Post-socialist Era Research Articles

Surviving in the post-repatriation era: home-making strategies of homeless people in post-socialist China

While Chinese people are technically guaranteed a place to live through the hukou system, homelessness is still an issue in China. Our paper aims to explore the home-making strategies of homeless people in the context of China’s homelessness policy transition from repatriation to assistance in the post-socialist era, using in-depth interviews with homeless people and others interacting with them in Shanghai’s high-prestige downtown area. Drawing on Giddens’ structuration theory, we find that homeless people work to create a sense of home through: 1) avoiding the government service centres where freedom, privacy and social contact are restricted; 2) adapting their routines to rigid place management in the daytime and benefitting from strict security at night; and 3) tactically utilising surrounding spaces and facilities to carry out daily activities and develop a sense of home and control. Government assistance through the service centres is inadequate and may even be diametrically opposed to home-making, highlighting room for improvement in government homelessness policies.

Social movements and critical discourses in former Yugoslavia: Structural approach

Until a decade ago, a comprehensive contestation of the so-called ?transitional? paradigm was largely missing in the post-socialist era. This reality changed in the last ten years, especially in the region of former Yugoslavia. Some social movements in this region have started questioning the very essence of the economic and social misconceptions of the post-socialist condition. This paper first provides an elaboration of the very conceptual edifice of the ruling paradigm (hence the object of the critique of the three social movements in question), as well as a theoretical and methodological framework. It goes on to map out the epistemic discursive content of the respective social movements in Belgrade, Zagreb and Sarajevo, thereby assessing the conceptual content of their critique of the post-socialist transitional paradigm. Finally, given the similarities between Serbia, Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina, the paper seeks to explain variations in the critique by how the structural and contextual features impact the perspective from which it is constructed.

Music Subculture versus Class Revolutionaries: Czech Antifascism in the Postsocialist Era

Abstract With its roots in the political, economic and social changes of 1989/1990, the Czech antifascist movement was initially characterized by its young supporters, who came mostly from subcultural and anarchist circles. When violent far-right skinheads increased their attacks in the country between 1990 and 1992, local antifascists were the main group to physically confront them. Three decades later, as a result of generational and tactical changes, Czech antifascists’ agenda is largely at odds with the class politics that drive important parts of the anarchist movement. At the same time, the antifascist movement retains some subcultural traits that have become depoliticized. Its strategy is now limited to monitoring far-right activists online and running cultural events. This study analyzes internal debates over the antifascist movement’s positions and reflects on their development over time.

Travel Down Memory Lane: Nostalgia and Nostophobia in Youth (2017)

Abstract The article analyses Youth, a Chinese melodrama directed by Feng Xiaogang in 2017, as a representation of China during a transitional period in history. It explores issues of nostalgia and nostophobia in connection with the complexities of memory, representation, and viewing pleasure. It discusses how sound and image trigger memories and conflicting emotional reactions. In the film’s nostalgic and elegiac re-enactment of a controversial past, the military art troupe performs songs and dances extolling socialist virtues as their own lives gradually unravel with the dawn of a post-socialist era. The article elaborates on how Youth reflects and enlivens personal and collective social memory as well as how we negotiate our ambivalent feelings towards the representation of a controversial past.

Public land privatisation and commodification as a field of changing social relations: The making of the Albanian Riviera

The paper critically explores public land privatisation and commodification as a particularly significant field of changing social relations. It focuses on Albania’s southern coast as it changed from an area of rural communities with light vacation and recreation activities and re-oriented itself towards international migration networks, intensifying coastal tourism, and the gradual making of the Albanian Riviera. By providing empirical evidence from fieldwork in the area of Himara, along with a review of the legal framework, and through the theoretical lenses of neo-liberalism and post-socialism, the paper investigates two episodes of public land privatisation and commodification: first, the de-collectivisation of cooperative agricultural land in the 1990s, and second, the long-term leasing of public land for large-scale tourism development since the mid-2000s. Analysing these two episodes sheds light on how the state provided the respective legal frameworks so as to open up differentiated land markets, and on the close relationship between the making of the Albanian Riviera, the “restitution” of private ownership, and the unmaking of common and collective social relations and significations. In turn, the paper argues that public land privatisation and commodification have destabilised and qualitatively changed social relations centred on the land which had survived from the pre-socialist and the socialist eras, by turning them into primarily commodity relations. This has also heightened multiple social tensions and conflicts, leading to a multiply-contested rural space and the rise of new social stratifications, polarisations, and inequalities in the post-socialist era.

Economic Development, Market Transition, and Work Values in Post-Socialist China

AbstractThis study examines the macro-level determinants of work values in urban China. Drawing on Inglehart’s theory of postmaterialism and the institutional theory in sociology, I argue that economic development and market transition, two of the most prominent themes of China’s social change in the post-socialist era, exert opposite effects on work values. On the one hand, rapid economic growth has created unprecedented material affluence and a high level of existential security in some parts of China. According to Inglehart’s theory, this should lead individuals to focus less on material rewards and to prioritize postmaterialist goals in the work domain. On the other hand, China’s institutional change from socialist redistribution to markets has abolished lifetime employment and replaced it with a precarious labor market. This change, I argue, promotes a materialist orientation among Chinese workers and discourages them from embracing postmaterialist work values. Using data from a 2012 national labor force survey, multilevel regression analysis shows that, all else being equal, workers in China’s more developed provinces indeed place less importance on how well work meets their survival needs, whereas workers in more marketized provinces exhibit the opposite tendency. However, neither economic development nor marketization at the province level is a significant predictor of postmaterialist work values. These findings have direct implications for work value research and for understanding social change in post-socialist China.

Characteristics of Post Socialist Spatial Development of the Functional Urban Area of Veszprém, Hungary

AbstractThe post-socialist era resulted remarkable changes in urban landscape in Eastern Europe and in Hungary. The special circumstances caused moderate level of urbanisation and special patterns of urban sprawl, traceable in land use changes. The urban sprawl and suburbanisation became an important trend around smaller Hungarian cities as well. Regulators are eager to rule the evolution of spaces, however, it is hard to control all aspects of land use. The research presented in this paper shows the dynamics of new artificial areas with the help of land use changes from the Corine Database for the functional urban area around Veszprém and attempts to find the most important policy responses to the growing artificial surfaces after transition. The research questions are: What are the most important trends in changing in-built areas in a small city after the transition? What kind of new artificial areas appeared and where are they situated? Were the land use plans and nature protection effective tools for manage urban sprawl? With the help of Corine land use changes between 1990-2018 the most important spatial changes are shown, and the different peri-urban areas are compared around the core town. Attention is drawn to the importance of regulation for sustainable land use and protection of resources. It also highlights the importance of the regulatory power of municipalities. Changes in the environment of Veszprém may give inspiration for the rethinking the relationship of urban-rural, and catchment area and core town.

De/re-construction of Zhuang shamanic songs in cultural festivals

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine the performance of Zhuang shamanic narrative songs at three festivals to explore how and why a narrative song genre that originated with Zhuang shamans is separated from shamanic ritual contexts and re-contextualized at festivals under the cultural policies instigated by the People’s Republic of China in the post-socialist era. Design/methodology/approach The research is based on a review of publications on Zhuang performance art and fieldwork data collected in southwestern Guangxi, China. Findings The de-construction of Zhuang shamanic narrative song melodies dates back to the late nineteenth century, when southwestern Guangxi literati used the melodies to compose popular songs. By the 1950s, the religious elements of these narrative songs had already been obfuscated, leading Chinese scholars to select them as representative of Zhuang performance arts. Since the enactment of China’s Intangible Culture Heritage (ICH) Law in the early twenty-first century, local Zhuang elites have re-constructed and re-introduced shamanic elements to narrative songs as they are performed at festivals as a means to further highlight the ethnic characteristics of the Zhuang people. Originality/value The paper provides detailed documentation of three cases of the restoration of shamanic elements to narrative songs sung by the Zhuang people. However, the research is limited to one community, inviting comparison with other cases, both inside and outside China, of how ICH policies impact grass-roots cultural practices.

시니컬 리얼리즘과 인민의 얼굴들, 몸

Cynical Realism is an idiom created consciously by Li Xianting, a Chinese contemporary art critic under a clear purpose of wanting to inform the Chinese art industry earnestly along with the creation of idioms like ''Political Pop Art'' and ''Gaudy Art''. The paths of these terms were mainly through magazines and the Venetian and Sao Paulo Biennale in Brazil which were done in 1993, 1995 and 1997, and the works exhibited here were sold in each market of the world art since mid-2000. This led China''s contemporary art to enter the capitalist line, and virtual realism became the most “Chinese” part of Chinese contemporary art by selling it at the highest price. In particular, these cynical realism artists who were educated in the socialist era wanted to open a new socialist art in the post-socialist era were like li Wei, Fang Lijun, Zhang Xiaogang, Yue Minjun, and Zheng Fanzhi. The characteristics are as follows. First, they focus on the ''face''. This confirms the status in which art was used in the last socialist period. It represents important symbols in post-socialist China by replacing the face of the present in the portraits of Mao Zedong. Second, ''family'' stands out as the identity of the individual and stands at the crossroads of ''people'', a member of the socialist era. This is read as a movement to push out the existence of ''workers, peasants, soldiers'' who existed only as constituent members of socialism in the past socialism, and to find their identity in the family members. Third, they pay attention to ‘emotion’ such as laughter or depression. This is also is in contrast to Mao''s expressionlessness. which was the face of a public hero during the socialist era. The face of the in the post-socialist era is just one person who is in the process of being happy. Especially, their emotions need attention because they are laughters and depressions that are pretended expressions rather than direct expressions. The post-Socialist “people” were now different from the positions of the socialist people. They have evolved into many classes, and in the present situation, the are actually in contact with the so called social lows after 2000.Thus, it can be said that the cynical realism is a realistic demonstration of the fact that the term people which was used in the socialism period, should be reconsidered.

Mapping qualitative research in psychology across five Central-Eastern European countries: Contemporary trends: A paradigm analysis

ABSTRACTThis study describes the current state of qualitative psychology and gives an overview of the philosophical paradigms used in English language qualitative psychology studies from the post-socialist countries of Central Eastern Europe. For political and historical reasons, academic life of this area is unique, providing a special field for investigation. This study explored the following research questions: Which philosophical paradigms are used in qualitative psychology? What kind of methods are applied? What kind of fields in psychology are examined? Thirty-five articles were analysed from five countries. Articles were examined through their paradigmatic considerations, using a dichotomous qualitative quasi-testing to distinguish positivist/postpositivist from interpretive/constructivist paradigms. We examined the methodology and content of various articles and analysed the keywords to explore common themes of interest. A dominant constructivist philosophical approach was present. Pure positivist articles were found to be quite rare, but mixed paradigms seemed to be frequent. Most of the methodologies were not specified. In terms of interest, the most commonly examined field was found to be social psychology. In the postsocialist era, mixed paradigms were conspicuous since culture and tradition might have had a significant effect on ontology, epistemology, and knowledge of the researcher.

Wind from an empty cave? Online rumor and ideology in postsocialist China and Russia

If the online spread of incendiary information has recently been hotly debated in the West, then related phenomena have been longer-standing concerns in China and Russia. Since 2009, explosions in social media use in both countries have seen internet “rumors” proliferate, alongside governmental efforts to curb them. The postsocialist environment is pivotal to these rumors’ spread, as shown by their fixation on symbols of the postsocialist era – particularly the mysterious dealings of political elites. Because the powerful leaders which these rumors target continue as they did under socialism to promote top–down ideological visions of social reality, these rumors appear to represent a form of anti-establishment “resistance.” But an anthropological approach to Chinese and Russian rumors, including comparison with magic and witchcraft practices studied elsewhere in the world, reveals that the authorities’ attempts to combat them with “fact” are misguided, and offers a new understanding of this highly contemporary phenomenon.

From "celluloid comrades" to "digital video activism”: queer filmmaking in postsocialist China

Although homosexuality was decriminalised in 1997 and partially depathologised in 2001, LGBTQ issues are still strictly censored in Chinese media. With the rapid growth of China’s LGBTQ community, an increasing number of independent films featuring LGBTQ issues have emerged in the past two decades. In this article, I trace a brief history of queer cinema in the People’s Republic of China in the postsocialist era (1978 to present). In particular, I chart the significant turn from ‘celluloid comrades’, i.e. queer people being represented by heterosexual identified filmmakers in an ambiguous way, to what leading Chinese queer filmmaker Cui Zi’en calls ‘digital video activism’, in which LGBTQ individuals and groups have picked up cameras and made films about their own lives. In doing so, I unravel the politics of representation, the dynamics of mediated queer politics and the political potential of queer filmmaking in China. I suggest that in a country where public expressions of sexualities and demands for sexual rights are not possible, queer filmmaking has become an important form of queer activism that constantly negotiates with government censorship and the market force of commercialisation. Rather than representing a pre-existing identity and community, queer films and filmmaking practices have brought Chinese gay identities and communities into existence.

Motorcycles on the Steppe: Skill, Social Change, and New Technologies in Postsocialist Northern Mongolia

Abstract In this paper, I explore the use of motorcycles among herding households in Mongolia, which are fast becoming ubiquitous features of everyday life. First, I outline the position of technology in academic debates and the tendency to envision technological change in teleological and revolutionary terms. Approached from a revised perspective of skilled practice, I argue against such accounts, emphasising the polydirectional ways in which people experience technological change. I present ethnographic material describing how herding households use motorcycles in the postsocialist era, including their impact on herding strategies, the everyday practices around the ger (yurt), and their connection to subsidiary technologies such as mobile phones. I show that technological change is not experienced as a transition from 'tradition' to 'modernity', as bringing about singular improvements, or as replacing pre-existing technologies in a unilinear way. Instead, they are experienced as affording improvements and limitations, generating new skills and deskillment, leading to variations between different kinds of household, and blurring the distinctions between the traditional and the modern, the socialist and the postsocialist, and the nomadic and the sedentary.

Global Land Grab and the Balkans: Continuity and Changes in a Unique Historical Context

Current developments concerning land grabs in the Balkans suggest that the region is re-experiencing in the post-socialist era what happened in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries due to the decline of the Ottoman land tenure system, under identical conditions involving fundamental socio-political transformations and integration with global capitalism. These changes are emblematic of a transfer of common to individual ownership. Nowadays, small landholders in some parts of the region—mainly the former labourers on socialist agricultural cooperatives—are influenced by the accelerating trend of (re)concentrating landownership, which in some cases takes the form of land grabbing similar to that seen in Africa. This study examines the historical continuity between the Ottoman rule over fledgling nation-states and the post-socialist era by referring to widely discussed socio-economic and political developments regarding contemporary land grab processes.

A “Dinosaur Doomed to Extinction”?

This article examines the recent history of the Polish Academy of Sciences (PAS) and its puzzling institutional stability despite sweeping societal transformations in its political and economic environments in the post-socialist era. The article shows that PAS has undergone mainly gradual changes that have not yet been transformative. Most important, it is argued that new formal rules addressing institutional change at PAS could not be properly implemented and have had little behavioral effect because the resources necessary for their implementation were not provided. The article illustrates how a shortage of research funding and a decline in scientific staff in the 1990s and 2000s helped sustain the status quo at PAS.

In Search of an Alternative Feminist Cinema: Gender, Crisis, and the Cultural Discourse of Nation Building in Chinese Independent Films

Chinese feminist cinema in the postsocialist era is shaped by the grand narrative of nation building that glamorizes urban professional career women and their contributions to economic marketization and globalization. Such cinematic overemphasis on urban women proves inadequate as it creates a disturbing silence about the diasporic existence of non-urban women. This uneven condition demands the creation of an alternative cinematic feminism that visualizes the diversity of Chinese women and represents the heterogeneity of feminist cinematic expressions and female experiences. Using Li Yu’s Lost in Beijing (2007, Pingguo 苹果) and Li Yang’s Blind Mountain (2007, Mang shan 盲山) as case studies, this essay investigates how Chinese independent films re-negotiate female gender identity and crisis through commercialized visual realism and social intervention while in reality the postsocialist grand narrative of nation building redefines the living conditions of female migrant workers and women of limited resources.

Making space for emotions: exploring China–Africa ‘mediated relationships’ through CCTV-9’s documentary African Chronicles (Feizhou jishi 非洲纪事)

ABSTRACTThis article explores how the image of China ‘as engaged with Africa’ is promoted within China, by looking at a State-sanctioned, Chinese-language media text targeting the domestic audience. It first proposes two paradigm shifts: in the direction adopted in investigating China’s soft power, and in the dimension considered in exploring China–Africa media interactions. After reviewing the relevant existing literature, it introduces African Chronicles (Feizhou jishi 非洲纪事), a TV documentary screened by CCTV-9 in 2011, and carries out a social semiotic analysis of the first episode, A Journey through Memory (Jiyi zhilü 记忆之旅). The analysis reveals that the storytelling of Prof. Ge, the protagonist, is instrumental in reminding the audience of the old rhetoric of the revolutionary years; it also serves the function of dismissing its adaptability to the contemporary postsocialist era, characterized by a less explicit political engagement and the prominence of economic interests. More importantly, this article illustrates that what unites China and Africa in this episode is the ‘emotional bond’, in its different variations, which has the power to stand the test of time and shorten both a physical and an emotional distance through what Ahmed callls a ‘narrative of love’ (The Cultural Politics of Emotion, 2004).

War Remembered, Revolution Forgotten: Recasting the Sino-North Korean Alliance in China's Post-Socialist Media State

From October 1950 to July 1953, the nascent Chinese state entered into a strategic alliance with North Korea; hundreds of thousands of Chinese soldiers shed blood on the Korean peninsula in defense of the socialist homeland and advancing Communist internationalism. But since the end of the Korean War, China has moved from revolutionary idealism and political radicalism in Mao's era to the current post-socialist pragmatism and materialism. As the ideological winds shift, China's contemporary propaganda apparatus must redefine the Korean War in order to reconcile the complexity of the war and wartime alliance with contemporary political concerns and popular views. By focusing on a documentary film, The Unforgettable Victory, produced by China's leading state-run film studio in 2013, this article explores the ways in which the official media of the post-socialist era presents the past revolutionary war. The new film celebrates the splendid valor of Chinese soldiers, civilians' heroic sacrifices, and the war's nationalist legacy; however, it purposefully forgets the revolutionary fervor and internationalist sentiments that once forged the Sino–North Korean alliance and empowered wartime mobilization. This article examines the process of remembering and forgetting, and reveals government propaganda's latest efforts to demobilize contemporary viewers while infusing the past revolutionary war with ideological clarity and political certainty in post-socialist China.

Theories of Farmer Knowledge and Food Security

Theories of Farmer Knowledge and Food Security

Re‐creating economic and cultural values in Bulgaria's wine industry: From an economy of quantity to an economy of quality?

AbstractThe transformation of the Bulgarian wine industry from a state‐owned and heavily industrialized enterprise into many privatized wineries and vineyards following the collapse of state socialism involved the question of how to transform an economy of quantity to one of quality. At the heart of this question are contestations around the meanings and values of technology in wine production. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Bulgaria among wine producers and stakeholders of the wine industry since 2008, this article discusses the debates and practices in Bulgarian wine production to understand how different attitudes regarding technology and its uses affect the social construction of “quality.” As a marginal wine‐producing country with a compelling Cold War history, the Bulgarian case offers an interesting vantage point from which to think about the cultural economy of the globalized food system. I show how Bulgarian wine producers in the postsocialist era grapple with different systems of value and how technology plays a role in their construction. The resulting contestations and tension over technology in constructing meanings of quality show how technologies and systems of value intersect in interesting ways.