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POSTSOCIALIST EUROPE

Anthropological Perspectives from Home

Edited by László Kürti and Peter Skalník

336 pages, ca 15 ills, bibliog., index
ISBN 978-1-84545-474-6 Hb $85.00/£50.00 Published (September 2009)
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Now that nearly twenty years have passed since the collapse of the Soviet bloc there is a need to understand what has taken place since that historic date and where we are at the moment. Bringing together authors with different historical, cultural, regional and theoretical backgrounds, this volume engages in debates that address new questions arising from recent developments, such as whether there is a need to reject or uphold the notion of post-socialism as both a necessary and valid concept ignoring changes and differences across both time and space. The authors’ first-hand ethnographies from their own countries belie such a simplistic notion, revealing, as they do, the cultural, social, and historical diversity of countries of Central and Southeastern Europe.

László Kürti has taught anthropology at the American University, and Eötvös University in Budapest, and presently teaches at the University of Miskolc. He has conducted fieldwork in the US, Romania and Hungary. His books include: Beyond Borders (1996, co-edited with J. Langman), The Remote Borderland (2001), Youth and the State in Hungary (2002), and he served as co-editor for Working Images (2004).

Peter Skalník currently teaches social anthropology at the University of Pardubice. He was the Czech ambassador to Lebanon (1992–1997). He has edited or co-edited: The Early Writings of Bronislaw Malinowski (1993), The Post-communist Millennium: The Struggles for Sociocultural Anthropology in Central and Eastern Europe (2002), Anthropology of Europe: Teaching and Research (2004), Studying Peoples in the People’s Democracies: Socialist Era Anthropology in East-Central Europe (2005).

Series: Volume 10, EASA Series

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Table of Contents (Free download)

Illustrations (Free download)

Preface (Free download)

Introduction

Postsocialist Europe and the Anthropological Perspective from Home

László Kürti and Peter Skalník

Now that twenty years have passed since the collapse of the Eastern bloc of "socialist" states there is a need to understand and theorize what took place since that historic date and where we are at the moment. The question of whether a democratic Eastern Europe does or does not exist because of the collapse of the Soviet bloc cannot be discarded. In our volume, case-studies, oscillating between cautious optimism and tamed pessimism, provide a slice of daily life in postcommunist East-Central Europe that we have not experienced before.

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Gender and Governance in Rural Communities of Postsocialist Slovakia

Alexandra Bitušíková and Katarína Koštialová

This chapter deals with the questions of women's participation in decision making by examining the example of female mayors in two rural communities in postsocialist Slovakia, a recently formed independent country where selected villages represent the most numerous administrative units in terms of size (less than 1,000 inhabitants). To place the role of women's representation in a broader societal context, in this study we combine data from the national level with ethnographies of everyday life in two communities.

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Property Relations, Class, and Labour in Rural Poland

Michał Buchowski

This chapter serves a dual purpose, informative and interpretative. With respect to the first, I would like to provide some data on the Polish privatization processes in agriculture. It will also provide a background for the second, in which I offer some anthropological insights into this process that go beyond statistics and the "raw" data.

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Migs and Cadres on the Move

Thoughts on the Mimetic Dimensions of Postsocialism

Hana Červinková

In this chapter, I approach "post-socialist transition" from the perspective of identity change, which that I see as the displacement of one particular form of mimetic faculty in favour of another. I focus on the institution of the Czech Air Force and its officers whose professional identity has been seriously challenged by the circumstances of large sociopolitical and institutional changes that accompany the "transition" from socialism to democracy.

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Diasporas Coming Home

Identity and Uncertainty of Transnational Returnees in Postcommunist Lithuania

Vytis Čiubrinskas

Our focus is on Lithuanian returnees and/or migrants from the West mostly the U.S. and Canada. We explore their accounts of the ongoing process of social and cultural accommodation after coming back to Lithuania. The different categories of returnees as well as different dimensions of return are discussed.

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A Rainbow Flag against the Krakow Dragon

Polish Responses to the Gay and Lesbian Movement

Gražyna Kubica

My paper comprises of three sections: an account of the most important events; a presentation of the main actors' ideas and experiences; and the theoretically crucial contexts against the background of which I will venture some interpretations with the help of literature from anthropological, sociological, gender, queer and cultural studies.

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Olivia's Story

Capitalism and Rabbit Farming in Hungary

László Kürti

The main focus of my study is on the relations between various groups and national as well as transnational institutions during the period generally referred to as the postsocialist phase. More specifically, I am concerned to make social change intelligible by relating it to institutional and economic contexts in which it develops and occurs. To that end, I look at how a foreign industrial venture restructured local agro-industry and labour processes.

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Punk Anthropology

From a Study of a Local Slovene Alternative Rock Scene towards Partisan Scholarship

Rajko Muršič

With some distant reference to the old communist slogan of "cultural imperialism" (even if wrapped in the cloth of post-modernism) and more recent discussions of cunning imperial reason, I will try to use results of my studies of the local alternative musical scene in north-east Slovenia to critically examine my own position as an experimental musician and a peripheral scholar. Despite the fact that the term "alternative" nowadays has no deeper meaning attached to it, I will try to employ it, not only metaphorically, in order to discuss my own scholarly position in the light of recently expressed criticisms of what we can describe as "epistemological imperialism" in "mainstream" anthropology.

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Being Locked Out and Locked In

The Culture of Homelessness in Hungary

Terézia Nagy

The intention of this chapter is to show how the "hidden poverty" of state socialism continues to manifest itself in the postsocialist present while the phenomenon of "new poverty" is being simultaneously created. Part of this new poverty is homelessness, a topic which did not officially exist during the socialist period and was considered taboo.

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Political Anthropology of the Postcommunist Czech Republic

Local-National and Rural-Urban Scenes

Peter Skalník

In the Czech Republic, post-1989 social change has been strongly informed by politics on all levels. The introduction of democracy has been accompanied by serious contradictions which make many people question the meaning of the transformation from communism to democracy and a market economy.

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Comparative Cultural Aspects of Work in Multinational Enterprises

Gabriel-Ionut Stoiciu

Even if they choose by free will other countries in which to earn their living, people — migrants or just expats — continue to blame all the difficulties they encounter not only on socio-economic objective conditions, but also on subjective cultural ones as well. The cultural difference between them and the enterprise's and/or manager's origin is the reason for the state of their misfortune.

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Immigrants from Ukraine in the Czech Republic

Foreigners in the Border Zone

Zdeněk Uherek

In this chapter I deal with several types of emigration from Ukraine to the Czech Republic that took place from the early 1990s to the early twenty-first century. The aim of this study is to show some of the specifics, including causes and effects, of postcommunist migration. I take note of the motivations of migrants, their aspirations, how they invest the wealth they have gained, what their attitudes are to the population of the target country and, conversely, how the majority population of the target country views migrant groups.

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Afterword - Under the Aegis of Anthropology

Blazing New Trails

Christian Giordano

Each article within this book reveals that something new is actually surfacing in Eastern Europe, and gives a clear indication that the discipline there is evolving or may have already undergone an irrevocable modification. I have a clear feeling that this volume will not only further an interest in anthropology but also reliably help reassess the overrated obstacles that hindered this discipline's swift development in Central and Eastern Europe for so long.

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Index (Free download)

Contributors (Free download)