Everyday Post-Socialism

Everyday Post-Socialism PDF Author: Jeremy Morris
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1349950890
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 281

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Book Description
This book offers a rich ethnographic account of blue-collar workers’ everyday life in a central Russian industrial town coping with simultaneous decline and the arrival of transnational corporations. Everyday Post-Socialism demonstrates how people manage to remain satisfied, despite the crisis and relative poverty they faced after the fall of socialist projects and the social trends associated with neoliberal transformation. Morris shows the ‘other life’ in today’s Russia which is not present in mainstream academic discourse or even in the media in Russia itself. This book offers co-presence and a direct understanding of how the local community lives a life which is not only bearable, but also preferable and attractive when framed in the categories of ‘habitability’, commitment and engagement, and seen in the light of alternative ideas of worth and specific values. Topics covered include working-class identity, informal economy, gender relations and transnational corporations.

Everyday Post-Socialism

Everyday Post-Socialism PDF Author: Jeremy Morris
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1349950890
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 281

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Book Description
This book offers a rich ethnographic account of blue-collar workers’ everyday life in a central Russian industrial town coping with simultaneous decline and the arrival of transnational corporations. Everyday Post-Socialism demonstrates how people manage to remain satisfied, despite the crisis and relative poverty they faced after the fall of socialist projects and the social trends associated with neoliberal transformation. Morris shows the ‘other life’ in today’s Russia which is not present in mainstream academic discourse or even in the media in Russia itself. This book offers co-presence and a direct understanding of how the local community lives a life which is not only bearable, but also preferable and attractive when framed in the categories of ‘habitability’, commitment and engagement, and seen in the light of alternative ideas of worth and specific values. Topics covered include working-class identity, informal economy, gender relations and transnational corporations.

Crisis and the Everyday in Postsocialist Moscow

Crisis and the Everyday in Postsocialist Moscow PDF Author: Olga Shevchenko
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253002575
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 258

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Book Description
In this ethnography of postsocialist Moscow in the late 1990s, Olga Shevchenko draws on interviews with a cross-section of Muscovites to describe how people made sense of the acute uncertainties of everyday life, and the new identities and competencies that emerged in response to these challenges. Ranging from consumption to daily rhetoric, and from urban geography to health care, this study illuminates the relationship between crisis and normality and adds a new dimension to the debates about postsocialist culture and politics.

Ambiguous Transitions

Ambiguous Transitions PDF Author: Jill Massino
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 1785335995
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 466

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Book Description
Focusing on youth, family, work, and consumption, Ambiguous Transitions analyzes the interplay between gender and citizenship postwar Romania. By juxtaposing official sources with oral histories and socialist policies with everyday practices, Jill Massino illuminates the gendered dimensions of socialist modernization and its complex effects on women’s roles, relationships, and identities. Analyzing women as subjects and agents, the book examines how they negotiated the challenges that arose as Romanian society modernized, even as it clung to traditional ideas about gender. Massino concludes by exploring the ambiguities of postsocialism, highlighting how the legacies of the past have shaped politics and women’s lived experiences since 1989.

Food & Everyday Life in the Postsocialist World

Food & Everyday Life in the Postsocialist World PDF Author: Melissa L. Caldwell
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 025335384X
Category : Food consumption
Languages : en
Pages : 249

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Book Description
Across the Soviet Union and eastern Europe during the socialist period, food emerged as a symbol of both the successes and failures of socialist ideals of progress, equality, and modernity. By the late 1980s, the arrival of McDonald's behind the Iron Curtain epitomized the changes that swept across the socialist world. Not quite two decades later, the effects of these arrivals were evident in the spread of foreign food corporations and their integration into local communities. This book explores the role played by food--as commodity, symbol, and sustenance--in the transformation of life in Russia and eastern Europe since the end of socialism. Changes in food production systems, consumption patterns, food safety, and ideas about health, well-being, nationalism, and history provide useful perspectives on the meaning of the postsocialist transition for those who lived through it.

The Unmaking of Soviet Life

The Unmaking of Soviet Life PDF Author: Caroline Humphrey
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 9780801487736
Category : Mongolia
Languages : en
Pages : 300

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Book Description
The Unmaking of Soviet Life brings together ten essays from award-winning author Caroline Humphrey. Humphrey explores such topics as the mafia, barter, bribery, and the new shamanism, locating them in the experiences of a wide range of subjects.

Seasoned Socialism

Seasoned Socialism PDF Author: Anastasia Lakhtikova
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 025304099X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 396

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Book Description
This essay anthology explores the intersection of gender, food and culture in post-1960s Soviet life from personal cookbooks to gulag survival. Seasoned Socialism considers the relationship between gender and food in late Soviet daily life, specifically between 1964 and 1985. Political and economic conditions heavily influenced Soviet life and foodways during this period and an exploration of Soviet women’s central role in the daily sustenance for their families as well as the obstacles they faced on this quest offers new insights into intergenerational and inter-gender power dynamics of that time. Seasoned Socialism considers gender construction and performance across a wide array of primary sources, including poetry, fiction, film, women’s journals, oral histories, and interviews. This collection provides fresh insight into how the Soviet government sought to influence both what citizens ate and how they thought about food.

Markets and Moralities

Markets and Moralities PDF Author: Caroline Humphrey
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000189287
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 187

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Book Description
Before the collapse of the Eastern Bloc, private marketeering was regarded not only as criminal, but even immoral by socialist regimes. Ten years after taking on board western market-orientated shock therapy, post-socialist societies are still struggling to come to terms with the clash between these deeply engrained moralities and the daily pressures to sell and consume. This book explores the new market and its resulting contradictions in a rapidly developing Eastern Europe and Russia. Will Western fast-food industries irrevocably alter local culinary practices? What effect has the privatization of land had upon ownership and exchange? What role do new commodities play within the household? Based on original, first-hand ethnography, this book is a long-awaited addition to existing literature on post-socialist societies. It will be essential reading for students of anthropology, sociology, European and cultural studies, as well as professional groups working in Eastern Europe and Russia, including NGOs, development organizations and businesses.

Postsocialism and Cultural Politics

Postsocialism and Cultural Politics PDF Author: Xudong Zhang
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 9780822342304
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 364

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Book Description
Xudong Zhang offers a critical analysis of China's 'long 1990s', the tumultuous years between the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown and China's entry into the World Trade Organisation in 2001.

Lost in Transition

Lost in Transition PDF Author: Kristen Ghodsee
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822351021
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 226

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Book Description
Through ethnographic essays and short stories based on her experiences in Eastern Europe between 1989 and 2009, Kristen Ghodsee explains why many Eastern Europeans are nostalgic for the communist past.

Coca-Cola Socialism

Coca-Cola Socialism PDF Author: Radina Vučetić
Publisher: Central European University Press
ISBN: 9633862019
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 362

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Book Description
This book is about the Americanization of Yugoslav culture and everyday life during the nineteen-sixties. After falling out with the Eastern bloc, Tito turned to the United States for support and inspiration. In the political sphere the distance between the two countries was carefully maintained, yet in the realms of culture and consumption the Yugoslav regime was definitely much more receptive to the American model. For Titoist Yugoslavia this tactic turned out to be beneficial, stabilising the regime internally and providing an image of openness in foreign policy. Coca-Cola Socialism addresses the link between cultural diplomacy, culture, consumer society and politics. Its main argument is that both culture and everyday life modelled on the American way were a major source of legitimacy for the Yugoslav Communist Party, and a powerful weapon for both USA and Yugoslavia in the Cold War battle for hearts and minds. Radina Vučetić explores how the Party used American culture in order to promote its own values and what life in this socialist and capitalist hybrid system looked like for ordinary people who lived in a country with communist ideology in a capitalist wrapping. Her book offers a careful reevaluation of the limits of appropriating the American dream and questions both an uncritical celebration of Yugoslavia’s openness and an exaggerated depiction of its authoritarianism.