Blackwell Reference Online

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The socialist economies of Eastern Europe did not have any property system … governing their productive activities. ( Frydman and Rapaczynski 1994 : 11) Ownership is the back-bone of the economic system of Socialist countries. ( Knapp 1975 : 64) Anthropological study of “actually existing” socialism was just gathering momentum when the events of 1989 effectively ended its existence in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. Over 20 years of research had produced a variety of writing on processes of socialist planning, rural political economy, kinship, gender, ritual, and ethnic and national identity; collectively, these works were beginning to reveal the lineaments of how socialist societies operated and how they differed from each other. Summarizing one clear result, Ernest Gellner observed that socialism's defining trait was the exhaustive invasion of the economic by the political. Perhaps nowhere else was the phrase “political economy” so apt a description. In this sense, “politics,” although manifest in most anthropological writing on socialism, had not been the focus of scholarly argument: rather, it simply permeated that work. To grasp the intertwining of the political with the economic (and with everything else) would prove essential to comprehending trajectories out of socialism after 1989. One area of which this was particularly true was the transformation of property, ... log in or subscribe to read full text