Russia as Europe's other

democracy; East-Central Europe; EU-East-Central Europe; European public space; history

Response to the roundtable

I should like to thank my four interlocutors for their thoughtful responses. I will touch only briefly on the comments made by Chris Brown and Jon Mercer, since we have few outstanding issues, and concentrate on what, not unexpectedly, emerges as the major bone of contention, namely the status of physiology or biology relative to a social science like ours. I agree with Chris Brown that there is perhaps too much self-reflection relative to other kinds of analysis within the discipline, but note in my defence that the genre of the inaugural is particularly inviting of this kind of stock-taking. We only seem to have one disagreement, namely the extent to which the roads not travelled in international relations should be studied. I may be more positive on this front, both for their inherent interest (what they can tell us about variation in relations between human polities) and also for the genealogical reason that systems tend to retain the memory of negative choices. These may, therefore, prove to be important later on. While I remain sceptical about Searle’s distinction between brute and institutional facts – what is so brute about the law of gravity in societies that do not acknowledge it?1 – I am in agreement with the general thrust of Jon Mercer’s argument. Neurosciences are important for us because they can tell us more about what is common to psychological systems, and so makes it easier to pin down psychological and social variation.2 Mercer also notes, contra Johnson, that psychology and biology are indeed causally linked, but that the psychological realm is ontically separate. I concur..

European Identity and Its Changing Others

-Taking its clue from Finnish experiences with identity politics, this lecture introduces the concept of collective identity. Collective identity is about forging an acting ‘we’. It constitutes the polis, and is therefore basic to any politics. Constituting the polis is a relational act: the group in question constitutes itself by drawing up and maintaining boundaries towards other groups. Drawing on these insights, the bulk of the lecture discusses European identity in term of Europe’s relations to some of its constituting others. Pointing to the importance of not sealing itself off from its Muslim citizens and neighbours, the lecture ends with a plea for Turkish EU membership

Europeans and the steppe: Russian lands under the Mongol rule

It was endemic on the medieval religious frontier not to admit consciously that one had borrowed institutions from conquered or conquering peoples of a different religion. This was true of Crusader Valencian 13th-century Spain about Islamic Moorish institutions, of the Arab Umayyad dynasty from the 7th century or the Ottoman empire from the 14th century about Byzantine institutions, and of the French Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem from the 12th century about Islamic institutions (Halperin 2000: 238)

Pop goes religion: Harry Potter meets Clifford Geertz

"The success of the Harry Potter phenomenon may be seen as co-constitutive of the general resurfacing of religion in Europe and the United States. The first part of this article introduces Geertz’s definition of the religious, which includes magic as ‘slippage’. The second part draws on historical work on witchcraft in early-modern Europe to demonstrate that Harry’s world shares so many traits with the lifeworlds of that period that its self-presentation as being an evolved version of those worlds is a credible one. The article speculates that the observable de-differentiation between the religious and consumption of popular culture artefacts such as Harry Potter may herald an individualization of the religious that is of a kind with the individualization of magic observed by Mauss. It is closely tied to the duality between individualized reading and mass-medialized social consumption, and suits the post-sovereign subject." [author's abstract

Uses of the self: two ways of thinking about scholarly situatedness and method

If the scholarly self is irretrievably tied to the world, then self-situating is a fruitful source of data production. The researcher becomes a producer, as opposed to a collector, of data. This how-to paper identifies three analytical stages where such self-situating takes place. Pre-field; there is autobiographical situating; in-field, there is field situating, and post-field, there is textual situating. Each of these stages are presented in terms of the three literatures that have done the most work on them -- feminism, Gestalt, and poststructuralism – and a number of how-to examples. We illustrate with a number of how-to examples. In conclusion, we discuss how two different methodological commitments to situatedness, which Jackson (2010) dubbed reflexivist and analyticist, give rise to two analytically distinct ways of using the scholarly self for data production. Reflexivists and analyticists approach data production from opposite ends of the researcher/informant relationship. Where a reflexivist researcher tends to handle the relation between interlocutor and researcher by asking how interlocutors affect her, an analyticist researcher tends to ask how the researcher affects them