Language:
English
Pages:
19 Seiten
Series Statement:
Working Papers. Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology 132
Keywords:
Ost-Europa Ungarn
;
Sozialismus
;
Dorfgemeinschaft
;
Intellektuelle
;
Sinti
Abstract:
Abstract: Twenty years after the collapse of the Soviet bloc, the challenge to anthropological theory posed by these social systems and their successors is in 2011 the subject of lively exchanges in the journal Critique of Anthropology. Tatjana Thelen laments a deficit in the Western anthropological accounts of (post)socialism, exemplified by the model of Katherine Verdery, which, it is alleged, casts socialist societies as "deficient" according to the criteria of neo-institutionalist economics. Thelen`s critique drew a prompt response from Verdery and another of those she criticized, Elizabeth Cullen Dunn. This commentary focuses on Hungary and on the socialist rather than the postsocialist component of the debate, which looks set to continue in 2012. Numerous Western scholars were able to carry out fieldwork during the Cold War (an elastic term nowadays unhelpfully extended to include the 1970s and 1980s). Their studies of Hungarian villagers do not support Thelen`s charge of deficiency, Particular attention is paid to her use of "otherness" and related terms, which raise more general issues of epistemology and ethics...
Note:
A revised version of this paper has been published as: Beyond Cold War, Beyond Otherness: some implications of socialism and postsocialism for anthropology. In: Christian Giordano, François Ruegg and Andrea Boscoboinik (eds.). Does East Go West?, 2013, Berlin: Lit Verlag, pp. 35-56. The working paper version has been taken out of circulation.
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