Studying Peoples in the People's Democracies II. Socialist Era Anthropology in South-East Europe

Author
Vintilă Mihăilescu, Ilia Iliev and Slobodan Naumović (eds.)

Publisher
Berlin: LIT-Verlag

Year of publication
2008

ISBN
978-3-8258-9911-0

OPAC

Abstract
The theory and practice of the anthropological disciplines in Romania, Bulgaria and Serbia during socialism are outlined from many different points of view in this volume. Beyond local and personal trajectories the authors illuminate more general and comparative questions. Was there anything like a ‘socialist anthropology’, common to all three countries? Did Soviet and/or Marxist influences, in the discipline and in society in general, penetrate so deeply as to form an unavoidable common denominator of anthropological practice? The answers turn out to be complex and subtle. While unifying ideological forces were very strong in the 1950s, diversity increased thereafter. Anthropology was entangled with national ideology in all three countries, but the evidence nonetheless calls for ‘polyphonic’ interpretations.

Go to Editor View