1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910172235603321

Autore

Verdery Katherine

Titolo

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

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Princeton, N.J. : , : Princeton University Press, , 1996

©1996

ISBN

1-4008-1372-7

1-282-75303-7

9786612753039

1-4008-2199-1

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (309 pages)

Collana

Princeton studies in culture/power/history

Disciplina

338.9498

Soggetti

Socialism - Romania

Communism - Romania

Post-communism - Romania

Post-communism

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Nota di bibliografia

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

Nota di contenuto

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

Sommario/riassunto

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.