This volume offers an analysis of the intertwined relationship between public health and the biopolitical dimensions of state- and nation building in Central, Eastern and Southeastern Europe. It challenges the idea of diverging paths towards modernity of Europe’s western and eastern countries by not only identifying ideas, discourses and practices of “solving” public health issues that were shared among political regimes in the region; it also uncovers the ways in which, since the late nineteenth century, the biopolitical organization of the state both originated from and shaped an emerging common European framework. The broad range of local case studies stretches from Bosnia and Herzegovina, Czechoslovakia, the GDR, Greece and Hungary, to Poland, Serbia, the Soviet Union, and Yugoslavia. Taking a time span that begins in the late nineteenth century and ends in the post-socialist era, the book makes an original contribution to scholarship examining the relationship between public health, medicine, and state- and nation building in Europe’s long twentieth century. Close readings and dense descriptions of local discourses and practices of “public” health help to reflect on the transnational and global entanglements in the sphere of public health. In doing so, this volume facilitates comparisons on the regional, European, and global level.

This Handbook is the key reference for contemporary historical and political approaches to gender in Central-Eastern Europe and Eurasia. Leading scholars examine the region’s highly diverse politics, histories, cultures, ethnicities, and religions, and how these structures intersect with gender alongside class, sexuality, coloniality, and racism. Comprising 51 chapters, the Handbook is divided into six thematic parts: Part I Conceptual debates and methodological differences Part II Feminist and women’s movements cooperating and colliding Part III Constructions of gender in different ideologies Part IV Lived experiences of individuals in different regimes Part V The ambiguous postcommunist transitions Part VI Postcommunist policy issues With a focus on defining debates, the collection considers how the shared experiences, especially communism, affect political forces’ organization of gender through a broad variety of topics including feminisms, ideology, violence, independence, regime transition, and public policy. It is a foundational collection that will become invaluable to scholars and students across a range of disciplines including Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Central-Eastern European and Eurasian Studies.

Die Geschichte von Menschen mit Behinderungen, die in den staatssozialistischen Gesellschaften lebten, ist bislang weitestgehend unerforscht. Die Beiträge dieses Bandes beheben dieses Desiderat. Sie bieten erstmals eine interdisziplinäre, internationale, systematische und vergleichende Perspektive auf Disability in den ehemaligen Ostblockstaaten, gehen dabei über den üblichen, begrenzten Fokus auf die UdSSR hinaus und bringen Disability mit anderen sozialen Kategorien – Ethnizität, Jugend, Geschlecht und Sexualität – ins Gespräch.

Muslims and the Making of Modern Europe shows that Muslims were citizens of modern Europe from its beginning and, in the process, rethinks Europe itself. Muslims are neither newcomers nor outsiders in Europe. In the twentieth century, they have been central to the continent's political development and the evolution of its traditions of equality and law. From 1878 into the period following World War II, over a million Ottoman Muslims became citizens of new European states. In Muslims and the Making of Modern Europe, Emily Greble follows the fortunes and misfortunes of several generations of these indigenous men, women and children; merchants, peasants, and landowners; muftis and preachers; teachers and students; believers and non-believers from seaside port towns on the shores of the Adriatic to mountainous villages in the Balkans. Drawing on a wide range of archives from government ministries in state capitals to madrasas in provincial towns, Greble uncovers Muslims' negotiations with state authorities--over the boundaries of Islamic law, the nature of religious freedom, and the meaning of minority rights. She shows how their story is Europe's story: Muslims navigated the continent's turbulent passage from imperial order through the interwar political experiments of liberal democracy and authoritarianism to the ideological programs of fascism, socialism, and communism. In doing so, they shaped the grand narratives upon which so much of Europe's fractious present now rests. Muslims and the Making of Modern Europe offers a striking new account of the history of citizenship and nation-building, the emergence of minority rights, and the character of secularism.

This monograph, a coherent and consistent historical narrative about Romania's modernization, focuses on one section of the country's elites of the late nineteenth century, namely the health professionals, and on the imagery they constructed as they interacted with the peasant and his world. Doctors ventured out of cities and became a familiar sight on dusty country roads in of Moldavia and Wallachia. Beyond a charitable impulse they did so thru patriotism as the rural world became ever more prominent within the national ideology. Furthermore, new health legislation required the district general practitioner (medicul de plasă) to visit the villages in his catchment area twice a month. Based on solid original research, the book describes rural conditions of the time and the efforts aiming to improve peasants' way of life with abundant quotes from doctors' public health reports and memoirs. The book sheds light on a variety of microscale realities of social life in the medical discourse on the peasant and the rural world in the mirror of medical discourse. Themes include general hygiene, clothing, dwellings, nutrition, drinking habits and healing practices of the peasantry, in the eye of medical specialists. Related official measures, laws, regulations, norms about public health are also discussed in the frame of wider modernizing processes.

This volume is dedicated to the academic achievements of Karl Kaser and to the 50th anniversary of Southeast European History and Anthropology (SEEHA) at the University of Graz. Its editors are collaborators of SEEHA and experts in various fields of Southeast European Studies: Siegfried Gruber, Dominik Gutmeyr, Sabine Jesner, Elife Krasniqi, Robert Pichler, and Christian Promitzer. The Festschrift covers diverse approaches toward the study of societies and cultures in Southeastern Europe, both with respect to history and current affairs, and brings together contributions from several of Kaser's former doctoral students, colleagues, collaborators and friends from across Europe.

Eugenics and scientific racism are experiencing a resurgence, and an understanding of the ideas of Aleš Hrdlička can help combat them. Today, the racial science of the early twentieth century is both untenable and contemptible. This book is about an arch figure of that period: Aleš Hrdlička served as Curator of Physical Anthropology at the prestigious Smithsonian Institution from 1910 to 1941. Although his ideas about race are today considered pseudoscience, the uncomfortable truth is that he was an internationally respected scientist in his own day. The Perils of Race-Thinking advances a bold new interpretation of modern racial ideology by exploring Hrdlička’s intellectual world. Using previously untapped Czech-language sources, Brandon irrevocably alters the discussion about this important figure by placing Czech nationalism at the center of his racial thinking. Defying disciplinary categories, Perils of Race-Thinking joins critical analysis of this key American anthropologist with an incisive revisionist perspective of interwar Czechoslovakia to unearth transnational racial presumptions lurking behind the worst crimes of the twentieth century. At the center of Hrdlička’s race beliefs was his commitment to Czech and Slovak unity and independence. From this center, his next level of concern was what he believed to be a millennial racial struggle between Germans and Slavs. On a global scale, he viewed the Slavs, and especially the Soviet Union, as a eugenic bastion of White strength holding off the “rising tide of color.” Step by step, Perils of Race-Thinking mercilessly dismantles Hrdlička’s racial system and exposes it as mysticism dressed up in the language of science. Convinced that human individuals belonged “naturally” in racial groups, Hrdlička embraced a revolutionary program of reordering the globe according to a harrowing morality of “Darwinist” struggle. Yet despite a lifetime of measuring body parts, even Hrdlička could not decide how many races there were or how to tell them apart.