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Members' meetings
The group meets about once
a month, to discuss papers and fieldwork experiences, plan activities,
and get to know each other. Specialized workgroups (e.g. the
Research planning group) meet as necessary.
Teaching
Since 1999, we have organized a number of courses on East/Central Europe.
These have attracted the students that at present form the Østgruppe. For
details, see the course list. We plan to continue with a similar teaching cycle during the next few years, and hope that the
result will be a more or less continuous recruitment to the group.
The NORFA mini-network
Åke Norborg, Steven Sampson and Jonathan Friedman have established a
NORFA-funded
mini-network between Copenhagen, Lund and Vilnius. Activities include exchange of
teachers and students, and has later been expanded with a Vilnius-Copenhagen Socrates contract.
During the spring semester of 2001, Michael Whyte and Finn Sivert Nielsen sent two 4th-semester fieldwork
groups to Vilnius, along with a student who had herself recently returned from
MA fieldwork Vilnius. The experiment was not continued in 2002, but we hope
to return to it next year (2003).
Later, 10 students and two
teachers from Vilnius visited Lund and Copenhagen.
In 2001, we
established a bilateral Socrates agreement (involving exchange of students,
Ph.D.'s and teachers) between Copenhagen and Vilnius, which allows us to conduct
more long-term student exchanges than the NORFA agreement permits. We had our first Lithuanian Socrates exchange student in Copenhagen
during the Fall semester of 2001, and have since then had 5 more. We have had
several visits to Copenhagen by teachers in Vilnius (Vytis Ciubrinskas, and
Kristina Sliavaite, who is studying for her Ph.D. in Lund). While Sliavaite was
here in 2001, she conducted her own
research, participated in the Østgruppe's activities, and gave lectures at a course on
post-communist anthropology, where she gave two lectures.
The anthropological milieu in Lithuania is
small, but active. A new institute is being built up in Vilnius by young and
enthusiastic teachers, who are cooperating widely with sociologists and
ethnologists in their country. We think that our link with Vilnius may be
beneficial to their pioneering work, and with an MA student, a Ph.D.-project,
the methods course, the Socrates agreement, and a prospective
research project (see below), it seems that the link may prove
beneficial to us as well.
In 2002, it was decided to take steps to
expand the Vilnius-Lund-Copenhagen network to include the University of Riga,
and to conclude a Copenhagen-Riga Socrates contract as well. In Riga, the
responsible teacher is Klavs Sedlenieks. Also, it has been decided to
conclude a Socrates agreement with Bucharest, where the responsible teacher is
Professor Vintila Mihailescu. In addition, we have a Socrates agreement
with the University of Ljubljana.
In 2003, the
anthropology milieu in Vilnius has been going through dramatic changes, due to
problems with the established Department of Theory of History and History
of Culture, which has hitherto been the home of the anthropology department. The
future of the department is therefore uncertain. Our cooperation will be
continued, however, to the extent that this is possible. We hope that a new
academic affiliation for anthropology in Lithuania will soon be found.
Internet-assisted teaching
During the Fall semester of 2002, we held a cooperative,
Internet-assisted course of the kind originally
suggested by Birgitte Refslund
Sørensen: In Copenhagen, Finn Sivert Nielsen had a two-module course similar to the one done by Åke Norborg and Finn
Sivert Nielsen in 1999. In Vilnius,
Kristina Sliavaite gave a similar course, with a similar reading list and a
similar lecture series. During the course, students from both universities
worked together in groups of 2-4 (each group ideally including students from both
universities), to compose a (fictive) project proposal for fieldwork somewhere
in the region. The groups communicated and exchanged documents via the
Internet. In
renewing our application for the continuation of the Vilnius-Lund-Copenhagen
agreement in 2002, we budgeted with a teacher exchange in mid-semester,
in which the two student groups literally "exchanged teachers"
for a week; and with a small sum to allow the
Lithuanian students to rent time at Internet cafés.
Due to the problems experienced by
anthropology milieu in Vilnius (see above), there
were certain problems recruiting Lithuanian students to the course, and the
cooperative aspect of the course was less successful than we had hoped. 2-3
groups did, however, participate in the cooperation. In addition, two Lithuanian
and two Polish students, who were in Copenhagen on Socrates exchange agreements,
participated in the course along with the Danish students.
Micro-Perspectives on Post-Soviet Transformations
This is an
interdisciplinary Nordic network, initiated in Helsinki, with members in all the
Nordic countries, the Baltic countries and Russia. The Østgruppe is a
collective member of the network, and sent a representative (Jeppe Linnet) to
Helsinki for its founding meeting and a workshop. The network has applied for NORFA-money to
conduct a number of activities, e.g. a conference bringing micro-oriented social
scientists from the entire circum-Baltic region together. Though the first
application, in 2002, did not receive funding, a second application has recently
achieved a more positive result, including financing for a conference. The
contact person for the network i Anna-Maria
Salmi, Helsinki.
For the Østgruppe, one of
the chief attractions of the network has been that it has brought us into contact with Swedish and particularly Finnish colleagues. Finland has an old and rich tradition
in studies of Russia and the Baltic, which is poorly known in the rest of
Scandinavia.
In March 2003, a second
workshop was carried out in Helsinki, with a number of participants from the
Østgruppe. After this workshop the network was discontinued. Some of its
functions will be continued by the larger, Nordic and East /
Central European Network (NECEN) which the ECEG has initiated.
The 4th
Nordic Conference on the Anthropology of Post-Socialism
Nordic
Conferences on the Anthropology of Post-Communism have been held in 1994 (in Tromsø), in 1996 (in
Copenhagen), and in 1998 (in Bergen). The conferences,
which have mainly had Norwegian, Danish, and to some extent Swedish
participants, have focused heavily on MA and (to some extent) Ph.D. students.
Prominent international scholars (e.g. Piers Vitebsky, Ladislav Holy, Katherine
Verdery, Vintila Mihailescu) have lectured at the conferences, given feedback to students
presenting papers, and participated in the often lively discussions.
In April
2002, the
Østgruppe hosted the fourth conference in this series. The conference - entitled New Socio-Cultural Divisions in East /
Central Europe - was held in Copenhagen, and comprised three days of
lectures and workshops. Three speakers lectured at the conference:
Eight workshops
were held, at which each of the ca. 40 participants presented a paper. The invited lecturers circulated
between the workshops, offering advice and giving feedback to the presentations.
The 40 participants were mostly MA and Ph.D. students - from Denmark, Norway,
Sweden, Finland, Russia, Belarus, Bulgaria, Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Serbia
and Great Britain.
After the
Conference, the senior participants and lecturers met with the leadership of the Institute in
Copenhagen to discuss
future cooperation.
The Conference
received funding from The
Social Science Research Council of Denmark, The Humanities Research Council of
Denmark, the Institute
of Anthropology, University of Copenhagen, the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign
Affairs and other sources. The main application was signed by
Finn Sivert Nielsen, Jonathan Schwartz, Steven Sampson (Lund) and Thomas Hylland
Eriksen (Oslo), and accompanied by a recommendation from the Institute.
The 5th
Nordic Conference on the Anthropology of Post-Socialism
... will be held in Oslo,
Norway, in 2004.
NECEN - (Nordic and
East / Central European Network in Qualitative Social Research)
As a result of the
conference, it was decided to start a more extensive research network comprising
anthropologists and other qualatively oriented social scientists in the Nordic
and East / Central European countries. See the
network homepage for details.
Research plans
We are in the early
stages of planning a collective research project that would bring together the
interests of many of the group's participants. Hopefully, the project would
serve as an "umbrella" that could include other members of the NECEN
network as well. More information will be posted, as our plans become more
concrete.
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