Event overview
'National humiliation and stranger capitalism in a semi-periphery' with Ivan Rajković, Max Plank Institute for Social Anthropology. Part of spring term seminar series.
Focusing on a Serbian town in which an iconic car plant has been privatized by Italian FIAT, this talk examines Balkan 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 hegemony, but as internal commentaries. They summon a Western privatiser as a strict, yet necessary external regulator of ‘our own’ mishandling of the common good - in local terms, as more of a ‘domaćin’ (pater familias) than ‘us’. This reveals balkanism as a variation of what Sahlins called ‘humiliation’: a point at which people start to see their way of life as flawed and actively debase it. Putting privatisations in continuity with peasant household and Yugoslav worker-management, humiliation legitimises state-mediated foreign capital. A foreign proprietor becomes a Stranger-Domaćin, one who saves ‘our own’ by becoming the definite proprietorof it. Such cosmoeconomic reform, however, has some 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.
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 27 Mar 2019 | 4:00pm - 6:00pm |
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