Short Abstract

This roundtable explores what a return to postsocialist ethnography as an ‘archive’, documenting nearly four decades of transformations, can offer to the understanding of current crises of liberalism.

Long Abstract

The advent and eventual collapse of state socialist regimes were among the most profound moments of social change in 20th-century Europe. State socialism was conceived as an institutionalised critique of liberal modernity, a teleological project that sought to create a comprehensive alternative to capitalism and liberal democracy. The dissolution of these regimes after 1989 inaugurated a tumultuous period in which socialist institutions and ways of life were often purposefully dismantled or otherwise eroded. Post-socialist societies experienced rapid political and economic change that was meant to (and for some, did) bring democratization and prosperity, and integrated them into the capitalist world-system.

As a laboratory of social change, the (post)socialist East occupies a special place in anthropology. Having accompanied and studied postsocialist transitions to liberal modernity since their beginning, we have accumulated a vast postsocialist ‘archive — decades of ethnographies, fieldnotes, and theoretical interventions — that document and theorise these changes and offer a privileged vantage for unsettling the certainties of capitalist modernity and liberal progress in the moment of unipolar U.S. hegemony.

Today, as that hegemony seems to be crumbling, this archive feels simultaneously indispensable and exhausted. Indispensable because it contains long-term evidence for the crises accompanying the decline of informal empires and regime change — authoritarian retrenchment, predatory capitalism, inter-imperial dynamics, and racialized migration. Exhausted because these very crises seem to have erased the conditions for accepting postsocialist critique as universally valid: the epistemic infrastructures, institutional audiences, and political narratives that once made the archive’s lessons legible have been transformed or delegitimised.

This roundtable explores what a return to postsocialist ethnography as an ‘archive’, documenting nearly four decades of transformations, can offer to the understanding of current crises of liberalism.