Reply to comments

I would like to extend my gratitude to the editors of Social Anthropology, as well as tothe commentators for engaging with my work. This is an exciting opportunity forfurther collaborative thinking about conditions of possibility for action in the Europeanpolitical space characterised by increased securitisation of borders and the resurgence ofnationalism, on the one hand, and a sense of political urgency, on the other.

I begin with clarification of my argument in relation to Gregory Feldman’svaluable comments. While in accord with the overall direction of my inquiry, Feldmancritiques my use of sociality in order to ‘increase its ability to capture local politicalaction that otherwise might go unnoticed’. This is a vital and necessary task, whichwe share. However, Feldman invests too much hope in human encounters in general,whereas I am concerned with how it is that the same human beings can exhibit empathyand understanding in some cases, but not in others. Understanding the emergence ofdifferentiated or qualified empathy is crucial for furthering thinking about conditionsof possibility for political action. Alexei Yurchak’s and Nicholas De Genova’s insight-ful comments push me to think further on this insofar as they invite reflections onethnographic complicity with Latvian nationalism and forms of racialisation thatinform the bordering encounter.

To begin with, there are important differences between how I use the concept ofsociality and how Feldman interprets my work. By using the term ‘sociality’, I markrelations that connect (or disconnect) people in the process of emergence of what isoften a fleeting collective subject, be it a public, a people, a multitude or savējie. Toput it another way, rather than focusing on how human beings are made into individualagentful subjects, such as citizens, I focus here on relations that link or are assumed tolink human beings to one another as they come to form collective subjects, such as anation or a savējie. I contend that it is important for our understanding of how powerworks to focus on the specificity of these relations in concrete situations rather thandescribe them with blanket terms – for example, identity (Brubaker and Cooper 2000).Yet, Feldman’s reading of the sociality of savējie as a trap of ‘timeless cultural essence’ failsto appreciate the elements that make savējie into a historically informed yet dynamic andcontextual formation without stable boundaries. Feldman assumes that savējie is anidentification formed on the basis of ‘webs of meaning’ and ‘shared experiences’ externalto the encounter and thus overlooks my emphasis on how the sociality of savējie emergesin the encounter as a post-Soviet formation shaped by both the Soviet past and theEuropean present. As such, it cannot be reduced to any cultural essence, Soviet orotherwise (see De Genova’s comments).

There are also important differences between the participants of the borderingencounter. The relation of fellow nationals that the Head of Department emphasisedin speaking to me in a scene that Nicholas De Genova in his comments correctly marks

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as ethnographic complicity is different from the relation of fellow travellers across linesof power that connected us as a ‘motley crew of post-Soviet subjects’ in the borderingencounter. These differences invite attention to how people form understandings aboutthe situations they find themselves in, as well as to what enables people to form ethicalrelations across categories of difference. Importantly, my analysis shows that peopletend to form ethical relations across some categories of difference, but not others. Iam therefore interested in what makes a difference with regard to the border guards’ability to form ethical relations across difference. I suggest that an important site forinvestigating this question is the formation of understanding about the specificconditions that shape lives – one’s own and those of others. Such formation ofunderstanding as a practical orientation in the world (Glaeser 2009; Barth 2000) cannotbe reduced to Geertzian ‘webs of meaning’, as Feldman suggests in his comments.

Having thus pried apart my intervention from the terms that obscure it, I move onto elaborate my take on the relationship between understanding, sociality and politicsin relation to Feldman’s emphasis on thinking and empathy. I do not suggest that thebordering encounter is exhaustively characterised by the political openings discerniblein the sociality of savējie. Neither is it determined in the last instance by the state-basedviolence of deportation. Beyond its ‘friendly and respectful’ (see Feldman’s comments)demeanour, the reach of state-based violence in this case is itself brought into questioninsofar as the Georgian man sought deportation as a state-provided service for goinghome. As I characterise the bordering encounter, it is a complex articulation of thestate-based violence of deportation and a sociality that exceeds it. This sociality exceedsthe state-based violence of deportation not because I think of it as ‘a public space forpolitical action’ (see Feldman’s comments), but because the state-based violence ofdeportation does not exhaustively characterise the encounter. The encounter is alsocharacterised by a relation of recognition of another as equal. This is a political openingrather than a fully formed political action. Perhaps this opening is best thought of as a‘space of appearance’ whereby subjects appear to each other in pre-political space(Arendt in Mitchell 2013). Following Arendt, such appearance, as argued by W. J. T.Mitchell with regard to the Occupy movement, is foundational insofar as it precedespolitics in the conventional sense (2013: 102). In the case of the bordering encounter,subjects appear to each other as equals in the interstices of everyday practices ratherthan in spaces of assemblage, as in the case of Occupy (Mitchell 2013). And while thepre-political space of appearance, argues Arendt, does not ‘survive the actuality ofthe moment which brought it into being’ (quoted in Mitchell 2013: xi), reiterations ofsuch appearances, whether in the square or in the office of the border guards, may crafta terrain where political action becomes possible.

The sociality of savējie did not survive the actuality of the moment, for, as Feldmanpoints out, the border guards did not subvert the Latvian state or the European borderregime. Moreover, the sociality of savējie was limited in reach insofar as it did notextend to the Somali asylum seekers. Importantly, however, this limitation did notemerge because the sociality of savējie is a community whereby its members under-stand each other on the basis of a shared history. Such a community of post-Sovietsavējie does not exist. The sociality of savējie crucially depends on the participants’ability to understand how another has been shaped as an agentful subject throughparticular structural conditions and power relations. For example, the border guardsunderstood that the Georgian man’s ability to obtain a visa was limited by corruption,that his ability to work and earn a living was severely hindered by post-Soviet

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economic collapse, that it was because of geopolitics that the Georgian man’s passportcould not get him to France in the same way that the border guard’s could. It was theunderstanding of the concrete conditions that shape lives and struggles that enabled theemergence of the sociality of savējie as a relation of recognition of another as equal.Furthermore, the border guards’ inability to form a similar kind of relation with theSomali refugees did not derive from a static condition of Somalis as always ‘the Other’,though racialisation did contribute to rendering the Somalis as more ‘other’ than theman from Georgia (see De Genova’s comments). Rather, it was the product of theformation of understanding as a practical orientation in the world. The border guardslearned things about Somalia and Somali refugees through media, Internet searches andconversations with colleagues in other European Union Member States. This formationof understanding was shaped by racialised stereotypes about why and how individualsfrom African countries set out on the road, which prevented the border guards fromequating their situation to that of the man from Georgia.

Understanding is not void of empathy. It may be articulated with or sparked byempathy in particular encounters, and, therefore, I do not wish to definitively juxta-pose understanding with empathy. Rather, I wish to ask: what are the conditions thatenable empathy to emerge in some encounters and not in others? Like Paul Bloom(2013), I suggest that empathy can be ‘parochial, narrow-minded and innumerate’.1

Feldman argues that ‘similar experiences of capitalist alienation and the dislocatingeffects of globalisation’ lead migration officials in his work to utter ‘they are like mebecause they also have kids to feed’. However such a link needs to be demonstrated.Moreover, one cannot assume a ‘capitalist alienation’ in general, which is supposed tolead to recognition of similarity (i.e. ‘we all struggle to make ends meet’). Literatureabounds with examples of how people explain their struggles arising from ‘capitalistalienation’ by blaming racialised others, including migrants (e.g. Holmes 2000). It doesnot matter that they live next door or that they have kids to feed as well. There arefactors, then, that intervene in people’s ability to form an understanding of how thesame processes of neoliberal capitalism, if you will, shape their struggles and thestruggles of, for example, Somali refugees. The recognition of ‘they have kids to feed’is not the recognition of the concrete conditions that shape lives, but rather recognitionof a human predicament in general. It does not prevent the emergence of a differentia-tion between more deserving people with kids to feed and less deserving people withkids to feed.

My attention to the sociality of savējie is an effort to trace the specific ways inwhich such differentiation emerges. Moreover, I suggest that until there are ways inwhich people make connections allowing them to understand that the same concreteprocesses that create hardships for them may also have set Somalis on the road and,indeed, that they themselves may be complicit in creating these hardships, it is possiblefor empathy to be fissured by racialised differentiations. Drawing on Arendt and myuse of Nusbaum, Feldman’s comment suggests that thinking as ‘the faculty of imagina-tion so that one can try to create an image in one’s mind of what it is like to stand in theshoes of another person’ leads to recognition of another as equal. However, I questionwhether the Arendtian analytic of thinking can account for the emergence ofdifferentiated empathy if only to suggest that thinking has failed. In turn, the analyticof understanding, especially as used by Andreas Glaeser (2009), invites attention to

1 I thank Karolina Follis for pointing me to this source.

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how people orient themselves as situated beings in particular situations. It thus opensmore possibilities for illuminating how understanding comes to be articulated withempathy in one case and not in another.

It is important therefore to recognise that there are no pure spaces of politicallyenabling sociality, as Feldman, De Genova and Yurchak all emphasise in relation tomy article. I very much agree with this point, and I think of the bordering encounterI analyse as precisely that kind of an ambivalent space within which there are openingsand closures and within which the openings themselves might be aided by racialisedconceptions of how the world is organised. Striking a balance between openings andclosures is an especially important and difficult task in postsocialist Eastern Europe,which tends to be viewed in both political and scholarly writings as saturated withproblematic ethno-territorial nationalism. The contemporary articulation of problem-atic ethno-territorial nationalism with Eastern Europe often enables Western Europeto emerge cleansed from its own nationalist and racist entanglements (Dzenovska2013a). The burden of postsocialist Eastern Europe seems to be that it is continuouslytrafficked between three major ideological ‘isms’ of the 20th century – nationalism,socialism and liberalism. For example, the critique of the liberal politics of diversity,which is so widespread in postcolonial contexts, is routinely treated with suspicion inpostsocialist settings, for there seems to be no legitimate space from which such acritique can emerge. It is either assumed to stem forth from socialism discredited inthe eyes of postsocialist subjects or from problematic nationalism discredited in theeyes of liberal Europe. In postcolonial contexts there are often allusions to some alter-native ontological space (Viveiros de Castro et al. 2014) or a space of difference(Chakrabarty 2000) that is not consumed in its entirety by Western modernity in itsliberal, socialist or nationalist iterations. In such conditions, when imaginations offorms of organising collective life are limited by the triangulation between liberalism,nationalism and socialism, it seems especially important to undertake the work ofexcavation through which to render the familiar unfamiliar or through which to takeapart situations explained with the help of analytical shorthands, such as identity ornationalism (Gibson-Graham 2006; Dzenovska 2013b).

In his comment, De Genova describes the border guard addressing me as a fellowLatvian as a scene of ethnographic complicity. I think that complicity is a very goodterm to think with not only about this scene but also about Europe in the way thatDe Genova suggests and about the postsocialist subjects becoming European. Thisbecoming is complicit with Europe as a postcolonial and racial formation (Dzenovska2013a; see also De Genova’s comments). This complicit becoming can be observed in thebordering encounter when the emergent sociality of savējie is racialised as more whitevis-à-vis the Somalis and as less than European vis-à-vis an ideal-type image of Europe.

In his comment, Yurchak points to another site of complicity. He asks whether theseemingly enabling sociality of savējie that emerges in the bordering encounter maynevertheless be underwritten by nationalist sensibilities insofar as Latvians mayconsider Georgians as more savējie than some other post-Soviets, such as Russians orRussian-speakers, because of the Georgians’ antagonistic relationship with Russia. Thisis certainly a possibility, but it did not emerge as a defining feature of the bordering en-counter. The Inspector who interviewed the man from Georgia was himself a Russian-speaker and the way he related to the man from Georgia – by joining him for a cigaretteafter the interview – did not differ much from that of the Head of Department. Unfor-tunately, I did not have much chance to explore the relationship between the Head of

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Department and the Inspector outside of the encounter, as they – one a Latvian and theother a Latvian Russian – worked towards securing the borders of the Latvian state.Overall, however, Yurchak is right to suggest that some Latvians may feel moreaffinities towards Georgians than towards Russians or Russian-speakers, but theseare not stable differentiations insofar as some Russians and Russian-speakers may bemore accepted than others, because they might, for example, think of a good life as alife led within the confines of a cultural nation rather than among Soviet people. Onsuch occasions, Sovietness is profoundly othered, which casts further doubt onFeldman’s characterisation of the sociality of savējie in terms of ‘once a Soviet, alwaysa Soviet’. The fact that such a sociality emerged in conditions when Sovietness isactively dismissed was a noteworthy event.

With regard to racialisation of Georgians as whiter than other post-Soviets, such asAzeris, this is a possible but, again, not a stable scenario. During the Soviet period, theterm melnie (blacks, or chernye in Russian) was often directed at Georgians whotravelled to Latvia to sell fruit in the markets of the capital at the same time as manyLatvians identified with the Georgians’ strong national spirit and resistance to Russia.This is to say that neither Soviet nor post-Soviet patterns of racialisation fix subjects instable hierarchical relations with each other, which can then be assumed to shapeencounters. Rather, such relations, similar to sociality, understanding and empathy,must be traced in and through encounters. Feldman’s, Yurchak’s and De Genova’svaluable comments therefore illustrate the importance of studying the complexities ofcomplicit becomings, forms of racialisation and state-based violence, while also excavat-ing these sites for openings towards other possibilities for organising collective life.

Acknow l edgemen t s

I thank Iván Arenas and Katherine Lemons for reading and commenting on both theoriginal article and my reply to the comments. I thank Gregory Feldman, AlexeiYurchak and Nicholas De Genova for their generous, inspiring and critical readingsof the article. I also thank the editors of Social Anthropology, especially Mark Maguire,for inviting comments on my article and for facilitating this exchange in a highlyprofessional manner.

Dace DzenovskaUniversity of Oxford – COMPAS58 Banbury RoadOxford OX1 6QS, UKdace.dzenovska@compas.ox.ac.uk

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