On Moral Substance and Visual Obscurity in Policies and Practice of State Expansion

What may the moment of territorial repossession and resettlement reveal to us about the practice of modern statehood? This paper discusses several key aspects of the Soviet occupation and incorporation of East Prussia in 1945-49: its juridical and administrative configuration into a zone of exception through militarized ‘closing’, the unequal invocation of citizenship rights and duties of Soviet settlers and the creation of legal and political limbo around German civilians, and the categorical production of social distinctions that separated the Soviet ‘us’ from the German ‘them’, together with a simultaneous articulation of a new, obscured identity—the spy. It demonstrates the thoroughly spatialized politics of settlement refracted through everyday experiences of travel, settlement, and cultural encounter. It argues on the basis of these findings that unintelligibility and ambiguity play a more complex role in statecraft than is often recognized

Evoking imaginaries : Art probing, ethnography and more-than-academic practice

I discuss and argue for combinations of artistic practice and cultural analysis, for meta- disciplinary and serendipitous endeavours that can entangle art and ethnographic research. These combinations can be understood as practices that are more-than-academic. I define the artistic side of this combinatory work as art probing. Art probes have a double function. First, they can instil inspiration and be possible points of departure for research, and, second, they can be used to communicate scientific concepts and arguments beyond the scope of academic worlds. According to this point of view, artistic and scientific output should be seen as provisional renditions oriented towards different audiences and as part of an extended open-ended art of inquiry. When working with this more-than-academic practice, a number of stakeholders are involved, ranging from academic professionals to art institutions, museums and visitors of art exhibitions, and performances. I will discuss how I understand ethnography as part of this process and in relation to practices of art probing