In conversation with Čarna Brković

I am about to embark on a new project called “Racial Socialism”, which focuses on humanitarian work in socialist countries to generate new perspectives on racialization. We understand well the role that racialization has played in capitalism, as the extraction of socio-economic value has often been justified by defining some people as ontologically – racially – different from others. We also know that people in socialist societies were racialized, too, as there is mounting historical evidence on this. However, little theoretical work has been done to explain what sense racialization made in socialist settings, which developed themselves in direct opposition to the extraction of socio-economic value. I hope to clarify this apparent contradiction by studying national Red Cross societies in the Socialist Federative Republic of Yugoslavia, the German Democratic Republic, and the People’s Republic of Bulgaria.

I am relatively promiscuous in my research and writing, as I read and let myself be inspired by discussions in cultural anthropology, European ethnology, cultural studies, area studies, and historical anthropology. In all of these fields, I search for “a-ha!” moments – these wonderful situations of Entfremdung, when something intimately known and familiar is seen with new eyes. I have to admit I am much more orderly when teaching, especially the introductory courses to the BA students. Nevertheless, I try to convince our students to let themselves be surprised by the everyday and to keep looking for weird and unexpected stories to tell about what seems known and familiar.

There is a fascinating body of literature in history and Eastern European area studies exploring attempts of nonaligned and socialist countries during the Cold War to build international infrastructures and global networks in economy, politics, and culture. Cultural studies of socialism show that the architecture of the international order was very much in development during the Cold War. The international order emerged through the multipolar discussions, disagreements, and collaborations. However, this was largely forgotten after the fall of socialism. Once capitalism became “the only game in town”, to cite TH Eriksen, many alternative attempts to integrate the world differently from (neo)liberal globalization were abandoned and forgotten. A critical examination of these experiments is vital in the current historical moment, in which the international order being twisted into something new, right before our eyes.

The case in point is the attempt of the Yugoslav Red Cross to convince the rest of the international Red Cross movement to revise some of its key principles, such as neutrality, to make more room for the humanitarian actors from newly decolonized countries. In my book, Realigning Humanitarianism, I examine this flawed and problematic attempt that shed light on alternative ways of imagining and practicing humanitarianism in a multipolar context. This could be of relevance for the actors in the humanitarian industry, who are today facing existential challenges.

Public anthropology for me means several things. First, studying themes and formulating questions that are relevant for people outside of the universities. Second, translating our scholarly arguments and research into contributions to the conversations in the public. This could mean writing OpEds in daily magazines; it can also mean sharing research in the interdisciplinary conversations among experts working in policy or social justice settings. Third, acting through teaching. Our Master students and I had the pleasure of writing together a short text on non-aligned approaches to humanitarianism for Alameda, a research institute that aims to, in its own words, “produce scientific knowledge that informs political decisions, humanitarian practices and intellectual production around the world, creating a synergy between empirical and theoretical matters”. We wrote this text after conducting archival research in Geneva, which was a joy in itself.

Let me go back to the question of teaching. The classroom provides a perfect venue both to do justice to the complexity of the stories we tell and to bring diverse people into a conversation on such stories. This is also what my colleague Marc Siegel and I have written about in a short piece for the journal Public Anthropologist – how as teachers and academics we “strive to create spaces where it is possible to sit with ambivalences of everyday life, while keeping in sight how these are ordered through death-inducing hierarchies”, particularly in the classroom, and particularly around the question of Germany’s responsibility towards the Palestinians.

As someone who grew up in socialist Yugoslavia as it was falling apart, I know how quickly things can change for the worse, and I recognize various worrying patterns in Germany today. We have responsibility as scholars and teachers to help our students make sense of the changing world, as well as to connect with one another and cultivate spaces where critical reflection and everyday life can go hand in hand.