Abstract:Through ethnographic encounters and interviews in English middle-class neighbourhoods and institutions, such as schools or the police, Katharina Eisch-Angus traces the concepts of 'safety' and 'security' concentrating particularly on their associations with the idea and practice of 'community' and the ways in which they are disseminated within everyday realities. Emerging systems of governmental control gain an irrefutable persuasiveness by coupling the necessity of safeguarding private spheres with public security demands and by referring to a mentality of personal civic responsibility and charity. In everyday narratives and on-going public debates -from issues of health and safety, or neighbourhood crime, to the threat of paedophiles -suggestive fear and everyday experience, reason and absurdity interlock, whilst also opening up space for resistance and alternative decisions.
In an interdisciplinary workshop in the former Iron Curtain borderlands of the Czech Republic and Bavaria seven multi-national artists and one European ethnologist revealed the cultural dynamics of boundaries both by exploring an expressive landscape and memory field, and by experiencing cultural difference as reflected in the co-operation and creation processes within the group. By using ethnographic approaches to assist the process of developing and conceptualising artworks and self-reflexive, ethno-psychoanalytic interpretation, the project followed the impact of twentieth-century border frictions and violence into collective identities, but also the arbitrary character of borders. The results suggest how a multi-perspective, subjectively informed methodology of approaching space and spatially expressed memory could be developed both for ethnology and for art, bridging the supposed gap between 'artistic' and 'scientific' methods by combining their strengths in a complementary way.
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