The time of post-socialism: On the future of an anthropological concept

Abstract

When accounting for changes in the post-socialist era, anthropologists were forced to carefully distinguish between what had remained the same, what had actually changed and what was emerging anew and on its own terms. As a sub-discipline, the anthropology of post-socialism has thereby contributed prominently to theories of time, change and temporal agency. It has also shown that the post-socialist present is, if at all, as determined by its socialist past as it is by its insecure futures. Based on a few ethnographic examples from a former socialist model city in East Germany, and my own experiences as both a post-socialist anthropologist and an anthropologist of post-socialism, I scrutinize the temporal logic of the sub-discipline’s defining concept. I do so by testing its applicability to three objects of anthropological inquiry, and by pondering upon its implications for a more sustained study of the future. The temporal multiplicity that this concept affords, I claim, is crucial for the discipline overall, but demands further scrutiny. Rather than abandoning it, as I and others have previously argued, it is time to rewrite the time of post-socialism with regards to the future.

The affective fields of working class among ‘Eastern European’ migrants in the UK

“…This section further unpacks how temporalities shape the working class. The questions of ‘when and how long until one can achieve a better life’ cannot be reduced to postsocialist working class sensitivities (Chelcea, 2015; Ringel, 2022). These temporalities require closer reflection, beginning with the most dramatic chronos , the break from the Soviet Union toward postsocialist neoliberal capitalism.…”

Ethical Endeavours

“…Anselma Gallinat (2022b) demonstrates how ideological othering and post-socialist stigma are used in political discourses about eastern Germany. All the articles in the volume engage with the complex temporality of post-socialism, showing how 'past, present and future interweave, as beliefs about the past impact on perceptions in the present and suggest, open or close options for the future' (Gallinat 2022a: 108) -for instance in relationship to large socialist-era agrarian infrastructure that damages groundwater in Romania today (Dorondel and Posner 2022) or in the ways notions of socialism and post-socialism are deployed in Eastern Germany to make sense of current problems or envision future solutions (Ringel 2022).…”