Lost in Transition: Ethnographies of Everyday Life After Communism

Description

Lost in Transition tells of ordinary lives upended by the collapse of communism. Through ethnographic essays and short stories based on her experiences with Eastern Europe between 1989 and 2009, Kristen Ghodsee explains why it is that so many Eastern Europeans are nostalgic for the communist past. Ghodsee uses Bulgaria, the Eastern European nation where she has spent the most time, as a lens for exploring the broader transition from communism to democracy. She locates the growing nostalgia for the communist era in the disastrous, disorienting way that the transition was handled. The privatization process was contested and chaotic. A few well-connected foreigners and a new local class of oligarchs and criminals used the uncertainty of the transition process to take formerly state-owned assets for themselves. Ordinary people inevitably felt that they had been robbed. Many people lost their jobs just as the state social-support system disappeared. Lost in Transition portrays one of the most dramatic upheavals in modern history by describing the ways that it interrupted the rhythms of everyday lives, leaving confusion, frustration, and insecurity in its wake. Dedication Contents Preface: Echoes Off the Iron Curtain Acknowledgments Introduction: The Road to Bulgaria, 1983–1990 1 Contraband, 1990 2 Kaloyan and Hristo, 1998 3 Her Lover in Cuba, 1999 4 Hair: Ethnographic Fiction 5 Shopaholic in Eastern Europe,1998–2006 6 New Carpets for Old Kilims, 1999 7 Comrades, 2000 8 Petar Hails a Cab: Ethnographic Fiction 9 Basset Hounds in the Balkans, 2005 10 The Master of Conspiracies, 2005 11 An Explosion in Sofia, 2008 12 Coffee: Ethnographic Fiction 13 Kaloyan in Maine, 2009 14 Tito Trivia: Ethnographic Fiction 15 Pilgrims from Sofia to Zagreb, 2009 Afterword: Lost in Transition, 2010 Appendix: Timeline of Twentieth-Century Communism Further Reading