Towards a Trans-National Discipline

Twenty-five years after the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe, the European East-West divide has not been relegated to the annals of history. Among other areas, it persists tenaciously within the ethnological/anthropological sciences practised in Europe. This article deconstructs and challenges reified differences between ethnologies in Central-Eastern Europe and Western, mainly British-style anthropology. It proposes to go beyond the prevalent divisive discourse towards a trans-national European ethnology/anthropology of Europe. It argues that fairness and equality in academic dialogue is a necessary prerequisite of such an endeavour. hough twenty-five years have passed since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe, entrenched Cold War divisions remain in place on the European continent. One encounters still the notion of a European “East” that is different from the “West.” It refers not to the geographic but the symbolic European “East,” a former space of communist ideology and socialist societies. In geographic terms, it includes Central and Eastern Europe (from now on referred to as cee, both in the adjectival and substantival form). Most of the former socialist countries in that area have joined the European Union, but this does not preclude the outdated notion of the “East” being widely used. The polarity “West”-”East” stands for many opposites: centre/core vs. periphery/margin, capitalism vs. former socialism (today post-socialist/post-communist space), democratic vs. undemocratic, developed vs. backward, modern vs. traditional. Its implications have persisted a quarter of a century after the ideological-political boundary nominally disappeared and in spite of recent regional realignments and developments, which underscore (old/new) divides along the North-South and eunon-eu axis (with the non-eu space becoming smaller with each new country’s entry into the eu). However, it seems that “for the core members of the eu, the traditional West, new members will remain part of East-Central Europe, or T