Vanishing Hectare

Katherine Verdery is Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the City University of New York Graduate Center. She is the author of Transylvanian Villagers, The Political Lives of Dead Bodies, What Was Socialism, and What Comes Next?, and National Ideology under Socialism and the coeditor of Property in Question: Value Transformation in the Global Economy.

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.'- Andrew Cartwright (Anthropological Quarterly) 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.- Keith Brown (Slavic Review) 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.- Richard Byrne (Chronicle of Higher Education)