Anthropology of Transformation

Juraj Buzalka

Description

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.

Sujets

• Political Science
• Essays

Informations

• Publié par: Open Book Publishers
• Date de parution: 31 octobre 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781800643659
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 9 Mo

Extrait

ANTHROPOLOGY OF TRANSFORMATION

Anthropology of Transformation
From Europe to Asia and Back
Edited by Juraj Buzalka and Agnieszka Pasieka





https://www.openbookpublishers.com
© 2022 Juraj Buzalka and Agnieszka Pasieka, editors. Copyright of individual chapters is maintained by the chapters’ authors.




This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0). This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0). This license allows you to share, copy, distribute and transmit the text; to adapt the text for non-commercial purposes of the text providing attribution is made to the authors (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). Attribution should include the following information:
Juraj Buzalka and Agnieszka Pasieka (eds), Anthropology of Transformation: From Europe to Asia and Back . Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2022, https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0282
Further details about the CC BY-NC license are available at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
All external links were active at the time of publication unless otherwise stated and have been archived via the Internet Archive Wayback Machine at https://archive.org/web
Updated digital material and resources associated with this volume are available at https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0282#resources
ISBN Paperback: 9781800643628
ISBN Hardback: 9781800643635
ISBN Digital (PDF): 9781800643642
ISBN Digital ebook (EPUB): 9781800643659
ISBN Digital ebook (AZW3): 9781800643666
ISBN XML: 9781800643673
Digital ebook (HTML): 9781800649439
DOI: 10.11647/OBP.0282
Cover image: Lenin mural, House of Culture, Temirtau, Kazakhstan (2014). Photo by Tommaso Trevisani. Cover design by Katy Saunders.

Contents
Acknowledgements vii
Contributor Biographies ix
Introduction x iii
Juraj Buzalka and Agnieszka Pasieka
1. Voiced versus Acted Trust: Managing Social Uncertainty and Marginalisation in Rural Southern Italy and Central Eastern Europe 1
Davide Torsello
2. Property Relations and Ethnic Conflict in Post-war Croatia: Reflections on Conceptual Approaches and Research Findings 25
Carolin Leutloff-Grandits
3. The ‘Post’ in Perspective: Revisiting the Post-socialist Religious Question in Central Asia and Central and Eastern Europe 5 1
Julie McBrien and Vlad Naumescu
4. “We Are Not Believers, We’re Workers”: The Synchrony of Work, Gender, and Religion in a Priestless Orthodox Community 81
Agata Ładykowska
5. The Moral Economy of Consensus and Informality in Uzbekistan 10 5
Tommaso Trevisani
6. The Moral Dimension of (Un)Employment: Work and Fairness in an Eastern German Town 13 1
Katerina Ivanova
7. Beyond Blue Eyes? Xenophobia on the Eastern Margins of the European Union 15 5
László Fosztó
8. Post-Peasant Progressivism: On Liberal Tendencies in the Slovak Countryside 1 79
Juraj Buzalka
9. Swimming against the Tide: Right-wing Populism, Post-socialism and Beyond 20 5
Agnieszka Pasieka
10. Transoceania : Connecting the World beyond Eurasia 22 1
Edyta Roszko
Index243

Acknowledgements
We would like to thank all those who helped us to make this volume a reality: the directors and staff of the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, with special thanks to Bettina Mann and Anke Mayer; the four anonymous reviewers, whose comments and suggestions greatly improved the final chapters; our former colleagues Deema Kaneff and Kristen Endres, who edited their own volume dedicated to Chris Hann’s work, Explorations in Economic Anthropology: Key Issues and Critical Reflections (Berghahn 2021), and encouraged and advised us to create our own ‘doctoral students’’ volume; Alessandra Tosi, Melissa Purkiss and Laura Rodríguez Pupo at Open Book Publishers, who assisted us with patience. Last but not least, we would like to thank all of our friends and colleagues—former doctoral students of Professor Chris Hann—who agreed to contribute to this volume and worked alongside us on it. Thank you for this truly collegial endeavour.

Contributor Biographies
Juraj Buzalka is Professor of Social Anthropology at the Faculty of Social and Economic Sciences of the Comenius University in Bratislava. His research includes the anthropology of social and political movements, politics of memory and religion, and the anthropology of wine. He recently published The Cultural Economy of Protest in Post-Socialist European Union: Village Fascists and their Rivals (2021). His first monograph was Nation and Religion: The Politics of Commemoration in South-east Poland (2007).
László Fosztó is a Senior Researcher at the Romanian Institute for Research on National Minorities, Cluj-Napoca, Romania. His main research interests include Romani studies, ethnicity and nationalism, anthropology of religion, migration and social networks. Most of his research has been carried out in ethnically mixed rural communities in Romania. He is the author of Ritual Revitalisation after Socialism: Community, Personhood, and Conversion among Roma in a Transylvanian Village (2009) and Colecţie de studii despre romii din România [ Collected Studies on Roma in Romania ] (2009). He is the administrator of the European Academic Network on Romani Studies (http://romanistudies.eu/).
Katerina Ivanova is a postdoctoral scholar at the Faculty of Social and Economic Sciences of the Comenius University in Bratislava. Her research interests include industrial labour, post-socialism and ethnicity with a regional focus on Eastern Germany and Bulgaria.
Carolin Leutloff-Grandits is a senior researcher at the interdisciplinary Viadrina Center B/ORDERS IN MOTION at the European University Viadrina. Her research interests include migration, borders, temporality, social security, and family. She is particularly concerned with the countries of the former Yugoslavia. Selected publications include ‘“We are not Just the Border of Croatia; This is the Border of the European Union…” The Croatian Borderland as “Double Periphery”’, Journal of Borderlands Studies (2022), and Claiming Ownership in Post-War Croatia. The Dynamics of Property Relations and Ethnic Conflict in the Knin Region (2006).
Agata Ładykowska is a research fellow at the Institute of Sociological Studies, Charles University, Prague. Her research interests include anthropology of religion and atheism, historical anthropology, anthropological theory, political anthropology, economic anthropology, anthropology of post-socialism/social change, and post-humanist and relational social sciences. Her publications include ‘The shifts between: Multiple secularisms, multiple modernities and the post-Soviet school’, in T. Köllner ed., Orthodox Religion and Politics In Contemporary Eastern Europe: on Multiple Secularisms and Entanglements (2019), pp. 109–122, and ‘The changing scope of religious authority and reconfigurations of social status in post socialist Russia’, Religion, State, and Society (2018).
Julie McBrien is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Amsterdam and the Director of the Amsterdam Research Center for Gender and Sexuality. Her research interests include religion, secularism, gender, and development. She is the author of From Belonging to Belief: Modern Secularisms and the Construction of Religion in Kyrgyzstan (2017).
Vlad Naumescu is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the Central European University (Vienna/Budapest). He has conducted extensive fieldwork in Eastern Europe and South India looking at practices, institutions and politics that shape Orthodox communities. He is the author of Modes of Religiosity in Eastern Christianity: Religious Processes and Social Change in Ukraine (2007), co-editor of Churches In-between: Greek Catholic Churches in Postsocialist Europe (2008), and a forthcoming monograph on ritual, history and ethics in the Russian Old Belief.
Agnieszka Pasieka is a Visiting Professor of Anthropology at the University of Bayreuth and Research Fellow at the University of Vienna. She specialises in anthropology of religion and anthropology of politics. She is the author of Hierarchy and Pluralism: Living Religious Difference in Catholic Poland (2015) and co-editor of the forthcoming Rethinking Modern Polish Identities: Transnational Encounters . Her new book focuses on the transnational networking of European far-right movements.
Edyta Roszko is Research Professor at the Chr. Michelsen Institute in Bergen, Norway and a Fellow of the Young Academy of Europe. She has published articles on ocean-related issues and the politics of religion and heritisation in Anthropological Quarterly , Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography , Journal of Contemporary Ethnography , Nations and Nationalism and others. Her first book, Fishers, Monks and Cadres: Navigating State, Religion and the South China Sea in Central Vietnam , was co-published in 2020 by NIAS and the University of Hawai’i Press and is available in open access format at http://hdl.handle.net/10125/76750.
Davide Torsello is Professor of Anthropology and Organizational Behavior at the Central European University, Vienna. He has extensive experience of ethnographic field research in organisations and communities in Japan, Italy and Eastern Europe. Davide has studied political and business corruption and has published over sixty journal articles and book chapters and eleven books, the latest (in press) being The Cultural Theory of Corruption. Institutions, Cognition and Organizations . He has consulted for international organisations (UNODC, EU Parliament) a