Focusing on Slovakia and East Central Europe, this book examines the cultural economy of protest and considers how the origins of political movements – progressive and reactionary – derive from resilient agrarian features. It draws attention to how the legacy of rural socialist modernization influences contemporary politics and to the ‘village’ version of fascism developing in the region. The chapters look at the interplay of post-peasant economic and political habits and representations as a result of state-socialism and with regard to the European project, as viewed through an ethnographic lens. Juraj Buzalka describes the bulk of Slovak citizens as post-socialist Europeans with a connection to the countryside who feel that this is where real power in society should be defined and based. He also observes the politicians who are skillfully mobilizing post-peasants while exploiting the political-economic context of the European Union. This volume will be relevant to scholars with an interest in European society and politics, particularly protest and populism, from disciplines including anthropology, sociology, political science and history.

Theorizing Transition provides a comprehensive examination of the economic, political, social and cultural transformations in post-Communist countries and an important critique of transition theory and policy. The authors create the basis of a theoretical understanding of transition in terms of a political economy of capitalist development. The diversity of forms and complexities of transition are examined through a wide range of examples from post-Soviet countries and comparative studies from countries such as Vietnam and China. Theorizing Transition challenges many of the comfortable assumptions unleashed by the euphoria of democratisation and the triumphalism of market capitalism in the early 1990s and shows transition to be much more complex than mainstream theory suggests.

This book discusses a broadly understood phenomenon of protest from several perspectives, including historical, cultural, social, political, environmental and semiotic. Through their analyses, the authors undertake to envision the possible evolution of the forms of contestation in the further decades of the 21st century, taking into account the specificity of the globalisation processes. A multidimensional approach offered in this volume makes it possible to capture and identify new features of contemporary contestation and those that seem unchanged despite the passage of time and altering audiences. Examples from Europe (France, the United Kingdom, Italy, Ireland, Malta, Bulgaria, Poland, Belarus, Russia), America (the United States, Mexico, Chile) and Far East (Hong Kong and China) are relevant case studies that show the faces of contestation while reaching for new or modified rhetoric, symbolism, communication channels and the so-called modus operandi of protest initiators, active and passive participants and short- and long-distant observers. The book will be of value to a wide audience, particularly to the researchers studying contestation, social resistance, individual and collective disobedience, crisis management and cultural/social dynamic of protests. It will also be of interest to experts and individuals from outside the academia like civil activists, practitioners and NGOs compelled by contemporary processes (tensions) occurring between the state, power, society and individuals.

This collection of essays is the result of the joint efforts of colleagues and students of the leading social anthropology and post-socialism theorist, Professor Chris Hann. With the thirtieth anniversary of the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 2019 as their catalyst, the authors reflect upon Chris Hann’s lifelong fieldwork in the discipline, spanning regions as diverse as East Central Europe, Turkey, and the Chinese north-west. The collapse of the Berlin Wall naturally triggered a plethora of analysis and scholarly research. Sociocultural anthropology, with its focus on ethnographic study and on the gradual evolution of social relations, sharply contrasted with the emphasis on dramatic rupture brought about by the 1989 transition. Continuing in this tradition, this volume, through micro-level analysis of societal transformation from the post-war years to the present day, provides an alternative perspective to the neoliberalist views often encountered in the scholarship on political and economic modernisation. The more nuanced analysis of social transformations proposed here is a particularly useful tool in the investigation of contemporary issues such as the COVID-19 pandemic, the refugee ‘crisis’, and the rise of right-wing populism in Eastern Europe and elsewhere. Anthropology of Transformation will be of interest to researchers in the fields of socio-cultural anthropology, religion and economics. Moreover, the book’s discussion of issues widely discussed beyond the field of academia such as neoliberalism and the welfare state, and populist and exclusionary politics, will appeal to non-specialist readers.

From the rise of populist leaders and the threat of democratic backsliding to polarizing culture wars and the return of great power competition, the backlash against the political, economic, and social liberalism is increasingly labeled "illiberal." Yet, despite the increasing importance of these phenomena, scholars still lack a firm grasp on illiberalism as a conceptual tool for understanding societal transformations. The Oxford Handbook of Illiberalism addresses this gap by establishing a theoretical foundation for the study of illiberalism and showcasing state-of-the-art research on this phenomenon in its varied scripts-political, economic, cultural, and geopolitical. Bringing together the expertise of dozens of scholars, the Oxford Handbook of Illiberalism offers a thorough overview that characterizes the current state of the field and charts a path forward for future scholarship on this critical and quickly developing concept.

The volume focuses on emerging "rooms for manoeuvre" in the socialist societies of Central and Eastern Europe after the Second World War. Unlike in other works, these areas of activity are not viewed as isolated spheres where citizens could act independently from political and societal constraints. They are rather conceptualized here as geographical, social or institutional spaces whose existence was either outside of political control or more or less intentionally allowed by authorities and other decision-makers. The contributions investigate how East Germans, Poles, Romanians, Slovaks and Czechs coped with the limitations of socialist reality. How did they adopt and successfully adapt given norms to their own specific interests? To what extent were the resulting "rooms for manoeuvre" not only essential aspects of the state socialist system, but even necessary to stabilize it?

Claims around 'who deserves what and why' moralise inequality in the current global context of unprecedented wealth and its ever more selective distribution. Ethnographies of Deservingness explores this seeming paradox and the role of moralized assessments of distribution by reconnecting disparate discussions in the anthropology of migration, economic anthropology and political anthropology. This edited collection provides a novel and systematic conceptualization of Deservingness and shows how it can serve as a prime and integrative conceptual prism to ethnographically explore transforming welfare states, regimes of migration, as well as capitalist social reproduction and relations at large.