Transylvanian Villagers: Three Centuries of Political, Economic, and Ethnic Change

by Katherine Verdery

What determines the shape and texture of life in small communities in Eastern Europe? How do historical processes of change determine the social forms of the present? What forms of ethnic identifications take in Eastern Europe? This first English-language work on Transylvanian rural society approaches these questions by weaving together history, sociology, and ethnography.

438 pages, Hardcover

First published November 2, 1983

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).