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by Subject: Anthropology (General)

By Area: Central/Eastern Europe

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Published April 2026
Empire and Eduards Volters

The Ethnography of Lithuanians and Latvians, 1882-1941

Savoniakaitė, V.

Eduards Volters was a linguist, ethnographer, and archeologist with the Russian Imperial Geographical Society, and considered one of the founders of literate Lithuanian and Latvian communities. This study compares various historical and theoretical contexts in anthropology and decolonization to reveal how Volters reconciled his ethnographic work within the political goals of the empire.

Subjects: Anthropology (General) Theory and Methodology

eBook
Published October 2024
An Ethnographic Chiefdom

Epistemic Arrest and Knowledge Production in Czechoslovak Ethnography (1969–1989)

Balaš, N.

The Czechoslovak academic discipline called ‘Ethnography and Folklore Studies’ was impacted and influenced by the daily realities of state socialism in 1969–1989. This book examines how state socialist features such as Marxist–Leninist ideology brought about the discipline’s epistemic stalling.

Subjects: Theory and Methodology Anthropology (General)

eBook
Published August 2023
Silences and Divided Memories

The Exodus and its Legacy in Post-War Istrian Society

Virloget, K. H.

Dealing with the difficult, silenced past of the so called "Istrian exodus" after the Second World War, this book shifts the usual focus from migrants to those who stayed behind and to the new immigrants who came to the “emptied” towns.

Subjects: Anthropology (General) Refugee and Migration Studies Memory Studies

eBook
Published June 2023
White Eagle, Black Eagle

Ethnic Relations in the German-Polish Borderlands

Parkin, R.

Studying the German-Polish ethnic relations, this book analyses the people and region through their respective borderlands, migration, official cooperation and unofficial suspicions across the border.

Subjects: Anthropology (General) Political and Economic Anthropology History: 20th Century to Present

eBook
Published March 2023
Feeding Anxieties

The Politics of Children's Food in Poland

Boni, Z.

Focusing on the underlying politics behind children’s food, this book highlights the variety of social relationships, expectations and emotions ingrained in feeding children In Poland. With rich ethnographic accounts, including research with children, the book demonstrates how families, schools, the food industry and state agencies shape and experience feeding anxieties.

Subjects: Food & Nutrition Anthropology (General) Sociology

eBook
Published February 2023
A Sea of Transience

Poetics, Politics and Aesthetics along the Black Sea Coast

Khalvashi, T. & Demant Frederiksen, M. (eds)

Transience is found in every meeting, encounter and form of coexistence between people and things that exist and live by, or move across or along, the Black Sea. With particular attention to poetics, politics and aesthetics, this volume focuses on the scales of transient moments and histories, and enables readers to see and sense the many forms of transience that occur in a given landscape, sea or space.

Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology Environmental Studies (General)

eBook
Paperback available
Published February 2022
Durable Solutions

Challenges with Implementing Global Norms for Internally Displaced Persons in Georgia

Funke, C.

Focusing on Georgia, this book presents a theoretical and empirical study on the implementation of durable solutions for internally displaced persons (IDPs). Building on extensive field research, it describes and explains the considerable problems which Georgia faces in establishing global norms, as well as the ongoing hardship that IDPs experience.

Subjects: Refugee and Migration Studies Anthropology (General) Peace and Conflict Studies

eBook
Published February 2022
Walls and Gateways

Contested Heritage in Dubrovnik

Loades, C. M.

Walls and Gateways provides an ethnographic case study, which explores how the production of Dubrovnik’s World Heritage intersects with the reconstruction and consolidation of identities and locality in the city’s post-war context. The book analyses how representations, perceptions and uses of Dubrovnik’s heritage are embedded in particular social and political structural conditions, cultural practices, materiality and place.

Subjects: Heritage Studies Anthropology (General) Memory Studies

eBook
Published July 2021
Textures of Belonging

Senses, Objects and Spaces of Romanian Roma

Racleş, A.

The longstanding European conception that Roma and non-Roma are separated by unambiguous socio-cultural distinctions has led to the construction of Roma as "non-belonging others." Challenging this conception, Textures of Belonging explores how Roma negotiate and feel belonging on the everyday level.

Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology Cultural Studies (General)

eBook
Published May 2021
To See a Moose

The History of Polish Sex Education

Kościańska, A.

Guiding the reader through the development of sex education in Poland, Agnieszka Kościańska looks at how it has changed from the 19th century to the present day. The book also identifies the women and men who changed the way sex was written about in the country, and how they established the field of Polish sexology.

Subjects: Anthropology (General) Gender Studies and Sexuality History (General)

eBook
Published March 2021
A Taste for Oppression

A Political Ethnography of Everyday Life in Belarus

Hervouet, R.

Belarus has emerged from communism in a unique manner. The author, who has lived in Belarus for several years, highlights several mechanisms of tyranny, beyond the regime’s ability to control and repress, which should not be underestimated. The book sheds light on the reasons why part of the population supports Alexander Lukashenko and takes a fresh look at the functioning of what has been called 'the last dictatorship in Europe'.

Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology

eBook
Paperback available
Published August 2020
Modernity and the Unmaking of Men

Schubert, V.

Responding to the renewed emphasis on the significance of village studies, this book focuses on aging bachelorhood as a site of intolerable angst when faced with rural depopulation and social precarity. Based on ongoing ethnographic fieldwork in contemporary Macedonian society, the book explores the intersections between modernity, kinship and gender.

Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology Gender Studies and Sexuality

eBook
Published August 2020
Under the Sign of the Cross

The People’s Salvation Cathedral and the Church-Building Industry in Postsocialist Romania

Tateo, G.

Based on extensive ethnographic research, this book investigates the construction of the world’s highest Orthodox cathedral in Bucharest, Romania. Through the notion of re-consecration, the book brings together sociological and anthropological scholarship on eastern Christianity, secularization, postsocialist urban change and nationalism in a vivid account of societal transformation.

Subjects: Anthropology of Religion Anthropology (General) Urban Studies

eBook
Published January 2020
Institutionalised Dreams

The Art of Managing Foreign Aid

Drążkiewicz, E.

How do states become donors? Why do individuals decide to share their wealth with others through foreign aid? Using examples from Poland, Elżbieta Drążkiewicz demonstrates how the concept of foreign aid requires the establishment of a specific moral economy which links national ideologies and local cultures of charitable giving with broader ideas about the global political economy.

Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Anthropology (General) Sustainable Development Goals

eBook
Published December 2018
Democracy Struggles

NGOs and the Politics of Aid in Serbia

Vetta, T.

This book explores the “associational revolution” in post-socialist, post-conflict Serbia. It traces the boom of local NGOs since the 1990s in the context of the global political economy of Aid, neoliberal state restructuring, and shifting post-Cold War hegemonies, and unpacks the various forms of dispossession and inequality entailed in the democracy-promotion project.

Subjects: Anthropology (General) Development Studies Political and Economic Anthropology

eBook
Published December 2018
From Storeroom to Stage

Romanian Attire and the Politics of Folklore

Urdea, A.

Tracing in reverse the journey of a collection of Romanian folk objects from a museum in London back to the villages where they were made, From Storeroom to Stage explores the role that material culture plays in the production of value and meaning.

Subjects: Anthropology (General) Museum Studies Heritage Studies

eBook
Published June 2018
Frontiers of Civil Society

Government and Hegemony in Serbia

Mikuš, M.

Frontiers of Civil Society is a historical anthropological analysis of the roles of ‘civil society’ in Serbia’s postsocialist and postauthoritarian transformation, focusing mainly on a set of interventions through which various civil society forces supported neoliberalization and transnational integration as part of a hegemonic project of social transformation after the rule of Slobodan Milošević.

Subjects: Anthropology (General) Political and Economic Anthropology History: 20th Century to Present

eBook
Published April 2018
Waiting for Elijah

Time and Encounter in a Bosnian Landscape

HadžiMuhamedović, S.

Waiting for Elijah is an intimate portrait of time-reckoning, syncretism and proximity in one of the world’s most polarized places, the Bosnian Field of Gacko. Based on long-term, multi-sited fieldwork, it examines the complexity of time situated between folk cosmology, political constructions of history and bodily experiences of a landscape in transition.

Subjects: Anthropology (General) Anthropology of Religion Refugee and Migration Studies

eBook
Paperback available
Published February 2018
Sacred Places, Emerging Spaces

Religious Pluralism in the Post-Soviet Caucasus

Darieva, T., Mühlfried, F., & Tuite, K. (eds)

Though long-associated with violence, the Caucasus is a region rich with spirituality. Based on fresh ethnographies and studies of sacred sites in Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan and Russia, Sacred Places, Emerging Spaces discusses vanishing and emerging sacred places in the multi-ethnic and multi-religious post-Soviet Caucasus.

Subjects: Anthropology (General) Anthropology of Religion Sociology

eBook
Paperback available
Published December 2017
Staging Citizenship

Roma, Performance and Belonging in EU Romania

Szeman, I.

Staging Citizenship explores a wide range of Roma performances and representations—from live music and cultural performances to Gypsy soaps and reality TV shows, demonstrating how disenfranchised urban Roma claim cultural citizenship and belonging in music, dance, activism and everyday encounters.

Subjects: Anthropology (General) Performance Studies

eBook
Paperback available
Published October 2017
Gender in Georgia

Feminist Perspectives on Culture, Nation, and History in the South Caucasus

Barkaia, M. & Waterston, A. (eds)

As Georgia seeks to reinvent itself in the post-Soviet period, Georgian women are maneuvering to adjust to the new economic, social and political order. Gender in Georgia brings together an international group of feminist scholars to explore the socio-political conditions that have shaped gender dynamics in Georgia from the late 19th century to the present.

Subjects: Gender Studies and Sexuality Anthropology (General) Cultural Studies (General)

eBook
Paperback available
Published October 2016
Hunters, Gatherers, and Practitioners of Powerlessness

An Ethnography of the Degraded in Postsocialist Poland

Rakowski, T.

Practitioners of Powerlessness gives a dramatic account of life after the socio-economic transformations of the 1990s in Poland, which left many people impoverished and unemployed.

Subject: Anthropology (General)

eBook
Paperback available
Published June 2015
Oikos and Market

Explorations in Self-Sufficiency after Socialism

Gudeman, S. & Hann, C. (eds)

This volume’s six comparative investigations of postsocialist communities illuminate the universal significance of Aristotle’s vision of the oikos, an economy based on the order of the house. These postsocialist configurations show that economies depend on macro institutions of markets and states, and also on the micro institutions of families, communities, and house economies.

Subject: Anthropology (General)

Paperback available
Published February 2015
Economy and Ritual

Studies of Postsocialist Transformations

Gudeman, S. & Hann, C. (eds)

Common sense suggests that rituals drain economic wealth and that rational actions are antithetical to rituals. These six ethnographies offer a different vision. Comparative, historical, and contemporary, the studies stretch from Macedonia to Kyrgyzstan, each one illuminating the changes in an area as it emerged from socialism and (re-)entered market society.

Subjects: Anthropology (General) Political and Economic Anthropology

Paperback available
Published February 2013
Places of Pain

Forced Displacement, Popular Memory and Trans-local Identities in Bosnian War-torn Communities

Halilovich, H.

This compelling and intimate description of places of pain and (be)longing that were lost during the 1992–95 war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, as well as of survivors’ places of resettlement in Australia, Europe and North America, serves as a powerful illustration of the complex interplay between place, memory and identity.

Subjects: Refugee and Migration Studies Anthropology (General) Peace and Conflict Studies Memory Studies

eBook
Paperback available
Published October 2011
Crude Domination

An Anthropology of Oil

Behrends, A., Reyna, S. P. & Schlee, G. (eds)

Subjects: Peace and Conflict Studies Anthropology (General)

eBook
Paperback available
Published September 2011
Multiple Moralities and Religions in Post-Soviet Russia

Zigon, J. (ed)

Subjects: Anthropology of Religion Anthropology (General)

eBook
Paperback available
Published September 2009
Postsocialist Europe

Anthropological Perspectives from Home

Kurti, L. & Skalník, P. (Eds.)

Subject: Anthropology (General)

eBook
Paperback available
Published March 2007
Exploring Gypsiness

Power, Exchange and Interdependence in a Transylvanian Village

Engebrigtsen, A.

Subject: Anthropology (General)

eBook
Paperback available
Published March 2006
Postsocialism

Politics and Emotions in Central and Eastern Europe

Svasek M. (ed)

Subjects: Anthropology (General) Cultural Studies (General)

eBook
Paperback available