The place and space of emptiness: An experiment in collaborative ethnographic comparison

Abstract

Emptiness is a term used by residents of eastern Latvia to describe life in places that are losing their constitutive elements, such as people, jobs, schools, shops, and transport connections. In this article, we transform the emic term “emptiness” into a portable analytic and undertake ethnographic comparison of resonant processes and experiences in eastern Latvia, eastern Ukraine, and the Russian Far East. We argue that emptiness is both a historical formation and a novel and increasingly common spatial coordinate in the shifting landscape of political and economic power. It is also a possibility for theory-building from the postsocialist periphery about the contemporary spatial configurations of power and forms of life and politics that emerge in response to them.