Anthropological Journal of European Cultures

About a year ago – some of us had just met at the Göttingen congress of the International Society for Ethnology and Folklore (SIEF) and discussed the idea of a Festschrift for her ninetieth birthday – we heard of the sudden death of Ina-Maria Greverus, founder-editor of this journal. In his contribution to the twenty-fifth anniversary issue of AJEC, Ullrich Kockel had recounted how the founders of AJEC had ‘set out to bridge the various real and imagined gulfs between disciplines and approaches’ and how ‘successive editorial teams have, in different ways, tried to continue that original project while negotiating contemporary pressures’, noting that ‘[a]long the way, the founding spirit may sometimes have appeared ousted by the hegemonic criteria of academic respectability’ but proved resilient in the face of such pressures (Kockel 2012: 58). With this in mind, the editorial board discussed the idea of a special issue featuring contributions by members of the board past and present as well as others whose paths had crossed with Ina-Maria’s, and we decided to issue an ‘open-format’ call, encouraging a variety of reflexive, reminiscent, or otherwise discursive engagement with Ina-Maria, her work, and her influence – both academic and personal – on so many of us, of her own as well as of younger generations.

Is fieldwork as anthropologists do it simply a method among others? This article disagrees, drawing on the concept of “serendipity” as introduced by German scholar Ina-Maria Greverus. Beyond the prescribed way of any method, anthropology’s specificity articulates as “discovery”, in this case: an unexpected discovery of remains of the Soviet past in Estonia, through the author’s family life.

The emergence of modern scientific thought has been characterised by a separation from the realm of art. Among others, German anthropologist Ina-Maria Greverus since the 1970s, in the context of the worldwide critique of the discipline’s formats, pioneered new approaches to articulate anthropological work and findings with and through artistic practices.

In German academic Volkskunde of the 1970s, scholar Ina-Maria Greverus was a pioneer in several realms. As a woman and feminist, she challenged the discipline’s gender order, including its hidden gendered epistemology; as an early reader of international cultural anthropology, she transgressed nationalistically confined horizons, and her methodological openness created space for new formats that challenged false assumption of scientific objectivity and neutrality.

On the basis of their shared research and teaching on Sicily since the 1970s, the author contrasts his own Mediterraneanist approach and German scholar Ina-Maria Greverus’ utopian view of the European south as an outstanding experience of an intellectual encounter. Respectful debates of disputatious positions are a rare gift in the academic world of today.

With reference to anthropologist Ina-Maria Greverus’ pioneering analyses of human-environment relations since the 1970s, the article pushes the idea of Heimat further to the more processual concept of Beheimatung. This is especially relevant for an anthropology of the transnational worlds of (post-)migrant societies with their current negotiation of cross-border migration in the present and concerning colonial objects from the past in museums.

In the 1970s, scholar Ina-Maria Greverus was a pioneer in opening German Volkskunde towards international horizons. Her concept of human-environment interaction as “territoriality”, inspired by US-american cultural ecology, is reconsidered as an anthropology of the Anthropocene avant la lettre.

The author reconsiders German scholar Ina-Maria Greverus as a committed feminist supporter of female doctoral students and early career academics. Greverus acted as an innovator especially in the realms of anthropology and aesthetics, and initiated a new international dialogue forum with the Anthropological Journal or European Cultures, which she founded in 1990 together with Christian Giordano.

The Anthropological Journal of European Cultures, initiated by German scholar Ina-Maria Greverus together with Christian Giordano in 1990, played a central role in the fundamental changes that the hitherto more or less nationally confined European ethnologies have undergone since then. The journal mediated the intensifying exchange between eastern and western Europe, while its attempt to cross boundaries in particular between an anthropology of Europe and European ethnology remains key.

For good reasons, anthropology some decades ago deconstructed the Mediterraneanist picture of familialist societies in the South. However, this deconstruction unexpectedly had its political twin in Malta’s fight against corruption to meet the conditions for EU-membership in 2004. Drawing on a deeper concept of “territoriality”, introduced by anthropologist Ina-Maria Greverus, the article considers lately observed new variants of nationalist positions that paradoxically are deeply entwined with clientelistic dynamics against the state, culminating in the recent murder of critical journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia.

Around 2010, a shift in the EU-understanding of austerity took place – from a future-orientated vision based on concepts of solidarity, cohesion and subsidiarity, to a crisis-driven present shaped around the imperatives of immediate fiscal discipline and debt repayment. This has had contradictory effects, producing widespread divisions, disunity and rising nationalism across Europe on one hand, and new forms of social solidarity and resistance on the other.

Ethnic Muslims and the ‘Halal Movement’ in Tatarstan

For migrants coming from Central Asia to Moscow, the Cathedral Mosque functions as a central hub to organise their life in the Russian capital. The reason for this is not predominantly their faith or religion. Rather, this place of worship opens a space in which these mostly Tajik people translate their status from that of a stranger exposed to xenophobia and distrust to the respected position of a proper Muslim.

In Russia, the division between a ‘folk’/‘ethnic’ and ‘doctrinal’ Islam is linked to the Soviet attempts to weaken scholarly religious knowledge. Today, similar to various regions of the Muslim world, certain Tatar Muslims with the madhhab system (Muslim schools of jurisprudence), engage in constructing a localised orthodoxy, an Islamic orthodoxy based on the universal foundations of Islam, while striving to integrate folk customs and traditions of ‘traditional Islam’ that formerly were denounced as state-loyal piety.

Like all the elites of post-Soviet Muslim countries, the political elite and religious officials in Russia have been in the search of a moderate and strictly national Islamic identity, to keep the Muslim population of Russia separate from Arab or Turkish versions of Islam that could be politicised and thus had the potential to undermine the state structure. ‘Tatar traditional Islam’ emerged through this framework.

In Tatarstan in the 1990s and early 2000s, a switch took place from an identity primarily based on ethnicity, to an identity more strongly informed by religious belonging. This happened in official political and scholarly Islamic discourse as well as in everyday Muslim life, and is linked to different variants of Tatar nationalism.

A nuanced reading of the current situation in the North Caucasus reveals two main trends that articulate in confrontation with Russian nationalism. First, in the eastern part of the region, particularly in Dagestan, Chechnya, and Ingushetia, a shift from nationalism to Islam has taken place, and the ties between religion and political machine are strong and visible. Second, and by contrast, in the western part of the region, including Adygea, Kabardino-Balkaria, Karachayevo-Cherkessia, and North Ossetia, nationalism has increased, and the political elites seldom practice religion publicly.

Since the beginning of the Syrian War, ties between Russia and the Shia sphere are primarily examined in terms of geopolitics, while little attention is being paid to the indigenous as well as immigrant Shia populations in Russia itself. Depending on the motives and circumstances that brought and bring various individuals and groups to more actively-professed Ja’fari Shi’ism, these can become the most active champions of its cause, or of social movements inspired by this persuasion. As such, the Shia element in Russia might become more relevant and present than its low-profile minority state suggests.

Books

Azra Hromadžić (2015), Citizens of an Empty Nation: Youth and State- Making in Postwar Bosnia-Herzegovina (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press), 248 pp., $59.95, ISBN 9780812247008.

Alexandra Schwell, Nina Szogs, Małgorzata Kowalska, Michał Buchowski (eds.) (2016), New Ethnographies of Football in Europe: People, Passions, Politics (London: Palgrave Macmillan), 241pp., €72.99, ISBN: 978-1-137-51696-1.

Thomas Sikor, Stefan Dorondel, Johannes Stahl, and Phuc Xuan To (2017), When Things Become Property: Land Reform, Authority and Value in Postsocialist Europe and Asia: Max Planck Studies in Anthropology and Economy (Oxford: Berghahn), 250 pp., $120.00/£85.00, ISBN 978-1- 78533-451-1.

Helena Wulff (2017), Rhythms of Writing: An Anthropology of Irish Literature (London: Bloomsbury), 156 pp., £76.50, ISBN 978-1-4742-4413-8.

Films

Anja Unger, director (2016), Carnaval à Villingen: la cinquième saison, produced by ARTE, Le Film à la patte and L’Envol, 52 minutes.

Barbed Wire Fence and Viennese Coffee Houses: A Review of the 2017 Edition of Ethnocineca International Documentary Film Festival Vienna