Page date:1 Feb.
2004
Chris Hann and the "Property Relations" Group. 2003.
The Post-Socialist Agrarian Question: Property Relations and the
Rural Condition. Münster: Lit Verlag.
This is an age of neo-liberalism,
in which the advantages and virtues of private property are often
taken for granted. Postsocialist governments have privatized and
broken up state farms and socialist cooperatives. However, economic
outcomes and the social insecurity now experienced by many rural
inhabitants highlight the need for a broader anthropological analysis
of property relations, which goes beyond changes in legal form.
A century after Kautsky addressed 'The Agrarian Question' in Germany,
it is therefore necessary to address a postsocialist Agrarian
Question throughout Central and Eastern Europe, the former Soviet
Union and China.
The studies collected here derive from the first cycle of projects
at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology. They are
prefaced by a substantial introduction by Chriss Hann, a Founding
Director of the Institute.
Contributors:
Susanne Brandtstädter, Andrew Cartwright, Barbara A. Cellarius,
John Eidson, Patty A. Gray, Chris Hann, Patrick Heady, Deema Kaneff,
Alexander D. King, Carolin Leutloff, Liesl L. Gambold Miller,
Gordon Milligan, Mihály Sárkány, Florian
Stammler, Wolde Gossa Tadesse, Davide Torsello, Aimar Ventsel,
Lale Yalçin-Heckmann, John P. Ziker.
Orders should be sent to LIT Verlag, Email: vertrieb@lit-verlag.de
(telephone +49 (0) 251 235091)
Table of Contents
Preface to the Series by Chris Hann
Preface by Chris Hann
1 Introduction: Decollectivisation and the Moral Economy
Chris Hann
2 Cooperative Entrepreneurs? Collectivisation and Privatisation
of Agriculture in Two East German Regions
John Eidson and Gordon Milligan
3 Trust and Property in Historical Perspective: Villagers and
the Agricultural Cooperative in Királyfa, S. Slovakia
Davide Torsello
4 The Great Transformation in Rural Hungary: Property, Life
Strategies, and Living Standards
Chris Hann and Mihály Sárkány
5 Coping with Economic Devastation: Agriculture in Post-War
Knin, Croatia
Carolin Leutloff-Grandits
6 Private Farming in Romania: What Are the Old People Going
to Do with Their Land?
Andrew Cartwright
7 Property Restitution and Natural Resource Use in the Rhodope
Mountains, Bulgaria
Barbara A. Cellarius
8 Retreat to the Cooperative or to the Household? Agricultural
Privatisation in Ukraine and Azerbaijan
Deema Kaneff and Lale Yalçin-Heckmann
9 Cooperation, Power, and Community: Economy and Ideology in
the Russian Countryside
Liesl L. Gambold Miller and Patrick Heady
10 Volga Farmers and Arctic Herders: Common (Post)Socialist
Experiences in Rural Russia
Patty A. Gray
11 Between Neo-Liberalism and Dirigisme: Approaches to Reindeer
Herding in Yamal and Sakha
Florian Stammler and Aimar Ventsel
12 'Horseradish Is No Sweeter than Turnips': Entitlements and
Sustainability in the Taimyr Autonomous Region
John P. Ziker
13 Social Security in Kamchatka: Rural and Urban Comparisons
Alexander D. King
14 The Moral Economy of Kinship and Property in Southern China
Susanne Brandtstädter
15 The Postsocialist Agrarian Situation in Southern Ethiopia
Wolde Gossa Tadesse
Contributors
Preface to the Series by Chris Hann
The Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology (MPISA) began
its work in Halle (Saale), Germany, at the end of 1999. Its research
staff, consisting mainly of Ph.D. students and postdoctoral fellows,
approaches anthropology as a modern social science and emphasises
comparison, in principle world-wide. In practice, however, fieldwork
methods and the long dominance of ethnography in the discipline
have led to strong particularising tendencies. Along the continuum
between conducting micro-studies of particular com-munities and
making global comparisons, most anthropologists draw on regional
or 'area studies' literatures. Even dedicated generalisers often
find that the gains achieved through examining their findings
against data from neighbouring regions exceed the gains to be
won elsewhere. Hence, despite criticism that may seem increasingly
persuasive in an age of accelerating globalisation, regional traditions
have remained prominent in anthropology.
But how exactly should we define the regions or areas to be studied?
One of MPISA's two departments currently focuses on the vast regions
of Asia and Europe that experienced Marxist-Leninist or Maoist
regimes in the recent past. Socialist rule, though differentially
experienced, brought a new measure of unity and comparability
to a highly diverse land mass. This delimitation of the area of
study makes sense in terms of the significance that most people
in these countries continue to attach to their recent history,
as a benchmark in coming to terms with current transformations.
The analysis of radical social reordering on this scale poses
a chal-lenge to anthropology. How did the consolidation of socialism
and its later disintegration affect 'everyday' consciousness and
social relations? And just as importantly, what did not change
during this double rupture? The anthro-pologist's first and most
basic task is to observe and offer accounts of how people live
their lives, in places and social contexts that other disciplines
by and large ignore. Empirical documentation through fieldwork
lies at the core of most MPISA projects. It may sound easy enough,
but we know that there is no such thing as perfectly objective
observation in the social sciences. Researchers may try-should
try-to keep their hypotheses and methods separate from their personal
values and political sympathies. But given the depth of the political
divide in the years of the Cold War, the personal ingre-dients
that enter into every anthropological field project often carry
excep-tional weight when Western researchers investigate the postsocialist
world.
Anthropologists working in the postsocialist countries also
face theo-retical challenges, many of them transcending disciplinary
boundaries. For example, we can hardly ignore a large interdisciplinary
literature when we tackle topics such as globalisation and transnationalism.
The postsocialist countries have been opened up to the rest of
the world-yet a closer inspec-tion reveals that the majority of
their citizens are still not very mobile. Like most people in
most other parts of the world, they look to their nation-state
as their prime frame of reference, a 'modernist' reflex that contradicts
exag-gerated academic diagnoses of postmodernity.
The topic of collective memory has also been fertile in recent
years: here researchers face the double task of uncovering histories
that were repressed under socialism while also accounting for
the fact that so many people look back nostalgically on a system
that, to its detractors, epitomised brutality and moral evil.
Such differences in perception are pertinent to current efforts
to promote 'human rights' in the postsocialist countries. If the
moral underpinnings of previous communities are undermined or
ignored and existential security jeopardised, then the insistence
on privileging an individual subject as the bearer of rights may
be misunderstood or rejected as a 'Western' imposition. Similar
issues arise in worldwide debates about 'civil society', the significance
of 'trust' in social relations and about how to combat 'corruption'.
The postsocialist countries of Eurasia have provided attractive
models of peaceful institutional transformation, but they have
also supplied numer-ous cases of violent conflict. Anthropological
explanations for these patterns may require a reappraisal of key
terms such as 'ethnicity' or 'culture'. De-bates around the latter
concept are of particular interest, given the central role this
term has played in the history of anthropology. To what extent,
for example, can we explain the differential effects of neo-liberal
economic reforms in the postsocialist world in terms of 'cultural'
factors? There are some signs that other disciplines are increasingly
recognising the value of anthropological contributions, but we
need to be careful that our message is not oversimplified or bowdlerised.
This happens all too easily when 'culture' is advanced as the
ultimate explanation for the failure of particular groups to develop
in the manner predicted by some external model.
For these and many other exciting issues in contemporary anthropol-ogy-indeed,
for every possible agenda and style in the social sciences-the
postsocialist countries currently provide an endlessly instructive
laboratory. Yet memories of socialism, still so strong at the
beginning of a new century, are bound to fade, and many of its
institutional legacies have already weak-ened or disappeared.
As the bases for comparability change, it makes in-creasing sense
to adopt wider perspectives, both in time and in space. We have
thus specified Eurasia, without qualification, in the title of
this series, potentially including large populations in South
and East Asia as well as the Middle East, the Mediterranean and
western Europe. The appointment of Richard Rottenburg, Burkhard
Schnepel, and Shingo Shimada to the new Institut für Ethnologie
at the Martin Luther University of Halle-Wittenberg in 2002 puts
us in a unique position to do justice to this vast canvas. In
a long-term historical perspective, Eurasia must be seen as a
single entity. As Jack Goody has demonstrated over the years,
all of the principal fields of anthropology can be fruitfully
explored here. We may even gain a better understanding of Marxist-Leninist
socialisms if we place them in wider Eurasian contexts of changing
moral systems and political and religious movements.
The goal of this series is, then, to improve our understanding
of social processes in present-day Eurasia, informed by careful
attention to the past, thereby complementing the knowledge produced
by other disciplines and advancing comparative anthropological
knowledge. The reasons why most parts of this land mass, including
Europe, are under-represented in the mod-ern anthropological literature
are well known. The scholars who created the discipline concentrated
on the study of nonindustrial indigenous peoples, exotic tribesmen
in distant colonies rather than compatriots in their home-lands.
Some of these homelands, however, were intensively studied by
'national ethnographers'; their legacies are still tangible, from
folk museums to the political slogans of populists and nationalists.
In some places the scholarly traditions of 'national ethnology'
have persisted strongly, whereas in others they have been replaced
by entirely new styles of enquiry. Nowa-days, everywhere one looks
in the world, both native scholars and foreigners come in many
guises. Better mutual understanding is called for, and perhaps
the distinction will eventually be eroded.
MPISA aims to play a constructive role in these continuing
conversa-tions. The intellectual legacies of particularist nationalisms
and of the (pseudo-) universalist ideology of Marxism-Leninism
should not be exag-gerated. In recent years, the impact of 'cultural
studies' on the postsocialist academy has probably exceeded the
continuing force of these earlier tradi-tions; like other new
fashions coming from the West, it probably deserves a more critical
reception. While the spread of new programmes in social or cultural
anthropology can also be viewed as a form of academic imperialism,
it is no part of our ambitions at MPISA to impose a new paradigm.
We are committed to comparison and generalisation, but also to
meticulous field-work methods in the tradition of Malinowski.
We are committed to respect for the beliefs and practices of those
we study and also for the diverse intel-lectual interests of those
with whom we cooperate in other research institu-tions. As with
the multiplicity of the beliefs and practices we study in the
world, there is value in the sheer diversity of the scholarly
activities that emerged under names such as anthropology, ethnologie
and etnografiya in the era of empires and nationalisms. At another
level, however, contempo-rary anthropology needs a broader vision.
It needs to shake off its strong association with the study of
the primitive and the exotic and become genu-inely global in its
comparisons. From this perspective, more sustained atten-tion
to Eurasia and a renewed focus on its historical unity might launch
the transformation of our parochial scholarly traditions into
a mature cosmo-politan science.