Download or read book Getting by in Postsocialist Romania written by David A. Kideckel and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This ethnographic study describes how Romanian industrial workers have fared since the end of socialism. The author finds fear and alienation due to their precarious job status, declining health and loss of a social safety net. Drawing on more than three decades of fieldwork he presents narratives from select individuals.
Download or read book Ambiguous Transitions written by Jill Massino and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2019-07-30 with total page 466 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focusing on youth, family, work, and consumption, Ambiguous Transitions analyzes the interplay between gender and citizenship postwar Romania. By juxtaposing official sources with oral histories and socialist policies with everyday practices, Jill Massino illuminates the gendered dimensions of socialist modernization and its complex effects on women’s roles, relationships, and identities. Analyzing women as subjects and agents, the book examines how they negotiated the challenges that arose as Romanian society modernized, even as it clung to traditional ideas about gender. Massino concludes by exploring the ambiguities of postsocialism, highlighting how the legacies of the past have shaped politics and women’s lived experiences since 1989.
Download or read book Disrupted Landscapes written by Stefan Dorondel and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2016-03-01 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The fall of the Soviet Union was a transformative event for the national political economies of Eastern Europe, leading not only to new regimes of ownership and development but to dramatic changes in the natural world itself. This painstakingly researched volume focuses on the emblematic case of postsocialist Romania, in which the transition from collectivization to privatization profoundly reshaped the nation’s forests, farmlands, and rivers. From bureaucrats abetting illegal deforestation to peasants opposing government agricultural policies, it reveals the social and political mechanisms by which neoliberalism was introduced into the Romanian landscape.
Download or read book Socialist Heritage written by Emanuela Grama and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2019-12-01 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This prize-winning study of post-WWII Romania examines the fraught relationship between national heritage and Socialist statecraft. In Socialist Heritage, ethnographer and historian Emanuela Grama explores the socialist state’s attempt to create its own heritage, as well as the ongoing legacy of that project. While many argue that the socialist regimes of Central and Eastern Europe aimed to erase the pre-war history of the socialist cities, Grama shows that the communist state in Romania sought to exploit the past for its own benefit. The book traces the transformation of Bucharest’s Old Town district from the early twentieth century into the twenty-first. Under socialism, politicians and professionals used the district’s historic buildings—especially the ruins of a medieval palace—to emphasize the city’s Romanian past and erase its ethnically diverse history. Since the collapse of socialism, the cultural and economic value of the Old Town has become highly contested. Its poor residents decry their semi-decrepit homes, while entrepreneurs see it as a source of easy money. Such arguments point to recent negotiations about the meanings of class, political participation, and ethnic and economic belonging in today’s Romania. Grama’s rich historical and ethnographic research reveals the fundamentally dual nature of heritage: every search for an idealized past relies on strategies of differentiation that can lead to further marginalization and exclusion. Winner of the 2020 Ed A. Hewitt Book Prize
Download or read book Under the Sign of the Cross written by Giuseppe Tateo and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2020-08-01 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Based on extensive ethnographic research, this book delves into the thriving industry of religious infrastructure in Romania, where 4,000 Orthodox churches and cathedrals have been built in three decades. Following the construction of the world’s highest Orthodox cathedral in Bucharest, the book brings together sociological and anthropological scholarship on eastern Christianity, secularization, urban change and nationalism. Reading postsocialism through the prism of religious change, the author argues that the emergence of political, entrepreneurial and intellectual figures after 1990 has happened ‘under the sign of the cross’.
Download or read book The Vanishing Hectare written by Katherine Verdery and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 452 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In most countries in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, the fall of communism meant individuals could acquire land. Based on fieldwork between 1990 and 2001, the author explores the importance of land and land ownership in one Transylvanian community.
Download or read book Europe in the Classroom written by Simona Szakács and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-10-13 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides an unconventional account of post-1989 education reform in Romania. By drawing on policy documentation, interviews with key players, qualitative data from everyday school contexts, and extensive textbook analysis, this groundbreaking study explores change within the Romanian education system as a process that institutionalises world culture through symbolic mediation of the concept ‘Europe’. The book argues that the education system’s structural and organisational evolution through time is decoupled from its self-depiction by ultimately serving a nation-building agenda. It does so despite notable changes in the discourse reflecting increasingly transnational definitions of the mission of the school in the post-1989 era. The book also suggests that the notions of ‘nation’ and ‘citizen’ institutionalised by the school are gradually being redefined as cosmopolitan, matching post-war patterns of post-national affiliations on a worldwide level.
Download or read book Postsocialism written by Maruška Svašek and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2006-03-01 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In many parts of post-socialist Europe the tumultuous political and economic developments have generated strong emotions, ranging from hope and euphoria to disappointment, envy, disillusionment, sorrow, loneliness, and hatred. Yet these aspects have been largely neglected in analyses of the profound transformations that have taken place in Central and Eastern Europe since 1990. Based on a wide variety of ethnographic case studies focusing on Russian, Siberian, Romanian, Bulgarian, Slovenian, Croatian, Czech, and Polish communities, this volume proves the significance of emotions to post-socialist political processes as an inherent part of the transformations and sheds new light on the impact of local, national, and transnational political forces that have given rise to the resurgence of nationalist sentiments, increasing poverty and marginalization, conflicts arising from the restitution of state property, constitutional changes, and economic deprivation.
Download or read book Domesticity on Display written by Maria Cristache and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2021-10-23 with total page 215 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines postsocialist transformations reflected in urban middle-class domestic spaces and in museums dedicated to socialism in Romania. It focuses on the significance and circulation of porcelain and crystal sets and ornaments during late socialism and after 1989, following the experiences of consumers, workers in the glassware and porcelain industry, and artists. By tracing the values and temporalities embedded in materiality, the book sheds light on how objects shape daily life in a time of cultural, economic, and social change. Drawing on ethnographic research, the book offers an in-depth analysis of the ambiguous relation between the middle-class and the socialist state, using materiality and consumption to shed light on contradictions between aspirations and resources and between official discourses and everyday practices. The book reveals changes in practices of display, gift exchange, and barter, in the perception and use of time, as well as in gender and inter-generational relations. This work will be of interest to sociologists, anthropologists and cultural historians, especially researchers interested in consumption, material culture, postsocialism, the anthropology of value and gift, the study of social time, practices of the middle-class, and the history of consumption in Eastern Europe.
Download or read book Class Cultures in Post Socialist Eastern Europe written by Dražen Cepić and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-10-26 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book investigates the extent to which social class has changed in Eastern Europe since the fall of communism. Based on extensive original research, the book discusses how ideas about class are viewed by both working class and middle class people. The book examines how such people’s social identities are shaped by various factors including economic success, culture and friendship networks. The present class situation in Eastern Europe is contrasted to what prevailed in Communist times, when societies were officially classless, but nevertheless had Communist party elites.
Download or read book The Political Lives of Dead Bodies written by Katherine Verdery and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 1999-04-07 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since 1989, scores of bodies across Eastern Europe have been exhumed and brought to rest in new gravesites. Katherine Verdery investigates why certain corpses—the bodies of revolutionary leaders, heroes, artists, and other luminaries, as well as more humble folk—have taken on a political life in the turbulent times following the end of Communist Party rule, and what roles they play in revising the past and reorienting the present. Enlivening and invigorating the dialogue on postsocialist politics, this imaginative study helps us understand the dynamic and deeply symbolic nature of politics—and how it can breathe new life into old bones.
Download or read book What Was Socialism and What Comes Next written by Katherine Verdery and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 1996-02-16 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Among the first anthropologists to work in Eastern Europe, Katherine Verdery had built up a significant base of ethnographic and historical expertise when the major political transformations in the region began to take place. In this collection of essays dealing with the aftermath of Soviet-style socialism and the different forms that may replace it, she explores the nature of socialism in order to understand more fully its consequences. By analyzing her primary data from Romania and Transylvania and synthesizing information from other sources, Verdery lends a distinctive anthropological perspective to a variety of themes common to political and economic studies on the end of socialism: themes such as "civil society," the creation of market economies, privatization, national and ethnic conflict, and changing gender relations. Under Verdery's examination, privatization and civil society appear not only as social processes, for example, but as symbols in political rhetoric. The classic pyramid scheme is not just a means of enrichment but a site for reconceptualizing the meaning of money and an unusual form of post-Marxist millenarianism. Land being redistributed as private property stretches and shrinks, as in the imaginings of the farmers struggling to tame it. Infused by this kind of ethnographic sensibility, the essays reject the assumption of a transition to capitalism in favor of investigating local processes in their own terms.
Download or read book Staging Citizenship written by Ioana Szeman and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2017-12-29 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Based on over a decade of fieldwork conducted with urban Roma, Staging Citizenship offers a powerful new perspective on one of the European Union’s most marginal and disenfranchised communities. Focusing on “performance” broadly conceived, it follows members of a squatter’s settlement in Transylvania as they navigate precarious circumstances in a postsocialist state. Through accounts of music and dance performances, media representations, activism, and interactions with both non-governmental organizations and state agencies, author Ioana Szeman grounds broad themes of political economy, citizenship, resistance, and neoliberalism in her subjects’ remarkably varied lives and experiences.
Download or read book Racialized Labour in Romania written by Enikő Vincze and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-05-30 with total page 243 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book critically examines the making and persistence of impoverished areas at the margins of Romanian cities since the late 1980s. Through their historical outlook on political economy and social policy, combined with media and discourse analysis, the eight essays of Racialized Labour in Romania forge new and cutting-edge perspectives on how social class formation, spatial marginalization and racialization intersect. The empirical focus on cities and the labour and the plight of the Roma in Central and Eastern Europe provides a vantage point for establishing connections between urban and global peripheries, and for reimagining the global order from its margins. The book will appeal to scholars, students, journalists and policy makers interested in Labour; Race and Ethnicity; Cities; Poverty; Social Policy; Political Economy and European Studies.
Download or read book Hungarian Catholic Intellectuals in Contemporary Romania written by Marc Roscoe Loustau and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2022-06-27 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Set against the backdrop of the rise of right-wing Christian nationalism in Eastern Europe, this book declares that Catholic theologians ought to be understood and studied as intellectuals: socially and historically situated creators of national cultural traditions. While the Romanian government funds thriving schools for the country’s Hungarian minority, NGOs founded by Transylvanian Hungarians continue to organize volunteers to supplement this formal pedagogy. These volunteers understand themselves to be reviving a national tradition of “serving the people” by educating the region’s rural Hungarian populace. While this book is about the challenges Catholic educators face in teaching villagers, it is just as much about their new effort to call groups of volunteers from across the border in Hungary to teach alongside them. In these encounters, Transylvanian Hungarian educators remake their intellectual tradition, especially ideas about the basis of pedagogical authority, the ethical character of the nation, and the social location of selfhood. When contemporary Catholic intellectuals urge teachers to manifest their national self-consciousness, they carry with them the assumption that selfhood emerges where humans collaborate with God. While Transylvanian Hungarian intellectuals are enmeshed in constant competition, by focusing on contemporary theologians New Magyar Apostles unmasks the struggle over the nature of divine presence that animates this revival of a Christian national tradition of intellectual service.
Download or read book Velvet Retro written by Veronika Pehe and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2020-02-03 with total page 190 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Scholars of state socialism have frequently invoked “nostalgia” to identify an uncritical longing for the utopian ambitions and lived experience of the former Eastern Bloc. However, this concept seems insufficient to describe memory cultures in the Czech Republic and other contexts in which a “retro” fascination with the past has proven compatible with a steadfast critique of the state socialist era. This innovative study locates a distinctively retro aesthetic in Czech literature, film, and other cultural forms, enriching our understanding of not only the nation’s memory culture, but also the ways in which popular culture can structure collective memory.
Download or read book Approaching Consumer Culture written by Evgenia Krasteva-Blagoeva and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-10-25 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This fascinating collection analyzes the impact of Western consumer culture on local cultures and consumption in Southeast Europe and East Asia. Cultural, historical, economic and sociopolitical contexts are examined regarding buying behaviors, usage and customization practices and consumer activism, specifically in Bulgaria, Serbia, and Romania as cultures continue to evolve in the post-socialist era, and in China and Japan as a continuation of movements toward modernity and progress. Surprising and thought-provoking contrasts stand out as consumers balance the global with the local in terms of clothing, technology, luxury items, and food. All chapters feature a wealth of empirical and cross-cultural data, and the presentation is framed by Professor Mike Featherstone’s theoretical essay on the origins of consumer culture and the consequences of two hundred years of increasing consumption for the human condition and the future of the planet. Included in the coverage: “You are a socialist child like me”: Goods and Identity in Bulgaria Consumer Culture from Socialist Yugoslavia to Post-Socialist Serbia: Movements and Moments Preserves Exiting Socialism: Authenticity, Anti-Standardization, and Middle-Class Consumption in Post-Socialist Romania Modernization and the Department Store in Early 20th-Century Japan: Modern Girl and New Consumer Culture Lifestyles A Cultural Reading of Conspicuous Consumption in China Approaching Consumer Culture broadens the cultural anthropology literature and will be welcomed by Western and Eastern scholars and researchers alike. Its depth and accessibility make it useful to university courses in cultural anthropology, cultural studies, and sociology.
