Torsello, Davide - Pappová, Melinda: Social Networks in Movement. Time, interaction and interethnic spaces in Central Eastern Europe - Nostra Tempora 8. (Somorja-Dunaszerdahely, 2003)

Introduction

Introduction 31 social environment. Space and time are brought together by local actors as they make sense, in times of profound change, of their shifting ethnic and interethnic spaces (Tóth, Árendás, Uherek and Plochová, this volume), as they con­struct and deconstruct boundaries (Szarka, Liszka, this vol­ume), build and re-build processes of identification (Árendás, Muršič, this volume), adapt to enlarging contexts of action (Kappus, Weinerová, this volume), decide to trust and/or not to trust people and institutions (Caldwell, Torsello, this vol­ume) and conceptualise their social interaction in terms of emotional and/or rational attachment to their home place (Svašek, this volume). The fluidity that emerges out of the analysis of the postsocialist world is a result of people’s efforts to control instability of time (frequent social and polit­ical changes) and space (reconfiguration of borders and boundaries). The observers’ attempts to analyse the chang­ing realities and make this knowledge intelligible to interna­tional academic circles acquire meaning when this fluidity is taken into account and contextualized. One lesson that can be learned from this book is that the transformation of one half of the European continent is an ongoing process which grounds its complexity on the histori­cal features of the countries concerned. The resilience of past practices and ideas should not merely be rejected as burdensome, or as hampering the transition to democracy and "civil society”. By studying the changing value and func­tions of networks as they become recombined in time and space the reader gains a different view of the postsocialist world. This is an environment in constant change where, as in any other social context, change is introduced from “above” and mediated from "below” to be adapted to the range of everyday strategies and choices. The specificity of postsocialism is that the interweaving of these strategies and choices often has its grounds in practices that were, in the former regime, mainly kept at merely informal and under­ground levels. Therefore, as long as the influence of past (socialist) ideas and practices is felt by actors in their pres-

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