Notes on Emptiness and the Importance of Maintaining Life
Main Article Content
Abstract
In these notes from the field, I will think ethnographically about the ways in which Latvia’s rural inhabitants live what is referred to as the “emptying of the countryside.” I will also consider how and with what effect policy makers, scholars, and intellectuals constitute the phenomenon of rural emptiness as a problem of migration and a problem of demography thought to have dire consequences for the life of the nation. In oscillating between these different registers of living and talking about the emptiness, my aim is to trace what Kathleen Stewart has called “a contact zone for analysis” without definitively enclosing it in particular interpretive frames. In the midst of research, I wish to see whether and how dwelling in this “contact zone” can generate insights that are overlooked by scholarly and political discourses concerned with migration and demography.
Keywords: emptying of the countryside, life, nation, migration, Latvia.
Downloads
Article Details
Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:
1. Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgment of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
2. Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgment of its initial publication in this journal.
3. While AEER adopts the above strategies in line with best practices common to the open access journal community, it urges authors to promote use of this journal (in lieu of subsequent duplicate publication of unaltered papers) and to acknowledge the unpaid investments made during the publication process by peer-reviewers, editors, copy editors, programmers, layout editors and others involved in supporting the work of the journal.