Post-socialism (Anthropology)

Annist, A. 2005. The worshippers of rules: Defining the right and wrong in local participatory project applications in Estonia.

by Aet Annist

Published in D. Mosse; D. Lewis (Toim.). The Aid Effect: Giving and Governing in International Development (150 - 170). London: Pluto Press
!! Not the exact replica of the published article.

Developmental cultures evolve through a complicated set of interests and agendas as well as the concerns of various... more Developmental cultures evolve through a complicated set of interests and agendas as well as the concerns of various stakeholders. The ethnographic data I collected during fieldwork in two south-east Estonian communities, and at different levels of a DFID-funded multi-agency participatory rural programme (RP) seeking to reduce poverty and social exclusion in rural communities in the Baltic states, is well suited to study this complex scene of global and local development relations.
I examine the evaluation process of project applications from rural Estonian communities at precisely the stage where the programme’s general ideology is tested and translated into practice. The chapter shows how local development agents strictly follow the requirements and regulations that organise the evaluation process in such a way as to create the impression of a trustworthy partner for foreign funders. At the same time, the process serves to conceal a frequent reliance on personal information, such as a suspicion about the motives of certain applicants, when rejecting projects.
The ethnographic cases provided illustrate both the process of translation in development industry as well as of the sensitivities in relation to the developmental status of post-Soviet societies.

Annist, A. 2009. Outsourcing Culture: Establishing Heritage Hegemony by Funding Cultural Life in South Eastern Estonia

by Aet Annist

Published in Lietuvos etnologija: socialinės antropologijos ir etnologijos studijos. 2009, 9(18), 117–138.

The following article compares the Soviet and post-Soviet processes of hegemony creation. Based on long-term... more The following article compares the Soviet and post-Soviet processes of hegemony creation. Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork, I describe how in Estonia, where highly formalised cultural sphere was a norm already in the 19th century, Soviet cultural hegemony was never properly established. The Soviet system of blanket-funding unintentionally enabled the perseverance of nationalist cultural counter-hegemony. In contrast, the current system of project based funding is more effective in creating cultural hegemony. I provide ethnographic examples of how such new practices of governmentality are outsourcing the establishment of emblematic
hegemony of a small cultural group, Setos.

Profits of disorder: images of the Transnistrian Moldovan Republic

by Michael Bobick

Published in Global Crime, 12:4, 239-265

The 'Psychomental Complex' Revisited: old Tungus shamanism and its mirror-image, shamanic revival (Tuva Siberia)

by Konstantinos Zorbas

Reframing History

by Gretchen Bakke

Slovene Studies, 30 (2): 185–217.
2008.

Unruly Entrepreneurs: Russian Worker Responses to Precarious Formal Employment.

by Jeremy Morris

draft only - not for citation

The nature of insecure work continues to attract debate, particularly in the context of neoliberal reform in many... more The nature of insecure work continues to attract debate, particularly in the context of neoliberal reform in many industrialised countries. The current research adds to a growing body of work on in-work poverty and informal economic activity. It provides ethnographic data on mobility patterns between formal and informal employment in Russia and shows that standard formal employment is understood as no less precarious than alternative work. The temporary and permanent movement away from formal work is understood by examining the multi-faceted evaluation by individuals of employment precarity. By examining ‘normative’ worker exit strategies from waged employment we can reappraise the meaning of the ‘reflexive worker’; ‘enterprising’ workers may reject the very formal work places and structures that are formative of such subjectivities. In spite of the disadvantages of own-account informal work, a number of economic and social push and pull factors away from formal employment are cited by informants.

Socially Embedded Workers at the Nexus of Diverse Work in Russia: An Ethnography of Blue-Collar Informalization.

by Jeremy Morris

Draft paper only. Not for citation.

This article presents extensive ethnographic data from the Russian provinces on workers and diverse economic... more This article presents extensive ethnographic data from the Russian provinces on workers and diverse economic practices. It traces the theoretical debates on the informal economy from Harding (1989) to Gibson-Graham (2008) and argues for a substantivist position on household reproduction that focuses on the interdependence of social networks, employment, class-identity and (informal) work. The ethnographic materials highlight an important nexus of formal/informal economic activity: ‘Normative’ workers (in waged formal employment) by virtue of a strongly embedded work-related social identity and characterized by a significant number of weak social ties, move with little ‘effort’ between formal and informal work. There are significant performative and spatial aspects of embedded worker identity that facilitate movement including the workspace itself, as a contested domain of formal/informal work.

When the World Went Color: Emotions, Senses and Spaces in Contemporary Accounts of the Czechoslovak Velvet Revolution

by Susanna Trnka

2012. Emotion, Space and Society. vol 5: 45-51.

Two decades after the dramatic conclusion of socialist rule in Czechoslovakia, Czechs’ personal recollections of the... more Two decades after the dramatic conclusion of socialist rule in Czechoslovakia, Czechs’ personal recollections of the 1989 Velvet Revolution offer a counter-point to official histories of this period by downplaying the revolution’s role as a catalyst for political and economic modernization to focus on its affective, sensory and other bodily dimensions. In this paper I argue that Czechs’ personal memories of 1989 convey the feeling of having (in local terminology) “really lived” through the revolution by highlighting its emotional and sensorial impact and by locating the physical self within local, public spaces that were invested with novel political and personal meanings. Crucial here is the situating of not just memory, but also emotion, affect, and sensation, in sites that are culturally coded as “public” in distinction to the “private” realms of domesticity, the family, and the body, suggesting how the revolution instigated a significant experiential rupture between these two domains. In doing so, these accounts illuminate how local sites can become the nexus of not only personal and collective historical memories but also of emotional and sensorial anchorages of self to event.

Formuje se Nová Generace? Výsledky Studie ‘Životy Mladých Pražských Žen'” (A New Generation in the Making? The Results of the Study ‘Young Women of Prague’)

by Susanna Trnka

Co-authored with Alena Heitlinger. 1999. In Martine Potůček (ed). Česká Společnost na Konci Tisíciletí. (Czech Society Towards the End of the Millennium). Praha: Karolinum Press. Vol. 2, pp 55-73.

Audiovisual Media and Identity Issues in Southeastern Europe

by Eckehard Pistrick

co-edited volume with Gretel Schwörer and Nicola Scaldaferri

The edited volume Audiovisual Media and Identity Issues in Southeastern Europe is an attempt to meet the challenges of... more The edited volume Audiovisual Media and Identity Issues in Southeastern Europe is an attempt to meet the challenges of text-based scholarship, to break medial one-dimensionality dictated by textuality and to shift the focus to the aural and visual dimensions of identity in a part of Europe heavily marked by the dynamics of political, cultural and social change, particularly during the last decades. The objective of this endeavour is to examine identity in Southeastern Europe by means of its communication media, specifically that of the photographic image and the sound recording.

How are identities communicated? How are they performed and made physically perceptible? Brought to a point, the primary issue is one of how people perceive themselves and their environment on the basis of communication media, seen through a lens of different disciplines (social anthropology, ethnomusicology, media studies, sociology and history) and methodologies from the point of view of scholars from Southeastern Europe and their Western European colleagues. The book pursues a distinct comparative and historical perspective, examining the media representations from socialist and pre-socialist periods in relation to the role media play in the postsocialist discourse. Another focus is laid on local media representations and their impact on local self-images. This distinct historical and local approach allows new insights into how identities are constructed, performed and negotiated in the light of media, resulting in different forms of interpreting, re-appropriating and re-evaluting the past and traditions. This opens up questions on the role of media in relation to cultural policies and their potential to preserve or to transform local cultural heritage.

The book is also an important contribution to the field of postsocialist studies in anthropology. It sheds a distinct cultural view on postsocialist transformation processes. Through a wide range of examples and first-hand results of basic field research from Greece, Bulgaria, Romania, Serbia, Albania and Slovenia this volume provides an opportunity for a comparative reconsideration of similar phenomena across national borders. It may serve also as a methodological reference work for scholars who are interested in the different ways of how to develop and practice “media reflexivity” in their own field research.


Eckehard Pistrick currently teaches Ethnomusicology at the Martin-Luther-University Halle-Wittenberg, Germany, with focus on Southeastern Europe. He has co-directed a research project at the same institution on “Aural and Visual Representations of Albanian Identity” and is currently completing his PhD at the Universities of Halle and Paris-Ouest-Nanterre. He is member of the Centre de Recherche en Ethnomusicologie (CREM).

Nicola Scaldaferri is Professor of Ethnomusicology at the University of Milan, Italy. He is also the founder and director of the LEAV - Ethnomusicology and Visual Anthropology Laboratory at the same institution. His research focuses on the music of Southeastern Europe and Southern Italy, as well as on Electroacoustic music. Since 1999 he has conducted extensive research on epic singing traditions and on the Milman Parry Collection at Harvard University. Major publications include Musica arbëreshe in Basilicata (Adriatica, 1994), Musica nel laboratorio elettroacustico (Lim, 1997), Nel paese dei cupa cupa (with Stefano Vaja, Squilibri, 2006) and the collaboration for the documentary Vjesh/Song (2007), realized by Rossella Schillaci.

Gretel Schwörer is Professor of Ethnomusicology at the Martin-Luther-University Halle-Wittenberg, Germany. Specialist in the musical traditions of Southeast Asia, her most recent research focuses on media and the multiple dimensions of sound. Another important aspect of her research relates to copyright issues for traditional music.


“What I find so valuable about the volume . . . is its realization in and of a four-part harmony. It is a harmony of theory and ethnography, of media criticism and media practice.”

—Steven Feld, University of New Mexico



Date Of Publication: Jun 2011
Isbn13: 978-1-4438-2930-4
Isbn: 1-4438-2930-7

“Singing back the kurbetlli – Responses to migration in Albanian folk culture as a culturally innovative practice” in Anthropological Notebooks XVI/II, 29-39.

by Eckehard Pistrick

Although the modes of creation and the value of the traditional song in Albanian rural
society have changed... more Although the modes of creation and the value of the traditional song in Albanian rural
society have changed significantly, music making is still considered a practice of emotional
release. Migration songs have been proved like other partly improvised repertoires such
as humoristic songs or përshendetje (songs for greeting and wishing for well-being) that
they are still valued for the expressing individual or collective pain. Migration songs open
up over-individual categories of identification (Papailas 2003: 1060) and even serve as a
low-tech counter-discourse to the official media discourse about migration. This became
apparent in the migration songs for Flamur Pisli which were understood by Albanians
as collective laments, making visible once again the self-renewing and magical power
attributed to traditional Albanian musical practice.

The Big-Man From the "White House". Negotiating Power In a Slovak Post-Rural Community

by Martin Hermansky