Social construction of (post)postsocialist reality
Ethnographic research into the everyday
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 14712646 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Milena Simić (0000-0001-8072-5578, University of Belgrade, corresponding author), Marina Simic |
| Year | 2019 |
| Volume | 67 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 121-134 |
| Publication date | 2019-01-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Glasnik Etnografskog instituta (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0350-0861 • E-ISSN: 2334-8259 |
| Publisher | National Library of Serbia (PUBLISHER • RS) |
| DOI | 10.2298/gei1901121s |
| OpenAlex | W2970284113 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 18 |
In this paper, I want to discuss the main proposition from Berger and Luckmann’s seminal book, The social construction of reality (or. 1966) - the idea that the everyday is the arena through which the social world comes into being-and to pair it with the understanding of memories and everyday life in postsocialist studies. It seems that various disciplines dealing with postsocialism sometimes treat the memories of socialism as an untheorized background of the analysis. I propose that postsocialist studies should do better by actively engaging in understanding the memories of socialism (and its aftermath) as an active force in shaping the present that should be addressed not only through the narratives of the past, but through the concept of the “everyday.” For that purpose, I deploy the contemporary Western idea of ethnography as a specific qualitative study of the present that can be a useful tool for the understanding of society and social reality in the way they are described by Berger and Luckmann. I believe that Berger and Luckmann’s account may shed new light on some of the central topics of related to the post-Yugoslav predicament (like the state, society, morality, and “normality”) and I offer new readings of some scholarly works that deal with these concepts (including my own)
Aesthetics · Epistemology · Ethnography · Everyday life · Morality · Narrative · Political science · Politics · Proposition · Social reality · Social science · Socialism · Sociology · Anthropology · Balkans: History, Politics, Society · Eastern European Communism and Reforms · Law · Memory, Trauma, and Commemoration · Philosophy
The Past is a Foreign Country
Marxism and literature
Post-Soviet Chaos
Memory
Everyday Stalinism
Suicide
Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More
Moral (dis)order and social anomie
The Social Construction of Man, the State, and War
Durkheim, Morals And Modernity
Dead ends in the critique of (post)socialist anthropology
Economic concepts, common grounds and ‘new’ diversity in the Anthropology of post-socialism
The social construction of reality
The Social Construction of Power
Shortage, fuzzy property and other dead ends in the anthropological analysis of (post)socialism
On the Road to Normal
The time and space of everyday life
American Kitchens, Luxury Bathrooms, and the Search for a 'Normal' Life in Postsocialist Hungary
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |