With The Red Riviera, Kristen Ghodsee has produced an engaging and approachable ethnography of post-socialist Bulgaria. The body of her text focuses on the lives of several women working in resorts on Bulgaria's Black Sea coast, and is filled with rich details about their career choices, including Communist Party involvement, the compromises necessitated by partners and families, the women's hopes and dreams for traveling abroad themselves, friendships with tourists (and also the perils of such friendships during the socialist regime), and the gentle schemes they use to profit from Western tourists while managing their sometimes overbearing demands. These women's stories, however, also provide Ghodsee with a means to critique existing interpretations of the changes in women's status throughout Eastern Europe during the past 15 years. The unusual success of women working in tourism demands an explanation, and Ghodsee invites us to explore the ways in which unexpected forms of symbolic capital accumulated during the socialist period enabled some individuals, such as tourism workers, to achieve economic success under the new conditions of capitalism.
Based on her work with women in the tourist industry, Ghodsee argues that the perceived decline in women's status throughout Eastern Europe, and especially in Bulgaria, since 1989, cannot be understood in gendered terms alone. While Bulgarian employment and income data do reveal a generally higher decline for women than men, Ghodsee urges us to take notice of two key facts: 1) men's employment is also declining, and 2) neither the nationally compiled data for men nor for women in Bulgaria are disaggregated along other variables such as type of work, level of education, age, or region. Thus these data actually prompt a broader question than has previously been asked: specifically, why is employment declining in general? This question is made all the more necessary given the obvious economic success of some groups, such as the mafia.
Clearly, some socialist subjects were capable of adjusting rapidly to capitalist conditions. Who were they, and how were they able to adapt? Women in the tourist industry appear to constitute another group that succeeded in the post-socialist period, prompting Ghodsee to ask if there might be more skills that might have been honed during socialism that would contribute to economic success in the post-socialist period. Tourism workers, for example, developed both hard and soft skills during socialism that have benefited them since 1989 in reaching out to Westerners and attracting a continued flow of money into their economic sector. While workers in many economic sectors may have had transferable skills, Ghodsee suggests that the extreme currency devaluations that occurred as Bulgaria entered the world economy forced widespread industry closings from which no degree of transferable knowledge and skills could have enabled successful transition. The tourism industry, in contrast, had access to hard currency during socialism, and in the early post-socialist transition, thus providing an economic cushion for individual workers and the newly privatized tourist enterprises. From this perspective, academics and NGOs have gotten the "woman question" of post-socialism wrong. The "real" problem (according to Ghodsee's informants and even the head of a women's NGO) is unemployment, not the sexual harassment or pornography that NGO's have been busy documenting to secure continued Western funding. Indeed, Ghodsee suggests that NGO activity is alienating many working women, and may also be strengthening a latent cultural discourse about women's "weakness," "need for protection," and lesser "capacity" or "stamina" for the working world that could naturalize and justify hiring practices that discriminate against women.
The economic dimensions of Ghodsee's work complement previous anthropological studies of socialism and the transition to capitalism. The Red Riviera will be well placed along such works as Daphne Berdahl's Where the World Ended, Katherine Verdery's The Vanishing Hectare, and Elizabeth Dunn's Privatizing Poland – all of which acknowledge that working in socialist factories and farms required substantial skills and knowledge (not just connections), and thus that the transition to capitalism has involved the uneven and highly individualized transferal of some of these skill sets and knowledge bases, along with the acquisition of other skill sets and knowledge bases. Ghodsee's work extends this approach to a third type of socialist industry – tourism – which is classed as a "service" industry in Western capitalist terminology, but was closer to bureaucratic work in the socialist era because of its extensive development of managerial positions. The Red Riviera thus suggests another approach to the transitions of socialist bureaucratic structures that deflects attention away from the importance of connections. Of course, connections are never completely absent from people's working lives, as becomes evident from Prolet's story of how she built her own tourist company, but Ghodsee shows us that they are only one side of the story of success in Bulgaria: necessary, but not sufficient, as Prolet herself is a highly trained individual who put in long hours to make her business bear fruit. For anthropologists whose work focuses on the cultural and educational sectors of post-socialist societies, Ghodsee's approach may also prove quite useful, especially as she discusses the social value placed on knowledge, languages, and degrees. Undoubtedly, most other "service" workers under socialism had less access to hard currency than did workers in the tourist industry, but issues of job satisfaction, environment, travel opportunities, and access to knowledge and learning may provide further points for comparison in understanding their social and economic position during and after socialism.
The Red Riviera, however, is more than an extension of previous themes in the anthropology of post-socialism. Admittedly, chapter 3 – which focuses on the history of tourism in Bulgaria – was my favorite for its sheer freshness of information and perspective. Ghodsee tells us, for example, of the growing attraction of Bulgaria's sea coast for Europeans in the years leading up to World War II. Although initially cut-off in the immediate post-War period, West Europeans began to trickle back to Bulgaria's beaches in the 1960s – some looking for bargain vacations, others hoping for a glimpse of socialist life. The history of Bulgarian tourism is thus entwined with the history of youth and social movements in Western Europe which incorporated "travel" into their ideologies of escape, change, and self-knowledge. On the beach, West Europeans mingled with tourists from within Bulgaria as well as those from other socialist states. For some, the effects of socialism were too much: Ghodsee recounts, for example, how a wealthy French tourist rented the whole floor of the Hotel Astoria, but packed-up and suddenly left after encountering a local hairdresser in the same dining room. Examples such as these push towards a deeper understanding of the logic of Western tourism and the desires of Western tourists. Workers in Bulgaria's tourist industry understand these desires well, as they have been learning to manage them for several decades, holding rooms with a view, for example, for the kinds of tourists who will complain and/or tip.
Past and present, Bulgaria's beaches offer us a new way to situate international politics and economics. With reference to the past, we learn that Bulgaria's resorts functioned as a microcosm of Cold War politics – from the highest levels of international espionage, to the intricacies of Bulgarian-Czechoslovak trade agreements, to the politics of family life among East and West Germans. Who knew, for example, that the KGB sent decoy agents to Bulgaria's beaches, having them pose as Westerners to test the loyalty of vacationing KGB agents by attempting to seduce them? As anthropologists of post-socialism struggle to resituate Eastern Europe in terms of "globalization" and "transnationalism," The Red Riviera provides a unique glimpse at the ways in which Bulgaria's beaches have long been a site for global and transnational encounters, and implicitly suggests ways of thinking about a "global (post)socialism" in conjunction with "global capitalism."
Under its serious consideration of economic transition and women's lives, The Red Riviera is also the raciest ethnography of Eastern Europe yet. If it sometimes leaves us wanting for more details and more stories, that only serves to highlight the timeliness and juiciness of a focus on tourism in Eastern Europe!