The Curtain Rises

The dramatic overturn of state socialist administrations shocked most political commentators. Received wisdom in the West was that the nations in Eastern Europe and Russia were repressed to the point of paralysis and that they were politically inert. But the events following the 1989 revolutions revealed their political sophistication through the rebuilding of civil society. This book captures the internal dynamics of that process and situates Eastern European societies within new perspectives in social theory. In the introductory section, the distinguished anthropologists Claude Meillassoux and Aidan Southall identify the importance of the 1989 revolutions for Marxist approaches. Then, starting from detailed ethnographic descriptions of social movements in progression, each contributor identifies the significance of their observation in terms of theory. Chapters from anthropologists in the field provide comprehensive analyses of newly evolving property relations, nationalistic movements, and new social identities.The countries covered in this theoretically informed study range from the core of the East European revolution (Germany and Hungary) to the hegemonic center (Russia) and the intriguing cases of Romania and Siberia. Never before has such a wide variety of current topics been applied to such a suggestive list of nations.