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
Property, power, and emotions 249 groups to construct particular images of their own individual and collective selves. The analysis thus regarded "emotion” as an inherently social process, even though emotions are often experienced by individuals as highly personal embodied feelings, and may help to create a strong sense of individual self. In addition to emotions, this paper also focused on identity as generated by different emotional subject-object discourses which have arisen in the Czech Republic as a result of postsocialist transformations. It showed how three conflicting narratives of ownership produced by the expellees, the Dutch entrepreneur, and the Social Democrat mayor and his supporters, reinforced distinct moral, legal, and political arguments concerning personal and collective ownership. Firstly, the expellee discourse of identity was based on the notion of a strong emotional connection of blood and soil in which subject and object merged into one single unit. Yet, as the analysis showed, almost none of the former inhabitants of Vesnice, even though they suffered from painful memories and feelings of loss and nostalgia, sided with the political aims of the Sudetendeutsche Landsmannschaft for Heimatrecht. The expellees from Vesnice played out their emotional discourse in the context of annual, religious ceremonies. With the help of local priests, they managed to symbolically appropriate the village within the socio-religious discourse of acceptance and reconciliation which served to contradict the political message of the Sudetendeutsche Landsmannschaft. When the new inhabitants of Vesnice were confronted with rapidly changing property relations after the introduction of a free market system in 1990, they reacted emotionally to foreign investors who sought to buy up land and real estate in the region. Some criticised the capitalist ideology of ownership because it did not give enough rights to the village as a collective unit, and thereby undermined their strong sense of identity and personal responsibility to the community which had been fiercely propagated by the Communists even if seldom adhered to. Others felt that their personal space was
