Anthropology of
East Europe Review © 1993 DePaul University. Author retains the right to all reproductions of this article. To discuss fair use of this article, or to request permission to reproduce the article, contact the author (if the name is highlighted, you can email the author directly), or use the AEER Response Page.
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Robert Rotenberg
DePaul University
Since this is the first number of the Review that I am taking complete responsibility for, I feel some obligation to put forward a manifesto. I will resist the urge and talk about the role that I hope the newsletter can play in our scholarly community.
Like Eastern Europe itself, our community is under going a Wende. Many of our research agendas were formulated under the conditions of super-power competition and the restrictions on information under Stalinist regimes. To a great extent, these conditions no longer exist. We are on the verge of discovering exactly how much these conditions influenced how were framed our questions, how we devised our research methods and how we established structures of authority to evaluate the results.
After a draught of almost a decade, a whole new generation of anthropologists, now in the latter stages of graduate school are turning their attention to Eastern Europe. They are doing so under new geopolitical conditions and different structures of authority for evaluating their research. This review should serve as a meeting place for these different generations perspectives on East Europe. It should be a place of debate, of discussion, of sharing experiences, and of exploring the new social experiences of our friends and coworkers in Eastern Europe.
This issue is a step in that direction. It includes a number of disturbing and compelling accounts of field experiences. In this issue, we learn of the impact of the Western experts in Romania, of the verities of gender relations in Russia, and the representation of the Other through contemporary ethnographic films. The first of what I hope will be a volume of mail on the Special Issue appear in this number. We also pause to acknowledge the loss of a colleague.
I need your cooperation in continuing this effort. I need you to react to these articles. I need you to send me your impressions of changes you observe in the East European communities you know well while doing research. I need you to write book and film reviews. I need you to submit articles for other to react to. This review is not refereed. It is not a journal of recorded. Were it to become so, it would lose the immediacy and openness that is its strength.
Copies of the special issue are available for classroom use at $10 per copy to college bookstores. Have your bookstores contact me by phone or fax for more information.
The deadline for the Autumn issue of AEER is September 30, 1994. Please do not wait for the last moment. If I can get submissions as early at mid-July, I can do much more with them.