Resources and Everyday Conflicts in Rural Ukraine - (Russian and East European Studies) by Deema Kaneff (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

Social change is a topic of central interest in the social sciences. The upheavals and reforms that swept across former socialist states in Eurasia offer a rich array of case studies to deepen our understanding of this phenomenon. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in an ethnically Bulgarian community in rural Ukraine, Kaneff uniquely brings to light a range of hidden conflicts and everyday tensions, as well as new alliances and solidarities resulting from the redistribution of resources following Ukrainian independence. A focus on five key resources provides a means to explore the way in which relationships have been contested and renegotiated in this small community, with implications that go far beyond those boundaries.

Review Quotes

In this finely grained, historically grounded ethnographic study of a village in Ukraine, Deema Kaneff focusses on resources--economic, social, material, and immaterial--as the core of her theoretical approach to social change. Resources may have use value, exchange value, or both, and may change and fluctuate according to context, political circumstance, and economic shifts. Kaneff examines different kinds of resources, ranging from land and water to identity, ethnicity, and language, as they move from a position of use and consumption to exchange value, or gain monetary value. She describes the changes in political economy and social relations of the ethnically Bulgarian village prior to and throughout the Soviet period, through the collapse of the Soviet Union, and with establishment of an independent Ukraine. Her last fieldwork in the village was in 2014, the beginning of the first Russian invasion, but the ensuing war is foreshadowed in discussions of increasing Ukrainian nationalism and exclusions based on ethnic identity and language. Kaneff paints a vivid portrait of a village reacting to, and being deeply changed by, events in the wider world--the end of the Soviet Union, economic restructuring, changing national and global markets, migration, new inequalities, and war. But it also tells a story of resilience, of adaptation to change, and of new possibilities opening through education, mobility, and networks of kinship and friendship.--Frances Pine, Goldsmiths, University of London

When the Bulgarian minority in Bessarabia was exposed to the dual forces of globalizing political economy and the nationalizing Ukrainian state, life-worlds and resource use changed radically. Kaneff's study is both an important addition to the literature on postsocialist transformation and, with its sophisticated conceptualization of resources, a truly original contribution to the analysis of social change generally.--Chris Hann, Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology

About the Author

Deema Kaneff is a Reader in Social Anthropology at the University of Birmingham in the UK and an Associate at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle, Germany. She has carried out long term fieldwork in Bulgaria and Ukraine and her research interests focus on property/resources and social change, social inequalities and migration. Deema is the Series Editor for a book series on Anthropologies of Eurasia: Ethnographic Encounters of Social Change (CEU Press), and a member of the Editorial Board for a book series on European Studies in Socio-Cultural Anthropology and Ethnology, (Berghahn Press). She is also a member of the board of a number of journals, including: Südosteuropa. Journal of Politics and Society; Bulgarska Ethnologia (Bulgarian Ethnology) and Ethnologia Balkanica (Balkan Ethnology). Deema is a founding member of the International Association for Southeast European Anthropology (InASEA) and a member of the European Association for Social Anthropologists (EASA). She is the author of a monograph based on her Bulgarian research: 2004 Who Owns the Past? The Politics of Time in a 'Model' Bulgarian Village, Oxford: Berghahn, as well as numerous other edited volumes and journal publications.