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This aptly titled volume is comprised of intriguing and diverse scholarly essays. Each by a different writer, they all illuminate specific European case studies that also shed light on general aspects of walls, borders, and boundaries in cultural and historical contexts. Represented are various territories and time periods, as well as differing academic, disciplinary, and artistic approaches. According to the Acknowledgments, support was provided by the German Studies Association, and the project emerged from a series of GSA panels marking the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Berlin and the wall are addressed in about half of the essays included. In the Introduction the editors associate the book with the "now burgeoning" "transdisciplinary" "field of border studies" and the "'spatial turn' in the social sciences and humanities" (16-17). Brief definitions and comments on the emergence and significance of these developments would have been appreciated here, even though readers can seek further information by referring to the extensive bibliographies following the Introduction and the book as a whole.
The anthology Rethinking Ethnography in Central Europe contains eleven essays reporting on contemporary ethnographic/anthropological research projects. Their authors are fourteen well-qualified scholars working in Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Serbia. Subjects are quite diverse, but unified by common aims and framed by general overviews in the editors' introduction and afterword. The essays provide specific information on culture, attitudes, and everyday life, both individual and communal, in contemporary Central Europe. Nearly all of the subjects involve relationships with other nations to some degree. The volume provides a traditional scholarly apparatus in the form of numerous footnotes, lengthy bibliographies, and cogent explanations of research theories and methods.
The title of this book, Post-Communist Nostalgia, identifies a term widely used since the fall of European communism in 1989-90. Common assumptions are that many residents of East and East Central Europe and the former Soviet Union are poorly adjusted. They harbor a pathological longing for the "good old days" under communism when they were taken care of by their governments and had no need to cope with change or to develop the initiative needed in capitalism. The authors of the generally well-researched if selective studies collected here look beyond the catch-phrase of the title and its associated generalizations. Articles discuss multiple aspects of citizens' relationships to the communist or socialist past in a dozen countries. Subjects include both lived experiences and memories and views expressed in songs, films, and books. Contributors are anthropologists, historians, sociologists, and professors in artistic fields. They are mostly from American universities, but they report on research conducted in the countries under discussion and their bibliographies include numerous entries in languages other than English. The result is an informative, cohesive, and well-organized book that dispels oversimplified and sometimes prejudicial myths and assumptions. To be sure, the book also introduces many nations, populations, and issues, thereby demonstrating that its subject is too vast to cover completely in a single volume. Several pertinent photographs are presented, including images of Bulgarian restaurants decorated with paraphernalia from the socialist era.
The Long Aftermath is a collection of documented research essays by twenty-one scholars from various nations and disciplines. The sub-title, Cultural Legacies of Europe at War 1936-2016, informs the reader that the book focuses on World War II, its ideological if not military "prequel," the Spanish Civil War (p. 23), and its effects or "aftermath" in the decades under discussion. Several chapters are devoted to each of seven European countries: Spain, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, Poland, and the USSR/Russia. The term "cultural legacies" is addressed rather broadly, encompassing personal memories, historical, political, and ideological commentary, and analyses of war-related literature and films. The articles focus on specific topics in detail, although some general conclusions emerge