This book concerns the politics of religion as expressed through apparitions of the Virgin Mary in Dzhublyk in Transcarpathian Ukraine. The analysis provides insights into the present position of Transcarpathia in regional, Ukrainewide, and European struggles for identity and political belonging. The way in which the apparitions site has been conceived and managed raises questions concerning...

The common critique of media- and ratings-driven politics envisions democracy falling hostage to a popularity contest. By contrast, the following book reconceives politics as a speculative Keynesian beauty contest that alienates itself from the popular audience it ceaselessly targets. Political actors unknowingly lean on collective beliefs about the popular expectations they seek to gratify,...

The collection of well-researched essays assesses the uses and misuses of history 25 years after the collapse of Soviet hegemony in Eastern Europe. As opposed to the revival of national histories that seemed to be the prevailing historiographical approach of the 1990s, the last decade has seen a particular set of narratives equating Nazism and Communism. This provides opportunities to exonerate...

Estonia is perhaps the only country in Europe that lacks a comprehensive history of its Jewish minority. Spanning over 150 years of Estonian Jewish history, On the Margins is a truly unique book. Rebuilding a life beyond so-called Pale of Jewish Settlement in the Russian Empire, the Jewish cultural autonomy in interwar Estonia, and the trauma of Soviet occupation of 1940–41 are among the issues...

Dynastic Memory, Healing and Salvation in Komnenian Constantinople. This book is about the Christ Pantokrator, an imposing monumental complex serving monastic, dynastic, medical and social purposes in Constantinople, founded by Emperor John II Komnenos and Empress Piroska-Eirene in 1118. Now called the Zeyrek Mosque, the second largest Byzantine religious edifice after Hagia Sophia still...

Having won a two-third majority in Parliament at the 2010 elections, the Hungarian political party Fidesz removed many of the institutional obstacles of exerting power. Just like the party, the state itself was placed under the control of a single individual, who since then has applied the techniques used within his party to enforce submission and obedience onto society as a whole. In a new...

The essays in this book provide interesting contributions to the ongoing debate concerning the representation of differing cultures, i.e., the “image of the Other” in the early modern period . They deal with images, projections, and perceptions, based on various experiences of coexistence. Although the individual contributions contain sources and references of iconography, this is not just...

Psy-sciences (psychology, psychiatry, psychoanalysis, pedagogy, criminology, special education, etc.) have been connected to politics in different ways since the early twentieth century. Here, in twenty-two essays, scholars address a variety of these intersections from a historical perspective. The chapters include such diverse topics as the cultural history of psychoanalysis, the complicated...

Remembering Communism examines the formation and transformation of the memory of communism in the post-communist period. The majority of the articles focus on memory practices in the post-Stalinist era in Bulgaria and Romania, with occasional references to the cases of Poland and the GDR. Based on an interdisciplinary approach, including history, anthropology, cultural studies and sociology,...

Market Society in the Visegrad States. Karl Polanyi’s “substantivist” critique of market society has found new popularity in the era of neoliberal globalization. The author reclaims this polymath for contemporary anthropology, especially economic anthropology, in the context of Central Europe, where Polanyi (1886–1964) grew up. The Polanyian approach illuminates both the communist era, in...

New Adversaries and New Opportunities. This volume aims to inspire students, researchers and citizens around the world to critically engage with Open Society values and to defend them wherever they are at risk.

This book examines film and media representations of the social, political, and economic issue of human trafficking, one of the most dramatic challenges of today’s globalized world. Hashamova productively combines fieldwork in NGOs in southeastern Europe, social science data, and the analysis of Western and East European anti-trafficking films and media and their reception in the United States...