Postsocialism as a "region"
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Elements that define the region:
Current political situation
History
Anthropological knowledge
Anthropologists who traveled to the region with concept apparatus developed
somewhere else
Village was a appropriate unit for participant observation
 Villages as the core of the traditional culture and have been destroyed
Urbanization and industrialization (change in division of labour and gender relations)
Network, patron client relations, social circles, local patriotism
The role of intellectuals in the construction and destruction of socialism
Economic capital, cultural capital, social capital and moral capital as significant
elements in various periods
Common macro structure (Socialism-postsocialism)
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What do we know about the region?
Ethnography produced by local/native ethnographers (type of folkloristic)
Demography
Geography
History (all versions, official, alternative, western and local)
Political system (how it functioned and how it did not function)
Religion (Islam, Christianity, shamanism, Buddhism, atheism, marxism?)
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Who traveled to the Eastern block?
 Anthropologists who had sympathy for socialism
 Anthropologist who were married with natives or the second generation
immigrants
 Some who were neither the first or the second category
What was produced before the fall of the Berlin wall
 The relationship between the people and the state
 The results of collectivization
 Village/community studies with little focus on meaning
 Very few studies about rituals
 Concentration of studies produced in Romania and Hungary due to the
openness of the regimes
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Former Soviet Union:
Historical development
 Continuity: Russian, Sovietic, postsovietic/Russian
 The population of the Soviet Union had been "inherited" from (multinational) Russian
empire.
 What is shared?
 Imperial past
 Revolution (both resistance and revolutionary activity)
 Leninist ideals; internationalism
 WW 2/common enemy: Germans/fascism
 Stalin regime (oppressions and deportations)
 Ethnic in form socialism in content
 Macro structure (everybody employed by the state)
 Russians in all parts of the USSR territory
 The project of civilization
 Modernization and urbanization/industrialization/collectivization
 Language, education system, media, public rituals, heroes, leaders (i.e. the culture of
socialism or communism)
 Religion (atheism)
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