Authors: Friederike Pank
Types: Concepts, Ethnography, Observations
Location: Germany
Themes: Capitalism, Deindustrialization, Depopulation, Extractivism, Meaning, Place, Postsocialism, The Future
Authors: Dace Dzenovska, Dominic Martin, Volodymyr Artiukh
Location: Latvia, Russia, Ukraine
Emptiness is a term used by residents of eastern Latvia to describe life in places that are losing their constitutive elements, such as people, jobs, schools, shops, and transport connections. In this article, we transform the emic term “emptiness” into a portable analytic and undertake ethnographic comparison of resonant processes and experiences in eastern Latvia, eastern Ukraine, and the Russian Far East. We argue that emptiness is both a historical formation and a novel and increasingly common spatial coordinate in the shifting landscape of political and economic power. It is also a possibility for theory-building from the postsocialist periphery about the contemporary spatial configurations of power and forms of life and politics that emerge in response to them.
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.