The Vanishing Hectare: Property and Value in Postsocialist Transylvania
About this ebook
Verdery tells this story about transforming socialist property forms in a global context, showing the fruitfulness of conceptualizing property as a political symbol, as a complex of social relations among people and things, and as a process of assigning value. This book is a window on rural life after socialism but it also provides a framework for assessing the neo-liberal economic policies that have prevailed elsewhere, such as in Latin America. Verdery shows how the trajectory of property after socialism was deeply conditioned by the forms property took in socialism itself; this is in contrast to the image of a "tabula rasa" that governed much thinking about post-socialist property reform.
About the author
Katherine Verdery is Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the City University of New York Graduate Center. She is the author of Transylvanian Villagers, The Political Lives of Dead Bodies, What Was Socialism, and What Comes Next?, and National Ideology under Socialism and the coeditor of Property in Question: Value Transformation in the Global Economy.
