The Vanishing Hectare: Property and Value in Postsocialist Transylvania

by Katherine Verdery

In most countries in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, the fall of communism opened up the possibility for individuals to acquire land. Based on Katherine Verdery's extensive fieldwork between 1990 and 2001, The Vanishing Hectare explores the importance of land and land ownership to the people of one Transylvanian community, Aurel Vlaicu. Verdery traces how collectivized land was transformed into private property, how land was valued, what the new owners were able to do with it, and what it signified to each of the different groups vying for land rights.

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.

Genres: Anthropology

448 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 2003

About the author

Katherine Verdery is Julien J. Studley Faculty Scholar and Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Since 1973 she has conducted field research in Romania, initially emphasizing the political economy of social inequality, ethnic relations, and nationalism. With the changes of 1989, her work shifted to problems of the transformation of socialist systems, specifically changing property relations in agriculture. From 1993 to 2000 she did fieldwork on this theme in a Transylvanian community; the resulting book, The Vanishing Hectare: Property and Value in Postsocialist Transylvania, was published by Cornell University Press (2003). She then completed a large collaborative project with Gail Kligman (UCLA) and a number of Romanian scholars on the opposite process, the formation of collective and state farms in Romania during the 1950s. The resulting book, Peasants under Siege: The Collectivization of Romanian Agriculture, 1949-1962, was published by Princeton University Press (2011).

Reviews

[Rhuff · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Post-socialist market transformation" underscores Pharaoh's old curse to the Hebrew slaves: let them make bricks without straw, and if they say they can't, it's their own fault so cut off their unproductive hands. The "market transition" of Romania did just this, by insisting on the division and individualizing of property without concern over the recipient's assets to give it value. Said value was (with foreseeable intent) appropriated by those with such capital assists: the IMF and other global financial institutions without, and state-subsidized developers within, as well as those individuals benefiting from extra or outside connections.

All these had a vested interest in "kicking away the ladder" (in Ha-Joon Chang's phase), to ensure privatization did not and could not work for the ordinary citizen. We see here the mechanics of "really existing capitalism", formed not according to self-serving theoretics but by the actions of the well-placed (foreigners, hereditary feudalists, state managers, etc.) transforming their insider legal advantages into market value, while throwing the "competition" (the majority) under the wheels of a market far from free or fair.

I do take issue with Verdery's description of re-emerging traditional agriculture as a symptom of present inequity, rather than a mere return to the past. She has a point; but traditional rural agriculture was *always* a forced reaction to systemic inequity and poverty. It is a recreation of the past, insofar as that past was an adaptation to parallel circumstances. This raises the issue of why collective farms were instituted upon the village in the first place: to prevent it from becoming a mere rural ghetto and a source of transient urban lumpen, as in so much of the "developing world." Removing the subsidized status of the collective farmer, giving him "property" that he can't profitably use because he can't afford to invest in it, created this very dynamic in Romania as it did elsewhere.

Verdery demonstrates that this is exactly how market value - and not just in land - is *designed* to work: to derive profit for the pre-advantaged few out of the intentionally impoverished majority; the latter hamstrung with liabilities derived from "austerity" and the desubsidizing of risk for those of "marginal utility." The whole scheme was skewered, like the market in general, for privileged insiders. For this reason I also take some issue with her characterization of national and local elites "still behaving like Communist apparatachiks." What did said apparatchiks behave like, if not feudal barons and bureaucrats? So again there is unbroken continuity in monopolizing land for the benefit of a self-chosen few. And - again - I can't help but see this as rooted in the nature of propertization itself. A more equitable (and realistic) distribution would have been based on use, and use-right, rather than exclusive entitlement. Land would still be a public trust, with usufruct privilege traded, sold, or bequeathed, but not the land itself.

An essential work for demythifying post-socialist studies and the "market revolution" in general: a deadly myth, like Pharaoh's, still forcing lethal consequences on millions of subjugated Europeans.

[Shasta · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really interesting, but dense and slow-going.