On Bodies in Flames and Nostalgia

During the spring break I open Facebook—Kristen Ghodsee posted a report on the fourth self-immolation case in Bulgaria. There will be more to come in the next month. The burning bodies bring to my mind protests of the 1970s in Eastern Europe. Flames of protest were spreading from one country to another. In Lithuania, in 1972 a nineteen-year-old Romas Kalanta set himself on fire in a public square in Kaunas. Authorities forced the family to bury Kalanta earlier than it was announced to avoid demonstrations. People still gathered and chanted “Freedom for Lithuania” and “Freedom for the hippies” as they walked through the city to commemorate Kalanta.

An elderly woman sits alone in the evening outside a major supermarket in Kaunas, Lithuania. She is knitting and selling a variety of goods. Photo courtesy Neringa Klumbyte

Post-socialist flames of protest resonate with socialist ones. But the protests of these days, carried out by people in Eastern European democratic states, are yet to be understood. People’s post-socialist discontent and grievances start in early 1990s, the years of rapid transformations, which took the lives of thousands. These lives are not counted in narrations of Eastern European revolutions of 1989, which, with the exception of Romania, are presented as peaceful. People who set themselves on fire like many others lived under new regimes of marginalization often glossed over in reports on rising GDP rates, opening of borders, liberalization of markets, and Europeanization.

Among many forms of post-socialist discontent is nostalgia. In 2004, Mitja Velikonja, the Slovenian sociologist, mimicking Churchill’s Cold War speech, ironically reflected that nostalgia for socialism descended from Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic as the Iron Curtain once did (Velikonja, 2004, Balcanis, 12-16, 37). Nostalgia has been increasingly documented among residents of villages and former industrial towns. But its boundaries cannot be delimited by space, class, and time. It gets more intense in some periods of time and recedes in others, punctuating all post-socialist decades.

In 2000s, in Lithuania, during the integration into the European Union and the rise of populist politics advancing neosocialist agendas, people’s longing embraced feelings of romance, pleasure, loss, irreversibility, and displacement. They spoke that it was better in Soviet times, certainly not because of terror and authoritarianism. Then, they remembered, fields were sown, schools in villages were open, they had jobs and money, and were able to go on vacation every year. Nostalgia was an embodied relation to history: people could not travel or buy their favorite foods. For some, warmth, light, and water was a luxury. Marija from Braziūkai burned candles instead of using electricity. The ceiling in the house was black, curtains were smoked up. Kazys from Domeikava heated only one room of his house and even there he wore his Soviet fur coat. Some pensioners saved water by minimizing dishwashing and bathing as well as by collecting rain water when possible. Some collected drops of water from dripping taps. The meter did not register water usage when the faucet was only open to a trickle. Among the most poignant strategies that I encountered was not flushing toilet regularly or flushing it with water used for washing dishes or clothes. In such cases, post-socialist poverty acquired a specific smell. Cold, darkness, sounds of dripping water and smells sparked nostalgia.

Nostalgia speaks about various post-socialist processes from shifts to post-industrial economy, neoliberal restructuring, to transformation of status and power regimes. It has multiple forms and manifestations and, definitely, not all forms of remembering the past are nostalgic. Although there is no consensus on what counts as nostalgia, nostalgia emerges in ethnographic reports as a distinct affective and political practice. It is a structure of feeling, in a Raymond Williams words, and a form of relation to the world, which permeates stories people tell about post-socialist history. Nostalgic longing, although wrapped in different cultural forms, existed in socialist times and was expressed in citizens’ grievances about the regime.

Nostalgia is also a political emotion, different in form, content, and intensity in different times and spaces. It expresses resistance to current political regimes and new solidarities of despair. Villagers in Lithuania, who were economically disadvantaged, but suffered from the Soviets, never resorted to nostalgic discourse, even if they recognized that some things might have been better in socialism. As a political commentary nostalgia is utopian and sometimes fantastic—it recreates the past that never existed. It builds the past from inaccurate pieces of memory. People remember abundance, joyful time, and villages full of people. They even speak of socialist progress recollecting how they got a house, bought a car, and a TV set. This material evidence is real, but subsumed in an ideological narrative of the past, to make claims about rights, dignity, and recognition in the present.

Political elites and many intellectuals encounter nostalgia as a threat. Nostalgia seems to challenge the future looking narratives on Europeanization and post-Soviet modernity. The common response is to speak of the nostalgic as backward and pro-communist, which further reinforce post-Soviet alterity regimes. In Lithuania, in an amusement park “1984. Survival Drama”, where audience can actively participate in recreation of the Soviet era, producers aim to bring into being a “correct” memory of the bygone era for the younger generation while also “correcting” the memories of those visitors now nostalgic for Soviet times. Through being exposed to the Soviet police state, shortages and drinking of vodka, this show has to help, in the words of organizers, people who are sick with Soviet nostalgia and help them recover. While being a mockery of nostalgia, this park serves as an ideological laboratory of post-Soviet national citizenship.

Like colonial nostalgia, post-socialist nostalgia is deeply unsettling. From light sadness to deep grievance, it tells the story of marginalization and suffering. Democracies promise more egalitarian citizenship, greater justice, and recognition of different peoples, but enforce various prejudices about national citizenship and rights. Bodies in flames are monuments for these disjunctions of democracies and of disrupted lives.

Neringa Klumbytė is an assistant professor of anthropology at Miami University (Ohio). She has published on nostalgia, consumption, laughter and power, nationalism and Europeanization, the state and citizenship in Soviet and post-Soviet Lithuania. She is one of the co-editors of the 2012 book: Soviet Society in the Era of Late Socialism, 1964-1985.

Kristen Ghodsee is contributing editor of the Soyuz column in Anthropology News.

via Anthropology-News http://www.anthropology-news.org/index.php/2013/05/31/on-bodies-in-flames-and-nostalgia/