Description

The ethnographies collected here offer a surprising and compelling picture of change in Russia and Eastern Europe found in no other book to date. Looking at the everyday processes by which individuals and groups forge new lives, the authors challenge the idea that we can understand this transformation by the predictable models-whether capitalism, post-socialism, modernity, or postmodernity.

The collection brings together a wide-ranging group of authors from sociology, anthropology, and political science to reveal the complex relationships that still exist between the former socialist world and the world today. Through evocative ethnographic research and writing, they bring to light the unintended consequences of change and show how the "slates" of the past enter the present not as legacies-but as novel adaptations. Often what appear as "restorations" of patterns familiar from socialism are something quite different: direct responses to the new market initiatives. By showing the unexpected ways in which these new patterns are emerging, this book charts a new and important course for the study of post-socialist transition.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1 Introduction
Chapter 2 Traders, "Disorder," and Citizenship Regimes in Provincial Russia
Chapter 3 Fuzzy Property: Rights, Power, and Identity in Transylvania's Decollectivization
Chapter 4 Barter of the Bankrupt: The Politics of Demonetization in Russia's Federal State
Chapter 5 Slick Salesmen and Simple People: Negotiated Capitalism in a Privatized Polish Firm
Chapter 6 "But We Are Still Mothers": Gender, State, and the Construction of Need in Hungary
Chapter 7 Deconstructing Socialism in Bulgaria
Chapter 8 Redefining the Collective: Russian Mineworkers in Transition
Chapter 9 Portable Worlds: On the Limits of Replication in the Czech and Slovak Republics

Product details

Published 04 Feb 1999
Format Paperback
Edition 1st
Extent 320
ISBN 9780847690435
Imprint Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Dimensions 229 x 154 mm
Publisher Bloomsbury Publishing

About the contributors

Anthology Editor

Michael Burawoy

Anthology Editor

Katherine Verdery

Contributor

Sarah Ashwin

Contributor

Michael Burawoy

Contributor

Gerald Creed

Contributor

Elizabeth Dunn

Contributor

Andrew Lass

Contributor

David Woodruff

Related Titles

Get 30% off in the May sale - for one week only

Environment: Staging