Torsello, Davide - Pappová, Melinda: Social Networks in Movement. Time, interaction and interethnic spaces in Central Eastern Europe - Nostra Tempora 8. (Somorja-Dunaszerdahely, 2003)
Introduction
36 Davide Torsello and Melinda Pappová leaves the incoming group in relative isolation within the hosting communities. In Chapter Twelve Svašek presents her ethnographic material on Vesnice, a western Bohemian village where the changes brought about by de-collectivisation and the restitution of ownership rights profoundly affected the social map of the village. Changing relations of power and interpersonal networks are shaped in the everyday interplay between different actors: villagers, the village mayor, a Dutch investor and the Sudeten Germans, expelled from the community in the aftermath of World War Two. The chapter emphasises the role of emotional attitudes to ownership in the dynamics of villagelevel power relations and in the interweaving of the actors’ different sets of interest. Caldwell (Chapter Thirteen) provides insights into the organization structure of a food aid program (soup kitchen) in Moscow. The author analyses the functioning of informal networks within an urban environment increasingly characterized by discriminative discourse on race. It is by bringing together European and African aid workers with local (Russian) aid receivers that relationships of trust and solidarity are instituted and they extend beyond the sphere of the aid program. The Appendix illustrates a rather different, but nonetheless important, approach to the treatment of postsocialist societies. This section contains project presentations, and descriptions of the tasks of local scholars in research institutes (Klenovics and Šutaj) and in one regional historical archive (Nováková). These contributions provide the reader with a rare opportunity for understanding the ways in which access to local knowledge is mediated to the open public, and the problems and directives that lead researches in the field of social science at national and international levels. Finally, the volume ends with an Epilogue by Pine, who elegantly portrays the intellectual environment within which the Galanta workshop took place and the challenges that such event posed to scholars and local people.
