In an attempt to facilitate the task of charting a path toward a radically different future, a future without the bourgeois intellectual property regime (IPR), this dissertation searches back in history by examining China's loss of socialism. The guiding question can be formulated thus: Why did the People's Republic of China give up its socialist mode of intellectual production only to embrace the bourgeois intellectual property regime (IPR), which had been subjected to devastating criticism by progressive scholars in the West since mid-1990s? Situating this rupture of China's approach to intellectual production within the ongoing process of postsocialist structuration in the wake of the waning Chinese socialism, this dissertation focuses on Chinese intellectuals as social mediators and locates the traces of the loss of socialism in various cultural productions during the postsocialist era.

This ethnographic dissertation research project examines HIV prevention programs in Warsaw, Poland to explore the concurrent processes of democratization and privatization as Poland begins European Union accession. As inherently political public health interventions, HIV prevention programs provoke discussions of risk and responsibility, and visions of the moral social order. Therefore, they can be used to understand the ways in which politically and socially marginalized populations invoke claims to citizenship status through attention to health issues. From an epidemiological perspective, HIV/AIDS arrived in Poland relatively late (1985) and never reached the anticipated epidemic levels. In the 1980s, drawing attention to the potential threat of AIDS served as a forum through which the perceived failures of the socialist government could be publicly addressed. In the 1990s calls for improved access to AIDS information suggested that to be democratic meant to have open and easy access to scientific information, and debate surrounding the establishment of AIDS care facilities suggested that to be European was to be tolerant. However, issues of information and tolerance were problematic in reference to homosexuality. Prior to the advent of AIDS in Poland, socialist gender and sexual ideologies converged with Catholic notions of proper morality to marginalize and pathologize homosexuality. Nascent gay organizations saw the potential of HIV prevention as a way to justify the value of such organizations for the greater good of society. The possibility of controlling and participating in the task of HIV prevention presented an alternative to statesponsored surveillance under the guise of HIV prevention and encouraged public dialogue about the issues gays face in their daily lives. Whereas the national HIV prevention agenda focuses on risks as equally distributed across Polish society, a central component of the HIV prevention programs within Polish gay rights and drug abuse prevention organizations is harm reduction. As practiced by Polish gay organizations, a harm reduction philosophy draws attention to heterogeneity within gays and challenges the construction of them as a coherent risk group. These programs deemphasize sexuality in favor of a wider constellation of factors that contribute to finding oneself in situations that can lead to risky behavior.

Based on a long-term ethnography inside a block of flats in Piatra-Neamt, Romania, this thesis explores how individuals, through everyday creative engagements with their apartments, try to come to terms with the uncertainties of a rapidly changing society - one caught between the vulnerabilities of both socialism and capitalism. It examines the inhabitants' capacity for self-organization, with a focus on the daily life of a block administrator overseeing the maintenance and repair of his ageing building. By paying close attention to a range of infrastructural elements often taken for granted - from water taps and boilers, to balconies and windows - my research offers new insights into how people negotiate complex relationships of trust and suspicion in the light of degrading infrastructure. Within the context of increasingly decentralized resources, I also demonstrate various difficulties involved in sustaining day-to-day practices of energy-saving, and discuss the block inhabitants' multifaceted understanding of the 'common good'. Finally, I emphasize how apartment renovations are fuelled by motivations that are at once aesthetic and functional, and thus problematize the distinction between these two categories that has dominated anthropological studies of the built environment to this day. My thesis contrasts the well-established literature about the home - that pays attention to aesthetics and identity at the micro-scale of the domestic space - with recent studies about infrastructure that typically examine macro-scale, functional reasons for urban transformations. Overall, I argue for a more prominent role for the study of home infrastructures in anthropology, while also contributing to debates about housing and energy policies.

This thesis uses the secular coming-of-age ritual, Jugendweihe (‘youth consecration’), as a locus for exploring the ways kinship and politics in Germany are complexly intertwined. Although Jugendweihe emerged in the mid-19th century as a substitute for ecclesiastical coming-of-age rituals, and was adopted by various movements, it is closely associated with the former GDR (German Democratic Republic/East Germany). Under the GDR, young people aged thirteen to fourteen prepared for their Jugendweihe ceremony in ten ‘youth lessons’, which aimed to craft ‘socialist personalities’. Between 1955 and 1989 more than seven million adolescents pledged allegiance to the GDR state during the public ceremony, which was followed by a family celebration. With the demise of state socialism in 1989-90, western observers and the Churches assumed the ritual would vanish, but Jugendweihe continues to be celebrated in contemporary eastern Germany – without a pledge of allegiance. Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted between November 2012 and January 2014 in Thuringia, this thesis investigates the changed social relations between individuals, families, and the state in eastern Germany after the political caesura of 1989-90. It explores the ritual’s abiding relevance within a different socio-political context, and considers how the ritual’s metamorphosis is mediated both through the local Jugendweihe Association and the grandparental and parental generations. The research examines what values grandparents and parents, who were socialised under the GDR, seek to transmit to their offspring born after the GDR state’s demise. It demonstrates the continued (and changing) salience of connections between kinship, ritual, and politics in contemporary Germany.

Within societies at war, the source of social change is not confined to the front lines of battle or the political leadership, nor are the sole effects of warfare the violent loss of life and political upheaval. War also leads to shifts in social relations and narratives through processes driven by civilian actors. In this dissertation, I examine how social life was transformed during war through the case of civilian volunteering in the Donbas conflict by drawing upon feminist scholarship on war, the sociology of gender, postsocialist studies, and the sociological literature on volunteering. This study is grounded in qualitative research conducted in Kyiv, Ukraine from September 2015 through June 2016, including eighty-two semi-structured interviews with volunteers, participant observation in volunteer networks, and secondary data derived from social media, news organizations, and government releases. My research expands what it means to study wartime change by bringing civilians’ lives and experiences into the center of such research. As volunteering entered the forefront of social life in Ukraine, it became a site for reimagining state-society relations alongside ideals of civic engagement and state care. I argue that the hybrid discourses of volunteers reflected a combination of neoliberal concepts and socialist demands that were characteristic of a borderlands, where multiple cross-cutting discourses are negotiated by local actors. The central role of volunteers within the war effort in Ukraine also brought visibility and status to the contributions of women, who are often invisible or constructed as secondary within wartime narratives. In effect, volunteering marked a space of gendered change during the Donbas conflict. I argue that women’s volunteering both challenged and reinforced hierarchical gender structures while creating a societal space for experiencing human connection amidst conflict. My research contributes to the global study of gender and war by investigating paths towards transforming gender hierarchies. I further work to shift the feminist focus to the local realities of wartime actors, and not just questions of women’s empowerment.

La Grèce et la République de Macédoine entretiennent des relations aussi intenses que complexes. C'est dans ce contexte, qui a vu passer la République de Macédoine du statut de république yougoslave à celui d'Etat indépendant que se place l'analyse des relations transfrontalières entretenues à l'échelle locale. Dans un premier temps, ce travail explore les processus transfrontaliers en cours afin de les documenter avant de les analyser au regard des processus sociaux à l’œuvre de part et d’autre de cette frontière. Cette analyse se base sur l'approche par le biais des recompositions en vue d’appréhender de façon combinée l'influence du passé et des enjeux contemporains sur les processus socio-spatiaux en cours dans les espaces étudiés. Se basant sur l’hypothèse selon laquelle les évolutions passées peuvent être mobilisées dans le cadre des diverses relations transfrontalières d’aujourd’hui, l’étude de l’histoire de la région et des multiples processus de fragmentation est nécessaire afin d’en analyser les résurgences. Ce travail s’oriente alors sur l’identification des acteurs de ces relations, des cadres dans lesquels ils agissent et des éléments mobilisés au fil de la relation construite pour en identifier les mécanismes et conséquences dans les sociétés frontalières étudiées, tout en prêtant une attention particulière aux dimensions culturelles et ethniques le long d’une frontière caractérisée par la présence transnationale de plusieurs groupes linguistiques ou ethniques. La construction de ces groupes ethniques et leurs évolutions contemporaines est ainsi examinée sous l’angle de leurs liens possibles avec les modalités de la relation transfrontalière. / Nowadays, Greece and the Republic of Macedonia are connected through intense but complex cross-border relations despite the name issue. The study of the these relations at the local level is taking place in that context that saw the Republic of Macedonia evolving from the status of member state of the Yugoslav federation to an independent state with European fate. The first aim of this research is to explore these cross-border relations in order to testify and document it. Several frames of cross-border relations are targeted through this work. In a context of economic crisis, border appears as a resource for an informal economy exploiting the economic and commercial differences between the countries. On the same way, the European integration process is also promoting cross-border relations through cross-border cooperation. But all actors are not equal regarding these processes in an area of cultural diversity. The approach through recompositions allows us to analyze the influence and interactions of past and contemporary issues in borderlands and their societies. Starting from the hypothesis that pasts historical events in the area are influencing the actual cross-border relations, the study of regional history and fragmentation processes that divided it is necessary to analyze its resurgences. Therefore, the issue is to identify the actors of these relations, the frame in which they locate their actions and the elements they mobilize for it by giving a special attention to cultural and ethnic dimensions. The building of ethnic groups and their contemporary evolutions will be analyzed through their possible connections with the cross-border relations’ modalities.

Background: In this dissertation I examine the political economy of the post-socialist mortality crisis as experienced in deindustrialising towns in Hungary. I develop and apply a relational political economy of health framework, putting emphasis on the economic institutions of post-socialist dependent capitalism in Hungary, as embedded in the semi-periphery of the global economy, their gendered implications and their cultural construction. Methods: I follow a mixed-method strategy combining quantitative and qualitative analyses. I rely on a novel dataset comprising data on settlement, enterprise, and individual levels. 260 companies and 52 towns were analysed in two waves. I group towns into severely and moderately deindustrialised categories (1989-1995); as well as into dominant state, domestic private and foreign ownership dominated categories (1995-2004). Population surveys in these towns collected data on the vital status and other characteristics of survey respondents' relatives. I assess the relationship between deindustrialisation, dominant ownership and the mortality of individuals by random intercept multilevel discrete-time survival modelling. I also investigate the health implications of the lived experience of economic transformation in four towns with diverging privatisation and deindustrialisation histories through a qualitative thematic analysis of 82 in-depth semi-structured interviews. Findings: Severe deindustrialisation is associated with a significantly larger odds of mortality for men between 1989 and 1995 (OR=1.12; 95%CI=1.00-1.26; p=0.042). On the other hand, prolonged state ownership is related to a significantly lower odds of dying among women, compared to towns dominated by domestic private ownership (OR=0.74; 95%CI=0.62-0.90; p=0.002) or towns dominated by foreign investment (OR=0.79; 95%CI=0.65-0.96; p=0.019) between 1995 and 2004. The multi-sited semi-structured qualitative interviews revealed that companies are central institutions in the cognitive maps of workers and that the fates of these companies affected the health of workers in multiple ways, whereas state involvement was perceived as a cushioning mechanism. Interpretation: Severe deindustrialisation was a crucial factor behind the post-socialist mortality crisis for men, whilst prolonged state ownership was associated with the protection of life chances for women. The indirect economic benefits of foreign investment do not translate automatically into better health. Rapid economic transformations threaten health; they should be avoided where possible, but if this is not possible, strong safety nets should be in place.

Was charakterisiert eine postsozialistische Stadt? Dieser Frage geht die Arbeit am Beispiel der georgischen Hauptstadt Tbilisi in den Jahren 2008 bis 2012 nach. „Postsozialistisch“ wird dabei nicht nur als spezifische Transformation der Gesellschaft, sondern auch als gesellschaftliche Praxis der Abgrenzung vom Sozialismus definiert; somit werden ausgewählte Praktiken der Transformation der einst sozialistischen Stadtlandschaft und des einst sozialistischen urbanen Alltags ins Zentrum der Untersuchung gestellt. Über den Vergleich touristischer Stadtpläne von 1980 und 2008 wird in der Arbeit den Veränderungen der Repräsentation und somit auch der Konzeption von Stadt nachgegangen. Anhand der regierungskritischen Proteste im Frühjahr 2009 werden unterschiedliche Protestpraktiken und die gegenseitigen Zuschreibungen der politischen Akteure analysiert. Ein zen¬traler Fokus der Analysen liegt dabei auf den Themen der Auseinandersetzungen rund um die Proteste – den Interpretationen von Zivilgesellschaft und der damit verbundenen (Un-)Sichtbarkeit der Akteure des Protests – sowie auf den Motiven des Protests und den Strategien ihrer Entpolitisierung. Im Transect durch die Stadt werden die unterschiedlichen Praktiken und Akteure der städtischen Rekonstruktion in öffentlichen und privaten Räumen mit Blick auf die Partizipationsmöglichkeiten für unterschiedliche Bevölkerungsgruppen untersucht. Die Arbeit beschäftigt sich mit den postsozialistischen Ausschlüssen der neuen georgischen Nationsbildung, die mit der „sozialistischen Sozialisation“ der Betroffenen legitimiert werden und dadurch eine kritische Diskussion der neoliberalen gesellschaftlichen Tranformation verhindern. / What are the characteristics of post-socialist cities? This question underlies my research about the post-socialist transformations in the Georgian capital Tbilisi, carried out between 2008 and 2012. I understand the notion ‘post-socialist’ as an indicator for a specific form of transformation and as a practice of differentiation from the ‘socialist’: the socialist urban landscape and everyday life. Based on the comparison of touristic city-maps from 1980 and 2008 I carve out the transformations of the urban representation and conceptualization of the city’s space. At the example of the anti-government protests in spring 2009, I analyse different protest practices and ascriptions applied to different political actors. The analytical focus is put on the central topics negotiated around the protests: on the understanding of civil society and the subsequent (in-)visibility of the actors of the protests as well as on the motivations to protest and the strategies of their depolitization. A transect through the city opens the view on different practices of transforming urban public and private spaces, asking for different degrees and ways of participating in the process of societal modernization. In sum, the analysis reveals how the new Georgian nation building excludes the ‘socialist’ through the construction and stigmatization of a ‘socialist habitus’, therewith, inhibiting a critical revision of the ongoing neoliberal transformations.

<p>This dissertation, Mobile Ethnicity, examines the formation of a transnational ethnic working class and the dynamics of remittance development in the context of Korean Chinese labor migration between China and Korea. I conducted multi-sited field research for over two years, mainly in Seoul, South Korea, and the Korean Chinese Autonomous Prefecture of Yanbian, China, the ethnic zone bordering North Korea. My ethnography is built on a local saying: "Everybody is gone with the Korean Wind." The Korean Wind is the popular name for the massive Korean Chinese transnational labor migration to South Korea that occurred mostly during the 1990s and 2000s, at the intersection of post-Cold War and post-socialist cultures. I especially highlight the Korean Wind as a unique product of China's economic reform and open economy (gaigekaifang), which has affected not only Korean Chinese but also Han Chinese in Yanbian and elsewhere in the region.</p><p> Through the lenses of kinship, development, money, love, bodies, and time, I analyze the new affect and materiality, new forms of belonging and dwelling, and new hopes and frustrations of mobile ethnicity. On the one hand, I trace the reconstituted subjectivity of Korean Chinese as a particular ethnic working class in a transnational setting. On the other hand, I map the re-characterized ethnic space of Yanbian as a borderland traversed by a myriad of different agents. Caught between the "Korean dream" and the "Chinese dream," Korean Chinese have chosen transnational mobility as a way of dealing with the contingencies of neoliberalism and globalization. But their way of working for a better future has created unexpected vulnerabilities, sealing them into a circuit of migration as a transnational ethnic working class. </p><p> This ethnography illuminates the ripple effects of the Korean Wind with a focus on remittances, as Korean Chinese have discovered, promoted, and deployed their ethnic currency in the transnational labor market. On a macro level, remittances play a critical role in relocating populations (both pulling them into spaces and pulling them out), and create an intersection of internal migration and transnational migration, thereby reshaping the ethnic relationships and spatial characteristics of the region. I emphasize the vulnerable characteristics of a remittance-dependent economy, which fluctuates in response to exchange rates and global economic forces. On a personal level, remittances are not only gifts or realizations of familial duty, but also an unstable form of currency requiring careful management and submission to a peculiar temporality of long waits and unknown futures. The life built upon the contingent flow of remittances has created and been impacted by the transnational temporality, constantly moving back and forth between the sharply split worlds; working and resting, making money and spending money, Korea and Yanbian. Rigid visa regulations by the Korean government especially force migrant workers into a "split life," as they must weave two different worlds into a common everyday life, and discipline their bodies to switch easily between two different modes of time. </p><p> This study examines "Yanbian Socialism" that has responded to and intersected with the Korean Wind, a particular socialism that stresses overt expressions of the Korean Chinese political faith in China while acknowledging the prefecture's cultural and economic links to Korea. My dissertation aims to weave together an account of the particular structure of feeling experienced by Korean Chinese as they are caught between confusion and hesitation, contention and contradiction, economic desperation and political caution. I view their constant adjustments and revisions as a major influence on the formation of mobile ethnicity. My work thus provides a new understanding of the politics of class and gender among Chinese ethnic minorities, articulated through transnational mobility at the intersection of post-Cold War, post-socialist, and neoliberal currents across and beyond East Asia.</p> / Dissertation

Neighborhood in Minsk built for the workers of the tractor plant became a site of creation of soviet man. Architecture of socialist realism itself played a positive role: it played in tune with postwar longing for peaceful life in privacy, with family with comfortable structure of enclosed blocks, and at the same time created a background and scenery of life that elevated man through classicist image. Village youth came to the site driven by the postwar hunger and need to reconstruct their lives together with the country. They became workers, appropriated shop floor practice and were life-long recipients of the soviet distribution system that included housing as the main resource. People learned to live and work for future, "when communism arrives", withdrawing to privacy from the slogans, not paying attention to the latter but in that very moment rejecting the sphere of public life its real power, denying possibility to change.