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What Was Socialism, and What Comes Next?
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1996
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Eastern EuropeColonialismDecolonialityClassical SociologyHistorical SociologySocial ChangeSocialismSocial SciencesComes NextPolitical EconomyCultural HistoryLanguage StudiesHistorical ExpertiseMarxismKatherine VerderyAnthropologySocial PolicySocial AnthropologyPolitical ScienceModernity
Katherine Verdery, one of the first anthropologists in Eastern Europe, had built a substantial ethnographic and historical foundation before the region’s major political transformations. She examines the nature of Soviet‑style socialism to better understand its aftermath and the possible alternatives. Using primary ethnographic data from Romania and Transylvania combined with other sources, she applies an anthropological lens to themes such as society, market creation, privatization, conflict, and gender. Her essays show that post‑socialist changes involve symbolic reinterpretations of money and property—e.g., pyramid schemes and land redistribution—and contest the notion of a straightforward shift to capitalism, instead emphasizing local processes.
Among the first anthropologists to work in Eastern Europe, Katherine Verdery had built up a significant base of ethnographic and historical expertise when the major political transformations in the region began to take place. In this collection of essays dealing with the aftermath of Soviet-style socialism and the different forms that may replace it, she explores the nature of socialism in order to understand more fully its consequences. By analyzing her primary data from Romania and Transylvania and synthesizing information from other sources, Verdery lends a distinctive anthropological perspective to a variety of themes common to political and economic studies on the end of socialism: themes such as society, the creation of market economies, privatization, national and ethnic conflict, and changing gender relations.Under Verdery's examination, privatization and civil society appear not only as social processes, for example, but as symbols in political rhetoric. The classic pyramid scheme is not just a means of enrichment but a site for reconceptualizing the meaning of money and an unusual form of post-Marxist millenarianism. Land being redistributed as private property stretches and shrinks, as in the imaginings of the farmers struggling to tame it. Infused by this kind of ethnographic sensibility, the essays reject the assumption of a transition to capitalism in favor of investigating local processes in their own terms.