What was socialism, and what comes next? / Katherine Verdery.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Verdery, Katherine.

Series:

Princeton studies in culture/power/history.

Princeton studies in culture/power/history

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Socialism--Romania.

Socialism.

Communism--Romania.

Communism.

Post-communism--Romania.

Post-communism.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (309 pages)

Edition:

Course Book

Place of Publication:

Princeton, N.J. : Princeton University Press, c1996.

Language Note:

English

System Details:

Mode of access: World Wide Web.

Summary:

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.

Contents:

Front matter

Contents

Introduction

Part I. Socialism

ONE. What Was Socialism, and Why Did It Fall?

TWO. The "Etatization" of Time in CeauÎescu's Romania

Part II. Identities: Gender, Nation, Civil Society

THREE. From Parent-State to Family Patriarchs: Gender and Nation in Contemporary Eastern Europe

FOUR. Nationalism and National Sentiment in Post socialist Romania

FIVE. Civil Society or Nation? "Europe" in the Symbolism of Post socialist Politics

Part III. Processes: Transforming Property, Markets, and States

SIX. The Elasticity of Land: Problems of Property Restitution in Transylvania

SEVEN. Faith, Hope, and Caritas in the Land of the Pyramids, Romania, 1990-1994

EIGHT. A Transition from Socialism to Feudalism? Thoughts on the Post socialist State

Afterword

Notes

Index

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (p. [235]-287) and index.

Description based upon print version of record.

ISBN:

9786612753039

9781400808236

1400808235

9781400813728

1400813727

9781282753037

1282753037

9781400821990

1400821991

OCLC:

700688704