The Vanishing Hectare: Property and Value in Postsocialist Transylvania

Katherine Verdery

Published by Cornell University Press 2003

The Vanishing Hectare

Property and Value in Postsocialist Transylvania

Katherine Verdery

In the series Culture and Society after Socialism

https://doi.org/10.7591/9781501717253

Overview
Contents

About this book

In most countries in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, the fall of communism opened up the possibility for individuals to acquire land. Based on Katherine Verdery's extensive fieldwork between 1990 and 2001, The Vanishing Hectare explores...

Author / Editor information

Katherine Verdery is Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the City University of New York Graduate Center. She is the author of Transylvanian Villagers, The Political Lives of Dead Bodies, What Was Socialism, and What Comes Next?, and National Ideology under Socialism and the coeditor of Property in Question: Value Transformation in the Global Economy.

Reviews

Richard Byrne:

Where the poet William Blake saw a world in a grain of sand, Ms. Verdery finds global collisions of values and culture in the manner that Aurel Vlaicu, a small Transylvanian town nestled at the foot of the Western Carpathian Mountains, privatized its landholdings after Romania's 1989 revolution.... Verdery often leavens her work with entertaining anecdotes.... Her intimate knowledge of the town proved useful when she delved into local corruption and ill feeling. Her larger critique of Western misprisions never dulls her eye for local failures.

Keith Brown:

Verdery's conclusions are bleak. She vividly describes how the efforts of individuals she depicts as conscientious, energetic, highly intelligent, and very charming all founder in the face of widening price scissors production costs and market returns.... The Vanishing Hectare showcases the value of long-term fieldwork—anthropology's core methodology—to illuminate the real-world consequences of wishful thinking, and deserves particular attention from scholars and practitioners concerned to understand the kinds of regime change formerly known as transition.

Andrew Cartwright:

Verdery's 30 years of fieldwork research in Romania supplied the groundwork for The Vanishing Hectare, enabling her to offer some alternative versions of the changes in rural life and reasons behind the supposedly irrational behavior of rural people.... Her account is not so much of the laws and administrative paraphernalia that established private ownership but rather of the broader social and economic conditions that make for what the author terms 'effective ownership.'

Marilyn Strathern, University of Cambridge:

This is an example of ethnographic enquiry at its best. In Katherine Verdery's hands it becomes a superb vehicle for exploring the tragedy of reformist intentions. Using economic means to achieve social ends, and the consequences this has for people's livelihood, is a story told over and over again in twentieth-century history. Here the socialist and postsocialist experiments of Eastern Europe have a special poignancy, not least in the way the people contribute to their own predicaments. Verdery dignifies their endeavours with breathtaking documentation and a fine-grained analysis of social realities. A remarkable feat.

John Borneman, Princeton University:

The Vanishing Hectare is the polished work of a scholar who, after several decades of ethnographic fieldwork in a single place, brings her knowledge to bear on a problem of world-historical significance: the transformation of property following the collapse of state socialism in the former Soviet bloc. Katherine Verdery traces how collective forms of land use were transformed into 'private property,' and does so methodically, documenting and analyzing with neither polemics nor circumlocution.

Michael Burawoy, University of California, Berkeley:

Here at last is Katherine Verdery's magnum opus. Extending out from a village in Transylvania to regional peculiarities, government policies, and the demands of the IMF and World Bank, Verdery illuminates the forces at work throughout the postsocialist world. This is a tour de force, the very best of ethnography with a historical and global reach, setting new standards for the study of market transition.

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
CONTENTS Publicly Available Download PDF	ix
ILLUSTRATIONS Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	xi
PREFACE Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	xiii
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	xv
NOTE ON PRONOUNCIATION, ROMANIAN NAMES,TERMS, AND TRANSLATIONS Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	xix
Introduction: Property, Value, and Global Transformation Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
PART I: MAKING, UNMAKING, AND REMAKING OWNERS
1. Property in Socialism: Collectivization, Administrative Rights, and the Circulation of Goods Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	40
2. Unmaking Socialist Agriculture: Contexts of Restitution in the 1990s 77 Comparative Decollectivizations Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	77
3. How Hectares Vanished: Decollectivization Politics in Vlaicu 116 Village Particulars Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	116
4. New Kin, New Serfs, New Masters: Transformed Social Relations and the Meanings of Land Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	158
PART II: REALIZING THE POWERS OF OWNERSHIP
5. The Death of a Peasantry: From Smallholders to Rentiers Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	190
6. Of Credits and Credibility: The Rise and Fall of the Vlaicu Association Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	229
7. The Dynamics of Decapitalization: The Fate of Vlaicu's State Farms Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	273
8. From Debts to Dallas: Value Transformation and the Rise of Supertenants Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	310
Conclusion: Property Processes and Effects Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	346
APPENDIX Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	365
NOTES Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	367
GLOSSARY Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	391
REFERENCES Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	393
INDEX Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	411

(Deutsch)

Language: English
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Audience: General/trade;
Pages
- Main content: 448
Illustrations
- Other: 13 tables, 3 maps, 26 halftones
Keywords: Soviet & East European History; Anthropology; Cultural Studies

eBook

Published: May 31, 2018
ISBN: 9781501717253