The seminar is cancelled.

Dr. Asta Vonderau, Associate Professor of Cultural Anthropology, Department for Film, Theatre, and Cultural Studies, Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (Germany):

"Making Capitalism without Capitalists? Neoliberal Governmentality and Media Representations of Europe, and 'Successful Europeans' in Lithuania"

Abstract

The post-socialist tranformation in Eastern Europe not only invoked a transition from a state-controlled to a free market, and from collective to private property, but also lead to the implementation of new neo-liberal mechanisms of governmentality and modes of subjectivity, of self-enterprising and self-controlling individuals. These modes of subjectivity did not emerge „naturally", as some of the reformers were expecting, but had to be taught, and also imposed upon, the Eastern European societies by way of EU policies, new bureaucratic regulations, or financial support mechanisms, and also through media images imported from the West.

In Lithuanian public discourse, this transformation was, and still is, often discussed uncritically and positively. It is understood as a „way back to Europe and the West", in terms of a modernisation process affecting the whole country as much as the individual, a development from primitive Soviet personality to the modern European one who is able to act sucessfully within the new political and economic system, and to gain recognition in (Western) Europe. As a result, social groups striving for a political or economic career and for elite status in today's Lithuania are under some pressure to live up to these subjectivity modes. It takes intensive symbolic work and everyday performances to construct the image of a ‚sucessful European': for instance, forgetting or reinterpreting aspects of one's (post-) Soviet biography, reorganizing one's lifestyle and shaping one's body in accordance to dominating images. Media (especially tabloid media) constitute sites where the new Europeans are staged, and where they can present themselves.

The seminar is based on Ethnographic research investigating the contruction and representation of the so-called ‚new elites' in Lithuania. Based on empirical examples from everyday life in Soviet Lithuania and today's Lithuanin society, it aims to show how certain modes of subjectivity are reproduced and represented through media and how social transformations can be followed by investigating these media discourses and images.

The seminar will be held in English.