Fairytale Cynicism in the ‘Kingdom of Plastic Bags’

Abstract

This article explores local transformations of power, and accompanying expressions of communal powerlessness, in Chelnochovskna-Dniestre, a town on the southwestern border of Ukraine where the collapse of the Soviet system has triggered the disintegration of the political, economic and physical infrastructure, as well as the concomitant departure of almost all those able to obtain visas to emigrate. It seeks to understand and articulate the distinctive and complex sense of place that has taken hold of the town, whose collective consciousness is now at once extensively transnational and intensively local, and where place is made palpable as much through what is absent as through what is present. In so doing, it seeks a more profound appreciation of the power of place itself on the lives of ethnography’s subjects.