Postsocialist Europe Anthropological Perspectives from Home [Paperback]

Now that nearly twenty years have passed since the collapse of the Soviet bloc there is a need to understand what has taken place since that historic date and where we are at the moment. Bringing together authors with different historical, cultural, regional and theoretical backgrounds, this volume engages in debates that address new questions arising from recent developments, such as whether there is a need to reject or uphold the notion of post-socialism as both a necessary and valid concept ignoring changes and differences across both time and space. The authors firsthand ethnographies from their own countries belie such a simplistic notion, revealing, as they do, the cultural, social, and historical diversity of countries of Central and Southeastern Europe.

László Kürtihas taught anthropology at the American University, and Eötvös University in Budapest, and presently teaches at the University of Miskolc. He has conducted fieldwork in the US, Romania and Hungary. His books include:Beyond Borders(1996, co-edited with J. Langman),The Remote Borderland(2001),Youth and the State in Hungary(2002), and he served as co-editor forWorking Images(2004).

Peter Skaln?kcurrently teaches social anthropology at the University of Pardubice. He was the Czech ambassador to Lebanon (19921997). He has edited or co-edited:The Early Writings of Bronislaw Malinowski(1993),The Post-communist Millennium: The Struggles for Sociocultural Anthropology in Central and Eastern Europe(2002),Anthropology of Europe: Teaching and Research(2004),Studying Peoples in the Peoples Democracies: Socialist Era Anthropology in East-Central Europe(2005).

The major contribution of the volume lays in its rethinking of the postsocialist paradigm from an insiders perspective. By taking a longue dur?e perspective on their societies, contributors explÃ