ABSTRACT
Throughout eastern and central Europe the year 1989, when socialism fell, saw the beginning of an acute and rapid shift in political economy and social life. This chapter discusses unemployment, migration and new knowledge regimes in Lublin, a city near the border between Ukraine and Poland, which has a complicated, powerful and at times troubled political history. It considers kinship and labor as two inextricably interwoven concepts. The chapter shows how, at times of enormous political, economic and social change, transmission can become so problematic that relations between generations are re-mapped. In Lublin after EU accession the interaction between transitions and historical change was unsettled. Patterns of kinship interdependence and reciprocity, established over generations, continued to be important in socio-economic relations and in social imaginings. Kinship provides a necessary framework for both the transfer of skills and information, and the transfer of knowledge practices, between generations, particularly in relation to work in factories and on farms.
