Torsello, Davide - Pappová, Melinda: Social Networks in Movement. Time, interaction and interethnic spaces in Central Eastern Europe - Nostra Tempora 8. (Somorja-Dunaszerdahely, 2003)
Epilogue
Epilogue 315 Epilogue Frances Pine Social networks, as the title of this volume suggests, extend across both place and time. In that sense, they are concerned with space, with movement in space, and with those particular and curious points where different groups, peoples, histories and cultures intersect or are contiguous. The relevance and usefulness of the concept have been comprehensively discussed by Profs Giordano and Wallace in the Preface, as has its history and recent application, and there is no need to elaborate on these issues here. Rather, in this Epilogue I would like to consider very briefly what the choice of subjects covered by these papers implies, and what we can learn from it. The papers were first presented at a workshop in a small town in Slovakia. For me it was a fascinating and quite exciting meeting, because it brought together anthropologists and other social scientists from several of the former socialist countries, and they outnumbered their colleagues from western universities. Not only the papers, but the ways in which the papers were presented, the languages used or not used, the problem (in both a practical and a political sense) of translation, and the discussions, often heated, which ensued, all gave clear indications of the strengths on which central and eastern European social scientists can draw, and the challenges which they have to face. First, the papers all address some aspect of social relations, as they are constructed and change over time, at the interstices of interethnic space, and/or with the fluidity of movement. In this region of central eastern Europe, where the conference took place and in which most of the papers were situated, these three themes are particularly evocative. Here borders have shifted historically, and people, sometimes indeed entire communities, have been moved with them, or have chosen or been forced to move across them. It
