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Against the historical backdrop of successive socialist and post-socialist claims to have completely remade society, the contributors to this volume explore the complex and often paradoxical continuities between diverse post-socialist presents and their corresponding socialist and pre-socialist pasts. The chapters focus on ways in which: pre-socialist economic, political, and cultural forms in fact endured an era of socialism and have found new life in the post-socialist present, notwithstanding revolutionary socialist claims; continuities with a pre-socialist past have been produced within the historical imaginary of post-socialism; and socialist economic, political, and cultural forms have in fact endured in a purportedly postsocialist era, despite the claims of neo-liberal reformers.
“…provides an important counterpoint to prevailing claims that socialism, in all its modes and meanings, was quickly abandoned by populations that were hungry to embrace the ‘freedoms’ of a market-oriented economy…reveals its ambitious scope and its broad, comparative approach toward understanding the complex anxieties and uncertainties that people continue to face in transforming societies.” · Journal of Anthropological Research
Harry G. West is Reader in Social Anthropology at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS). His research in northern Mozambique has examined how colonialism, revolutionary socialism, and post-socialist political and economic liberalization have reconfigured institutions of local authority.
List of Contributors
Introduction: Poetries of the Past in a Socialist World Remade
Parvathi Raman and Harry G. West
Chapter 1. From Socialist Chiefs to Postsocialist Cadres: Neotraditional Authority in Neoliberal Mozambique
Harry G. West
Chapter 2. ‘For Eating, It’s Guangzhou’: Regional Culinary Traditions and Chinese Socialism
Jakob A. Klein
Chapter 3. Searching for the Time of Beautiful Madness: Of Ruins and Revolution in Post-Sandinista Nicaragua
Dennis Rodgers
Chapter 4. The Object of Morality: Rethinking Informal Networks in Central Europe
Nicolette Makovicky
Chapter 5. Vietnamese Narratives of Tradition, Exchange and Friendship in the Worlds of the Global Socialist Ecumene
Susan Bayly
Chapter 6. Waste under Socialism and After: A Case Study from Almaty
Catherine Alexander
Chapter 7. Corruption and the One-party State in Tanzania: The View from Dar es Salaam, 1964–2000
John R. Campbell
Chapter 8. Media and the Limits of Cynicism in Postsocialist China
Kevin Latham
Chapter 9. The Rooted Anthropologies of East-Central Europe
Chris Hann
Chapter 10. Historical Analogies and the Commune: The Case of Putin/Stolypin
Caroline Humphrey
Chapter 11. Signifying Something: Che Guevara and Neoliberal Alienation in London
Parvathi Raman
Index