Postsocialist Eastern Europe is one region where economic restructurings coincide with state-building processes, both of which lead to a reordering of national values and a redefining of national identity. The former USSR continues to be a reference point for adults in western Ukraine as they make sense of ongoing uncertainties. The generation born after socialism and Ukraine's independence in 1991, however, has learned what life was like before it was transformed only through the accounts of others. As a result, the way these young people relate to the cultural, political, and economic elements associated with socialism and postsocialism are not the same as what the older generation expects of them. / Drawing upon ethnographic and linguistic data collected over sixteen months at two public schools in western Ukraine, this research examines how space and time work in concert to allow young people in contemporary Ukraine to make sense of the world they live in. Specifically, I apply Bakhtin's notion of the chronotope, a space-time association that underlies people's experiences and conceptions of personhood, to contend that teenagers draw upon multiple linkages between space and time in order to position themselves among their peers, within their local communities, and towards the wider global community. / My analysis suggests that teenagers position themselves in relation to different social identities by constructing multiple chronotopes of tradition and modernity. Specifically, I examine how these space-time associations underlie teenagers' attitudes towards out-migration, language use and linguistic variability. These chronotopes play an important role in how Ukrainian teenagers perceive the differences between the older and younger generations, between rural and urban residents, and between Ukrainians and the rest of the world. In addition, socioeconomic class and differing ideologies of language influence how space and time are valued within these dichotomous relationships. / An investigation such as this suggests that everyday encounters with change are only one way in which social transformation is experienced. People also draw upon space and time in order to contextualize change and understand its effect on their lives, an integral facet of experience that extends beyond any particular historical event or rupture.

In the eighteenth century, European rulers pursued a common policy of enlightened centralism, which assaulted the rights of self-governing corporations in the name of material, social, and economic progress. For the towns of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, enlightened centralism began under King Stanislaw August Poniatowski (r. 1764--1796) and continued uninterrupted through the partitions of Poland into the mid-nineteenth century. Employing the petitions, financial records, and demographic data of a select group of towns from Poland and Ukraine, this study investigates the consequences of enlightened centralization for the political and economic lives of burghers, Jews, and other town dwellers in Poland-Lithuania and some of its successor states: the Russian Empire (after 1795), Austrian West Galicia (1795--1809), the Duchy of Warsaw (1806--1815), and the Congress Kingdom of Poland (after 1815). A particular emphasis is placed on the fate of so-called private towns, which possessed royal charters and rights of self-government but belonged to individuals. When divorced from the effects of nineteenth-century industrialization and population growth, enlightened centralization in the towns of Poland-Lithuania did not produce the economic growth, administrative efficiency or social improvements that served to justify the abrogation of self-government in the minds of Enlightenment writers and many modern historians. Instead, centralizing policies weakened the political rights of townsmen, imposed enormous administrative costs, and substituted an ineffective and legalistic system for local control. Private towns fared the worst under centralization because state control undermined the ability and incentive of owners to offer attractive conditions to townsmen, and these unusual entities experienced an absolute decline in population and wealth after 1795.

Modern Ukrainian Paganism is a new religious movement that draws upon beliefs and practices from over a thousand years ago. It represents a mode of resistance to both the political oppression of Ukraine and the dominant position of Christianity in that country. Paganism spread among the urban Ukrainian intelligentsia in the North American diaspora after World War II, and developed actively in Ukraine after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Today, while experiencing a great decline in the diaspora, it is rapidly growing in Ukraine, involving many different Pagan communities and thousands of believers. / Pagans draw on a variety of sources including both historical chronicles containing information about old Slavic mythology and contemporary rural folklore that is believed to maintain remnants of the old pagan worldview. Although many folkloric forms have been appropriated by the Christian church, contemporary Pagans consider these elements to have originated in pre-Christian times and reclaim them for their own needs. / This work is the first extended study of Ukrainian Paganism in its post-Soviet East European context and in the North American diaspora, simultaneously comparing it with Western Paganism. It is based on ethnographic fieldwork, including participant observation of rituals and interviews with Pagans in both Ukraine and North America, as well as on archival and published materials. / While focusing predominantly on the revival of pagan folklore within this movement, this thesis demonstrates how the imagined past has become important for constructing an alternative national identity in modern contexts of socio-political turmoil. The thesis suggests that this cultural revival often has little to do with historical reality, since there is limited primary information available. Like other revivals, it involves the construction of new cultural forms through creative interpretations of the ancestral past. Moreover, the obscurity of the past allows individualistic interpretations that result in many variations of similar forms. These forms are examined in their relationship to the concepts of nationalism, gender, charisma and power, religious syncretism, and aesthetics. This work is multidisciplinary in nature as it draws upon theoretical frameworks developed in fields of folkloristics, anthropology, sociology, cultural studies and art criticism. It contributes to the understanding of modern cultural processes that shape the national consciousness of people in various parts of the world.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2009. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 70-06, Section: A, page: . Adviser: Carol Leff. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 190-203) Available on microfilm from Pro Quest Information and Learning.

<p> In the past ten years or more, social complexity has taken center stage as the focus of archaeologists working on the Eurasian steppe. The Middle Bronze Age Sintashta period, ca. 2100 - 1700 BC, is often assumed to represent the apex of social complexity for the Bronze Age in the southern Urals region. This assumption has been based on the appearance of twenty-two fortified settlements, chariot burials, and intensified metal production. Some of these studies have incorporated the emergence and subsequent development of mobile pastoralism as their primary foci, while others have concerned themselves primarily with early forms of metal production and their association with seemingly nascent social hierarchies. Such variables are useful indicators of more complex forms of social organization usually accompanied by strong degrees of demographic centralization and social differentiation.</p><p> This dissertation explores the relationship between demographic centralization and the balance between social differentiation and integration based on the data collected during archaeological survey of 142 square km around and between two Sintashta period settlements, Stepnoye and Chernorech'ye, located in the Ui River valley of the southern Urals region, Chelyabinsk Oblast, Russian Federation. Because of the multi-component nature of archaeological survey, materials recovered date from the Mesolithic to the twentieth century. However, the focus was on Bronze Age materials to better identify and evaluate changes between demographic centralization and social differentiation.</p><p> Center-hinterland dynamics and the use of historical capital (materials, practices, and places re-used in identifiable ways) were evaluated from the Middle Bronze Age Sintashta period through to the end of the Final Bronze Age. Based on the results of the Sintashta Collaborative Archaeological Research Project (SCARP) project, the ongoing work of Russian scholars, and the results of this dissertation, there is considerable evidence that it was in the Late Bronze Age that social complexity may have become more pronounced, even as the demographically centralized Sintashta period communities dispersed. The results of the landscape and materials analyses indicate strong possibilities for land-use and craft traditions carried through to the end of the Final Bronze Age, with such traditions acting as historical capital for later communities. </p>

<p> Demonstrations in response to the harsh austerity budget in Greece which cut valuable government services, and the civil unrest in Athens specifically, are an outward, visible response to economic crisis. In an androcentric society such as Greece, women are disproportionately affected by the austerity measures because of the feminization of budget cuts. This ethnographic study explores how middle class women in Athens are coping economically, politically and socially in a national and global financial crisis. Through studying middle class Greek women, one can intensively illustrate the faults of neoliberal economic policies that pride themselves on the creation of the so-called middle class while simultaneously eliminating it. This research examines the survival strategies and adaptation methods of middle class women in Athens as well as placing them within the global economic context further displaying the fallacy of neoliberal economic policies as an economic growth agenda.</p>

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This research explores selected cultural traditions and histories associated with the Pomaks, a community inhabiting the Rhodope Mountains of southwestern Bulgaria. They speak Bulgarian as a mother tongue, but profess Islam as their religion unlike the country's Orthodox Christian majority. Based on this linguistic unity, the Pomaks have been subjected to recurring forced assimilation since Bulgaria's independence from Ottoman rule in 1878. Today, taking advantage of Bulgaria's democratic rule, they are beginning to assert a heritage of their own making. Still, remnants of entrenched totalitarian mentality in the official cultural domain prevent any formal undertaking to that effect. / With the Pomaks as my case study, this research links the concept of heritage to identity and the way dissenting voices negotiate a niche for themselves in public spaces already claimed by rigid master narratives. I advocate pluralistic interpretation of heritage in the public domain, where master and vernacular narratives exist and often collide. Insofar as cultural diversity serves to enrich the heritage discourse, heritage professionals ought to serve as educators in society, not as creators of exclusionary master narratives. Using fieldwork, archival research, and available literature to support a relevant theoretical framework, I strive for understanding of what constitutes (Pomak) heritage and what ways there are to promote and preserve alternative narratives. Five stories regarding Pomak identity serve as my analytical frame of reference and constitute a premeditated effort to identify, formulate, and preserve in writing fundamental aspects of a highly contested and threatened heritage. / A striking example of a Pomak tradition which merits preservation is the elaborate wedding of Ribnovo, a small village in the western Rhodope. The wedding's most visible manifestation today is the elaborate and colorful mask of the bride, a ritual long gone extinct outside of Ribnovo. Four other case studies examine prominent aspects of Pomak heritage, including forced assimilation, nationalism, and historical narratives.

On the basis of extended field research in Sofia, Bulgaria, between 2004 and 2006, this project provides an ethnographic account of the predicament of art and culture producers after the end of socialism. The end of socialism deprived the Bulgarian intelligentsia from its economic security, prestige, and a sense of clear moral mission. Now young cutting-edge artists, writers, designers, theater directors and other culture producers seek a way out of this predicament and aspire to become moral leaders of the nation. Through ethnographic participant-observation at the lifestyle magazine Edno, a mouthpiece for this social segment, and through research radiating from the offices of the magazine to the fringes of contemporary Bulgarian art and culture, this project demonstrates that the new culture producers comprise a social segment in a state of flux, an elite in-the-making. While its future is uncertain---it could solidify in a new dominant faction of the intelligentsia, could disintegrate or could take the shape of a qualitatively new configuration---its present condition sheds light on post-socialist debates about artistic merit, the importance of national versus international recognition, and the changing value of cultural capital. The dissertation investigates how the young culture producers strategically code their artistic preferences and ways of life as "European," and demonstrates that they strategically capitalize on a historical local anxiety that Bulgaria is deficient and less modern than an imagined "Europe." The project is indebted to a Bourdieusian understanding of the relationship between taste and social class, and pays close attention to aesthetic preferences in two fields: lifestyle and creative work. At the same time, it departs from Bourdieu in recognizing that while well-suited to account for social reproduction, his model is less successful in explaining social production: the emergence of new social groups and the re-ordering of existing social relations in the context of rapid social change. The project addresses this problem through the prism of Foucauldian ethics. It suggests that the young culture producers have an at least partially correct understanding of their objective circumstances and consciously reflect on the mismatch between their expectations, and the reality of post-socialist Bulgaria.