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Paper short abstract:

The conceptual purchase of ‘post-socialism’ as a category has been recently questioned from point of its descriptive relevance for understanding contemporary Eastern Europe and the former Soviet space. I propose instead to approach it through the lens of ‘temporalisation’ (Koselleck).

Paper long abstract:

In his insightful and provocative essay ‘Good-bye, postsocialism!’, Martin Müller (2019) evokes the movie Good-Bye Lenin to suggests letting go of the temporal analytics of rupture and the vanishing that underpin this concept. Müller adds to a recurrent and important debate in the anthropology of this region. His own preferred lens are spatial: those of the Global East with multiple global interconnections and hierarchies. In this paper I treat the temporal dimension of postsocialism not as a conceptual solution to be argued for or against but an ethnographic problem that I suggest exploring through the lens of the anthropology of time. By looking how temporalisation is implicated in the relations of power, I submit that for understanding divergent historical trajectories in this region from the EU integration to the rise of right-wing populism and statism can be productively explored through their different teleological ends and ways in which they draw distinctions of the ‘new’ and the ‘old’, incorporating different modalities of the ‘old’ into the ‘new’. Furthermore, I argue that this temporalisation has a longer history which is only partially this region’s but has to do with the temporality that is endemic to the categories of ‘society’, ‘the social’ and ‘socialism’. My case in point is the relations of exchange between the temporalities of these categories, and those of the market and empire in a reindeer herding and hunting collective in Sub-Arctic Siberia.