Uncertain Transition Ethnographies of Change in the Postsocialist World

by Burawoy, Michael; Verdery, Katherine; Ashwin, Sarah; Burawoy, Michael; Creed, Gerald; Dunn, Elizabeth; Humphrey, Caroline; Lass, Andrew; Woodruff, David; Zbierski-Salameh, Slawomira

• ISBN13: 9780847690435
• ISBN10: 0847690431
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1999-02-04
• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers

Summary

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

Acknowledgments
Introduction	p. 1
Traders, "Disorder," and Citizenship Regimes in Provincial Russia	p. 19
Fuzzy Property: Rights, Power, and Identity in Transylvania's Decollectivization	p. 53
Barter of the Bankrupt: The Politics of Demonetization in Russia's Federal State	p. 83
Slick Salesmen and Simple People: Negotiated Capitalism in a Privatized Polish Firm	p. 125
"But We Are Still Mothers": Gender, the State, and the Construction of Need in Postsocialist Hungary	p. 151
Polish Peasants in the "Valley of Transition": Responses to Postsocialist Reforms	p. 189
Deconstructing Socialism in Bulgaria	p. 223
Redefining the Collective: Russian Mineworkers in Transition	p. 245
Portable Worlds: On the Limits of Replication in the Czech and Slovak Republics	p. 273
Afterword	p. 301
Index	p. 313
About the Contributors	p. 321
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