Central Europe has lost its lustre and it is seen as a “trouble maker” in international and EU terrains. Once it was seen as a political program showing ways ahead from claimed Sovietization, while it seem that now it is a trip back to the past. No longer it is a geographical location but a collection of worries. Despite the post-2004 optimism that made European reunification nearly complete, there are now voices rising in Europe that the enlargement was a mistake. Worse still, Central Europe is once again adopting newspeak: it rejects liberalism but embraces crony state capitalism. Why did this happen? A debate featuring authors and topics of the recently published book “Understanding Centr
This co-hosted workshop engages with the intellectual heritage of Karl Polanyi as an economic anthropologist on the basis of recent ethnographic works on the livelihood of marginalized groupings. The presentations depart from the idea that the current epoch is marked by the global expansion – as well as new configurations – of informalized and precarious labour. The livelihood practices and coping strategies of marginalized populations, including the poor or the sub-proletariat, have been among the classical themes of inquiry in economic anthropology. Especially since the outbreak of the financial crisis at the end of the 2000s, academic scholars and policy-experts seem to share a renewing p