Changing Identities in Post-Cold War Central Europe

Spring 2013

Masaryk University in Brno


1. February 28 – Introduction: cultural and political theories of identity

+ Gupta, Akhil and James Ferguson (1992) Beyond ‘Culture’: Space, Identity, and the Politics of
Difference. Cultural Anthropology, vol. 7, no. 1 (Feb. 1992), 6–23.

+ Brubaker, Rogers (1996) Rethinking Nationhood: Nation as Institutionalized Form, Practical
Category, Contingent Event. In Nationalism Reframed: Nationhood and the National Question in the
New Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 13–22.

+ Laitin, David D. (1998) A Theory of Political Identities. In Identity in Formation: The
Russian-Speaking Populations in the Near Abroad. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 3–35.


2. February 28 – Cultural geographies of East-Central Europe

+ Szücs, Jenő (1988) Three Historical Regions of Europe. In John Keane, ed., Civil Society and the
State (London: Verso), 291–333. (ECE)

* Gal, Susan (1991) Bartók’s Funeral: Representations of Europe in Hungarian Political Rhetoric.
American Ethnologist, vol. 18, no. 3, Representations of Europe: Transforming State, Society, and
Identity (Aug. 1991), 440–458. (HU)

* Galbraith, Marysia H. (2004) Between East and West: Geographic Metaphors of Identity in Poland.
Ethos, vol. 32, no. 1 (March 2004), 51–81. (PL)

+ Arnason, Johann P. (2005) Introduction: Demarcating East-Central Europe. European Journal of
Social Theory, vol. 8, no. 4, 387–400. (ECE)


3. March 14 – Nationalism and national minorities

+ Brubaker, Rogers (1996) National Minorities, Nationalizing States, and External National
Homelands in the New Europe. In Nationalism Reframed: Nationhood and the National Question in the
New Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 55–76. (ECE)

* Holy, Ladislav (1994) Metaphors of the Natural and the Artificial in Czech Political Discourse.
Man, New Series, vol. 29, no. 4 (Dec. 1994), 809–829. (CZ)

* Hann, Chris (1998) Postsocialist Nationalism: Rediscovering the Past in Southeast Poland. Slavic
Review, vol. 57, no. 4 (Winter 1998), 840–863. (PL)


4. March 14 – Race and ethnicity: ascribed and adopted identities

* Hayden, Robert M. (1996) Imagined Communities and Real Victims: Self-Determination and Ethnic
Cleansing in Yugoslavia. American Ethnologist, vol. 23, no. 4 (Nov. 1996), 783–801. (YU)

* Lemon, Alaina (2002) Without a ‘Concept’? Race as Discursive Practice. Slavic Review, vol. 61,
no. 1 (Spring 2002), 54–61. (RU)

* White, Jenny B. (1997) Turks in the New Germany. American Anthropologist, vol. 99, no. 4 (Winter
1997), 754–769. (D)


5. March 28 – History, memory and forgetting: reworking identities

* Kugelmass, Jack, Annamaria Orla-Bukowska (1998) “If You Build it They Will Come”: Recreating an
Historic Jewish District in Post-Communist Kraków. City and Society, vol. 10, no. 1 (June 1998),
315–353. (PL)

* James, Jason (2006) Undoing Trauma: Reconstructing the Church of Our Lady in Dresden. Ethos, vol.
34, no. 2 (June 2006), 244–272. (D)

* Parla, Ayse (2009) Remembering across the Border: Postsocialist Nostalgia among the Turkish
Immigrants from Bulgaria. American Ethnologist, vol. 36, no. 4 (Nov. 2009), 750–767. (BG)


6. March 28 – Religious revival and emerging fundamentalism

* Bohlman, Philip V. (2000) To Hear the Voices Still Heard: On Synagogue Restoration in Eastern
Europe. In Daphne Berdahl, Matti Bunzl and Martha Lampland, eds., Altering States: Ethnographies of
Transition in Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,
40–69. (ECE)

* Kalb, Don (2009) Conversations with a Polish Populist: Tracing Hidden Histories of Globalization,
Class, and Dispossession in Postsocialism (and Beyond). American Ethnologist, vol. 36, no. 2 (May
2009), 207–223. (PL)


Readings marked with a plus sign (+) are required readings for all students (8 readings).

7. April 11 – Citizenship: exclusion and inclusion

* Borneman, John (1993) Uniting the German Nation: Law, Narrative, and Historicity. American
Ethnologist, vol. 20, no. 2 (May 1993), 288–311. (D)

* Feldman, Gregory (2005) Culture, State, and Security in Europe: The Case of Citizenship and
Integration Policy in Estonia. American Ethnologist, vol. 32, no. 4 (Nov. 2005), 676–694. (EE)

+ Verdery, Katherine (1998) Transnationalism, Nationalism, Citizenship, and Property: Eastern
Europe since 1989. American Ethnologist, vol. 25, no. 2 (May 1998), 291–306. (RO)


8. April 11 – Property, personhood, and community: selves and identities

+ Verdery, Katherine (1996) The Elasticity of Land: Problems of Property Restitution in
Transylvania. In Katherine Verdery, What Was Socialism and What Comes Next? Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 133–167. (RO)

* Verdery, Katherine (1999) Fuzzy Property: Rights, Power and Identity in Transylvania’s
Decollectivization. In Michael Burawoy and Katherine Verdery, eds., Uncertain Transition:
Ethnographies of Change in the Postsocialist World. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 53–81. (RO)


9. April 25 – Class cultures: vocational identity, flexibility, and mobility

* Lampland, Martha (1991) Pigs, Party Secretaries, and Private Lives in Hungary. American
Ethnologist, vol. 18, no. 3, Representations of Europe: Transforming State, Society, and Identity
(Aug. 1991), 459–479. (HU)

* Dunn, Elizabeth (1999) Slick Salesmen and Simple People: Negotiated Capitalism in a Privatized
Polish Firm. In Michael Burawoy and Katherine Verdery, eds., Uncertain Transition: Ethnographies of
Change in the Postsocialist World. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 125–150. (PL)

* Thiessen, Ilka (2002) ‘Leb i Sol’ (Bread and Salt): The Meanings of Work in the Changing Society
of Macedonia. Anthropology of Work Review, vol. 23, no. 1–2, 8–13. (MK)


10. April 25 – Leisure, consumption, and situational identities

* Berdahl, Daphne (2001) ‘Go, Trabi, Go!’: Reflections on a Car and Its Symbolization over Time.
Anthropology and Humanism, vol. 25, no. 2, 131–141. (D)

* Patico, Jennifer (2005) To Be Happy in a Mercedes: Tropes of Value and Ambivalent Visions of
Marketization. American Ethnologist, vol. 32, no. 3 (Aug. 2005), 479–496. (RU)

* Fehérváry, Krisztina (2002) American Kitchens, Luxury Bathrooms, and the Search for a ‘Normal’
Life in Post-Socialist Hungary. Ethnos, vol. 67, no. 3, 369–400. (HU)

* Kotnik, Vlado (2007) Sport, Landscape, and National Identity: Representations of an Idealized
Vision of Nationhood in Slovenian Skiing Telecasts. JSAE, vol. 7, no. 2 (Fall-Winter 2007), 19–35.
(SL)


11. May 9 – Gendered and generational identities

* Bunzl, Matti (2000) The Prague Experience: Gay Male Sex Tourism and the Neocolonial Invention of
and Embodied Border. In Daphne Berdahl, Matti Bunzl and Martha Lampland, eds., Altering States:
Ethnographies of Transition in Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union. Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press, 70–95. (CZ)

* Friedman, Jack R. (2007) Shame and the Experience of Ambivalence on the Margins of the Global:
Pathologizing the Past and Present in Romania’s Industrial Wastelands. Ethos, vol.35, no.2 (June
2007), 235–264. (RO)

* Ilieva, Polya (2010) Bulgaria at the Cross-Roads of Post-Socialism and EU Membership:
Generational Dimensions to European Integration. JSAE, vol. 10, no. 2 (Fall-Winter 2010), 18–28.
(BG)


12. May 9 – Rethinking the family: feminism and anti-feminism

+ Verdery, Katherine (1996) From Parent-State to Family Patriarchs: Gender and Nation in
Contemporary Eastern Europe. In Katherine Verdery, What Was Socialism and What Comes Next?
(Princeton: Princeton University Press), 61–82. (ECE)

* Haney, Lynne (1999) ‘But We Are Still Mothers’: Gender, the State, and the Construction of Need
in Postsocialist Hungary. In Michael Burawoy and Katherine Verdery, eds., Uncertain Transition:
Ethnographies of Change in the Postsocialist World. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 151–187. (HU)

* Kapusta-Pofahl, Karen (2002) ‘Who Would Create a Czech Feminism?’: Challenging Assumptions in the
Process of Creating Relevant Feminisms in the Czech Republic. Anthropology of East Europe Review,
vol. 20, no. 2, 61–68. (CZ)


Readings marked with an asterisk (*) may be chosen for class presentation (27 readings).