This book focuses on survival strategies developed at local levels in response to changing cultural, political and economic structures in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. An interdisciplinary approach is adopted as the contributors engage with questions of gender, ethnicity, migration, nationalism, employment and labour patterns and changing family structures.

This book is a collection of articles by anthropologists and social scientists concerned with gendered labour, care, intimacy and sexuality, in relation to mobility and the hardening of borders in Europe. Interrogating the relation between physical, geopolitical borders and ideological, conceptual boundaries, it offers a range of vivid and original ethnographic case studies that will capture the imagination of anyone interested in gendered migration, policies of inclusion and exclusion, and regulation of reproduction and intimacy. The book presents ethnographic and phenomenological discussions of people’s changing lives as they cross borders, how people transgress and reshape moral boundaries of proper gender and kinship behaviour, and moral economies of intimacy and sexuality. It also focuses on migrants’ navigation of social and financial services in their destination countries, putting questions about rights and limitations on citizenship at the core. -- .

The disintegration of Eastern Europe and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989 marked the beginning of what was hailed both East and West as a period of tranformation to liberal democracy. Yet in the years that have followed, the peoples of the vast region have found themselves dealing with new tensions, insecurities and the chaos of the new order. This wide ranging study comprises of case studies drawn from various countries of the former socialist world. Centring around the theme of survival strategies developed in response to changing cultural, political and economic structures, the contributors consider the problems implicit in these changing economies at all levels, from household strategy to state and policy formation. It covers a huge geographical area and explores many other themes such as: gender; ethnicity; migration; employment and labour patterns; changing family structures; and ideas of nationalism. By emphasizing local level experience, regional difference and the use actors make of local knowledge in developing survival strategies, this study argues that local level research is essential to an understanding of the transformations taking place.

Focusing on places, objects, bodies, narratives, and ritual spaces where religion may be found or inscribed, the authors reveal the role of religion in contesting rights to places, to knowledge and to property, as well as access to resources. Through analyses of specific historical processes in terms of responses to socio-economic and political change, the chapters consider implicitly or explicitly the problematic relation between science (including social sciences and anthropology in particular) and religion, and how this connects to the new religious globalization of the twenty-first century. Their ethnographies highlight the embodiment of religion and its location in landscapes, built spaces and religious sites which may be contested, physically or ideologically, or encased in memory and often in silence. Taken together, they show the importance of religion as a resource to the believers: a source of solace, spiritual comfort, and self-willed submission.

This book is a collection of articles by anthropologists and social scientists concerned with gendered labour, care, intimacy and sexuality, in relation to mobility and the hardening of borders in Europe. Interrogating the relation between physical, geopolitical borders and ideological, conceptual boundaries, this book offers a range of vivid and original ethnographic case studies that will capture the imagination of anyone interested in gendered migration, policies of inclusion and exclusion, and regulation of reproduction and intimacy. The first part of the book presents ethnographic and phenomenological discussions of people's changing lives as they cross borders, how people shift, transgress and reshape moral boundaries of proper gender and kinship behaviour, and moral economies of intimacy and sexuality. In the second section, the focus turns to migrants' navigation of social and financial services in their destination countries, putting questions about rights and limitations on citizenship at the core. The final part of the book scrutinises policy formation at the level of state, examining the ways that certain domains become politicised and disputed at different historical junctures, while others are left outside of the political. -- .

This book explores connections between poverty and migration in the context of the expansion of neoliberalism in Europe. The last decade has witnessed a massive movement of people in response to rising inequalities as a result of political changes and economic reforms implemented across the continent. As people seek new opportunities, movement itself becomes part of the process of generating new inequalities. The chapters in this volume provide vivid examples of local participation in such global processes.