Torsello, Davide - Pappová, Melinda: Social Networks in Movement. Time, interaction and interethnic spaces in Central Eastern Europe - Nostra Tempora 8. (Somorja-Dunaszerdahely, 2003)
Interaction, migration and change
230 Maruška Svašek requires examination of practical outcomes as well as ideals and moral discourses, and an appreciation of historical processes, both short-term and long-term. Katherine Verdery (1998: 161) has similarly claimed that property should be analysed “in terms of the whole system of social, cultural, and political relations, rather than through more narrowly legalistic notions such as ‘rights’ and ‘claims’”. Ownership not only constitutes subject-object relationships between owners and their possessions but also shapes specific connections between different social actors. In other words, property relations are dynamic social relations between people with regard to rights over certain “things” (cf. Hoebel 1966; Hann 1998). The wider, socio-historical and contextual approach to ownership has generated a number of revealing analyses of the ways in which the lives of individuals, families, and ethnic groups have been part of and affected by changing property relations in post-1990 Eastern Europe. To my knowledge, however, none of the authors have explicitly incorporated a focus on emotions in their theoretical perspective.3 By contrast, this paper argues that an anthropological perspective on ownership must necessarily include a theoretical focus on emotional dynamics. Without such a focus, the complexities of property-related behaviour cannot be fully understood (cf. Svašek 2000b, 2001; Leutloff 2002; Zerilli 2002). Emotions play a crucial role in most areas of social life, as noted by an increasing number of anthropologists who have focused on the social, cultural, and political dimensions of emotions in the past three decades (cf. Lutz and White 1986; Svašek 2002).4 In post-socialist Eastern and Central Europe in particular, the rapidly transforming socio-economic and political conditions have generated strong feelings of euphoria, hope, disillusionment, disappointment, jealousy and hatred (cf. Creed 1998; Verdery 1998; Svašek 2000a, 2000b; Müller 2002; Skrbiš 2002). These same feelings have also been evoked in response to and as part of changing property relations (cf. Leutloff 2002; Svašek 2002; Zerilli 2002).
