This substantial essay depicts urban collapse in an exceptionally difficult period of the Serbian capital. The author has marshalled facts, reflections, photographs and other imagesto demonstrate the ...transformation of Belgrade during the Milošević years. With the theoretical grounding of cultural anthropology, history studies, culture of memory, history of art, and urbanism, Mileta Prodanović considers changes to the built environment and urban landscape in the city in the 1990s. He covers many visual aspects of life with great ingenuity: shopping centers, unregulated construction and “wild” modifications of buildings, new buildings (broadcasting studios, shops, homes) that do not fit the surroundings, bad taste in home furnishings (camp, kitsch), boondoggles such as the international art center, problematic historical markers like the obelisk of the eternal flame, billboards, store displays, electoral propaganda, graffiti, grave-markers and cemetery memorials, coins and paper money, calendars, beer labels, and even religious icons (and more). All this information is provided with some critique and much implied comparison to past standards.
During the 2010s, several studies questioned the conceptual stability of "post-socialism." I review some of these critiques, paying particular attention to the contradictions of the "Global East," ...proposed lately as a substitute concept. Resisting this recent call to abandon it and building on recent scholarship, I suggest three spatial and temporal extensions that will assist researchers in using the lens of "post-socialism" to explore new questions, by: documenting the use of "strategic anachronisms," best illustrated by universal anti-communism; configuring post-socialism as a heterochrony and messy temporality; and reorienting the concept from its connection with the past to a connection with a potential socialist future, among other things by provincializing East European/Former Soviet Union post-socialisms. The concept of post-socialism prompts plenty of inspiring questions about theory-making, challenges to neoliberal normalization, shifting notions of value, failure and success, local and global histories and possible futures for socialism, and comparative urbanism, thus allowing further exploration of contemporary and emerging politics, East and West, South and North. Scholars might be better off leaving the concept radically open and using it, selectively, as a toolkit, without relying on deterministic assumptions and putative master narratives. "To let a thousand flowers bloom" might be a more productive epistemological terrain than attempting to rationalize and then eradicate the concept of post-socialism. Assigning meta categories that classify global space is, of course, optional; if we have to give a name to our object of study, scholars should use, for want of a better term, post-socialism.
A fogyatékos emberek társadalmi mozgalma történetileg befolyásolta a liberális demokráciák fejlődését. A fogyatékossággal élő embereket érintő progresszív szakpolitikai változások a fogyatékosügyi ...mozgalom nyomására történtek. Ugyanakkor nem világos, hogy a civil érdekvédelmi térnek az erodálódó demokráciákban tapasztalható zsugorodása mennyiben érinti a fogyatékosügyi mozgalmat. Tanulmányunk a hazai fogyatékosügyi mozgalom 1998 óta eltelt időszakát vizsgálja a szakpolitikai bevonódás szintjeire és az érdekvédelmi lehetőségek változására fókuszálva. Tapasztalt mozgalmi szereplőkkel készült interjúkra (15) építve, és szakpolitikai dokumentumok vizsgálatával megállapítható, hogy a hazai fogyatékosügyi mozgalom bevonódása jelentősen romlott a 2010-es évek kezdete óta. A konzultációs platformok kiüresedtek, a kormányzati reakciótól tartva a szervezetek rendszeresen öncenzúrát gyakorolnak a kommunikációjukban, és kerülik a kormányzat kritikáját. A mozgalom széttöredezett. A fogyatékossággal élők igényeinek emberi jogi keretezése egyre kevésbé preferált kormányzati oldalról, az emberi jogokkal szembeni mozgalmi hozzáállás apatikus. Szűkült a média és a független emberi jogi intézmények elérése is.
In this paper, I raise the question of how we can, as anthropologists, take a balanced or symmetrical approach in our research in situations where our interlocutors have different relations with ...scientific knowledge. I describe how in my research on raw milk consumption in Croatia, some of my interlocutors were people working in the scientific production of knowledge, and others were consuming raw milk where they did not account for this knowledge. I explain how it was a challenge to consider both types of approach in an equal way because of my own relation to the scientific production of knowledge. I argue this is because of the duplex relation we have with our interlocutors who work in science: a collegial relation and an ethnographic one. As I show, this is a point that has been made in some of the literature on vaccination (e.g. Drążkiewicz Grodzicka, 2021), as well as one that has been discussed elsewhere (e.g. Nadasdy, 2007). I then consider these issues through Hufford’s (2020, 2008) idea of methodological symmetry, where I argue that it is in the “field” where relations are set up asymmetrically. Therefore, I argue that we need to think very carefully about how these relations unfold in practice during our fieldwork, and not just later on when we are analysing them.
The fall of the socialist system in the late 1980s determined major changes in the economy of former socialist countries. These changes affected especially the mono industrial cities. Even after ...privatisation, the industrial sector remained in restructuring and decline, often leading to the closure of factories. Structural or functional conversion processes have been delayed and on the site of former factories remain many abandoned places, which were neglected by the authorities. These areas influence both the natural and socio-economic environment: from local community to potential investors. Since the brownfield areas were not given much attention, this paper contributes to a correct definition, identification and presentation of such sites and the main barriers that hinder their redevelopment. For the case study, two mono industrial cities from two neighbouring former socialist countries (Romania and Serbia) were analysed. The object of the study was the comparison of the redevelopment solutions applied so far with their impact on socioeconomic environment and the plans for future development.
20世纪80年代末期社会主义制度的覆灭决定了多个前社会主义国家的重大经济变革。这些变 革尤其影响单一工业城市。即使经历了私有化，工业部门依然处于重组和衰退中，最终迎来的 往往是工厂关门。结构性或功能性的对话过程被耽搁，先前的工厂成了一处处被政府部门忽视 的废弃之地。这些地方既影响自然环境，也影响社会经济环境，从地方社区到潜在投资者均受 到影响。鉴于棕色地带未得到重视，本文尝试正确定义、识别并展示这些场所以及妨碍其改造 的主要障碍。在案例研宄部分，我们分析了两个相邻的前社会主义国家（罗马尼亚和塞尔维亚) 的两个单一工业城。本研宄的目的是比较目前为止实施的改造方案和它们对社会经济环境的 影响以及未来的发展计划。
•Extensive food self-provisioning by Middle class Czechs and Poles promotes quiet sustainability.•These food practices defy research and policy expectations of emerging middle class ...consumption.•Quiet sustainability practices carry environmental benefits but these are not prominent motives.•Quiet sustainability practices are important but unrecognised forms of sustainable consumption.
This paper questions assumptions about the relationship between class formation, sustainability and patterns of consumption. The empirical elements of the research are based upon qualitative and quantitative time-series research into food self-provisioning and ‘quiet sustainability’ in post socialist Central and Eastern Europe (Poland and the Czech Republic). It considers sustainable practices that are often considered to be taking place ‘in the wrong place and the wrong time’, i.e. they appear anomalous in terms of western expectations of patterns of development. We offer evidence of comparatively very high levels of food self-provisioning and sharing of the resulting produce amongst middle class Poles and Czechs. This evidence questions widely held assumptions about class, development and consumption. This evidence may be of significance for consideration of a much wider set of household practices/behaviours that are associated with the middle classes. Our explorations of the reasons for food self-provisioning throw new light on discussions of ethical consumption: ethics is lightly worn, even unacknowledged, amongst practitioners, but the commitments are widespread and robust. Our empirical findings, and the theoretical arguments we seek to test on the basis of them, are of particular significance in the context of rapid processes of rural and urban change in emerging economies.
Comparative research aiming to explain differences in segregation on national level is highly desirable for public policy in increasingly diverse countries including new immigrant destinations. This ...study explores residential segregation of non-European migrants in Czechia using the individualised scalable neighbourhood method based on anonymised geocoded register data. Czechia is the main immigrant-receiving country in Eastern European post-socialist context. To place our results in a comparative perspective we replicated the methodology of recent comprehensive study of residential segregation in Northwest Europe by ResSegr project. The comparison indicate overall similarity of residential segregation of non-European migrants in selected Northwest European countries (Belgium, Denmark, the Netherlands, Norway and Sweden) and in Czechia across spatial scales when measured by index of dissimilarity for individualised neighbourhoods. However, the decomposition to neighbourhood concentration and neighbourhood representation indices challenges this result. Non-European migrants are less concentrated in Czechia at all scales. Lower over-representation and higher under-representation in neighbourhoods in Czechia provide an evidence that large-scale neighbourhoods with a considerable non-European migrant concentration known from other European countries are close to non-existent in Czechia. In the conclusion, we draw implications for neighbourhood research and policy and question the pertinence of the term segregation in European context.
•Residential segregation is explored based on geocoded data and by using the individualised scalable neighbourhood method.•Concentration of non-European migrants in neighbourhoods is lower in Czechia than in Northwest Europe at all scales.•Stronger under-representation and weaker over-representation of migrants in Czech neighbourhoods is evidenced.•The level of segregation is similar, but the migrant-dense neighbourhoods in Northwest Europe lack a counterpart in Czechia.•Spatial distribution of non-European migrants does not lead to the development of pronounced ethnic neighbourhoods in Europe.
The proposed paper is a study of resource nationalism. Resource nationalism appeared in Mongolia in the post-Socialist period. In this paper, we understand resource nationalism as a wide spectrum of ...strategies domestic elites employ in order to increase their control of natural resources - definition by Paul Domjan and Matt Stone. After an analysis of legal materials, mass media articles and political rhetoric, the author of this paper concludes that the sources of resource nationalism should be searched in the texts that date back to the Socialist era. Also, the sources of resource nationalism can be found in the ideas about justice of those times. The idea that natural resources belong to the people has been fixed in mass opinion, while contemporary nationalists justify this idea from the standpoint of “blood and soil”. That creates serious problems for Mongolia, a country with resource economy. The matter is that economic growth driven with foreign investments has caused a deep social stratification. In its turn, social stratification gave birth to a social demand for fair profit distribution from natural resource extraction. In the political sphere, this social demand quickly received a reaction - in the form of resource nationalism rhetoric. In the paper, we notice that resource nationalism in Mongolia has not been formed as a vivid legal or political doctrine. Today, it is a set of populist rhetoric of current interest which are used both for lobbying future political decisions in mining and for legitimizing the decisions already made.
The text deals with the changes in Macedonian society after the fall of Yugoslav socialism and the creation of a new independent Republic of Macedonia. The text also shows how Macedonian citizens ...project their future in a country that has been mired in geopolitical uncertainty for the last thirty years, which was crucial for shaping the past and future development of the country.
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