Download or read book Repatriating Polanyi written by Chris Hann and published by Central European University Press. This book was released on 2019-07-18 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Karl Polanyi’s “substantivist” critique of market society has found new popularity in the era of neoliberal globalization. The author reclaims this polymath for contemporary anthropology, especially economic anthropology, in the context of Central Europe, where Polanyi (1886–1964) grew up. The Polanyian approach illuminates both the communist era, in particular the “market socialist” economy which evolved under János Kádár in Hungary, as well as the post-communist transformations of property relations, civil society and ethno-national identities throughout the region. Hann’s analyses are based primarily on his own ethnographic investigations in Hungary and South-East Poland. They are pertinent to the rise of neo-nationalism in those countries, which is theorized as a malign countermovement to the domination of the market. At another level, Hann’s adaptation of Polanyi’s social philosophy points beyond current political turbulence to an original concept of “social Eurasia”.
Download or read book Ernest Gellner s Legacy and Social Theory Today written by Petr Skalník and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2022-10-28 with total page 604 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This edited volume examines the critical issues of the 21st century through the prism of Ernest Gellner’s work. The contributors look critically at Gellner ́s legacy, questioning whether he remains an inspiration for today’s social theorists. Chapters proactively probe Gellner’s thoughts on a variety of pressing topics—modernity, postcolonialsm, nationalism, and more—without losing sight of current debates on these issues. This volume further brings these debates to life by having each chapter followed by a comment by an academic peer of the chapter author, thus transforming the text into a lively and dynamic conversation.
Download or read book Explorations in Economic Anthropology written by Deema Kaneff and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2021-07-16 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At a time of rising global economic precarity and social inequality, the field of economic anthropology offers solutions through the study of local and contextualized economic practices. This book is made up of an exciting collection of succinct essays authored by leading scholars primarily from the field of economic anthropology, but also featuring contributions from sociology and history. The chapters engage with debates at the cutting edge of research on the topics of Eurasia, the anthropology of postsocialism and the embeddedness of economic practices.
Download or read book Public Policy in Transition Economies written by Maciej J. Grodzicki and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-06-21 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Public policies are usually carefully designed to address a particular problem, but they are also shaped and influenced by the sociocultural heritage of a particular country. This volume explores the origins of economic and other public policies in Central and Eastern Europe. This region makes for a particularly interesting case because after going through a major system change – transitioning from a command economy into a market economy – many of the key policies were written anew. The contributors to this book look at key policy areas at the intersection of state and private sectors, including industrial, pension, energy, and competition policies. The chapters examine key questions such as: how did these policies evolve from the time of transition to their final form? What were the main drivers of policy conduct and factors influencing major policy choices? How does the historical context impact contemporary policy space? Throughout the volume, an institutional approach is adopted, according to which policies are perceived as the outcome of top‐down design, filtered through social institutions inherited from the past. With this approach, this book presents a long‐running assessment, over 30 years, of policymaking in transition economies, which were subject to profound changes throughout the period. This book will be of interest to readers in institutional economics, policy studies, transition economies, and the recent history of Eastern Europe.
Download or read book Work Society and the Ethical Self written by Chris Hann and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2021-09-17 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Primarily on the basis of ethnographic case-studies from around the world, this volume links investigations of work to questions of personal and professional identity and social relations. In the era of digitalized neoliberalism, particular attention is paid to notions of freedom, both collective (in social relations) and individual (in subjective experiences). These cannot be investigated separately. Rather than juxtapose economy with ethics (or the profitable with the good), the authors uncover complex entanglements between the drudgery experienced by most people in the course of making a living and ideals of emancipated personhood.
Download or read book Kari Polanyi Levitt and Canadian Political Economy written by Michèle Rioux and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2021-12-15 with total page 82 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book acts as a tribute to the legacy of the Canadian political economist Kari Polanyi Levitt, daughter of Karl Polanyi, one of the great economists of the 20th century. Polanyi Levitt’s life and work were devoted to understanding the scientific and political challenges that humanity faces and the incredible impacts of development, trade, and globalization in their diverse manifestations, including in the context of the current COVID-19 pandemic. This book reflects on Polanyi Levitt’s conviction that the solution to contemporary challenges lies not in the development of sophisticated technologies, but in questioning how we want to live with each other and working to re-embed the economy in the wider social system. Ultimately, the book contends that Polanyi Levitt’s message is simple: humanity must rethink the way we live in this world our place in the universe, and our relationship with nature. Drawing on a 10-year research project encompassing interviews and literature review, this short volume introduces and celebrates Kari Polanyi Levitt's legacy and invites political economists to engage with her work.
Download or read book Anthropology of Transformation written by Juraj Buzalka and published by Open Book Publishers. This book was released on 2022-10-31 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of essays is the result of the joint efforts of colleagues and students of the leading social anthropology and post-socialism theorist, Professor Chris Hann. With the thirtieth anniversary of the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 2019 as their catalyst, the authors reflect upon Chris Hann’s lifelong fieldwork in the discipline, spanning regions as diverse as East Central Europe, Turkey, and the Chinese north-west. The collapse of the Berlin Wall naturally triggered a plethora of analysis and scholarly research. Sociocultural anthropology, with its focus on ethnographic study and on the gradual evolution of social relations, sharply contrasted with the emphasis on dramatic rupture brought about by the 1989 transition. Continuing in this tradition, this volume, through micro-level analysis of societal transformation from the post-war years to the present day, provides an alternative perspective to the neoliberalist views often encountered in the scholarship on political and economic modernisation. The more nuanced analysis of social transformations proposed here is a particularly useful tool in the investigation of contemporary issues such as the COVID-19 pandemic, the refugee ‘crisis’, and the rise of right-wing populism in Eastern Europe and elsewhere. Anthropology of Transformation will be of interest to researchers in the fields of socio-cultural anthropology, religion and economics. Moreover, the book’s discussion of issues widely discussed beyond the field of academia such as neoliberalism and the welfare state, and populist and exclusionary politics, will appeal to non-specialist readers.
Download or read book The Migration Turn and Eastern Europe written by Attila Melegh and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2023-02-22 with total page 454 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Using Marxist and Polanyian frameworks, this book examines the structural and discursive transformation that can explain the polarization of migration debates and within the rise of nationalist anti-migrant discourses in Europe with a special attention to Eastern Europe and Hungary. It goes beyond the mainstream explanations of these phenomena that uses nationalist propaganda as causal factors and instead argues that the rise of anti-immigration currents cannot be understood without a dialectical and historical analysis of the material and discursive transformations, most importantly marketization and related reification. Drawing from thinkers such as Lukács, Polanyi, and Gramsci as well as diverse empirical sources including demographic studies, historical modelling, and discourse analyses, Migration Turn and Eastern Europe is a unique and rigorous study of one of the most pressing and puzzling political and sociological questions of our time.
Download or read book Politics and the Environment in Eastern Europe written by Eszter Krasznai Kovacs and published by Open Book Publishers. This book was released on 2021-07-28 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Europe remains divided between east and west, with differences caused and worsened by uneven economic and political development. Amid these divisions, the environment has become a key battleground. The condition and sustainability of environmental resources are interlinked with systems of governance and power, from local to EU levels. Key challenges in the eastern European region today include increasingly authoritarian forms of government that threaten the operations and very existence of civil society groups; the importation of locally-contested conservation and environmental programmes that were designed elsewhere; and a resurgence in cultural nationalism that prescribes and normalises exclusionary nation-building myths. This volume draws together essays by early-career academic researchers from across eastern Europe. Engaging with the critical tools of political ecology, its contributors provide a hitherto overlooked perspective on the current fate and reception of ‘environmentalism’ in the region. It asks how emergent forms of environmentalism have been received, how these movements and perspectives have redefined landscapes, and what the subtler effects of new regulatory regimes on communities and environment-dependent livelihoods have been. Arranged in three sections, with case studies from Czechia, Hungary, Lithuania, Poland, Romania and Serbia, this collection develops anthropological views on the processes and consequences of the politicisation of the environment. It is valuable reading for human geographers, social and cultural historians, political ecologists, social movement and government scholars, political scientists, and specialists on Europe and European Union politics.
Download or read book State Socialism in Eastern Europe written by Eszter Bartha and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2023-07-10 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume brings together a diverse set of scholars to address the long theoretical, conceptual and political debate on the interpretation of “actually existing” socialism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. While the major paradigms – totalitarianism, neo-totalitarianism, revisionism, post-revisionism, modernization, and the world-system analysis – are well known in the Western (English-language) literature, the concept of state socialism, which has strong theoretical roots in Hungary (going back to the works of György Lukács and István Mészáros) received less international attention. This book contributes to a productive discussion about viable alternatives to capitalism by introducing and theoretically elaborating on the concept and practice of state socialism, highlighting the historical significance of Hungary’s experiment with the “new economic mechanism” of 1968. It generates a common point of reference for various generations of anti-systemic thinkers, scholars, and activists to move beyond Cold War simplifications and ideological divides, and contributes to the discussion about anti-capitalist alternatives, which are relevant today for the global left. The chapter “Dance Around a ‘Sacred Cow’: Women’s Night Work and the Gender Politics of the Mass Worker in State-Socialist Hungary and Internationally” is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial- NoDerivatives 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.
Download or read book One Hundred Years of Argonauts written by Chris Hann and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2024-06-01 with total page 511 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Malinowski’s Argonauts of the Western Pacific was a major contribution to anthropological theory and method, while simultaneously establishing the sub-field of economic anthropology. Even a century after its publication, Malinowski’s pioneering work remains critical for anthropology in a postcolonial age. This volume uses ethnographic studies from around the world to contextualize the work politically and intellectually, examining its gestation and influence from multiple perspectives. It critically explores the meaning of “economy” for Malinowski from his formation in the Austro-Hungarian Empire to his path-breaking fieldwork in Melanesia and ensuing career in London.
Download or read book European Integration written by Johann P. Arnason and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2019-12-30 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: To understand the current difficulties and future prospects of European integration, multiple perspectives are required. The essays in this collection explore historical and geopolitical aspects of European integration and their relevance to interpretations of the current climate. They also examine the different regional dynamics of integration and the attitudes that result from those experiences, including in the European peripheries that are so often overshadowed by the dominant centres. In drawing all of these perspectives together, the collection allows the reader to assess the EU's current crisis in context.
Download or read book Reckoning and Framing written by Balázs Borsos and published by Waxmann Verlag. This book was released on 2023 with total page 366 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is necessary for every discipline to take stock of its own current state every 20-30 years. Such review helps determine the discipline's path and tasks for the coming decades, and it also facilitates reflection upon the changes and challenges of the scientific and non-scientific world around it. For this purpose, the Committee of Ethnography of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences organized a series of conferences on the current state and the future of ethnography between 2018 and 2020. Those papers of international interest have been translated and are presented in this volume. The first section discusses the dilemmas of ethnography/ethnology as an independent discipline. Articles in the second section provide a fresh perspective on the intrinsic interrelatedness of agriculture, livelihood, environmental perception, and traditional ecological knowledge studied by Hungarian ethnographers. The subsequent section scrutinizes research into and management of cultural heritage in Hungary and the role of ethnographic scholarship in safeguarding intangible heritage. The volume closes with insightful case studies on when ethnographic situations/experiences can be translated into meaningful social actions.
Download or read book Formation of Adult Learning Systems in Central Europe written by Jan Kalenda and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2024 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the formation and development of the cross-national patterns of adult learning systems between 1989 and 2019 in four Central European countries: the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary and Poland. Drawing on the approach of the political economy of adult education and historical institutionalism, the book closely examines (1) how the institutional settings in these countries have formed, evolved and contributed to overall participation in adult education and training, (2) how they have shaped patterns of participation and unequal chances to be involved in this social activity, as well as (3) perceived barriers to access organized learning and related governmental policies. This book offers a contemporary overview of key findings regarding adult learning systems. It delves into the factors that influence participation in adult education and training. Through the utilization of the novel framework, GALS (Global Adult Learning Space), the book not only highlights a crucial distinction among adult learning systems within the region but also presents in-depth case studies of these systems in Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Slovakia spanning a 30-year period. Despite these countries sharing similar institutional backgrounds and societal challenges, the book reveals that their adult learning systems have undergone divergent trajectories over the past three decades. This book will be useful to researchers and scholars in the fields of adult education, comparative education, welfare policy, sociology of education, and European studies.
Download or read book Transnational Musicians written by Beata M. Kowalczyk and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-12-29 with total page 140 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Informed by theories pertaining to transnational mobility, ethnicity and race, gender, postcolonialism, as well as Japanese studies, Transnational Musicians explores the way Japanese musicians establish their transnational careers in the hierarchically structured classical music world. Drawing on rich material from multi-sited fieldwork and in-depth interviews with Japanese artists in Japan, France and Poland, this study portrays the structurally – and individually – conditioned opportunities and constraints of becoming a transnational classical musician. It shows how transnational artists strive to conciliate the irreconcilable: their professional identification with the dominant image of ‘rootless’ classical musicianship and their ethnocultural affiliation with Japan. As such this book critically engages with the neoliberal discourse on talent and meritocracy prevailing in the creative/cultural industry, which promotes the common image of cosmopolitan artists, whose high, universal skills allow them to carry out their occupational activity internationally, regardless of such prescriptive criteria as gender, ethnicity and race. Highly interdisciplinary, this book will appeal to students and researchers interested in such fields as migration, transnational mobility, ethnicity and race in the creative/cultural sector, gender studies, Japanese culture and other related social issues. It will also be instructive for professionals from the world of classical music, as well as ordinary readers passionate about Japanese society.
Download or read book The SAGE Handbook of Cultural Anthropology written by Lene Pedersen and published by SAGE. This book was released on 2021-03-31 with total page 938 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The SAGE Handbook of Cultural Anthropology is the first instalment of The SAGE Handbook of the Social Sciences series and encompasses major specialities as well as key interdisciplinary themes relevant to the field. Globally, societies are facing major upheaval and change, and the social sciences are fundamental to the analysis of these issues, as well as the development of strategies for addressing them. This handbook provides a rich overview of the discipline and has a future focus whilst using international theories and examples throughout. The SAGE Handbook of Cultural Anthropology is an essential resource for social scientists globally and contains a rich body of chapters on all major topics relevant to the field, whilst also presenting a possible road map for the future of the field. Part 1: Foundations Part 2: Focal Areas Part 3: Urgent Issues Part 4: Short Essays: Contemporary Critical Dynamics
Download or read book The Cultural Economy of Protest in Post Socialist European Union written by Juraj Buzalka and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-09-22 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focusing on Slovakia and East Central Europe, this book examines the cultural economy of protest and considers how the origins of political movements – progressive and reactionary – derive from resilient agrarian features. It draws attention to how the legacy of rural socialist modernization influences contemporary politics and to the ‘village’ version of fascism developing in the region. The chapters look at the interplay of post-peasant economic and political habits and representations as a result of state-socialism and with regard to the European project, as viewed through an ethnographic lens. Juraj Buzalka describes the bulk of Slovak citizens as post-socialist Europeans with a connection to the countryside who feel that this is where real power in society should be defined and based. He also observes the politicians who are skillfully mobilizing post-peasants while exploiting the political-economic context of the European Union. This volume will be relevant to scholars with an interest in European society and politics, particularly protest and populism, from disciplines including anthropology, sociology, political science and history.
