ABSTRACT
During the twentieth century, anthropologists generated a vast literature on “the penetration of capitalism,” including work as varied as the Manchester School, economic anthropology in the modernization paradigm, critical political economy and the modes of production debate, and work on rural transformation, migration, and urbanization. The conditions for the development of a Western-style anthropology of socialism were breaches in the U.S.–Soviet superpower stand-offthat enabled anthropologists to conduct fieldwork “behind the Iron Curtain.” The influence of postsocialist ethnography on anthropology began to be felt only after 1989, as large numbers of anthropologists initiated fieldwork in the region and their choice of topics and theoretical inclinations diversified rapidly. Neoliberal ideologies view persons not as producers in a community but as consumers in global markets. For ethnographers in the EE/FSU after 1989, changing consumption patterns associated with this new phase of capitalist expansion were immediately visible and often remarked.
