Abstrakt
In the decades following the end of the Cold War, the developments in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) were frequently explained in terms of a grand transition from state socialism to parliamentary democracy and market economy. Both the transitory and the post-socialist character of societies so designed imply a hierarchy and marginalise historical agency of the societies in question (e.g.
Buden 2009). The same power equation translates into the hierarchies of knowledge production about those societies (Buchowski 2001, 2006; Prica 2007).
While this grand transition was symbolically accomplished by many CEE countries with the EU membership, soon after, with the advent of the "Crisis", their societies, along with the world they had strived to be part of, were confronted with an imperative of a further reform - of another transition to a state, which has no name, no definition, and no tangible working example. We propose to call it the transition 2.0 and encourage an anthropology of the world(s) in reform.
The dynamics of reform and resistance intersect geographical, cultural and social boundaries and bring about a new air of coevalness, along with fresh imagination about possible futures (e.g. Graeber 2013).
The 2014 CASA conference aims to address precisely this transition 2.0 in process.