The Difficulty of ‘Letting-Be’

Elizibeth and her husband Milad are among the Iraqi families who took out a loan to buy a little house outside of Nitra. But while the family feels very comfortable in their own home, it comes with new challenges: the villages around Nitra are predominantly commuter areas. People commonly travel into town by car to work. Elizibeth's husband, however, works in Germany for several weeks at a time, taking the family car with him. Not just jobs, but also education and health facilities are concentrated in Nitra. Elizibeth has to travel from their settlement to the center almost every day, to attend driving classes and to bring her four-year-old daughter Lana, who has Down syndrome, to a daycare and rehabilitation center.

Having her long-term adaptation and ‘functioning’ in mind, social workers wanted to teach Elizibeth to go to Nitra by bus. They showed her where the bus stops were, and explained to her the connection, schedule, and where she had to change. Elizibeth was unenthusiastic about the proposal, to say the least. The bus goes only once an hour and takes, unsurprisingly, significantly longer than the car. But the social workers argued that many Slovaks rely on public transport daily, so they could expect Elizibeth to tolerate the inconvenience and do the same. Elizibeth claimed that the bus ride was a stressful and straining experience for Lana and that her daughter's restlessness could affect the other passengers. Anyone who ever accompanied Elizibeth and Lana on the bus (including me) got a rather different impression, namely that Lana, generally of calm and introverted nature, was not too bothered by the ride and the other passengers. “If a doctor or health professional confirms that it is bad for Lana's development to go by bus, then that's a different issue, of course,” Jakub explained, immediately adding that he was rather inclined to see it as an excuse. Elizibeth also complained that she had to carry Lana in her arms due to her difficulties with balance and coordination. The NGO promptly addressed this problem by providing Elizibeth with a secondhand stroller. Once, Elizibeth missed the bus but elegantly saved the day by calling her acquaintances from the village, asking them to give her a lift.

From “Poetical Essays in April 1773,” London Magazine, or Gentleman's Monthly Intelligencer 42 (1773): 200–201.

“Verses by Lord Lyttelton, to Mrs. Peach, now Mrs. Lyttelton”

Negotiating Trust and Mistrust

During an integration meeting, Mohamed was asked whether he had any opportunity to talk Slovak in his day-to-day life. Mohamed answered through his interpreter that he had Slovak friends he could practice with. “Slovak?!” Sofia commented incredulously, looking at the others with raised eyebrows. After the meeting, Nina told me she also had a funny feeling about these ‘friends.’ She expressed worries that they might be associated with the local drug scene. At the next meeting with Mohamed, Nina tried to find out more about the mysterious friends. Casually, she asked him how often he met them and how old they were. Mohamed answered her questions and added with a giggle that they shared a joint sometimes.

The revelation that Nina's immediate suspicion was not too far beside the point made me painfully aware of my own subconscious assumptions. The team's intuition that those people accepting Mohamed as a friend could not be entirely kosher seemed cynical to me. I had brushed off Nina's scenario of him spiraling into drug abuse and petty crime as too pessimistic—and it probably was. Yet it still astonished me that Nina's instinct about the involvement of illegal substances, the possession and consumption of which is punishable by severe penalties in Slovakia, was correct.

My misjudgment both of Mohamed's integrity and of Nina's intuition was one of those fieldwork moments that made me acutely aware of the delicacy of “negotiated trust” (Loizos 1994): How to approach the refugees’ and NGO workers’ accounts and my own assumptions with some caution while building trust at the same time? Trust is the basis of ethnographic fieldwork, especially in organizations. A modicum of trust needs to be there to build any kind of relationship; if we cannot believe that people's accounts of themselves hold at least some value, and that the information they convey is by and large in consonance with what they take to be true, ethnography as a method would essentially be worthless. Participant observation, with close attention to the thoughts, speech, and actions of those in the field, can approximate knowledge, but never produce certainty.

Individuals in Charge

Whenever I was addressing the state of the Slovak refugee care system with my interlocutors, the workers at the NGOs, schools, and even the state institutions opened up really quickly and did not hold back with their frustrations and complaints. Often, they delivered a crushing critique of the formal procedures, only to express their discomfort about the informal means (involving rule-breaking and their own over-engagement) they applied to make up for these deficits.

Katka, the manager of the state-led integration project, which had been implemented by Charita and had already ended by the time of my fieldwork, elaborated:

Renata, the vice president of a school that accepted two Syrian refugee girls, explained:

This book focuses on the works of six Australian women who were active photographers in the period from the late nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century. It critically examines their photographic works against the tumultuous backdrop of the first women's movement, British settlers’ violent and incursive treatment of Indigenous Australians, the Great War in Europe, the last years of Chinese Nationalist Party rule in China, Australia's imperialist occupation of New Guinea and debates about photography's status as an art form – all of which occurred during the period in question.

The photographers who inform our study are not particularly well known today, unlike mid-twentieth-century Australian modernist photographers such as Olive Cotton and Margaret Michaelis, but we have selected them because we believe that their stories and works offer new insights into aspects of Australian society and culture that have received little or no treatment in histories of Australian photography. Clearly, we are not attempting to produce a comprehensive record of Australian women's photography from this period or write a history of women's photography focusing on aesthetic issues. We are rather attempting to demonstrate photography's usefulness as a source for understanding key moments in Australia's cultural history and exploring some unique ways in which women contributed to the history of photography in Australia.

The idea that photography might shed new light on major cultural forces at work in the nation's past is by no means novel. As early as the 1940s, Australia's national librarian, Harold White, described photographs as ‘another vital form of source material that illustrated the life and development of a nation and its people’. This observation guided the National Library's collecting policy from 1952 to the present. However, as Helen Ennis has pointed out, the library's preference has been for ‘representational pictures’, with the result that most of the images collected by the National Library are realist and documentary in style. They also focus on activity in the public domain. Typical examples include industry-related photographs of mining, agriculture and large-scale construction projects such as the Snowy Mountains Scheme. Largely overlooked, according to Ennis, have been photographs that are expressive in style or record the private and intimate aspects of people's lives.

When I started doing fieldwork in Slovakia in the summer of 2017, two years after the events usually referred to as ‘refugee crisis,’ refugees and asylum were still ubiquitous topics of conversation, causing emotional discussions wherever I went. Three days into my stay in Bratislava's eastern district of Ružinov, seemingly out of nowhere, my landlady Sára suddenly burst into a long, agitated monologue on the refugee situation. She was convinced that the recent ‘exodus’ was being controlled by someone with an agenda, maybe destabilizing Europe. She did not believe that all refugees were threatened by war, and even if they were, they should rather stay where they were and fight for their country. “A man who abandons his family is not a man in my eyes,” she declared resolutely. “When there was war in Slovakia, no one left, we all stayed here. Indeed, we had the Slovak National Uprising!” she added with pathos.

I was stumped by the raw animosity in her words. Sára was a skilled potter in her midsixties with Jewish roots. She had told me that when anti-communist protests started taking place in her hometown in 1989, she stood in the front row. I had got to know her as a passionate democrat and an astute observer of national and international politics. Yet she went into a downright tirade of derogatory and generalizing comments on how “the Muslims” were ungrateful and incompatible with “our” advanced and civilized European culture.

Reacting to my acute discomfort, she contained her rage. Almost apologetically, she explained that her fear and skepticism came from her life experience and her experience of Slovakia as a nation. Slovaks were hostile toward Muslims almost innately; this was because Ottoman rule in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries came with so much violence and deprivation for an innocent population.

Sára's argument against refugees, and my queasy reaction, shows the emotional capacity of the issue: it touches upon essential expressions of personhood—individual and national identity, and (collective) memory—and upon core values such as safety, continuity, and justice. It is very common in Slovakia to see one's stance on refugees, like Sára, not as a political opinion like any other but as a question of principle. Politics boosts this framing by tying the refugee issue tightly to essential needs such as national security and sovereignty.

Freud famously and very apocryphally cautioned against overdetermination – an exclusive focus that blinds people to difference and subtlety – by quipping that sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, rather than an embodiment of female objectification or Europe's nineteen thirties waltz into the abyss. In discussing New Horizons as a matter of exploration, this book has suggested that the virtual world can be appreciated from a range of perspectives, in part a matter of the reader's (or player’s) interests and values. In that spirit, this chapter offers some concluding remarks, centred on pleasures, creativity and futures. It represents a sense of why people might write and read about New Horizons, and of course venture into that virtual world.

Playscapes

Animal Crossing is a matter of virtual space, a commercial ‘scape’ for play by adults and minors with varying degrees of expertise and creativity alongside a range of motivations and outcomes that extend from the consolation of routine to co-creation of a stage worthy of commendation for both its aesthetic excellence and facilitation of sociable performance by multiple gamers. It is not a social media platform such as Facebook that in the guise of supporting a global community commodifies the attention of its users by displaying advertisements and mining data about user locations, affiliations, preferences and other attributes for sale to unidentified third parties such as Cambridge Analytica. It is also not a platform that exists solely to facilitate real-world commercial transactions, for example, the digital stock exchanges. There are transactions in New Horizons but they are about pleasure, not about entities such as hedge funds and dark pools.

It is a scape for scholarly attention, both in itself and as one world – somewhat brighter and friendlier – than the expanding galaxy of aggressive computer games that attract our attention and our money. It can be understood as a manifestation of human needs: our desire to be entertained, delighted, occupied, friended and creative. It can also be understood as a commercial exercise: returns from inputs within a global legal framework that fosters the flow of capital and a shared experience based on digital networks and artificial intelligence.

[A65b, B288b, C265b, D209a, E240a, F259a, G234b, H251a, I268a, J256a]

(a) Tevārīḫ-i Mülūk-i āl-i cOsmān ve Ġazv-i Īşān bā-Küffar

• 1. Bu tevārīḫ çün eyledüm beyān

• Göñlüme bir nesne düşdi nāgehān

• 2. Daḫ1 sözler vesvese˘ol ilhāmdur

• Çāresi nedür anuñ itmāmdur

• [B289a, C266a]

• 3. Ol melikler ki˘anlar1 ẕikr eyledüm

• Ḥāletin ü sīretini söyledüm

• 4. Kimi kāfirdi kimi ehl-i sitem

• Ḳahrldl anlarda bīş u luṭf kem

• [H251b]

• 5. Ol Moġol sulṭānlarlnuñ cadlini

• Niceyidi işit imdi şerḥini

• 6. İtmediler an1 kim Cingīz Ḫān

• Ẓulmden ḫalḳa ider idi cayān

• 7. Ẓulm itdiler velī ḳānūn1la

• Ellerin boyamad1lar ḫūn1la7

• 8. Ẓulm kim ḳānūn ẓabṭ1la ola

• cAdl gibi ḫalḳa ol āsān gele

• [F259b]

• 9. Vardur ol sözlerde bize çok zelel

• İdelüm şimdi˘an1 ki˘anda yoḳ ḫalel

• [G235a]

• 10. Çün añ1ld1 ol ḳamu ehl-i sitem

• Zikre getürelüm ehl-i cadli hem

• [J256b]

• 11. Añalum ol begleri kim serteser

• Hem Müsülmān idiler hem dādger

• [E240b]

• 12. Ḳamus1nuñ işi kāfirle cidāl

• Geydügi vü yidügi māl1 ḥelāl

• [I268b]

• 13. Bu kitāba idelüm an1 ḫitām

• Ki˘anuñ1la ola bu nāme tamām

• [D209b]

• 14. Bir ġazāvetnāme düzeyim saña

• İşid illā ictirāż itme baña

• 15. Ġāziler ṣoñra nişe˘añ1ld1 dime

• Anlar aşaġa neçün geldi dime

(b) İstiẕār-1 Teḫīr-i Ḳażiyye-i Ġāziyān

[B289b]

• 16. Ṣoñra gelen öñ gelenden yig olur

• Fikri olan bun1 kim direm bilür

• [C266b]

• 17. Virdi Ḥaḳ insāna feyż itdükde cūd

• Ḳudret ü caḳl u ḥayāt u hem vücūd

• 18. cAḳl ol üçden yigrekdi bigümān

• Lācirem ṣoñra˘old1 añlardan cayān

• [H252a]

• 19. Ṣoñra geldi enbiyādan ol Resūl

• Ḫātim old1 vü ḳamudan eşref ol

• 20. Dört kitābuñ soñ1 Ḳurāndur gelen

• Faẓl1la˘oldur anlara nāsiḫ olan

• [F260a]

• 21. OEamudan çün ṣoñra geldi ādemī

• Faẓl1la old1 ḳamunuñ ḫātimi

• 22. Pāẕişeh aşaġa yuḳaru calem

• Ol calemden pāẓişeh olur m1 kem

• 23. Dürr-i meknūn baḥr ḳacr1nda olur

• Ḫār u ḫas ḫāşāk yuḳaru ḳalur

• [I269a, J257a]

• 24. Tebbet ile Ḳul huva’llāhu aḥad

• Bu söze ḥüccet ki yoḳdur aña red

(c) Āġāz-1 Dāsitān

[E241a, G235b]

• 25. Bir gün ol Sul†ān cAlāü’d-dīn sacīd

• Ṣoñra nolur ḥāl-i ġāzī vü şehīd

• [B290a]

• 26. Bildi an1 kim ġazā key iş olur

• Ġāzī˘olanuñ ḥaşr1 bīteşvīş olur

• 27. Ġāzī olan ḥaḳ dīnüñdür āleti

• Lācirem ḫoş olas1dur ḥāleti

• 28. Ġāzī olan Tangr1nuñ ferrāş1dur

• Ṣirk çirkinden bu yiri ar1dur

• [D210a]

• 29. Ġāzī olan Ḥaḳ ḳ1l1c1dur yaḳīn

• Ġāzī˘olur püşt ü penāh-1 ehl-i dīn

• 30. An1 ki˘ola Tangr1 yol1nda şehīd

• Öldi ṣanma kim diridür ol sacīd

• [C267a]

• 31. Ḥaḳ ḳat1nda r1zḳ içindedür olar

• Ölmediler belki zindedür olar