Confronting Risk in the Anthropology of South-East Europe

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

Risk has not been a popular topic in area studies, even though three decades of postsocialism has brought wave-after-wave of new risks to the peoples of Eastern Europe, Russia, and Eurasia. Risk has not been a popular topic within anthropology either —not within the discipline as a whole, and not among ethnographers of East and South-East Europe. “Risk” has hardly even been discussed during the past decade when themes like “crisis”, “precarity” and “uncertainty” have drawn attention, even though the concept is robustly developed within some social scientific fields (e.g. economics), has had its own named subfield since the 1970s (anthropology of risk), and has drawn the attention of leading sociologists (Anthony Giddens) and anthropologists (Mary Douglass). Why have we ignored it for so long? In this panel, we re-visit our own long-term ethnographic research projects in South-East Europe and ask what we can learn about imagined geographies by confronting risk. We confront the theme of “risk”: through attention to the kinds of risk that our informants perceived in their lives at various times; by considering how past experiences of risk inform new responses; by conceptualizing the roles of culture and memory; and by understanding how our own views of risk changed through fieldwork. This panel was under development before war in Ukraine began, but now has additional urgency.

Sub Unit

• Anthropology/Cultural Studies

Chair

• Margaret Hiebert Beissinger, Princeton U

Papers

• Living on Fault Lines: How Aging Women and Men Anticipate the Threat of Old-Age Poverty in Bulgaria - Detelina Tocheva, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (France)

• The Risk of 'Losing Our State': Macedonian Anxieties and Domestic Mobilizations in 'Dangerous Times' - Miladina Monova, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences (Bulgaria)

• The Risk of Witnessing: Soviet Childhood in the Gulag between Memory Practices and Knowledge Production - Ludmila D. Cojocaru, Moldova State U / National Museum of History of Moldova (Moldova)

• Dance, Work, Pray: Living with 'Total Crisis' on the Banks of the Nistru - Jennifer R. Cash, Nanyang Technological U (Singapore)

Discussants

• Ljupco S. Risteski, Ss.Cyril and Methodius U (Macedonia)

• Deema Kaneff, U of Birmingham (UK)

Session Manager

• Jelena Dureinovic, U of Vienna (Austria)