest, is situated in Poland, while the remaining territories are in Belarus. The state border that runs through the forest appeared as a result of geopolitical changes after World War II, and in 2004 it became the border of the European Union. How are these things related? What could be the points of commonality between the preservation of nature and the Polish-Belarusian border demarcated by the victors of WWII? And what does this mean today when an external border of the EU has been established? The exploration of these somewhat unexpected connections is the subject of this paper. A Short History of the Forest The Białowieża Forest is a very important place for Poles, for Belarusians and for the bison whose symbol can be found on the park emblem, on the label of a local beer, in the name of Żubróvka, a well-known liquor and popular export item, or in the name of one of the most famous organisations of the Belarusian political opposition. The Białowieża Forest, the pushcha, a word used in both Polish

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and Belarusian, is part of the cultural heritage of both countries. Notes of the Białowieża Forest can be found in Lithuanian and Polish documents from the 15th century, where we can also find the first regulations regarding restrictions on entry into the territory of the forest. Even then, not just anyone could enter the forest, which served as a place which Lithuanian Earls and Princes and Polish Kings used for game hunting, before eventually being succeeded by Russian Tsars. These restrictions are the reason why a large part of the forest has been preserved to this day: as a property of Polish Kings or Russian Tsars, the forest was their sovereign terrain on which logging and development was for a long time significantly restricted (Faliński 1968; Franklin 2002; Korbel 2009). Besides its supposed continuity and authenticity, the Białowieża Forest also has two other features that distinguish it from similar ecological niches. First, it is the symbolic role which the Białowieża Forest plays in the articulation of the uniqueness and specificity of the actors who invoke it. The second distinction-making feature is the discourse around the idea that right of entry into the Białowieża Forest was “always” rather limited. Therefore, a series of different boundaries are demarcated from the time when the first written references to this area are made. Both these characteristics are complementary. They are exclusive, as they rather serve as distinctions towards others. Each characteristic in its own way develops a policy that “strangers” must stay outside. And, as in other cases that advocate that “strangers” should stay outside, very often appear passionate disputes about who could be inside. In the Białowieża Forest, this takes many different forms. Strangers and Locals “We have to organize international action to pressure the Polish government. As we did in 2004, when we to significantly reduce logging. Why should it not be possible even now?” It is May 2005, and I am sitting in the kitchen of a plain wooden house in Białowieża. Mariusz, a sinewy fifty year old, is passionately depicting a plan of action which only four months later filled the news in the Polish national media. Mariusz is a city planner, architect, and a former university teacher. During the period of postsocialist restitutions, he acquired some assets, abandoned his academic career and decided to leave the industrial city of Katowice and move to Białowieża. From here, he started to organize resistance against the way the forest is managed. “Foresters chop everything down. They see only wood in the forest. In 1996, the national park area has been extended to double in size, but the main goal, the extension of the strictly protected area where nobody with a chainsaw could ever enter, failed to be achieved.2 Foresters today harvest timber in areas in which, 2

The Contract for Bialowieza was a contract signed by the local population and government with a promise to expand the national park over all the forest in 2000, but local peo-

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according to the marked trails, entry is forbidden. Locals do not understand how important the preservation of the forest is; hence, we cannot expect any support from them. Anything other than mobilizing an international public is not possible. The Polish government will not heed anything else,” he explains. Mariusz is right: people living in Białowieża do not support plans to expand the zone of strict protection of the park, having voted against it in the 2000 referendum. The locals are mostly Polish Belarusians (Białorusini in Polish), for whom, however, ethnic identification with the neighbouring nation state is largely problematic. They refuse to define themselves ethnically, preferring to be called locals, or tutejshi. More than anything, it is religion that defines them – Orthodox Christianity. In this area, if you do not attend a church (meaning a Catholic Church), but a tserkiev (an Orthodox Church), you are identified as a Belarusian or Ukrainian, in one word a rusek (Engelking 1999; Sadowski 1995).3 Amongst tutejshi are Vasil and Jadwiga. In the summer of 2005, when I was with my students mapping the changes that occurred on the eastern Polish border after Poland joined the EU, one of the places we visited was Białowieża. We arrived in the village in the evening and, as it was evident that finding private accommodation would be quite difficult, we asked our bus driver for advice. From the conversation, I remember his astonished reaction at the fact that we were interested in something as strange as the national border, and as weird as the people and the country behind this border. I then encountered this reaction among people in Białowieża many times. But the driver introduced us to Vasil and Jadwiga, an older married couple who during the school year rented two rooms to apprentices from nearby forestry schools, and throughout the year provided lodging to bus drivers whose route and journey at the end of the day ended in Białowieża. Vasil and Jadwiga were quite wary towards us at the beginning, but eventually I managed to introduce us as “students”, and justify our presence in Białowieża and our overnight stay. That first time we stayed in Białowieża for only three or four days – too short a time to be able to say anything about the life of locals, but long enough to deepen my interest in Białowieża. Over the next three years, I returned to Białowieża and stayed with Vasil and Jadwiga repeatedly. What I found striking was a certain selective amnesia that the couple applied to each of my visits – pretending that they did not remember me, saying each time, “No, we don’t rent rooms;” “We don’t know you;” “You were not here before, you must be mistaken.” Unlike on the first day, when I was supported by the bus driver who brought me to their door, I realized that now I was a lone man in his thirties who stood at the

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ple and foresters passed legislation which gave them local control. See Niedzialkowski (2012). For a more comprehensive discussion of ethno-religious identification, see for instance Straczuk (2013: 17-61). Cargo (2016), Vol. 14, No. 1 - 2

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gate with a backpack, asking in fluent Polish but with a foreign accent for accommodation for a few days or a week it was probably enough to scare anyone. The reasons were further clarified to me one night when Vasil hosted me with homemade spirit – horilka – mixing it with honey, and explained in his unmistakable phrasing and soft local dialect: “You know, it’s not so common here to find a lone guy in front of the house. Behind the fence, starts the forest and behind the forest, there is already Lukashenko. On the other hand, to the west, there are the Polish, and you never know what to expect from them.” It took us a while before we established that although Vasil’s neighbours included many Polish people, these were mostly scientists who worked in nearby research institutes, people from the top management of the National Park, members of the Border Police, Catholic priests inhabiting the Białowieża rectory and people who, like Mariusz decided to exchange life in the big city for a life in nature. Behind the forest, in Belarus, there were Belarusians, who could also be people that are local, like Vasil and Jadwiga, but Vasil did not actually know them. The few memories that he still had about the family of his great-uncle who lived in Belarus, he stored in the form of fading photographs from family reunions in the early 1970s, when the family met at their great uncle’s funeral in Belarusian Pruzhany, a town situated only 40 km from Białowieża. The only thing that Vasil was able to say about Belarus was what he knew from Belarusian television broadcasts. Unlike in Poland, in Belarus people have jobs and are not hungry, there is order and, even if Lukashenko most likely is not an angel, he is capable to take care of his people and the whole country. Which is something that Vasil cannot say about Poland with such certainty. It is not that Vasil feels distance towards Poland, although he would probably cheer for Belarusian footballers rather than for the Polish team. However, he does not have any particular reason to show loyalty to Poland and to the Polish people. Vasil still remembers stories of neighbours, whose families were considered ethnically unreliable and deemed Belarusians or Ukrainians – simply not Catholics and therefore non-Polish, and who were evicted from the eastern border region to the west and north of Poland. After all, his parents-in-law gave his wife a very “Polish name” precisely for the reason of “reliability” in the eyes of the Polish authorities. He also speaks of witnessing the oppression of local villagers by the Polish government. When he explains his reasons for voting against the expansion of the protection zone of the Białowieża Forest, Vasil uses an argument identified by Polish sociologists (Sadowski 1995): Vasil, like many Polish Belarusians, is concerned about the possibility of further Polonization. The elimination of the existing possibilities of free entry to the forest would ultimately mean the liquidation of scattered forest settlements and the eviction of locals beyond the extended territory of the national park. “What do we do there, diffused and cut off from our roots? There they would make Poles out of us.”

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Jadwiga, who was silent during the whole argument, eventually got involved in our conversation. The issues of our conversation cover a lot of ground, such as Vasil’s story of his visit to Pruzhany, the evaluation of the quality of Polish democracy and economy, and also two recurring themes: the quality of life in Białowieża in the context of the possible expansion of the area of strict protection within the national park and the question of the national border, which runs less than a kilometre behind their house. Jadwiga and Vasil knew about the large demonstrations that took place in world cities. “They showed it even on Belarusian television channels,” explained Jadwiga. My landlords could talk about this topic for a long time. However, somehow they could not cope with the fact that their pride and enthusiasm resulting from the fact that “their Białowieża” interested people as far away as “in America”, goes hand in hand with a disillusionment that their own voice, the voice of the tutejshi people who oppose the ecological demonstrators, is heard no farther than regional administrative centres, such as Hajnówka or Białystok.4 It was only after some time that I registered that Vasil with Jadwiga began to identify my presence in Białowieża and my interest in their lives in the heart of the forest with the dispute over the extension of the national park that we discussed. I realized that I was positioned as a Polish man and a scientist, one of those people against whom the tutejshi define themselves in the dispute over the pushcha and its borders. A Polish man, because what other Polish-speaking foreigner would have appeared in Białowieża (of course, sometimes Germans, Dutch, and even Americans arrived, but everybody knows that they are not Polish because they do not speak Polish). A scientist, after all, because I told them that I work at a university in Prague and in the Warsaw Academy of Sciences, because I also know some people who work in research facilities located in Białowieża and because, like activists and certainly many scientists from Białowieża, I have also been in some of the world capitals where demonstrations against the interests of the tutejshi took place. The Border Vasil and Jadwiga understood the Polish-Belarusian border, which runs across their backyard, in ways comparable to how they understand the relationship between the tutejshi and the scientists residing in Białowieża. Of course, they understand that the Białowieża Forest is a “unique in the world”, “reservoir of natural resources”, “cultural heritage of humanity” and that, as such, it must not only be protected but also studied, for instance, in the way done by the scientists who work here in several research institutions. Vasil and Jadwiga do not know much 4

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about the scientists’ work. Or more precisely, when it came to talk about the scientists’ work, it turned out that Vasil and Jadwiga did not know anything about it. I am not even sure if they had ever met any scholar or scientist living in Białowieża. They do not fall within their circle of acquaintances, their relatives, neighbours and friends, in other words those who are simply tutejshi. Unlike tutejshi, the interests of scientists are, according to Vasil and Jadwiga, only instrumental: to get the most out of the local conditions and then leave Białowieża. So, it turns out that Vasil and Jadwiga did have some kind of knowledge about the scientists: they knew that – unlike them – scientists are mobile. This unfortunately does not mean that scientists are in Białowieża only temporarily, but rather their mobility implies in that if one group of scientists leave, others came right away in their place. One of those mobile scientists is Magda who, in the Mammal Research Institute of the Polish Academy of Sciences, is working on her dissertation on the migration routes of bison. Following the signals of small lightweight radio transmitters that are attached to the bodies of these animals, Magda is able to monitor the mobility of the bisons almost in real time. For now, she is working only on a pilot project which monitors the movement of animals in the game preserve, but soon she should be monitoring the movement of the wild animals as well. This is why Magda’s interest is to expand the “natural ecosystem” in which the bison range as widely as possible. Although Magda does not agree with all the arguments formulated by environmental activists, such as Mariusz, she is in agreement with them on the following: the requirement for expanding the national park should not apply only to the area that is utilised by loggers, such as Vasil, to which locals provide vigorous resistance, but should be formulated in such a way that all kinds of roadblocks that impede the natural movement of animals would disappear. There are many such roadblocks in the forest, such as the border fence built in the 1980s by the border troops of the Soviet Army in order to defend the territory of the Soviet Union against dangerously active Solidarity movement. Magda believes that for now it would be enough, if there were selected places where the fence could be demolished. This wired fence and through the ploughed land around it, did not managed to stop the flow of anti-communist ideas under the previous regime, but bison do have a problem with the fence. At least, according to what scientists say about bison’s natural migratory gradients. While for scientists and environmental activists, such as Magda and Mariusz, physical barriers at the border are something improper, undesirable and perhaps even harmful, Vasil and Jadwiga see borders and their material visibility differently. “Borders and wolves are best avoided,” Vasil once commented regarding his relationship to the border. This was during our first meeting, when together with my students I wanted to learn how to find the easiest route to get to the border line. Our interest was understood as the interest of tourists interested in any local or specific scenery which it is required to photograph before departure so

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that the captured image at home could serve as proof of the fact that we were really there. This was not far from the truth. The only thing that was missing was the reason why we so strongly link Białowieża with the border. Sure, Białowieża lies in its close vicinity, but Vasil himself, as has been said previously, attributed the real social relevance of the border with the social boundaries that divide the local villagers, such as himself and Jadwiga, from townspeople, scientists and other Poles, like myself for example. “The border is dangerous,” the explained to us Vasil. Dangerous and tricky. As proof of his allegations, he began invoking true stories of Russian (Soviet, Belarusian) border guards who attract tourists and mushroom or blueberry pickers to cross at the border posts, saying they will be happy to take photographs with them and show them truly abundant sites of berries or mushrooms. The unfortunates who fell for this were immediately detained after crossing the border, while the cunning border guards were rewarded for their vigilance with special holidays. These stories of real events which Vasil invoked are probably part of the collective memory of the whole Polish eastern borderlands. These memories I’ve registered in almost identical forms on the border with Ukraine and Lithuania as well, but I have also heard them at the Czech-Polish border, as a proof of the credibility of Czech pioneers or camp cooks and the treachery of the Polish soldiers who guarded the border between socialist Czechoslovakia and the Polish People’s Republic. Regardless of whether Vasil depicted real events (being fact does not preclude settled narrative forms) or whether we are dealing here with one of the modern myths that has the special function of pointing out the relationship between the civilian population (ordinary citizens) and soldiers (the state), Vasil’s story shows one very important thing. While for me the state border was a subject of professional interest, the reason why I came to Białowieża, for Vasil and Jadwiga it remained something elusive, that in our conversations could only be covered via vague stories and common precepts. No information about how to get to the border, no references to situations where one or the other managed to approach the intersection dividing the forest into two sides, no descriptions which would give us, foreigners and youngsters, an illustration of how life actually looked near the border then, or under socialism when borders still held their seriousness. None of the things described within the context of life at the Czech-German border by Spalová (2003), or at the German-German border by Berdahl (1999). The border itself for Vasil and Jadwiga was not an issue, and remained so even during my repeated visits. Vasil and Jadwiga’s ostentatious non-interest to the existence of the Polish-Belarusian border in their immediate vicinity stood out especially in situations when we started to talk about the political regime in Belarus. Accustomed to the environment which I frequent in the Czech Republic, and for a while in Poland, I expected that our positions would be the same. Lukashenko’s regime I evaluate as bizarre

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and ridiculous, but also as authoritarian and extremely cruel, and I automatically expected that Vasil and Jadwiga would share similar views. In fact, Vasil and Jadwiga did agree with me. The difference, however, was that despite all these characteristics they did not consider the political regime in Belarus unacceptable. I realized this during my stay in Białowieża in August 2006. I was together with Vasil and Jadwiga after one of my visits to nearby Hajnówka and again got into a lengthy conversation. Already a year has passed since the moment I, along with the bus driver and my students, found myself for the first time in front of their house. During our common interactions, that despite the great length of time from the first contact could be counted in weeks rather than months, we managed to discuss a lot about ourselves, refute many of the initial misunderstandings and stereotypes, and strengthen or deepen others. On that August evening, I was returning from Hajnówka, where I had visited a peculiar, but among locals wellknown pub, called “U Wołodzi”. The Bar U Wołodzi was not only a place where you could drink local beer (Żubr) or local vodka (Żubrovka), but a particularly bizarre open-air museum exhibiting red flags, Soviet military uniforms, portraits of Lenin and countless photos of Vladimir Putin and Alexander Lukashenko. Thus, a small wooden shed huddled on a main street between blocks of flats, offering more seats in a small “garden” than inside, has, thanks to its eye-catching decoration become, right from the early 90s when the bar owner, Mr. Wojciech, started his business, a local landmark. It seemed to the owner a pity that bust of the leader of world revolution which had been pulled down from some monument should ended up on a scrapheap, so he made the bust the main icon of his recently opened drinking room. Up to this point, I had an ambivalent relationship to this place. The muddle of historical artefacts referring to the period of socialism fascinated me. At the same time, the positive response and success of this business which, although its icons exposed the precedent ideology to ridicule at the same time expressed a certain nostalgia for bygone times, and perhaps even for the previous regime, also amazed me in the context of anti-communist and above all anti-Russian Polish society. The uncertainty of what everything actually means in the bar U Wołodzi, was also perceived by Mr. Wojciech. His father had come from the German border and his mother from the Slovakian border, but his entire life he had lived in Hajnówka. Although he considers himself a local, sometimes he feels that he does not really fit in. He accepted the possibly that there are situations where what he considers a jokey reference to the past is perceived by his patrons or people from Hajnówka as disparaging important symbols. When I then had a conversation with Mr. Wojciech talking about people’s relationship to the former regime, often came to my mind the warnings I had heard many times that the villagers of the Białowieża Forest often cooperated directly with the Soviet KGB and even today cooperate with its Belarusian successor. The topic that I opened immediate-

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Picture 1: Bar U Wołodzi, Hajnówka. (Source: www.ciekawepodlasie.pl)

ly attracted the attention of other guests in the bar. Instead of confirming this information or refuting it, the message articulated by the new participants in our conversation was very clear: anyone who did not live here, should not start such topics as these and, moreover, should not even talk about such matters. Then was perhaps the first time that I could not challenge these views by pointing out that I also had spent a considerable part of my life in socialism and that many of the things my bar acquaintances talked about, I had also either experienced myself or had been otherwise interpreted to me in Bohemia, Poland, Ukraine and Belarus many times before. My ignorance during this noisy debate still more and more inflamed the local context, and eventually it become for my debaters the main argument: why I, from the position of a foreigner, cannot understand the situation of locals and their relationship concerning the period of the Polish socialism, postsocialist transformation, their assessment of the political situation in Belarus and Western democracy. After returning from Hajnówka, I found Vasil and Jadwiga sitting in a room watching television. When I mentioned that I had been at the bar U Wołodzi, I noticed a flash of displeasure cross Vasil’s face. “I do not like it there, they make fun of everything there,” he commented in response to my question as to whether he ever went there. He had never been there, but of course he does know about it the place. The U Wołodzi bar often appears in national newspapers and magazines, 14

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and even film-makers from Japan or the United States had filmed documentaries about the bar. “They think that they are making a document about how life is here, but they don’t know anything,” said Vasil explaining his reservations, having no idea how much his words resonated with what had been said a few hours earlier by the regulars in the bar U Wołodzi. He feels that this interest of journalists and tourists is just another effort to get interesting experience out of a picturesque wilderness. The U Wołodzi bar is thus just another open-air museum in which the people of Poland and the West would like to close all tutejshi. I stood there in the doorway, a little uncomfortable with the rejection which I felt in Vasil’s tone of voice and, feeling that this was a little bit pointed at myself too, I began to wonder how best to end the entire conversation. Jadwiga who, while seeming to listen to us all the time, was at the same time flipping from one television channel to another, until she stopped at one of the Belarusian television programs where an old Soviet crime thriller had just started. “You’re right, the museum is on that side,” I said to Vasil and nodded to the TV. What should have been a sentence that I hoped would strike a peace between us, turned out quite the opposite. Jadwiga turned in her chair and slowly, to make sure that I understand all that she was about to say, started to explain that democracy and freedom is one thing, but on the other side of the scale does not lie dictatorship, as they write in the newspapers, but justice, order and the ability to work, to earn a living the way it has been done here for generations. And that the people in the forest understand the meaning of this much better than in Warsaw. In fact, nothing much would happen if the border crossed not behind, but in front of their house concluded Jadwiga, bringing our conversation for the evening to a close. Tourism Lukashenko‘s regime, often referred to as the last dictatorship in Europe, creates an interesting juxtaposition with the Białowieża Forest, the last European natural forest. Blavascunas (2008) describes how, in the eyes of Polish tourists and the practices of Białowieża’s hoteliers and tourism promoters, the Białowieża Forest stands not only as a witness to an original state of nature, but also emerges as a relic of the distant and recent political history of Poland. One of the artefacts that, according to Blavascunas, immerse Białowieża and its surroundings in the centre of a mythical Polish national history was the Soplicowo Hotel which opened in 2003 (burned down in 2010). The hotel name referred to one of the imaginary places from the epic story Pan Tadeusz by Adam Mickiewicz (1834). Mickiewicz, a native of the eastern Polish borderlands (now part of Belarus), in this national epic places in Soplicowo events that portray an idealized life of villagers, and the eponymous hotel through its architectural design confirms this idyllic vision of rural life. Casual visitors and hotel guests find themselves in

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a country house where every detail demonstrates unity with nature (the materials used, the representations of different domestic animals), staff are dressed in plain clothes (referring to folk clothing worn perhaps in the 19th century), and the furniture evokes the squire aristocracy which in Mickiewicz‘s work bears thoughts of the reunification of the Polish state (room design).

Picture 2: Hotel Soplicowo. (Source: www.findpolandhotels.com)

Indeed, visitors to Białowieża can find themselves in different moments in Polish history: in a luxury imperial restaurant housed in the former Białowieża railway station, at the Tsar’s Boudoir Nightclub located in one of the big Białowieża hotels or in a railway train on a trip into the heart of the forest, where passengers are exposed to a staged attack of Soviet / Russian partisans and subsequently admitted to the Communist Party. The antiquity of the forest and its uniqueness is thus connected with all this bizarre “Polish” history with which the visitor comes into contact only through its exotisation. Blavascunas conceptualises the past which the tourist encounters in Białowieża, as being composed of the following (2007, 2008): the ancient landscape and architectural details; the old (original) forest; the Polish view of Belarusians / local residents in the nineteenth century; and the period of communism, which is largely presented through the regime in neighbouring Belarus. The wired fence, the impenetrable border, which is so abhorrent to scientists and ecologists, and perhaps even to all the mammals on whose behalf scientists and environmentalists speak, then plays an important role in this image of Białowieża as a village frozen in time. It presentation as an attractive tourist relic of the past makes Białowieża, its inhabitants and neighbouring Belarus into genuine antiquities.

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Every year, more and more tourists arrive in Białowieża. When the season is in full swing, the population of the village, originally less than a thousand, almost doubles. The luxury hotels that have been raised here in recent years are for Mariusz an eyesore. “To bring thousands of tourists to the National Park is nonsense,” he says. “Moreover, what exactly can they do here? People who came in recent years are increasingly those who not satisfied by organized walks in reserved zones and in the dedicated visitor park. One day in the forest, a second day in a museum, but what about the third day and other days?” Mariusz knows what program hoteliers would like to offer their guests, but further development of the infrastructure for the tourism industry, similar to the one provided by the Hotel Soplicowo and tourist trips into the forest, would go ever further into the history of nature and society. Environmentalists and scientists have, for now, successfully defended against this new development. As an attraction, therefore, hoteliers offer a trip to Belarus. The forest and mosquitoes are identical there, but the opportunity to visit another environmentally conserved area, along with politically conserved Belarus, makes this alternative very attractive in the context of the Białowieża boredom. Border Crossing The centre of Białowieża is only three or four miles away from the border with Belarus. Anatoly, a native local man and commander of the local border police station, did not seem to be too busy when meeting with me and my students in 2005. In the summer of 2005, he with his entire unit moved to a new gatehouse, one of those that were recently built, every twenty or thirty kilometres along the external border of the European Union. We do not encounter illegal border crossing here: the density of the forest and the abundance of mosquitoes in the summer months are the best barrier. And if anyone ever tried to transgress the border, in new cars with the slogan, “Leading through technology”, the border police will catch anyone. A modernisation similar to that through which the guardhouse passed in 20052006, also happened on the nearby border crossing into Belarus. Two modular buildings on the Polish side, the other two on the Belarusian side, a border gate, a white line bisecting the narrow asphalt road exactly in the places where the state borders run and finally a large iron gate. This was how the border crossing in Białowieża used to look before modernizing it (or more precisely, EU-nizing it). The three members of the border police and one employee of the customs administration stationed here did not have much work. Since 2006, however, things are different. European standards have no understanding for modular buildings. Border crossings on the external border of the EU must comply with strictly prescribed requirements, including a bunker where the border police unit could hide in case of an air attack from enemy parties.

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Picture 3: Bialowiezha: border crossing in the heart of the forest, 2005. (Picture: Jakub Grygar)

However, the EU does not harmonize only the border crossing itself, but the entire border regime. The institution of small local border traffic, which can be used only by locals and which was mainly used for visits of divided families across the border, was indeed cancelled and the possibility of lawfully crossing the border from April 2005 opened to all. If you have a valid passport, and if you have a Belarusian visa, you should have no obstructions to cross the border. Whether you are a local or a tourist. And this is exactly what Mariusz is afraid of. It starts with the construction of a new border crossing, then the expansion of the road that leads to it that will bring tourists here and thus the devastation of the “original” and “untouched wilderness” picks up speed. In the Białowieża Forest, free movement and the removal of all artificial barriers are deserved only by bison. In contrast, the movement of people should be restricted with new barriers. The border crossing is only for pedestrians or cyclists. However, because the crossing is in the heart of the forest, it is not desirable that visitors should move around without proper supervision. At least, this is how the Belarusian authorities explains it when they do not allow tourists to wander around the park without a guide – an employee of the National Park. Tourists who pass through customs and passport clearance must wait until one of the employees of the park comes and takes over from the border guard. “The iron gate on the Belarusian side, is that 18

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Picture 4: Bialowiezha: border crossing according to EU standards, 2006. (Picture: Jakub Grygar)

the fence built in the eighties?”, I ask Jana, a young guard that here, in the middle of the forest, dressed in tight skirt and stilettos, seems somewhat out of place. “No, no, this is the gate where the Belarusian area of the strictly preserved zone of the national park begins,” she explains. Like on the Polish side, in this zone only tourists accompanied by an employee of the National Park can enter. It has already happened on several occasions that tourists properly checked and dispatched to the Belarusian side had, after several hours of waiting for staff from the National Park, simply returned back. “After all, for just one or two tourists it is not worth it for the Belarusians to send someone to come out of the park,” says Jana’s colleague with a rueful smile. There were others, perhaps Dutch tourists, whose visas, passports, everything was fine, and who crossed the border on bicycles. And two hours later, a military off-road car arrived from the Belarusian KGB and escorted the Dutch tourists with their bicycles back to the border crossing. Grażyna, an ethnologist and national park employee from Białowieża, a Polish Belarusian, also talks about the KGB and experiences with its ever-present Belarusian secret police informers. Beyond the border, Grażyna visits distant relatives and, even in the 90s, conducted ethnological research there. “They guard only villages and roads. In the forest, you don’t come across control,” says Grażyna. Belarusians are not interested in the forCargo (2016), Vol. 14, No. 1 - 2

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est and its protection. The only thing guarded is Lukashenko’s summer house, or dacha. “The Białowieża Forest, the Belarusian half, is de facto Lukashenko’s personal property.” Grażyna thus creates a parallel between the untouchable (sacred) area in order to protect public interest, as in the Polish part of the National Park, and state protection, or rather the untouchability of personal property, as it is in the case of Belarus. The form in which interstate borders exist and how the border control regime and cross-border migration is practiced, thus directly affect the potential “vulnerabilities” of nature, the state and its representatives. It is no wonder that tourists, as they move around in the context of the reality of a country with a political regime envisaged as an odd remnant from the period of the Soviet Union, and encounter unusual supervision and restriction of movement, explain their as a “return” to a bygone era. Tourists’ allegations of about the poverty in which Belarusian villagers live and the restrictions of movements to which they were exposed, which Blavascunas also experienced (2008), reinforce tourists’ understanding of their own civilizational maturity. The important thing is that tourists’ trips “to Belarus” and their understanding of what they saw on the Belarusian side, are not depicted in strict opposition to what they found in Białowieża. Belarus is not the antithesis of Białowieża. The only difference is in the range of services and the facilities for tourism: the obsolescence of the local population in Białowieża, on the other hand, is only slightly smaller than the one they witnessed in Belarus. National borders act as a border of the quality and “antiquity” of the life of locals, as well as of an exotic and wilderness environment. The viewpoint of Polish / western tourists is similar to the conclusion that Jadwiga formulated after my return from the bar U Wołodzi: that is that the national border could be allocated not beyond Białowieża, but several miles in front of it. Forms of Border The zone of strict protection of the National Park, for which Polish activists call, is also to be found on the Belarusian side of the border. The restricted zone that is to ensure the undisturbed lives of world unique game, here (coincidentally?) accurately replicates the belt where the national border runs. The barrier is not only created by the white line on the road, the gate, the Iron Gate, the fence, the border police, the KGB and the mosquitoes, but also by a zone of “untouched wilderness”. The forest, and its strict protection zone, serve as a natural barrier. Or perhaps as a roadblock created by nature? For each of the actors who appear in this paper, the border between Poland and Belarus represents something different that separates (or includes) different important facts and has other sources of legitimacy. Scientists and environmental activists, such as Mariusz or Magda, whose academic careers reflect usual “Western” values and trajectories would like to remove physical barriers at the borders, so as to allow the movement of game to be as nat-

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ural as possible, hence in the territory of both the Polish and Belarusian parks. This does not mean, however, that they would like to simultaneously open the Białowieża Forest, Białowieża and the small settlements scattered around it for the entire world. On the contrary, while the border should be more accessible for animals, the movement of people across the National Park should be more limited. According to Magda and Mariusz, until that happens, the existence of the PolishBelarusian border dividing the national park entails at least one good thing: the closed border prevents the contamination of the “natural” Belarusian part of the forest by tourists. The relationship to the border which Vasil and Jadwiga (and by extension, many other tutejshi) share is not straightforward and clear. Of course, they realize that its existence created a barrier and significantly reduced, or even ended living contact with many relatives who now live in Belarus. However, at the same time they are very well aware that the interplay of their life in the forest and on the border contributes to their marginalization and exotization by the inhabitants of the central state, by “Poles”. Paradoxically, they do not attribute the border only with negative connotations. Its existence also demonstrates that many stereotypical views that they are exposed to do not reflect their own values. When Jadwiga said that the border could easily run in front of their house, she also said that the people and the values to which she is introduced by the Belarusian media feel (perhaps due to the historical experience of locals / tutejshi with the Poles) to her closer than the discourse of political legitimacy and justice currently dominant in Polish public space. The Polish-Belarusian border thus acts as a border between different local experiences imprinted with great history and varying value standards, and less like a border of different geopolitical regimes. The importance difference of being tutejshi, that Vasil and Jadwiga perceive, is also emphasized by many Polish tourists and Białowieża’s hoteliers. The difference is that locals, who are enacted by the tourist industry as exotic and archaic, want to break away from this picture. They do so symbolically to seriously express a belonging to this past. Not as a curiosity, but as a practical policy option. For many visitors, Białowieża is only further evidence of the antiquated natural and social environment in which they found themselves for a few days. By tying interpretations of the region and its inhabitants, which are both anchored in the Polish national consciousness with the time of national revival, with the exotified image of post-Soviet Belarus, which the tourist industry actually offers, these tourists reiterate that the Belarusian border through the centre of the forest could equally be delineated in front of their own national park. In this paper, I did not discuss the possibilities for nature conservation. Nor was my aim to argue about the motives and strategies of mobilization that Mariusz and his colleagues choose. I did not want to say that protests by environmentalists acted in favour of Lukashenko. And the last thing I wanted was to question the legiti-

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macy of these protests. Through describing the situation of the environmentalists’ protests, I just wanted to point out the various ways in which international borders are enacted. The practices that build them and the practices that dilute them. And the often unintended connections that these actions create. The mere presence or absence of a fence does not mean anything. It is not enough to ask what kind of material (physical) barriers, we find at a border, or what barriers are missing and who is missing them. Actually these barriers are not that important. More important is how these borders / barriers are used. The Białowieża Forest, its different zones with different regimes of entry (Strict Reserve National park, open national park, state forestry lands, and state forestry nature preserves), material barriers, EU standards, global and local arguments about how to protect nature, political tensions between Poland and Belarus, quests for mutual relationships between Poles and Belarusians (both those that are Polish and those that are citizens of Belarus), political interests and vocabulary based on the opposition of democracy and totalitarianism: all these in different situations refer to and are linked to each other. These references and links are directly involved in border creation or reduction. Through these connections, we can see how these different borders are permeable or impermeable for humans as well as for bison (and all those in Poland and Belarus that the Żubr represents).

REFERENCES Berdahl, Daphne. 1999. Where the World Ended. Re-Unification and Identity in the German Borderland. Berkeley: University of California Press. Blavascunas, Eunice. 2007. “The Primeval Forest at the Belarusian Border in Poland: Constituting and Crossing Borders.” In Borders of the European Union: Strategies of Crossing and Resistance, edited by Paul Bauer and Mathilde Darley, 232 – 253. Prague: CeFReS. ———. 2008. The Peasant and Communist Past in the Making of an Ecological Region: Podlasie, Poland. ProQuest, Umi Dissertation Publishing. ———. 2010. “Imaginative Geography at the Forested Polish/Belarusian Borderland.” Annus Albaruthenicus vol.11, edited by Sokrat Janowicz. Stowarzyszenie Villa Sokrates, Krynki, Poland. Engelking, Anna. 1999. “The Natsyas of the Grodno Region of Belarus: A Field Study.” Nations and Nationalisms 5 (2): 175 – 206. Faliński, Janusz Bogdan, ed. 1968. Park Narodowy w Puszczy Białowieskiej. Warszawa: PWRiL. Franklin, Stuart. 2002. “Białowieża Forest: Myth, Reality, and the Politics of Dispossesion.” Environment and Planning 34 (8): 1459-1485. Korbel, Janusz J. 2009. Puszcza Białowieska – czarno na białym. Białowieża. 22

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Niedziałkowski, Krzysztof, Jouni Paavola, and Bogumiła Jędrzejewska. 2012. “Participation and Protected Areas Governance: The Impact of Changing Influence of Local Authorities on the Conservation of the Białowieża Primeval Forest, Poland. Ecology and Society 17 (1): 2. http://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol17/iss1/art2/. Sadowski, Andrzej. 1995. Pogranicze polsko-białoruskie. Tożsamość mieszkanców. Białystok: Trans Humana. Spalová, Barbora. 2003. “Když to pude, já se vocaď nehnu. (Lokální a regionální identita kulturních elit v pohraničí.)” In Regionální identita obyvatel pohraničí, edited by František Zich, 59 – 80. Praha: Sociologický ústav AV ČR. Straczuk, Justyna. 2013. Cmentarz i stół. Pogranicze prawosławno-katolickie w Polsce i na Białorusi. Toruń: WydawnictwoNaukowe UMK.

Jakub Grygar [email protected] Institute of Sociological Studies Faculty of Social Sciences Charles University in Prague www.fsv.cuni.cz Institute of Ethnology The Czech Academy of Sciences www.eu.cas.cz

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Stati/Articles

pp. 25–54

Housing and Moralities: Construction of Home and Middle-Class Identity in Post-Socialist Context Tomáš Samec Abstract: Constructing the personal and social identity in the current complex era might be seen as non-trivial achievement. In the context of post-socialist housing market and in the practice of creating the home I present the findings of my field research based on several interviews with “middle-class“ people from Czech Republic acquiring their home during recent years. Combing the narrative and content analysis the article presents broad and deep insight into the people᾽s understanding of space, places and morality. The conclusion is that the realm of housing is more important, than might have been regarded in the connection of performance of certain roles – good parent, capable husband or wife and successful person in general. Thus it reveals the values and ethos, which are regarded as principal by the middle-class people. Moreover the issue of emotions is tackled and proved to be crucial in the people decision making and moral evaluation. The article thus provides the presentation of original method of analysis and persuasive presentation of ordinary people everyday life with regard to their valued ethos, objects and beliefs. Keywords: housing, narrative, emotions, post-socialism, constructivism, moral ethos

Buying a house, might be a very important decision, but creating yourself a home, may be the most important and hardest decision one can ever made.1 Making these decisions in the times of uncertainty, in the times of rising or dropping of real estate᾽s market prices, may be even harder, yet potentially stimulating for the construction of certain social identities. This text presents findings of research, which was conducted during my master thesis research project and which was supposed to focus mostly on the issue of the Financial crises. However other themes in the informant᾽s accounts have proven to be significant in connection to their narratively (re)constructed identities. These themes have involved the ability to express the well performed role of good parent, capable person or respon1

The work was supported by the grant SVV-2016-260 339. I would like to thank Jakub Grygar for immense help during the all stages of my research project. I would like to thank Petr Gibas for the help with proofreading and two anonymous reviewers for insightful comments. Special thanks for great support to Eva Šindelářová.

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Housing and Moralities: Construction of Home and Middle-Class Identity in Post-Socialist Context

sible partner in connection with the process of creation of home for them and their families. Following text describes the results of the analysis of narratives and presents the answer for research question: What kind of “language tools” (tropes, themes and figures) informants use in their narratives, when speaking about the experience of social construction of home? Formulating the answer for this research question also enable me to present more general findings about the links between the significance of home in the process of construction correct and acceptable middle-class identity. The importance of such research may seem at first glance unclear. Why we should deal with accounts of “ordinary”, middle-class people and their stories, how they acquired their homes? I have two answers on both theoretical and “practical” levels. From the theoretical point of view, in the anthropological and sociological research has been tendency to observe the “different”, “otherness” and even “exotic” and the “normal”, “ordinary” and “banal” has been usually omitted from the interest of researchers (Highmore 2002). My focus was thus to reverse this usual approach and shed light on the “ordinary” bourgeoisie middleclass, which might be sometimes regarded as intuitively understandable, however more systematic and rigorous ways to describe and interpret these domains are desperately missing. People belonging to the middle-class has experienced also significant pressures due to the combination dismantling of welfare state, increasing tax burden and sustained aspirations to climb on the social ladder (or at least not to fall down). Thus even thought the concept of middle-class may be problematic (we may be facing the “danger” of essentialism), focusing on this “average” terrain may be fruitful in order to understand more general social processes and changes. From the “practical point of view”, understanding the processes of how people, who are identified (by themselves or by the others) as belonging to the middle-class᾽ economical and cultural milieu, construct their identities through certain performance on housing markets, may be essential in order to suggest potential future scenarios of housing market development. In other words, significance of home as cultural tool, which serves to construct the “correct” identity, and the practices of people conducted in order to perform this identity has also structural impacts on housing market, e.g. due to the preference of ownership housing or certain forms of housing (family house with garden etc.). Broadening the angle of view on the issues of housing and social construction of identity from the historical perspective of the experience of post-socialism in the context of the Czech Republic, regarding the housing market, is also one of the aims of this article. In this perspective, the domain of housing and process of the transformation of the housing market, represented by the privatization and restitutions of the real estate (Lux 2012), became the stage where people could learn how to live their lives under different structural conditions. Experiencing the changes on the housing market (which affected, if not everybody, then most of the people) was one of the learning tools how to live under new capitalist post-

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socialist conditions. As for example the practice of using the mortgage as a instrument to obtain the real estate has definitely not been “natural“ in the Czech context and actors on the market have had to learn it. The learning of the practices of the global capitalism could be seen as marked by the narratives of independence and emancipation on different scales and dimensions: politics, economics, family and individual. All these experiences during the period of transition and transformation might be seen as important regarding the symbolic tropes, certain ethos and imaginations rooted in the collective memory and used in the current narratives (Halbwachs and Coser 1992). I. Housing: Global and Post-Socialist Contexts: Material and Symbolic Domains The concepts of modern housing and modern home as certain safe places are not culturally neutral and natural. They are subjects of the collective social constructions through usage of certain more or less local or global imaginations (Burawoy 2000). Although often communicated through global channels of communication, they are often contested and modified in the local contexts. Especially remarkable is the example and the relevance of the “dream of own family house”, which origins might be traced from 1930s᾽ and interestingly enough in connection with the Great Depression, when the single-family household unit was supposed to increase the levels of consumption (Taylor 1999: 13). The irony of history is that the American dream for home-ownership, (Stephens 2003: 1013; Boehm and Schlottman 1999: 217-218) which should be preferably in the suburbs, (Taylor 1999: 20) in connection with the transformation of ethos of thrift into the ethos of greed and/or (over)consumption (Kenway and Fahey 2010) resulted into the fertile ground for the housing bubble on the American housing market. That we can never get away from the sprawl /// Living in the sprawl /// Dead shopping malls rise like mountains beyond mountains /// And there᾽s no end in sight (Arcade Fire – Sprawl II – The Suburbs 2010) The experiences of living in these specific places – suburban neighborhoods – under certain conditions, which require certain conformity to the imagined ideal, are so strong, that apart from scientific discourse they have been also subject to mainstream cultural production (such as The Stepfords Wives, Blue Velvet, American Beauty). At this point we should prefigure the non-trivial relation between two domains of experience: material and symbolic. One possible approach is the framework of Herbert Blumer, where the material domain is being subjected to the scrutiny of the symbolic domain and the meaning of objects and practices is being constantly recreated using the symbolic resources (Blumer 1966). However, Jean Baudrillard has problematized the simple distinction between objects and

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meanings/signs presenting the idea of collapse of the symbolic into its own and neglecting the exchange between “real” and “sign” (Baudrillard 1993: 6 – 7; see also Baudrillard in Foster 1983: 126 – 134). In his perspective, the crucial role in this process is marked by the end of production and the era of consumption, whereas both material and symbolic may be the subject of consumption. In order to be able develop the meaningful and practical analytical framework, I deliberately put aside the theoretically problematic division of materiality and symbolic into two realms. The symbolic domain I define as being constituted by certain abstract “tools”, which are able to communicate meanings. First, (global) imaginations, which represent certain visions of how the “ideal” reality should or might look like (Gille and Ó Riain 2002: 283 – 285); second, ethos, which is the set of moral principles and values, which are used by people in order to coordinated their behaviour and construct certain identities (Ossowska 2012); third, narrative tropes, which are the references in the communication, which draws his imaginative power from a pool of metaphors, images and references to cultural, historic or situational cliches (Knight 2013). Through these symbolical references the meanings are communicated, identities constructed and in certain situations symbolic boundaries are being enacted (Lamont and Fournier 1992). This differentiation between me/us as “better” than the others might be constructed on the basis of emotions (Sayer 2005), on the basis of moral valuation of conduct (Ossowska 2012), on the status of old-resident or new-comer (Southerton 2002) or as suggest on the basis of practising of certain aesthetics or (non)conforming to certain standards of everyday practice. In the context of aesthetics and standards of everyday behaviour we cannot neglect the historical dimension. We might assumed, that the condition of post-socialist experience in the housing market and in the process of social construction of home is different, than in the United States or Western countries in general. Krisztina Fehérvary is developing argument, why has been the ideal of suburban family houses so successful in the Hungarian context and how is the materiality connected to the process of (social group) identity construction (Fehérvary 2011). She suggests that the social differentiation as a process is being achieved by the specific material condition (living in the certain type of house) in connection to the certain management of space through certain activities, such gardening and others (Fehérvary 2011: 20-21). These practices are also reified by discourses of normality and morality, which circulate and in some cases are being narrated when there is a need to express some stances towards the lived situation. In other words those who wants to express their belonging to the middle class have to perform certain behavior regarding their housing i.e. family house with “pretty accessories“, both inside and outside the house (Fehérvary 2011: 23-26). In the Czech context, the suburbanization has been subject of study mostly for the social geographers and sociologist. Either with the interest in it as phenome-

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non in general (Sýkora 2003) or in the concrete examples of this process in the regions of Prague (Ouředníček 2003) or Brno (Galčanová and Vacková 2008) or for the whole Czech Republic (Kostelecký and Čermák 2004). These studies mostly share interest in the processes of migration, mobility and social change. The historical experience of transition and evolution of the housing market in the Czech Republic have been marked by several important features: property restitutions and regulation of the rental housing market (Lux and Mikeszová: 2012) (Lux, Sunega and Boelhouwer 2009). These unique circumstances have resulted in the creation of two housing classes: privileged and non-privileged i.e. those who did not have the access to the restitution of apartment or had to rent for the market prices (Lux and Sunega 2006). So the differentiation of certain groups was in this case structural, but resulting from the application of certain ethos or ideologies, which favoured the private ownership and were somehow connected to the euphoric atmosphere after the Velvet Revolution (Lux 2012: 85-86). In arguing for private ownership or rental housing were employed also certain discursive figures and imagination such as “spoiled tenants“ and “greedy investors“, which also shaped the perception of certain types of housing, resulting together with other factor in almost universal acceptance of the ideal model of homeownership (Lux 2012: 89, 92). The imagination of “good investment“ in the real estate is so pervasive, that during the quasi-experiment with young people concerning their behaviour on the housing market, most of them were willing to pay significant amounts of their funds for their own house or apartment (Lux 2009). So it seems, that the ideal of private ownership, preferably of family house is deeply rooted in the shared cultural preferences in the post-socialist countries. Those cultural preferences are being performatively actualized and thus reified in the everyday life through the emotions, usage of certain commonly understandable symbolic references (tropes) and links to the moral ethos. In the field of housing Olga Šmídová (2012) has dealt with issue of (auto)biographies and institutions in her research of how the “old“ practices are sustained and reified. Šmídová described the process of how the institution of private ownership was distorted during the socialism into the institution “right to use” the house or apartment (Šmídová 2012: 117-120). This had also profound impact on the process of restitution and privatization of housing stock – owners and “users” of apartments had to develop new quasi-institutions and narratives to support them in order to make the system work (Šmídová 2012: 122-124). It has been attempts to create the schemes of decision making process regarding the housing choice (Wong 2002), but their limitations are based on their theoretical assumptions of individual, whose actions are being either based on the utilitarian rationality or on the influence of the psychological factors (Akerlof and Shiller 2009). These conceptualization completely avoid the cultural and narrative dimensions of the decision making process, which is presented in this article.

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II. Narrative(s): The Story Is behind It All When having a conversation about housing and your communication partner says: “Oh! This mortgage is such a good buy!”, it does not just mean, that it is rationally and economically advantageous, but it also makes you feel good and capable, because you were able to fix this kind of advantageous financial instrument. This remark would be like for the social scientist like one of the top-chart summer tunes hundred times repeated in the radio: language is not neutral medium of communication, but using it you also create and construct the world for yourself and also for others. This idea is of course deeply rooted in the works of many importants authors (Wittgenstein 2001) (Garfinkel 2002) (Berger and Luckmann 1973) (Searle 1969) and eventually the ideas of “interpretative turn” rest upon it (Reckwitz 2002). Althought “narrative” is often regarded to an overloaded concept, the attempts to clarify the different (analytic) meanings and to construct diverse theoretical frameworks has been made (Hájek, Havlík and Nekvapil 2012). The wide variety of usage of the narrative approach reminds us of the importance of this specific communication genre in the effort of grasping both biographical life-times stories and small stories about everyday life experiences (Spector-Mersel 2010: 213). Moreover narratives often enable people to bridge the great divide between the personal biographical experience and structural historical events (Häninnen 2004) (Polkinghorne 1988: 14). In other words, narrative as a communication genre serves also individuals to make sense of their lives (Ezzy 1998: 239; Spector-Mersel 2010: 210). This may be illustrated in the very concrete historical case of transformation from the socialist state into the post-socialist, capitalist system during the 1989 and 90᾽s. Jiří Kabele has promoted the idea of dual social construction, which one the theoretical element is the interaction between the narrativization and institutionalization of social reality (Kabele 1998). This interplay is crucial in the construction both meaningful everyday lives and “functional” institutions in the course of (historical) uncertainty. In other words “nobody” knew what is going to happen after the Velvet Revolution, but there were two main huge narratives – Havel᾽s democratic and life in truth and Klaus᾽ neo-liberal market style. These two huge narratives then functioned as a frame for the biographies of people helping them “make sense” of the events they were experiencing, (de)legitimizing them (e.g. free elections, coupon privatization). Balázc Vedres in case of Hungary suggests, that “the reality“ is even more complicated and not only huge narratives are enough to provide the interpretation of transformation, but more subtle and multiple ways how to narrate/understand the events in their temporal, dynamic dimensions (Vedres 2004). Classical work of William Labov, dealing with the structure of narrative, highlights the significance of the evaluation part of narrative (Labov 1972: 354-370). 30

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The evaluation in this sense serves like a justification of the account, but also serves as a medium to communicate certain stances of the story-teller and serves as a performance of certain morality or ethos (Atkinson and Delamont 2006: 165). Narratives also may serve as a tool how could people describe themselves in the “favourable light”, being a “good person” (Hanninen 2004: 78) and constructing thus a certain face and practising the impression management in the Erving Goffman᾽s sense (Goffman 1959). Another issue is the fact, that the meaning in not inherently contained somewhere in the story itself, but has to be created not just by the story-teller, but in the cooperation with listener (De Fina 2009: 238, 246-248). In the context of ethnomethodological re-use of data from the narrative accounts from socialism Zdeněk Konopásek and Zuzana Kusá has demonstrated this issue (Konopásek and Kusá: 2005: 63). So the significance of narratives might be summarized in their three important features: they make sense of the reality, especially during the times of “transformation“ (Kabele 1998: 158-159); through them the people evaluate the social reality, creating the moral stances; the meaning of the narrative is created in the interaction of teller and listener. These features of narrative, as a genre of communication, are essential is the process of social construction of home. We get here back at the beginning to the postulated research question, which opens the field of language tools in the process of home᾽s construction. Through usage of certain language tools, people are to articulate their everyday experience with their homes and they may signify those issues, which are relevant for them. Moreover they are able to bring in the temporal dimension in their accounts and in fact this is crucial for the construction of meaning, both what is being told (to the listener), and what is being lived and experienced (by the narrator). Conceptually this is closely link to the Doreen Massey concept of place, which is characteristic by the relevance of procesuality in the construction of places (Massey 1994). Her approach is remarkable not only because she points on the significance of process and dynamics of place, but that she also suggest understanding places like texts. Places themselves have no inherent meaning. They are ascribed to them only by “readers“ (people, networks of people) summoning certain values and characteristics, which are based on their knowledge and networks of relations between them (Massey 1994: 149-156). In this process the language and certain language tools are significant and thus “home spoken” is “home real”. III. Field, Data, and Analysis During the field research eleven narrative interviews which ranged from 40 to 75 minutes have been conducted. Nine of them were done with individual and two of them with couples. Two of these interviews were preliminary and were done only without explicit scenario, only framed by the topic on my research. I al-

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so tried to specify the group of my informants in order to be able to get a deeper understanding about certain imagined social group. In my case I was interested in the people who bought their houses or apartments slightly before, during or after the Crisis, so the likelihood that the Crisis is relevant theme for them might be higher. They were also mostly men and women with families (two of them divorced) and young children in their thirties or early forties. Roughly half of them are from Prague and half of them from Písek, a town with 30 thousand inhabitants located one hundred kilometres far from Prague. Most of them were also what could be classified as middle-class and in terms of education with mostly university or college degrees. Therefore the chance their narratives would converge around certain themes was increased. The conceptual significance of narrative as communication genre has been already stressed out. However from the analytical point of view, I have decided not to conduct the narrative analysis in the strict sense, but combine it with the qualitative content analysis (Krippendorf 2004). I have decided for this combination from two main reasons: a) application of narrative analysis alone increase the risk of overlooking certain figures or tropes in the narrative, which might be crucial; and b) qualitative content analysis is very flexible (White and Marsh 2006) and enables combinations with other kinds of analysis and conceptual framework i.e. narrative analysis. Certain branches of narrative analysis, which may be labeled as structuralist, are quite limited in the results of analysis, being able to describe the common structure of narrative (Labov 1972), lifetime events related to the macroscale event (Kazmierska 2001), or represent certain process on the behalf of narratives into the visual, structural model (Bearman and Stovel 2000). These approaches alone would not sufficient enough to answer my research questions and analyze the narrative figures and tropes in their structural connections, but also in their embeddedness in the meanings and context. The concrete analytical procedure, which I have undertaken can be summed in the following steps: 1. Preliminary phase: transcription of the interviews, transfer of data into the Atlas.ti software, which I used in the following analysis. 2. Open coding of the interviews, where the unit of analysis (Schilling 2006: 31) were mostly sentences and/or paragraphs, which signified certain stance or evaluation of action of informants. 3. Roughly from the half of the data analyzed, I have developed preliminary categories, which I tried to use for every following coding and thus in the code combining categories and concrete codes. Categories were constructed on the behalf of their thematic similarities (Ryan and Bernard 2003) and involved symbolic and practical dimensions (as described in table 1). 4. After this the stage of what might be called “acute constant comparison”, rose up 500 codes, which were only limited in their affiliation to their categories.

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5.

6.

7.

8.

Thus I have reduced the number of codes looking for the similarities in the accounts and assigned all codes to certain categories (in the Atlas.ti so-called families). This resulted in the number of 250 codes. All of the categories were subject of specific analysis in order to “make sense of them” and in order to identify the most relevant ones. Preliminary results were based on the careful comparison of accounts connected to each category – theme, were laid down. Three most relevant categories were identified taking into account also their quantity (Schilling 2006: 34; see also see Onwuegbuzie and Leech 2005) and the relevance for the construction of narrative: Crisis, ethos and emotions. Codes of these categories were visualized and then sorted out according to their content into the super-codes or sub-categories (as presented in the findings section). Again the process of what Krippendorffs calls hermeneutic loop (2004: 87-88) was undertaken and the relations of categories – supercodes – codes – data was reconsidered. Three main findings were formulated and again the narrative aspect of the data was taken into account when constructing the main interpretation, which frames the main and minor findings into one coherent result.

Non-textual evaluation Ambivalance Emotions Symbolic boundaries

Symbolic references Aesthetics Imaginations Ethos

Evaluation Expert(᾽s)

Practices / Materiality / Everyday experience Children factor Family

Self-perception

Finance

Textual evaluation

Tropes

Cross-cut categories

Financing of housing Mortgage Locality Real estate agency Reconstruction Unrealized housing

Crisis, Community, Housing, Space

Table 1: List of final analytic categories

Describing the process of analysis in the very detail and clarifying each step, I would like to increase the “truth value” of my study (Lincoln and Guba 1985). Finally I would like to stress the fact, that I have not analyzed the accounts as takenfor-granted facts, but as performative accounts embedded in certain (un)wanted

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language ideologies (Gal 2005). On the other hand I have not fully adopted the deconstructivist methodology (Martin 1990), but only focused on the certain ambiguities, contradictions and metaphors (ibid.: 355), which hailed the incoherence between the what is being told and evaluated by narrator and what is being told in the other part of the story or is taken as the culturally “normal” way of referring to certain issues. It is essential to be reminded that I simple do not present the narratives and the informants᾽ account but I also creatively recreate them in order to tell the narrative of my research (Grygar 2013: 523-524). Following paragraphs present two kinds of narratives. First are narratives regarding the specificity of construction of particular home and community. Second are emotions and moral ethos, which are connected to this process of home construction. Logic followed here is to present more concrete, in practices rooted findings and then to provide their more general interpretation and conclusions. IV. Narratives of Home and Community Looking for a place, which could become one᾽s home seems to be a quest for a holy grail in the informants᾽ narratives. Analysing this ultimate decision, two important notions have proven to be significant. First, the particularity of certain places (locations) in terms of their atmosphere and accessibility of other places or objects. Second, so called “children factor“. Both of these are connected to the imagination of perfect home and then the actual decision to get certain home based on both “rational“ and “irrational“ factors. Thematization of space has been important in the construction of narratives. Certain configuration of space into places and objects, which are being “useful“ and “pleasant“ for informants is needed to satisfy the need for the ideal home or at least get to this ideal as close as possible. Most pervasive was the imagination of nature. This narrative trope enters as the most significance actor in the narrative evaluation of certain places (current of unrealized) home or during the description of the searching process. Nature should be close at hand. That is something, which is taken for granted, because it is just good for children. You can go there and be there, with children and there is nothing to question about. Even the thought the “nature” might sound a bit vague, it was used by my informants in a way, they supposed, I would understand it. Nature stands in the narratives as trope for the positive, healthy, enjoyable and happy situations. Comparing this to the Fehérvary accounts, we can see striking similarity. Fehérvary also mentions the change from the socialist ideal (live in the city and be in the countryside on the weekends) to the post-socialist᾽s embodied in the suburbia housing and propose, that the continuity of dream was not abandoned completely and the arguments somehow remained the same even though the context has changed: “to be in the suburbs is good, because there is nature, therefore it is heal-

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thy for your children.“ However is has been modified by the emphasis on the selfrealization through your housing and explicit denial of socialist past as backward using certain aesthetics (Fehérvary 2011: 25, 27, 32-34). With one of my informants, Susan (all names used in the text are imaginary), we were talking in the newly built house, which mostly built by themselves – Susan was very proud of her husband being both hardworking during the construction of the house and also in his job (works like a chef in Germany). The house stands in the better-off neighborhood on the hill and it would have nice view on the city in the case, that their nearest neighbor would not build a house,which violates the rule about the high of family house. Susan and her husband have two kids and are happy to provide them the most possible comfort. “Well of course, if you have small kids, you expect some standard of living. I mean some playgrounds and access to forest (…) you want to be close to the nature.“ (Susan – 7:45) Fortunately their house is indeed close to the nearby forest, so they are able to fulfill the need for the nature. Realizing the interview with Martin was a little bit different. He is a friend of mine and we met in a café. He loves his children and thus for him the immanent goal was to fulfill, what he and his ex-wife regarded as important: “(…) for me, the location was important, that I like the nature and surroundings.“ (Martin – 8:7) Even though he always used to be “urban-person” they moved to the suburban area, where the nature was close by. Difference between the ideal of most of my informants (everybody except Martin) and the Fehérvary᾽s is the denial of suburbia by my informants. Not only because the distance and worse accessibility (you have to “drive everywhere“), but also due to the symbolic boundaries towards those who live in the suburbia, as will be described later in the text. Similarly to this topic, in some of the narratives was present the idea, that public space has undertaken major change in terms of using it by children. There is no more “going out to streets“ and play there on their own for them, as it used to be even fifteen years ago (as I can remember it myself). Now according to my informants, this is not possible due to several reasons, while the main one is the importance of feeling of safety for the children. Another one is the rising structuring of free time for children and thus the lack of it for them. But the idea of safety is quite interesting and some of informants spoke about the place with boundaries, where you can release your children, but not in the public space itself. This change of the public space, evident in the perception of people would deserve more attention in some other research, but here we need to focus back on the process of constructi-

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on of “good home” narrative. I suggest, that the trope of nature as a certain space, which is semi-public: you go there and meet other people, but usually as a family – you do not leave kids alone, functions as a new public space and is important to use not only that you have fresh air and nice smell of recently cut wood. Although nature is the most frequent term also another tropes are being employed in order to describe the perfect home. One of them, not surprisingly, is the imagination of garden, which acts as somehow tamed nature, again ready for children to play around. The interview with the married couple Peter and Elisabeth, took place in a cafe. They talked about their “housing journey”, told me how they always ended in the house at the village, but at the last time changed their mind (by Peter᾽s decision). Even though they are absolutely content with their apartment – it is huge, close to the city centre and they enjoy not to work around the apartment as much as they would have to in the house, they feel the need for the nature. They recently bought a cottage nearby the city – so they could somehow “tame“ the nature and provide it for the children. “And kids can enjoy the garden. That is, what we did not have, when we had moved to the apartment.“ (Elisabeth – 5:51) Another objects and features, which are being summoned to illustrate the need for good accessibility, are mostly proximity to schools, jobs, and places like shops or hospitals and sometimes the fact you can reach them by foot is highly regarded. What is strikingly similar is the almost ever-present figure of importance of the possibility to access these objects or places for children and by children. Proximity of grand-parents sometimes become essential and influence the decision making process in terms of choosing the location of new home. Mary had two kids, twins, and was expecting the third one during our interview. She lives with them and her husband in the older, yet beautifully renovated house. She told me, how she enjoyed the reconstruction – she took a major role in the construction process, consulting with the planner. She is also proud on her husband, him being very skilled, but the reconstruction was hard enough anyway. She managed to get a house of their dreams – in the (almost) perfect location. “(…) I do not drive the car, so that we have everything nearby is advantage. Two elementary schools, we can decide, so for non-driver that is perfect. (…) the hospital is quite far away, but the locality is great, it is close to the river, so I think we are content here.“ (Mary – 1:32) The need for space, which can be used for children and also for self-realization evokes the dream for your own family house. However, this dream is not for my informants about the house in the suburbs, and possibly represents the dream not just for family house, but for family and house (as a place of security). Presence of

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this dream in people᾽s narratives is not being non-reflexive, but becomes certain reference point: you can refer to this ideal type of dream when creating the narrative of your ideal home. You can either fit in this category (which seems to be dominant) or you are kind of subversive and you have to bring certain arguments to support your decision not to move to family house. Children often serves also as an actors, who enable communication between people, becoming reason to bring them together and somehow enhance the relationships among the community (but not to build the community itself). Even though this was very common narrative, informants usually mentioned that their contacts within community (or better to say with close neighbors) are on the basis: “We are good, but we are not friends.” Children often figure in narratives as reasons, why to move or why to do a reconstruction of the apartment or family house. Materiality and Symbolic Boundaries Accessibility and “children factors” are important tropes in the narratives, but for some informants, they are not the only ones used in describing the ideal home. For some people certain material objects are significant in creating an impression of the ideal. Two most important are balcony and garage. I interpret these two as tools to enable better accessibility of the public space, keeping the tool itself being private per se at the same time. In other words, balcony brings a little bit of “nature” into the home, while garage enables to posses car (your private object) in order to be able to reach for work, school and other public places. But the significance of materiality and places is not in its “usefulness” and function, but resides also in the realm of aesthetics and symbolic dimension. Differentiation between the city as a cultural hub and countryside as a place for nature and the aesthetic and functional differentiation between gardens as places of “chill out“ and places “to deal with“ (cutting grass, etc.) are employed to create certain symbolic boundaries (Lamont and Fournier 1992). These symbolic boundaries, constructed by narrators, are even more evident in the example of differentiation: them and “the others“, those who are living in the suburbia. The suburbia figures as a place with a bad accessibility and place, which encompasses certain strict social norms, materialized in conform aesthetics of gardens and in a way comparative game run about the social status. George and Margaret are couple with three children. We did the interview in their newly renovated house in the joint are of kitchen and living room. Drinking tea and eating home-made pie we talked about their housing journey “there and back again“. Even though they have lived in the apartments, renting and the last one owning, they always wanted the family house. The house, which would be in the nature, almost in the forest. They actually did not succeed in this (although it is replaced by the nice garden) because the prices for the properties at that speci-

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fic area were insanely high and they were quite certain, that they do not want go to the suburbs. “(…) when we moved here, I realized, that they are mostly denizens here and we would rather fit here, that in the newly build neighborhoods, where everybody is like: ᾽look he has 2 garages and 4 cars᾽ (…) we would not meet that standard, which is expected there and we will be like thorn in the eye for someone.“ (George – 3:5,6) For Peter and Elisabeth it was rather an issue of remoteness of place. Having the interview in the cafe with the beautiful view on the Old bridge, they admitted, they are “urban-people“ enjoying rather theater or music concerts rather than house-keeping. Yet also for them the issue has proven to be quite delicate, bringing in the expression of emotions: “Well, and second thing is that Peter has a band and he likes to live a culturally rich life. I am also not a type, which cares only about the garden and the house.“(Elisabeth – 5:14) “Well, we have a friend who lived in the city, but moved in the village...huge estate, house, everything...but there is a problem for them to come the city. We always have to go there to see them. It was like a thousand events we told them to come, and it is only like 10 km and they work here, but still the social activity zero. They have kids, and they cannot left them there alone, so it is horribly complicated. It is the choice, you either have sheeps on the garden or you can go to the coffee house...so we do not want the sheeps. (Peter – 5:91) These symbolic boundaries serves as important figures in informants᾽ narratives, because they enable them to configure certain ideal place and express the “best“ of it making other places “not suitable“ for them and in general “suspicious“ and just not that great. Referring to the imagination of nature and garden, to the city and suburbs in the specific contexts enable the narrators to construct their identities as those who care about their children and those who want create their home in specific environment. The importance of imagination in the ability to express certain value stances is described by the Zsuzsa Gille and Seán Ó Riain (Gille and Ó Riain 2002). Their conclusion that the usage of imaginations is important in the political domain may be re-interpreted and we can regards those imaginaries being the expression of certain moral ethos, while the informants construct their identities upon those ethos. Atmosphere and Decision: Bond and Locations The process of finding a home was narrated as a complex chain of events and stages, which employ the need to make several different choices, regarding the fi38

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nancial issues and accessibility and (in)security issues among the most important ones. Informants often stressed the difficulties and demands of the process of searching for a new home, which involves a lot of effort in terms of looking up information and going to visit the apartments or houses. Interestingly enough the final decision itself and sometimes the fact, they were able to get to a certain home or apartment was the result of what could be seen as “coincidence“ or “irrational factor“ on the first sight. It may be the coincidence in terms of acquiring the information about the certain house and possibility to buy it via informal networks of contacts. Also majority of narratives mention the crucial importance of certain instant emotional bond to the place, which is framed under the term “atmosphere”. Here, I have several different quotes to illustrate the omnipresence of this topic in the informants᾽ narrative. It seems, that sometimes it is an instant “click“ between the subject (informant) and object (house/apartment) creating the emotional bound, which triggers the construction of home. “(...) the moment I came it, I felt good.“ (Julia – 2:14) “(…) but in that old house, when we came, so such a atmosphere just embraced me, which was kind a familiar for me, the one, which I wanted to enter into (…)“ (George – 3:4) “(...) basically we did not have much time for the selection, but anyway we have searched for half a year, but still nothing really HEARTY.“ (Rosamund – 4:23) “So, we went there and we immediately knew that᾽s the one.“ (Peter – 5:18) “Certainly, you care about the impression [of the apartment].“ (Eva – 6:30) This immeasurable moment often deeply involves expressing emotions in the narrative configuration of the situation. The place is immediately able to generate certain emotions, which are essential in the establishing the connection between informants and the place to construct a home. This again supports the Akhil Gupta᾽s and James Fergusson᾽s thesis about the importance of home and homeland in the imagination of people and also support their claim about the constant recreation of place(s) and culture(s) (Gupta and Ferguson 1992: 10-13) through the emotional bond towards the places as stressed out by Doreen Massey (Massey 1994: 146-156). These emotions of attachments were not often limited to certain house or apartment, but to the place in the broader sense – certain city is being perceived as home. The evidence from narratives thus supports this conception of places not being created merely by the fact of being in the certain time-space coordinates, but also by certain interactions and processes.

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V. Narrative Expression of Ethos and Emotions I have already touched the theme of morality, which is inherently connected to the genre of narrative, because informants were making evaluative judgements, which were often connected and expressed by emotions. In other words, it is very hard to explain some moral imperatives by referring to them directly and explicitly, explaining them in the rational way or sort of logic. They are often taken-forgranted. Although, the rationalization of moral stances, may be one of the strategies how to legitimize them. The successful accomplishment of certain moral code is thus represented by narrating certain emotions. This is very closely related to the Arlie Russel Hochschild᾽s concept of the feeling rules (Hochschild 1975: 289). Certain cultural values are regarded as morally right and through the cultural prescriptions and typification of actions in specific situations certain states of mind are discursively reconstructed as concrete emotions. Emotions thus become one of the ways how to effectively express informants᾽ stances and opinions, while they are able to maintain the role of “good narrator“. One, who can both tell a meaningful story and who is morally right. On the other side, emotions did not work as a pure explanator of the ethos in informants narratives, e.g. “We are scared of having the mortgage, thus we think is bad,“ but rather accompany the moral accounts in a illustrative way to make them more significant. Another important feature in the stories, which enabled expression of moral commitments or judgements were certain tropes, which could informants relate, criticize or deny or in some other way use in their stories. Some of them were already mentioned: mortgage, loans or credit, nature, garden; and others were also used: role of expert, unrealized housing choices, family house, reconstruction of house/apartment (see the table 2). Trope

Ethos

Mortgage

Aversion to credit Attitude towards consumption Significance of the family (financial support)

Loans or credit

Aversion to credit Attitude towards consumption Significance of the family (financial support)

40

Expressed emotions Commitment, obligation – fear, concern Rich metaphors (“rope on the neck“, “Sword of Damocles“, “commitment“) Fear from the loan and from the inability to repay it.

Evaluation External advices being used – mostly from the informal social network (“friend of friend“) Important is the to lower the loan towards the value of house or apartment: family support

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Nature or garden

Morally correct identity construction

Affection towards the nature as place for children and for self-realization.

Role of expert


-

Unrealized Morally correct housing identity choices construction Family house

Reconstruction



Discontent with the real estate agencies. Expressed emotional bond and attachment towards the place. Imagination of the ideal housing. Stress – draining strengths both emotionally and physically Enjoyment of the reconstruction

Place for children Tool for expressing the symbolic boundaries Either selfperception of being expert or the use of expert᾽s advice in the financial issues Importance of accessibility of place. Enables children to have more place for themselves. Bad experience with the workmans. (“doit-yourself is better“ approach) Self-realization through reconstruction

Table 2: Connection of tropes with certain ethos, emotions and evaluations

Two central moral themes, which were most often referred to, were analytically coded under subcategories Attitude towards consumption (in general, housing and money) and Morally correct identity construction. These two are connected through most cited moral reference, which was the Aversion to credit and are also connected via the category Management of housing finance. Other fields of moral evaluation are thematized in ethos: Freedom – certainty is not necessary, Stance towards the everyday reality and Right to good housing as depicted in the scheme 1.

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Scheme 1: Visualization of Ethos᾽ sub-categories

Attitude Towards Consumption (in General, of Housing and Money) When talking about the consumption either in general, or in particular about the consumption of space (housing), money and time, most prevailing narratively expressed accounts were connected to the issue of frugality, modesty and thrift and aversion to loans, credit and debt. The theme of aversion to debts was most strikingly present and was rather ambivalent in nature. Even though some of the informants reflected, that in strictly rational sense it would be favourable for them to use loans to finance their consumption of housing, they try to avoid it as much as possible. The extensive reconstruction of Mary and her family᾽s house was probably rather financially challenging, yet the approach was quite strict regarding the usage of loans. It seemed, that probably as important as the final goal (having the house reconstructed) was the also the fact not being indebted: “When we have some credit, we always think how to pay it off as soon as possible, even from the point of view of economist it is not the most efficient strategy, because of course the debt is less expensive, than one᾽s own resources.” (Mary – 1:68) Here is necessary to mention the essential role of the mortgage trope. Mortgage was likely to trigger fear in the informants and they tried to avoid having huge 42

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payments of the mortgage (but sometimes did not succeed). They developed several strategies, which share in common the diversification of the portfolio of loans (not having one huge loan, but smaller ones). First strategy was using the advice from expert, who is often in quasi-friendly relationship to informants. Second and the most common was the financial help from parents in order to reduce the value of mortgage. Interestingly enough this help from parents subverts the ultimate goal, which is to get one᾽s own place to live and also that is the manifestation of independence and capability (Peebles 2010: 230). Another dimension of ambivalence of this loan and credit aversion is the fact that as informants tried to use the loans as little as possible, for the reason of getting the house or apartment (and thus home), credit was perfectly justifiable. They usually constructed symbolic boundaries between them as good creditors (using loan for housing) and the bad creditors (making debts for their overconsumption of material goods). The moral dimension of debt (ibid.: 232-233) is thus revealed in the informants᾽ accounts. Jan lives with his wife and children and they have quite high proportion of mortgage towards the value of house, thus high payments. He runs a little IT company, where we also met and had a chat. “Using the mortgage and housing loans is good, because you invest this money into your family. Using loans and credit to supply your consumption is wrong and despicable.“ (Jan – 9:45) He provided me not just with his experience and with the important moral distinction of good and bad debt, but also with beautiful criterion how one can figure out, that the Financial crises is on or over. He and his family lives in the tall panelhouse almost in the last floor and have decent view on the Prague cityscape. During the New-Years Eve the people are very much into the fireworks. In 2007 it was madness, hours of lights and explosions. The next year to much less extent and in 2009 almost nothing. Now it seems to coming back to “normal“. In Jan᾽s and other informants᾽ approach we may see, that the two main ethos are interconnected. Narrative performance of good, reasonable and capable creditor is essential in the performance and maintenance of morally correct identity. This face maintenance is achieved using and mixing the “rational“ and “irrational“ arguments, which is perfectly fine for the informants, because they do not understand the rationality as is usual in the economics discourse. What is being rational for them draws the rationality from the ethos and emotions related to places, objects and people. Morally Correct Identity Construction From the issue of frugality and thrift, which were in some narratives also strongly connected, not just to the loans/credit problem, but also to the rejection of Cargo (2016), Vol. 14, No. 1 - 2

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overconsumption of material goods and highly praised value of time we get to the second frequent ethos – Morally correct identity construction. This subcategory involves such narratives performances, which leads to actualization of certain ethos in order to construct the morally correct identity from the standpoint of the narrator and supposedly also from the standpoints of the listener(s). It is indeed connected to the previous category, because it partially relies on the same value stances. It seems that this theme is the most central one. Presence of certain figures in narratives suggest, that for informants to be a good parents, capable finding nice house or apartment in the good location, close to nature means far more, than just the way how to acquire and maintain proper and correct face through performing certain role of parent. Who is according to my informants “good person” and thus more or less implicitly them? As already mentioned, it is the one, who can: a) make a decision, that results in acquiring a “good debt” and being able to repay it; Julia has not been mentioned as my informant yet. She lives with her husband, who works in IT and two children. Currently she is on the maternal leave and thus the family depends on the husband᾽s salary, which is reasonably high. Anyway they do not want to be indebted: “And now, it is almost completed, we are not indebted at all. Last December, November we paid off 95% of it. (…) Well, we had quite large capital at the beginning. Thank to our savings and our parents gave us some funds and for the rest we took a three years mortgage. We are thrifty.” (Julia – 2:73) Rosamund is even more in the position, when her husband currently has a high salary, but still the spectre of unwise debt haunts the story: “Yeah, even though my husband makes a decent money, we did not want to get unreasonably over indebted.“ (Rosamund – 4:49) who is b) hardworking, especially when it comes to searching for a new housing opportunities or taking care for the reconstruction: “(...) and then we had start to build a house here and my husband did a lot, I had helped somehow, we did a quite a lot of thing in do-it-yourself style, because my husband is skilled in this.“ (Susan – 7:3) c) who is independent and take care of not just him or herself, but whole family (especially in times of crisis) either in the job or housing issues. All these three are multiplied by the fact, that they have to be fulfilled in order to maintain the family: “(…) so when we planned to have a family, we have also started to plan this huge reconstruction.“ (Mary – 1:9) 44

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Narratively Expressed Emotions The connection between the narrative expression of emotions and its usage with the relation with certain tropes is depicted in the scheme 2.

Scheme 2: Visualization of Emotions᾽ sub-categories and Tropes (in circles)

The importance of emotions in the narratives and in their support of increasing of the credibility of expression of certain moral ethos has been already tackled. Yet when we closely examine this issue it may be relevant to contextualize the findings with other authors. The housing market has not been subject of analysis through the lens of emotions until recently. One of the approaches is mostly represented by the behavioral economics trying to explain the existence of the market bubbles or other imbalances (Akerlof and Shiller 2009). Second one is the approach represented by Hazel Christie, Susan Smith and Moira Munro, who are trying to combine the effect of emotions on the market and the meaning of home presenting the idea, that emotional discourses constitute framework for people and emotions are relational – do not resident “in the market” nor “in the buyers/ sellers“ (Christie, Smith and Munro 2008: 2305). Both of the aforementioned approaches regarding the decision making process, at the (housing) market, share the interest in the role of emotions. However, the behavioral economics subdue the individual to the crowd influence and psychological factors, being culturally decontextualized. The second approach seems to be more comprehensive, while is able to explain both “positive“ (attachment, pride, excitement) and “negative“ (fear, anxiety) emotions in the context of buying a real estate and creating a home (ibid.: 2309-2310). These emotions are often hard to articulate, but seems to play

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significant role especially in the stage of final decision making (Levy, Murphy and Lee 2008: 284-265), this idea has been confirmed also in the accounts of my informants, when certain feeling of atmosphere related to the concrete place was actually important factor in the decision making process. The idea, that emotions are experienced (formulated and articulated) not thanks to the psychological essential states of mind, but thanks to the discourses, which enables people to understand “what is going on” (i.e. what is being felt by them) is more closer to my approach and interest in the language tools, which enables people to socially construct their homes. Another connection between the accounts of my informants and my approach and the findings suggested by Christie, Smith and Munro (2008: 2302-2309) is that the certain emotions like fear and love have special place in the certain emotional discourses. Thus through people᾽s own self-regulation by feeling management and the will to retain a face (Goffman 1982) are both influencing the market and have significance for people themselves to be able to construct identity and ontological (in)security (Christie, Smith and Munro 2008: 2310). Also in the narratives of my informants the expression of pressure from not matching the housing ideal, (in)security in the certain localities or stress with the process of searching for a house and dealing with reconstruction (all of them expression of “fear emotional discourse“) is crucial in their management of certain identity construction. Emotions are thus having impact both on the practical actions (decision making) and on the symbolic process of identity communication and thus construction. VI. Success, Responsibility and Adulthood All of mentioned practices in the morally correct identity construction are components in the grand story of success of the individual (and family), which seems to be the meta-narrative, the reason d᾽etre, the current under the river surface. The ability of acquiring and maintaining certain house or apartment turning it in the home even in the times, when things are uncertain or some difficulties approach (problems with financial repayments, divorce) tells an ultimate story of your life success and for young families with children this kind of success might be even more important than success in jobs career or other fields. This story employs certain ethos and moral evaluation. These are illustrated by narrators expressing certain emotions. These emotions as Andrew Sayer suggest, serves as certain cultural tools with the ability to distinguish between “good” and “bad”; “favourable” and “unfavourable”. This seems to be inseparably connected to the certain emotions, such as fear, pride, guilt and shame, which are being drawn in the basis of evaluative aspect of these normativity constructing emotions (Sayer 2005: 947-953).

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The story of being independent, responsible and capable tells a story of success on the level of everyday experience (ritual of leaving the old family and creating a new one) and on the extraordinary, macro-structural historical basis. Being capable to deal with the complex system of housing, which requires certain abilities, demonstrates that you are able to live a life in the context of complex and ever-changing world. By demonstrating independence, responsibility and capability one may perform the certainty, which is materialized in the home. What does it mean from the perspective of post-socialist country? These findings suggest that in the post-socialist condition, we have already through certain performances on the housing market acquired the basic capitalist values, which are represented by those three attributes. VII. Conclusion Providing the answer for my research question What kind of “language tools” (tropes, themes and figures) informants use in their narratives when speaking about the experience of social construction of home? I firstly present the summary of the partial findings from the narratives and then I interpreted them in the broader historical and social context. Thematically the partial findings may be divided into two realms: narratives of homes and community and the expressions of emotions and ethos, which are based on its importance and recurrence in the narrative accounts. Being in detail described in the findings section, I present here the table with the summary of them in table 3. 1. Narratives 1.1. Importance of accessibility of certain places for the good of Home and home: nature, work, garden etc. All these are mostly related and Community justified as being the children᾽s need. The “children factor“ seems to be very significant for the narrators. 1.2. Symbolic boundaries related to certain practices and aesthetics is being employed to explain the choice for certain location of home. The figure of the “unrealized housing choice“ is widely used in the narratives to illustrate the complexity of the searching process 1.3. The final decisions in the housing search process were often made not only with respect to the reasons related to the accessibility and the issue identity issues, but were also rooted in the emotional dimension and included the usage of informal social networks. This means that certain houses or apartments were chosen mostly because of their atmosphere.

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2. Narrative expressions of the emotions and ethos

2.1. The stances of modesty and thrift were mostly expressed in relation to the financial issues such as loans, credit and mortgage were expressed the stances. The narrators put emphasis on the ability of debt repayment. The differentiation between a “good debt“ (like an investment = for the family) and a “bad debt“ (only for material consumption) was made. 2.2. Morally correct identity is presented mostly in relation to the issues of a) ability to repay the debt(s) b) be hardworking, especially in connection of the managing the housing search or/ and the reconstruction of estate c) being independent and can take care of the whole family

Table 3: Summary of partial findings

What can be said, bearing in mind my informants᾽ accounts, about the contribution to our knowledge of everyday life, issues of home, housing market and identity construction? Firstly, the housing choices employ far more issues, dimensions and factors than we would presuppose according to a certain conceptual decision making schemes (Wong 2002). The choices are being made on the basis of what would be termed like irrational behaviour under the terms of mainstream economics. But they are rather strongly rational for the regular, lay actors. This kind of rationality may be driven by emotions. The feelings of bond towards certain places and of commitment towards children make just perfect sense for the informants. Thus the idea, that places are being constantly re-created (Massey 1994) seems to have a lot in common with the emotions and their management. Also the connotations and co-occurrence of narratively expressed emotions and certain subjects or objects – such as house – locality – “children᾽s needs“ suggest, that certain emotional discourses (Christie, Smith and Munro 2008: 2301) exist. The discursive expression of emotions is means of certain “rules“ prescribed as “love“ or “affection“ being connected to the e.g. home – children – safety – garden/nature. As I showed in the theoretical section, emotions also influence the (self)respect of the subjects, so they mostly influence the decision making process. In other words, being good parent (i.e. one expressing love and responsibility) towards the children means to be able to secure for them a place with certain features (access for nature for example). Secondly, the extraordinary decisions and everyday practices have been usually described in terms of some moral stance. Those are also very much rooted and connected to the (expressed) emotions, but not only to those. As Andrew Sayer suggests, emotions are important part of conducting moral evaluations. Fear (arising from uncertainty), pride (on the fact, that he/she is able to secure the home 48

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in the times of uncertainty) or guilt (towards the generalized society of overconsumption) are being employed to draw certain symbolic boundaries on the basis of evaluative aspect of these normativity constructing emotions (Sayer 2005: 947953). Those symbolic boundaries draw certain line between those who are good (often people themselves) and bad (some of the others). To construct successfully the symbolic boundary, which may be expressed in the narrative (and thus being introduced by the narrator with the assumption being culturally understandable), requires the ability to draw its meaning from certain culturally and historically significant symbolic references. In other words, when my informants speak about the debt with the aversion, they presuppose, that their speech and stance would be understandable for me (and also for generalized others). Their stances might be either taken-for-granted or explicitly reflected. In order to construct the intelligibility and perform persuasiveness of their accounts, they refer to and use certain cultural tools to draw on what Ossowska calls bourgeois morality, which relies on the ethos of thrift, responsibility and family values (Ossowska 2012). The emphasis on the category of normality being expressed by the narrator is not accidental. Those specific values and qualities seem to have enormous relevance for the identity construction and also for belonging to certain social group, which is also connected to certain materialities – such as family house (Fehervary 2011: 20-21). In other words, expressing modesty (with the reference e.g. on the values inherited in the family or through global citizenship), responsibility towards children influence very much the decisions of the informants.

Scheme 3: Scheme of the main findings Cargo (2016), Vol. 14, No. 1 - 2

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This leads us to the third and final general finding. What becomes essential in the narratives of social construction of home (with the accent on emotions and ethos) is the ability of being independent, capable and responsible person. This does not just help perform normality through moral correctness, but also serves as a vehicle to produce and express oneself as being successful person. The success is being narratively constructed by the usage of certain tropes (the Crisis, reconstruction, family house) to picture the problems of getting to the final destination – current home. This process also somehow marks the transition ritual from an old family to the new one, but with some ambivalence, because the narrators often had to rely on his or her parents (financial) support. So the independence is often more or less ambiguous. Relating these accounts of success to the wider historic and structural context i.e. to the conditions of living the post-socialistic cultural millieu, we may interpret their significance as representation of similarity of current post-socialistic middle-class people to the middle-class in the “classical capitalism western society”. Success being represented by independence, responsibility and capability is typical to capitalist-individualist values. However, the question for further research, lie in the issues of housing and home. Even though we may assume the importance of housing as cultural tool to perform the success of individual (and family of individual) we may be cautious to put the equation mark between the ways of how the context of housing is used in the “western” and post-socialist contexts. In the context of post-socialistic society the overall success of individual is represented both by the material success itself (acquiring home has certain financial costs) and by the ability of being able to endure material/financial losses in order to ensure and by the success in ensuring the security and certainty for your family. The security is achieved by the ownership of house or flat, which stand as rock in the ever changing world. It may be the experience of the transformation from socialism to post-socialism/capitalism, which make the middle-class people so keen to have the security and certainty represented in their homes.

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Ouředníček, Martin. 2003. “Suburbanizace Prahy/The Suburbanisation of Prague.“ Sociologický časopis/Czech Sociological Review: 235-253. Peebles, Gustav. 2010. “The Anthropology of Credit and Debt.“ Annual Review of Anthropology 39 (1): 225. Polkinghorne, Donald. C1988. Narrative Knowing and the Human Sciences. Albany: State University of New York Press. ISBN 0-88706-622-4. Reckwitz, Andreas. 2002. “Toward a Theory of Social Practices. A Development in Culturalist Theorizing.“ European Journal of Social Theory 5 (2): 243-263. Ricoeur, Paul. 1984. Time and Narrative Vol 1, translated by Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. ISBN 02-267-1332-6. Ryan, Gery W., and H. Russell Bernard. 2003. “Techniques to Identify Themes.“ Field Methods 15 (1): 85-109. Sayer, Andrew. 2005. “Class, Moral Worth and Recognition.“ Sociology 39 (5): 947-963. Schilling, Jan. 2006. “On the Pragmatics of Qualitative Assessment: Designing the Process for Content Analysis.“ European Journal of Psychological Assessment 22 (1): 28. Searle, John R. 1969. Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language. Repr. London: Cambridge U.P. ISBN 05-210-7184-4. Southerton, Dale. 2002. “Boundaries of ᾽Us᾽ and ᾽Them᾽: Class, Mobility and Identification in a New Town.“ Sociology 36 (1): 171-193. Spector-Mersel, Gabriela. 2010. “Narrative Research: Time for a Paradigm.“ Narrative Inquiry 20 (1). Stephens, Mark. 2003. “Globalisation and Housing Finance Systems in Advanced and Transition Economies.“ Urban Studies 40 (5-6): 1011-1026. Sýkora, Luděk. 2003. “Suburbanizace a její společenské důsledky/Suburbanisation and Its Social Consequences.“ Sociologický časopis/Czech Sociological Review: 217-233. Šmídová, Olga. 1996. Vlastnictví a kvazi-vlastnictví bytů za socialismu a jejich postsocialistická mutace/Ownership and Quasi-ownership under Socialism and Their Post-socialist Mutations, 115-136. Taylor, Peter J. 1999. “Places, Spaces and Macy᾽s: Place–Space Tensions in the Political Geography of Modernities.“ Progress in Human Geography 23 (1): 7-26. Vedres, Balázs. 2004. “Testing Narratives of Post-socialism: Transition and Sequence Approaches to the Ownership Histories of the Largest Hungarian Corporations, 19911999.“ Review of Sociology 10 (1): 27-46. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. c2001. Tractatus logico-philosophicus. London: Routledge. ISBN 0-415-25562-7. Wong, Grace KM. 2002. “A Conceptual Model of the Household᾽s Housing Decision–Making Process: The Economic Perspective.“ Review of Urban & Regional Development Studies 14 (3): 217-234.

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Tomáš Samec [email protected] Institute of Sociological Studies Faculty of Social Sciences Charles University in Prague www.fsv.cuni.cz

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Stati/Articles

pp. 55–79

Imagining the West: (Im)mobility, Social Media and Indigenous Youth in Chiapas, México Marie Heřmanová Abstract: This article examines the collective and individual imageries of the “West” developed by young indigenous people living in the suburbs of the Mexican city of San Cristóbal de Las Casas. Massive rural-urban migration has occurred in Chiapas in the last four decades, creating the infamous “poverty belts” in the suburbs of San Cristóbal. The inhabitants of these suburban areas are mostly of indigenous (Tzotzil or Tzeltal) origin and they earn their living by selling craftwork to tourists visiting the colonial city centre. The everyday interactions with tourists together with online interactions via social networking sites create a landscape of an “Imaginary West” (Yurchak 1995) – an unseen, yet ever-present homeland of the tourists and, most importantly, a place where “better lives” happen. Using the concept of “technologies of imagination” (Sneath, Holbraad and Pedersen 2009), the article analyzes the “Imaginary West” as a set of imaginative practices that significantly shape the way in which young Tzotziles and Tzeltales construct their identity and negotiate their place in their immediate (offline) environment. The article is based on my long-term field research in San Cristóbal focusing on the relationship between mobility patterns, identity and imagination in a marginalized urban environment. Keywords: imagination, social networks, urban marginality, mobility, digital anthropology, indigenous youth, México, Chiapas

I. México Imaginario In 2001, the Mexican State Tourism Agency (SECTUR) launched a programme called “Pueblos mágicos” – Magical Villages.1 A Magical Village is “a locality with symbolical attributes, legends, history and transcendental substantiality, in a word a MAGIC which emanates from each of its socio-cultural manifestations and which today means a great opportunity for touristic development.”2 San Cristóbal 1

2

This article was supported by the The Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports – Institutional Support for Longterm Development of Research Organizations – Charles University, Faculty of Humanities, 2014. “es una localidad que tiene atributos simbólicos, leyendas, historia, hechos trascendentes, cotidianidad, en fin MAGIA que emana en cada una de sus manifestaciones socio – cultura-

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Imagining the West: (Im)mobility, Social Media and Indigenous Youth in Chiapas, México

de Las Casas was one of the first Magical Villages announced, joining this exclusive club in 2003 (to date, there are 47 Magical Villages all around Mexico, some of them – like San Cristóbal – are urban centres with a large population, but there are also small and remote villages on the list). Positioned in the heart of the Highlands of the Chiapas region, the old colonial city certainly has its own, very specific charm. Cobbled streets lined with brightly coloured houses, old colonial churches and colonial palacios at every corner, and the green mountains almost always hidden in white clouds that surround the city create the magic of a “mystical, indigenous and ethereal San Cristóbal – a visit here is sure to enchant and fascinate.”3 In 1994, San Cristóbal became world-famous as the centre of the uprising of the Zapatista movement. Indigenous fighters led by the charismatic leader Subcomandante Marcos added a new and very special touch to the magical atmosphere of the city, attracting antiglobalization activists from all around the world,4 and the city also became a basis for various NGOs and collectives working in one way or another with the Zapatista movement. The constant presence of tourists, international activists and NGO workers, as well as the permanent residence of intellectuals, anthropologists or just new age type seekers from Europe and the United States has recently transformed the city in a very significant way. San Cristóbal is used to Westerners and offers them all kinds of the services they might call for – vegetarian restaurants, bookstores selling English, French and Italian paperbacks, little shops offering local organic coffee and a picturesque and colourful market with indigenous handcrafts and all kinds of local souvenirs. I came to San Cristóbal for the first time in 2007 with a bunch of friends, activists and anthropologists who wanted to participate in the Zapatista encuentro.5 I was not particularly interested in the Zapatista movement back then, but I was a big fan of Gabriel García Marquéz and an enthusiastic reader of everything related to Latin American magical realism. In San Cristóbal, I suddenly found myself right inside one of my beloved books, in the middle of something like a Marquéz Macondo. Before actually going to Mexico, my picture of Mexican indigenous culture was very precise and blurry at the same time, based on books, movies and my exoticising fantasies about adventurous science done somewhere in deep forests and high mountains among the descendants of ancient civilizations. In my Mexico,

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les, y que significan hoy día una gran oportunidad para el aprovechamiento turístico.“ http:// www.sectur.gob.mx/pueblos-magicos. English translation by the author. http://www.gonomad.com/1485-san-cristobal-de-las-casas-mexico-an-ethereal-highlandcity. For a detailed ethnography of young global activists and Zapatista supporters in San Cristóbal, see Kuřík 2010. About the organization, meaning and symbolics of encuentros, see Kuřík 2009. Cargo (2016), Vol. 14, No. 1 - 2

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everything was colourful, exotic and, in a very special way, surreal and irrational – like a Frida Kahlo painting. I was not even much interested in the history or the contemporary politics of Mexico – almost everything I knew I had learned in fiction books and movies. My individual colourful imageries were, moreover, widely supported by collective ones – you can open basically any catalogue of any Czech travel agency offering tours to Mexico and you will find pictures of pyramids in the jungle (“ancient civilizations”) and smiling women in bright-coloured clothes (“still existent descendants of ancient civilizations”) mixed with photographs of sunny beaches and the sky-blue Caribbean sea. Edward Fischer (2004) observes that this is how most of the magical realism novels work – they melt the exotic, strange and unknown into a narrative structure and social context we know and understand. He also suggest that this “melting” process stands at heart of the scientific concept of hybridity, which was widely used in postcolonial studies in the 1990s. “Westerners borrow an essentialized view of indigenous to help satisfy our insatiable appetite for authenticity in this age of reproductions and simulacra… take Latin American novels of magical realism that cook up the cold offerings of native culture to our hot western tastes.” The classic of Mexican social science, Guillermo Bonfil Batalla, deploys his famous metaphor of “México imaginario” from very similar premises. He distinguishes México imaginario, which pretty much corresponds with the image presented by travel agencies and described above, from México profundo – the real and profound Mexico of rural indigenous communities and recently also of large swathes of a poor urban population who, according to him, continue to maintain a lifestyle deeply rooted in ancient traditions. While his description of the profound Mexico is in itself very exoticising and needs to be treated carefully and critically, the distinction nonetheless remains useful in this context. Batalla suggests that México imaginario is imaginary not because it does not exist (it certainly does as every tourist who has ever been to San Cristóbal could confirm and also because “imaginary” does not imply “not real” as will be discussed later), but because it is highly selective and ignores the everyday reality of a large part of the Mexican population. In San Cristóbal, the difference between the imaginary and the “profound” Mexico (if we were to take Batalla’s metaphor literally) can be experienced even physically. Once the visitor crosses a small dirty river at the end of the public market which marks the borderline between the city centre and its northern suburbs, he leaves the pueblo mágico and finds herself or himself in a different world. Over the river, the so-called Zona Norte begins – an extensive belt of settlement inhabited by migrants from indigenous6 communities from the Highlands of the Chia6

Since I use the term “indigenous” so often here, I feel the need to point out that I am very well aware of all the problems related to the use of such a label. Mácha (2005) suggests that in order to eliminate the strong ethnocentric connotations of this word and avoid all noti-

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pas region, mostly of Tzotzil or Tzetal origin. The red, blue and yellow houses with thatched roofs are substituted, first, by far less splendid rows of family homes with small shops in front of them, selling meat, tortillas or coffee to passers-by, and the cobbled streets change into plain asphalt roads. After a few hundred meters, the asphalt disappears too and dirty roads are lined with homes in various states of habitability – concrete houses alternating with wooden or metal and cardboard shacks. Spanish (or castellano as Mexicans say) is nowhere to be heard here, and the quick, dense yet melodic sentences in Tzotzil or Tzeltal confuse the chance visitor with their alien-like sounds. Children in plastic flip-flops play in the pools of water in the dirt by the roads, and small shops sell only corn chips, cookies, soft drinks and instant Nescafé. The organic bakeries and fair-trade fresh coffee shops in the city centre seem like a distant memory from another world here. In 1950, San Cristóbal had around 35 000 thousand inhabitants exclusively of mestizo origin (the so-called ladinos). Today’s San Cristóbal claims to have 185 0007 inhabitants (unofficial numbers go much higher – it is hard to count those who use neither water nor electricity) and the colonial houses are surrounded by large areas of new settlements – Zona Norte in the northwest of the city, but also middle class suburbs in Zona Sur along the caretera Panamericana, the main highway connecting San Cristóbal to the Chiapas capital city, Tuxtla Gutiérrez. In 2008, there were 43 districts, called colonías, in the Zona Norte. In 2010, the number increased to 47 (according to SAPAM, The Office for the Distribution of Drinkable Water) or 49 (according to the inhabitants of Zona Norte). In 2013, I counted at least 4 new colonías on the outskirts of Zona Norte that were not yet on the official city map.8 The colonías are a very accurate example of what urban

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ons about indigenous people as a race, the term should be used strictly with a capital, as in “Indigenous”, to designate a group of people who live in the same geographical territory (like Germans with a “G” do), and when this rule is no sufficient, we should specify the term by using the concrete name of the ethnic group in question (Tzeltal and Tzotzil, in my case). But by doing so, I would only shift the problem to a more concrete level (the misunderstanding remains the same whether we speak about “indigenous” or “tzotzil”). According to the Mexican state, some of my informants are not even indigenous, because they do not speak any indigenous language (the most important official criterion), but when they spoke about themselves, they repeatedly used the Spanish term “indígena” (here by me translated as “indigenous”). This fact I think gives me the right to call them indigenous too. And I also prefer the use of the lower case /indígena instead of Indígena/, because “Tzotziles” are in my opinion rather a group based on Anderson’s imagined community (Anderson 1983) than just a “group of people living in the same territory.” www.inegi.org – Chiapas The only institution able to provide a map of the whole city is the SAPAM office that runs the city water distribution system. When I asked for a map at various offices of the city hall, I was given only a map of the city centre – the Zona Norte seemed to be non-existent in these documents. If you google “map of San Cristóbal”, none of the results will show you the whoCargo (2016), Vol. 14, No. 1 - 2

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anthropology calls “poverty belts” (cinturónes de miseria“, Betancourt 1997: 3): chaotic and extremely diversified areas in various degrees of urbanization, also associated with all the stereotypes usually related to marginalized urban areas. As Loic Wacquant sums it up: “They are known, to outsiders and insiders alike, as the ‘lawless zones’, the ‘problem estates’, the ‘no-go areas’ or the ‘wild districts’ of the city, territories of deprivation and dereliction to be feared, fled from and shunned, because they are – or such is their reputation, but in these matters perception contributes powerfully to fabricating reality – hotbeds of violence, vice and social dissolution” (Wacquant 2008: 1). While the oldest colonías – those closest to the public market which forms an imaginary borderline between the city and its northern suburbs are fully urbanized – new colonías have no basic infrastructure and are often composed of a few shacks clamped to the hillsides. Inhabitants of Zona Norte mostly came to the city from one of the indigenous communities in the Highlands in order to find a new way of subsistence. Many of them (mostly women and children, but also men sometimes) end up as “vendedoras” – selling souvenirs to the tourists in the city centre. Here, with their colourful clothing and incomprehensible languages, they become part of the “mystic” and “magical” atmosphere associated with the old colonial city of San Cristóbal de Las Casas. The Tzotziles and Tzeltales from Zona Norte literally cross the border between the “imaginary” and the “profound”9 Mexico every day on their way to work. Nowadays, the complete area of Zona Norte is roughly three times that of the city centre and is home to more than two thirds of the city inhabitants. There are minibuses running every ten minutes from the public market to various colonías, except for the ones that are positioned on the hillsides – to colonías like La Hormiga or San Antonio del Monte, a taxi would be the only option and when it rains heavily during the rainy season from March to September and mud rolls down the steep streets, these colonías can become inaccessible for several hours once or twice a week. But under normal conditions, a small collectivo, a regular taxi or a half hour walk could take anyone into the Zona Norte. Yet, besides its inhabitants, no one ever seems to go there. During my fieldwork, on my frequent rides from the city centre to my rented home in Zona Norte, I only met one woman in a collectivo who was clearly a foreigner. She was frantically taking pictures of everything she saw from the window of the minibus, yet she did not get out of it. I also

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le city, but – again – only the city centre. Omission from official city maps and urban plans is common feature of rural migrant informal settlements in Latin America, as Ann Varley notes (Varley 2012). I do not mean to imply here that what Bonfil Batalla describes as the “profound” México is an accurate representation of the lives of my informants. I use his distinction between “imaginary” and “profound” as a mere metaphor in a literary sense of the word, and I will explain later why this metaphor does not work in an analytical sense.

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remember very clearly a conversation with a taxi driver whom I asked to take me to colonía Progresso. With a very serious face, he explained to me “that the people there are dangerous” and “that they never work and if you ever see a nice house there in the Norte, that’s because they’re selling drugs.” This driver was probably the most eloquent on the topic, but I collected several similar conversations with taxi drivers (and once even with a collectivo driver). I conducted my fieldwork in Zona Norte, spending 14 months there between 2008 and 2013. My primary research question deals with the relationship between urban marginality (since this label could certainly be applied to the colonías), mobility and imagination – I focused on how the frequent interactions with tourists in the city centre shape the way the people in the colonías see, construct and reconstruct their own position in the infrastructure of the city and how imageries of the “West” (i.e. the place where the tourists come from) are incorporated into this process. The mobility of the tourist, their constant comings and goings, plays a significant role in both the construction of the identity of my informants as “marginal”, as well as in their perception of what being a “western tourist” means. In the course of my fieldwork, however, my field-site changed significantly through the expansion of Internet use among my informants. Their encounters with the tourist and with the “West” they represent are no longer restricted to personal communication in the city centre and the internet-mediated representations of the “West” became one of the main sources of collective imageries among young Tzotziles and Tzeltales. The use of online communication tools (mostly social networking sites) also further stressed the importance of long-distance mobility – in contrast with virtual long-distance communication. In the following sections of this article, I would thus like first to introduce the landscape of the “Imaginary West” created and constantly imagined by the young indigenous people from the colonías and, secondly, to point out the influence that the expansion of social networking sites is having on the imagined worlds built by my informants and their (dis)connection to the offline reality of their lives. As follows from the above, the conceptualization of the “West” as an imagined world was one of the original topics of my research that I have tried to explore throughout my fieldwork, while the influence of Internet, however, was not something I was originally interested in – mostly because wireless internet connection was not really available in San Cristóbal at the time when I started my fieldwork and smartphones – the only wireless devices available to my informants – were yet to become widely sold and used. But the simple fact that all my key informants are now almost constantly in touch with the inhabitants of their “Imaginary West” via Facebook, G-chat or Whatsapp turned out to be a crucial factor in my exploration of the effects imaginary worlds have on their physical counterparts, and I would like to present here some ideas of what implications this might have not only for

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my own research, but for the study of imagined and/or virtual worlds in general. II. “People Like You Have Cars Like This” – The Landscape of the Imaginary West As I was became acquainted with everyday life in Zona Norte, I gradually went through a process of confronting all my personal imageries about the colourful and mystic indigenous México with the lived reality of the people I had previously imagined. I accompanied some of my Tzotzil friends to work, so I crossed the aforementioned border between “magical” and “profound” México on their way to work with them many times. I learned about their ways of crossing to the city centre and participating in the picture of “Pueblo Mágico” as a way of subsistence.10 But as I did so, I realized that I was not the only one who was doing the imagining and that my imaginary México, with all its mystical colours and flavours, has its counterpart in a sort of imaginary Europe. I was also constantly “being imagined” together with all the tourists and global nomads that my informants encountered daily. The following is a description of an event which was crucial in my fieldwork in many respects – besides being a very good example of the feeling of “being imagined”, it was also the first critical moment I experienced together with the family of my main informant.11 María is a Tzotzil woman in her forties (I never got to know her real age and I doubt she knows it herself) and a mother of four children: Carlos (26), Miguel (24), Natalia (23) and Cristina (21). She was born in a remote and small village in 10 Although it is a topic that, if elaborated, would need a separate article, I feel the need to stress that my informants are not passive “objects” of imageries created by someone else, but that they also actively participate in their creation. Everyday, the women would put on their traditional trajes – thick sheep wool skirts and embroidered blouses – when they are going to work to the city centre. One example of many – younger girls would usually just wear a pair of jeans and sneakers when at home, but they would never go to work in regular clothes – “because we wouldn’t sell anything. The tourists like the indigenous clothes,” one of them explained to me. 11 I am well aware of the epistemological and methodological questions generated by the fact the I am myself a significant part of the imageries my informants created. I was constantly questioned about my lifestyle in Prague, about the clothes I wear, about my friends, my family… and many crucial situations in my fieldwork evolved around something that concerned me personally. Again, this would probably need a separate article if elaborated properly and I have had many difficulties in my research in trying to find a balance between being both methodogically and theoretically reflexive and being over-reflexive in the narcissistic sense. I find that a “novelist” (Byler and Iverson 2012) style of writing, where the author’s own ego can be more visible in a sort of “diary” style, can help overcome these difficulties, if it is not over-used at the expense of the soundness of the presented material. Cargo (2016), Vol. 14, No. 1 - 2

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the mountains, approximately a two hour car-ride from San Cristóbal. She came to San Cristóbal when she was 18, leaving her violent and usually drunk husband behind. She works as a partera, a traditional midwife, and as a vendedora, like most of her friends and female family relatives in San Cristóbal, selling handicrafts to tourists in the city centre. The family lives in the colonía Progreso in a two-bedroom house and all the children attended Spanish Sunday school. María speaks Spanish quite fluently, but she prefers Tzotzil, while her children are completely bilingual (they always spoke fluent Spanish with me, though between themselves – even in my presence – they usually used Tzotzil). Natalia has a child of her own, a little boy named Jesús, but she still lives with her mother, because the boy’s father, a US citizen Leo, turned out to be a heavy drinker and consequently completely useless and sometimes cruel and violent (by the time I met Natalia, he was causing her so much trouble she even considered leaving San Cristóbal to get rid of him). Right at the beginning of my fieldwork, when I had known María and her children for approximately a month, I experienced one quite critical situation with them. I met María in front of the cathedral in the centre and she asked me for a favour – Leo had left for the United States leaving his car full of stuff in front of his house (situated in one of the typical fraccionamentos in Zona Norte). María was afraid that something could happen to the car and asked me to drive it to her street, so she could watch it from her house (no one in the family had a driver’s license). Even though I was not a very experienced driver at the time and I was trying to avoid driving in Mexico (where the only respected traffic law is “first come first served”), I was also eager to please her and confirm my friendly relationship status with her family, so I agreed. But when we came to Leo’s house I realized that there might be a difficulty – his car looked like some sort of expensive SUV, the type I only knew from Hollywood movies. It had an automatic gear unit and a very complicated safety system…so to cut a long story short, I was not even able to start the engine. It was not even my fault, as it turned out later, because the battery was flat, but at the time it looked like a clear failure on my side. It was around midnight, Natalia was upset and talking on the phone with Leo, who was, unsurprisingly, drunk and giving me a lot of pointless advice, and María was standing in front of the car lamenting that she does not know what to do, that we cannot just leave the car where it is because somebody will steal Leo’s things for sure. I felt stupid because I had promised her that I would solve the situation and I had not been able to fulfil the promise, but most of all I felt quite hopeless because I just was not able to explain her how it is possible that I can not handle the car – I repeated many times that I had never driven a car like this before, but she just could not seem to understand me. We decided to go back to her house in Progreso, where Miguel and Carlos were waiting for us. When we entered the house, the boys were waiting in the kitchen and María immediately started talking in Tzotzil, explain-

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ing to her sons what had happened. Miguel than turned to me and asked in Spanish, wonderingly: “How come you can’t get it started? Our cousin also tried and he didn’t know what to do either, but we thought that it’s because it’s an American car and that you would know for sure. We have different cars here, old cars…but you have cars like this, don’t you? We thought that you have those cars at home, so you would know how to handle it, cause maybe you have the same car at home.” A strange and big vehicle that I had never seen in my life before had been assigned to me on the principle that “people like you have cars like this.” Out of desperation, I just murmured that I usually ride a bike. But from then on, I started to think about reciprocity in the process of imagining, because it was at that moment that it occurred to me that this simple presumption – “people like you have cars like this” – must have deeper roots. Is there a world of “people like me” that are characterized by big and strong cars and – perhaps – also by other specific things? How is this world created, why is it created and what does it mean? The geographical dimension of this world obviously was not important, because the car was from the US, as Carlos mentioned, and they all knew that I am not from there. But yet, somehow, people like me have something in common with cars like this. On a similar premise, as I later noticed, my female informants would talk about the specific fashion style worn by tourists in the city centre. It does not matter if Levi’s jeans and Converse sneakers are worn by a French tourist, US hippie or Czech anthropologist – the simple fact of wearing these specific brands puts all the people wearing them in the same group of “foreigners” or “Westerners”, independently of their real country of origin. Wearing specific things like jeans, denim shorts or outdoor jackets, or driving a specific sort of a car were considered by my friends to be a symbol of belonging to an imagined world of the “West”, with a location that is not geographically specific. Alexei Yurchak used the metaphor of the “Imaginary West” in his study of the break-down of the Soviet regime (Yurchak 2005: 158nn). He characterizes it as “The Elsewhere of Late Socialism” and shows how this concept was creatively placed into the communist world-view (which it rationally contradicted) and how the young people who listened to illegal records of Western rock bands could still be convinced about the rightness and omnipotence of the Party’s politics. He then continues by exploring the sources of the imaginary worlds which existed within the Soviet universe (the Imaginary West being although one of many, perhaps the most significant), and also stresses the role of fiction and literature in general in the creation of these imaginary worlds. He makes a very interesting parable by comparing the Imaginary West to “the Zone”, the enigmatic land with mysterious powers presented in Andrei Tarkovski’s famous film “Stalker”. The Zone in the film, as does the Imaginary West has “a paradoxical status – intimate, within reach, and yet unattainable. The Zone could only exist as an imaginary construct

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that could not be encountered in reality”… “a kind of space which was both internal and external to the /Soviet/ reality” (2005: 161). This paradoxical status is also the reason why this imaginary West is based solely on images, ideas – Yurchak says that the imaginary West “was produced locally and existed only at the time when the real West could not be encountered” (Yurchak 2005: 159). Yurchak’s notion of the Imaginary West also in part corresponds with Appadurai’s concept of “imagined worlds” (Appadurai 1996). Appadurai defines his various “scapes“ (ethnoscapes, mediascapes, etc.) as “building blocks of what (extending Benedict Anderson) I would like to call imagined worlds, that is, the multiple worlds that are constituted by the historically situated imaginations of persons and groups spread around the globe” (Appadurai 1996: 33). Like Yurchak, Appadurai also uses examples from film and literature to back up his theories. While the concept of imagined worlds, as Appadurai presents it, is really a theoretical extension of Benedict Anderson imagined communities, he however specifically points out how two phenomena usually ascribed to “modernity” – i.e. migration and electronic media – work as starting points for building such imagined worlds.12 “Such media transform the field of mass mediation because they offer new resources and new disciplines for the construction of imagined selves and imagined worlds. (…) Always carrying the sense of distance between viewer and event, these media nevertheless compel the transformation of everyday discourse. At the same time, they are resources for experiments with self-making in all sorts of societies, for all sorts of persons. They allow scripts for possible lives to be imbricated with the glamour of film stars…” (Appadurai 1996: 3). Appadurai repeat12 Appadurai’s theory of “imagination as social force” is very powerful and there is no denying that “Modernity at Large” is today a canonical text when it comes to the social theory of the imagination, but in my opinion it lacks – at least in some respects – soundness. Appadurai distinguishes imagination from fantasy and claims that only now has imagination as such entered the lives of everyday people and become a “social force” because – unlike fantasy – it is shared collectively and propels people to action. While the observation that imagination in a society with mass media and mass migration works differently than it worked before is indisputably correct, I cannot agree with the assumption that this means that imagination was not present in everyday life before – or only in the form of religious or mystic practices, as Appadurai suggests (1996: 3nn). Imagination is a basic capacity of the human mind and while its social and collective manifestations change, the capacity itself is always immanent to human existence, both individual and collective. In this respect, I agree with other authors (Sneath, Holbraad and Pedersen 2012) who have critiziced Appadurai over the notion that we cannot distinguish between a world that is “imagined” and a world that is “real” as different realities, and treat the immediate and everyday environment of social actors as more “real” than – let’s say – a world generated through online news services. The imagination is one of the capacities that enables us to see and perceive and make sense of any possible world, as I will argue in the following sections of this article. What needs to be studied are the various manifestations of imagined worlds in various social and political conditions.

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edly points out that the power of imagination lies in the fact that it makes things and possibilities imaginable and that there’s a difference between imaginable and possible. Imagination in an Appaduraian sense is so powerful because it lets us imagine things and situations we have never experienced before – it allows us to write scripts for possible lives we might have lived, to paraphrase him. And once we know we could have lived them, we might start to think about why we actually cannot – hence his link between imagination and resistance (which is also important in Yurchak’s concept, though not as explicitly). Jonathan Friedman (2000) points out that for any imagined world to be established, a shared meaning needs to be generated. This meaning according to Friedman is always generated through a shared social experience that lies at the core of any form of social and cultural reproduction. In Appadurai’s case, the inhabitants of most of the “scapes” do not share any direct experience with the people they imagine and dream about – the inhabitants of a refugee camp in Somalia, to use one of Appadurai’s own examples, who dream about a life in Europe have maybe never met someone who is actually from Europe, yet they have a collective notion of what life in Europe looks like. The fact that people from Europe and people from a refugee camp in Somalia never shared a social experience does not, however, mean that the imaginary world of Europe (imagined by refugees in Somalia who have never been to Europe) does not exist. Rather it means that when analyzing it, “we must ascertain to what degree the same meanings are attributed to the same phenomena and/or objects in the global arena. Second, one must ascertain the ways in which there might be said to be overlapping resonances or analogous experiences being produced that allow a broader possibility for identification of the same things the same way“ (Friedman 2000: 646). Or, as Sneath, Holbraad and Pedersen say – we must “focus on the concrete processes by which imaginative effects are engendered, or, what we call‚ technologies of imagination” (2009: 11). While in Yurchak’s case, as well as in Appadurai’s general theory, imagination is activated by images or sounds (books, music, stories in general), the “imaginary West” that I discovered in my research is embedded in a very concrete shared social experience – the direct encounters with tourists that constitute the way of living and thus everyday routine of my informants. It is through these direct encounters (and their subsequent replays via online communication channels that will be analyzed later), that the young indigenous people who have never left the city in their whole life, whose parents sometimes speak only tzotzil or tzeltal, and who live in neighbourhoods with no basic infrastructure, receive information about a different lifestyle of people with SUV cars and expensive jeans, and through this one, sometimes very short and sometimes only virtual, but still shared experience, they also somehow become part of it. The different and distant lifestyle of “people like me”, the residents of the Imaginary West, has many components like education (university degree) or family situation (for example, being single or in a rath-

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er free relationship, instead of being married with two kids at the age of 18), financial situation and consequently relationship to material things – like, possible ownership of a big SUV car or Levi jeans.13 Later in my fieldwork, when I came back to San Cristóbal after a longer period spent in the Czech Republic, I experienced another conversation about what the “Imaginary West” looks like. I was sitting on the stairs in front of the main cathedral of San Cristobal de Las Casas with Jeanette, a young tzeltal woman living in La Garrita, one of the oldest parts of Zona Norte. Jeanette was one of a very few members of her social group who completed a university degree, but was currently unemployed, desperately looking for any source of income and taking care of her sick mother. It was a sunny day with a clear blue sky and the mountain sun was warming. In these sunny days, San Cristobal felt to me like the most beautiful place on Earth – blue sky, green mountains surrounding the city, all the colours of the picturesque colonial buildings in the city centre and the colourful dresses of indigenous women. I closed my eyes and felt wonderful with the warm sun on my skin, after yet another cold night. Jeanette stared at me and started laughing: “You look almost blissful in the sun, like you’re somewhere on the beach.” “Well, I am enjoying myself!” I replied, also laughing. “You know, where I live, there’s cold and dark for almost 5 months each year, can you imagine?” “Really? Well, that never occurred to me... I always imagine you have nice weather where you live.” “Well, yeah, we do sometimes, but not quite as often as I would like. What else do you imagine?” “You know... everything. What you do, how you live, what your university looks like, how the people you meet look? That’s what I try to imagine.” A few minutes later, we bought fresh juice from a restaurant across the street and sat on a bench on the main pedestrian zone that was full of both tourists and locals, indigenous sellers of food or souvenirs, ladino families on their afternoon walk and loud groups of young Spanish and Italian backpackers. We were discussing the movie we had seen together a few days ago – Jeanette had asked me to take her to the only cinema in the city to see the new Harry Potter film. I asked her what she likes about this type of film and she replied, thoughtfully: “Well, I like it, because it’s fun! It’s not just about Harry Potter, that’s a fairytale. But I do like Hollywood movies, because they show a whole world that I would never experience 13 It is interesting that the symbolic importance of such things as jeans is almost never based on a specific brand – even though the jeans my informants would notice on passing girls would be mostly of the same brand, they almost never mentioned the brand itself and they might not even know it. It was the specific type of clothing that was attributed to the inhabitants of the Imaginary West, but the obsession with brands that is actually intrinsic to Western culture is not manifested here.

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here. I know reality is not like in the movies, I’m not that naive, even for you in Europe, it’s not like this. But still, what is waiting in the future here, for me? When I think about your life in Europe, it’s like a movie for me. You live in the city, you have friends, you go and have a coffee with your friends, you study at university... and I think you live in a nice place, is that right? I think your place must be really nice. I like to think about it. I always think about it when I talk to the tourists – how they live, how their home looks. It’s kind of like a movie for me, you know?” and she started laughing again. What Jeanette thus did, when she said that my life is like a movie for her, constituted a simple, yet at the time, for me, very surprising process – she placed the real people she encountered and whose story she knew in the imaginary world she knew from movies. It was the equivalent of the simple assumption that “people like you have cars like this.” Throughout my fieldwork, I experienced many similar situations – my home and the lifestyle I led while being home was quite often discussed and I had to answer never-ending questions about my studies, my family or about – for example – the brand of jeans I was wearing – where did I buy them, could they be bought in Mexico as well, how much did they cost me? In just the same way I used to exotize and imagine indigenous people in Mexico, I was also being placed in some imaginary landscape of “Europe”, where things like coffees with friends from university do happen and where people know how to handle big cars, because – obviously – they drive them. Jeanette knew very well that the movie lifestyle she was talking about is not my everyday reality, but she also knew that it is still somehow real – as she put it, “it’s not like that completely, but something like that, and it must be great and you cannot experience it here.” Or, as Yurchak says, her “Imaginary West” was almost there, but never really there – within reach (because I was sitting right next to her) but also unattainable and still an ocean away. I mentioned above that the Imaginary West as it is created by young people from the suburbs of San Cristóbal has many components, like university education or family situation, but the last mentioned – the relationship to material things and the perception of Western consumerist patterns in general – is the most visible of all. Countless hours are spent by the young girls in the suburbs talking about clothes or fashion, peeking through the windows of the few clothes shops and boutiques in the city centre, or exchanging clothes and creating new combinations. On many occasions, the fashion style of tourist girls (and sometimes boys) was mentioned, judged and in various ways reproduced. While it might be difficult for a young Tzeltal girl to achieve university education (even though it is certainly not impossible, as Jeanette’s case confirms), the way one dresses is something that can be changed quite easily. It is thus this specific “fashionscape”, to paraphrase Appadurai again, that provides most of the ethnographic examples of how the Imaginary West is created and incorporated into everyday social interac-

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tions. I have described and analyzed this process in detail elsewhere (Heřmanová 2010). III. Technologies of Communication, Technologies of Imagination Imagination was traditionally seen in the history of social science as an individual ability and comprehended in the tradition of the philosophical concept of Immanuel Kant as a basic capacity of the human mind that enables us to perceive and synthetize what we are perceiving into knowledge. Kant’s concept of the imagination as a capacity of the mind is also especially important from an analytical point of view, because it implies that there is no knowledge without imagination. As Sneath, Holbraad and Pedersen point out (2009: 12), this processual view on the imagination as a basic aspect of our perception of reality allows us to connect the way we perceive our immediate surroundings with the way we imagine things, people or situation we have never encountered before. Imagination in a Kantian perspective is a “capacity involved in everything from the basic perception of objects to our engagement with entirely immaterial knowledge” (Sneath, Holbraad and Pedersen 2011: 12). From this point of view, there is no qualitative difference between what Bonfil Batalla would call the “profound” and the “imaginary” – both are imagined, perceived and built out of the concrete observations of an individual mind. Just as the “Imaginary West” is imagined, so the Soviet reality lived by Yurchak’s subjects is imagined out of different sources, and just as my informants imagine what life in Europe looks like, so they have specific imageries about their own lives that they deploy in their life strategies. Yet, even though the tool we use to place ourselves in our immediate social environment may be generated by the same capacity of imagining that we use when dreaming about different and distant destinations we have never seen, the effects these two processes create are very different. What are these effects and how can we empirically show their difference is the topic of the following section. The Imaginary West probably does not look and feel the same to Jeanette, as it does to Cristina or to any other indigenous girl or boy from the colonías. Every person has their own version based on different observations and different sources. For Jeanette, who did not care much about clothing, the movies and magazines were her most used source (together with conversations with me and also a friend of hers, who actually moved to Europe and who will be mentioned later). For Cristina and her sister, clothes were very important – in general, clothes were a topic for girls and also a topic that was easily broached in conversation with girls I did not know so well or maybe had just chatted with a few times in the city centre while they were working. For boys, clothing was important in reference to their favourite music bands or sports’ celebrities – both national and internation-

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al. It is interesting from this point of view, that a popular Mexican rock band could be easily incorporated into the landscape of “Imaginary West”, because it belongs to the same sphere in the eyes of my informants – it shares the same characteristics of being unattainable, attractive and associated with people who live in the city and have a different lifestyle (and it does not really matter if the city is the Mexican capital or if it is New York – again, the reference to the “West” does not have anything to do with the geographical West, and not just because the whole US is more “North” for Mexicans). The Imaginary West thus does not create a “landscape” in the sense of a space, with borders and rules that apply consistently. Its various features are very concrete, because they are imagined by concrete people and they are based on their own different experiences: thus, cars would be more important for Carlos, while clothes and movies define what Cristina and Jeanette see in the Imaginary West. But the fact that the Imaginary West is not a homogeneous space with characteristics shared by everyone who participates in it does not imply that there are as many Imaginary Wests as there are people who imagine them – the real power of the Imaginary West lies precisely in the fact that it assumes collective and shared meaning, in a way very similar to Anderson’s imagined community of a nationstate. The “Imaginary West” could be characterized by what Sneath, Holbraad and Pedersen call an “external imaginary” – a “space spanning between persons and things… such external spaces are often constitutive of imaginative projects, as they serve to delineate particular vistas on which that which is imagined assumes its form” (2009: 14). The landscape of the imaginary West is a collective space constituted by many particular, concrete and personal situations, encounters and experiences that create concrete imageries (such as the one about people having a certain type of cars or girls wearing a certain type of clothes or university students doing specific things, like having coffee with fellow classmates) – but these imageries are placed in a space that is external to personal and unique experiences and transcends them. It is only in these external, shared spaces of an imagined community that the concrete situations start to make sense and “assume their form”. The Imaginary West is collective and at the same time is created in specific, concrete and unique ways that could be described as “technologies of imagination – [the] diverse manner through which imaginative effects are engendered” (Sneath, Holbraad and Pedersen 2009: 16). In the previous sections, I have described how the Imaginary West is created out of conversations with tourists (or with me and other similar actors), magazines and images of celebrities. For example, Cristina’s job (selling souvenirs to tourists in the city centre) here thus presents a specific technology that creates a concrete effect – and this effect, together with similar effects created by different

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technologies such as TV series, movies or the Internet are the building blocks of the landscape of the Imaginary West. It is, however, through examining the last “technology” – the Internet (that is conveniently a technology in both senses of the word) that the specific imaginative effect and its difference from everyday imaginative knowledge about immediate one’s social environment can be analysed. Over the course of the last few years, the Internet has become massively available in in San Cristóbal de Las Casas. When I first visited the city in 2007, there were of course some internet cafés and the more expensive hotels in the centre provided wireless service. In 2013, on the other hand, there was a public wi-fi network covering the whole city centre and Internet cafés could be found at every corner, even in the Zona Norte. There are of course many ways in which connection to the Internet is used among my informants (because, as Miller points out, the Internet is always reinvented locally by its users, 2012: 19), but here I choose to analyse one specific way of using it – communication via social networking sites (mostly Facebook, though Whatsapp is also widely used in Mexico, while in the Czech Republic it is not that popular). The reason why the most common use of the Internet among the inhabitants of Zona Norte is social networking is perhaps very pragmatic – most inhabitants of Zona Norte do not own a personal computer or a laptop, but a cheap smartphone is available to them. Writing emails or reading articles (two other common online activities of my informants) is much more comfortable on a computer screen, but Facebook can be easily used on a smartphone (and Facebook messenger and the Whatsapp app are even intended for mobile use only). When I was in San Cristóbal in 2008, I had just created my own Facebook profile because I was to be far away from home for a longer period of time and wanted to stay in touch with my friends – almost all of whom had a Facebook profile at the time. At the time, none of Cristina, Natalia or their brothers, (or any of my friends in San Cristóbal) had ever heard of it. I used to teach them how to use email, because they wanted to learn, but all the courses were too expensive for them. In 2013, all of my acquaintances in San Cristóbal were equipped with a smartphone that they used solely for online communication via Facebook, Whatsapp or Gmail chat – they usually had no money to pay for credit to be able to make phone calls or send text messages, but due to the free wi-fi in the city centre or in some places, like shops, cafés or libraries, they were constantly communicating online. A smartphone had become standard “equipment” for all the vendedoras in the city centre. They used it as a source of entertainment during the long periods of waiting for customers and they also collected pictures – situations in which an indigenous seller would take a selfie of herself and a random tourist who had just bought something from her is nowadays a common sight in the city centre. Many of them would then post the picture to Facebook immediately (again,

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there might be a practical reason for this – there is wi-fi in the city centre, while there is no connection at the homes in Zona Norte). Sometimes, they would also ask the random tourist for her name so they could “befriend” them on Facebook – though not all the vendedoras have the courage to do this. Social networking sites like Facebook or Whatsapp are important in the context of this article, because they stress one of the most important characteristics of the Imaginary West, mentioned in almost every situation in which the lifestyle of tourists, or of myself or of one of my friends here in Europe, was discussed by my informants. Because of their ability to mediate a long-distance contact, social networks target mobility – or rather the lack of it. Mobility as a specific feature of the Imaginary West also works as a very good example of the different effects various imaginative processes have. While there is no qualitative difference between the imagined reality of everyday life in Zona Norte and the imagined reality of everyday life in the Imaginary West, there is a difference, even a gap, between the effect of the first (being in Zona Norte and sending messages over Facebook to Europe) and the second (actually being in Europe). What Facebook thus creates in my research site is a situation that is new both to me and my informants. Besides the fact that they are now supplied with images from my life even when I am not “there”, when I am not in Mexico with them, they are also constantly confronted with the fact that I can choose to be physically distant or close to them (because I can afford to buy a flight ticket), while they can only be mobile while online. They can send me a Facebook message, but they cannot come to visit me – and the fact that I (or anyone they encounter in the city centre, while selling him or her a bracelet or a blouse) can do both, constitutes one of the most important characteristics of the lifestyle of the inhabitants of the “Imaginary West”. The issue of mobility is not particularly new in the young people from Zona Norte’s negotiations of their own identity and their relationship to their social environment. Stories of migration and moving are common in the family histories, because they have all moved from mountain villages surrounding San Cristóbal in recent decades. In the generation of my informants, however, these stories are seen as a distant past that has nothing to do with their present situation – they were born in the city (or the majority of them were, and those who were not came to the city as very small children and do not remember much about life in their original communities). While their relationships to the villages from which their parents came vary from complete disinterest to politically shaped proclamations about their “indigenous” roots, they consciously perceive and present themselves as “urban youth” (Heřmanová 2010). While internal migration in Chiapas is mostly seen as family history, international migration is perceived as a current issue, but is not so common in Chiapas – the most southerly state of Mexico, bordering

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Guatemala and thousands of kilometres from the infamous wall at the US-Mexican border – as it is in the rest of Mexico. One of the reasons that seem plausible to explain this is the financial cost of the journey – for a Tzotzil woman from Zona Norte, even the journey to Ciudad de México is almost impossible due to the price of the bus tickets, and the journey to the North of Mexico to the border with the US would cost more than a family might need for food for months. On the other hand, many of the vendedoras have travelled for work – Cristina and Natalia’s family, for example, had spent a few months working in Guadalajara, and Natalia remembered a period when she used to accompany her mother to work in Cancún when she was little. Although the girls would recount these travels with excitement, they were clear about their mission – in the end, it was just another way to make money and survive for a few more months, and there was always a great risk that the money paid for the bus ticket would not be earned back if they did not sell enough in the destination city. The difference between a worker going somewhere in order to find a means of subsistence and a tourist going for a holiday is very clearly articulated. The kind of mobility that characterizes the inhabitants of the Imaginary West is seen as qualitatively different – even if just for the simple fact that the tourist is someone who chooses his or her own destination for pleasure, for fun or for other comfortable reasons, a luxury a mere economic migrant never has.14 The feature of mobility ascribed to the Imaginary West is thus a special kind of mobility that is not available to the inhabitants of Zona Norte for many reasons – mostly because they do not have the financial resources. While social media and online communication tools in general are often used in the context of mobility by economic migrants to maintain contact with their families back home (Miller and Madianou 2012), in the context of my research the use of social media is based on a relationship built the other way around – from the people who stay in relation to the people who move (voluntarily, in this case). Once, I asked Cristina about her relationship to the tourists – does she like talking to them? And why? “Of course we like it! It’s the most fun part of the boring job we have here! Nothing never happens here. I’ll probably never go to Europe, but I can at least try to persuade somebody to send me a postcard!”, her sister Natalia jumped into the conversation and both girls started to laugh. Then Cristina pulled out her mobile phone and showed me a picture of a blonde girl wearing one of the bracelets she sold: “Look, this is what my friend from California sent me just yesterday!” She looks at her sister and says: “She wants postcards, because she 14 Zygmunt Bauman (1998) develops the distinction between tourists and vagabonds – while the first move around the globe for pleasure, the last do so out of necessity. “The tourists move because they want to, the vagabonds because they have no other bearable choice“ (p. 93, italics in the original text). I think this distinction applies here quite accurately.

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doesn’t have Facebook, you know,” Cristina laughed at her sister, who just rolled her eyes. In this case – as in many other similar cases – an encounter with a tourist that maybe lasted for minutes or possibly for a few days, has a lasting influence on Cristina’s life thanks to Facebook. She is trying to make as many “friends” during her work as possible, because the tourists she meets and their lifestories captured on social network profiles are an important source of both information and entertainment for her – including my own Facebook profile. She and her brother Carlos comment on almost every picture I post on Facebook, sometimes they even ask about articles that I link and that they do not understand. They also send me messages whenever they see I am online and since this would usually be late at night European time, it usually means that I am busy writing something and have no time for answering them properly. At first, I did not know how to deal with the situation. It even felt inappropriate to me to add my informants as my “Facebook friends“ – it felt, for some reason, like crossing the line between my research and my personal life. They could see pictures from my holidays, pictures from my friends’ birthday parties or pictures of my niece from my parents’ garden. They witness situations in my life that they could never witness personally, that would remain hidden from them were it not for the online world we both share. I felt that it is not right to filter my Facebook content, because I do not want my informants to see what I really do when I am at home. But I needed to admit to myself that I was annoyed. I felt embarrassed just a few days ago when Carlos posted a picture of a cute puppy on my profile and I feel uncomfortable when Cristina comments on a picture of me and my sister in my parents’ house, noting how big the house seems to her. Postill (2013), however, notes that this situation is one encountered by many researchers recently: “This architecture [of social media] results in a digitally mediated ‘open plan’ sociality, a duality of social intercourse in which formely discrete facets of our lives are now within the purview of our wider network. Increasingly, Facebook brings into the semi-public personal spaces of ethnographers two sets of significant others, namely the researched and the nonresearched, sometimes even blurring the distinction between the two. This is the stuff of scientific insight – and potential trouble.“ Postill also notes that the virtual relationships that Facebook creates tends to be “awkward“, precisely because they blur the lines between what is personal and what is public into a kind of semipublic representation. This is exactly what happened to me. But – as Postill notes, this is not only a cause of trouble, but also a point of scientific insight. In my case, the social media communication between me and my informants made the imaginary lifestyle that I, among many others, represent more accessible, at any time and even at long distance, but it did not make it any more possible, to recall again Appadurai’s distinction between what is imaginable and what is possible. So what does it mean for Cristina that she can now reach me via Facebook any time, but

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that she can still never reach me in the way I can reach her, by coming to visit me? And is my unwilligness to stay in touch with her after I leave my field behind and go home, something to do with my privilege of mobility? How does Cristina’s constant online contact with my life in Prague change her attitude towards the Imaginary West as my homeland and her dream destination? In short, how do the effects of online and offline imaginary worlds interact? Besides being fundamentally “awkward”, Facebook also enables us to explore these questions. IV. Imagining Mobility or “Being Stuck in San Cristóbal” In the last few years, an interesting discussion has been going on in anthropology about how to study ethnographically the virtual worlds of online communities and what does the “virtual” actually mean for the anthropological examination of social reality. The study of online imaginary worlds poses many important epistemological and methodological challenges that have generated a lot of attention in the last decade.15 Recently, a few authors have noted that the sub-discipline of digital anthropology, however, treats the study of virtual worlds from a very problematic point of view – starting from the idea that we cannot and should not treat the virtual and the physical as distinct and separate (Boellstorf 2012: 40). Gabriella Coleman summarises this perspective when she notes that “the bulk of this work, however, continues to confound sharp boundaries between off-line and online contexts” (Coleman 2010: 492, quoted in Boellstorf 2012: 41). The imperative to study online worlds in their offline context, that has been set up as the main task of digital anthropology, often leads to the conclusion that the two cannot be separated at all and that in our digital age, online and offline are blurred together, and our virtual identity is part of our everyday life to such an extent that it becomes an organic, inseparable part of our personality and our social life. Gabriela Coleman noted (2010) that the presumption of blurred lines between online and offline partly comes from the fact that most of the work in digital media and communication technologies has been done in North America and Europe, amongst people who are privileged in their access to technological resources and Internet connection. The digital reality of marginalized people all around the world, however, shows a different picture that is more in correspondence with Appadurai’s distinction between the “imaginable” and the “possible” mentioned above. Tom Boellstorff, who was one of the first anthropology scholars to have done ethnographic research in virtual space (an early version of Second Life) but whose main research area lies in Indonesia, notes that “the idea that online and offline could fuse makes as much sense as semiotics whose followers would anticipate the collapsing of the gap between sign and referent, imagining a day when 15 For an exhaustive overview see Horst, and Miller 2012: 3 nn (Introduction).

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words would be the same thing as that which they denote” (Boellstorff 2012: 42).16 Boellstorff also quotes Miller and his observation from fieldwork in Trinidad: “forms of expression can take place on Facebook, but the space of Facebook and the space of /Trinidad/ do not thereby collapse into each other. You can still be on Facebook without being in Trinidad and you can be in Trinidad without being on Facebook.” My analysis of the online mobility of young indigenous people in San Cristóbal and the offline mobility of the inhabitants of the “Imaginary West” provides another example. When speaking about my life in Prague, Jeanette always said to me that she feels “stuck” in San Cristóbal. Right after our conversation about movies and how she compares them to what she thinks life in Europe looks like, she told me a story about a friend who was half Tzeltal, but married a guy from Switzerland and went to live with him in Europe. She was in close contact with her via emails and I heard the story many times afterwards. In fact I heard it so many times that it annoyed me in the end, she was obsessed with it and every time I would mention something, she would react “yes, my friend, you know, the one who married Marco, she also tells me that she does this or that in Switzerland.” I even asked her once why she mentioned her friend so often – was she maybe a good friend of hers and she is upset that she has left? But Jeanette said that they were not really that close, but “of course I am upset she’s left. Because I am stuck here and I have no prospect of ever leaving San Cristóbal.” In other words, she felt even more stuck because of the fact that her friend was now sending her emails from Switzerland. Her offline world in San Cristóbal and the online images of a life in distant Switzerland could not have been less blurred – on the contrary, email communication with her friend made the distinction even more visible and sharp for Jeanette. This internal debate inside the discipline about the interaction of online and offline modes of our existence leads back to the question of the effects of various technologies of imagination. From an analytical point of view, both online and offline worlds are perceived by us in the same way. Horst and Miller (2012: 12) note the importance of this analytical aspect when they say that every human communication, be it personal or internet-mediated, is always mediated by many channels and frames – but we fail to see this, because in face-to-face interaction these frames work so effectively. Horst and Miller are thus effectively going back to Kant and his notion of the imagination as a basic human capacity that precedes any kind of knowledge that we are able to extract from the world of objects, both 16 Boellstorff also suggests that digital anthropology can overcome this misleading tendency by using what he calls an indexical theory of understanding – borrowed from philosophy and semiotics – for understanding the relationship between virtual and actual. In his concept, the virtual serves as an index for the actual, in a way similar to the way in which a word serves as an index for an object – see Boellstorff 2012: 50nn. Cargo (2016), Vol. 14, No. 1 - 2

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material and immaterial. We are not able to be in “non-mediated” contact with each other, because our interactions are always framed by our sociocultural background, just as we are not able to have non-mediated knowledge about the world, because we are always imagining shapes and possible meanings in what we see and feel. “Just as we construct meanings, we imagine realities and this, we might say, is the only way in which we are able to perceive them” (Sneath, Holbraad and Pedersen 2009: 12). The Imaginary West is thus not any less “real” or “present” to my informants than the houses of Zona Norte. Both realities are mediated and imagined. But that also does not mean that they would “collapse into each other”, to quote Miller. Jeanette’s life in San Cristóbal is shaped by her perception of her own position in it, is imagined through the lens of her family history, her education and her personal experience. Life in Europe is imagined through the lens of magazines, films and email conversations with a friend who lives there. Both realities are mediated, but they are not, in any aspect at all, blurred. They may be built from the same ontological foundatings, but their difference lies in the effects they have on the life of my informants. These effects are also the only way to access the impact of imagination in social life empirically. Mobility is an excellent example of this effective difference. The ability to move long distances is such a prominent feature of the landscape of the Imaginary West precisely because it stresses the practical impossibility of moving on the part of those who are imagining it. Social networks connect my informants to distant places, but every Facebook message they send me reminds them of the fact that our connection remains purely virtual and no matter what they do in the virtual world, it will not move them from where they are. The effects of the Imaginary West on their life thus become more visible than ever before, because they are constantly reminded of the profound gap between what is possible online and offline. As Cristina herself said in one of our Facebook exchanges, when commenting on a picture of my niece taken in the garden of my parents’ house: “That’s really nice, Mari. It’s great that I can see you parents’ house, though it’s not like I can actually go there...” (followed by an incredible amount of emoticons that she uses all the time). “I’ll come to visit you soon,” I reply after a while, because I do not know what else to say and then it occurs to me that it was probably the worst possible answer. But she just sends another smiley face. Conclusion Over the preceding pages, I have attempted to develop the concept of the “Imaginary West” as it is created and lived by a group of young indigenous people in the suburbs of the city of San Cristóbal de Las Casas. While the notion of the “Imaginary West” comes from Alexei Yurchak (2005) and his analysis of the cultur-

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al background of the breakdown of the Soviet regime, the “Imaginary West” as it is described here constitutes a twist on Anderson’s notion of an imagined community (Anderson 1983). It is created out of lot of diverse material and in many different ways – from conversations with tourists in the city centre, from movies and TV series and also, most importantly in the context of this article, from social network communication between my informants and the tourist friends they encounter while working in the city centre. The Imaginary West can also be compared to what Arjun Appadurai (1994) calls “imaginary worlds” – though Appadurai also tracks his concept back to Anderson. Anderson’s notion of an imagined community is very useful also, because he illustrates it with a vast amount of empirical material and also traces various technologies that are used by members of an imagined community to build a sense of belonging. Sneath, Holbraad and Pedersen mention the example of Anderson’s analysis in their introduction to “Technologies of imagination” (2009). They propose an understanding of such technologies as “diverse manners through which imaginative effects are engendered” (2009: 16), which allows us to study the effect of imaginative practices on social reality ethnographically. The imagination as such is a capacity of an individual mind, as is noted already in Kant’s thinking about the imagination, but the effects of the imagination assume their forms in what Sneath, Holbraad and Pedersen call an “external imaginary” or what Charles Taylor previously studied as the “social imaginary” (Sneat, Holbraad and Pedersen 2012). It is interesting that in the case of my fieldwork, as is also the case in Anderson’s famous analysis of imagined communities, the technologies of imagination are “technologies” in every sense of the word. Anderson tracks the origin of nationalistic thinking back to the invention of printed books or to the use of geographical maps in Western colonies in Asia. The Imaginary West I have attempted to present in this article is constructed among other things through the use of online communication technologies, mainly social networking sites such as Facebook or social apps such as Whatsapp. The “imaginary” in it thus seemingly overlaps with the “online” or sometimes the “virtual”. The anthropology of online worlds has undergone a very interesting debate about how to study empirically the online identities and interactions of social actors and how to capture the difference between online and offline modes of existence without blurring them together, as has been the case in many recent studies (see Coleman 2010) or conversely, without seeing them as ontologically different and incomparable. My example based on one of the eminent features of the Imaginary West – the mobility of its inhabitants – aims to show that it is again through the practical effects that the online and offline worlds have that we can capture and study ethno-

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graphically their role in the social life of our informants. The concept of “technologies of imagination” applied to the social media communication of structurally disadvantaged and marginalized people, such as the inhabitants of the poor suburbs of San Cristóbal de Las Casas, can provide a deep ethnographic insight into the practical effects of imaginary worlds on the social life of people and the way in which the imaginary, the online and the offline interact on an everyday basis.

REFERENCES Anderson, Benedict. 2008. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. New York: Verso. Appadurai, Arjun. 1996. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimension of Globalisation. University of Minnesota Press. Bauman, Zygmunt. 1998. Globalization: The Human Consequences. Cambridge: Polity Press. Betancourt Aduen, Dario. 1997. Bases regionales en la formacion de comunas rurales-urbanas en San Cristóbal de las Casas. Universidad Autonoma de Chiapas. Boellstorff, Tom. 2012. “Rethinking Digital Anthropology.“ In Digital Anthropology, edited by Horst Heather and Daniel Miller. 2012. London: Berg. Bonfil Batalla, Guillermo. 2006 (1987). México profundo, Una civilización negada. Random House México. Byler, Darren, and Shannon D. Iverson. 2012. Literature, Writing & Anthropology. Introduction to the curated collection of Cultural Anthropology. http://www.culanth.org/curated_collections/5-literature-writing-anthropology Coleman, Gabriela E. 2010. “Ethnographic Approaches to Digital Media.“ Annual Review of Anthropology 39: 487 – 505. Fischer, Edward 2004. “Strategic Identities and Subversive Narratives: On Being Maya in Globalized World.“ Vanderbuilt e-Journal of Luso-Hispanic Studies. Vanderbuilt University. http://ejournals.library.vanderbilt.edu/lusohispanic/viewarticle.php?id=24&layout =html. Friedman, Jonathan. 2004. “Globalization, Class and Culture in Global Systems.“ Journal of World-System Research 5: 636 – 656. Horst Heather, and Daniel Miller. 2012. “The Digital and the Human: A Prospectus for Digital Anthropology.“ In Digital Anthropology, edited by Horst Heather and Daniel Miller. 2012. London: Berg. Kuřík, Bob. 2009. “Struggle for and in Public Spaces in Zapatista’s Chiapas.“ In: Lightning the Bonfire, Rebuilding the Pyramid, Case studies in Idenitity, Ethnicity and Nationalism in Indigenous Communities in Mexico, edited by Přemysl Mácha. Ostravská univerzita v Ostravě. ———. 2010. Aktivisté na cestách za zapatisty. Diplomová práce. Praha: Karlova univerzita. 78

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Mácha, Přemysl. 2005. “O psaní slova Indián, neexistenci lidských ras a záludnosti rasového myšlení.“ Český lid 92 (3): 231 – 241. ———. 2007. “Los Comanches de Nuevo México. Hybridita, autenticita a politika identity v Novém Mexiku.“ Český lid 94 (2): 141 – 156. Madianou, Mirca, and Daniel Miller. 2012. Migration and New Media. New York: Routledge. Postill, John. 2013. “Public Anthropology in Times of Media Hybridity and Global. Upheaval.“ In Media, Anthropology and Public Engagement, edited by Simone Abram and Sarah Pink. Oxford: Berghahn. Sneath, David, Martin Holbraad, and Morten Axel Pedersen. 2009. “Technologies of Imagination: An Introduction.“ Ethnos 74 (I): 5 – 30. Varley, Ann. 2012. “Postcolonialising Informality?“ Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 2013 (31): 4 – 22. Wacquant, Loïc. 2008. Urban Outcasts, A Comparative Sociology of Advanced Marginality. Cambridge: Polity Press. Yurchak, Alexei. 2005. Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation. Princeton University Press.

Marie Heřmanová [email protected] Faculty of Humanities Charles University in Prague www.fhs.cuni.cz

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How “Native” Is My “Native Anthropology”? Positionality and the Reception of the Anthropologist’s Work in Her Own Community – A Reflexive Account Grażyna Kubica Abstract: The paper problematizes the issue of the positionality of an anthropologist and the resonance of her or his work. It is argued that this is especially challenging when an anthropologist is a “native”, and it is his or her own minority community that reads the research results and reacts to them. The paper offers analyses of these issues using the example of the author’s own long-time study of the community she comes from and the resonance her work has gained there. The paper also presents the results of reflexive work about the political relevance and ethical obligations of the author’s work in the situation of the cultural hegemony of national culture over the minority she has been studying and comes from. Keywords: native anthropology, anthropological reflexivity, Cieszyn Silesia, cultural hegemony, political relevance of anthropology

The title paraphrases the question posed by the Indian-American scholar Kirin Narayan in her important paper originally published in 1993. It was entitled “How Native is a ‘Native’ Anthropologist?” and was an attempt to deconstruct the part of the discipline’s colonial legacy which consisted in polarising Anthropologists (who study) and Others (who are studied). Those researchers who did not fit into such a model were named “native”, “indigenous” or “insider”, and were seen as dealing with “their own cultures from a position of intimate affinity” (Narayan 1993: 671). The situation of East and Central European anthropologists does not really fit well into the model analysed by Narayan, because we have always tended to study our own folk cultures “at home”, without a colonial context. But we should still consider the problems she tackled, especially the issue of the positionality of an anthropologist, an issue which is rarely problematised, at least in Polish anthropology, either by those of an ethnological (volkskundist) or those of a sociological background. Another problem that is scarcely reflected upon is the resonance of

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an anthropologist’s work. This is especially challenging when an anthropologist is a “native”, and it is his or her own community that reads the research results and reacts to them. I propose here to reflect on these issues using the example of my own long-time study of the community I come from and the resonance this work has gained. I am here not focusing on the theoretical and methodological problems of my research, but rather on its results, and the problems they cause for various audiences, including myself. Thus my idea is to do some reflexive work about the political relevance of my work in the situation of the cultural hegemony of the national culture over the minority I am studying. My paper consists of four parts. In the first, I discuss the issue of “native” anthropology, problematising it and characterising my own position in the field. Next, I discuss my own research on Cieszyn Silesia. The third part presents an “ethnography” of my paper, namely an analysis of the reception of my Silesian book and its political uses. Finally, I refer to my last project, an oral-history documentary film, and the problems of various kinds that the work on it revealed. In the conclusions, I formulate the findings of my reflexive analysis and implications which may be of use for other “native” anthropological researchers. “Nativeness” Problematised Traditionally, classical Western anthropology was meant to deal with “Other worlds”. At a certain point, though, an alternative project appeared: studying one’s own society, or “anthropology at home” (Jackson 1987). We can distinguish some types of such projects, mainly: insider anthropology, e.g. research by anthropologists coming from the dominant ethnic group carried out in their own society; and native anthropology, when researchers come from a minority ethnic group and study its members (Messerschmidt 1981: 13). Polish (and also other East and Central European) traditional ethnographic studies of folk culture can be classed in the first category, namely insider anthropology: researchers came from the dominant ethnic group of the studied society. Yet, there were huge class and cultural differences between ethnographers who came from the post-landed gentry intelligentsia and the local folk of various regions. Also, most contemporary anthropological studies carried out in Poland can be classified as insider anthropology, but the issue of doing research in one’s own society has not really been taken up, even in the situation when a member of a dominant ethnic group studied members of a cultural minority, like a Polish researcher studying Lemkos, Silesians or Roma. This of course resulted from the positivistic model of scientific inquiry, which prevented researchers from any reflexivity. It is only recently that some anthropologists have started to explore the problem (e.g. Pasieka and Sekerdej 2013; Krzyżowski 2009).

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When a researcher is a member of a minority group him- or herself, she or he is more likely to raise this issue, as if out of a need to somehow “excuse” oneself (Królewski 2011; Kubica 2011b; Modnicka 2010). This situation should be counted in the second category, namely as “native” anthropology. It is here that my own undertaking can be located. In my case it is the study of the community I come from: Cieszyn Silesians. It is important to stress the minority character of the group I am studying and from which I come (in fact it is even twofold: ethnic and religious). In socio-cultural anthropology, the research situation of “native” anthropologists has already been thoroughly discussed by authors from various milieus (e.g. Aguilar 2010; Bakalaki 1997; Brettell 1993; Fahim 1982; Hastrup 2008; Kuwayama 2004; Medicine 2001; Messerschmidt 2010; Narayan 1993; Wolcott 1999). Here I present the main issues of the discussion: general epistemological concerns, relevance for research practice and the reception of anthropological work. Some anthropologists are very sceptical about the very project of “native” anthropology. Kirsten Hastrup believes that the basic standards of scholarship also comprise reading the literature on the study area, including local knowledge. “But it belongs to another register of knowledge, because both types of understanding should be measured according to other scales of values. As theoretical knowledge, anthropology is the opposite of the practical mode of knowledge that is the basis of the normal social experience in the social world. (...) There is no way to talk simultaneously from the position of the anthropologist and a native. Speaking from inside and outside at the same time is logically impossible” (Hastrup 2008: 171). Hastrup believes that inscribed in anthropology is the “process of ‘making foreign’”, that is of looking at the studied cultural reality from a distance and that there is none of this when we examine our own society (Hastrup 2008: 171). Thus, in this formulation “native” anthropology as a project is something that is dubious, if not impossible. There are also other problems: Takami Kuwayama warns that using the concept of “native” anthropology may strengthen cultural essentialism, but claims that it is still a useful concept to show the workings of the world system of anthropology (Kuwayama 2004). He points out that the differentiation between “native” and non-“native” should be considered in terms of three components: 1. the culture used as point of reference in ethnographic observations; 2. the assumed audience (readers); 3. the language in which research results are written up. “Nativeness” is thus a complex issue, not only a matter of an anthropologist’s biography, but rather of point of reference in research and writing up. The problem may be seen quite differently. It is believed that formal education in the field of anthropology provides “natives” with a “comparative perspective in the study of their own people”, as Harry F. Wolcott put it. According to him, the roots of the comparative perspective come from the social sciences, and not from

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researchers’ biographies. What actually makes the projects of “native” anthropologists “sufficiently different”, Wolcott argues, is the nature of their “indigenous community”, which differs from the dominant model in terms of ethnicity, region or class (Wolcott 1999: 155). It is important, however, for researchers to have previous experience of foreignness. Pierre Bourdieu wrote about the genesis of his research on the celibacy of French peasants, which enabled him to formulate a theory of symbolic violence: “When I worked in Kabylia, in a world that is foreign to me, I thought that it would be good to create a kind of Tristes tropiques in reverse (...) it means to observe the effects that could produce in me objectification of the world in which I am a native. (...) I made the effort to go beyond the usual explanations that were accepted by both residents and journalists” (Bourdieu and Wacquant 2001: 157). The objectification of the world in which one is a native can be difficult, but an anthropological education and an experience of alienation, which allow one to go beyond the categories of one’s own culture and reduce ethnocentrism, can be helpful in achieving this. As Anthony Jackson puts it, “doing anthropology at home is of benefit when the researcher has prior experience of fieldwork abroad before turning homewards, since this aids the ‘distantiation’ process that is necessary if we are to see ourselves as others see us” (Jackson 1984: 14). Narayan deconstructed the very concept of “native” anthropology, instead proposing “that at this historical moment we might more profitably view each anthropologist in terms of shifting identifications amid a field of interpenetrating communities and power relations. The loci along which we are aligned with or set apart from those whom we study are multiple and in flux. Factors such as education, gender, sexual orientation, class, race, or sheer duration of contacts may at different times outweigh the cultural identity we associate with insider or outsider status” (Narayan 1993: 671-2). Though I agree with Narayan, I think that we, Eastern and Central European anthropologists, should draw benefit from the discussion of “native” anthropology and think over the situation of studying our own cultural reality, the positionality of a “native” anthropologist and the reception of his or her findings in the studied community. There are obvious advantages of research as a “native” anthropologist: easy contact with informants, lack of linguistic problems and understanding of nonverbal communication, not yielding to hidden stereotyping, good access to certain aspects of the studied culture, especially to its emotional dimension, and finally, understanding cultural subtleties (see Aguilar 1981, Hastrup 2008). In addition to these obvious advantages, attention is also drawn to the disadvantages of “native” anthropologists’ studies: by participating in the everyday life of the phenomena they are studying, they may be reluctant to analyse them; they lack distance to formulate questions; their interlocutors assume that the researchers know the rules and will follow them; the anthropologists are immediately placed in some social category; and they have a tendency to apply preconceived notions (Aguilar 1981).

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There is still one important point that I am yet to raise. It has been pointed out that the activities of “native” anthropologists are politically oriented to the benefit of a studied community, aiming to increase its pride and ability to resist oppression (Kuwayama 2004). Kuwayama also points to the fact that researchers from minority groups are often accused of a lack of objectivism, because they represent the political interests of their groups. But this, he argues, is rather because the public sympathises with the dominant model. Researchers of the mainstream of society are usually considered “objective” and “neutral”, due to a sympathy on the part of the audience. The researchers of the minority are often seen as “subjective” or “biased”, because they do not have the sympathy of the majority. He concludes that “‘objectivity’ is another name for domination of the weaker by the stronger” (Kuwayama 2004: 21). Kuwayama, like Narayan, writes that in post-colonial times “the traditional boundary between the coloniser/researcher and the colonised/researched has become increasingly blurred.” “Natives” can read what others have written about them, and they can also write themselves. Their discourse, often representing ethnic nationalism, is confronted with the discourses of outsiders, especially from former colonising countries. Kuwayama concludes that in this situation a major task in contemporary anthropology is “the creation of a ‘dialogic space’ between the describer and the described, as well as among all the people concerned with the culture studied, without privileging one kind of discourse over another” (Kuwayama 2004: ix). This is a very good point, but Kuwayama has failed to take into account the situation of the cultural hegemony of the centre over minorities which makes a “native” anthropologist clash not only with the dominant party, but also with his or her own “native” folk, who adopt its perspective. Narayan too refers to the issue of the reception of an anthropologist’s work, suggesting focusing on “relations with the people we seek to represent in our texts”, on whether they are instrumentalised or invited to dialogue and critique. Narayan proposes a more narrative style of anthropological texts, and translating professional jargon into the language of everyday life which would offer “native” audiences a more democratic share in an anthropological project. However, she did not reflect on the problems that may result from this. Judith Okely warns that if fieldwork is at home, “the anthropologist cannot escape being read or misread by a wide range of interested parties beyond the usual academic constituency” and “avoid the political consequences of his or her research” (Okely 1996: 26). The political implications of a “native” anthropologist’s work are inevitable, and should be taken into account and even welcomed. They may concern the academic community, the dominant society and a minority group. In my case, it was coming from multi-denominational Cieszyn Silesia to Catholic Krakow to study at university that gave me a sense of distance (as Wolcott put it); it was especially the constant necessity to explain my Lutheran background

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to my colleagues and other people that made me think of myself as being different. On the other hand, my sociological and anthropological education helped me to realise the working of the cultural hegemony of Polishness and to appreciate my Silesianness. Both factors – the experience of being different and theoretical knowledge – produced an “objectivisation of the world in which I was a native”, as Bourdieu put it. But at the same time, I still felt a Pole, though I often differed from my Polish colleagues in my opinions and ideas about various problems of a political and cultural nature. Later, in the course of my various research projects, I was able to appreciate the advantages of my being a “native” (as Aquilar called them): I could “read” Silesian culture and have good access to its users, both Catholics and Lutherans, because I could communicate with them in Silesian, the language of the people “from here”. And, as Narayan put it, “I often share an unspoken emotional understanding with the people with whom I work” (Narayan 1993: 674). But I have also experienced the negative aspects of the situation. It is particularly difficult when my interviewees assume that I should know the problems I am asking about, because I’m “from here”. In this situation, it helped me to throw in a comment that I live in Krakow and may not be informed. On the other hand, anthropological theories help me to understand important problems and to analyse them (as Wolcott suggested). And still, there were often other factors that mattered more in research situations, especially my gender, class or education (as noted by Narayan). I believe that I was able to resolve the impossibility of “speaking from inside and outside at the same time” raised by Hastrup by writing in various genres: ethnographic and literary. As to Kuwayama’s components of differentiation between “native” and not-“native”: 1. the culture used as point of reference in ethnographic observation: there is no simple answer, it was Silesian and academic Polish, depending on the context and situation; 2. the assumed audience: primarily academic colleagues, but also Silesian compatriots; 3. the language in which the research results are written up: Polish (the language of academia and also of the public sphere in Silesia). My research was to some extent politically motivated (in the way discussed by Kuwayama). Apart from the purposes of scientific inquiry, I wanted to enhance the status of Cieszyn Silesian culture. I am particularly concerned with the rebirth of the Cieszyn variety of the Silesian language and with its introduction to the public sphere as a “fully-fledged alternative to the hegemonic language”, to use Tomas Hyland Eriksen’s phrase (Eriksen 1992: 329). And above all I want to deconstruct the cultural hegemony of Polish nationalism-Catholicism, which is not just a political, but also an epistemological issue (I will elaborate on this in later sections).

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Cieszyn Silesia and my Research I will begin by recalling the most important historical facts. Silesia has in its history been part of various states: the Polish Kingdom, the Czech Crown; later, together with it, coming under the rule of the Habsburgs (1526). The Duchy of Cieszyn has always been a unique country. One of the factors instrumental in this was religion: from the time of Reformation it was mainly Lutheran, but later the Counter-Reformation weakened local Lutheranism. Another was the economy: from the second half of the 18th century the region underwent intensive industrialisation. Cieszyn Silesia was cut in half and divided between Poland and Czechoslovakia in 1920. In 1938, the Czechoslovak part was incorporated into Poland and in 1939 the whole region became a part of the German Reich, in 1945 the division between Poland and Czechoslovakia was restored.1 Since 2004, and the EU accession of the Czech Republic and Poland, the state border has become less and less important, but the country, having being included in two different states for almost hundred years, is still culturally divided. I started my research on the Polish part of Cieszyn Silesia in the late 1970s with a historical-sociological study of the social bonds of the Cieszyn Silesian Lutheran community (Kubica 1996). I returned to research my own “native” region in the 1990s, carrying out several projects: both historical and ethnographic. They dealt with various problems that attracted my attention, addressing local concerns as well as problems inspired by anthropological theory. One of these was the analysis of autobiographies of pro-Polish activists (from the 1848 Revolutions until the interwar period) to look for the ethical dimension of identity. Another one consisted in dialogues with local political and cultural activists about the categories of being-from-here (“stela” in Silesian), and not-from-here (“nie stela”), which started to be politicised then. I monitored public rituals of various sorts and scrutinised their changes, as well as examining the cultural landscape and its religious dimension. All these studies were based on thorough research on the economic and social history of the region. Furthermore, I investigated several problems concerning the Lutheran community: its ethos and how it has changed; rituals and concepts of death and dying, also from a historical perspective; the autobiographies of Lutherans and how their religion was written about; another topic was to find out how women were presented in those texts, and finally, an interview with a gay Lutheran about what it means to be a minority within a minority. I also wrote about topics subject to concealment in the multicultural context that I came across in my research and private life; another topic was the social memory of World War II, when Silesians were subjected to forced labour, imprisonment, or conscription to the German Army. I have published several papers on these topics over the 1

For a historical overview, see the Polish-Czech-German volume: Bahlecke, Joachim, Dan Gawrecki, and Ryszard Kaczmarek 2011.

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years, and later, together with some new articles, several texts of prose and photographs, composed a volume called Śląskość i protestantyzm. Antropologiczne studia o Śląsku Cieszynskim, proza, fotografia [Silesianness and Protestantism. Anthropological studies on Cieszyn Silesia, prose, photography] (Kubica 2011a). My projects were based on various classical and contemporary anthropological and sociological theories. I would like to refer here to only some of them. I found especially useful the Gellnerian distinction between “wild” and “garden” cultures. According to this theory, some cultures develop spontaneously as part of human life: as a system of shared values and norms. These “systems passed down naturally from generation to generation without conscious intention, supervision, care, regrow without special fertilization” (Gellner 1991: 65). Therefore, one can learn a wild culture only through living in it, being brought up in it. It is not formulated in the form of “rules”, but learned through experience. Some wild cultures, Gellner claims, become garden ones, and those that do not see a chance for this give up and do not produce nationalism. My historical analysis of the narratives of pro-Polish activists in Cieszyn Silesia showed that, until the first half of the nineteenth century, the only higher culture there was German. Silesians, with the education they received, came under the influence of German language and culture. They felt German. The 1848 Revolutions and consequent greater social mobility brought with them, as it was called, a “national awakening”. Educated Silesians noticed that their Germanness was “false” and that they had to return to their “cultural roots”. But particularly important here is the fact that they called their roots Polish and mystified this construction. Nationalism required everyone to be involved in some kind of moral community. Silesia did not constitute such a community, so the choice was between Polish and German culture (and also the Czech one in some areas). Moreover, the choice was between two different sets of values. Germanness was connected with progress, the future and pragmatism, and Polishness with tradition, authenticity, selflessness and honour. These were the two moral horizons between which Silesians oscillated (see Kubica 2011c). Another important concept in my theoretical vocabulary is that of Antonio Gramsci’s cultural hegemony. According to him, this emerges from the variety of activities and ideas that are rooted in the experience of the class that have historically shaped the meaning of the world. The dominance of elites becomes natural by a diverse set of strategies in the field of culture. Culture structures the human perception and experience in such a profound way that the hegemonic vision is accepted as absolute truth by the whole society. The common-sense outlook of subaltern people remains vague and fragmented, and only in specific historical conditions may it become a hotbed of resistance against hegemony (see Lears 1985; Crehan 2002; Petrusauskaite and Schröder 2010). The Polish culture transmitted through education and promoted in the media is based on the history of “the Polish nation”, by which it is the Catholic gentry-

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intelligentsia dominant group that is meant. Hegemony is evident in the acceptance of the dominant role of Polish Catholic intellectual elites by Cieszyn Silesians. They feel their distinctiveness, emphasise being “from-here” and consider Silesian language an important element of their identity (see Kubica 2011d). But they call it a “dialect” (or “po naszymu” – our way) and do not believe that it should be specially cultivated. Speaking Silesian in public is not adopted, because this may indicate that a person is not educated and does not know literary Polish. Social memory worships only the victims of World War II who are in line with the Polish martyrological-heroic ethos, and many Silesians who were killed serving in the German army are not memorialised in any way, with their memory preserved only by family and friends (see Kubica 2011e). To sum up, in my book I analysed the problem of Silesianness as a wild culture in a Gellnerian sense. I tried to reveal what has been covered by the dominant Polish-centred meta-narrative, and discredited as illegitimate, unjust, non-independent or fragmented. I treated Silesianness as an independent category, at least potentially. My theoretical position was also a clear political stance. On the other hand, I tried to show that in Poland, Catholicism is a kind of a cultural norm not only in public discourse, but also in academic reflections on religion. The religious pluralism of Cieszyn Silesia reveals this problem. I also focused on the political dimension of religious communities. Multi-denominationalism is not merely a religious phenomenon, but is also important in local-level politics, and is a basis of a true pluralism of the public sphere and civil society (see Kubica 2011b). This theoretical statement also has obvious consequences. The Reception and Political Consequences of my “Native Anthropology” My Silesian book was published in 2011 by the Jagiellonian University Press and a few months later there was an additional printing, which is quite rare for an academic book. The reception of the volume and its political meaning were quite interesting. Let me summarise them. Some time after the book was published, I was approached by the leader of the Silesian Autonomy Movement (RAŚ), Jerzy Gorzelik. This group is quite popular in Upper Silesia and Gorzelik was then a member of the Silesian Province board. But RAŚ has a rather limited influence both in Cieszyn Silesia and among Lutherans. Gorzelik proposed that we collaborate, basing this proposition on an understanding that our ideas about the importance of Silesianness are quite similar. RAŚ organised several meetings to discuss my book with the general public. The first one took place in Katowice, the capital of Upper Silesia, and was co-organised by the Polish Lutheran Association and a local bishop. The gathering was quite well attended. At it, I not only tackled the problems of Silesian Protestants being in a difficult position in Poland, in a situation which can be described as Catholic

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“ethno-clericalism” (Perica 2002). I also raised other issues: such as women in the Polish Lutheran Church not being ordained, and the situation of gays and lesbians being concealed. The discussion proved that the first issue was really catchy and the public eager to discuss it. The second appeared in a less formal gathering during a dinner with a female member of the Church synod, who was not an enthusiast of women pastors. The third did not come up at all. There were also two other meetings: in Bielsko-Biała and Cieszyn, with rather limited audiences. Gorzelik’s idea to attract more people with my help did not really work, and Cieszyn Silesians remain generally indifferent to his political message. But my name became associated with RAŚ. I also had several other meetings: in my hometown, Ustroń, in the local museum; in neighbouring Wisła, in a public library; and in other places. These occasions, as well as letters and personal meetings with readers of my book, made me realise that it was quite significant for many people. It had some importance. I would venture the observation that it made people think about their Silesian identity and, perhaps, gave them intellectual instruments to construct it, and to name their own doubts towards the dominant discourse of Polishness. It was a kind of a trigger for their own reflexivity and identity work. Apart from this positive resonance, there were also critical reactions to my work. A good example might be the negative comments to the interview I gave to the Polish website Interia. I had been approached by a young Lutheran from Cieszyn Silesia who worked in Krakow. She told me that she was constantly treated as a freak by her Catholic colleagues, and would like me to explain to the wider public who we, Cieszyn Lutherans, were. I tried my best to meet this demand: demonstrating doctrinal and organisational differences between Catholicism and Lutheranism, and giving a historical overview of Silesian Protestantism. The editor of the site put as the title of the interview “Protestant Cieszyn Silesia.” After some time, I learned that the interview had been republished by a Cieszyn website and had provoked heated comments.2 The main problem, in my opinion, laid in the title. What was acceptable in Warsaw or Krakow was impossible in Cieszyn: “Protestant Cieszyn Silesia” might for some readers mean that local Catholics are not important (or not “from-there”), or that Cieszyn Silesia is not Polish (because not Catholic), etc. The comments revealed the negative emotions of Catholics, who were probably accustomed to the dominant position of Catholicism in Polish society and could not stand a region being called “Protestant”. My interview, which simply reported several issues, launched negative reactions, even hatred, very far from the regular inter-denominational “political correctness” successfully practised in the region. 2

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It is still to be consulted: http://facet.interia.pl/meskie-tematy/news-protestancki-slaskcieszynski,nId,450562. http://gazetacodzienna.pl/article/kultura/dr-kubica-heller-o-protestanckim-slasku-cieszynskim-cz-i-wywiad. Both accessed September 21, 2015. Cargo (2016), Vol. 14, No. 1 - 2

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Later, there appeared a very critical comment about my book in an interview with a cultural activist who has been working in Cieszyn for some years: “I must admit that this book left me very disappointed. I believe that the formulation of Polishness in this work is extremely unfair. Yes, perhaps Poland has never been a good mother to these areas, but the permanent use of the term ‘Polish nationalism’ in a book which deals with the coexistence of peoples, cultures and religions is for me a complete misunderstanding. In reference to Polish nationality, it seems to me that this is largely unfair. If such works, such descriptions are being created, we still do not have an objective history. But after all it is an open, decisive voice in the cultural history of the region” (Bogusław Słupczyński in Drabik 2014: 121). It is very disappointing to see one’s work misunderstood. In this case, the problem was with the very term “nationalism”. In Polish, it has a very pejorative connotation (and usually refers to “others”), in contrast to “patriotism”, which is an important virtue (of “us”). I was using the term in an anthropological sense, but the reader missed it. Another dubious reaction to my book, or perhaps rather the lack of one, took place within the Lutheran Church. Apart from several meetings in parishes (organised together with RAŚ or not), the book did not receive much attention in the Church media. For instance, it was not reviewed by the major weekly Zwiastun. I tried to attract the attention of an editor who I know personally. She seemed very interested, but the review never appeared. I was later informed, by way of the “private” explanation of another person, that the editor-in-chief did not want to tackle any controversial matters and therefore did not want to publicise my ideas, which apparently were inconvenient for him. My book was also ignored by Cieszyn cultural institutions and the local branch of the Silesian University (despite my presenting it to several ethnologists there). The only3 quite critical opinion was expressed by an ethnologist coming from the Czech part of Cieszyn Silesia but working on the Polish side, Jan Kajfosz. In one of his papers, he argued that because I researched only the Polish part of Cieszyn Silesia, I was de facto grounding the division of the territory by the state border. He also presented the work of Jakub Grygar (see Grygar 2004), who carried out his fieldwork on the Czech side, in the same manner. According to Kajfosz, this amounted to a way to stabilise the division conceptually (Kajfosz 2013). In this critique, he was certainly right, though I did try to refer to both parts of the country when it was possible. Multi-sited fieldwork on both sides of the border would be the solution in this situation. In fact, I had planned such a project even before Kajfosz’s criticism (see the next section). 3

Another Cieszyn ethnologist, in his as yet unpublished book, mentions my works several times, but only in some minor points, and does not discuss my theoretical considerations, despite analysing the same problems (Studnicki, Grzegorz. 2016. Śląsk Cieszyński: obrazy przeszłości a tożsamość miejsc i ludzi. Katowice: Wydawnictwo UŚ.).

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Thus, if I were to summarise the reception that my anthropological work had, the image to emerge would not be a simple one. 4 I was very pleased by those readers who reported on the role my book played in their own “identity work” and reflexivity. But I also have to admit that they came from quite a limited social milieu: namely the Silesian intelligentsia, both local and emigrant. My book appeared to be a kind of consciousness-raising read to those who were already open to such a perspective. I had hoped that it would provoke a deeper discussion with agents of the discourse of Polishness, but this was not really the case. I was probably just labelled a supporter of RAŚ, and therefore anti-Polish, by the dominant Polonocentric circles of the area, and thus ignored. To attract more attention to my ideas of the recreation of Cieszyn Silesia as a cultural entity (especially among the younger generation), I came up with a new project. “Everyday Life in the Shadow of a Border” Some time ago, I joined a group of feminist scholars and NGOs activists who were involved in a project consisting in collecting oral-history interviews with women deported from Poland to Soviet Ukraine after World War II and producing a documentary film.5 I suggested carrying out a similar project in Cieszyn Silesia with autochthonous elderly women who could tell us about everyday life in a region cut in half by a state border. My idea was that the feminist perspective would help us to escape nationalistic hegemonies and folklorism, and recreate everyday Cieszyn Silesian culture through women’s experiences, spoken about in the local Silesian language. Thus, we would be able to deconstruct the border and show that the culture on both sides of it is the same, and that people speak the same language. I wanted this to be a kind of performative action, creating Silesianness by talking about the border in women’s lives. The resulting film would be shown in secondary schools on both sides of the border, as well as in cultural centres for regular audiences. That was the idea. It was, in my opinion, quite simple. We managed to obtain funding from the European Network Memory and Solidarity, and started our project in September 2013 together with a Czech NGO partner. It took me quite some time to explain the local context to my Polish friends. I was helped by my colleague, the anthropologist Jakub Grygar. The Czech members of the project consisted mostly of autochthonous young activists with whom I could speak Si4 5

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There were two regular academic reviews in Polish sociological and ethnological journals (Kubik 2012; Pasieka 2012). The film was entitled Stacja kolejowa Krasne-Busk. Opowieści przesiedlonych kobiet, Kraków 2012, and has Polish, Ukrainian, German and English subtitles. Cargo (2016), Vol. 14, No. 1 - 2

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lesian; they also knew Polish very well, because they were educated in that language at schools and later at universities in Poland. There was also one Czech participant from Prague, and a German – from Rostock. The language of our project was English. We began with the conceptualisation of our research, a methodological workshop and a historical overview, and later started to collect our filmed interviews. They were extremely interesting, but my initial idea to conduct them in Silesian did not work well. On the Polish side of the border, only the women from mountain villages spoke Silesian (or rather a Polish-Silesian mixture), while those from towns mostly spoke Polish. One of our interlocutors (a former teacher, a public figure) explained that when giving an interview she “automatically” spoke Polish. But when they got accustomed to us and when we insisted on speaking “po naszymu” they could do this well. On the Czech side of the border, the situation was quite similar. Our interlocutors were all educated in Polish schools, some of them were retired teachers and for them it was important to speak Polish, because it was also a political gesture. It was not easy to persuade them to speak “po naszymu”. We decided also to have some representation of autochthonous people who felt Czech. We found such a person and asked our Czech colleague to carry out the interview. The person also knew “po naszymu”, as all autochthonous inhabitants do, and she reflected about the issue of local language. During our project, we had constant discussions in our Polish team about the problem of national identities, Silesian identity and multiculturalism. I realised that my Polish feminist colleagues were very open-minded and pluralistic, but they had problems in grasping the issue of the multi-layeredness of identity on both sides of a border; the Polish nationalistic attitudes of the Silesian minority on the Czech side; local Lutheranism, which was Polish and Silesian at the same time, etc. Multiculturalism, for them, meant rather the equal status of various national identifications and I continually had to explain to them complications of that sort on both sides of the border. Our Czech partners, who were mostly autochthonous Silesians and who felt Polish, explained to us the specificity of the Czech part of Cieszyn Silesia. They also told us about the local dialect being a kind of a continuum: with more Czech words in it on one side and more Polish on the other. The way of assessing one’s national identity, they explained, depended on the share of Polish or Czech words in their Silesian. Another problem was connected with the fact that they could not stay with us all the time as they were also absorbed by their everyday obligations and other projects they were involved in. But we usually met at dinners and could then discuss our problems. The experience of the NGO’s activity made us all “one family”. Only our German colleague often felt rather uncomfortable, because she had the feeling that it was only because of her that we had to speak English, and was not very angry when we switched to Polish or Silesian, or Czech. She was,

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however, quite receptive to the identity complications of our interlocutors. While still in Cieszyn, we started the group work on editing our material, and choosing extracts to include in our film. We worked out several themes according to which we searched for interesting pieces of narratives. This began with my introduction in Silesian, and later there was a series of extracts from interviews. We had the idea of putting information about the names and state affiliations of our interlocutors at the very end to stress the similarity of their experiences and languages. We decided that Silesian would be the language of our film, and everything would be translated into Polish, Czech and English. We wanted to achieve an effect of equal linguistic distance to Czech and Polish, but were told by our partners that for Czech viewers it would be undistinguishable: they would perceive the language of our film as Polish, as they usually do not see a difference between Polish and Silesian. The draft version, prepared later in Krakow, was shown to all the members of the project. As a response, many viewers pointed to its chaotic character and suggested some changes. We also had to consult the draft of our film with the sponsor, the European Network Memory and Solidarity. They were also not very happy with the results. Their main criticism was that we had virtually only Polish interlocutors and only one Czech, because they perceived nationality through language, and totally overlooked Silesianness and our attempts to present it as an autonomous culture. They suggested major changes and wanted us to do what we in fact wished to avoid: to show people’s lives intertwined in “great History”: wars, uprisings, crises, etc. We negotiated with them and came to some compromise. My conclusions from this discussion were that for them multiculturalism and pluralism again means a plurality of national cultures; women’s experiences are not interesting; and common people’s lives are not catchy, unless they are involved in History. Later, we re-edited the whole material, added some animated sections showing the historical changes of the region’s state affiliations and other problems, included stories about the Second World War, got rid of some “female topics” (love, food, etc.) and generally shortened it, putting it into chapters which each started with some introductions (narration + animation). The film has not yet been shown to its target audience.6 I have only screened it to my Krakow sociology students, who liked it and appreciated its educational character. There were also some students from Cieszyn Silesia who found watching the film quite an emotional experience. One of them said, “It was as if I was listening to my grandma. I know the stories, but I have never thought of them as important. I have to record her too”. Though the film has not yet been shown to the general public, what was quite interesting was the production of it, which revealed further problems important 6

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The film is entitled in Silesian: Żywobyci przi granicy. Babski godki z obu strón Olzy [Everyday Life on a Border. Women’s Stories from Both Sides of the Olza], and has Polish, Czech and English subtitles. Cargo (2016), Vol. 14, No. 1 - 2

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for a “native” anthropologist. These are connected with the conceptual framework we have at our disposal. It was only my cooperation with my Polish feminist colleagues and later discussion with the representative of our NGO sponsor that revealed to me the conceptual difficulty that Poles have in perceiving the phenomenon of mixed and multi-layered identities. Contemporary Poland is almost totally culturally homogenous, a trait strengthened by the fact that almost all Poles are Catholic (by faith or background), and all this is reinforced by education and the media which ground the discourse of Polishness. Even non-nationalistic activists and intellectuals therefore possess a “nationalistic epistemology.” Conclusions Only after my book was published and I was able to discuss its theses with a broader audience did I realise that my theorising about Silesianness using Gellnerian concepts was in a sense its own enactment. It was bringing Silesianness to life as a legitimised identification, or “academically baptised” identity. Gellner’s theory, being halfway between constructivism and essentialism (Hroch 2003: 103), suits this purpose well. In particular, his metaphor of “wild culture” brings ontological significance to otherwise “unjust”, or “regional” identification (as Silesianness is seen by Polonocentric history and sociology). It helped many people to construct their identity in this idiom. I have also come to some conclusions as far as the position of a “native” anthropologist is concerned. She/he should be a “defender” of his/her community against hegemonic misunderstanding or misrepresentation made by researchers from a dominant group. In the case of Silesia, researchers often try to squeeze it into too tight a uniform of the concept of “private homeland”, a sociological category invented by the Polish scholar Stanisław Ossowski (1984). This term may be applicable in the situation of regional or other minor identifications, but is misleading in the case of ethnic identity (even a not yet fully articulated one). Another example of misrepresentation consists in using Catholic concepts to describe the reality of Lutheranism. Catholicism is a kind of “norm” in Poland, and many religious terms are treated as “neutral”, descriptive categories. The reality of another religious group is interpreted in terms of the dominant church. I pointed to these problems in my book (Kubica 2011b), and later my younger colleagues discussed them and coined the term “methodological Catholicism” (Pasieka and Sekerdej 2013). Another problem still is treating Silesian Lutherans as a minority in the same way as they are in the rest of Poland. Lutherans in Cieszyn Silesia are above all indigenous inhabitants; they are at home. A “native” anthropologist (as any other) should point out and criticise the mistakes of her or his colleagues, and draw attention to their simplifications or their tone of superiority. Unfortunately, such proceedings expose one to negative reactions in academia, and accusations

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of carping and being “subjective”. On the other hand, a native anthropologist should also name certain problems which are concealed or erased from the social memory of his or her own community. This may bring negative reactions from compatriots, who may feel threatened. But it is necessary to trigger the process of “re-working” trauma and postmemory, especially when these emotions are seen as “improper” by a dominant group, as was the case of Silesian memory about World War II. And still another problem is connected with the working of the cultural hegemony of the centre on the minority, whose members do not recognise the problems a “native” anthropologist tries to name and analyse, because they have adopted the dominant point of view. It is important that a “native” anthropologist makes his or her findings accessible to the general public (including the members of his or her own community). It is possible to write in a manner that is understandable to any educated reader who is engaged in the topic, but we have to remember that our analytical categories are quite often also used in popular language and may have different meanings. It is advisable to try various kinds of media to disseminate our results and theoretical ideas. A documentary film is a good option. But again we have to take into account that there will be various audiences watching it, who may have no prior knowledge of the problem. Group work is a good laboratory for discovering preconceptions or hidden stereotypes, and the way outsiders understand the reality familiar to us. Such an experience helps an anthropologist to translate his or her “home” into categories known to others; and also to realise that it is a process that reveals subsequent layers of the complexity of the local context, and cannot be completed quickly and easy. The category of “nationalistic epistemology”, which I coined for the purpose of this paper, reveals the way some people perceive cultural diversity: the major (sometimes only) instrument being national identities and/or perceiving history and the present day through the national perspective. Certainly, the very concept of “native” anthropology should be treated with distance, as Narayan suggested, because we are all hybrid and complex, belonging to various worlds. But nevertheless ethnographers should reflect on what it means to study one’s own community. What are the advantages and disadvantages of the situation, the apparent privileges and hidden traps, but even more important: what are one’s moral obligations and responsibilities? A “native” anthropologist is assessed three times: by academia, by his or her own folk, and also by a dominant group. As Narayan put it in her conclusions, “Writing texts that mix lively narrative and rigorous analysis involves enacting hybridity, regardless of our origin” (Narayan 1993: 682). I would add that it also involves enacting theory. Moreover still, researching one’s own community inevitably involves more responsibility, ethical

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sensitivity and political engagement. There is also more risk of failure and wrong reception, especially when readers do not want to acknowledge their own hybridity.

REFERENCES Aguilar, John. 2010. “Insider Research: An Ethnography of a Debate.” In: Anthropology at Home in North America. Methods and Issues in the Study of One’s Own Society, edited by Donald Messerschmidt, 15-27. 2 ed. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Bahlecke, Joachim, Dan Gawrecki, and Ryszard Kaczmarek, eds. 2011. Historia Górnego Śląska. Polityka, gospodarka i kultura europejskiego regionu. Dom Współpracy PolskoNiemieckiej, Gliwice. Bakalaki, Alexandra. 1997. “Students, Natives, Colleagues: Encounters in Academia and in the Field.” Cultural Anthropology 12 (4): 502-526. Bourdieu, Pierre, and Loic Wacquant. 2001. Zaproszenie do socjologii refleksyjnej, translated by Anna Sawisz. Oficyna Naukowa, Warszawa. Brettell, Caroline B., ed. 1993. When They Read What We Write: The Politics of Ethnography. Westport, Conn, Bergin & Garvey. Crehan, Kate. 2002. Gramsci, Culture and Anthropology. Pluto Press: London. Drobik, Andrzej. 2014. Rozmowy o Śląsku Cieszyńskim. Made in SCI, Cieszyn. Edensor, Tim. 2004. Tożsamość narodowa, kultura popularna i życie codzienne, translated by Agata Sadza. Wydawnictwo UJ, Kraków. Eriksen, Thomas Hylland. 1992. “Linguistic Hegemony and Minority Resistance.” Journal of Peace Research 29 (3): 313-332. ———. 2013. Etniczność i nacjonalizm. Ujęcie antropologiczne, translated by Barbara Gutowska-Nowak. Wydawnictwo Universytetu Jagiellońskiego: Kraków. Fahim, Hussein, ed. 1982. Indigenous Anthropology in Non-Western Countries. Durham, Carolina Academic Press. Gellner, Ernest. 1991. Narody i nacjonalizm, translated by Teresa Hołówka. PIW, Warszawa. ———. 1994. Conditions of Liberty. Civil Society and Its Rivals. The Penguin Press. Grygar, Jakub. 2004. Paměť identity – identita paměti. Politiky vzpomínání ve Stonavě na Těšínsku (doctoral thesis). Charles University, Prague. Hastrup, Kirsten. 2008. Droga do antropologii. Miedzy doświadczeniem a teorią, translated by E. Klekot, Wydawnictwo UJ, Kraków. Holy, Ladislav. 1992. “Kulturowe tworzenie tożsamości etnicznej: Berti z Darfur”. In Sytuacja mniejszościowa i tożsamość, edited by Zdzisław Mach and Andrzej K. Paluch, 105122. “Zeszyty Naukowe UJ”, Kraków. Hroch, Miroslav. 2003. Małe narody Europy. Perspektywa historyczna, translated by Grażyna Pańko, Wydawnictwo Ossolineum, Wrocław-Warszawa-Kraków.

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Jackson, Anthony. 1987. Anthropology at Home. Routledge Kegan & Paul, London. Kajfosz Jan. 2013. “Magic in the Social Construction of the Past: the Case of Teschen Silesia.” Polish Sociological Review 3 (183). Królewski, Jarosław. 2011. “Przyszłość Łemków w Polsce - szanse i zagrożenia w subiektywnej wizji przedstawicieli społeczności łemkowskiej.” Studia Humanistyczne AGH 10 (2): 37-51. Krzyżowski, Łukasz. 2009. Między gminą Radgoszcz a resztą Europy. Ku antropologii transmigracji. Nomos, Kraków. Kubica, Grażyna. 1995. Luteranie na Śląsku Cieszyńskim. Studium historyczno- socjologiczne. Wydawnictwo „Głos Życia”: Bielsko Biała. ———. 2011a. Śląskość i protestantyzm. Antropologiczne studia o Śląsku Cieszynskim, proza, fotografia. Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Jagiellońskiego: Kraków. ———. 2011b. “Wstęp”. In Śląskość i protestantyzm. Antropologiczne studia o Śląsku Cieszynskim, proza, fotografia. Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Jagiellońskiego: Kraków. ———. 2011c. “Chwalebna polskość...” In Śląskość i protestantyzm. Antropologiczne studia o Śląsku Cieszynskim, proza, fotografia. Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Jagiellońskiego: Kraków. ———. 2011d. “Śląsko-cieszyńska tożsamość.” In Śląskość i protestantyzm. Antropologiczne studia o Śląsku Cieszynskim, proza, fotografia. Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Jagiellońskiego: Kraków. ———. 2011e. “Trudna pamięć...” In Śląskość i protestantyzm. Antropologiczne studia o Śląsku Cieszynskim, proza, fotografia. Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Jagiellońskiego: Kraków. Kubik, Jan. 2012. (review of) „G. Kubica Śląskość i protestantyzm. Antropologiczne studia o Śląsku Cieszynskim, proza, fotografia.“ Studia Socjologiczne. Kuwayama Takami. 2004. Native Anthropology: The Japanese Challenge to Western Academic Hegemony. Trans Pacific Press, Melbourne. Lears, T. J. Jackson. 1985. “The Concept of Cultural Hegemony: Problems and Possibilities.” The American Historical Review 90 (3): 567-593. Medicine, Beatrice. 2001. Learning to Be and Anthropologist and Remaining ‘Native’: Selected Writings. Urbana, Univ of Illinois Press. Messerschmidt, Donald. 2010. “On Anthropology ‘At Home’.” In Anthropology at Home in North America. Methods and Issues in the Study of One’s Own Society, edited by Donald Messerschmidt, 3-14. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Modnicka, Noemi. 2010. “Misjonarz? Zdrajca? Badacz! O problemach etycznych w badaniu własnej grupy religijnej.” In Etyczne problemy badań antropologicznych, edited by Katarzyna Kaniowska and Noemi Modnicka, 115-138. Łódzkie Studia Etnograficzne (XLIX). Narayan, Kirin. 1992. “How Native is a ‘Native’ Anthropologist?” American Anthropologist 95 (3): 671-686. Okely, Judith. 1996. “Fieldwork in the Home Counties. Double Vision and Dismantled Identity.” In Own or Other Culture, 22-26. Routledge: London and New York. Ossowski, Stanisław. 1984. O ojczyźnie i narodzie. Państwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe, Warszawa. 98

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Pasieka, Agnieszka. 2012. (review of) „Śląskość i protestantyzm. Antropologiczne studia o Śląsku Cieszynskim, proza, fotografia.“ Lud. Pasieka, Agnieszka, and Kinga Sekerdej. 2013. “Researching the Dominant Religion: Anthropology at Home and Methodological Catholicism.” Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 25: 53-77. Perica, Vjekoslav. 2002. Balkan Idols. Religion and Nationalism in Yugoslav States. Oxford University Press, Oxford. Petrusauskaite, Vita, and Ingo Schröder. A Pluralism of Traditions in a Catholic Majority Society: Catholic Hegemony vis-à-vis Nationalism and Ethnic Experience, paper at a conference “Religious Hegemony and Religious Diversity in Eastern Europe: Postsocialism vis-à-vis the Longue Dureé.” Halle 2010. Wolcott, Harry. 1999. Ethnography. A Way of Seeing. AltaMira Press, New York, Oxford.

Grażyna Kubica [email protected] Institute of Sociology Jagiellonian University in Kraków http://www.uj.edu.pl/

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Zažívání: role afektu v zážitkové gastronomii Iveta Hajdáková Abstract: The paper focuses on digesting and experiencing (digesperience) in the context of “experiential gastronomy.” It describes the processes, agents, bodies, materialities and discourses which contribute to the production and consumption of experience as a commodity. The analysis of experience and the process of experiencing draws upon theoretisations of affect and shows how affect contributes to the production of value in luxury gastronomy. The interpretation of gastronomic experience is placed within a larger political and economic context and shows that affective labor and consumption require the existence of subjects that are capable of being affected. The paper is based on participant observation conducted in a luxury restaurant and interviews with its employees and guests. Keywords: affect, experience, gastronomy, value, restaurant, food, economy, postsocialism

Co je zážitek? Jak jej lze vytvořit, prodat, zažít, zprostředkovat a jak jej může antropologie studovat?1 V oblasti prodeje, marketingu a péče o spotřebitele se slovo zážitek používá pořád častěji (zejm. customer experience, user experience). Zážitky se podílejí na vytváření hodnoty produktů a služeb do té míry, že lze mluvit i o zážitkové ekonomii (angl. experience economy, Pine and Gilmore 1999). Byť jsou zážitky součástí lidské zkušenosti, sociálněvědní kritika i kritický „selský rozum“ mohou snadno narazit na problém objektivity, sdělitelnosti či autenticity zážitků, které lze na vyžádání a za poplatek vytvořit, jako je tomu v případě zážitkové gastronomie, jíž se zde budu zabývat. V tomto textu navrhuji způsob, jak lze o gastronomických zážitcích uvažovat, aniž bychom je zredukovali na pouhou iluzi, neautentickou komoditu, nedosažitelné fantasma nebo vysoce subjektivní a relativní zkušenost. Chci ukázat, že brát gastronomický zážitek vážně může odhalit širší politické a etické souvislosti. Hlavním vodítkem mé analýzy bude koncept afektu, který se v kontextu českých sociálních věd příliš nepoužívá. Tento termín pochází z latinského podstatného jména affectus, stav mysli či hnutí mysli, a souvisí se slovesem afficere, půso-

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Na vznik této publikace byla FHS UK poskytnuta Institucionální podpora na dlouhodobý koncepční rozvoj výzkumné organizace (MŠMT– 2014).

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bit, zasáhnout (česky afikovat).2 Pojem afekt odkazuje na emocionální i smyslový aspekt lidské zkušenosti a má tedy širší význam než pojem emoce. Afekt, ve smyslu působení věcí na smysly, je podmínkou poznání.3 V současných sociálních vědách se vychází z pojetí afektu Deleuze a Guattariho, respektive Spinozy. Pro Spinozův přístup je důležitá neoddělitelnost těla a mysli, propojenost jednotlivce s prostředím, jinými bytostmi a interakcemi s nimi. Jednotlivec (i když jde o slovo nezcela vhodné) není samostatným celkem, ale nekonečnou sérií potencialit, schopností ovlivňovat a být ovlivněn4 (DeLanda 2002: 62; cit. podle Thrift 2004: 62). Afekt není reakcí, ale akcí, která vytváří události. Například Thrift (2010: 290) poukazuje na afektivní aspekt některých moderních komodit, který je možné vnímat jako allure – kouzlo či půvab. Toto „kouzlo“ je vytvářeno hrou estetiky a veřejné intimity, díky níž dochází ke smyslovému a emocionálnímu uspokojení i touze po vyjádření emocí a vášní, jež kdysi bývaly považovány za soukromé (Thrift 2010: 293–294). Kouzlo a půvab jsou produkty tzv. afektivní práce (Hardt 1999), jejímž cílem je vytvářet „pocit uvolnění, well-being, uspokojení, vzrušení, vášně – dokonce spojení“ (Hardt 1999: 96). Vysoká gastronomie, kterou se zde budu zabývat, představuje vysoce afektivní pole, kde jsou pozitivní zážitky vytvářeny nejenom prostřednictvím jídla, ale také s využitím technologie, těla, vědění a zejména afektivní práce. Na příkladu luxusní restaurace Gusto, kde jsem v roce 2012 po dobu dvou měsíců pozorovala kuchaře při práci a následně prováděla rozhovory s vybranými zaměstnanci a hosty, se pokusím ukázat, jakou roli hraje afekt při vytváření hodnoty a jak se proces zažívání a zážitek stávají komoditou. Ukážu, že při vytváření zážitku je nutná souhra mnoha prvků, okolností, matérií, subjektů, objektů, těl, smyslů atd., a proto uvažuji spíše o zažívání než o zážitku. Chci tak zdůraznit, že při (gastronomickém) zážitku nejde o jeden prostorově a časově lokalizovatelný výsledek několika příčin a následků, ale o souhru multiplicitních afektivních procesů. V kontextu gastronomie má výraz zažívání navíc dvojí smysl, když vedle emocionálního prožitku odkazuje i na rozměr tělesnosti studovaných aktérů, přičemž jeden od druhého nelze zcela oddělit. Mým cílem je ukázat, jak se v zážitkové gastronomii vytváří zážitek, intimita a pocit uspokojení, ale především mám v úmyslu naznačit, že zažívání je specifickou technologií sebe samého (angl. technology of the self; Rose 1992: 367), v tom 2

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Srov. například s českým překladem Kantovy Kritiky čistého rozumu: „Jestliže receptivitu naší mysli, její schopnost vnímat představy, je-li nějakým způsobem afikována, nazveme smyslovostí, pak schopnost vytvářet představy neboli spontaneita poznání je rozvažování. (…) S ohledem na naši přirozenost může být názor vždy jen smyslový, tj. je pouze způsobem, jak jsme předměty afikováni. Rozvažování je naopak tou schopností, jíž lze předmět smyslového názoru myslet.“ Kant, Immanuel. 2001. Kritika čistého rozumu. 1. vyd. Překlad Jaromír Loužil, Jiří Chotaš, Ivan Chvatík. Praha: Oikoymenh. Viz též Matonoha (2014). angl. to aﬀect and be aﬀected.

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smyslu, že gastronomický zážitek je podmíněn schopností nahlédnout na vlastní zažívání a prozkoumat své pocity, zkušenosti, touhy a vnímat případnou novost prožitku. Díky této schopnosti pak spotřební praktiky a volby zákazníků nabývají etický rozměr. Jídlo jako předmět studia Jídlo a gastronomie se stále víc stávají předmětem odborného i laického zájmu, protože umožňují hlouběji porozumět smyslové a emocionální zkušenosti. Například experimentální psycholog Charles Spence z Oxfordské univerzity se proslavil výzkumy vlivu zvuku, textury, barvy, tvarů apod. na prožitek chuti. Podobné fenomény zkoumají i američtí neurogastronomové. V rámci molekulární gastronomie se experimentuje s chemickými vlastnostmi pokrmů a jejich vlivy na vnímání chuti. Některé firmy dnes také využívají jídlo pro stimulaci kreativního myšlení nebo pro pochopení rozmanitosti smyslových prožitků. Studium jídla tedy představuje v současné době pestré interdisciplinární vědecké pole. V rámci antropologie bylo v minulosti jídlo a stravovací praktiky důležitým předmětem zájmu ve strukturalistické tradici (Lévi-Strauss 1965, 1969; Douglas 1966, 1972, 1974), která inspirovala i pozdější výzkum sociálních nerovností, projevující se prostřednictvím vztahu k jídlu a stravovacími praktikami (zejm. Bourdieu 1984; dále např. Goody 1982). Další důležité tradice v oblasti studií jídla představují výzkumy zaměřené na souvislost mezi tradicí, identitou a jídlem (Appadurai 1988; Mennel 1985; Parkhurst Ferguson 2004; Spang 2000; z českých prací např. Pokorná 2009), výzkumy materiální kultury (Miller 1998; Roseberry 1996; Ries 2009) a každodennosti (Sutton 2001; De Certeau 1998). V současné době roste zájem o studium jídla v rámci studií vědy a technologií (STS) a prostřednictvím symetrických přístupů (Mann 2011; Moll 2008, 2010). Jídlo také představuje zajímavou oblast pro studium postsocialismu, zejména s ohledem na konzumní praktiky v kontextu nedostatku, na domácí produkci jídla, změny konzumních praktik, fenomén globalizace apod. (např. Caldwell 2004, 2009; Ries 2009; Farquhar 2002). Jídlo jakožto předmět směny je objektem zkoumání i v rámci ekonomické antropologie (zejm. Munn 1986). Je zakotveno v sociálních vztazích i heterogenních sítích lidských i nelidských aktérů, v rámci nichž „putuje“ napříč různými „režimy hodnoty“ (Appadurai 1986; Keane 2001), tj. specifickými kontexty, ve kterých se při směně produkuje hodnota. Produkcí hodnoty v režimu práce, nerovností, postsocialistické transformace a ekonomické směny v kontextu gastronomie a pohostinství jsem se zabývala pří analýze diskrétní ekonomie, v jejímž rámci vzniká hodnota paradoxně na základě popření ekonomické směny (Hajdáková 2013). Souvislosti mezi jídlem a hodnotou je možné sledovat v dalších režimech, např. v režimu estetiky a materiality jídla (Roosth 2013; Dolphijn 2004), paměti a tra-

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dice (Sutton 2001; Appadurai 1988), produkce autenticity (Robinson and Clifford 2012; Zukin 2008), smyslových vjemů (Sutton 2010) a expertního vědění (Roosth 2013). Jedním z možných analytických klíčů pro zkoumání produkce gastronomického zážitku je koncept afektu (Clough 2007), jejž je možné zeširoka definovat jako „neosobní intenzity, které nepatří subjektu ani objektu a nepřebývají ani v prostoru mezi nimi (Anderson 2010: 161) a které hrají významnou roli při práci a produkci hodnot v současné podobě kapitalismu. Například Thrift (2010) nabízí pohled na roli afektu jako „technologii veřejné intimity“ (Thrift 2010: 290), díky níž vznikají „obecně stravitelná prostředí“, tedy prostory, skrze něž subjekty existují a vnímají to, co jim předchozí formy disciplinačních režimů vnímat neumožňovaly (Thrift 2010: 295). Muehlebach (2011, 2012) zase poukazuje na roli afektu při vytváření občanského vztahu náležení: afekt a s ním související intimita definují „morálního neoliberála“, jehož patření má formu „etického občanství“, prostřednictvím kterého si „občané představují sami sebe jako provázané na základě morálních a afektivních, spíše než sociálních a politických vazeb a primárně prostřednictvím povinností, spíše než práv“ (Muehlebach 2011: 43). O afektivním aspektu jídla píše ve svém filozofickém pojednání Dolphijn (2004) a souvislost mezi jídlem, prožitkem a politickou transformací zkoumá Farquhar (2002; 2006). Mým úmyslem je v tomto textu ukázat, jak lze koncept afektu využít pro analýzu a interpretaci gastronomického zážitku. V první části pojednání představím restauraci Gusto zaměřenou na zážitkovou gastronomii a poukážu na roli afektu při tvorbě gastronomického zážitku. Druhá část bude věnována různým významům pojmu zážitek a tomu, jak se zážitek stává problematickým v kontextu spotřeby. V případě zážitku jako komodity je důležitá autenticita, ale i zvyk a nevyhnutelnost, které se můžou jevit jako nekompatibilní. V závěru druhé části proto navrhnu řešení, díky kterému se lze vyhnout nahlížení na zážitek v kategoriích autenticity nebo neautenticity. Třetí část přinese vysvětlení, že hodnota afektivních komodit spočívá v jejich možnosti rozšířit intersubjektivní časoprostor, a to tím, že způsobí pohnutí, překvapení, zapamatování apod. Zároveň poukážu na to, že schopnost zažívat a snaha kultivovat ji má také etický rozměr. Při argumentaci budu sledovat dvě vzájemně se doplňující linie. Prvním cílem mé analýzy je přesvědčit čtenáře o užitečnosti konceptu afektu jakožto interpretačního klíče, který umožňuje rozkrýt pole luxusní zážitkové gastronomie, a ukázat, jak lze přistupovat ke studiu gastronomického zážitku, aniž bychom ho redukovali na konstrukt. Druhým cílem je ukázat, co tato hra afektů způsobuje, dělá, tedy jak funguje jakožto technologie sebe samého, díky níž se zákazníci stávají etickými konzumenty.

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„Kdo neumí dobře jíst, ten nemůže bejt úplně šťastnej.“ Gastronomické zažívání není individuální. Podobně jako jiné zdroje slasti, je i jídlo předmětem omezení a kontroly a skrze estetizaci, intelektualizaci, slova, technologie, profesionalizaci, expertizu atd. se stává součástí veřejného řádu (Parkhurst Ferguson 2004: 17). Koncept afektu umožňuje sledovat propojenost mezi tělem, smysly, prožíváním, hodnotami a širším společenským a politicko-ekonomickým kontextem. V případě diskurzu, který vytvářejí čeští experti na gastronomii, jakými jsou Zdeněk Pohlreich, Roman Vaněk a Pavel Maurer, můžeme například sledovat úsilí o „očištění“ gastronomie i společnosti od pozůstatků socialismu – purification from socialism (Eyal 2003; Vargha 2010) – a to právě prostřednictvím zlepšování spotřebitelského chování. Pokud si lidi začnou vařit dobře sami doma, tak jsme třeba na začátku něčeho normálního. Jsem přesvědčen, že čtyři z pěti restaurací u nás nemají právo na existenci, v Evropě by ji taky neměly. Jediný, čím bojují, je cena. A staví na tom, že tenhle národ se spokojí s málem. Všichni žerou věci, který je musí časem zabít, sami sebe si neuměj vážit. Možná sem narušenej, ale já si myslím, že jídlo je strašně důležitá věc. A kdo neumí dobře jíst, ten nemůže bejt úplně šťastnej. (Pohlreich v: Čermáková and Burza 2010) Zdeněk Pohlreich klade do přímé souvislosti politicko-ekonomickou transformaci společnosti a následnou neschopnost chovat se tržně s kvalitou individuálního života. Lidé by si, dle Pohlreicha, měli uvědomit, že cena není jediným orientačním bodem při uspokojování lidských potřeb, ale že prioritou má být umět dobře jíst, být šťastný, vážit si sám sebe a nespokojit se s málem. Pohlreich vysvětluje, že jeho pořad Ano, šéfe! …vypovídá o tom, že jsme ochotni spokojit se s náhražkami, že nám chybí nejen spousta sebevědomí, ale také vzdělání nebo výchova v základních atributech lidského života. Vykresluje, jak závistiví jsme, jak bychom si přáli zážitky za nic i to, jak se tady dá nebo nedá podnikat. (Čermáková and Burza 2010) Podobně jako další experti i Pohlreich kritizuje, když jídlo slouží pouze k zasycení a konzumentovi záleží víc na kvantitě a ceně, než na kvalitě a požitku (Krekovič 2013; Wilková n. d.). Dle Pohlreicha nemůže být šťastný ten, kdo není uvědomělým konzumentem. Když se postsocialistická těla naučí zažívat, budou nejen zdravější, šťastnější, sebevědomější, ale svým spotřebitelským chováním také přispějí ke zkvalitnění služeb, podnikatelského prostředí i společnosti. Pavel Maurer ve svém rozhlasovém pořadu apeluje na asertivní přístup ke gastronomickým službám: „Máte nejen právo, ale i povinnost se bránit. Obhajujete v té chvíli nejen sebe, ale i nás všechny, co do podniku přicházíme po vás. Pokud budeme tolerovat šlendrián a Cargo (2016), Vol. 14, No. 1 - 2

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podvod, pak se bude rozrůstat jako houby po dešti“ (Glosa Pavla Maurera 2013). Gastronomie se tak stává arénou individuální i společenské transformace (Hajdáková 2013), kde konzument má povinnost chovat se jako „etický občan“ (Muehlebach 2011: 43). Restaurace Gusto se netajila aspirací na roli gastronomického buditele ve společnosti. Jedna z vlivných recenzí na ni nesla například podtitulek: „Kdo tam nebyl, není Čech.“ Zažívání v Gustu tedy mělo mít širší rozměr a význam a působit exemplárně a edukativně. V následující části textu nastíním, jak se zde – s ohledem na tuto roli Gusta – přistupovalo k jídlu, stolování a zažívání. „Ideální je člověk, kterej si to přijde užít.“ Hluboce intenzivní chuťový, emoční, kulturní a duchovní prožitek z prochutnávání všech jednadvaceti chutí se asi sotva dá přirovnat k něčemu jinému než k pomalé procházce obrazovou galerií jako Uffizi, Louvre, National nebo Rijksmuseum. (Z recenze na restauraci Gusto)5 Zážitek a zažívání nejsou jen produktem, který lze zakoupit a pasivně konzumovat. Zákazník luxusní restaurace se na procesu zažívání aktivně podílí. Na druhé straně zaměstnancům restaurace nenáleží jen produkovat, ale očekává se, že si práci vychutnávají a užívají. Vysoce afektivní prostředí a intenzivní zažívání pak zhodnocuje nejen jídlo, ale také práci, spotřebu a individuální i společenský život. Při prvním setkání s šéfkuchařem restaurace Gusto jsem se pokusila vysvětlit záměr svého výzkumu: řekla jsem, že zkoumám luxusní restaurace, a než jsem mohla pokračovat dále, přerušil mě s tím, že Gusto není luxusní restaurace. „Podívejte, ani ubrusy tu nemáme,“ dodal. Trochu jsem se zastyděla, když jsem vycítila, že luxus zde není žádoucím označením pro restauraci, byť se jedná o jednu z nejdražších, nejslavnějších a nejoceňovanějších restaurací v Česku. Dřevěné stoly nebyly zakryty ubrusy záměrně, a to právě proto, aby se podnik vymezil vůči luxusu, který si lidé obvykle spojují se snobismem. Manažer restaurace mi to vysvětlil následovně: ...vidíte dřevěné stoly. My chceme, aby sem lidi přišli a aby se cejtili dobře, aby se cejtili třeba jako doma, protože kolikrát, když přijdete do restaurace, kde jsou ubrusy a stříbrný příbory a už na první pohled to tam vypadá honosně, tak ne každej se tam cejtí. Takže nám nevadí, když sem člověk přijde v džínách. Tedy na jednu stranu to luxusní je, podáváme tady luxusní vína, luxusní ingredience, je to luxus si sem zajít, i cenově, ale na druhou stranu to, jak to vypadá, to luxusní určitě není. Je pravda, že s tím občas má někdo problém, že nemáme ten ubrus, že je na to zvyklej. 5

Z důvodu zachování anonymity restaurace neuvádím zdroje recenzí.

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Pro restauraci bylo nejdůležitější, aby se klienti cítili dobře. Tvůrci konceptu této restaurace přemýšleli jako typičtí strukturalisté, a proto byl každý detail znakem v pestrém souboru binárních opozic. Holými stoly se restaurace vymezovala vůči tradičnímu pojetí luxusu v restauracích, kde dlouhé bílé ubrusy evokují čistotu, uhlazenost, snobismus až „naškrobenost“, avšak kde malá chyba ve stolování může způsobit znečištění ubrusu a tím doslova poskvrnit stolujícího jakožto člověka dobrých mravů a způsobů a vyvolat u něj pocit hanby a ztrapnění.6 Ubrusy však nechyběly zcela – visely totiž z bočních stran stolů tak, že zakrývaly nohy hostů. Jejich bělost připomínala čistotu luxusního prostředí, ale zároveň nepůsobila jako hrozba společenského znemožnění. Schované ubrusy vyjadřovaly ambivalentní vnímání nerovností v gastronomii, typické pro současné foodies, pro které je jídlo radostí a požitkem, a byť se jejich spotřeba odehrává v kontextu výrazných sociálních rozdílů, sami se vůči snobismu vymezují a zdůrazňují svoji „všežravost“ (Johnston and Baumann 2009; srov. s Bourdieu 1984). Jedním z nejdůrazněji artikulovaných prvků spoluvytvářejících gastronomický zážitek však bylo samo jídlo, které v Gustu nemělo zasytit, ale udivit, překvapit a povznést, podobně jako umělecké dílo. Takto vysvětlil koncept restaurace kuchař Milan: Třeba naše restaurace funguje jako divadlo. Buď jdeš na představení do divadla, nebo jdeš k nám do restaurace. My jsme zážitková restaurace, tudíž bys od nás měla odcházet překvapená a plná zážitků. Není to v tom, že máš hlad a jdeš se najíst. Nejdeš uspokojit potřebu toho hladu, jdeš na divadelní představení. To je ten význam. Můžeš to brát jako společenskou událost. Světla i zrcadla v restauraci byla zaměřena na stoly a tedy na jídlo, nikoli na hosty, jak tomu bylo už v prvních restauracích ve Francii (Spang 2000). Číšníci a servírky v strohých černých uniformách se po restauraci pohybovali jako stíny, ale ve chvíli, kdy jídlo servírovali hostům, doprovodili servis povídáním a vysvětlováním podávaného jídla. Someliéři pak na požádání jídlo spárovali s vínem a rovněž doplnili o vysvětlení. S klientem se zde jednalo ne jako se zkušeným gurmánem, ale jako s někým, kdo chce a má být překvapen. Nedostatek zkušeností s vysokou gastronomií nepředstavoval problém ani nedostatek, ba naopak – zážitek měl spočívat i v předání vědění o jídle, jeho původu, zpracování a přípravě, a neměl tak uspokojit očekávání hosta, nýbrž je překonat. S tím souviselo i posunutí norem etikety. Třeba „focení“ pokrmu, pohrávání si s jídlem, konzumace pomocí prstů, ochutnávání z talířů spolustolujících, konverzování o jídle, jeho očichávání a ohmatávání, nekonvenční formy servírování: na kameni, dlažební kostce, kůře stromu nebo v brčku – to 6

Nabízí se zde srovnání s Eliasovou (2000) historickou analýzou procesu civilizace, ve které upozorňuje, že změny pravidel stolování byly součástí širší transformace struktury afektů, senzibility a pocitů, zejména pocitu odporu, studu či hanby (2000: 98–99).

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vše vedlo k porušování tradičních norem etikety za účelem zvýšení intenzity zážitku. Mohla jsem například sledovat zákaznici ve středním věku, jak s pobavením i koketností konzumovala rajčatový salát, který měl gelovou konzistenci a podával se v přibližně osmicentimetrovém průhledném brčku, z něhož bylo třeba jej vysát. Hra s očekáváním a formou způsobovala překvapení a neobvyklý způsob konzumace – připomínající infantilní nebo erotické sání – vyvolával pobavení. „Hra s formou“ zde připomíná strukturu vtipu, jak jej v návaznosti na Freuda analyzuje Douglas (1975), kladoucí důraz i na fyzické prožívání vtipu, které mimo jiné spočívá v narušení tělesné kontroly, například výbuchem smíchu. Mohlo by se zdát, že záměrné popírání pravidel stolování představuje obrat v procesu civilizace, jak jej popsal Elias (2006), ale jde spíše o změnu v představě o tom, jaký je a není „civilizovaný“ nebo disciplinovaný subjekt. Klíčem pro toto rozlišení je míra, v níž je tělesný subjekt afikovatelný, tj. schopný zažívat, prožívat a užívat si. „Příborářka“ Aneta charakterizovala ideálního zákazníka jako člověka, „kterej si to přijde užít“. Naproti tomu špatný host byl podle ní ten, kdo se choval „škrobeně“. To je náš koncept tý restaurace, že je fakt zaměřenej, že tam choděj lidi, který to fakt zajímá, protože tam máme i to párování vína k tomu. Který si to jdou užít, který si to užívaj, takže to není… to víš, že jo, vždycky se pak najdou i takový ti, co tak škrobeně seděj a čekaj, až se objeví nějaká chybička, za kterou by tě mohli sepsout a tak… tim se člověk nemůže nechat rozhodit. Kuchař Milan považoval za nejhoršího hosta toho, „co přijde do restaurace, jako jsme my, protože je luxusní, a jde tam jenom ukázat, že má prachy a jídlo ho v podstatě nezajímá.“ Aktivní zájem a následné „užívání si“ představují přístup ideálního hosta, zatímco špatný host je vnímán jako někdo, kdo se chce „ukázat“ a pak „sedí a čeká,“ tedy je pasivní, nespolupracuje a nelze na něj působit. Jedna z mých informantek, Alena, navštívila Gusto několikrát jako zákaznice, a to jako doprovod svého tehdejšího přítele. Protože, jak sama uvedla, nevyrůstala v prostředí, kde by se chodilo do luxusních restaurací, byl jí tento druh gastronomie „cizí“, vadila jí příliš velká pozornost číšníků, jejich vyprávění o jídle, dress code (který poprvé neodhadla a oblékla se příliš elegantně), jídlo, které nebyla zvyklá jíst: Samozřejmě, že to bylo upravené tak, že to vůbec nevypadalo jako to, co to bylo. Ani to tak nechutnalo, ale vnitřně má člověk pocit, že jí něco, co za normálních okolností nejí. To mě trochu vyděsilo, že když jsem se na to menu podívala poprvý, tak jsem si říkala: „No, to si nic nevyberu.“ Ale samozřejmě, když to pak přinesli, dobře to vypadalo, dobře to chutnalo, tak to bylo úplně o něčem jiném, ale primárně mě samozřejmě vyděsilo to, že mám strach, že mi nic z toho nebude chutnat. Že je mi jako proti srsti to jíst. Jinej to považuje za delikatesu a pro mě je to jako… 108

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Za největší „ránu“ však pociťovala to, když jí hosteska přinesla speciální podložku pod kabelku. Poprvý, jsem už navštívila nějaké restaurace, kde to bylo takové jako oficiálnější, ale ta největší rána, kterou jsem pociťovala, že jsem měla zrovna tuhle kabelku a slečna přinesla jako stoličku, na kterou tu mojí kabelku dala, aby nebyla ta kabelka na zemi, což jakoby já jako neřešim, takže mi je jedno, že se ta kabelka válela na zemi, když byla ta zem čistá, ale to, že dala tu kabelku na tu stoličku, to mi vytane na mysli, kdykoli si na to vzpomenu. Asi bych měla mluvit o jídle, takže tohleto a pak jakoby asi nějakej klasickej zážitek z restaurace, asi nic zvláštního utkvívajícího není... (později) Asi aby moje kabelka seděla na stoličce. Takovej jakoby ten nadstandardní servis, co mi přijde asi jako až zbytečný, samozřejmě milý, když třeba nemusíš vstávat od stolu a přinesou ti ručník a že tu hygienu, dalo by se říct, provedeš před tim jídlem u stolu, že nemusíš na toaletu a mýt si ruce. Ale to mi už přijde jako snobárna, aby moje kabelka měla vlastní místo. Se k tomu musim furt vracet, protože mi to vytanulo na mysli. Tato zákaznice sama sebe považovala za „nenáročného hosta“, který „jí proto, aby žil, a nežije proto, aby jedl.“ Později mi vyprávěla příběh o tom, jak se po luxusní večeři v Paříži rozplakala. Ale důvod, proč jsem říkala tu historku, bylo to, že jsme zaplatili tu částku za tu večeři, a teď jsme vylezli na tu ulici, šlo se zpátky na tu hlavní třídu takovou poměrně tmavší uličkou a teď tam stáli bezdomovci. A teď, jak mám vystudovanou tu sociální práci, tak já s těm lidma všema cejtim, teď jsem tam viděla ty bezdomovce, jak tam jedí takovou tu věc… něco neidentifikovatelnýho, a to jsem začala brečet podruhý: „Podívej se, kolik my jsme dali za večeři a oni tady tohleto jedí. To je hrozný! Jaký my jsme snobáci, tady lidi nemaj co jíst a my tady žerem v takovejch drahejch restauracích.“ Takže to jsem si teď vybavila, ani nevím proč. Ten večer pro mě byl teda hodně plačtivej. Nevim, z jakýho důvodu. Ale myslim, že to dává představu, jak k tomuhle jakoby přistupuju. Že to je pro mě opravdu luxus, a nepotřebnej luxus, a že bych přesně viděla ty peníze utracený za něco jinýho a pro mě jakoby smysluplnějšího. Alena, jakožto člověk, který si nedokáže a ani nechce užít luxus, by pro personál Gusta určitě nepředstavovala ideální zákaznici. Odmítala příliš velkou pozornost číšníků, nechtěla žádat o speciální úpravu jídla, které jí nechutnalo, a otázky týkající se toho, jestli jí něco nechybí a jestli je všechno v pořádku, jí byly nepříjemné.

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V ideálním případě vznikne v průběhu stolování mezi personálem a hostem „vazba“, „vztah“, v jehož rámci jsou přípustné drobné chyby ze strany personálu i náročná přání ze strany hosta. Vztah umožňuje vyjednávání, zakrývá nerovnosti a zpříjemňuje zážitek. Toto propojení personálu a hostů dále podporuje otevřená kuchyně, v níž lze vidět pečlivou přípravu jídla, náročnou práci a také radost z práce. Hosté, kteří upřednostní tuto „podívanou“ před soukromou konverzací a zasednou k tzv. chef ’s table, pak s kuchaři částečně sdílejí i teplo a páru sálající z kuchyně a můžou naslouchat jejich konverzaci, která představuje pestrou škálu výroků, od strohých pokynů typu „dva lanýže na třináctku, česky“ až po stesky na běžné problémy, jako například, že někomu lezou kalhoty pod paty, a následnou vtipnou reakci: „Mám známého na patologii!“ Prostředí kuchyně je také vysoce afektivní, jak jsem mohla zažít na vlastní kůži během svého pozorování, kdy jsem po dobu dvou letních měsíců pozorovala kuchaře při práci, přičemž jsem v kuchyni stála buď u odpadkového koše, nebo vedle lednice, a to někdy až v průběhu čtrnácti hodin. Fyzicky náročné pozorování mi však soustavně zpříjemňovalo vtipkování kuchařů a ochutnávání jídel. Bylo důležité, abych se i já, podobně jako ostatní, bavila, ochutnávala, poznávala a užívala si to. V kuchyni se pořád něco dělo, jako by ani nebyla plná pracujících mužů, ale spíše hrajících si dětí a jejich hraček. Kuchaři byli zvědaví, jak bude jídlo chutnat, jestli se něco podaří, jaké suroviny přiveze nákupčí, projevovali zájem učit se, a tak si vzájemně radili a experimentovali s různými technikami výroby jídel (zejména s technikami tzv. molekulární gastronomie), zpívali si a tancovali, vtipkovali a dělali si ze sebe legraci (například tím, že při krájení křenu neupozornili cukráře a pak mu do cukrárny máváním utěrek naháněli palčivý zápach). Někdy přes celou kuchyň házeli kusy zeleniny do odpadkových košů, smáli se jeden druhému za to, jak zápasí s těstem nebo s masem. Občas se někdo pořezal a zakřičel. Při domlouvání se o tom, co se bude vařit pro personál, nadšeně vykřikovali své preference. Šéf kuchařům obvykle v zábavě nebránil. V průběhu dne se pestrost vyjadřování a interakcí částečně měnila, protože se musela přizpůsobit pracovnímu tempu. Občas hru vystřídal stres, což by bývalo mohlo eskalovat v nepříjemnou spolupráci, úrazy a zejména chyby při přípravě jídla. V takové situaci jednou šéf všechny upozornil: „Bez stresu, hlavně ať je to perfektní.“ Někteří hosté si všímali souhry personálu, technologií a věcí a projevovali nadšení a pobavení. Jeden starší manželský pár se mnou navázal se zájmem hovor: chtěli vědět, co si to zapisuji. Zaujala je právě ona souhra personálu, která jim připomínala „symfonii“. Poznamenali i to, že si všimli, jak se kuchaři potí. Jim samotným bylo též teplo, ale nijak si nestěžovali, naopak, sdílení a vědomí náročnosti pracovních podmínek kuchařů na hosty zapůsobilo. Šéfovi ani nevadilo, že jsem si v otevřené kuchyni dělala zápisky – otevřenost zde přispívala k produkci hodnoty a projevování zájmu také. Mé působení v restauraci bylo interpretováno jakožto projev zájmu, a tak jsem se nikdy nemusela schovávat před hosty.

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Práce v kuchyni nebyla jen zábavná. Byla především velmi fyzicky náročná a hraní si bylo proto nejen projevem afektivní práce, která přidávala hodnotu gastronomickému zážitku, ale také způsobem, jímž se kuchaři vyrovnávali s obtížností své práce. Kuchař Štěpán mi vysvětlil, že práce má vliv i na jeho zažívání a projevy zažívání pak umožňují udržovat dobrou náladu, a tím se vyrovnat s dlouhou pracovní dobou strávenou s dalšími lidmi ve vymezeném prostoru. Štěpán: Že jsou prasata [kuchaři] (smích). Ale ono je to asi všude. Jsme tady třináct hodin denně. A bavíme se jenom o filmu, o sexu, o sexu a o sexu. O ničem jinym. O ženskejch. A prdíme. Furt, všichni prdíme. To nás udržuje v tý pohodový náladě. Jseš třináct hodin s lidma, tak si musíš najít nějaký to téma a ten sex je takovej nešvar. Pro ty, co maj přítelkyně, je to v pohodě. Pro ty, co nemaj, je to nepříjemný. Já: A vás všechny nadýmá? (smích) Štěpán: Já jsem v tom extrémní, mě nadýmá i vzduch. Pořád něco ochutnáváš a v tom žaludku se to nějak mísí. Na někoho to působí míň, na mě úplně extrémně. Zákazníci i personál se shodovali na tom, že v restauraci jde především o jídlo, i když ne zase docela úplně: důležité jsou detaily interiéru, jimiž jsou například ubrusy, zrcadla, osvětlení, dále hluk, teplota, vůně, ale i další vybavení restaurace, například podložka pod kabelku. Jeden zákazník, jehož stížnost, respektive doporučení viselo na nástěnce v kuchyni, si postěžoval na to, že jídlo bylo skvělé, „ale to je málo“. Tento zákazník nebyl spokojený se servisem, protože už při telefonické rezervaci byl upozorněn na to, že jediný volný stůl bude u dveří vedoucích na toalety. „Proč kazit zážitek už na začátku?“ Místo mu nakonec nevadilo, a šlo tedy podle něj o zbytečné narušení zážitku. Popsal se jako „zcestovalý“ a svůj kritický e-mail odůvodnil jako doporučení pro zlepšení služeb. „Jde totiž nejen o jídlo, ale i atmosféru a zážitek.“ Na začátku již citované recenze na Gusto popisuje autor „dokonalost“, která je „vypiplána do podrobností na první pohled nenápadných“: Do plného vědomí vám to naskočí teprve tehdy, když se vaše partnerka vrátí z toalety čerstvě vonící ne tak ledasčím, nýbrž Clinique od Estée Lauder, a rozzářeně vám vypráví, jaká laskavá a ohleduplná překvapení tam na dámy čekají: od tamponků přes pilníčky na nehty po krém na ruce, lak na vlasy a zubní nit. Zážitky a různá překvapení „číhala“ na zákazníky všude – od jedení až po vylučování. Cílem bylo zákazníka nasytit, ale zároveň v něm vyvolat zvědavost, zájem a hlad po dalších stimulech. V závěru recenze čteme:

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Po celý večer vás provází lehkost, ani po dezertu se nedostaví pocit přesycenosti, přechucenosti či sebemenší náznak nevolna. Ještě dlouho vám na cestě domů doznívá duši chlácholící a ducha povznášející mnohatónová harmonie. To samozřejmě nemůžete chtít za hubičku, tak se snažte na peníze zapomenout a plaťte poslepu kartou. Vaše banka už to nějak vyřídí. Ze závěru plyne, že hodnota zažívání, které stimuluje duši i tělo, je obtížně vyčíslitelná a jeho cena by tedy měla být zapomenuta a přehlédnuta. Toto popírání ceny je součástí tzv. diskrétní ekonomie (Hajdáková 2013), která je charakteristická pro luxusní služby. Jiná recenze z roku 2014 pak radí, jak se „ušetřit srdeční příhody při placení“: „Pokud na útratu v Gustu skutečně nemáte částku výrazně přesahující 5000 korun na osobu, tak pro vás tento podnik není.“ Peněžní hodnota zážitku by mohla nepřipravenému zákazníkovi přivodit nežádoucí „překvapení“ v podobě účtu za zážitek, který si nemůže dovolit zaplatit. Výška účtu nebo předchozí upozornění, že rezervované místo se nachází v blízkosti toalet, ilustrují, že ve vysoce afektivním prostředí zážitkové gastronomie je také přítomna hrozba ze zklamání a narušení zážitku. V závěrečné části textu ukážu, jak lze uvažovat o zážitku jakožto o komoditě – o hodnotě zážitku a zažívání a o tom, jak můžou být jednotlivé součásti procesů zažívaní zhodnocovány nebo znehodnocovány. Co je zážitek? Autentické prožívání versus nevyhnutelnost a zvyk žíti žiji 1°: uzdraviti se, zotaviti se z nemoci, vyhojiti se. Trvá v mor. ožit okřáti (a spis. ožíti vzkřísiti se, sic. ožit), požit zotaviti se. Tomu odpovídá lit. gyjú gijaü gýti zotaviti se, iš-gýti – mor. vyžit okřáti, atgýti = ožitf nugýti vyhojiti se. Některé přípony činí toto žíti přechodným a to ve smyslu nabýti něčeho, dostati něco, normálně ve smyslu zesílení tělesného i majetkového, zmohutnění, nasycení, prospěchu, tedy všestranného „zotavení“ tvora dříve slabého, chorého a chudobného. Tak i lit. i-gýti získati si (majetek, slávu, rozum, přízeň), dostati (zdravou barvu) apod. Č. užíti něčeho = ve svůj prospěch vzíti, přibrati, požíti snísti, vypíti (ale i p. šňupavého tabáku, sic. užil si = šňupl si), sic. požívat = míti požitek (jakýkoli); k požíti přitvořeno sžíti Jg t/v, dále zažíti dobře stráviti, mor. vyžit vytráviti (huseše nevyžila), zálivný. (Machek 1968) V oblasti spotřebních praktik a praktik trávení volného času jsou dnes důležitější zážitky než produkty. Byť je stolování a jídlo vnímáno jako zážitek i jinde, s konceptem tzv. zážitkové gastronomie jsem se setkala jen v Česku a na Slovensku. Pokud je zážitek komoditou, jak lze uvažovat o její hodnotě? V následující části textu chci ukázat, (1) jak je význam a smysl zážitku propojený s vnímáním autentické existence a svobody v rámci širšího myšlenkového dědictví evropské a americké filozofie; (2) jak komerční sféra a oblast spotřeby těží z těchto významů a dá112

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le je umocňuje tím, že dává konzumentovi možnost utvářet se skrze své spotřební praktiky, byť neustále hrozí, že takto „zkonstruovaný“ produkt přestane být autentický; a (3) jak se lze využitím konceptu afektu vymanit z uvažování o hodnotě zážitku v termínech autenticity a iluze. Dle Williamse (1983: 126) má anglické slovo experience od 18. století dva hlavní významy – „(i) vědění získané z minulých událostí, ať vědomým pozorováním, nebo úvahou a reflexí; a (ii) určitý druh vědomí, které je možné v některých kontextech odlišit od rozumu nebo vědění“ (Williams 1983: 126). První smysl (odpovídá českému zkušenost) je konzervativní a odkazuje k vývoji na základě minulých zkušeností a také k experimentu (experiri). Druhý smysl se týká aktivního vědomí i pocitů v přítomnosti, při kterém je aktivován celek vědomí a celek bytí a nikoli jen určité stavy a schopnosti (Williams 1983: 127). Tomuto pojetí by v češtině mohlo odpovídat slovo „prožitek“. Jedná se například o duchovní a náboženské prožitky, které jsou individuální, ale jsou to zároveň svědectví určené ke sdílení, které „jsou nabízené nejenom jako pravdy, ale jako nejautentičtější druh pravd“ (Williams 1983: 128). Mezi těmito dvěma smysly je neshoda, zejména co se týče role uvažování, reflexe a analýzy, které jsou předpokladem experience v prvním smyslu, ale jsou vyloučeny v experience ve smyslu bezprostředního autentického prožitku (Williams 1983: 128). Gastronomický zážitek nelze jasně zařadit do jedné ani do druhé kategorie. Při zažívání je důležité jak prožívání v přítomnosti, tak i vědění získané z předchozích zkušeností. Již Becker (1953) pozoruje, že zážitek z marihuanového opojení je podmíněn nejen bezprostředním efektem marihuany, ale zejména naučenou schopností mít z ní požitek. Neshodě mezi pojetím zkušenosti a pojetím prožitku také určitým způsobem odpovídá rozdíl mezi pojetím zvyku (ve smyslu rutiny, typičnosti apod.) a pojetím autentického bytí. Handler a Saxton (1988: 249–250) upozorňují na tento rozdíl vyplývající z Heideggerova pojetí autentické existence, jejímž cílem je realizace potencialit a péče o bytí, jemuž člověk instrumentálně podřizuje dílčí potřeby. Na druhé straně, neautentická existence se při uspokojování potřeb nevztahuje k celku svého bytí. Z tohoto vymezení pak vyplývá i pojetí svobody vlastní evropskému existencialismu a fenomenologii, které klade lidskou svobodu do protikladu k nevyhnutelnosti a zvyku. Naproti tomu americký pragmatismus přiznal hodnotu zvyku a nahlíží na něj pozitivně, jako na podmínku myšlení, vědění a svobody, jak popisuje Valverde (1998: 35–42). Heslo fake it till you make it (finguj to, dokud to nedokážeš), které je často asociováno se společenstvím Anonymních alkoholiků, vyjadřuje právě přesvědčení, že díky neautentickému opakování je možné dosáhnout autentického bytí, a tudíž svobody. Napětí mezi autentickým prožíváním, ve kterém se projevuje svoboda, a nevyhnutelností podřídit se potřebám, rytmům a zvykům, je obzvlášť naléhavé v oblasti spotřebních praktik. Marketing a média vytvářejí „metasvět obrazů a hodnot zářivější a reálnější než jakýkoliv jiný svět, který známe“ (Rose 1999: 243). V ob-

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lasti spotřeby je nutno se rozhodovat, volit a vybírat na základě vlastních hodnot, potřeb a tužeb a tímto způsobem si budovat vlastní identitu, individualitu a život (Rose 1999: 231). Skrze spotřební praktiky a využívání volného času tedy jednotlivec uplatňuje svoji svobodu a stává se tím, kým chce, přičemž o správnosti jeho volby ho utvrzuje onen „metasvět“, který definuje, co je reálné.7 Appadurai (1996) upozorňuje na to, že i když mnohé ze způsobů spotřeby usilují o osvobození se ze zvyku, přesto se každá spotřeba vztahuje k technikám těla (Mauss 1973) a k nějakému způsobu setrvačnosti, opakování a habitualizace. Významnost spotřeby nespočívá jen v symbolickém kontextu, ale také v materialitě a temporalitě. Spotřeba se musí odehrávat ve správném prostoru, mezi správnými objekty a osobami a být součástí správných technik těla (Appadurai 1996: 75– 76). Dosahování prožitku autentické existence a svobody skrze spotřební praktiky nenaráží jen na paradox opakování, habitualizace a nutnosti konzumovat správným způsobem, ale i na problematičnost autenticity jako takové (Robinson and Clifford 2012: 573–574; Handler and Saxton 1988: 251), která je konceptem konzumní společnosti, v rámci níž slouží jako prostředek pro uvažování o hodnotě v zdánlivě objektivních termínech, a je tedy spíše reprezentací než prožitkem (Zukin 2008: 728). Přístup, který zde navrhuji, umožňuje vyhnout se otázce autenticity tak, jak se s ní doposud zacházelo, aniž by se zredukoval gastronomický zážitek na pouhou iluzi vytvářenou konzumní společností, která paradoxně plodí spíše neautenticitu než autenticitu. Tento přístup naopak umožní ukázat, jak je zážitek jakožto hodnota produkován a zintenzivňován působením mnoha prvků a dílčími, hodnoty produkujícími událostmi. O zažívání a afektu budu uvažovat jako o faktiši, což je termín, který si vypůjčuji od Latoura (1999, v Danholt 2012). Jak vysvětluje Danholt (2012), termín faktiš označuje povahu předmětu jakožto zkonstruovaného i konstruujícího. V rámci této ontologie, vysvětluje Danholt, nejsou „reálné“ a „zkonstruované“ v protikladu, ale jsou propojené v tom smyslu, že každý fakt musí být důsledně zkonstruován v rámci sítí, spojenců, kalkulací atd., aby se mohl stát „skutečným“ (Danholt 2012: 3). Proto, říká Latour, „čím více zkonstruované, tím skutečnější“ (cit. podle Danholt 2012: 3). Důležitou podmínkou zažívání je otevřenost a připravenost zažívat, kterou subjekt získává zkušeností a učením, jejichž předpokladem je určitá forma habitualizace. Latour (2004: 206) navrhuje uvažovat o těle jako o „rozhraní, které se stává více a více popsatelným spolu s tím, jak se učí být afikováno (angl. affected) větším množstvím prvků. Tělo tak není provizorním příbytkem něčeho vyššího – 7

Lze uvézt příklad tzv. food porn („potravinové porno“). Jedná se o detailní a hyper-stylizovaný způsob zobrazování jídla, který vzbuzuje touhu po konzumaci. Iggers (2007: 98-99) dává původ food porna do souvislosti s reklamním průmyslem a celkovým zvýšením zájmu o obraz, v rámci kterého se obraz stává reálnějším než samotný předmět. Iggers zmiňuje výzkumy, dle kterých značkové jídlo chutná konzumentům víc než jídlo bez značky.

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nesmrtelné duše nebo mysli –, ale zanechává dynamickou trajektorii, jejímž prostřednictvím se učíme registrovat a stávat se citlivějšími vůči tomu, z čeho se skládá svět“ (Latour 2004: 206). Na příkladu výcviku „nosů“ pro parfémový průmysl ilustruje, jak se tělo stává citlivým, respektive artikulovaným na působení rozdílů (srov. též s Becker 1953). Tělo tedy pro Latoura není substancí, ale artikulací rozdílů a potenciálem pro učení se být afikováno. Zážitek, který svým zákazníkům nabízelo Gusto, byl podmíněn předchozí zkušeností a následným očekáváním, které ale mělo být překonáno, a tím měla vzniknout nová zkušenost, nová artikulace rozdílů, na jejímž základě pak zákazník bude umět registrovat nové podněty. Slovy zákaznice Marie: „Neočekáváš jenom to, že to jídlo ti bude chutnat, zároveň očekáváš i to překvapení...“ Překvapení a Schrödingerovo foie gras Chci jíst něco, co neexistuje. Pro mě je v kuchyni největším cílem vychutnat si jídlo na kreativní a emocionální úrovni. Můžete si domyslet, že překvapit mě je velmi složité, takže pokud mě někdo překvapí svým jídlem, jsem pohnutý. Jídlo, které by mi pomohlo změnit způsob, jak chápu vaření – to je to, co by se mi líbilo. (Ferran Adrià)8 Munn (1986) sleduje transformativní procesy, jimiž komunita vytváří symbolickou hodnotu v rámci intersubjektivního časoprostoru. Aktéři svým jednáním vytvářejí časoprostor a jsou jím také vytvářeni v tom smyslu, že vytvořený časoprostor dává formu tomu, jak aktéři zakoušejí svět a sami pak tvoří sebe jako aspekty tohoto časoprostoru. Akty pohostinnosti vytvářejí časoprostorové vztahy, například na základě paměti, zpracování a trvání jídla a ovlivňování myslí jiných aktérů. Dialektika mezi dáváním jídla (vytvářením pozitivní hodnoty) a konzumováním jídla (vytváření negativní hodnoty) je dialektikou mezi rozpínáním a smršťováním intersubjektivního časoprostoru. Jak lze uvažovat o transformaci hodnoty v luxusní restauraci? V případě zkoumání restaurace jako laboratoria se lze lehce nechat svést k tomu, že ji budeme chápat jako ohraničený čas a prostor. Skrze zažívání se však i v tomto případě, obdobně jako u Munn, časoprostor rozepíná, nebo sráží. Notoricky známá scéna s madlenkou z Proustova Hledání ztraceného času popisuje, jak madlenka v autorovi vyvolává vzpomínky a umožňuje mu vybavit si jiný čas a prostor. Dolphijn (2004; srov. též se Sutton 2001) ukazuje, jaký vliv má chuť na paměť. Chuť a vůně madlenky není úlomkem v čase, ale „bodem, ze kterého je celý čas vytvořen“ vychází z něho jak historie, tak budoucnost a přítomnost (Dolphijn 2004: 13). Madlenka působí na Prousta, ale i Proust působí na madlenku, protože ta se stává jídlem a madlenkou až v momentu, kdy působí jako jíd8

Adrià in Bullow (n. d.).

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lo a madlenka. Toto setkání se stává událostí, jejíž obsah je vytvořen ochutnáním a ovoněním. Madlenka se stává vyjádřením příběhu, ale ne pouze symbolem nebo prostředkem, je multiplicitou. Madlenka, čas, prostor, Proust jsou propojeni vztahy a vzájemně na sebe působí (Dolphijn 2004: 14–16). Afekt, vzájemné působení mezi prvky události, se odehrává v různých režimech, definovaných na základě aktivity a touhy, díky nimž vzniká afektivní spojení. Aby bylo možné na hmotu působit, musí být tato hmota ochotna být afikována a zakódována.9 Událost je vždy definována jinými událostmi a je otevřena působení nekonečného počtu režimů a také změn (Dolphijn 2004: 23–24). Chuť, podobně jako jiné aspekty zažívání, tedy není pouze individuální, ani výlučně fyziologická. Pro zažívání navíc není důležitý jen režim chuti. Jsou především zapotřebí těla uschopněná zažívat, a to v různých režimech, například také v režimu vědění (je důležitá předchozí zkušenost; výklad od kuchařů, číšníků, someliérů, recenzentů; rozhled v gastronomii atd.). Chuť je také vztažena k paměti, k příběhu jídla, k různým místům (lokální a exotický původ pokrmů). Zákaznice Marie mi o svém zážitku z restaurace Gusto řekla: Ono je to hrozně zajímá..., ono vzhledem k tomu, když člověk jako sám někdy zažil tuhletu hru, tak třeba v tom Gustu je to prostě taková velká sranda, protože oni tam jako přijdou, teď ti tam ukážou tu kuchařku a tam jako kamarád a kamarád a „Jak se máte?“ a tyhlety neformální řeči. A v podstatě potom jako samozřejmě třeba v tom Gustu je každý to jídlo, na rozdíl od jinejch restaurací má za sebou opravdu vymakanou tu přípravu, kdy třeba tam dělají nějaký ty vývary mnoho hodin, tak samozřejmě, že to oceníš, a i ta prezentace toho jídla je taková velká hra, který ty jsi najednou součástí. Takže tím tě nadchne, nějaký ty detaily, ty kombinace, když se třeba zeptáš: „Tady máte nějakou pěnu z českého sýra. Hele, prosim tě, když o tom tak povídáš, z jakýho sýra je to pěna?“ „No, blaťácký zlato.“ Takže je to takový, působí to na tebe a jako na duši. Pro zákazníka Martina, také foodieho, byla pro gastronomický zážitek důležitá „souhra aspektů“: Je to souhra aspektů, to nemůže bejt jeden nikdy. Je to, už jak tě přivítaj, říkám, servis pro mě dělá sedmdesát procent toho zážitku. No a pak jídlo samozřejmě samo o sobě, ale ten servis. Zažil jsem hospody, kde třeba nevařili úplně tip ťop, ale ten vrchní o tom dokázal tak houževnatě a poutavě hovořit, že prostě mi to chutnalo. 9

Dolphijn k ilustraci používá příklad mentální anorexie, která má souvislost s ideálem krásy a tedy je kódována a kóduje v rámci sexuálního režimu. Anorektička je „definována“ touhou po nejídle a nejídlo je jako nejídlo „definováno“ na základě toho, že ho anorektička shledává jako nepoživatelné (například proto, že obsahuje moc tuku). (Dolphijn 2004: 23)

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Aby gastronomický zážitek byl vnímán jako zážitek, musí dojít k „přerušení“ běžného toku prožívání (Dawney 2013), nebo k „pohnutí“ (Latour 2004), kdy se tělo naučí rozlišovat, artikulovat další rozdíly. Moji informanti často mluvili o anticipaci pozitivního překvapení. Jak jsem již zmínila výše, zážitek byl zintenzivňován hrou s očekáváním, například díky prvkům molekulární gastronomie. Pozitivní překvapení mohlo být také výsledkem dalších snah a procesů (třeba díky afektivní práci číšníků a kuchařů), náročného zpracování a estetické úpravy pokrmů, dárků, předání vědění a dalších. Pokud luxus budeme chápat jako formu excesu (Lipovetsky 2005), jenž úzce souvisí s logikou daru (Mauss 1999; Appadurai 1986; Hajdáková 2013), bylo Gusto v pravém smyslu luxusní restaurací. Phoebe Damrosch ve své knize Obsluha v ceně vysvětluje filozofii šéfkuchaře slavné newyorské restaurace The French Laundry, Thomase Kellera. Dle Kellera je důležité dodržovat zákon klesajících výnosů a zároveň nabízet bohatou extravaganci. Cílem je vzbuzovat u hostů zvědavost a chuť na něco dalšího a poskytovat jim širokou paletu chutí a textur. Exces proto není vhodné chápat pouze jako „přidanou hodnotu“, nebo „dostat víc, než se čekalo“, ale ve smyslu časoprostorového rozpínání, jak ukazuje Munn, a „pohnutí“ těla, jak vysvětluje Latour. Kellerova filozofie se zakládá na poznání, že habitualizace může vést ke snížení hodnoty zážitku a že bohatá extravagance zase umožňuje nekončící souhru mezi matériemi a významy. Zažívání je multiplicitní proces, který poskytuje excesivní množství momentů, ze kterých lze vygenerovat hodnotu. Hodnota zde má afektivní povahu a vyžaduje souhru mezi afikujícím (působícím) a afikovaným. Co není zakoušeno jako hodnotné, žádnou hodnotu nemá. Například hodnota foie gras je problematická v případě, že jej konzumuje někdo, kdo odmítá jíst vnitřnosti, nebo že mu prostě nechutná nebo nedokáže ocenit ingredience, složení, přípravu a originalitu pokrmu. Hodnotě je zde vlastní určitý „kvantový moment“, kdy jedna singularita v procesu zažívání existuje ve všech svých potencialitách a výsledek není nikdy předpokládatelný ani měřitelný. Tak jsme dělali oplatku z foie gras. To není tak, že usušíš foie gras, tam se musí přidat nějaký příměsi, ok, ale uděláš oplatku. My jsme použili tenhle recept a děláme oplatku, protože foie gras není český, tak my to děláme z uzenýho hovězího jazyka. Když jseš ten kuchař, kterej tomu má rozumět nějakym způsobem, tak normální kuchař rozumí tomu, že k hovězímu jazyku patří křen, hořčice, chleba, jabko, jablečnej křen, vejmrda se tomu říká staročesky, křen s jabkem. To párování těch jídel, křen, jabko, chleba, hořčice, kyselá okurka. My tam všechno tohle uděláme. A to teď to uděláme jinak, že uděláme tu jazykovou oplatku, takže už nemáš klasickej jazyk, už máš nějakou oplatku, na to koukáš, nevíš, co tě čeká, sníš to a máš uzenej hovězí jazyk v puse. A teď víme, že k tomu patří křen, takže my si uděláme, třeba smícháme fresh z křenu s mlíkem, dáme tam agar a uděláme z toho takový to pyré. Máme jazyk, křen, teď tam patří jabko, ale my nechcem dát klasický jabko, Cargo (2016), Vol. 14, No. 1 - 2

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tak tam dáme třeba křížaly. Takhle to funguje, že to je furt to samý, není to nic složitýho, jenom to děláme jinak. Kuchař Milan takovýmto způsobem popsal „logiku“, která stojí za vytvářením nových originálních jídel, v tomto případě foie gras. Překvapení nespočívá jen v tom, že se nejedná o „skutečné“ foie gras, ale také v konkrétních ingrediencích, v jejich tradičně netradiční kombinaci nebo ve formě oplatky. Překvapit může i způsob přípravy, servírování, konzumace a tak dále. Ono překvapení je možné právě díky zmíněnému „kvantovému momentu“, tj. díky situaci, ve které nelze předvídat, jakým způsobem ovlivní chuť a další smysly, ale ani to, jestli budou rozpoznány jednotlivé části a částečná spojení, ze kterých je událost „utkána“. V ideálním případě je při zažívání zákazník šikovně konfrontován s nepředvídatelností, překvapením, které mu představují realitu bohatou na možnosti být ovlivněn a afikován za předpokladu, že k tomu bude uzpůsoben tělem, myslí, ale i různými formami kapitálu. Předčit zákazníkova očekávání je možné mnoha způsoby, ale úspěch není nikdy zaručen. Specifikem zážitkové gastronomie je míra reflexe nad oním afektivním zažíváním. Na jejím základě je pak při každém zprostředkování mezi zákazníkem a restaurací možné, že jednotlivé aspekty zažívání – nebo zážitek jako celek – budou vnímány jako nespokojenost, frustrace, zklamání. Reflexi nelze oddělit od výsledku a jeho prožívání. Zde má myšlení a reflexe také afektivní povahu, jak říká Thrift (2004: 60). V případě, že zklamaný zákazník disponuje zkušenostmi a znalostmi gastronomie, jako v případě nespokojeného hosta zmíněného výše, může jeho nespokojenost posloužit jako „zpětná vazba“, „návrh na zlepšení“ a podobně, a tím dále a rozsáhleji působit v časoprostoru restaurace a její zážitkové ekonomii. Naopak v případě Aleny, pro kterou se gastronomický zážitek odehrával spíše v režimu hladu (nikoli chuti) a v režimu umírněnosti (ne excesu), se ukazuje, že afekt a afektivita funguje také jako prostředek vymezování podle schopností těl zažívat. Proto podobně jako může být afekt prostředkem patření, může být také prostředkem odcizení (srov. s Muehlebach 2011; Dawney 2013; Anderson 2012). Zákazník Martin zase využíval afekt jako způsob orientace na trhu. Tím, že experimentoval a sbíral gastronomické zkušenosti, kultivoval své touhy a na jejich základě dělal svá spotřebitelská rozhodnutí. Když jsem ho požádala, aby specifikoval, co pro něj gastronomický zážitek znamená, řekl: Mám chuť se tam vrátit. To tady třeba hodně restaurací a hodně provozáků furt nechápe, oni si myslej, že ty lidi budou furt chodit a nový, že je naštvou ty zákazníky, že to nevadí. Ale jediná stabilní ekonomika v týhle branži se podle mě dá udělat tak, že se ti vracej stálý zákazníci. To, co mě změní, je opravdu to, že si řeknu: „Ano, bavilo mě to, nelituju těch peněz, co jsem tam nechal, a vrátim se tam.“

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Spíše než na základě racionální volby se Martin rozhodoval podle toho, jak byl ovlivněn předchozí zkušeností. Pokud se bavil, nelitoval utracené peníze a měl chuť se vrátit. Na příkladech Aleny a Martina vidíme, že touha být afikován/a je podmíněna předchozí zkušeností a slouží také jako nástroj výběru dalších zkušeností a zážitků. Etičtí spotřebitelé Schopnost zažívat tedy nevypovídá o schopnosti autenticky prožívat život, autenticky konzumovat a vymanit se ze zvyku, ale o získané možnosti, schopnosti a touze být afikován (ovlivněn), a dále afikovat (působit) časoprostorovými událostmi. Tato otevřenost vůči světu však představuje i otevřenost vůči působení biomoci. Thrift (2004) připomíná, že afekt je součásti politiky a biopolitiky, již nazývá „mikrobiopolitikou“ (Thrift 2004: 58), a proto je i aktivně vytvářen. Dawney (2013) také poukazuje na souvislost mezi afektem a politikou a navrhuje propojit Spinozův koncept afektu s Foucaultovým pojetím subjektivace, a to právě prostřednictvím analýzy afektivní produkce zážitku a zkušenosti. Prožívání tedy nelze chápat jako individuální soukromý proces, ale jako vtělené působení politiky a událostí. Také Anderson (2011) upozorňuje, že afektivní těla jsou předmětem a cílem disciplinace a biomoci, jíž se podřizují, a v rámci které se proplétají jak aktivity produkující hodnoty, tak i život jako takový. Pokud je v kapitalismu možné vytěžit ekonomickou hodnotu ze všech aspektů života, včetně afektu a afektivních vztahů, život může být otevřený změnám, náhodě a „svobodě“ a pro působení biomoci už není důležité organizovat život do pevných struktur a produktivních procesů (Anderson 2011: 33). Díky excesu významů a matérií je spotřebitelské jednání předmětem reflexivity a vyžaduje informovanost a vědění. Konzumenti zvažují svou volbu, protože jsou povinni být svobodní, tj. „rozumět a realizovat svůj život v termínech volby“ (Rose 2004: 87). Rose vysvětluje, že mechanismy regulace prostřednictvím touhy produkují konzumní zdvořilost za pomoci expertů a profesionálů, čímž se z konzumentů stávají proto-profesionálové, kteří svoje životy organizují dle expertizy profesionálů, jež je jim dostupná díky médiím a různým formám terapie. Důsledkem toho je, říká Rose (2004: 88), že lidé jsou ovládáni skrze úzkosti a aspirace ovlivněné vědomostmi a zodpovědnostmi. Na konzumenty však nelze nahlížet jako na hlupáky, na které je zvenčí uvalena touha. Rose (1999: 231) říká, že skrze spotřebu se „každá volba stává emblémem naší identity, známkou naší individuality, každá vrhá zpětnou zář a osvětluje já toho, kdo konzumuje.“ Spotřeba konstruuje subjekt, ale je jím i konstruována. Lidé kalkulují a učí se kalkulovat skrze chutě, zážitky, touhy a reflexi, a také očekávají, že jejich touhy budou uznány. Ekonomie, ale i politika a etika jsou vtěleny a mají afektivní rozměr.

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Dle Muehlebach (2011) je to právě afekt, jenž definuje morálního neoliberála. Kultivací afektu prostřednictvím učení, znalostí, chování, sebepozorování a ovládání touhy se afekt stává i prostředkem transformace společnosti. Zákaznice Marie například zastávala názor, že Češi trpěli kognitivní disonancí v tom smyslu, že ignorovali informace a sociální zodpovědnost, odmítali dělat zodpovědná rozhodnutí a reflektovat svou volbu – jak v oblasti jídla, tak v oblasti politiky. [s]pousta lidí, i když by to nepřiznali, tak se rozhodovali u ceny a necítili potřebu zkoumat, jako si mysleli, že se buřty dělaj z masa, a oni najednou se dělají ze soji. Je u nich daleko menší reflexivita společenskýho dění, která je založená spíš na tom, že se bouří proti tomu, na co jim ukážou média, že by se měli bouřit, než na základě jejich svobodnýho rozhodnutí a informovanosti. Z toho důvodu byla Marie aktivní amatérskou recenzentkou a blogerkou. Alena zas tvrdila, že je „tragédií“, že pořád existuje „gastronomie devadesátých let“, protože lidem jde jen o to se zasytit a nic dalšího neočekávají. Sama se toto pojetí snažila vyvracet a být uvědomělou konzumentkou, která ovšem díky svým silným zážitkům z prostředí luxusu také pamatovala na sociální rozměr spotřeby. Díky afektu a zažívání si připomínala svůj původ a existenci sociálně slabších lidí. Martin zas řekl, že pro vytvoření luxusu jsou potřební lidé s dobrým chováním, spíše než s penězi: „Tady ti prostě budou chodit ti Janouškové do těhle hospod, tyhle typy lidí, protože si to můžou dovolit. A vytvářej ten umělej luxus, takovej ten prchlavej.“ Stěžoval si, že za současných podmínek v gastronomii, kdy ani recenze, reputace nebo cena neinformují o skutečné kvalitě, si zákazník musí všechno „prožít sám“. Z toho důvodu on a jeho kamarádi „gastrofašisti“ podnikali výpravy do různých hospod po celém Česku a na základě svých zážitků pak spoluvytvářeli lepší konkurenční prostředí. Experti na gastronomii, zaměstnanci Gusta i zákazníci se tak díky svému zažívání stávají etickými občany, kteří na sebe berou zodpovědnost za zlepšování české gastronomie. Závěr V tomto textu jsem se pokusila navrhnout způsob, jak přistupovat ke studiu gastronomického zážitku, aniž bychom jej redukovali na pouhý konstrukt, jemuž neodpovídá materiální substance či autentický prožitek. Mým cílem bylo vyhnout se zaužívanému pojmovému aparátu a interpretačním rámcům, abych mohla proces zažívání zpřístupnit pozorování a analýze. K tomu mi posloužil koncept afektu, tak jak jej sociální vědy používají v návaznosti na Deleuze a Guattariho, a tzv. afektivní obrat. Ukázala jsem, že zážitková gastronomie představuje vysoce afektivní prostředí, kde na sebe vzájemně působí, respektive afikují se matérie, těla, diskurzy, vě-

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dění, procesy atd. za účelem vyvolat u zákazníka pozitivní překvapení, tj. pohnutí, které rozšíří jeho intersubjektivní časoprostor. Podmínkou zážitku je však i to, aby byl zákazník uschopněn k zažívání, aby mohl být afikován multiplicitními procesy. Zákazník je tudíž veden k tomu, aby pozoroval a kultivoval vlastní touhy, chutě a prožitky a na základě tohoto sebepoznání byl schopen vnímat a rozeznávat rozdíly a dělat uvědomělá a zodpovědná spotřebitelská rozhodnutí. „Škrobený“ host, který „si nedokáže užívat“, představuje nežádoucího zákazníka. Naopak host, který je otevřený, afikovatelný, je schopen nejen samotného gastronomického zážitku, ale díky své schopnosti „zažívat“ se dokáže orientovat na trhu a chovat se jako etický spotřebitel. Domnívám se, že sociálněvědní kritika by se měla vyvarovat redukce a moralizování při studiu spotřebitelských praktik. Tím ovšem neříkám, že by neměla přestat hledat kritickou perspektivu. Můj text by mohl posloužit jako návrh na rozšíření konceptuálního rámce i předmětů antropologického zájmu a jako výzva pro hledání nových kritických perspektiv.

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Iveta Hajdáková [email protected] Fakulta humanitních studií Univerzita Karlova v Praze www.fhs.cuni.cz

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Jaroslav Klepal, Edit Szénássy

Rozhovor/Interview

pp. 125–134

From Barefoot Anthropologist to Global Watchdog: An Interview with Nancy Scheper-Hughes (Jaroslav Klepal, Edit Szénássy) An avid advocate of public anthropology, Nancy SCHEPER-HUGHES (born 1944) is Professor of Medical Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley where she directs the doctoral program in Critical Studies in Medicine, Science, and the Body. Her first book, Saints, Scholars and Schizophrenics: Mental Illness in Rural Ireland (1979), exploring madness, loneliness and socio-economic change in an Irish village setting, won the Margaret Mead Award from the Society for Applied Anthropology in 1980. In Death without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday life in Brazil (1993) she discusses the difficult choices Brazilian mothers make when refusing to care for their babies: choices driven by hunger, structural violence and poverty. Since the 1980s, Professor Scheper-Hughes has greatly shaped anthropological thinking about the body, violence, suffering, medicine and genocide: she has coined and popularized terms such as „mindful body“ (1987, with Margaret Lock), „political economy of the emotions“ (1993a), „life boat ethics“ (1993b), „neo-cannibalism“ (2001), „sexual citizenship“ (1994b), the „genocidal continuum“, „militant anthropology“ and anthropology „with its feet on the ground“ (1995). Since 1999, she has been engaged in human rights activism and scholarly research on the global trade in human organ trafficking: she is the co-founder and director of the Berkeley-based nongovernmental organization Organs Watch. Professor Scheper-Hughes was raised by a mother who was a first generation Czech-American and a father who has a German Lutheran background in Brooklyn, New York City. On the occasion of her Prague visit in April 2016, amidst her busy schedule Professor Scheper-Hughes agreed to be interviewed for Cargo by Edit Szénássy and Jaroslav Klepal, two doctoral students of the Department of General Anthropology at Charles University in Prague. Edit Szénássy: Throughout your career you’ve done everything but remain in the ivory tower: you’ve been engaged in various high profile cases, helped investigate organ thefts and manipulations, death squads, etc. Together with other UK and USbased anthropologists, you and your colleagues at Berkeley started challenging anCargo (2016), Vol. 14, No. 1 - 2

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thropologists to become witnesses whose professional testimonies make a difference. Anthropological witnessing has become a relatively widely accepted position since, indeed something of an expectation, a new standard. Do you feel there is still a need to make a point for public anthropology? Nancy Scheper-Hughes: Public anthropology is definitely still contested, as is the notion of witnessing. Peter Redfield, who introduced the idea, but also Donna Haraway and others who took it up, speak of modest witnessing. I think the form anthropological witnessing takes depends on where you are, what part of the world you are situated in, and who the people are that you are studying. If you’re studying, as I did, people who are psychotic or who are hearing voices, other people are not going to listen to their voices. Their voices are not going to be heard except through the anthropologists who study psychosis and try to represent what we have learnt from them. Of course, these people can and do talk for themselves, as for instance through the Hearing Voices Movement,1 and they have to be absolutely in the middle of the discussion. The Hearing Voices Movement, for example, is made up of people from all walks of life, class, professions and identifications who claim the right to hear and express their voices, defining voice hearing as an existential experience. The Movement is not uniform as some of the people engaged in it take psychotropic medications, while others do not. Some experience voice hearing as intense suffering and others see it as an extraordinary and sometimes mystical experience, an aspect of their ‘thrownness’ in the world with which they can change the world. Jaroslav Klepal: So it is a kind of religious experience for them? Nancy Scheper-Hughes: For some it is a religious experience that they feel has been suppressed by drugs or by years of hospitalization. Some of them have what could be called anthropological experiences and theories of understanding madness as another kind of radical difference! But back to witnessing. If, for example, you are studying infants, infants don’t speak. You can, and must, talk to their mothers, but basically sometimes you become a witness for them, the infants, as well as for their parents. And then there are places where people are not free to speak, because they’re living in a police state or they’re living in a state of terror, hence they need the anthropologist to speak. The form anthropological witnessing takes depends very much on where you are situated as a researcher. In Latin America, for example, it’s much easier, since there’s a longer tradition of intel1

Editors’ note: originating in the 1980s, the Hearing Voices Movement is an international network of organizations and individuals who promote an alternative way of understanding the experience of those people who hear voices, have visions or have other unusual perceptions. Aiming to destigmatize the experiences of voice hearers, the movement spreads positive messages about the experience of hearing voices through support groups and advocacy (see: http://www.intervoiceonline.org/).

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lectuals – and not just anthropologists – of being public. I believe this may also be true for many parts of Europe, but not for the United States where intellectuals have always been marginalized and disrespected. Intellectuals in the US have always been seen as basically useless. Those intellectuals who have had an influence on public life have generally been conservatives involved in right-leaning institutes, such as the Hoover Institute at Stanford University and the Livertarian Cato Institute in Washington, DC., which promotes free enterprise and small government. Within anthropology today there is still an active debate about witnessing: whether you have the right to speak on behalf of the other or not. The debate has taken on new dimensions of political correctness: what gives you, a white woman form the United States, the right to speak on police brutality in South Africa, or to write on the sexual lives of bachelor farmers in East Kerry, Ireland. Or what gives you the right to criticize the rights of kidney buyers when you have two healthy kidneys? Indeed, on many occasions when I did become engaged, it was against my best sense and against my wishes to do so. At the same time, not everything is engaged and anthropological engagement doesn’t mean that we throw out our notions of epistemological openness and go into the field without trying to bracket out all the personal baggage one brings into the field (one’s theoretical biases and the weight of one’s life experiences). We still must try to be neutral and to engage in self-reflexive, critical thinking, interrogating who we are and all the complex relations behind why we ask certain questions and not others. Self-analysis is part of being engaged and I think this is true when you do any kind of ethnographic encounter. Jaroslav Klepal: Do you feel that anthropologists are in a privileged position to act as witnesses? Nancy Scheper-Hughes: Certainly, every society has its own witnesses from within, who are not anthropologists and who are involved in various political actions. But yes, I think we are privileged. We are privileged to be able to spend as much time as we do in the field, with people. I’ve done a lot of work with investigative journalists, because of organs trafficking, and with filmmakers, and I can see the wonderful skills they have. But the one thing they don’t have is this kind of deep hanging out that we do. It’s the intimacy and the closeness of our relations with people that makes anthropology privileged. I feel it’s a privilege for medical anthropologists to be with people who are giving birth, people who are experiencing psychosis, or with women with babies they don’t know whether they can keep or not. I think that one of the things that keeps me in anthropology through all of its changes is that it’s an enormous privilege. Edit Szénássy: Which is one of the things you also underline in Death without Weeping where you elaborated on the term ‘good enough ethnography.’ It refers to an abil-

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ity to listen and observe carefully, emphatically and compassionately. I was wondering how your understanding of the term has evolved since 1993, when Death without Weeping was initially published, with regard both to your own work and to anthropology as a discipline. Is what was good enough twenty years ago still good enough? Nancy Scheper-Hughes: I still use the term ‘good enough ethnography’. I teach it in dissertation writing and sometimes I use it as a way to let fellow anthropologists know that we can never get the entire picture. That we can’t constantly go back to check. My message is similar to that of Winnicott,2 who was talking about the good enough mother, to just trust yourself. If you’re critically reflexive enough and keep not only field notes, but also a private journal almost daily and go over what you think you did right, what you didn’t do, what question you didn’t ask, when you talked too much: you self-censor constantly. At the same time, good enough ethnography was also to say that ethnography and anthropology are good enough. Because we we were so heavily criticized due to our origins, which we know were rooted in colonialism. First came the military, then came the missionaries and they made it safe for us, anthropologists, to go to the field. There were a lot of things that the early anthropologists later in life recognised: what they had and had not seen, where they were complicit with systems, where they saw themselves as trying to be the good enough brokers. What the needs of the people they studied were, where we put our loyalties. I definitely think our origins were muddied, but I also believe that one evolves as an anthropologist. Some of the things that I would’ve said about being the barefoot anthropologist in the 1990s were a representation of a particular moment in Brazilian and Latin American history. To a large extent, I just borrowed the notion of ‘theology on the ground’, based on liberation theology. What I meant by being a barefoot anthropologist was not that you only spend your time with poor people in shanty towns, but that you engage in a certain way that is intimate. You make yourself bare in terms of your interactions. Lévi-Strauss’s example helps me to think about the notion of being really grounded and present in the field. I’ve always admired his work and the way he was able to reflect on it. I happened to be in Paris for the celebration of his turning 90 years old. What struck me even more than the beautiful exhibition displayed in his honor was his extreme self-criticism. When, for example, in his photographic memoir, Saudades do Brasil (1995) he commented on the indigenous people he had first studied, admitting that he had not really recognized that there “tribes“ were the remnants of what was once an enormous Amazonian civilization. It would take the work of archaeologists, long after Lévi-Strauss published Tristes Tropiques, to excavate the original civilizations that had thrived before Western colonialism along the Brazilian Amazon from Belem to Manaus. 2

Editor’s note: D.W. Winnicott (1896-1971) was a paediatrician and psychoanalyst who proposed the idea of good enough mothering, referring to ‘real’ mothers who are caring towards their babies. but at the same time are ambivalent about motherhood.

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Lévi-Strauss only later realized that what he investigating at the time were essentially the results of mass killings. When he did so, he raised our common responsibility for the situation of these peoples and became politically engaged around race with UNESCO. Edit Szénássy: How important is it for anthropologists to have politically engaged leadership roles? Nancy Scheper-Hughes: It depends on the situation: I’ve certainly taken a leadership role with respect to organs trafficking. That was where I moved from barefoot anthropology to militant anthropology and then militant in a different sense: detective. Which meant, in each of the moves, changing your modus operandi and how you do fieldwork. It was a shift away from loving long-term research and going back to the relatively small groups I used to work in. My Irish village had four hundred and fifty-five people: I knew everything about that place and they knew everything about me. My Brazilian field site, the Alto do Cruzeiro, is five thousand people who I’ve known now over a long time.3 A very different approach is required by multi-sided ethnography, when I’m moving constantly. It also compels me to collaborate with people I would never have thought I would collaborate with. In Brazil, you’re a companheiro, a term used in liberation theology: so the notion of leadership refers there to accompaniment. It sounds funny though: ‘Are you going to accompany us?’ Yet what they meant is: ‘Are you going to have solidarity with us?’ It doesn’t mean that you’re a leader, but rather a follower. And I think that’s the other thing – you have to be a foot soldier, a pedestrian, a barefoot anthropologist. You’re the lowest in the ranks. When raising the issue of different kinds of ethics, there is the question about the ethics of going undercover: how to work undercover, while still feeling like you’re an anthropologist. I can honestly say that the kind of undercover work I did was pretty minimal. It’s true that I occasionally have to pose for a few minutes, before I tell the person: ‘Look, I’m not looking at buying a kidney, let’s stop bartering about it, but are you still willing to talk to me?’ My undercover work in South Africa, in the United States, in Turkey, in the Philippines, sometimes meant going to hospitals and just saying, ‘I’m Doctor Nancy Scheper-Hughes and I’m interested in transplant.’ Sometimes I got access to things without, one would say, full disclosure of what I was looking at. Later I found that even this was not necessary. For me, that’s where face-to-face intimate encounters influenced by Levinas‘ essays on substitution makes one think how in our own fieldwork we honor the others who have provided us with our livelihood. Levinas’ notion of face was always a little bit mysterious to me and his notion of ethics is so extreme – I could never 3

Editors’ note: Nancy Scheper-Hughes paid her first visit to the Alto about fifty years ago and has been going back ever since on a regular basis. Her next visit was scheduled within a few days after she was to return home from Prague.

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live according to it. Nevertheless, the idea of treating every other person as if their existence were more important than yours allows you to actually learn something from that person. This helped me very much in my work on organ trafficking, enabling me to get close to people who were criminals and yet still see them as humans, worthy of care in our portrayals of them, even though I believe that they were doing something evil. Maybe it’s a simple case of hating evil acts but not the person, which is considered to be primeval. Jaroslav Klepal: You mentioned a certain epistemological shift you went through in your work, and currently you’re exploring the notion of evil. As of now you have only had a few talks about it and in your previous work, namely in the ‘Primacy of the Ethical’, there are only certain references in this direction. The whole issue about evil and anthropology seems to have come up during discussion with a fellow anthropologist on your Brazilian work. Nancy Scheper-Hughes: Yes, well, first it was the response of an American psychological anthropologist (now deceased) who was a discussant at an American Anthropological Association meeting, where I was talking about the madness of hunger and the way in which babies of Alto do Cruzero, Brazil, who were starving were being given perverse drugs in the clinic: sleeping pills and appetite suppressants. Imagine giving appetite suppressant to a starving baby! It was just unbelievable, and there was no way to really talk about that except to critique it and to suggest that there was either terrible misrecognition by the doctors or that the opposite of good is not evil, but that it’s really indifference. I think that more people have been killed by indifference than by physical violence. The dicussant said that what Nancy was writing about is about evil and that is not an anthropological topic, for once you identify evil you want to stop it and then you enter political life and leave ethnography behind. That was the first time my writings were linked to an anthropological engagement with evil. Today, I am re-thinking my writings about the mothers and angel babies of Northeast Brazil. I think there was a suggestion that the shantytown had something of an ethics of the death camp that runs through Death Without Weeping, but is never really articulated; although I did refer to “camp rations” and the fact that the dietary intake of the sugar cane cutters was similar to people at Buchenwald. I’m writing a companion book to Death Without Weeping that will revisit and bring up to date and critique my original conclusions. I never really left my Brazilian field site and have made several fieldtrips to my ground zero in Brazil. More recently, I have begun to rethink the topic of evil as an anthropological subject through the work of one of my former PhD students and a collaborator with me in my field site in 2014. Sam Dubal, who’s an MD/PhD now, has worked in Uganda with Kony’s soldiers. His revised dissertation, which will be published by the University of California Press, is entitled: Against Humanity. In it, Dubal takes the critique of the human to its

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extreme. Many of the people Sam did research with are people who have been reformed, some of them have lost their legs from landmines, and all are working for humanitarian organizations, because that’s how they get fed. Nonetheless, they explain that although they were kidnapped, being part of the LRA was the best part of their lives: that there they made families, they had solidarity, they were guerrillas. They say that they turned into animals and became strong. Which resonates with what I’m after: trying to bring together some of the tendencies of moral anthropology with the question of the human and evil. In his article playing on Nietzsche and Foucault ‘Beyond Good and Evil’, Didier Fassin states that the reason why evil is not an anthropological topic is because it’s already a moral judgement, a moralized concept. But my answer is that it’s an existential concept, as the late Neil Whitehead’s work on Dark Shamans in the Amazon well illustrates. Whitehead lived with people who had embraced evil as their way of life. It’s absolutely explicit: their practices are quite horrendous, they basically cannibalise the people that they kill. They kill with all kinds of poisons, then they bury their victims and dig them up three days later only to eat their decomposed flesh. It’s the original kind of exocannibalism. I think we should study these people as radically evil, as people who embrace evil as a meaning in life. Edit Szénássy: Can you tell us about what publications you’re working on just now? Nancy Scheper-Hughes: I have a book that’s overdue and that I’ve held back, because I want to make one more trip to the field. I’d like to end this book, The Ghosts of Montes de Oca: Naked Life and the Medically Disappeared on a somewhat happy note as the psychiatric camp is slowly being transformed. The site is a national psychiatric colony in Argentina, where I first went in 2000 undercover with an armed detective. This whole project made me think about how sometimes being a good, open, epistemologically careful, neutral person is absolutely where we start our work as good social scientists, but it may not be where we finish it. When are we really bystanders and complicit with what we see? But to begin with, I was investigating a little report in the British Medical Journal about a state inquiry into the egregious mistreatment of a colony of ‘mentally deficient’ people. The report talked about people who’d gone missing, organ trafficking, tissue trafficking, baby trafficking. After the director of the institution, Dr. Florencio Sánchez, was arrested I wanted to visit the place, but I didn’t want to go alone. So I invited a medical director of the International Red Cross, an expert in torture, institutions and people in confinement, to accompany me. The first person to explore the place was a psychologist-detective who went undercover and spent three days in the colony, during which time nobody even bothered him. He presented himself as mentally deficient. He then used one of the escape routes to get out: something that looks like a swamp, but which, we believe, is full of dead bod-

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ies. After having talked to him, in 2000 we got in with an alibi and saw what I can only describe as a death camp. It was truly unbelievable. People were totally naked, they were lying on the ground, some were emaciated. After talking to hundreds of people, I came up with a pretty strong story which I sent as a report to the government of Argentina. They accepted it, which I thought was amazing, and which also made me think it was probably wrong. I attributed everything to the Dirty War and to the fact that General Videla had appointed that particular director to run the center, the one who was arrested before we even got there. I went back three more times in different positions and in my upcoming book’I suggest that what was taking place in the colony was a war within the Dirty War, a war against mental disability in Argentina. The mentally disabled were not seen as acceptable to the new Proceso,4 which created a new state that was both very modern and very conservative. The method was malignant neglect. Patients/inmates [most were there for life] were treated in a very weird way: they were told they didn’t have to do anything. Doctors said: ‘We’re giving these inmates back their human rights, their freedom. If they don’t want to eat, they don’t have to eat. If they don’t want to wear clothing, they don’t have to wear clothing. If they want to have sex, they can have sex.’ Edit Szénássy: A conveniently libertarian argument… Nancy Scheper-Hughes: Absolutely. And it was also the easiest way to get rid of them. Dr. Sanchez was appointed by General Videla to head the colony during the Dirty War. Videla himself had interned one of his sons in the colony and he died in this horrible place, when he could have interned his sons in private institutions run by nursing sisters. I think Videla and his wife were ashamed of their son, and this experience made Videla appoint a doctor who was willing to let all the deficient inmates “disappear themselves“, which was a term used by a protégé of Sanchez at the colony. An article of mine on this topic is accessible online (). If I’m right, then the history of this place should be thoroughly investigated and there should be some sort of truth commission about the patients who disappeared, because they are in the thousands. And if I’m wrong, they should probably arrest me. (laughter) Jaroslav Klepal: Lastly: what does Nancy Scheper-Hughes read? Nancy Scheper-Hughes: It depends on what I’m writing. I definitely want to mention the Czech philosopher Patočka, about whom I learned from a Czech mental patient. I encountered him in Trieste, Italy, at a mental hospital that was 4

The National Reorganization Process (or Processo) was the name used by its leaders for the military dictatorship that ruled Argentina from approximately 1976 to 1983. The term Dirty War is mainly used in the US-American context and does not have an Argentinian equivalent.

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totally radicalised by Franco Basaglia. This mad man from the Czech Republic told me about the Solidarity of the Shaken. Right now I also read a lot of things that are not necessarily anthropological, but are radical critiques of the prison, including Didier Fassin’s work on policing. Because I have to, I read a lot of the critiques of the human and humanity. I read what my graduate students read and what they’re writing about. I think that this is part of ‘moral anthropology meets not-moralistic anthropology’. I read a lot of moral anthropology, the stuff that Fassin and his group writes and I often critique it. Much of it is connected to my recent work on evil. He and his group, which is large and includes some of my colleagues in UCLA and elsewhere, take a very Foucauldian view. And of course I read Foucault, too – what Foucault said about evil, with which I would agree completely. He says the problem is that when evil is simply in the realm of traditional continental or theological moral philosophy, then you’re dealing mostly with Christianity and maybe with Talmud, but that it’s Western. Therefore it often moralises things that were deeply immoral and deeply evil, and it doesn’t recognise its own evil. So, in a way, I don’t think that Didier Fassin is right. I think that you begin with differentiating theodicies from homodicies, you look into the human, the social and cosmological explanations of what evil is, but you should also talk about when evil is realised as reality. Evil is something you can and should engage with, though not everybody might have the stomach for it. One can approach evil like an anthropologist. First you have to understand the cosmologies, the rationalities, but then you don’t have to, in the end, in your interpretation, not grapple with evil. I’m working on a small book in which there are different dimensions of evil, which also makes me go back to some philosophers such as Kierkegaard. The end of this whole project for me is the idea of anthropology perhaps being evil itself, in what it sees and what it doesn’t see, in what it acknowledges and what it doesn’t. But then I have a twist in the end, which is: can anthropology save the world? (laughter) And that last chapter, I will tell you, is called ‘On xenophilia’. What I mean by this term is curiosity, getting close enough to something to understand it. A willingness to engage with the other. Edit Szénássy: Since we’re in the Czech Republic: do you have any connection to your maternal heritage? Nancy Scheper-Hughes: If I had a day here, I might go to the town of Znojmo, because my grandfather’s name was Charles Znojemsky and my grandmother was also Czech, she always called herself “Bohemian”. The only thing I know is that they met in Vienna, where my grandmother was working as a chef and my grandfather was avoiding military service. They ran off together after one meeting and then he left my grandmother in Budapest with a child. It’s a strange story; it doesn’t make sense to me. He came first to New York, to Brooklyn, then he brought my grandmother and I believe she left the child behind – but then she had nine more

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and two of them died of diphtheria during an epidemic in New York. My grandfather died before I was born, my grandmother when I was six or seven. I was born right after World War II in a neighbourhood that was Hasidic and had a small Catholic population. Essentially, everyone was from Eastern Europe. When I was growing up, from 1944 to 1950, there was a sense of trauma: you just didn’t ask people about their backgrounds. I remember once in grade school, a best friend of mine coming up to me and saying, ‘My parents said I can’t talk to you because your people killed my people.’ I guess it was because we identified as Catholic, but frankly, I don’t know if we weren’t Jewish. But I think everyone basically is mixed in Eastern Europe, as in the United States.

Nancy Scheper-Hughes [email protected] University of California, Berkeley http://anthropology.berkeley.edu/

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Recenze / Book Reviews


pp. 135–142

Food Consumption in Global Perspective Kristián Šrám Klein, Jakob A., and Anne Murcott, eds. 2014. Food Consumption in Global Perspective: Essays in the Anthropology of Food in Honour of Jack Goody. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 230 pp. ISBN 978-1-137-32640-9. Recenzovaná kniha je sbírkou deseti esejí různých autorů na téma antropologie jídla, která vyšla na počest třicátého výročí vydání knihy Cooking, Cuisine and Class (1982) britského antropologa Jacka Goodyho.1 Myšlenka takto poctít autorův příspěvek do jmenované oblasti vznikla na sympoziu pořádaném Food Studies Centre při School of Oriental and African Studies v Londýně (Klein and Murcott 2014: 1-2). Abychom lépe porozuměli recenzovanému dílu, je třeba si nejprve přiblížit obsah Goodyho práce, jíž tento sborník příspěvků vzdává poctu. V historickém pohledu na vývoj disciplíny antropologie jídla je Goodyho kniha Cooking, Cuisine and Class označována za zlomové, ale částečně nedoceněné dílo (takto např. Mintz and Du Bois 2002: 100, nebo Klein and Murcott 2014: 2-4). Největším přínosem a inovací této Goodyho práce byla skutečnost, že nezkoumala jídlo pouze prizmatem tehdy dominantních symbolicky orientovaných perspektiv, ale byla schopna zachytit ho také v kontextu sociální stratifikace, materiálních faktorů a historické změny pohledem historické a komparativní analýzy (Klein and Murcott 2014: 2). Tato analýza přitom zohledňuje celou řadu do té doby opomíjených faktorů. Těmi jsou především problematika ekonomického pozadí zacházení s jídlem a zohlednění dodatečných dimenzí, jako jsou výrobní možnosti, logistika, distribuce atd. (Klein and Murcott 2014: 6). Mintz a Du Bois toto období dokonce označují jako okamžik, kdy antropologie jídla dospěla (2002: 100). Co se empirického materiálu týče, Goodyho kniha je postavena na historickokomparativní metodě srovnání euroasijských a afrických společností, kombinované s etnografickým výzkumem v různých oblastech západní Afriky. Euroasijské společnosti jsou v knize označovány jako hierarchické, zatímco společnosti africké jako hieratické. Goody si všímá toho, že odhlédneme-li od skladby jídelníčku, 1

Tento text vznikl v rámci projektu Specifického vysokoškolského výzkumu SVV 2016 č. 260339.

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existuje mezi euroasijskými a africkými společnostmi důležitý rozdíl v sociální diferenciaci jednotlivých kuchyní. Tento proces rozlišování je v euroasijských kuchyních pevně přítomen, v afrických kuchyních se naproti tomu s obdobně založenou rozmanitostí nesetkáváme, přestože i v nich jsou patrny různé sociální hierarchie. Goodyho zajímá, proč tomu tak je (Goody 1982: 1). S tím zároveň souvisí otázka, jaké podmínky jsou potřebné pro vznik vysoké a nízké kuchyně (high and low cuisine, ibid.: 1-9), tedy faktu typického pro euroasijské, hierarchické společnosti již od dob starověkého Říma nebo Číny (Pottier 2014). Důležitým příspěvkem Goodyho práce je konstrukce narativu historického vývoje antropologie jídla. Nejprve se autor kriticky vymezuje vůči funkcionalistickému, strukturalistickému a kulturalistickému výzkumnému proudu (Goody 1982: 12-133). Dále uvádí, že etapě systematického zkoumání jídla předcházela relativně dlouhá doba, kdy sice jídlo vstupovalo do antropologického bádání zejména v kontextu tematiky rituálu, tabu, obětí a dalších náboženských aspektů (ibid.: 10-12), ale nebylo samostatným objektem zájmu. Na podkladě diskuse příspěvků různých směrů je následně postaveno zmíněné analytické prizma reflektující řadu ekonomických a materiálních dimenzí. Tyto aspekty jsou shrnuty v Goodyho rozfázování procesu zacházení s jídlem, v němž identifikuje pět stadií, jimiž jsou produkce, distribuce, příprava, konzumace a likvidace (Klein and Murcott 2014: 6). Kniha pokračuje bohatou analýzou studované problematiky, v závěru poté dochází k popisu několika hlavních rozdílů mezi euroasijskými a africkými společnostmi, jimiž je vysvětlen pozorovaný jev odlišností v sociální diferenciaci. Jedná se zejména o bohatost a dostupnost potravin (včetně přístupu k exotickým surovinám), o míru gramotnosti a tedy možnost využívání receptů ve formě tištěných kuchařek, míru specializace kuchyně (rovněž postavené na možnostech kumulace receptů), schopnosti šíření různých typů národních kuchyní a elaboraci dělby práce v oblasti přípravy jídla (Goody 1982: 191). Všechny tyto aspekty jsou rozvinutější v prostředí euroasijských společností a v kombinaci s podstatně pokročilejším trhem vytvořily podmínky pro sociální diferenci různých typů kuchyní. Ta neprobíhala pouze na úrovni typu konzumované stravy, ale rovněž ve způsobech její přípravy a konzumace. Ve svém důsledku se tyto oblasti stávají součástí životních stylů (ve weberovském slova smyslu) různých sociálních skupin (pro detailnější argumentaci viz Goody 1982). Po vydání knihy Cooking, Cuisine and Class byla problematika jídla a souvisejících praktik studována na makro- i mikro-strukturální úrovni. Jídlo jakožto materiální i symbolický prvek kultury a jeho konzumní i produkční praktiky tak byly postupem času propojeny s celým spektrem dalších sociálních jevů, jako jsou konflikty, nepokoje a války (Dirks 1988; Ember and Ember 1994 in Mintz and Du Bois 2002: 100), gender (Trankell 1995 in Mintz and Du Bois 2002: 102), sociální změna, identity a sociální pozice (Lockwood and Lockwood 2000 in Mintz and Du Bois 2002: 109, Anderson 2005: 124-140), nebo etnicita a imigrace (Gabaccia

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1998). Všechny citované studie upozorňují, že jídlo disponuje silným potenciálem k tomu, aby se stalo markerem identity a bylo prostředkem jejího konstruování či performace. Jídlo a stravování je studováno i ve vztahu k makrostrukturálním procesům. Vedle materiálního a symbolického rozměru je jídlo také základní biologickou potřebou a předmětem každodenní spotřeby, a stává se tedy faktorem silně orientujícím lidské jednání. Díky těmto dimenzím vstupuje do oblasti zájmu disciplín, jež stojí mimo prostor antropologie a sociologie. Výzkum spotřebního chování například propojuje jídlo a související praktiky s životními styly - jídlo se tak může stát dělícím kritériem při segmentaci společnosti pro marketingové účely (Solomon 2006: 239-241, viz také Chitakunye and Maclaran 2008). Široký zájem o v různých směrech ukotvené sociálněvědní studium jídla postupně ústí ve vznik mezioborových food studies. Časovou hranici jejich vzniku nelze stanovit přesně, nicméně se jedná zhruba o období posledních dvaceti let, kdy je možné pozorovat progresivně rostoucí počet příspěvků věnovaných problematice jídla přistupujících k jídlu z různých perspektiv a prezentovaných na konferencích, v akademických časopisech, monografiích atd. (Albala 2013: 20). V rámci takto bohatého spektra teoretických i metodologických možností navazuje recenzovaná kniha Food Consumption in Global Perspective na linii vymezenou Goodyho prací Cooking, Cuisine and Class. Zejména v oblasti metodologie převládá historická perspektiva a etnografický výzkum. Goodyho komparativní metodologii však autoři jednotlivých kapitol nesdílejí v její původní podobě. Klein vysvětluje, že Goodyho komparativní metodologie byla autory knihy nahrazena komparativním přístupem (Klein and Murcott 2014: 15). Jednotlivé eseje jsou vždy postaveny na studiu dílčí instituce: oslavných versus pohřebních rituálů v Ghaně (Clark 2014), komemorativní ceremonie a uctívání předků v Číně (Watson 2014), nebo materiálního prvku jídelníčku v dané geografické lokalitě, jako je alkohol v muslimském světě (Zubaida 2014), vepřové maso v Číně (Watson 2014), Fufu v Ghaně (Clark 2014) aj. Následně je sledována historická proměna předmětu výzkumu v určitém časovém horizontu od několika desetiletí až po celá staletí. V úvodní eseji (Klein 2014) se tak autoři hlásí k postupu R. G. Foxe (Fox 2002), který aplikuje podobnou metodu při studiu historické transformace objektů. U studovaných předmětů a jevů je předpokládána existence určité kulturní biografie a její zachycení slouží k analýze změn v čase (Klein and Murcott 2014: 15). Zmíněný metodologický rámec knihy shrnuje úvodní esej, kterou zpracoval jeden z editorů J. A. Klein. Dalším motivem úvodní kapitoly je diskuse vývoje disciplíny a shrnutí hlavních témat, jimiž Goody přispěl. Tato témata jsou dalším pojítkem tvořícím kontinuitu sbírky a hlavní oblasti, v nichž Goodyho Cooking, Cuisine and Class vystupuje jako referenční dílo. Konkrétně se jedná o problematiku (1) produkce a konzumace, (2) sociální diferenciace a (3) komparativní metody a globalizace (Klein and Murcott 2014: 4-14). Tyto body lze chápat jako urči-

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té strukturální doplnění symbolické a kulturní interpretace fenoménů spojených s jídlem a jeho konzumací, které nás při čtení všech esejí provázejí. První bod shrnuje tendenci zohlednění vlivu ekonomických systémů, jako je produkce a distribuce zboží. Vývoj těchto systémů a zejména technologický pokrok a inovace mají silné dopady na možnosti skladování, šíření a celkové množství dostupných statků (Klein and Murcott 2014: 4-6), ale i na reprodukci praktik souvisejících se stolováním či podobu jídel a národních kuchyní, jejichž proliferace a reprodukce byla podmíněná vznikem a šířením kuchařek (Sobral 2014: 108-134), na což upozorňuje již Goody (1982: 192-193). Význam ekonomických faktorů a jejich vliv na sociální život a uspořádání společností lze demonstrovat například na zvyšování produktivity výrobních faktorů, které dalo postupně vzniknout fenoménu konzumerismu. Masová produkce exponenciálně znásobila dostupnost a množství historicky vzácných produktů (jako například maso, koření, exotické ingredience), které byly zpravidla dostupné jen nejvyšším společenským třídám. Ekonomické procesy lze takto spojit se subverzí a dekonstrukcí tradičních, třídních a sociálních hierarchií. Tento moment (respektive jeho odraz v oblasti tematiky jídla) kniha reflektuje zejména v oblasti interakčně orientovaných, mikrostrukturálních perspektiv, jež zachycují procesy vyjednávání a performance sociální pozice (Abbots 2014: 87-107). Druhý bod pojí procesy industrializace a globalizace v oblasti jídla s vyjádřením a definicí sociálních hierarchií či identit (Klein and Murcott 2014: 6-7). Diskutována jsou různá teoretická východiska v pohledu na diferenciaci, stabilitu či dynamiku sociálních hierarchií a jejich manifestaci v praktikách stolování, konzumace jídla atp. (foodways). Určitý posun v porovnání s Goodyho přístupem ke třídě, kde je vztah k jídlu a s ním souvisejícím praktikám konceptualizován Weberovým pojetím životních stylů (Goody 1982: 93), lze spatřit ve skutečnosti, že úvahy o třídě jsou spojeny s konotacemi jako performace třídy (viz např. Staples 2014; Abbots 2014). Některé eseje tak lze chápat jako určité rekontextualizace a rekonceptualizace Goodym zavedených problémů v modernějších teoretických přístupech. Kniha však nepředkládá jen staré problémy v novém světle, ale díky etnografické orientaci přináší i nové empirické poznatky. Třetí bod akcentuje význam globálních migračních toků napříč i v rámci národních států a procesu globalizace, který již byl částečně nastíněn. Globalizace, která ve svých důsledcích smršťuje svět a časové vzdálenosti (Giddens 1991: 2123), vytváří nové možnosti míšení nejrůznějších etnických či národních vlivů, které vysoce navyšují komplexitu dynamiky současného světa. V tomto ohledu kniha naráží například na tematiku kosmopolitních versus lokálních praktik spojených s jídlem a stravováním obecně označovaných jako foodways. Zajímavým přínosem v této oblasti je diskuse efektu globalizace na oblast lokálních způsobů. Již přebal knihy avizuje, že dílo nabízí řadu příkladů těchto praktik, které odporují globalizační tezi o jejich rozpadu. Ukázkou může být esej analyzující dopad

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globalizace na rozvoj nových business modelů - konkrétně franšízového modelu rychlého občerstvení (Abbots 2014). Autor zde ukazuje, že expanze řetězců jako KFC na ekvádorský trh nevytlačila tradiční kuchyni, comida típica, jak by se dalo očekávat, ale dala jí vlastně nové prostředky reprodukce, díky čemuž vznikly restaurace rychlého občerstvení nabízející tamější klasickou kuchyni (Abbots 2014: 87-105). Přes tyto společné body se jednotlivé eseje vzájemně liší. Některé jsou více historicky popisné, zatímco jiné jsou převážně sociologicky analytické. Příkladem prvního typu esejí může být studie pojednávající o kulturní biografii vepřového masa v Číně (Watson 2014: 25-44), která shrnuje proměnu jeho kulturního významu v postupném časovém vývoji a v kontextu nejrůznějších proměn společnosti. Vepřové maso bylo historicky vždy velmi vzácným statkem, který byl konzumován zejména ritualizovanou formou při svátečních událostech. Ty zároveň sloužily jako určitý distribuční systém, jenž rozděloval limitované množství masa mezi konkrétní jednotlivce na základě jejich statusu, věku a celkové pozice v rodokmenové hierarchii (Watson 2014: 31). Tento stav byl narušen až zlomovým momentem, který přišel s tzv. open door policy konce 20. století, kdy se ze sledované oblasti Pearl River Delta stává komerční a industriální region (ibid.: 35). Podpůrným procesem byl zároveň technologický pokrok v oblasti rozvoje možností skladování a distribuce masa, což vedlo k bezprecedentnímu růstu jeho spotřeby (ibid.: 35). Radikální proměny technologické sféry musejí mít nutně své implikace v oblasti symbolického významu vepřového masa, jelikož jeho konzumaci uvádějí do nových kontextů. Navzdory globalizačnímu tlaku kulturní rozměr vepřového masa, jak autoři dokládají, nemizí, dochází však k jeho proměně. Díky masifikaci spotřeby se řada symbolických významů spojených s vepřovým masem umenšila. Na druhou stranu vznikají nové oblasti, v nichž se jeho symbolický význam zvyšuje. Jelikož je vepřové maso stále obtěžkáno významy spojenými se slávou i krušností minulosti, buduje si roli například v oblasti politiky identit (Watson 2014: 37-38), kdy je při nejrůznějších politických aktech užíváno jako pojítko s historií. Osobně preferuji druhý typ esejí, které se ve svých východiscích často hlásí ke konkrétním teoretickým pozicím, jimž následně přispívají empirickou evidencí. Nicméně pro omezený rozsah se jedná spíše o ilustraci problematiky než o její teoretický rozvoj. Takto například J. Staples studuje proměnu indické kastovní společnosti v kontextu praktik spojených s jídlem (Staples 2014). Autor v ní postuluje, že nazírání Indie prostřednictvím kastovního členění zastírá celou řadu dalších hierarchií, jako je třída, gender či věk (Staples 2014: 66), které se vzájemně různým způsobem překrývají. Již z tohoto tvrzení je zřetelné, že esej se nekloní k tradičnímu přístupu ke třídě jako sociální klasifikaci vznikající na podkladě socio-ekonomických nerovností (viz Šanderová 2000: 25), ale zaměřuje se na oblast významů, performace a vyjednávání třídních pozic. Strukturalistická perspektiva je explicitně odmítnuta (Staples 2014: 66) a jídlo a s ním spojené praktiky je chápáno jako

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prostředek vyjednávání či subverze různých sociálních kategorií (ibid.: 66). Goodyho vliv lze spatřit v kontextu, v němž je interpretována pozorovaná transformace od kasty ke třídě. Tímto kontextem jsou ekonomické liberalizační reformy nastupující v 90. letech a efekt globalizace (ibid.: 66), což je v současných etnografiích asijského regionu chápáno jako hnací síla vniku střední či konzumní třídy (Saavala 2003; Corbridge and Harriss 2000 in Staples 2014: 66). Sledovaný fenomén vnáší do rigidních kastovních struktur fluidní prvek, který umožňuje či předpokládá vyšší míru svobodné vůle ve vyjednávání sociální pozice. Autor na řadě konkrétních příkladů (jako je třeba konzumace zahraničních sodových nápojů mladou generací) ukazuje, že jídlo skutečně mlží tradiční sociální hranice (Staples 2014: 81-83). Díky propojení se zmíněnými Goodyho myšlenkami je symbolický rozměr jídla a stravovacích praktik rámován rozměrem materiálním, který je zastoupen analýzou ekonomických procesů, jež v podstatě diskutovanou společenskou změnu facilitovaly. Ne všichni autoři zastoupení v recenzované knize se však opírají striktně o Goodyho. Takovou výjimkou může být esej S. Mennella. Zabývá se v ní konstrukcí strachu a nedůvěry v některé typy jídel například kvůli zažívacím potížím, jež údajně způsobovaly (Mennell 2014: 135-158). Zmíněné obavy Mennell považuje za relativně rozšířený jev v Anglii 19. a 20. století (ibid.: 136-137); jsou chápány jako mechanismus osvojení morální disciplíny a tělesné sebekontroly. Po vzoru N. Eliase autor interpretuje dobový diskurz obav, tvořený expertním pohledem medicíny, jako součást civilizačního procesu (Mennell 2014: 152, viz Elias 2012), nikoliv jako nezávislou proměnnou. Esej tedy vybočuje z celku svým přihlášením se k významně odlišným teoretickým perspektivám. Avšak přispívá k celkové pestrosti diskutovaných problémů a demonstruje, že problematiku jídla lze nahlížet ve velmi odlišných teoretických rámcích. Eseje obsažené v knize odrážejí celou řadu témat od globální dynamiky sociálních vztahů až po vnitřní fungování etablovaných společností, kdy jsou řešena témata konstrukce mezitřídní solidarity prostředním redistribučních praktik vzácných statků (Watson 2014). Díky šíři svého záběru kniha poskytuje i řadu etnografických vhledů. Knihu lze číst jako ukázku aplikace nejrůznějších sociologických a antropologických konceptů, která zároveň odkazuje na širší teoretická dilemata sociální teorie, přičemž sama zvládá překlenout vzájemné třecí plochy symbolického a materialistického úhlu pohledu. Určitým paradoxem je skutečnost, že krátkou předmluvu k recenzované knize napsal sám Jack Goody, který 16. července loňského roku zemřel ve věku nedožitých 96 let. Předmluva k práci vydané na jeho počest se tak stává jedním z posledních autorových textů.

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BIBLIOGRAFIE Abbots, Emma-Jayne. 2014. „The Fast and the Fusion: Class, Colonialism and the Remaking of Comida Típica in Highland Ecuador.“ In Food Consumption in Global Perspective: Essays in the Anthropology of Food in Honour of Jack Goody, edited by Jakob A. Klein and Anne Murcott, 87-107. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Albala, Ken, ed. 2013. Routledge International Handbook of Food Studies. London: Routledge. Anderson, Eugene Newton. 2005. Everyone Eats: Understand Food and Culture. New York: New York University Press. Clark, Gracia. 2014. „From Fasting to Fast Food in Kumasi, Ghana.“ In Food Consumption in Global Perspective: Essays in the Anthropology of Food in Honour of Jack Goody, edited by Jakob A. Klein and Anne Murcott, 45-64. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Corbridge, Stuart, and John Harriss. 2000. Reinventing India: Liberalization, Hindu Nationalism and Popular Democracy. Cambridge: Polity Press. Dirks, Robert. 1988. „Annual Rituals of Conflict.“ American Anthropologist 90 (4): 856870. Douglas, Mary. 1966. Purity and Danger. New York: Praeger. Elias, Norbert. 2012. On the Process of Civilization. Dublin: UCD Press. Ember, Melvin, and Carol R. Ember. 1994. „Prescriptions for Peace: Policy Implications of Cross-Cultural Research on War and Interpersonal Violence.“ Cross-Cultural Research 28 (4): 343-350. Fox, Richard G. 2002. „The Study of Historical Transformation in American Anthropology.“ In Anthropology, by Comparison, edited by Andre Gingrich and Richard G. Fox. London and New York: Routledge, 167-184. London and New York: Routledge. Gabaccia, Donna R. 1998. We Are What We Eat: Ethnic Food and the Making of Americans. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Gane, Nicholas. 2005. „Max Weber as Social Theorist: Class, Status, Party.“ European Journal of Social Theory 8 (2): 211-226. Giddens, Anthony. 1991. Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age. Cambridge: Polity Press. Goody, Jack. 1982. Cooking, Cuisine and Class: a Study in Comparative Sociology. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Chitakunye, David, and Pauline Maclaran. 2008. „The Everyday Practices Surrounding Young People‘s Food Consumption.” Young Consumers 9 (3): 215-227. Klein, Jakob A. 2014. “Cooking, Cuisine and Class and the Anthropology of Food.” In Food Consumption in Global Perspective: Essays in the Anthropology of Food in Honour of Jack Goody, edited by Jakob A. Klein and Anne Murcott, 1-24. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Klein, Jakob A., and Anne Murcott, eds. 2014. Food Consumption in Global Perspective: Essays in the Anthropology of Food in Honour of Jack Goody. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1965. „Le triangle culinaire.“ L‘Arc 26: 19-29.

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Lockwood, William G., and Yvonne R. Lockwood. 2000. „Finnish American Milk Products in the Northwoods.“ In Milk: Beyond Dairy, edited by Harlan Walker. Symp. Food Cookery: 232-239. Mallery, Garrick. 1888. „Manners and Meals.“ American Anthropology 1 (3): 193-207. Mennell, Stephen. 2014. „Indigestion in the Long Nineteenth Century: Aspects of English Taste and Anxiety, 1800 – 1950.“ In Food Consumption in Global Perspective: Essays in the Anthropology of Food in Honour of Jack Goody, edited by Jakob A. Klein and Anne Murcott, 135-158. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Mintz, Sidney W., and Christine M. Du Bois 2002. „The Anthropology of Food and Eating.“ Annual Review of Antropology 31: 99-119. Saavala, Minna. 2003. „ Auspicious Hindu Houses. The New Middle Classes in Hyderabad, India.“ Social Anthropology 11 (2): 231-247. Smith, William Robertson. 1889. Lectures on the Religion of the Semites. New York: Appleton. Sobral, José Manuel. 2014. „The High and the Low in the Making of a Portuguese National Cuisine in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries.“ In Food Consumption in Global Perspective: Essays in the Anthropology of Food in Honour of Jack Goody, edited by Jakob A. Klein and Anne Murcott, 108-134. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Solomon, Michael et al. 2006. Consumer Behaviour: European Perspective. New York: Pearson Education Limited. Staples, James. 2014. „Civilizing Tastes: From Caste to Class in South Indian Foodways.“ In Food Consumption in Global Perspective: Essays in the Anthropology of Food in Honour of Jack Goody, edited by Jakob A. Klein and Anne Murcott, 65-86. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Šanderová, Jadwiga. 2000. Sociální stratifikace: problémy, vybrané teorie, výzkum. Praha: Nakladatelství Karolinum Trankell, Ing-Britt. 1995. Cooking, Care, and Domestication: a Culinary Ethnography of the Tai Yong, Northern Thailand. Sweden: Uppsala University Press. Watson, James L. 2014. „Meat: A Cultural Biography in (South) China.“ In Food Consumption in Global Perspective: Essays in the Anthropology of Food in Honour of Jack Goody, edited by Jakob A. Klein and Anne Murcott, 25-44. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Zubaida, Sami. 2014. „Drink, Meals and Social Boundaries.“ In Food Consumption in Global Perspective: Essays in the Anthropology of Food in Honour of Jack Goody, edited by Jakob A. Klein and Anne Murcott, 209-223. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Kristián Šrám [email protected] Katedra sociologie Institut sociologických studií Fakulta sociálních věd Univerzita Karlova v Praze http://iss.fsv.cuni.cz 142

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Editorial Board CARGO – Journal for Cultural and Social Anthropology ISSN 1212-4923 (print) ISSN 2336-1956 (online) Publication Frequency: biannually Symmetrical Anthropology

Tatiana Bužeková (Comenius University in Bratislava) Hana Červinková (University of Lower Silesia, Institute of Ethnology, The Czech Academy of Sciences, v. v. i.) Jakub Grygar (Charles University in Prague, Institute of Ethnology, The Czech Academy of Sciences, v. v. i.) Ema Hrešanová (University of West Bohemia) Bob Kuřík (Charles University in Prague) Adéla Souralová (Masaryk University) Edit Szénássy (Charles University in Prague) Zdeněk Uherek (Institute of Ethnology, The Czech Academy of Sciences, v. v. i.) Technical Editor

Cargo is a peer-reviewed journal published by the Czech Association for Social Anthropology (CASA). Cargo focuses on theory-and-practice of ethnographic research, critical discussion of anthropological theory, and on ethical issues of producing anthropological knowledge. The journal publishes academic articles, interviews with key scholars in anthropology, and texts debating methods of teaching anthropology. Cargo seeks to present materials that are innovative, challenging, and sometimes experimental. As a journal publishing texts in Czech, Slovak, and English, Cargo aims to reach scholars whose fieldwork and topics are close to geographical area of Central and East Europe.

Cargo is listed in the European Reference Index for the Humanities (ERIH), category NAT. This issue is supported by the Council of Scientific Societies of Czech Republic.

Anežka Jiráková (Charles University in Prague) Proofreadinig Benjamin Cope (European Humanities University) Editorial Advisory Board Michał Buchowski (Adam Mickiewicz University of Poznań and Europe-University Viadrina, Frankfurt / Oder) Chris Hann (Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology) Haldis Haukanes (University of Bergen) Krista Hegburg (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum) Martin Kanovský (Comenius University in Bratislava) Marcin Lubaś (Jagiellonian University, Krakow) Janusz Mucha (AGH University of Science and Technology, Krakow) Alexandra Schwell (University of Vienna) Maruška Svašek (Queen‘s University Belfast) Cargo Website Manager

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