Fieldwork
DEAGENCY will study the role of the agency of the dead in individuals’ lives within three fields of research, that is, areas of social or cultural changes or problems, related to the post-socialist period:
FIELD OF RESEARCH 1:
The Effects of the Problematic Past: Mass Graves
FIELD OF RESEARCH 2:
Changing Religious Landscape: Alternative Spiritualities
FIELD OF RESEARCH 3:
Changing Social Life in Rural Landscapes
Encompassing disparate changes and problems, these fields of research are ideal to obtain all the information and evidence that is needed to achieve the aim of the project.
Fieldwork Fundational Points
Aims of Research
To gain insight into the widest possible range of roles of the dead’s agency in individuals’ lives, the project will examine the interplay between the agency of the dead and individuals, situated within a variety of disparate social, cultural, religious, and economic contexts within East-Central Europe.
Locations
The countries where the research will be carried out are Slovenia, Slovakia, Hungary, and in both entities of Bosnia & Herzegovina (BiH). Fieldwork in each of the three fields of research will be conducted in all four countries (except FoR 1 which will only be studied in Slovenia and BiH as there are no mass graves resulting from secret massacres in Slovakia and Hungary as far as we know), at locations strategically selected in terms of their sensitivity to these particular changes or problems. This selection of East-Central European countries is designed to identify the impact of social, cultural, religious, and economic factors on the role that the agency of the dead has in individuals’ lives.
Methodology
The main data will be gathered during the fieldwork with the use of qualitative, ethnographic method: in-depth semi-structured interviews will be conducted and the method of participant observation will also be applied observing practices and rituals related to death and the dead.
Timeframe
The duration of the project is 60 months (5 years), from 1 September 2023 until 31 August 2028. The project started out with 10 researchers (PI, 3 senior researchers, four postdocs and 2 PhD students) that will conduct most of the field research in the first 2 years of the project, that is, between February 2024 – December 2025, with some short additional fieldwork possibly conducted in the later stages of the project).
Fields of Reasearch
DEAGENCY investigates a range of physical and digital settings where the agency of the dead is articulated and experienced. These include mass graves, cemeteries, roadside memorials, and commemorative rituals.
The Effects of the Problematic Political Past: Mass Graves
In many (post)socialist countries, mass graves of the victims of massacres that took place at the end of WW2 were discovered at the end of the 1980s. In the territory of former Yugoslavia, these discoveries served to promote new historical revisionism and helped ignite the war in the 1990s which consequently resulted in a multitude of new hidden mass graves in Bosnia and Herzegovina of victims from this war. The research will primarily focus on the southeastern region of Slovenia (especially Kočevje and Laško), where the majority of mass graves from World War II have been uncovered since the 1990s. Fieldwork will be carried out in various localities—given the wide and often remote distribution of the graves—and will also involve ethnographic research with actors involved in research and memory politics.
Changing Religious Landscape:
Alternative Spiritualities
“Spiritual revolution”, i.e., the emergence of individualised and de-institutionalised forms of spirituality, with religious consumers creating their own personal packages of meaning, rather than being guided by stable cultural norms came to East-Central Europe in the 1980s, where the new tendency towards alterative spiritualities can also be viewed in the context of general loss of faith in socialism as an “ideological” system. DEAGENCY aims to access individuals’ interactions with the dead within changed religious frameworks. It will explore how religious changes affect the inclination of individuals to give agency to the dead, and how the role that the agency of the dead plays in individuals’ lives relates to changing religious feelings in the context of new spiritual ideas. The research will primarily focus on urban areas across different countries. In Bosnia and Herzegovina, fieldwork will be conducted in Sarajevo and Banja Luka; in Slovenia mainly in Ljubljana; in Slovakia, it will center on Bratislava; and in Hungary, on Budapest, Pécs and its surrounding areas.
Changing Social Life: Rural Communities
In postmodern society, social life has become increasingly individualised and atomised, and individuals involved in much more fragmented relationships than before, when relationships were largely limited to family and narrow community ties. In East-Central Europe, the change of economic regime after the collapse of socialism thoroughly affected rural economies; this has had an additional impact on inhabitants’ way of life, in particular their social norms and values, and family and community relationships. The project will explore how changing ways of life, family and social relationships, and values and norms within rural communities are reflected in the (changing?) role of the agency of the dead in individuals’ lives. This will be studied in various contexts of changing social relationships and changing norms and values in postsocialist rural communities affected by the consequences of “transition”. The research will be conducted in North-East Slovenia, South-West (Somogy county), and North Hungary (Heves county), Central Bosnia (region between Visoko and Kakanj), Central Slovakia (Horehronie region).