Publications
2018
"Durable Remains: Glass Reuse, Material Citizenship and Precarity in EU-era Bulgaria"
Elana Resnick. 2018. Journal of Contemporary Archaeology.
Elana Resnick. 2018. Journal of Contemporary Archaeology.
Bulgarian Roma living in the capital city of Sofia rely on glass for EU-era survival becauseof its role in food-jarring practices and its ability to be repeatedly used and reused withoutbreaking down. The durability of glass emerges as a salient material quality for ensuringa means of preservation in the face of everyday economic precarity. Glass's durability ismaterial and temporal: temporal in that it transcends political and economic upheavals,and material in that, unlike plastic, metal and paper, glass does not naturally decomposeover time. Instead, it enables structurally disadvantaged urbanites, like the Roma, touse homegrown food packaging technologies in order to survive in the era of EU "free"markets, plastic packaging and neoliberal discardability. The temporal and materialdurability of glass juxtaposes the precarious circumstances of those most engagedwith its contemporary reuse for whom glass enables both survival and a form of EU-eramaterial citizenship. However, EU regulations focused on recycling fail to acknowledgethe widespread practice of glass reuse in Bulgaria. This paper analyzes how EU policy,recycling company officials and Romani and non-Romani Sofia residents reconfiguredurability through different temporal materialities - and practices - of recycling and reuse.
2017
"Protest and the Practice of Normal Life in Bulgaria"
Elana Resnick. 2017. Lithuanian Ethnology: Studies in Social Anthropology and Ethnology.
Elana Resnick. 2017. Lithuanian Ethnology: Studies in Social Anthropology and Ethnology.
Bulgaria’s 2013–2014 protests were rooted in an imagined ‘normal’ life that protesters turned into political action, what I call the politics of praxis. The politics of praxis refers to the practice of aspirational everyday life as a form of political engagement. Protesters craft the type of world they deem ‘normal’ by performing and practicing what they imagine an EU-era Bulgarian society should be. Everyday ‘normalcy’ is both (1) to what protesters aspire, and (2) the conditions of everyday protest life. It is only within the unordinary space of protest that utopian visions of EU-era ‘normal’ life can be realized.
2015
"Discarded Europe: Money, Trash and the Possibilities of a New Temporality."
Elana Resnick. 2015. Anthropological Journal of European Cultures.
Elana Resnick. 2015. Anthropological Journal of European Cultures.
How are time and materiality felt in periods of expectation, when change is awaited but never comes, at least not in the way anticipated? Disappointment may set in, but in the expanding European context in which I conducted research, something else occurs: sensory experiences of time and materiality intermingle and shape each other. These experiences of temporal-material relations, in a context of historical disorientation, are the basis of a new European temporality. My ethnographic research on waste management in Bulgaria, conducted between 2010 and 2013, with informal garbage collectors, city street sweepers, waste company officials, Sofia citizens, municipal representatives and ministry employees, provides the empirical foundation for this piece.
2010
"The Unintentional Activist: Questions of Action, Activism, and Accountability."
Elana Resnick. 2010. Collaborative Anthropologies.
Elana Resnick. 2010. Collaborative Anthropologies.
I have never considered myself an activist. My problem with the term does not stem from debates about whether ethnography should be an activist endeavor but rather from the implication that ethnography could be anything else. If we think of an "activist" as someone who actively engages in the field, we must ask: What differentiates an activist anthropologist from an anthropologist who does not have activism as a central focus or goal? What are the limits and possibilities of action when it is conceived of in activist terms? Who or what has control over where action begins, ends, and takes shape? In this essay I explore what happens when our desires for—and understandings of—action do not coincide with those of our field consultants. By focusing on linguistic accountability as a realm of underexplored action in ethnographic contexts, I question how promises become constituted as actions and the effects this has on fieldwork relationships.
2009
"Transnational Affiliations, Local Articulations: Consumption and Romani Publics in Bulgaria."
Elana Resnick. 2009. Anthropology of East Europe Review.
Elana Resnick. 2009. Anthropology of East Europe Review.
Combating the entrenched position of Roma as Bulgaria‘s stigmatized underclass, Romani activists in Sofia seek to affiliate the Romani population with internationally recognized entities outside of the nation‘s borders: in particular, with the United States via African American movements (from the Civil Rights Movement of MLK to hip-hop), and with South Asia as an ostensible homeland for the European Romani diaspora. This paper examines how different transnational affiliations constitute—and are constituted by—the ways in which Romani activists align themselves in a global sphere, shifting affiliations among the Bulgarian state, the European Union, the United States, and India. By analyzing publics in terms of consumption, I examine how people forge affiliations vis-à-vis the consumption of certain "objects," including political models/concepts (e.g., American Civil Rights) and media forms (e.g., Indian films, hip-hop music).
