Anthropology of Eastern Europe

Abstract

This essay presents an overview of East Europeanist sociocultural anthropological research concentrating on the work of American anthropogists. Given the relatively late maturation of this field, most work has been published during the past decade. In recent years, the field has been marked by a great diversity in theoretical and methodological approaches. This survey concentrates on research by Americans and, with few exceptions, materials published in English in Western journals are considered. The contributions of East European ethnologists have been crucial to defining the field, and the works of a few selected scholars form an integral part of this survey. We define the region surveyed by this article as the Slavic states of Europe outside the U.S.S.R. and the geographically contiguous states of Albania, Hungary, and Romania, excluding East Germany for sociocultural historical reasons. National and even regional boundaries severely restrict work as they frequently tend to be self-conscious entities, often with strong feelings of ethnocentrism. Anthropological research, since it does tend to concentrate on locally defined cultural units, is particularly susceptible to these influences. Aspects of this situation are apparent in certain titles cited. For the most part,