Van kleine mensen, de dingen die nooit voorbijgaan. Cultuur en alledaagse politiek in een Oost-Duitse fabriek

Samenvatting

Cultural and Daily Politics in an East German Factory. Since the German unification of 1990, there has been much debate on the character and the width of the cultural cleavage between East and West Germans. This article explicitly distances itself from the mentalistic assumptions about cultural change and conflict governing that discussion. In its stead, it makes a case for a historically and political-economically grounded approach. The empirical substance is drawn from fieldwork in a recently privatized chemical plant in the industrial heartland of the former GDR. It is shown that workers hold the world to be a place that is essentially and eternally characterized by the bipolar opposition of big and small, capital and labor, powerful and powerless, hypocrites and the honest, and, at present, also East and West. Two conclusions can be drawn: (1) the so-called "wall in the heads" should be given its proper assessment as part and parcel of daily experience and culturally informed action; and (2) culture is not some ephemeral discourse, but should be considered as an interpretive scheme informing and giving direction to the practice of local relations. 46 References. Adapted from the source document.