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Syllabus for 2018/19
9 October:
Introduction and class rules
16 October:
A brief history of the region under socialism. General debate on socialism, post-socialism and post-communism in anthropological perspective. The first session aims to introduce students to the recent works of post-socialism in social sciences, to assess the state of the field, as well as critically examine methodological, analytical and theoretical issues offered by this concept. Postsocialism and postcolonialism.
Lecturer: Dr. Agnieszka Kościańska, University of Warsaw
Readings:
Buchowski, M. (2006) The specter of orientalism in Europe: from exotic other to stigmatized brother. Anthropological Quarterly, Vol 79, no 3, pp. 463-482.
Cervinkova, H. (2012) Postcolonialism, postsocialism and the anthropology of east-central Europe. Journal of Postcolonial Writing 48:2, pp. 155-163.
Hann, C. Humphrey, C. and Verdery, K. (2002) Introduction. Postsocialism. Ideals, Ideologies and Practice in Eurasia. Hann, C. M. (ed.), London & New York: Routledge, pp. 1-27.
Further references:
Cervinkova H., M. Buchowski, Z. Uherek (2015) Rethinking Ethnography in Central Europe, eds., New York, Palgrave Macmillan.
Stoler A.L. (2016) Duress: Imperial Durabilities in Our Times, Durham: Duke University Press.
30 October:
Moralities of postsocialism: the view from religion
Lecturer: Dr. Vlad Naumescu, Central European University
This session provides an overview to debates on religion and morality in postsocialist societies. It looks at postsocialist transformations through questions of ethics, individual and collective moralities showing how religion constitutes a privileged space for remaking self and society.
Readings:
Naumescu, Vlad. 2016. "The End Times and the Near Future: Old Believers' Ethical Engagements." JRAI (N.S.) 22 (2):314–331. doi: 10.1111/1467-9655.12379.
Wanner, Catherine. 2007. Introduction. In Communities of the converted : Ukrainians and global evangelism, Culture and society after socialism. Ithaca, N.Y.: Bristol : Cornell University Press.
Further references:
Pelkmans, Mathijs, ed. 2009. Conversion after Socialism: Disruptions, Modernisms, and the Technologies of Faith. Oxford: Berghahn Books.
Steinberg, Mark D., and Catherine Wanner. 2008. Religion, morality, and community in post-Soviet societies, pp. 1- 20. Washington, D.C. Bloomington: Woodrow Wilson Center Press ; Indiana University Press.
Zigon, Jarrett. 2010. Making the new post-Soviet person : moral experience in contemporary Moscow. Leiden ; Boston: Brill.
Zigon, Jarrett ed. 2012. Multiple moralities and religions in post-Soviet Russia. New York: Berghahn Books.
13 November:
Moral Economies of Consumption in Post-Socialism.
Lecturer: dr. Renata E. Hryciuk, University of Warsaw
Readings:
Marisa Wilson (2009), „Food as a good versus food as commodity: contradictions between state and market in Tuta, Cuba”, Journal of the Anthropological Society of Oxford, 1, pp. 25-51.
Penny Van Esterick (2006), From Hunger Foods to Heritage Foods: Challenges in Food Localization in Lao PDR [in:] Fast Food/Slow Food. The Cultural Economy of the Global Food System, (ed.) Richard Wilk, Altamira Press.
Renata Blumberg (2014), Placing Alternative Food Networks: Farmers’ Markets in Post-Soviet Vilnius, Lithuania [w:] Ethical Eating in the Postsocialist and Socialist World, (eds.) Yuson Jung, Jacob A. Klein, Melissa L. Caldwell, University of California Press.
27 November
Sexuality, Gender and Expertise in state-socialist Czechoslovakia
Lecturer: Dr. Kateřina Lišková (Masaryk University)
Sex seems like the most intimate matter in the world. Yet, it is shaped by public discourses: experts through their assessments or governments through their policies form what kinds of sex we (are allowed to) have with whom and how we understand ourselves in the mix. Common sense has it that life under socialism was dreary, devoid of pleasure and without exciting new knowledge. Dr. Lišková’s research so far has proven otherwise. Expert knowledge about sexuality called sexology existed and flourished in many countries of Central and Eastern Europe bringing expertise from medical doctors to ordinary people and their communist governments about the female orgasm (and satisfying heterosexuality) or about homosexuality (and why it should be decriminalized) already in the 1950s, years before such topics were broached in the West. In this class, we will trace the ways in which this “sexpertise” traveled between sexologists, state authorities, and people as well as across East and West.Our aim will be to understand how intimacy gets constructed under a vastly different socio-political regime and how socialist power shapes (and is shaped by) expert knowledge. Last but not least, we will explore how “sexpertise” changed over time in connection with the changing political climate.
Readings:
Herzog, Dagmar. „East Germany’s Sexual Evolution.“ In Socialist Modern. East German Everyday Culture and Politics. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008. (p. 71-95).
Lišková, Kateřina. "Introduction." In Sexual Liberation, Socialist Style. Communist Czechoslovakia and the Science of Desire, 1945-89. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018 (p. 1-22).
„Do communists have better sex?“ - video
11 December:
Postsocialist mobilities and refugee crisis in Central-Eastern Europe
Lecturer: Dr. Karolina Bielenin-Lenczowska, University of Warsaw
The first part of the session explores migration and mobilities from and to V4 countries as sites for studying social change in post-socialist societies. In the second part, we will discuss refugee crisis in Europe and its responses in V4 countries.
Readings:
Patzer H., Góralska M., Winkowska M. (2015) The Stadium as a Witness. A Story of a Changing Monument, "View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture" no. 9: http://pismowidok.org/index.php/one/article/view/271/542
Cave, M. E. and Roberts, B. M., (2017) A ‘Moral’ Crusade: Central-Eastern European Nationalism, Xenophobia, and Far-Right Extremism in Response to the ‘Refugee Crisis’. „Honors Theses AY” 16/17. 78: http://repository.uwyo.edu/honors_theses_16-17/78
8 January
The Post-Socialist Peoples´ Economy
Lecturer: Dr. Juraj Buzalka, Comenius University in Bratislava
The session aims to discuss what matters for people with regard to economy, livelihood strategies as well as ideas about the material world after socialism and how peoples´ model of socialist economy - i. e. the model different from official socialist planning and redistribution -- finds the way to and is re-made up by contemporary political mobilisation. The discussion shall cover people´s everyday economic practices and ideas under communism, their transmission, and/or re-invention by contemporary politics and gain fuller understanding of ambivalent role that communist modernization had in developing of specific model of livelihood strategies, ideas, and practices under post-socialist capitalism.
Reading:
Juraj Buzalka (forthcoming) Post-Peasant Memories: Populist or Communist Nostalgia in East European Politics, Societies, and Cultures.
Further readings:
Buzalka, Juraj and Michaela Ferencová (2017) ‘Workers and Populism in Slovakia’, in Victoria Goddard and Susana Narotzky, eds, Work and Livelihood in Times of Crisis: History, Ethnography, Models, Routledge (with Michaela Ferencová), pp. 157-71.
Neringa Klumbyté (2010) The Soviet Sausage Renaissance. American Anthropologist 112/1.
Nadkarni, Maya and Olga Shevchenko, ‘The Politics of Nostalgia in the Aftermath of Socialism’s Collapse: A Case for Comparative Analysis’ in .” In Anthropology and Nostalgia, edited by Olivia Angé and David Berliner, 61-95. Berghahn: New York and Oxford, 2015.
22 January
Presentations of students’ projects. General discussion.
Lecturers: Dr. Karolina Bielenin-Lenczowska, University of Warsaw, Dr. Agnieszka Kościańska, University of Warsaw
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