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Social Anthropology Seminar - Dr Ivan Rajkovic – (Max Planck)

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Dates:1 April 2019
Times:16:00 - 18:00
What is it:Seminar
Organiser:School of Social Sciences
Speaker:Dr Ivan Rajkovic
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Social Anthropology Seminar

Monday, 1st April 2019

Dr Ivan Rajkovic – (Max Planck)

“Balkanizing Sahlins: National Humiliation and Stranger Capitalism in a Semi-Periphery”

Focusing on a Serbian town in which an iconic car plant has been privatized by FIAT, in this talk I will read Balkanist humiliations through Oceanic eyes, and vice versa. Recalling how the factory was managed in the past, the town inhabitants appropriate its privatisation into a local theory of a self-destructive national 'we’: one that threatens its own existence. Scorning Italian management as ‘bigger conmen than we are’, they weave stories of Western Europe as a place of social cohesion and economic longevity, what I call the ‘genealogical West’. I argue that such desires for ‘proper capitalists’ develop not simply out of geoeconomic dependence and market hegemony, but as internal critical commentaries. They summon a Western privatiser as a strict, yet necessary external regulator of ‘us’ and ‘our own’ mishandling of the common good - in local terms, as more of a ‘doma?in’ (traditional pater familias) than ‘us’. This reveals balkanism as a variation of what Sahlins called ‘humiliation’ moment in social change: a point at which people start to see their way of life as flawed, and actively debase it. Putting privatisations in continuity with echoes of agricultural economy and Yugoslav worker-management , humiliation ensures the legitimacy of state-mediated foreign capital. A foreign proprietor becomes a Stranger-Doma?in, one who saves ‘our own’ property by becoming the definite owner of it. Such cosmoeconomic reform, however, has its specificities in the semi-periphery: a space where boundaries between autochthony and alterity are relative, Stranger-Kings disappoint, and the cargo of market salvation is repeatedly deferred. Here, both power and hierarchy are seen as coming from afar. Second Floor Boardroom 2.016 / 017 Arthur Lewis Building

Time 4:15 to 6:00pm

(Tea and coffee available outside the room from 4:00pm)

ALL WELCOME!

Speaker

Dr Ivan Rajkovic

Role: Speaker

Organisation: Max Planck

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2nd Floor Boardroom 2.016 / 017
Arthur Lewis Building
Manchester

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Val Lenferna

0161 275 4799

val.lenferna@manchester.ac.uk

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