Beschreibung
Slovakia is a young and little studied country of the former
socialist bloc. As in all postsocialist Eurasia, continuing
transformations of everyday practices are still inadequately
understood. This study combines anthropological and
historical methods to search for alternative ways of
“reading postsocialism” in the rural community. More
specifically, it applies the notions of trust and property
to map the outcomes of over a hundred years of turbulent
social change, but not in the way that mainstream economists
and political scientists have used these concepts. Trust and
property acquire analytic significance only when
contextualised into the practices and ideologies of the
actors. This allows the observer to grasp the nuances of
apparently ambivalent behaviour and “uttered mistrust” in
other villagers and local institutions. Ambiguity veils
subtle strategies for keeping up with the instability of the
times and obtaining the best one can from the present.
By providing a theoretically grounded ethnographical account
of historical transformation the book makes an original
anthropological contribution to the classic theme of social
change in rural societies, while at the same time engaging
constructively with other social science approaches to
postsocialism.
Davide Torsello was born in Lecce, Italy. He
studied anthropology at the Universities of Hirosaki and
London (LSE) and obtained his PhD at the Martin Luther
University, Halle-Wittenberg, in 2003. He was then awarded a
postdoctoral fellowship at Collegium Budapest in order to
expand his research into issues of trust, begun in this
volume, into a wider comparative enquiry.
