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London
The material practices of project implementation and the politics of Europeanization
Julie Scott,
London Metropolitan University

Abstract:
Much of the anthropological work on the European Union has taken the form of ethnographies of institutions such as the European Commission, the European Parliament and the European Space Agency, as a means of capturing the power dynamics driving the processes of Europeanisation from the centre. However, without taking into account the articulations between the centre and the localities that are the objects of EU cultural policy, the picture remains incomplete. In this paper I argue that academics involved in European projects are well positioned to explore the interface between the two through taking an ethnographic approach to the material processes of project implementation.

Ideas about 'culture' and 'heritage' have an important place in the creation of 'Europe' and its borders, but this paper suggests they exist in tension with the material conditions of their production. The tensions explored in this paper centre on the operational imperatives of project implementation; contradictions between the discourse and the materiality of the Euromed space; and the difficulties inherent in encounters between the 'insider culture' of European officials with alternative cultures of 'outsiders' formed in relation to other institutional and professional values, loyalties and practices.

These encounters tend to reinforce the impression that Europeanization is primarily a process of inflexible and unresponsive bureaucratisation. But in these clashes we might also distinguish the overlaying of distinctive temporalities and territorialities: the temporality of the 'virtual Europe' of the Commission, with its proliferating time horizons and experiences of past and present projects; the 'real time' in which the projects are carried out; the various institutional times and autobiographical trajectories in which the project participants are enmeshed; the orientation towards the past and the relationship with its uses in the present, with which the projects are concerned; the spaces of the particularistic and the common (for example, urban neighbourhoods and the territory of EU imagination). The material practices of project implementation permit an approach that embodies and embraces both the local and the translocal, in order to study the ways in which each is configured in the other.

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