Author: Cristofer Scarboro
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253047803
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 237
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Book Description
“First-class, rigorously researched, richly documented, and thought-provoking” essays on the consumer experience in socialist Eastern Europe (Graham H. Roberts, author of Material Culture in Russia and the USSR). As communist regimes denigrated Western countries for widespread unemployment and consumer excess, socialist Eastern European states simultaneously legitimized their power through their apparent ability to satisfy consumers’ needs. Moving beyond binaries of production and consumption, the essays collected here examine the lessons consumption studies can offer about ethnic and national identity and the role of economic expertise in shaping consumer behavior. From Polish VCRs to Ukrainian fashion boutiques, tropical fruits in the GDR to cinemas in Belgrade, The Socialist Good Life explores what consumption means in a worker state where communist ideology emphasizes collective needs over individual pleasures.
Author: Cristofer Scarboro
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780739145593
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
This book investigates the question of subjectivity-how people made sense of a world that was supposed to be understood within centrally created ideological frameworks. It brings together the literature of socialism, nationalism and trans-nationalism, and post-colonialism, areas that have been heretofore all too discreet. How states attempt to model subjects, and the negotiation this entails, is the central question of the modern era. It will be of interest to scholars and students in a wide range of subjects from history to anthropology to aesthetics.
Author: Albena Shkodrova
Publisher: Central European University Press
ISBN: 9633864046
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 264
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Book Description
Communist Gourmet presents a lively, detailed account of how the communist regime in Bulgaria determined people’s everyday food experience between 1944 and 1989. It examines the daily routines of acquiring food, cooking it, and eating out at restaurants through the memories of Bulgarians and foreigners, during communism. In looking back on a wide array of issues and events, Albena Shkodrova attempts to explain the paradoxes of daily existence. She reports human stories that are touching, sometimes dark, but often full of humor and anecdotes from nearly one hundred people: some of them are Bulgarians who were involved in the communist food industry, whether as consumers or employees, while others are visitors from the United States and Western Europe who report culinary highlights and disappointments. The author made use of the national press, officially published cookbooks, Communist Party documents, and other previously unstudied sources. An appendix containing recipes of dishes typical of the period and an extensive set of archival photographs are special features of the volume.
Author: Kapka Kassabova
Publisher: Penguin Random House New Zealand Limited
ISBN: 1742539009
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 305
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Book Description
After years on the outside, Bulgaria has finally made it into the EU club, but beyond the clichés about undrinkable plonk, cheap property, and assassins with poison-tipped umbrellas, the country remains a largely unknown quantity. Born on the muddy outskirts of Sofia, Kapka Kassabova grew up under Communism, got away just as soon as she could, and has loved and hated her homeland in equal measure ever since. In this illuminating and entertaining memoir, Kapka revisits Bulgaria and her own muddled relationship to it, travelling back to the scenes of her childhood, sampling its bizarre tourist sites, uncovering its centuries' old history of bloodshed and blurred borders, and capturing the absurdities and idiosyncrasies of her own and her country's past. Also available as an eBook
Author: Maria Todorova
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 0857456431
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 310
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Book Description
Although the end of the Cold War was greeted with great enthusiasm by people in the East and the West, the ensuing social and especially economic changes did not always result in the hoped-for improvements in people's lives. This led to widespread disillusionment that can be observed today all across Eastern Europe. Not simply a longing for security, stability, and prosperity, this nostalgia is also a sense of loss regarding a specific form of sociability. Even some of those who opposed communism express a desire to invest their new lives with renewed meaning and dignity. Among the younger generation, it surfaces as a tentative yet growing curiosity about the recent past. In this volume scholars from multiple disciplines explore the various fascinating aspects of this nostalgic turn by analyzing the impact of generational clusters, the rural-urban divide, gender differences, and political orientation. They argue persuasively that this nostalgia should not be seen as a wish to restore the past, as it has otherwise been understood, but instead it should be recognized as part of a more complex healing process and an attempt to come to terms both with the communist era as well as the new inequalities of the post-communist era.
Author: Mary C. Neuburger
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501762508
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 324
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Book Description
Ingredients of Change explores modern Bulgaria's foodways from the Ottoman era to the present, outlining how Bulgarians domesticated and adapted diverse local, regional, and global foods and techniques, and how the nation's culinary topography has been continually reshaped by the imperial legacies of the Ottomans, Habsburgs, Russians, and Soviets, as well as by the ingenuity of its own people. Changes in Bulgarian cooking and cuisine, Mary C. Neuburger shows, were driven less by nationalism than by the circulation of powerful food narratives—scientific, religious, and ethical—along with peoples, goods, technologies, and politics. Ingredients of Change tells this complex story through thematic chapters focused on bread, meat, milk and yogurt, wine, and the foundational vegetables of Bulgarian cuisine—tomatoes and peppers. Neuburger traces the ways in which these ingredients were introduced and transformed in the Bulgarian diet over time, often in the context of Bulgaria's tumultuous political history. She shows how the country's modern dietary and culinary transformations accelerated under a communist dictatorship that had the resources and will to fundamentally reshape what and how people ate and drank.
Author: Kristen Ghodsee
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400831350
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 280
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Book Description
Muslim Lives in Eastern Europe examines how gender identities were reconfigured in a Bulgarian Muslim community following the demise of Communism and an influx of international aid from the Islamic world. Kristen Ghodsee conducted extensive ethnographic research among a small population of Pomaks, Slavic Muslims living in the remote mountains of southern Bulgaria. After Communism fell in 1989, Muslim minorities in Bulgaria sought to rediscover their faith after decades of state-imposed atheism. But instead of returning to their traditionally heterodox roots, isolated groups of Pomaks embraced a distinctly foreign type of Islam, which swept into their communities on the back of Saudi-financed international aid to Balkan Muslims, and which these Pomaks believe to be a more correct interpretation of their religion. Ghodsee explores how gender relations among the Pomaks had to be renegotiated after the collapse of both Communism and the region's state-subsidized lead and zinc mines. She shows how mosques have replaced the mines as the primary site for jobless and underemployed men to express their masculinity, and how Muslim women have encouraged this as a way to combat alcoholism and domestic violence. Ghodsee demonstrates how women's embrace of this new form of Islam has led them to adopt more conservative family roles, and how the Pomaks' new religion remains deeply influenced by Bulgaria's Marxist-Leninist legacy, with its calls for morality, social justice, and human solidarity.
Author: Albena Shkodrova
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350132314
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 201
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Book Description
How did people exist and resist in their daily lives under Soviet control in the Cold War period? Shkodrova's monograph shows how in communist Bulgaria many women passionately exchanged recipes with friends and strangers, to build substantial and impressive private collections of recipes. This activity was borderline contraband in going against the general disapproval of home cooking that formed part of the ideology of communism, in which home cooking was considered household slavery and an agent of patriarchalism. Private recipe collections were by far the preferred written source of culinary information, more popular than the state-approved commercial cookbooks. Shkodrova shows how these recipe collections held many different meanings for the women who collected them, from helping to navigate the communist economy, to enabling new friendships to be developed while engaging safely in power relations, and cultivating a sense of individual identity in a society where collective existence was prioritised and exalted. Drawing on primary sources including scrapbook cookbooks and working from the establishment of cookery classes before communism and their obliteration thereafter, Shkodrova presents a structured outline of the meanings of recipes exchange and home cooking for Bulgarian women under communism.
Author: Kristen R. Ghodsee
Publisher: Bold Type Books
ISBN: 1568588895
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 189
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Book Description
A “brilliant,” “engaging,” and “valuable,” (Financial Times) exploration of why capitalism hurts women and how socialism, when done right, can bring economic independence, better labor conditions and, yes, even better sex. In a witty, irreverent op-ed piece that went viral, Kristen Ghodsee argued that women had better sex under socialism. The response was tremendous — clearly she articulated something many women had sensed for years: the problem is with capitalism, not with us. Ghodsee, an acclaimed ethnographer and professor of Russian and East European Studies, spent years researching what happened to women in countries that transitioned from state socialism to capitalism. She argues here that unregulated capitalism disproportionately harms women, and that we should learn from the past. By rejecting the bad and salvaging the good, we can adapt some socialist ideas to the 21st century and improve our lives. She tackles all aspects of a woman's life - work, parenting, sex and relationships, citizenship, and leadership. In a chapter called "Women: Like Men, But Cheaper," she talks about women in the workplace, discussing everything from the wage gap to harassment and discrimination. In "What To Expect When You're Expecting Exploitation," she addresses motherhood and how "having it all" is impossible under capitalism. Women are standing up for themselves like never before, from the increase in the number of women running for office to the women's march to the long-overdue public outcry against sexual harassment. Interest in socialism is also on the rise -- whether it's the popularity of Bernie Sanders or the skyrocketing membership numbers of the Democratic Socialists of America. It's become increasingly clear to women that capitalism isn't working for us, and Ghodsee is the informed, lively guide who can show us the way forward.
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.
