Decentering (Western) Europe: Rethinking Global Entanglements from the Eastern Semi-Periphery

The timely volume proposes a new theoretical framework for ethnographic Europeanization research informed by postcolonial theory, from the vantage point of German anthropology. The reviewer argues that this innovative program of ‘decentering Europe’ can and should be productively extended to ethnographic research in the ECE region, in dialogue with critical ECE social sciences perspectives.1 Following Dipesh Chakrabarty’s call to provincialize Europe (Chakrabarty, 2000), the anthology edited by a team of scholars currently or formerly affiliated to the Institute for European Ethnology of Humboldt University, Berlin, proposes ‘a fresh view on the fragile presence of the European project in time of multiple crises, from the perspective of its currently less considered global entanglements and dependencies, linking (German) social and cultural scientific Europeanization research with postcolonial perspectives for the first time’ (cover text). The volume introduces the project of Critical Europeanization Studies (CES), as a ‘program and perspectives of an Anthropology of reflexive Europeanization,’ ‘decentering the perspective on Europe from the perspective of its margins, its global entanglements and internal omissions. This focus expands the temporal and spatial scope of the investigation far beyond the current political project of European integration: towards a long-term, relational embedding of the continent in the production of “World,” as a general context of unequal and shifting transregional relations’ (p. 8). It is the volume’s declared objective to encourage and expedite such a linking of postcolonial and anthropological approaches to the investigation of current processes of Europeanization and the production of Europe in the context of global conditions. The editing team’s co-authored introduction ‘Decentering Europe: Program and Perspectives of an Anthropology of Reflexive Europeanization,’ (pp. 7–33) presents CES as a theoretical concept and proposes analytical perspectives for