Class Cultures in Post-Socialist Eastern Europe PDF Download

Author: Dražen Cepić
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429840101
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 170

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Book Description
This book investigates the extent to which social class has changed in Eastern Europe since the fall of communism. Based on extensive original research, the book discusses how ideas about class are viewed by both working class and middle class people. The book examines how such people’s social identities are shaped by various factors including economic success, culture and friendship networks. The present class situation in Eastern Europe is contrasted to what prevailed in Communist times, when societies were officially classless, but nevertheless had Communist party elites.

Author: AZEN. CEPIC
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 9780367583132
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 170

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Book Description
This book investigates the extent to which social class has changed in Eastern Europe since the fall of communism. Based on extensive original research, the book discusses how ideas about class are viewed by both working class and middle class people. The book examines how such people's social identities are shaped by various factors including economic success, culture and friendship networks. The present class situation in Eastern Europe is contrasted to what prevailed in Communist times, when societies were officially classless, but nevertheless had Communist party elites.

Author: Krisztina Fehérváry
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253009960
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 323

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Book Description
A historical anthropology of material transformations of homes in Hungary from the 1950s o the 1990s. Material culture in Eastern Europe under state socialism is remembered as uniformly gray, shabby, and monotonous—the worst of postwar modernist architecture and design. Politics in Color and Concrete revisits this history by exploring domestic space in Hungary from the 1950s through the 1990s and reconstructs the multi-textured and politicized aesthetics of daily life through the objects, spaces, and colors that made up this lived environment. Krisztina Féherváry shows that contemporary standards of living and ideas about normalcy have roots in late socialist consumer culture and are not merely products of postsocialist transitions or neoliberalism. This engaging study decenters conventional perspectives on consumer capitalism, home ownership, and citizenship in the new Europe. “A major reinterpretation of Soviet-style socialism and an innovative model for analyzing consumption.” —Katherine Verdery, The Graduate Center, City University of New York “Politics in Color and Concrete explains why the everyday is important, and shows why domestic aesthetics embody a crucially significant politics.” —Judith Farquhar, University of Chicago “The topic is extremely timely and relevant; the writing is lucid and thorough; the theory is complex and sophisticated without being overly dense, or daunting. I thoroughly enjoyed reading it.” —Brad Weiss, College of William and Mary

Author: David A. Kideckel
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 9780253219404
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
This compelling ethnographic study describes how two groups of Romanian industrial workers have fared since the end of socialism. Once labor's elite, the celebrated coal miners of the Jiu Valley and the chemical workers of the Fagaras region had many social privileges and often derived genuine satisfaction from their work. Today, they are a rarely noted casualty of postsocialist transformations. Fear, distance, and alienation are the physical manifestations of stress experienced due to their precarious job status, declining health, and loss of a social safety net. Kideckel traces these issues in the context of labor, political relationships, domestic and community life, gender identities, and health. Drawing on more than three decades of fieldwork, he presents many narratives from select individuals, in their own words, providing a poignant and illuminating perspective on the everyday lives of ordinary people.

Author: John Frederick Bailyn
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 1438471440
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
Explores the current and future trajectories of the paradigm of postsocialism. If socialism did not end as abruptly as is sometimes perceived, what remnants of it linger today and will continue to linger? Moreover, if postsocialism is an umbrella term for the uncertain times of various transitions that followed in socialism’s wake, how might the “post” be rendered complicated by the notion that the unfinished business of socialism continues to influence the trajectory of the future? The Future of (Post)Socialism examines this unfinished business through various disciplinary and transdisciplinary approaches that seek to illuminate the postsocialist future as a cultural and social fact. Drawn from the fields of history, ethnology, anthropology, sociology, economics, political science, education, linguistics, literature, and cultural studies, contributors analyze various cultural forms and practices of the formerly socialist cultural spaces of Eastern Europe. In so doing, they question the teleology of linear transitional narratives and of assumptions about postsocialist linear progress, concluding that things operate more as continued interruptions of a perpetually liminal state rather than as neat endings and new beginnings. John Frederick Bailyn is Professor of Linguistics at Stony Brook University, State University of New York, and the author of The Syntax of Russian. Dijana Jelača teaches in the Film Department at Brooklyn College and is the author of Dislocated Screen Memory: Narrating Trauma in Post-Yugoslav Cinema. Danijela Lugarić is Assistant Professor of East-Slavic Languages and Literature at the University of Zagreb, Croatia. She is the coeditor (with Jelača and Maša Kolanović) of The Cultural Life of Capitalism in Yugoslavia: (Post)Socialism and Its Other.

Author: Agnes Gagyi
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030769437
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
Contrary to dominant narratives which portray East European politics as a pendulum swing between democracy and authoritarianism, conventionally defined in terms of an ahistorical cultural geography of East vs. West, this book analyzes post-socialist transformation as part of the long downturn of the post-WWII global capitalist cycle. Based on an empirical comparison of two countries with significantly different political regimes throughout the period, Hungary and Romania, this study shows how different constellations of successive late socialist and post-socialist regimes have managed internal and external class relations throughout the same global crisis process, from very similar positions of semi-peripheral, post-socialist systemic integration. Within this context, the book follows the role of social movements since the 1970s, paying attention both to the level of differences between local integration regimes and to the level of structural similarities of global integration. The analysis maintains a special focus on movements’ class composition and inter-class relationships and the specific position of middle-class politics in movements.

Author: Cristofer Scarboro
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253047803
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 237

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Book Description
“First-class, rigorously researched, richly documented, and thought-provoking” essays on the consumer experience in socialist Eastern Europe (Graham H. Roberts, author of Material Culture in Russia and the USSR). As communist regimes denigrated Western countries for widespread unemployment and consumer excess, socialist Eastern European states simultaneously legitimized their power through their apparent ability to satisfy consumers’ needs. Moving beyond binaries of production and consumption, the essays collected here examine the lessons consumption studies can offer about ethnic and national identity and the role of economic expertise in shaping consumer behavior. From Polish VCRs to Ukrainian fashion boutiques, tropical fruits in the GDR to cinemas in Belgrade, The Socialist Good Life explores what consumption means in a worker state where communist ideology emphasizes collective needs over individual pleasures.

Author: Jeremy Morris
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1349950890
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 261

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Book Description
This book offers a rich ethnographic account of blue-collar workers’ everyday life in a central Russian industrial town coping with simultaneous decline and the arrival of transnational corporations. Everyday Post-Socialism demonstrates how people manage to remain satisfied, despite the crisis and relative poverty they faced after the fall of socialist projects and the social trends associated with neoliberal transformation. Morris shows the ‘other life’ in today’s Russia which is not present in mainstream academic discourse or even in the media in Russia itself. This book offers co-presence and a direct understanding of how the local community lives a life which is not only bearable, but also preferable and attractive when framed in the categories of ‘habitability’, commitment and engagement, and seen in the light of alternative ideas of worth and specific values. Topics covered include working-class identity, informal economy, gender relations and transnational corporations.

Author: Ingo Schröder
Publisher: LIT Verlag Münster
ISBN: 3825811212
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
This book addresses class formation and changes in personhood in contemporary Eastern Europe in the context of the spread of a market economy. The authors investigate processes of social closure, marginalization and elite formation, paying particular attention to their cultural expressions and to the legitimizing discourses of nationalist and neoliberal agendas. While individual and collective identities are inextricably linked with the consolidation of global capitalism, external blueprints are everywhere mediated through historically grounded experiences and local social relations. Comprising studies from Bulgaria, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, and Russia, the volume explores practices, stories, and performances in everyday life worlds. The ethnographies show both individual and collective identities to be emergent projects, constrained by economic processes and state policies but ultimately created by people themselves as they pursue their interests and search for meaning.

Author: Maria Todorova
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 0857456431
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 310

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Book Description
Although the end of the Cold War was greeted with great enthusiasm by people in the East and the West, the ensuing social and especially economic changes did not always result in the hoped-for improvements in people's lives. This led to widespread disillusionment that can be observed today all across Eastern Europe. Not simply a longing for security, stability, and prosperity, this nostalgia is also a sense of loss regarding a specific form of sociability. Even some of those who opposed communism express a desire to invest their new lives with renewed meaning and dignity. Among the younger generation, it surfaces as a tentative yet growing curiosity about the recent past. In this volume scholars from multiple disciplines explore the various fascinating aspects of this nostalgic turn by analyzing the impact of generational clusters, the rural-urban divide, gender differences, and political orientation. They argue persuasively that this nostalgia should not be seen as a wish to restore the past, as it has otherwise been understood, but instead it should be recognized as part of a more complex healing process and an attempt to come to terms both with the communist era as well as the new inequalities of the post-communist era.