The Cultural Economy of Protest in Post-Socialist European Union

The Cultural Economy of Protest in Post-Socialist European Union
Author: Juraj Buzalka
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 281
Release: 2020-09-22
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1000175995

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Focusing on Slovakia and East Central Europe, this book examines the cultural economy of protest and considers how the origins of political movements – progressive and reactionary – derive from resilient agrarian features. It draws attention to how the legacy of rural socialist modernization influences contemporary politics and to the ‘village’ version of fascism developing in the region. The chapters look at the interplay of post-peasant economic and political habits and representations as a result of state-socialism and with regard to the European project, as viewed through an ethnographic lens. Juraj Buzalka describes the bulk of Slovak citizens as post-socialist Europeans with a connection to the countryside who feel that this is where real power in society should be defined and based. He also observes the politicians who are skillfully mobilizing post-peasants while exploiting the political-economic context of the European Union. This volume will be relevant to scholars with an interest in European society and politics, particularly protest and populism, from disciplines including anthropology, sociology, political science and history.

Protest in Late Modern Societies

Protest in Late Modern Societies
Author: Monika Banaś
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 223
Release: 2023-05-16
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 100087494X

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This book discusses a broadly understood phenomenon of protest from several perspectives, including historical, cultural, social, political, environmental and semiotic. Through their analyses, the authors undertake to envision the possible evolution of the forms of contestation in the further decades of the 21st century, taking into account the specificity of the globalisation processes. A multidimensional approach offered in this volume makes it possible to capture and identify new features of contemporary contestation and those that seem unchanged despite the passage of time and altering audiences. Examples from Europe (France, the United Kingdom, Italy, Ireland, Malta, Bulgaria, Poland, Belarus, Russia), America (the United States, Mexico, Chile) and Far East (Hong Kong and China) are relevant case studies that show the faces of contestation while reaching for new or modified rhetoric, symbolism, communication channels and the so-called modus operandi of protest initiators, active and passive participants and short- and long-distant observers. The book will be of value to a wide audience, particularly to the researchers studying contestation, social resistance, individual and collective disobedience, crisis management and cultural/social dynamic of protests. It will also be of interest to experts and individuals from outside the academia like civil activists, practitioners and NGOs compelled by contemporary processes (tensions) occurring between the state, power, society and individuals.

Anthropology of Transformation

Anthropology of Transformation
Author: Juraj Buzalka
Publisher: Open Book Publishers
Total Pages: 253
Release: 2022-10-31
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1800643659

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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.

Theorizing Transition

Theorizing Transition
Author: John Pickles
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 519
Release: 2005-08-31
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 113471565X

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Examining transformations using a variety of perspectives Theorizing Transition provides both a rich empirical map of the dimensions of post-Communism and raises important theoretical issues about how we interpret these changes.

Rooms for Manoeuvre

Rooms for Manoeuvre
Author: Jerzy Kochanowski
Publisher: V&R Unipress
Total Pages: 309
Release: 2021-09-06
Genre: History
ISBN: 384701336X

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The volume focuses on emerging "rooms for manoeuvre" in the socialist societies of Central and Eastern Europe after the Second World War. Unlike in other works, these areas of activity are not viewed as isolated spheres where citizens could act independently from political and societal constraints. They are rather conceptualized here as geographical, social or institutional spaces whose existence was either outside of political control or more or less intentionally allowed by authorities and other decision-makers. The contributions investigate how East Germans, Poles, Romanians, Slovaks and Czechs coped with the limitations of socialist reality. How did they adopt and successfully adapt given norms to their own specific interests? To what extent were the resulting "rooms for manoeuvre" not only essential aspects of the state socialist system, but even necessary to stabilize it?

Ethnographies of Deservingness

Ethnographies of Deservingness
Author: Jelena Tošić
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Total Pages: 447
Release: 2022-08-12
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1800736002

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Claims around 'who deserves what and why' moralise inequality in the current global context of unprecedented wealth and its ever more selective distribution. Ethnographies of Deservingness explores this seeming paradox and the role of moralized assessments of distribution by reconnecting disparate discussions in the anthropology of migration, economic anthropology and political anthropology. This edited collection provides a novel and systematic conceptualization of Deservingness and shows how it can serve as a prime and integrative conceptual prism to ethnographically explore transforming welfare states, regimes of migration, as well as capitalist social reproduction and relations at large.

Living Right

Living Right
Author: Agnieszka Pasieka
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 304
Release: 2024-11-12
Genre: History
ISBN: 0691258422

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"Living Right offers an in-depth examination of far-right youth movements in Poland, Italy, and Hungary. The protagonists include students and young entrepreneurs, former skinheads, construction workers, bohemian musicians, and rich kids from the upper class who have all found a nurturing community in far-right groups. While they focus on local action, they are also part of a broader project with global ramifications. Agnieszka Pasieka engages in intensive fieldwork in these communities, particularly among members of the far-right Polish movement "National Radical Camp" (ONR), the Italian neofascist movement Lealtà Azione ("Loyalty Action, " or LA) and the FedeRazione ("Federation"), which comprises over a dozen movements across Italy, along with additional fieldwork among young Hungarian fascists. Pasieka makes some startling and counterintuitive discoveries. She observes that these groups embrace forms of civic engagement we tend to associate with left-wing organizations and movements, such as volunteerism in soup kitchens, animal shelters, and orphanages; environmental activism; and "humanitarian" missions to such places as the Balkans and the Middle East. Moreover she finds that such groups adopt language that overlaps in significant ways with left-leaning progressivism, notably a critique of globalization, consumerism, capitalism, mass culture, and "Americanization," as well as a selective embrace of the welfare state-so long as the benefits of public assistance are limited to white Christian compatriots. Members of these youth groups are often enthusiastic-but selective-readers of modern social science, and embrace notions of "cultural autonomy," "cultural rights," and "diversity." This language though buttresses an understanding of the world as made up of demarcated ethno-cultural entities, in which each entity should not mix with others. Taken together, her findings lead her to consider the far right's rejection of a hegemonic liberal order"--

Time and Its Object

Time and Its Object
Author: Paolo Fortis
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 215
Release: 2021-03-30
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1000366944

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This volume examines the way objects and images relate to and shape notions of temporality and history. Bringing together ethnographic studies from the Lowlands of Central and South America and Melanesia, it explores the temporality inhering in images and artefacts from a comparative perspective. The chapters focus on how peoples in both regions ‘live in’ and ‘navigate’ time each through their distinctive systems of images and the processes and actions by which these come to be manifest in objects. With original theoretical and ethnographic contributions, the book is valuable reading for scholars interested in visual and material culture and in anthropological approaches to time.

Bioinformation Worlds and Futures

Bioinformation Worlds and Futures
Author: EJ Gonzalez-Polledo
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 269
Release: 2021-11-29
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1000486222

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This book sets out to define and consolidate the field of bioinformation studies in its transnational and global dimensions, drawing on debates in science and technology studies, anthropology and sociology. It provides situated analyses of bioinformation journeys across domains and spheres of interpretation. As unprecedented amounts of data relating to biological processes and lives are collected, aggregated, traded and exchanged, infrastructural systems and machine learners produce real consequences as they turn indeterminate data into actionable decisions for states, companies, scientific researchers and consumers. Bioinformation accrues multiple values as it transverses multiple registers and domains, and as it is transformed from bodies to becoming a subject of analysis tied to particular social relations, promises, desires and futures. The volume harnesses the anthropological sensibility for situated, fine-grained, ethnographically grounded analysis to develop an interdisciplinary dialogue on the conceptual, political, social and ethical dimensions posed by bioinformation.

Remains of Socialism

Remains of Socialism
Author: Maya Nadkarni
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 153
Release: 2020-07-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1501750194

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In Remains of Socialism, Maya Nadkarni investigates the changing fates of the socialist past in postsocialist Hungary. She introduces the concept of "remains"—both physical objects and cultural remainders—to analyze all that Hungarians sought to leave behind after the end of state socialism. Spanning more than two decades of postsocialist transformation, Remains of Socialism follows Hungary from the optimism of the early years of transition to its recent right-wing turn toward illiberal democracy. Nadkarni analyzes remains that range from exiled statues of Lenin to the socialist-era "Bambi" soda, and from discredited official histories to the scandalous secrets of the communist regime's informers. She deftly demonstrates that these remains were far more than simply the leftovers of an unwanted past. Ultimately, the struggles to define remains of socialism and settle their fates would represent attempts to determine the future—and to mourn futures that never materialized.