How to inherit a mountain: more-than-human politics in the Balkan Mountains
How to inherit an »old« mountain? Scholars studying environmental justice point out that indigenous heritage and biodiversity conservation belong to the same battleground. And yet inheritance also involves a decision about what form of value is deemed worthy of passing on and what should be left in the past. Read this way, the goal of »continuing to live« always becomes a question of deciding whose life needs to be saved and how. Against this background, this study combines archival data and ethnographic fieldwork to examine the changes in the practices of pastoralists in the Balkan Mountains from the socialist to the post-socialist period. While they were almost wiped out in the days of "revolutionary" ecology, today indigenous breeds of sheep and cattle are proving to be important means of survival on largely depopulated land. Thus, they call for bringing together the stories of intergenerational violence and cross-species care in a single framework.
Ivan Rajković, a Postdoc University Assistant at the University of Vienna, is a social anthropologist with interests in political ecology, moral economy, and multispecies relations. Ivan completed his PhD at the University of Manchester and worked as a postdoc at the School of Slavonic and Eastern European Studies, University College London, and the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle. Ivan’s first research project, The Gift of Labour, dealt with the politics of deindustrialization and unemployment after Yugoslav socialism. His current project, How to Inherit a Mountain, focuses on the energy transition, environmental conflicts, and multispecies relations in the Balkan Mountains. Combining ethnographic fieldwork and archival research, he explores the way »life« becomes universalised in ecopopulist rebellion, as well the way that forms other than capital – such as livestock – come to determine human relations across longer periods of time.
»Whose death, whose eco-revival? Filling in while emptying out the depopulated Balkan Mountain«, in: Focaal - Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology, 2023, S. 71–87.
»Three ecopopulist lessons for the Balkans’ green left«, in: Iva Marković (Hg.), The Good Story: Green Narratives for the Balkans, Belgrade 2022, S. 4–17.
»Emerging varieties of work«, in: James Carrier (Hg.), Handbook of Economic Anthropology (third edition), Cheltenham 2022, S. 289–302.
»From freedom to loaf to freedom to work: the late socialist countermovement and liberalization from below in Yugoslavia«, in: Chris Hann (Hg.), Work, Society, and the Ethical Self: Chimeras of Freedom in the Neoliberal Era, New York, Oxford 2022, S. 158–181.
»For an anthropology of the demoralized: state pay, mock-labour, and unfreedom in a Serbian firm«, in: Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 2018, 24(1), S. 47–70.
Combining archival data from the 1950s–1960s with contemporary ethnographic fieldwork, the lecture explores what happens when heritage matters involve making a decision about which environmental assemblages should be passed down, and which ones should be left ›in the past‹.