The State of the Art of Central European Anthropology

The image that the state of art in anthropological enterprise in Central and Eastern European countries under communist regimes was unified is inadequate. Of course, there were some unifying factors. Similar nomenclature in academic system was accepted in the whole region and, with exception of Yugoslavia, the discipline was called ‘ethnography’. As a matter of fact, in the first postwar decades it was almost universally understood as a historical science focusing on the reconstruction of traditional forms of folk culture that were considered highly important for the ideology of people’s democracies and, somewhat paradoxically, for the nationalist cause. Changes in the period of a rapid socialist modernization should be also documented. Therefore, a sort of an ethnographic paradigm of research was established. However, in ‘Late Socialism’, already in the 1970s and 1980s, in countries like Poland, Yugoslavia and Hungary, a new research and interpretation models developed, triggering a sort of an ‘anthropological turn’ that diversified the picture of the discipline in the region. In result, at the moment of political shifts between 1981 and 1991 there was no one model of dominant ‘socialist ethnography’.

In the post-socialist period new several new factors came into play: changes in the educational system and financing of science, more research opportunities abroad and an intensified inflow of anthropological ideas. These general circumstances have caused numerous changes in an already intellectually diversified region, but at the same time can be seen as conditioning forces causing an existence of some common patterns. They should be considered as multifarious intellectual, personal and institutional interactions viewed within a wider framework of transnational (external) and ‘intra-national’ (internal) academic relations. An overall ‘anthropologisation’ of the discipline means theoretical and topical multiplicity and openness to the ideas imported mostly from metropolitan anthropologies. It means also a specific fashion for the trade mark ‘anthropology’ among social scientists, many of whom – after loosing their former disciplinary harbors like, for instance, ‘scientific atheism’ – have been searching for new identities and safe heavens. It brought popularization, but at the same time ‘deprofessionalisation’ of the enterprise. Fixation on the ‘West’ caused also a disruption in regional research cooperation that only recently has been in some rare cases re-established. Western style ‘anthropologisation’ involves also that certain hierarchies of knowledge have been established in which Anglo-American ideas are often considered more valuable and therefore dominant. This hegemony translates into new relations of power within Central and Eastern European academia. Labels such as ‘anthropology’ and ‘ethnography’ are used in struggles for symbolic, social and, last but not least, economic capitals.

In the midst of these complex transformations anthropology in Central and Eastern Europe is slowly but steadily establishing itself as a sound scholarly discipline that becomes a part (hopefully somehow distinct) of a European and world anthropologies.