Traversing: Embodied Lifeworlds in the Czech Republic

By Susanna Trnka

Traversing is about our ways of seeing, experiencing, and moving through the world and how they shape the kinds of people we become. Drawing from concepts developed by two phenomenological philosophers, Martin Heidegger and Jan Patočka, and putting them in conversation with ethnographic analysis of the lives of contemporary Czechs, Susanna Trnka examines how embodiment is crucial for understanding our being-in-the-world.

In particular, Traversing scrutinizes three kinds of movements we make as embodied actors in the world: how we move through time and space, be it by walking along city streets, gliding across the dance floor, or clicking our way through digital landscapes; how we move toward and away from one another, as erotic partners, family members, or fearful, ethnic "others"; and how we move toward ourselves and the earth we live on.

Above all, Traversing focuses on tracing the ways in which the body and motion are fundamental to our lived experience of the world, so we can develop a better understanding of the empirical details of Czech society and what they can reveal to us about the human condition.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Release date: May 15, 2020
• ISBN: 9781501749230

Susanna Trnka

Susanna Trnka is an Associate Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Auckland.

Book preview

TRAVERSING

Embodied Lifeworlds in the Czech Republic

Susanna Trnka

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS     ITHACA AND LONDON

For Lukáš

Only by means of a body, and of a body which we control directly, can we be active in the world, taking a real part in the process of change of what it contains.

—Jan Patočka, The ‘Natural’ World and Phenomenology

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Movement, Technology, and Culture in the Making of (Czech) Lives

1. Footsteps through the City: Social Justice in Its Multiplicity

2. Digital Dwelling: The Everyday Freedoms of Technology Use

3. Ballroom Dance and Other Technologies of Sexuality and Desire

4. The New Europeans: Twenty-First-Century Families as Sites for Self-Realization

5. Making Moods: Food and Drink as Collective Acts of Sustenance, Pleasure, and Dissolution

6. Reconnection: Between the Power Lines and the Stars

Notes

References

Index

Acknowledgments

First and foremost I would like to thank my interlocutors, friends, and relatives in the Czech Republic for opening their doors and sharing their lives with me. I cannot do justice to the many insights they have shared, much less to the generosity of spirit they have shown me and my family, but it has not gone unnoticed. I will not name them here as many of them appear (with pseudonyms) in the pages of this book, but my gratitude to them runs deep. Several colleagues and friends from around the world very generously read the draft manuscript and gave me detailed feedback for which I am extremely grateful. I would especially like to thank Alena Heitlinger, Lloyd Johns, Sarah Pinto, Amy Speier, Julie Spray, Marek Tesar, Jason Throop, and Anja Uhlmann. I am very grateful to my brother, Peter Trnka, who read the manuscript with a philosopher’s keen eye and engaged in many a debate over Heidegger’s texts with me. My husband, John Correll, deserves credit for providing feedback on a very early first draft as well as for patiently partaking in years of discussions about Heidegger, Patočka, and the nature of ethnography as the book unfolded. My parents, Nina and Jiří Trnka, took a keen interest in this project, reading through sections of the book and sharing their memories of post–World War II Czechoslovak society.

Thank you also to my dear friend and longtime colleague Christine Dureau, who spent many hours discussing this project with me and gently encouraging it forward. Three other friends made sure I was well supplied with encouragement and enthusiasm during the research and writing process—my warmest thanks to Kerry Gibson and Phyllis Herda in Auckland and Kateřina Křížková in Prague. Thanks are due to Tereza Stöckelová and Václav Bělohradský for their thoughtful and generous engagement with this project and to Jana Kopelent Rehak for sharing with me her memories (and those of her family and friends) of ballroom dance classes as well as her thoughts on how Czechs navigate through space. I am also grateful to Ivan Chvatík for showing me around Prague’s Patočka Archive.

Courtney Addison, Sharyn Graham Davies, Pauline Herbst, Jesse Hession Grayman, and Sam Taylor-Alexander provided detailed feedback on chapter 3 as part of a Society of Medical Anthropology in Aotearoa (SOMAA) roundtable in Auckland. I would like to thank the editors of Ploughshares for permitting publication of an excerpt from Jaroslav Seifert’s poem View from Charles Bridge, the English translation of which was originally published in their journal. Chapter 6 draws from a previous publication (Playing Cowboys and Indians: The Therapeutics of Nostalgia, Canadian Slavonic Papers/Revue canadienne des slavistes 57 [3–4]: 284–98 © Canadian Association of Slavists, reprinted by permission of Taylor & Francis Ltd, http://www.tandfonline.com on behalf of Canadian Association of Slavists), and I would like to thank the editor of that volume, Graham H. Roberts, for his encouragement and editorial finesse. Finally, a very hearty thank you to the editorial team at Cornell University Press—and most especially to Jim Lance and Mary Kate Murphy—for so enthusiastically shepherding this book to press.

Introduction

MOVEMENT, TECHNOLOGY, AND CULTURE IN THE MAKING OF (CZECH) LIVES

Look, it’s Prague! my nine-year-old son Lukáš exclaimed as he ran up to me carrying his father’s iPad. Google Maps was open to a satellite view of Smíchov, the area where we used to live. It’s the park and the ice-cream place! Lukáš said as he pointed excitedly, and then asked, Do you think we can see the Eiffel Tower? referring to the lookout tower in Prague’s Petřín Park, a smaller-size replica of its Parisian namesake.

I was taken back for a moment to another time and place—not to our many stays in Smíchov, but to an evening spent on the other side of Prague, perusing Google Maps with my close friend Lenka’s eleven-year-old son Karel. Karel had asked me to show him where I live in New Zealand and I’d pulled up a satellite view of Auckland, pointing out some landmarks—the Harbour Bridge, the Sky Tower. But none of it meant anything to Karel, who had never been to New Zealand. We were both getting bored when he asked me, Should we go to Paris? and pulled up a view of the (Parisian) Eiffel Tower.

My son and I could spend hours on Google Maps exploring Prague. Together, we are there, but not there, traversing the spaces we know so well, remembering the pleasures of the Czech capital and anticipating our next visit. There is a sensoriality to this experience, as we feel a thrill when we recognize a building or laugh at the familiar sight of swans on the riverbanks. We feel this because we have felt this city, we have been there before. In contrast, for Karel, satellite images of New Zealand are meaningless, even with a knowledgeable narrator sitting at his elbow. He has no bearings in Auckland and one street melds into the next as we move along them, courtesy of Pegman, Google Maps’ iconic little yellow man. But while neither Karel nor I had been to Paris at that point, the Parisian Eiffel Tower was something we both recognized. There was already an image of it in our heads, an image that was both confirmed and expanded by our experience of Paris through Google Maps. We were there but not really there—reaching out, extending ourselves, trying to grasp a world constituted by layers of fantasy, imagination, and digital surveillance.

There is something about actually being there that Google Maps or any other representative media cannot convey to us. Being there is a matter of embodied sensoriality. It is a matter of getting to know the world through our perceptions, movements, and tactile capabilities. It is necessarily partial and subject dependent; it is our knowledge, conscious as well as unrecognized, of the world as we encounter it.

In my forties, I made my first trip to Paris. I’d pictured the Eiffel Tower for many years and even steadied myself to experience a bit of a letdown after seeing so many iconic photographs and cinematic images. Instead, when I got my first glimpse of it in real life, I was startled by its size and command of the city. I had not been there, until I was there.

As many a traveler has recounted, imagining a place is one thing, but experiencing it can be quite another (Bærenholdt et al. 2004). This is not to say that we cannot be in virtual environments, for we certainly can have deeply embodied knowledge of virtual spaces, as scholars who study digital culture, particularly gaming and virtual worlds, have shown (Boellstorff [2008] 2015; Doyle 2009). My point here is a simpler one. When we are engaged, even if bodily, with a simulacrum such as Google Maps, this simulacrum may very well be related to the real world and extend our experience of it, but it cannot replace what we gain by being in situ. Google Maps can extend our sense of being there, so that we are there again, or are there seeing more than we had before, taking a turn down a street we never traversed in real life, seeing a moment in time we did not experience. It can also prepare us for what we might expect when we first come there (which is often why we use this application in the first place). But it cannot replace the bodily experience of being in a place and all of the conscious and unconscious knowledge that that imparts.

As the twentieth-century Czech philosopher Jan Patočka stated, our vision is always linked to our bodily interaction with a thing or a space. To see a situation, I must already be somewhere within it: "Perspective always extends out from a center constituted by a perceptually incomplete appearance of our own corporeity. . . . A situation is something in which I must be in order to understand it (not above or before it)" ([1967] 1989, 254). Patočka also elucidated how our vision is not static; rather, we see via our movements through space, learning to recognize through our corporeal engagement. Our movements, he noted, are, moreover, in a dynamic relationship with the world: as we move through it, we necessarily change it.

Representative media, such as maps, photographs, or interactive virtual worlds, can extend our imaginations as well as our actual reach in very specific and partial ways, but they cannot erase the situatedness—the historical, cultural, and individual biographical specificity of how and from where we see the world and engage with it. They also cannot replace the more subtle but deeply profound knowledge we accrue by means of being in a place—our knowledge of how best to move through a particular maze of streets, avoiding the crowds or the gaps in the cobblestones on the sidewalk, of where to stand so we don’t get the sun shining in our eyes, of what it smells like or the crispness in the air—in other words, the sensorial facets of our bodily there-ness in this particular space and time.

This does not mean that we encounter the world in some sort of pure or raw form. Cultural representations, collective accounts, and historical memories all shape not only the meaning of places but our experiences of them (Urry [1990] 2002). But to focus on these without accounting for the sensoriality of our embodied being-in-the-world is to miss a crucial facet of how we constitute not only knowledge but also ourselves (Csordas 1990; Patočka [1995] 1998).

Traversing

This book is about our ways of seeing, experiencing, and moving through the world and the kinds of persons we become through them—a process I think of as traversing. Drawing from philosophical concepts developed by two phenomenological philosophers, Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) and Jan Patočka (1907–77), and putting them in conversation with ethnographic analyses of the lives of contemporary Czechs, in the pages that follow I examine how embodiment is crucial for understanding our being-in-the-world. Specifically, I focus on three kinds of movements we make as embodied actors in the world: how we move through time and space, be it by walking along city streets, gliding across the dance floor, or clicking our way across digital landscapes; how we move toward and away from one another, as erotic partners, family members, or fearful, ethnic others; and how we move toward ourselves and the earth we live on.

Traversing is necessarily an embodied practice. It highlights the significance of both spatiality (namely, being in a world of objects and spaces that determine our movements) and temporality, considering how movement varies across different moments in the body’s temporality or life course (childhood, youth, adulthood, and old age) as well as how the experience of time shifts as we move through, and with, it. Traversing also considers the fundamentally important role that interrelationality plays in our being-in-the-world: there is a decided social and political edge to traversing, as it is always played out in a politically charged universe of possibilities where the decisions that we make matter, not only to ourselves, but to others moving alongside and after us.

Highlighting movement, traversing is necessarily active, but with an awareness of collective and structural constraints. Traversing foregrounds human independence and interdependence, agency and creativity. It posits culture, history, and technology in terms of how they shape how we traverse through life, and in turn examines how our movements act to create culture, recast history, and engage with, or disavow, technology. Asserting the dynamism of any given society and any given human life, it highlights how we move through life, just as life moves through and around us, necessitating that we never stay in exactly the same place and time but must continually navigate our thrownness or situatedness in a specific historical moment.

I have chosen to explore traversing’s various facets by means of an ethnographic examination of key moments that occur across many Czechs’ lives. These moments are in many ways extraordinarily mundane, yet they remain extraordinary in terms of how they constitute what it is to live a life. They include such things as walking through cities, updating Facebook, taking part in ballroom dance classes, living within a family, eating and drinking, and reconnecting with nature. In each case, my interest is in how these activities shed light on how we go about moving through time and space, connecting and disconnecting with others, embracing and losing our sense of self and of the world in which we live.

Conceptually, then, this book grapples with what it means for our existence to be necessarily corporeal and temporally finite, located in a specific place and time, and shaped by our dwelling in a world molded by culture and technology. A starting point that I find helpful for exploring these ideas is the philosophical work of Heidegger and Patočka, both of whom insisted on highlighting the importance of the historical, technological, and cultural specificity of how we live our lives, while also focusing on unveiling the universal characteristics of human existence. Particularly significant is Heidegger’s notion of Dasein, a term that is usually translated as presence or existence but that literally means "being (sein) there (da)."

Being There: Dasein

There are many ways to interpret Heidegger’s employment of Dasein, but it is generally accepted that in replacing the notion of the self or person with Dasein, Heidegger intended to emphasize the situatedness of existence. Heidegger perceived our existence, or being-in-the-world, as necessarily located within a specific spatial and temporal framing. In "being there, we are always located in and therefore contingent on the temporal and spatial there" in which we find ourselves. According to Heidegger, Dasein, moreover, not only is in the world, but dwells within it. Dwelling is fundamentally active; it consists of building and thinking—both reflecting on our world and reshaping it. Dwelling is thus closely linked to technology, as it is through technology—hammers and planes, bridges and roads, cars and high-rise buildings—that humans reshape the world in which we live.

Heidegger’s contemporary, Jan Patočka, was greatly inspired by Heidegger but felt that noticeably absent from much of Heidegger’s conceptualization, and in particular his seminal text Being and Time (Sein und Zeit), was a comprehensive examination of how dwelling in the world necessitates being in a body. This may seem rather ironic as Heidegger’s work is often credited with being a philosophical catalyst for taking embodiment seriously (e.g., Csordas 1994). There is, of course, a bodiliness inherent in many of Heidegger’s descriptions of being. If, to draw from one of his most famous passages, being-in-the-world consists of reaching out and grabbing hold of a hammer in order to fix or build something, one must have either a hand or a prosthesis to do so. But the embodied dimensions of such actions—for example, how we see an object and experience moving toward it, how we feel as we lift it and how this experience might change as we age—remain largely implicit in Heidegger’s early work. Patočka’s point was to highlight the need for making a phenomenological examination of the corporeality of being-in-the-world the focal point of analysis.

Inspired by Heidegger but significantly expanding on his vision, Patočka emphasized two aspects of being-in-the-world that he felt Heidegger left under-developed: the corporeal, with its inherent dynamism; and the interrelational, in terms of a much broader range of positive and negative relations to others than Heidegger had explored in Being and Time. In contrast to Heidegger, Patočka’s depiction of being-in-the-world spotlights what it means to be-among-others as a corporeal subject moving through space and time.

Patočka also added an explicit political dimension to his analysis of being. Heidegger emphasized the importance of the individual facing the realities of being, and its finitude, in order for Dasein to be in the truth ([1953] 2010, 212). Throughout his work, Patočka greatly expanded on the need for, as he put it, living in truth, developing this concept in two directions: the individual’s ability to search for and live according to the meaning of being; and the collective establishment and protection of societies that have as their goal enabling their citizens to strive toward such living in truth. Crucially, living in truth thus has both personal (philosophic) and collective (political) dimensions.

This point became central to the work of another Czech philosophical thinker—Patočka’s fellow dissident Václav Havel, who became one of the leaders of the 1989 revolution that overthrew the Communist state and then went on to act as the first postrevolution president. Indeed, when Havel penned his famous essay The Power of the Powerless (1978), he rallied opposition against the state socialist regime by calling on Czechoslovaks to live in truth and embrace all that this entailed. Much like Patočka’s underground philosophy seminars that were frequented by dissidents, artists, and academics, philosophy here acted not only as an exercise in critical thinking but as a political force.

We will return to a fuller examination of Heidegger’s and Patočka’s ideas below. For now, it is important to note that their examinations were cast within the mode of philosophical argumentation as the two scholars attempted to parse away the assumptions and misconceptions made by both popular culture and the influential thinkers who came before them, and thus hone in on the fundamental attributes of being. There is, however, a much more empirical way of grappling with the nature of the human condition and all of its cultural, technological, and historical specificities: ethnography.

Being There, or Deep Hanging Out

Since the early twentieth century, anthropology has insisted that there is a more productive method than philosophical reflection for both unearthing and moving beyond our own cultural assumptions. In fact, much of contemporary anthropological knowledge is based on the idea that only by delving into another context and immersing ourselves in another set of cultural practices will we be able to both recognize our own assumptions and, through comparison, come to a more genuine understanding of human nature. As an early pioneer of ethnographic inquiry, Bronisław Malinowski explained, In each culture, the values are slightly different; people aspire after different aims, follow different impulses, yearn after a different form of happiness (1922, 19). It is precisely by exploring how these values, aims, impulses, and yearnings are differently constituted that we can throw into relief our own assumptions about what is, and is not, a universal facet of human experience.

The most productive means for achieving this, Malinowski suggested, is ethnographic fieldwork, which requires anthropologists to plunge into a society and use their experiences living among its peoples as their primary data. A later formulation of the same idea came from Clifford Geertz (1973), who argued that the antidote to cultural essentialism is immersing ourselves in a cultural context that is alien to us in order to examine what really motivates and shapes various people’s being-in-the-world. In his famous essay Being There (1988), Geertz rocked the anthropological establishment by arguing that the authority of any ethnography resides not in its factual accuracy as much as in its author’s ability to convince readers that he or she has actually been there, living in the midst of the culture in question. Throughout his career, Geertz devoted himself to exemplifying how through immersion we uncover not only true universals, but also the astounding diversity of the ways in which human life is played out. Simply put, ethnography reveals how the world gives us many more options and much more variety than we can possibly think up ourselves, confronting and overturning our assumptions about what must be through a presentation of the radical alterities of what is.

So how do we achieve this?

There have been many primers on ethnographic fieldwork, but perhaps one of the most revealing expositions was Geertz’s 1998 review in the New York Review of Books in which he defended the process of fieldwork as a form of deep hanging out. Asserting that anthropology requires a certain depth of critical engagement beyond the fleeting interactions advocated by postmodern scholars such as James Clifford (whose book was one of the texts being reviewed by Geertz), Geertz offered a highly spirited defense of how open-ended, informal, in-depth fieldwork—that is, spending a year or more living in the field—is vital to anthropological knowledge production.¹

Indeed, one of the true gifts of in-depth fieldwork is how it can often alter, sometimes in very radical ways, our thinking about the subject(s) we are studying. Theoretical ideas or concepts can be tried out in advance, but the nature of one’s interactions in the field usually determines which ones become the most salient for analyzing actual social phenomena. Deep hanging out, or immersive, open-ended research, requires the researcher to be willing to suspend being directive and let the research process play out in front of her or him, for while fieldwork might involve structured fieldwork engagements or directed questioning, it requires as much, if not more, nondirected engagement. We can never really foretell what we will encounter in the field, as our research participants can steer the project in entirely different directions. Serendipity can also play a key role in reshaping the structure of research. The payoff of such open-ended engagement for the researcher is that one encounters relationships or events that one never would have set out to study, but that can become the crux of one’s findings in the field.

In a book that Cris Shore and I edited in which we asked several senior anthropologists to describe their fieldwork experiences to us, one after another told us of the eureka moment when their thinking about their research radically changed—and not based on encounters they had planned in advance (Shore and Trnka 2013). David Trigger (2013), for example, related how his understandings of social dynamics in Australian Aboriginal communities shifted when he unexpectedly became the victim of a sorcery attack, something you cannot build into your research agenda. Marilyn Strathern (2013, 239) described conducting fieldwork in the Highlands of Papua New Guinea in the early 1960s and documenting a phenomenon without even having a name for it—what she was observing, she realized in retrospect, was really ‘gender,’ except that the term ‘gender’ wasn’t there yet; that word didn’t occur until [several years later]—when it became a central concept in anthropology, in no small measure through her own contributions to the discipline. Michael Jackson (2013a) fascinatingly spoke of not only changing research agendas, but of wanting himself to be changed through his encounters with other peoples and other places, and his experiences in war-torn Sierra Leone would suggest he was. In fact, without allowing for this kind of open-ended quality to our research, we are guilty of the hubris of thinking we know the field in question before we begin our research and thus risk missing vital aspects of the phenomena we aim to understand.

In their introduction to their book on fieldwork, aptly titled Being There: The Fieldwork Encounter and the Making of Truth, John Borneman and Abdellah Hammoudi suggest that,

new philosophical reflection often takes the form of . . . puppeteering—the staging of dialogues between past and present, between theorists, or between theorists and native interlocutors—instead of grappling with the actual dialogues that go on in the field: episodes of asymmetrical conversation, argument, misunderstanding, agreement, mutual sharing, affection, aggression, and manipulation. . . .

Fieldwork encounters, we hope to demonstrate, are modes of ethical engagement wherein the ethnographer is arrested in the act of perception. This arrest can lead both to a productive doubt about the ongoing perception of the phenomena in interaction and to the possibility of elaborating shared knowledge. (2009, 16, 19)

As Borneman and Hammoudi attest, anthropology and, in particular, the ethnographic encounter offer the potential of radically revising our understandings of the world. That said, today anthropological scholarship is being carried out in an educational and financial environment that threatens to strip away the fluid and contextually responsive character of longer-term engagements. The danger of this is that short-term fieldwork that tightly adheres to a preset hypothesis, methodology, and analytical framework (all prepared prior to stepping into the field) leaves little space for altering the research process in response to what an ethnographer actually learns from her or his interlocutors. While brief fieldwork encounters have their role (and should have their role) in the anthropological enterprise, there will be a real loss if short-term fieldwork—from the cosmopolitan-style, decentered, fleeting dialogical engagements advocated by Clifford to the increasingly prevalent interview-based ethnographies necessitated by restrictions on researchers’ time and money—come to overshadow and dominate anthropology to the point where deep hanging out becomes a thing of the past. As Borneman and Hammoudi suggest, it is by only by enabling ourselves to have the space for pausing and changing our mind about the phenomena that we are encountering that we have the chance to stumble on to new paths and directions.

The Making of This Book

This book undertakes the task of elucidating what is through an examination of such open-ended encounters. Its material comes from ethnographic observations I have made over the span of thirty years of visits—from 1987 until 2017—to what was once Czechoslovakia and is now the Czech Republic. Some of this material is drawn from my personal experiences as a Czech American, now New Zealander, going home to see people I deeply care about. Other parts of this book came about through the practice of ethnographic fieldwork and, in particular, by means of deep hanging out. At times, it is hard to separate one from the other.

I grew up in a Czech immigrant family in the United States. My parents were part of a wave of emigrants who left Czechoslovakia when the borders opened up in 1968 in what was to be much too brief a period of democratic revitalization. Czechoslovakia had had a state socialist government and been under Soviet domination since the post–World War II election of the Communist Party in 1948. However, in January 1968, the newly appointed first secretary of the Communist Party, Alexander Dubček, revealed himself to be a reformist, easing restrictions on the media, free speech, and travel. Soviet concern over these new stirrings of democracy resulted in Warsaw Pact forces invading Prague in August 1968. Dubček was arrested and taken away to Moscow, where he and other Czechoslovak leaders were forced to reverse their reformist agenda. A series of political purges and crackdowns quickly halted the Prague Spring, and the nation was plunged into a harsher form of totalitarian control.

My parents were in London when the Russian tanks pulled into Prague. Neither of them, nor any of their children, set foot into Czechoslovakia again until I made my first visit there in 1987 at the age of sixteen, a curious teenager wanting to see where my family came from and meet the relatives I had heard so much about. My trip was authorized