Annotation
Course Description
This course provides a survey of topics underlying debates on nature of geography, culture, identity, and the societies of Eastern and Central European countries. During the course, we will examine the processes and particulars of what has become known as the “transitions from socialism to capitalism”.
We will address the field of postsocialist studies and Europeanization studies from an anthropological perspective: that is, exploring the daily lives of people, and how they have struggled and managed to redefine their experiences in light of the new institutions and logic of economic and social activities since the 1990s. Such perspective takes as its goal an enhanced comprehension of how lives in this part of Europe are defined, experienced and understood by those living them and what is the role of postsocialist transformation and Europeanization in these processes. In so doing, we will focus on the contradictions, paradoxes and ambiguities of post-socialism and Europeanization by looking closely at emerging forms of nationalism, kinship ties, gender relations, language use, production and consumption, identification with place, and new assumptions about identity, memory, personhood and nation.