Authors: Friederike Pank
Types: Concepts, Ethnography, Observations
Location: Germany
Themes: Capitalism, Deindustrialization, Depopulation, Extractivism, Meaning, Place, Postsocialism, The Future
Authors: Dace Dzenovska
With the Russo-Ukrainian war, the language of decolonization has become central to scholarship on eastern Europe. Yet, residents of Lielciems in eastern Latvia find it hard to orient in a political field defined by the binary of colonized and the colonizer. They live in a place that is losing its constitutive elements due to a variety of other “de” processes – deindustrialization, depopulation, and devaluation. They live amidst absences rather than unwanted presences. They wish for someone – the Chinese, NATO, or the European Union – to establish some permanent structure that could bring back life to their place of residence. Otherwise, the place is doomed to empty out completely, and their children are destined to permanently settle abroad. Based on an ethnography of an emptying town, this article outlines the limits of the politics of decolonization and argues for the use of the lens of empire for analyzing the intersecting forms of power that shape Lielciems, Latvia and eastern Europe today.
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.