Social Anthropology Seminar - Dr Ivan Rajkovic – (Max Planck)
| Dates: | 1 April 2019 |
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| Times: | 16:00 - 18:00 |
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| What is it: | Seminar |
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| Organiser: | School of Social Sciences |
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| 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
Travel and Contact Information
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2nd Floor Boardroom 2.016 / 017
Arthur Lewis Building
Manchester
