Page date:4/4/2002
Leonard, Pamela & Deema Kaneff, eds. (2001) Post-Socialist Peasant? Rural and
Urban Constructions of Identity in Eastern Europe, East Africa and the Former
Soviet Union. Palgrave.
During
the past decade, life in post-socialist states has been fraught with instability
and conflict. This book focuses on changing rural-urban relations - and growing
divisions between them - in the context of the reforms. Contributions to this
volume explore responses to capitalist-oriented policies and reasons for rural
disenfranchisement. The work takes an ethnographic approach to exploring how
'global' processes engage with local, rural concerns in the post-socialist world.
Reviews
'Post-Socialist Peasant? brings together important and recent research on Eastern
Europe, Russia, Vietnam and China. The authors, using extensive first-hand knowledge,
analyse how post-socialist transitions have affected the ways in which urban
policy-makers and intellectuals, on the one hand, and rural residents, on the
other, perceive the growing inequalities between rural and urban populations.
These perceptions, the contributors convincingly argue, condition policy responses,
which ostensibly are aimed at ameliorating those inequalities. Power relations
differences between those who make policy and those who are the subject of those
policies are especially well analysed. Post-Socialist Peasant? is full of rich
detail and focuses on issues that are critical to our understanding of reformist
policies throughout the post-socialist world.' - Rubie Watson, William and Muriel
Seabury Howells, Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University
'The inability of many policy makers and analysts to make better sense of
the post-socialist condition can be traced in part to their lack of interest
in the countryside. This collection convincingly demonstrates the rural influence
on the trajectory of 'transition', and provides the information we need to correct
earlier interpretations and policies.' - Gerald Creed, Hunter College and the
Graduate School City University, New York
PDF
of the Introduction and Index from the publisher.
Table of Contents
List of Contributors
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Post-Socialist Peasants
P.Leonard & D.Kaneff
Peasant Consciousness
J.Flower
Old Corn; New Corn
P.Leonard
Just a Peasant: Economy and Legacy in Northern Vietnam
R.M.Abrami
Rural Identities in Transition: Particle Persons and Partial Peasants in Post-Soviet
Russia
L. Perrotta
Subsistence Farming and the Peasantry as an Idea in Contemporary Russia
C.Humphrey
The Village, the City and the Outside World: Integration and Exclusion in Two
Regions of Rural Poland
F.Pine
Work, Identity and Urban/Rural Relations
D.Kaneff
Urban Peasants in a Post-Socialist World: Small-Scale Agriculturalists in Hungary
A.Czegledy
Index
PAMELA LEONARD is Adjunct Lecturer at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte.
DEEMA KANEFF is Senior Researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology
in Germany.