What Was Socialism, and What Comes Next? / / Katherine Verdery.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Princeton University Press eBook-Package Archive 1927-1999
• VerfasserIn: Verdery, Katherine,
• Place / Publishing House: Princeton, NJ : : Princeton University Press, , [1996]; ©1996
• Year of Publication: 1996
• Edition: Course Book
• Language: English
• Series: Princeton Studies in Culture/Power/History
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (312 p.)
• Other title: Frontmatter --; 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 Postsocialist Romania --; FIVE. Civil Society or Nation? "Europe" in the Symbolism of Postsocialist 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 Postsocialist State --; Afterword --; Notes --; Index
• Format: Mode of access: Internet via World Wide Web.
• ISBN: 9781400821990; 9783110442496
• DOI: 10.1515/9781400821990
• Access: restricted access
• Hierarchical level: Monograph
• Statement of Responsibility: Katherine Verdery.

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.