Definitions and boundaries
Determining the precise boundaries of Central and Eastern Europe has been an awkward task for scholars and politicians alike. For the purposes of this entry the region is taken to comprise the German-speaking countries together with the large swathe of former socialist territory, the extremities of which are formed by Albania, Macedonia and Bulgaria in the south, the Baltic states in the north, and the Ural Mountains in the east.
Many fine lines can be drawn within this large area, e.g. between Germans and Slavs, between Eastern and Western Christianity, between cultures of wine, of beer and of vodka. Each of these criteria may have significance for anthropology. But of course finer distinctions can always be drawn: within Western Christianity you have Catholics and Protestants, within Protestantism you have Lutherans and Calvinists, and so on. Moreover ‘anomalous’ groups such as Greek Catholics, found in several countries of the region and still numbering several millions, thoroughly subvert such line-drawing exercises.
It is rather more interesting to enquire into the subjective moral geography and the emotions that lie behind these boundaries. Lines bisecting the European continent longitudinally and lati-tudinally will cross in an obscure region of the Carpathian Mountains (a monument marks the alleged spot, at Jasinya in the Ukraine) where questions of national belonging remain confused and contested. The inhabitants of this region, often known as ‘Sub-Carpathian Rus’, are East Slavs. The most important element in their culture is Eastern Christianity, and few would wish to classify them as other than East European. The Hungarians are immediate neighbours of these ‘Ruthenians’, but Hungarians like to position themselves in ‘East-Central Europe’, and to imply a particularly sharp boundary between themselves and other neighbours to the southeast (‘The Balkans’). East—West stereotypes have figured prominently among the Southern Slavs (especially Serbs against Croats), but they have also emerged with surprising strength within Germany in the years since reunification. Europe itself has become a key symbol, and following the collapse of communism, many countries of this region have seen vigorous debates concerning their proper relation to it.
Ethnicity and nationalism
The political map of this region has been redrawn several times during the last 150 years. After the disappointments of the ‘springtime of nations’ in 1848, Bismarck’s united Germany became the region’s first modern state, and in spite of all the twentieth-century vicissitudes it has remained the most powerful. Ottoman and Habsburg empires did not last long into the present century. With the collapse of the socialist supra-national states, the triumph of nationalist ideology now appears complete: the political boundaries are, more than ever before, congruent with those of the nation.
A good deal of the ethnographic work in this region since the nineteenth century has been undertaken in the service of nationalism, sometimes very explicitly. The task of the scholar was to document an authentic folk culture worthy of veneration by the members of the ‘nation-state’. The national museums and folk dance theatres found throughout the region are clear testimony that this political ambition was met. At the same time there is much in the work of native ethnographers that, carefully interpreted, does not support exaggerated focus on the boundedness of the nation. Many ethnographers have emphasized the distinctiveness of small localities; others have pointed to interconnected-ness over very large areas, so that ‘national ethnography’ was never a completely rigid strait-jacket. In many parts of the region these traditions have been explicitly challenged, as ethnographers (increasingly preferring to style themselves anthropologists) have subjected the work of their predecessors and some of the core symbols of the nation to rigorous critique. However, perhaps the most devastating critique remains that of Ernest Gellner, whose 1983 outline of ‘Ruritania’ parodies a general type of Eastern European nationalism. For Gellner, whatever the rhetoric of ‘awakening’ that intellectuals use, the nations are in fact ‘invented’ to comply with the requirements of industrial social organization. However, this model perhaps needs some modification if it is to account for the spread of nationalism in this region, which contains a good number of ‘old’ nations and ‘high’ cultures alongside other countries where the degree of intellectual fabrication was necessarily somewhat greater.
Even after the recent transformations, Central and Eastern Europe — Gellner’s ideal type of cultural homogeneity within state boundaries — remains only a distant aspiration. The populations of large border regions such as Silesia and Transylvania remain mixed, and the potential for reviving long-standing antagonisms is ever-present. Other awkward groups are scattered throughout the region. Gypsies, having resisted socialist attempts at assimilation, have been a renewed target of ethnic or racial abuse in the years after communist collapse. The Jews, their main long-term rivals for the scapegoat role in this region, had been largely eliminated by the middle of the twentieth century. (Some interesting work is continuing, particularly at the Jagiellonian University in Cracow, on the nature of past Jewish relations with other ethnic and national groups.)
At the same time, as elsewhere in Europe, some new minorities have appeared on the scene. In the economically most developed German areas the presence of ‘guest workers’ and their dependents, particularly Muslim Turks, has already attracted anthropological attention (from Werner Schiffauer, Lale Yalcin-Heckmann and others). In general, anthropological effort, as elsewhere in Europe, has tended to focus on the peripheral and marginal, but some have begun to examine the identities of majorities, including that of contemporary Germans. The region as a whole remains an exciting testing ground for theories of ethnicity and identity. In one extraordinary development, the efforts of Paul Robert Magocsi, a Canadian professor, to create a new nation for the Ruthenians suggest that nineteenth-century recipes may still be appropriate in what Gellner terms the ‘East European time zone’.
It is not always recognized that tendencies towards a ‘Fortress Europe’ in the West have themselves been partially responsible for accentuating divisive nationalisms in the former socialist territories. Anthropological investigations of such forces have scarcely begun (but see God-dard et. al. 1993). Nor is there much sign that anthropological expertise has been utilized by political decision-takers in places where ethnic tension has been most extreme, such as Bosnia, Kosovo and Transylvania.
Peasantry and underdevelopment
With perhaps a few debatable exceptions, notably the ‘tribal’ structures described by Hasluck, Whitaker and others for Albania, the inhabitants of most of this region qualify for that loose term: peasant. Peasantries were usually called upon to provide the folklore sources for the constructions of new nationalisms, but close attention has also been paid to the more prosaic socio-economic characteristics of peasant farming. This work, although mainly carried out by other specialists, has had some impact on economic anthropology and development studies. The contrasting interpretations of the pre-revolutionary Russian peasantry offered by A.V. Chayanov and V.I. Lenin have each inspired anthropological emulation. Chayanov emphasized the fact that inter-household inequality was influenced by demographic composition and by what Fortes later labelled the developmental cycle of the domestic group. His arguments were reworked by Sahlins for a rather different range of societies in the guise of the domestic mode of production. Meanwhile Lenin sought to explain the same statistical inequalities in terms of class polarization. Adjudication is difficult in the absence of any satisfying anthropological studies from this period, but Shanin’s (1972) careful assessment suggests that Chaya-nov won the intellectual argument, if not the short-term political one.
As in other parts of the continent, rural family organization in Central and Eastern Europe has continued to attract considerable anthropological attention. Some demographers have proposed a great East-West divide in patterns of marriage and household formation, the frontier consisting of a line running approximately from Trieste to St Petersburg, but this would appear to be a dangerous oversimplification in the light of the evidence available to date. There are dangers in this field too of exaggerating apparently exotic features of the Eastern region: for example, in the considerable attention that has been bestowed on extended families (the zadruga) in a particular period of ‘Balkan’ history.
Altogether, the historical formation of peasantries in this region is a process of enormous interest, but not yet sufficiently understood. In some cases the patterns are clearly the more or less direct consequences of ecological circumstances: see, for example, the Alpine studies of Cole and Wolf (1974), Netting (1981), and the comparative volume of Viazzo (1989), all of which make effective use of historical data. Peasantries in the region also frequently bear the marks of changing political circumstances: for example, Poland’s agrarian structure today still shows the signs of the generations during which the country was partitioned between the very different powers of Russia, Prussia and Austria. But a case can also be made for the proposition that the region as a whole was adversely affected by the onset of commercial expansion, increased urbanization and industrialization in the West. From this perspective, Eastern Europe was a prototype for what later became known as the ‘Third World’: even earlier than other parts of the European periphery, it was the first region to be systematically underdeveloped by capitalism.
Socialism and the aftermath
It is useful to bear in mind this legacy of under-development when assessing the achievements of the socialist period. We have a number of studies by anthropologists from Western countries, very unevenly spread across the region. The outstanding study of a Soviet-type collective farm was made outside this region; but Caroline Humphrey’s Buratian study (1983) still has much to offer East Europeanists. Many of the community studies in Eastern Europe focused on altogether looser forms of collective agriculture (particularly in Hungary), or on the countries which avoided Soviet-style collectivization altogether — Poland and Yugoslavia. Hann developed a comparative approach to the study of rural transformation in Poland and Hungary: in spite of the impact of collectivization on his property rights, the Hungarian farmer in fact benefited substantially from well-integrated processes of rural development in the late socialist period, in contrast to the stagnation and political deadlock experienced in Poland. Hungarian success in combining small-scale farming (organized in Chayanovian manner by the family) with large-scale socialist enterprises was unmatched elsewhere in the region. It proved to be short-lived following the collapse of socialist power, when the pressures for decollectivization accentuated rural instability throughout the region.
Despite the obvious importance of socialism for this region, it has only rarely been made the explicit focus of anthropological investigation. Yet it is precisely through the ideologies and practices of socialism that much of this region has obtained a measure of unity in recent generations. We do not really know how deeply this new culture penetrated. It is clear that it did not dissolve a number of older ethno-national conflicts, and it may even have accentuated them in some places. But as to the impact of socialist ideals, symbols and rituals on the generations for whom they were central features of socialization, anthropological knowledge is thin. Some of the best studies of ritual, both its manipulation from above and its availability in strategies of resistance from below, have been made in Romania by Gail Kligman (e.g. 1988). Other American anthropologists have addressed the specifically socialist character of Ceausescu’s Romania more directly. Steven Sampson’s (1984) investigation of settlement policies and grass roots political mobilization shows how anthropological work can help to demolish some of the familiar ‘totalitarian’ stereotypes. David Kideckel has contributed a valuable historical community study in the same region (1993). Katherine Verdery (1991) moves beyond the conventional limitations of the community study in her work on the intellectual producers of nationalist ideology in the last years of the dictatorship. She also attempts in this work to elaborate a general model of socialism that draws on the critiques offered by ‘dissident’ intellectuals themselves (but see also Hann 1994).
Conclusions
It is difficult to speak of any coherent regional tradition in the work that has been done so far on Central and Eastern Europe by anthropologists from outside the region. No doubt problems of access and the general political climate of the Cold War decades play some part in explaining the relatively meagre harvest of this period (though much valuable work has been continued by the local heirs to the traditions of national ethnography). Those who have worked in Eastern Europe reflect the general fashions in the discipline, and it is perhaps ironic that the influence of Marxism and of political economy approaches has been particularly strong. Surprisingly, though few of the monographs to date can be regarded as truly outstanding, the position is more favourable if one considers the medium of film. There have been fine programmes in Granada Television’s Disappearing World series on Hungarian Rom (Michael Stewart), a Moslem-Croat village in Bosnia (Tone Bringa) and Albanian villagers in the throes of decollectivization (Berit Backer).
Overall, the contribution to international social and cultural anthropology of scholars with roots in Eastern Europe — Boas, Malinowski, Polanyi, ^Nadel, Gellner, etc. — far exceeds the contribution to date of general anthropology to the study of this region. It is well worth exploring how far the approaches of such scholars derive from their roots in this region: for example, Gellner (1988) has argued that Malinowski’s synchronic functionalism is related at least in part to his Polish cultural nationalism in the days when no Polish state existed.
Whether or not this is so, social anthropologists will certainly need to transcend their Malinowskian anti-history heritage as they grapple to understand the region’s current problems. The substantivist approach of Polanyi might serve them rather better as they explore the implementation of a caricatured ‘Western free market economy’ in the present ‘transitional’ period. Certainly it is already clear that the enthusiasm that greeted the demise of socialism was far greater outside the region than within it. Some important work in progress is focusing on the cultural misunderstandings which hinder the effective deployment of Western ‘aid’ to the region; echoing the conclusions of many Third-World studies, Janine R. Wedel has found that some American aid to Poland is totally inappropriate, serving the strategies of donor country rather than the needs of the recipient. Over the longer term, foreign anthropologists in this region, like the aid donors, would be well advised to heed rich traditions of indigenous knowledge, and to work with local researchers whenever possible. They should also be prepared to use the excellent archival and other documentary sources, for which there are good precedents in the literature on this region (e.g. Thomas and Znaniecki 1918—20), in order to address important issues of cultural transmission. High on this agenda must be the dissemination and transmission of the contemporary culture associated with socialism.
