Katherine Verdery

Thinking between the Posts: Postcolonialism, Postsocialism, and Ethnography after the Cold War

Lenin spoke at the Second Congress of 1920 to multiple audiences. In continuity with the First International, he spoke in the utopian language of Bolshevism, of the successful revolutionary proletariat that had taken the state and was making its place in history without the intercession of bourgeois class rule. Recognizing the limits of socialism in one country surrounded by the military and economic might of “World imperialism,” however, Lenin also pressed for a broader, ongoing world-historic anti-imperialism in alliance with the oppressed of the East, who, it seemed, were neither sufficiently proletarianized, nor, as yet, subjects of history. There are many ways to situate this particular moment in Lenins thought. One can see the budding conceits of Marxist social history, or “history from below,” in which millions in the East could become historical subjects under the sign of “anti-imperialism.” One can also see this gesture to those outside the pale as a flourish of the emergent Soviet empire, and as a projection of anxieties about Bolshevik control over a vast and varied Russian countryside with its own internal enemies. But Lenin also spoke to audiences who would make up the next, Third International, like the Indian Marxist M. N. Roy, who saw imperialism dividing the world into oppressed and oppressor nations. For this Third Worldist audience, looking increasingly to the new Soviet Union for material and military support for “national self-determination,” Lenin extends the historic mission of a future world socialism.

Peasants under Siege: The Collectivization of Romanian Agriculture, 1949-1962

List of Illustrations ix List of Tables xi Preface xiii Acknowledgments xvii Abbreviations xxi Introduction 1 Part I. Laying the Groundwork Chapter 1. The Soviet Blueprint 49 Chapter 2. The Village Community and the Politics of Collectivization, 1945-62 88 Chapter 3. Creating Party Cadres 150 Part II. Pedagogies of Power: Technologies of Rural Transformation Chapter 4. Pedagogies of Knowledge Production and Contestation 215 Chapter 5. Pedagogies of Persuasion 283 Chapter 6. Fomenting Class War 324 Part III. Outcomes Chapter 7. The Collectives Are Formed 369 Chapter 8. The Restratification and Bureaucratization of Rural Life 408 Conclusion 444 Appendix I. Project and Participants 461 Appendix II. Methodology 464 Appendix III. List of Interviewers and Respondents 472 Bibliography 477 Index 499

Inequality as temporal process Property and time inTransylvania's land restitution

How is inequality related to time? This article explores some temporal coordinates of newly emerging unequal land distributions inTransylvania (Romania), in the wake of socialisms collapse. Building on a notion of temporally based strategies, it examines both temporal conceptions and temporally based practices to describe how time entered into the initial conception of the land restitution process, how achieving ownership was itself a time-intensive activity, and how the governments economic policy has inadequately supported the time-horizons appropriate for new owners. In each respect, time tends to work to the advantage of the former holders of political and social capital as they seek to convert those forms of privilege into control over land.

Anthropological adventures with Romania's Wizard of Oz, 1973-1989

Throughout the Cold War, most people in the US saw the commu- nist party-states of the Soviet bloc as all-powerful regimes imposing their will on their populations. The author, a child of the Cold War, began her fieldwork in Romania in the 1970s in this belief. The present essay describes how her ex- periences in Romania between 1973 and 1989 gradually forced her to see things differently, bringing her to realize that centralization was only one face of a system of rule pervaded by barely controlled anarchy and parasitism on the state. It was not simply that the regime had failed to change peoples con- sciousness; rather, the systems operation was actively producing something quite different. These insights contributed to the authors developing a new model of the workings of socialism.

A Comment on Goody's Development of the Family and Marriage in Europe

Goodys argument linking European marriage and family forms with the growth of the Church is criticized as teleological It is argued instead that early Church pro hibitions, rather than reflecting churchly institutional designs, served as instruments through which powerful members of kin groups reduced the claims of their kinsmen upon property; this facilitated their using that property to consolidate the effective fighting units.

Ethnicity and Local Systems: The Religious Organization of Welshness

Publisher Summary This chapter discusses the religious organization of Welshness related to ethnicity and local systems. The traditional sociological view of ethnicity as a primordial sentiment destined to dissolve as industrialization progresses has recently given way to the idea that ethnicity is actively generated. It involves the creation and maintenance of boundaries that structure relations among divergent groups within a region and that may, in fact, be brought about by inequities intrinsic to the spread of industrialism. The chapter presents Hechters work in two ways: (1) by applying his own logic at another spatial level—within a peripheral region and (2) by inquiring into the specific mechanisms through which peripheral sectionalism is generated. Hechters publications to date leave room for both these refinements. First, his interest in Celtic ethnicity as a whole leads him to gloss over discernible variations in ethnic identity in each portion of the Celtic fringe. Within any one part—that is, within Scotland, Ireland, or Wales—an extension of Hechters model would predict variations in peripheral sectionalism based on unequal distributions of resources and capital investments, with consequent internal discrepancies in economic development and differentiation. Second, because Hechters aim is to establish the validity of the reactive argument as against the functionalist one, his analysis slights the actual mechanisms through which reactive solidarity develops.

How Communist Cadres Persuaded Romanian Peasants to Give Up Their Land

The collectivization of agriculture in the Soviet bloc caused millions of peasants to sign away their rights to land and join collective farms. How did Party cadres accomplish this extraordinary change? In this article, drawn from a large collaborative project, the authors present examples from Romania to describe one of the central techniques used: “persuasion work.” The authors focus on how the persuaders sought to create their authority with villagers, peasants’ and cadres’ reciprocal manipulations of kinship and gender, cadres’ disruptions of the accustomed spatial and temporal organization of village life and peasant responses to them, bargaining and negotiations between cadres and villagers, and more overt forms of “persuasive” coercion. Although persuasion was ostensibly about creating an inner state of belief—convincing peasants of the superiority of collective agriculture—the authors argue that it is more appropriately seen as a performative matter, in which peasants learned to perform the consent that was required of them, whether they believed in the virtues of collectivizing or not. Among the reasons was that Romania’s cadres were largely ill prepared for the job and were unable to be very persuasive. Thus, they both relied on force (thereby heightening peasants’ resistance to joining the collectives) and settled for villagers’ pro forma adherence rather than their active conviction.

Socialist Societies: Anthropological Aspects

Socialist societies constitute a class of modern societies loosely sharing certain formal similarities in their political, property, and production regimes. They tended toward political monopoly by a Communist Party, a predominance of collective or state property forms, and centrally organized economic production toward redistributive goals. Over time, these formal features were modified by systemic reforms and everyday practices of both citizens and elites, including clientelism, kinship and ritual practices, gift-giving, and other self-forming behaviors. Socialist systems diminished many inequalities yet created new forms of hierarchy.

Talking the Nation and Inventing the State: Intellectual Practice in Ceausescu's Romania@@@National Ideology under Socialism: Identity and Cultural Politics in Ceausescu's Romania.

The current transformation of many Eastern European societies is impossible to understand without comprehending the intellectual struggles surrounding nationalism in the region. Anthropologist Katherine Verdery shows how the example of Romania suggests that current ethnic tensions come not from a resurrection of pre-Communist Nationalism but from the strengthening of national ideologies under Communist Party rule.