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Self-sufficiency of the house is practiced in many parts of the world but ignored in economic theory, just as socialist collectivization is assumed to have brought household self-sufficiency to an end. The ideals of self-sufficiency, however, continue to shape economic activity in a wide range of postsocialist settings. This volume’s six comparative studies of postsocialist villages in Eastern Europe and Asia illuminate the enduring importance of the house economy, which is based not on the market but on the order of the house. These formations show that economies depend not only on the macro institutions of markets and states but also on the micro institutions of families, communities, and house economies, often in an uneasy relationship.
“…the volume offers possibilities for fruitfully reconsidering enduring topics and issues in economic theory that are of great interest not just to anthropologists but to other social scientists and economic philosophers.” · Anthropos
“These studies make a timely contribution to postsocialist studies, wherein anthropologists grapple with the transformative effects of collectivization and subsequent privatization of productive resources. They also offer enduring insights into the way people sharpen or blur boundaries between household and market, especially with regard to particular lives. These understandings resonate throughout anthropology.” · Anthropological Forum
“The readable and theoretically important ethnographies in Oikos & Market, as should be apparent, not only provide interesting insights on contemporary life in Eastern Europe but challenge a number of widely-held assumptions about economics, the household and the market, and the meaning of 'self-sufficiency.' …the case studies represent anthropology at its best, in refuting generalizations and exposing the valuable of the mundane.” · Anthropology Review Database
“The volume presents a compilation of well written ethnographic accounts of ideals and practices of self-sufficiency in a wide range of postsocialist settings. Historically contextualised, the individual contributions stress the strong values placed on self-sufficiency in virtually all of the localities, as well as the various ways and degrees to which actors try to come close to it.” · Tatjana Thelen, University of Vienna
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Self-Sufficiency as Reality and as Myth
Stephen Gudeman and Chris Hann
Chapter 1. The Ideal of Self-Sufficiency and the Reality of Dependence: A Hungarian Case
Bea Vidacs
Chapter 2. How Much is Enough? Household Provisioning, Self-Sufficiency and Social Status in Rural Moldova
Jennifer R. Cash
Chapter 3. When the Household Meets the State: Ajvar Cooking and Householding in Postsocialist Macedonia
Miladina Monova
Chapter 4. Self-Sufficiency is Not Enough: Ritual Intensification and Household Economies in a Kyrgyz Village
Nathan Light
Chapter 5. “They Work in a Closed Circle”: Self-Sufficiency in House-Based Rural Tourism in the Rhodope Mountains, Bulgaria
Detelina Tocheva
Chapter 6. Self-Sufficiency and “Being One’s Own Master” among Transylvanian Forest Dwellers
Monica Vasile
Notes on Contributors
Index