Memory of the Communist Past as a Research Field

Abstract

More than three decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the debate over the study of socialism continues. Socialism is not a closed page for the researchers, not at least because we keep living with its consequences. By prioritising the "bottom-up" perspective and studying the problems of everyday life under socialism, anthropology has a specific role among the social sciences. The insight into the fabric of everyday life gives the anthropologists a chance to contribute to the understanding of socialism as a unique experience in human history.An inexhaustive overview reminds us that the anthropology of socialism 1 took shape in the 1970s as an Anglophone field of research and as a manifestation of the theoretical renovation of social anthropology (Hann, 2009: 134-135). After the publication of the results of pioneering studies, carried out through field work in Eastern Europe and Eurasia since the 1970s, "the empirical harvest was immensely valuable" (ibid: 135). There is no doubt that both the climate of the cold war and the personal political stance of the authors have influenced the way whereby they present "the ethnographic facts". Some of the most valuable investigations conducted during the last two decades of socialism (