Anthropological Journal of European Cultures

One of the great anthems of the romantically famed 1960s was Dylan’s ‘The times, they are a-changing’. But are they ever not? They certainly are right now, and radically. As a subject concerned with what one might, in slightly old-fashioned terms, describe as ‘the human condition’, anthropology ought to pay attention to and engage with these changes. That attention and engagement ought to be visible in the pages of its journals, and across the spectrum of journals, it certainly has been. For small journals like AJEC, this poses particular challenges. When the editorial board met last year during the EASA conference in Tallinn, we discussed these challenges and how best to respond to them. The journal has been doing exceptionally well in a difficult publishing climate, and the changes to the management and of format of AJEC, agreed in Tallinn and complemented by subsequent consultation, will build on this success.

Over the past decades, ‘participation’ has evolved as a key concept in a multitude of practice fields and discursive arenas, ranging from diverse political and economic contexts, through academic research, education and social work, urban planning and design, to arts institutions and artistic projects. While participation originally is a political concept and practice, it has long set out as a ‘travelling concept’ (Bal 2002). This special issue focuses on its travels between three fields of practice: the city, the arts and qualitative empirical research. Each of these practice fields over the past decades has yielded distinct understandings, objectives and methods in respect to participations, yet they also increasingly intersect, overlap and fuse with each other within specific practice contexts. What is more, many of the individual actors engaging in these initiatives on behalf of the city – from temporary projects to long-term collaborations – are not situated in one practice field only. Along with Jana König and Elisabeth Scheffel we understand them as ‘double agents’ (König and Scheffel 2013: 272–3) or even ‘multiple agents’, with simultaneous entanglements and commitments in more than one practice field.

The concept of participation is currently evoked by constituencies as varied as urban planners, local governments, universities and social movements. This coincides with a revival of participatory research methods in the social and cultural sciences. This article argues that the critical potential of participatory research methods should not be taken for granted in cognitive capitalism, where participation is as much an instrument for governmental regulation from above as it is a practice for democratic self-determination from below. First, the politics of participation from the emancipatory departures of the 1970s to today's revival are being discussed. Second, based on a long-term ethnographic study on the transnational Euromayday movement of the precarious, it is demonstrated how positioning the researcher using reflexive ethnography can support a critical research attitude through a process of reflexive hybridisation. In concluding, reflexive activist scholarship is outlined as a critical research attitude which encourages participatory knowledge production in a way that responds both to the field of activism and the field of academia.

This article explores the creation of new structures of participation and counter imaginaries within the city between the poles of arts and politics. On the basis of two case studies, one situated in the non-institutionalised artistic field and one in the non-institutionalised political field, I will explore narratives of a 'topography of the possible' in the city of Salzburg. Aiming to outline collage pieces of a topography of the possible and of counter-narrative in and of the city – the city is looked at in terms of collage, understood as overlapping layers of the three spatial dimensions materiality (physical space), sociability (social space) and the imaginary (symbolic space). These are understood as differing but interrelated spatial dimensions, each one unfolding forms of collective appropriation of a city. The focus lies on the creation of social relations and collective imaginaries on the micro-level of cultural and political self-organised initiatives, looked at under terms of narration and storytelling. My ethnographic project asks for the creative potentiality of a city and for the creative power of social relations and collective imaginaries.

The article discusses the process of setting up an exhibition presenting the fragments of alternative creative practices in 1980s Maribor (Slovenia) in an art museum. Within an interdisciplinary approach – art historical, museological and anthropological, which is in focus here – I try to understand how such a heritage of alternative creative practices is constructed and produced. Furthermore, the question of the anthropological potentiality of exhibition-making as a method for researching certain aspects of urban practices and development is considered. During the exhibition the art museum became a collaborative place for negotiating, mediating and constructing a heritage between an imagined community of (once) alternative individuals and collectives who participated in the exhibition, the museum staff, visitors and the media. The exhibition was echoed in some other events in the city as it also addressed contemporary artistic, cultural and social issues in Maribor.

A pragmatist study of art in regeneration, this article contributes a nuanced understanding of how art works as an ingredient of regeneration practice. To ameliorate post-industrial decline, commissioning art has become part of the work of the planner. In planning studies art is usually accounted for as completed artworks in relation to socio-economic agendas. But what of the effects produced in their making? Inspired by Actor-Network Theory, by tracing associations between human and non-human actors I reveal art as part of the translation process of regeneration. Drawing on a one-year ethnography of a regeneration office in North East England, I describe how art mediates collaboration with and in planning practice as a catalyst for professionals to re-consider their professional remit anew.

Since global interdependencies are a feature of urbanisation, Kwame Anthony Appiah's pleading for an education in 'cosmopolitan citizenship' is forward-looking. Given increasing mobility, handling different urban rhythms is as important as dealing with different languages. Actors explore how airports, supermarkets and cemeteries react to gait, respiration and heartbeat and how people adopt or impose rhythms. Such investigations might appear superficial from an academic perspective, but they bear resemblance to ethnographic fieldwork.

We (an actor and an anthropologist) refer to the shift from participant observation to collaboration proposed by George Marcus, and conjointly explore rhythmic aspects of urbanisation, which are difficult for scholars to grasp. Our aim is to expand anthropological concepts, methods and forms of representation. In reference to Paul Stoller, we consider acting methods a 'sensuous scholarship' and argue that rhythm allows us to explore preverbal aspects of feelings of belonging or alienation in the urban space.

When increasing numbers of people are obliged to spend increasing amounts of time in transit then nodes and hubs alongside major traffic corridors – where traffic comes to halt and exchange between actors en route happens – represent new forms of urbanity and public space, sites where both individuals' routes, routines, and rituals and political transitions and urban transformations can be explored. If we follow Henri Lefebvre's thesis that urbanity is no longer defined by density but by the degree of difference performed at specific places, then these nodes paradigmatically represent new forms of urbanity and public space. What remained largely unexplored in the investigations so far was emphasising these nodes as polyrhythmic ensembles, linked to their temporal adaptability – reacting on daily, weekly and seasonal rhythms of traffic flows – and their interdependence on one another.

This article explores how the fluctuating cartography of East and West and the varying degrees of perceptive Europeanness influence everyday practices of the people working in Polish state bureaucracies, who professionally advance European integration within a national framework. While an important part of their self-image is formed through the dissociation from cultural 'Eastness' and the backwardness they ascribe to fellow citizens, they still experience negative stereotyping and mistrust from the part of the EU-15 'Westerners'. Consequently, East-Central European state officials oscillate on the continuum between cultural 'East' and 'West' and constantly negotiate distance, relatedness and thus their own liminal position. By scrutinising how Polish state officials aim at positioning themselves on the mental map of Europe, this article shows that they attempt to escape the cultural pattern of negative stereotyping and mistrust by using a functionalist narrative of efficiency. This is a rhetorical strategy employed to cope with existing asymmetries.

A. Heijnen (2013), The Social Life of Dreams: A Thousand Years of Negotiated Meanings in Iceland (Münster: LIT), 290 pp., Pb: EUR29.90, ISBN: 978-3-643-90238-2.