“How Does Your Tongue Even Lift to Hustle Me Along!”: Care and Surveillance in the Lithuanian Borderland

Seeing the Woods · 4 weeks ago · 36 views

By Eunice Blavascunas: “I do not find the mushrooms. The mushrooms find me!” And with this declaration 82-year-old Zinaida justifies breaking the rules.1 She enters the forest commons–turned–military-exclusion zone to meet the mushrooms that want to locate her. Lithuania, like its neighbors Latvia and Poland, created special defense zones at their borders with Belarus beginning in 2021, a year before the full-scale war in Ukraine began, and a year after massive protests against Belarus’ Lukashenko regime.