Authors: Friederike Pank
Types: Concepts, Ethnography, Observations
Location: Germany
Themes: Capitalism, Deindustrialization, Depopulation, Extractivism, Meaning, Place, Postsocialism, The Future
Authors: Dace Dzenovska
Drawing on Katherine Verdery’s Transylvanian villagers and fieldwork in Latvia, this article discusses triangulation as an imperial power device whereby one actor makes an alliance with another to influence a third. The social and political field within which triangulation is deployed is not a flat world of nation-states or networks, but a three-dimensional social and political field. The actors involved are not of the same kind (e.g., ethnic groups or nation-states), nor are they arranged in binary pairs (e.g., colonizer and the colonized). Most importantly, triangulation is not a power device deployed solely by the empire’s agents. It is also used by subjects of empire to pursue their own ends.
92-year old Milda lives in a village next to a former railway station in the Latvian-Russian borderlands. During the Soviet period, it was a vibrant transportation hub. Residents recall 'wagons of watermelons' that passed through and 'crowds of summer residents' that came from Leningrad. Things have changed since then. This European Research Council-funded project aims to find out what these changes mean for the people who are living them, and what they reveal about forms of capitalism and political authority in postsocialist spaces and beyond.
If you would like to find out more about the project or contribute a blog on a resonant aspect of your own research to the Field Reports section of our website, please get in touch by writing to emptiness@anthro.ox.ac.uk.