Katherine Verdery N E T

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The Political Lives of Dead Bodies: Reburial and Postsocialist Change (1999)

After 1989, scores of bodies across Eastern Europe were exhumed and brought to rest in new gravesites. This book, winner of the 1999 Heldt Prize in Slavic Studies, investigates why certain corpses–the bodies of revolutionary leaders, heroes, artists and other luminaries, as well as more humble folk–took on political life in the turbulent times following [...]

The Vanishing Hectare: Property and Value in Postsocialist Transylvania (2003)

In most countries of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, the fall of communism opened the possibility for individuals to repossess land their families had owned prior to the communists’ collectivization of agriculture. Based on extensive field research between 1990 and 2001, this book explores the importance of land and landownership to the people [...]

National Ideology under Socialism: Identity and Cultural Politics in Ceausescu’s Romania (1991)

This book is about the politicking that took place around the Romanian national idea during the socialist period. Based on the theoretical model of socialism that Verdery also published in the articles “Theorizing Socialism” and “What Was Socialism and Why Did It Fall,” this book analyzes disputes in the field of cultural production in which ideas [...]

What Was Socialism, and What Comes Next? (1996)

Among the first anthropologists to work in Eastern Europe, Katherine Verdery had built up a significant base of ethnographic and historical expertise when the major political transformations in the region began to take place. In this collection of essays dealing with the aftermath of Soviet-style socialism and the different forms that may replace it, she [...]