The Vanishing Hectare: Property and Value in Postsocialist Transylvania (Culture and Society After Socialism)

Here at last is Katherine Verdery's magnum opus. Extending out from a village in Transylvania to regional peculiarities, government policies, and the demands of the IMF and World Bank, Verdery illuminates the forces at work throughout the postsocialist world. This is a tour de force, the very best of ethnography with a historical and global reach, setting new standards for the study of market transition.

The Vanishing Hectare is the polished work of a scholar who, after several decades of ethnographic fieldwork in a single place, brings her knowledge to bear on a problem of world-historical significance: the transformation of property following the collapse of state socialism in the former Soviet bloc. Katherine Verdery traces how collective forms of land use were transformed into 'private property,' and does so methodically, documenting and analyzing with neither polemics nor circumlocution.

This is an example of ethnographic enquiry at its best. In Katherine Verdery's hands it becomes a superb vehicle for exploring the tragedy of reformist intentions. Using economic means to achieve social ends, and the consequences this has for people's livelihood, is a story told over and over again in twentieth-century history. Here the socialist and postsocialist experiments of Eastern Europe have a special poignancy, not least in the way the people contribute to their own predicaments. Verdery dignifies their endeavours with breathtaking documentation and a fine-grained analysis of social realities. A remarkable feat.

Verdery's 30 years of fieldwork research in Romania supplied the groundwork for The Vanishing Hectare, enabling her to offer some alternative versions of the changes in rural life and reasons behind the supposedly irrational behavior of rural people.... Her account is not so much of the laws and administrative paraphernalia that established private ownership but rather of the broader social and economic conditions that make for what the author terms 'effective ownership.'

Verdery's conclusions are bleak. She vividly describes how the efforts of individuals she depicts as conscientious, energetic, highly intelligent, and very charming all founder in the face of widening price scissors production costs and market returns.... The Vanishing Hectare showcases the value of long-term fieldwork-anthropology's core methodology-to illuminate the real-world consequences of wishful thinking, and deserves particular attention from scholars and practitioners concerned to understand the kinds of regime change formerly known as transition.

Where the poet William Blake saw a world in a grain of sand, Ms. Verdery finds global collisions of values and culture in the manner that Aurel Vlaicu, a small Transylvanian town nestled at the foot of the Western Carpathian Mountains, privatized its landholdings after Romania's 1989 revolution.... Verdery often leavens her work with entertaining anecdotes.... Her intimate knowledge of the town proved useful when she delved into local corruption and ill feeling. Her larger critique of Western misprisions never dulls her eye for local failures.