Search results

Der Autor beschreibt in seinem Beitrag die heute noch anzutreffende "Subalternität" bei ehemaligen Arbeitern der Chemiebranche und bei Bergleuten in Rumänien - einem Land, das die Gegensätze von sozialistischer Industrialisierung und postsozialistischer Deindustrialisierung besonders krass erlebt hat. Er vergleicht den gegenwärtigen "Neokapitalismus" mit der "Neoleibeigenschaft" der vorausgegangenen Epoche in dieser Region und stellt fest, dass Osteuropa ein weiteres Mal die oppressive und unmenschliche Variante eines Systems erleiden muss, das im Westen ganz anderen Regeln gehorcht. Er problematisiert die ethnographische Basis neokapitalistischer Annahmen, die Entmachtung der Arbeiterklasse im Sozialismus und Neokapitalismus, die gegenwärtigen klassenbezogenen Transformationen sowie die sozialen Beziehungsnetze der Arbeiter und ihre körperliche Kondition. Abgesehen von der prekären Beschäftigungssituation der Chemiearbeiter und Bergleute ist der Stress in beiden Berufszweigen hoch. Die Arbeiter sind ungenügend informiert, sie werden als Schwarzarbeiter ausgebeutet und in den Medien zum "Sündenbock" für alle Übel des Sozialismus gemacht. (ICI2)

The Politics of Duplicity: Controlling Reproduction in Ceausescu's Romania. Gail Kligman. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. 373 pp.

Incidents observed during Oct 1992 fieldwork in rural southern Transylvania are used to contrast Eastern & Western perceptions of postcommunist agricultural privatization in Eastern Europe. The incidents, which brought together representatives from 44 households of a Romanian community to divide & distribute previously collectivized land, show the different approaches to privatization taken by 2 agricultural associations. They confront Western perceptions of privatization as the worthy goal of a process whose problems are not significant. It is argued that Eastern Europeans experience privatization as a process rather than a goal, & live its problems as real costs. Land distribution events such as the ones observed suggest that privatization can increase democratic participation, but also point to intense land competition & suspicion within communities. It is concluded that the process of privatization needs to be considered as much as the goal, if the goal is to be reached. 2 Tables, 14 References. E. Blackwell

The death of authority figures like fathers or leaders can be experienced as either liberation or loss. In the twentieth century, the authority of the father and of the leader became closely intertwined; constraints and affective attachments intensified in ways that had major effects on the organization of regimes of authority. This comparative volume examines the resulting crisis in symbolic identification, the national traumas that had crystallized around four state political forms: Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, and East European Communism. The defeat of Imperial and Fascist regimes in 1945 and the implosion of Communist regimes in 1989 were critical moments of rupture, of "death of the father." What was the experience of their ends, and what is the reconstruction of those ends in memory? This volume represents is the beginning of a comparative social anthropology of caesurae: the end of traumatic political regimes, of their symbolic forms, political consequences, and probable futures