Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Europe最新文献

Socialist ideology in Eastern Europe strived to remodel all aspects of social life and to provide a framework for political, economic, and moral authority. For twenty years after the fall of socialism in 1989, Eastern Europeans have been entangled in dynamic transitions from socialism to democracy, from nationalized to privatized economies, and from ‘thinking local’ to ‘thinking global.’ Now, they are struggling with a new set of transformations: becoming part of the European project for politico-economic and socio-cultural integration. This multifarious process affects people in different ways according to their age, economic status and gender, among other factors. This paper investigates how age affects the experiences and conceptualizations of European integration of citizens in one post-socialist EU member-state—Bulgaria. It attempts to reveal differences in ideological motivations, degree of intensity and nuances in experiencing, conceptualizing, and engaging with the European Union. Exploration of these various experiences and conceptualizations suggests the existence of significant conceptual and metaphoric discrepancies between the pre-and post-1980s generations and within the youth generation of the 1980s itself. Both disappointment with the failure of the Soviet model of social engineering and nostalgia for the socialist past inform anticipation of the effects of and reaction to European integration. However they do not capture or explain new ways of reconstructing the past or emerging narratives of the present and the future, influenced by the differential access to a range of new economic opportunities, social realities, and domains of knowledge enabled by European integration.

Fertility has long been part of a complex analysis of economics, social values, family formation and community in Ireland; yet little attention has been focused on the meaning of childlessness and infertility in relation to those same values and social institutions. Couples struggling to conceive are widely assumed to have chosen their childlessness. This paper argues that such assumptions in Ireland are now part of a wider social narrative in which reproductive choice has become a metaphor for social change. The paper shows how political, moral and religious meanings for family formation and motherhood have been re-articulated in new economic, material and medical ideals in the guise of individualism and choice, sometimes increasing the burden of individual responsibility in the process. Moreover, people are expected to consider costly and invasive assisted reproduction technologies (ART) such as in vitro fertilization (IVF) as part a repertoire of reproductive options for infertility. The research took place against a backdrop of immense social and economic change in Ireland—something the 40 women and 10 men in the study reflected upon almost universally within their narratives on their inability to conceive.

This article analyzes the popular, award-winning German film The Lives of Others as an intervention in memory politics focused on the socialist German Democratic Republic (GDR). Confronting the crimes of the East German regime has been framed as coming to terms with Germany's “second dictatorship,” suggesting an equivalence not only between the Nazi and socialist states and their abuses, but also the moral and historical stakes of facing up to the two legacies. The Lives of Others reinforces the “second dictatorship” discourse and fails to provide a nuanced portrayal of the GDR, opting instead for a moral drama that elides the political world it claims to represent. Drawing on ethnographic research on identity in Eastern Germany and critical readings of recent public discourse, I analyze claims about the film's authentic portrayal of GDR repression and its importance as a corrective to Ostalgie by situating The Lives of Others as a text and cultural phenomenon within the cultural landscape of post-socialist memory in Germany. This landscape, in turn, must be placed within the still broader context of national unification, identity, and memory in unified Germany.