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On the Social Life of Postsocialism
Memory, Consumption, Germany

Daphne Berdahl
Edited and with an introduction by Matti Bunzl
Foreword by Michael Herzfeld
Paperback
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Pathbreaking studies of the postsocialist transition
"This marvelous collection . . . reminds us how much we have lost with Daphne Berdahl’s death. Its wide-ranging themes . . . are unified by both her sophisticated overarching conception of their interconnections and her splendid gift for ethnography." —Katherine Verdery, The Graduate Center, City University of New York
Anthropologist Daphne Berdahl was one of the leading scholars of the transition from state socialism to capitalism in central and eastern Europe. From her pathbreaking ethnography of a former East German border village in the aftermath of German reunification, to her insightful analyses of consumption, nostalgia, and citizenship in the early 21st century, Berdahl's writings probe the contradictions, paradoxes, and ambiguities of postsocialism as few observers have done. This volume brings together her essays, from an early study of memory at the Vietnam War memorial in Washington, D.C., to research on consumption and citizenship undertaken in Leipzig in the years before her untimely death. It serves as a superb introduction to the development of the field of postsocialist cultural studies.

Daphne Berdahl (1964–2007) was Associate Professor of Anthropology and Global Studies at the University of Minnesota. She is author of Where the World Ended: Re-Unification and Identity in the German Borderland and editor (with Matti Bunzl and Martha Lampland) of Altering States: Ethnographies of Transition in Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union.

Matti Bunzl is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is author of Symptoms of Modernity: Jews and Queers in Late-Twentieth-Century Vienna and Anti-Semitism and Islamophobia: Hatreds Old and New in Europe.
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Distribution: World
Publication date: 2/1/2010
Format: paper 192 pages, 1 b&w illus, 6.125 x 9.25 x .497
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