Description: Social change is a topic of central interest in the social sciences. The upheavals and reforms that swept across former socialist states in Eurasia offer a rich array of case studies to deepen our understanding of this phenomenon. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in an ethnically Bulgarian community in rural Ukraine, Deema Kaneff uniquely brings to light a range of hidden conflicts and everyday tensions, as well as new alliances and solidarities resulting from the redistribution of resources following Ukrainian independence. A focus on five key resources provides a means to explore the way in which relationships were contested and renegotiated in this small community, with implications that go far beyond those boundaries.
Review Quotes: In this finely grained, historically grounded ethnographic study of a village in Ukraine, Deema Kaneff focuses on resources--economic, social, material, and immaterial--as the core of her theoretical approach to social change. Resources may have use value, exchange value, or both, and may change and fluctuate according to context, political circumstance, and economic shifts. Kaneff examines different kinds of resources, ranging from land and water to identity, ethnicity, and language, as they move from a position of use and consumption to exchange value, or gain monetary value. She describes the changes in political economy and social relations of the ethnically Bulgarian village prior to and throughout the Soviet period, through the collapse of the Soviet Union, and with establishment of an independent Ukraine. Her last fieldwork in the village was in 2014, the beginning of the first Russian invasion, but the ensuing war is foreshadowed in discussions of increasing Ukrainian nationalism and exclusions based on ethnic identity and language. Kaneff paints a vivid portrait of a village reacting to, and being deeply changed by, events in the wider world--the end of the Soviet Union, economic restructuring, changing national and global markets, migration, new inequalities, and war. But it also tells a story of resilience, of adaptation to change, and of new possibilities opening through education, mobility, and networks of kinship and friendship.--Frances Pine, Goldsmiths, University of London