Can Eastern philosophy help to understand Western emptiness?

Abstract (English)

In the Latvia-Russia borderlands, people describe their worlds as emptying. They invoke emptiness as a meta-concept that helps them describe radical changes in place-constituting relations in the process of which places lose their constitutive elements--people, infrastructure, services, the future. They also qualify emptiness by talking about the changed dynamics of light and darkness, sound and silence, nature and the built environment, and, on a more abstract level, form and matter. In this paper, I consider whether and how Eastern philosophy, especially Taoist and Buddhist notions of emptiness and blandness, can sharpen anthropological insights about emptiness as a lived reality and emptiness as a vernacular and analytical category derived from the Russia-Latvia borderlands.