A world-renowned anthropologist, Anatoly M. Khazanov offers a witty, insightful, and cautionary analysis of ethnic nationalism and its pivotal role in the collapse of the Soviet empire.
“Khazanov’s encyclopedic knowledge of the history and culture of post-Soviet societies, combined with field research there since the 1960s, informs the case studies with a singular authoritative voice. This volume is destined to be an absolutely necessary reference for the understanding of ethnic relations and the politics of minorities in the ex-USSR into the next century.”—Leonard Plotnicov, editor of Ethnology
First Paperback Edition
In Fieldwork Dilemmas ten anthropologists disclose the political and physical dangers inherent in field research. Focusing on former socialist states, they vividly depict the upheavals of everyday life in eastern Euorpe, revealing how their informants and the communities in which they live undergo political and economic dislocations, plummeting living standards, emerging gender inequalities, and ethnic and nationalist violence.
Reports from Armenia, Bulgaria, eastern Germany, Kyrgyzstan, Macedonia, Russia, Serbia, and Uzbekistan show how fieldworkers struggle to reconcile previous experiences with postsocialist stereotypes about Soviet culture, the West, and the effects of the penetration of capitalism into noncapitalist societies. These fieldwork dilemmas are analyzed by anthropologists who are learning to position themselves professionally and personally in the field under often unstable, unpredictable situations. This volume will interest not only anthropologists but fieldworkers of all kinds, and not only scholars of eastern Europe but all those who study rapid societal changes.
Transport in the former Soviet Union is experiencing massive changes in the 1990s: government responsibility has changed from operation to oversight; competition in the industry is increasing; and alternative financing and investment methods are emerging. Moving to Market examines rail, road, water, and air transport in the former Soviet Union and discusses the policy issues involved in making a transition from an industry once entrenched in a centrally planned economy to an industry that can thrive in a more open market. The authors conclude that the raw physical capacity is in place, but that quality of service and product needs to be improved. In addition, price structures need to be changed to reflect real costs and market demands.
The authors cite the "three M's"--marshaling, managing, and monitoring transport resources--as critical for the development of the nation's infrastructure as it moves toward the next century.
Ranging widely across time and geography, Rites of Place is to date the most comprehensive and diverse example of memory studies in the field of Russian and East European studies. Leading scholars consider how public rituals and the commemoration of historically significant sites facilitate a sense of community, shape cultural identity, and promote political ideologies. The aims of this volume take on unique importance in the context of the tumultuous events that have marked Eastern European history—especially the revolutions of 1905 and 1917, World War II, and the collapse of the Soviet Union. With essays on topics such as the founding of St. Petersburg, the battle of Borodino, the Katyn massacre, and the Lenin cult, this volume offers a rich discussion of the uses and abuses of memory in cultures where national identity has repeatedly undergone dramatic shifts and remains riven by internal contradictions.
While we know a great deal about the benefits of regional integration, there is a knowledge gap when it comes to areas with weak, dysfunctional, or nonexistent regional fabric in political and economic life. Further, deliberate “un-regioning,” applied by actors external as well as internal to a region, has also gone unnoticed despite its increasingly sophisticated modern application by Russia in its peripheries.
This volume helps us understand what Anna Ohanyan calls “fractured regions” and their consequences for contemporary global security. Ohanyan introduces a theory of regional fracture to explain how and why regions come apart, consolidate dysfunctional ties within the region, and foster weak states. Russia Abroad specifically examines how Russia employs regional fracture as a strategy to keep states on its periphery in Eurasia and the Middle East weak and in Russia's orbit. It argues that the level of regional maturity in Russia’s vast vicinities is an important determinant of Russian foreign policy in the emergent multipolar world order.
Many of these fractured regions become global security threats because weak states are more likely to be hubs of transnational crime, havens for militants, or sites of protracted conflict. The regional fracture theory is offered as a fresh perspective about the post-American world and a way to broaden international relations scholarship on comparative regionalism.
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