Description:
In most countries in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, the fall of communism opened up the possibility for individuals to acquire land. Based on Katherine Verdery's extensive fieldwork between 1990 and 2001, The Vanishing Hectare explores...
Brief description: Katherine Verdery is Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the City University of New York Graduate Center. She is the author of Transylvanian Villagers, The Political Lives of Dead Bodies, What Was Socialism, and What Comes Next?, and National Ideology under Socialism and the coeditor of Property in Question: Value Transformation in the Global Economy.
Review Quotes:
Verdery's 30 years of fieldwork research in Romania supplied the groundwork for The Vanishing Hectare, enabling her to offer some alternative versions of the changes in rural life and reasons behind the supposedly irrational behavior of rural people.... Her account is not so much of the laws and administrative paraphernalia that established private ownership but rather of the broader social and economic conditions that make for what the author terms 'effective ownership.'
--Andrew Cartwright "Anthropological Quarterly"