National ethnology / anthropology - Economy and Culture

Pre-requisites: No preconditions

Course objectives: Illuminating the relationship between economics and culture through the study of links connecting the economy (specifically the area of consumption) and other aspects of society and culture, like politics, ideology, kinship, ritual, in socialism and post-socialism.

Course description: Starting from the assumption found in the modern anthropology of consumption that "there is no universal way to spend", contemporary economic trends and relationships, usually related to the institutional, economic and cultural framework of capitalism, will be monitored and analyzed in the context of post-socialist transformation of societies of Southeast Europe. Attention will be given to the elements of the socialist heritage, such as state-controlled economy, the allocation as a source of political power and ideological opposition to spending.

Learning Outcomes: Training for critical and analytical approach to studying the nature of production and consumption of (post) communism / socialism in a comparative context of Southeastern Europe

Literature/Reading:

• Ildiko Erdei, Antropologija potrošnje, XX vek, Beograd, 2008
• Daniel Miller, Consumption Studies as the Transformation of anthropology, u: Acknowledging Consumption, Routledge, London and New York, 1996, 264-295
• Ketrin Verderi, Šta je bio socijalizam i šta dolazi posle njega, Fabrika knjiga, Beograd, 2005
• Sheila Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism, Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the 1930s, Oxford University Press, 1999, 40-66
• David Crowley and Susan E. Reid (eds.), Style and Socialism: Modernity and Material Culture in Post-War Eastern Europe, Berg Publishers, 2000
• Sue Bridger and Frances Pine (eds.), Surviving post-socialism, Local strategies and regional responses in eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, Routledge, London and New York, 1998
• Ruth Mandel & Caroline Humphrey, Markets and Morralities, Ethnographies of Postsocialism, Berg, Oxford, New York, 2002
• Susan E. Reid, Cold War in the Kitchen: Gender and the De-Stalinization of Consumer Taste in the Soviet Union under Khrushchev, Slavic Review, Vol 61, No 2, 2002, 211-252