Resources and Everyday Conflicts in Rural Ukraine: Theorizing Social Change

Social change is a topic of central interest in the social sciences. The upheavals and reforms that swept across former socialist states in Eurasia offer a rich array of case studies to deepen our understanding of this phenomenon. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in an ethnically Bulgarian community in rural Ukraine, Deema Kaneff uniquely brings to light a range of hidden conflicts and everyday tensions, as well as new alliances and solidarities resulting from the redistribution of resources following Ukrainian independence. A focus on five key resources provides a means to explore the way in which relationships were contested and renegotiated in this small community, with implications that go far beyond those boundaries.

Deema Kaneff is a Reader in Social Anthropology at the University of Birmingham in the UK and an Associate at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle, Germany. She has carried out long term fieldwork in Bulgaria and Ukraine and her research interests focus on property/resources and social change, social inequalities and migration. Deema is the Series Editor for a book series on Anthropologies of Eurasia: Ethnographic Encounters of Social Change (CEU Press), and a member of the Editorial Board for a book series on European Studies in Socio-Cultural Anthropology and Ethnology, (Berghahn Press). She is also a member of the board of a number of journals, including: Südosteuropa. Journal of Politics and Society;Bulgarska Ethnologia (Bulgarian Ethnology) and Ethnologia Balkanica (Balkan Ethnology). Deema is a founding member of the International Association for Southeast European Anthropology (InASEA) and a member of the European Association for Social Anthropologists (EASA). She is the author of a monograph based on her Bulgarian research: 2004 Who Owns the Past? The Politics of Time in a ’Model’ Bulgarian Village, Oxford: Berghahn, as well as numerous other edited volumes and journal publications.