Comments on: Lenin in the Basement

By: Strong

Strong — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 09:32:36 +0000

Oh I forgot.
The cultural geographers I cite in this post refer principally to Malkki’s work on refugees and national-cultural territoriality. Giorgio Agamben is a further relevant connection of course, and here is a nifty little piece that outlines some of his ideas. It is useful in referencing some 20th Century background to the problem of ‘minority populations’ and ‘stateless nationals’ in Europe.
http://www.egs.edu/faculty/agamben/agamben-we-refugees.html

By: Strong

Strong — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 09:29:07 +0000

Thanks CKelty. Lots of good anthropological work on collective memory in postsocialist states. You might remember that I went to a conference on ‘memory’ in Tartu earlier this year. The remarkable thing about that conference, in retrospect, was how apolitical it seemed in regard to the very-much-present problem of memory in the ongoing construction of Estonian national order. I only hint at how interesting this is in this post, which was largely just drawing attention to the almost literal notion of ‘repression’ used in a museum devoted to the Soviet era that puts Lenin underground, next to the toilets. In this respect then it is relevant to remember that Estonia has embraced free market fundamentalism with something of a vengeance. It is number one on the ‘World Liberty Index’ for example: http://www.stateofworldliberty.org/ Bush felt happy to visit Tallinn this spring. Etc.

I am going to Berlin tomorrow and hope to visit an exhibit on DDR that Haidy Gaismar blogged about at Material World http://www.nyu.edu/projects/materialworld/2007/06/socialism_could_be_fun.html! Can’t wait.

By: ckelty

ckelty — Fri, 29 Jun 2007 21:46:56 +0000

This reminds me of two things: one was my visit to an aging East German museum of Hair and Hair technology in Marzahn, outside Berlin. It was truly creepy, since there was a kind of herman Munster guide (bald) who kept tailing us through the place, as well as a room filled with nothing but hair dryers (the kind you sit under) from various eras, many looking like torture devices. I'm not sure why it was still operating, except for certain policies of full employment, but we certainly weren't the only visitors. The other is Sophie Calle's project "The Detachment" which was a project in which she photographed places in East Berlin where monuments had been removed, and asked residents to recall what they were, and why they were there. The resulting document is pretty engrossing. Statues of Lenin, and any number of ddr heros were all over East Berlin, now its hard to find even the most benign.