Resources and Everyday Conflicts in Rural Ukraine

When the Bulgarian minority in Bessarabia was exposed to the dual forces of globalizing political economy and the nationalizing Ukrainian state, life-worlds and resource use changed radically. Kaneff’s study is both an important addition to the literature on postsocialist transformation and, with its sophisticated conceptualization of resources, a truly original contribution to the analysis of social change generally.

-- Chris Hann, Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology

In this finely grained, historically grounded ethnographic study of a village in Ukraine, Deema Kaneff focuses on resources—economic, social, material, and immaterial—as the core of her theoretical approach to social change. Resources may have use value, exchange value, or both, and may change and fluctuate according to context, political circumstance, and economic shifts. Kaneff examines different kinds of resources, ranging from land and water to identity, ethnicity, and language, as they move from a position of use and consumption to exchange value, or gain monetary value. She describes the changes in political economy and social relations of the ethnically Bulgarian village prior to and throughout the Soviet period, through the collapse of the Soviet Union, and with establishment of an independent Ukraine. Her last fieldwork in the village was in 2014, the beginning of the first Russian invasion, but the ensuing war is foreshadowed in discussions of increasing Ukrainian nationalism and exclusions based on ethnic identity and language. Kaneff paints a vivid portrait of a village reacting to, and being deeply changed by, events in the wider world—the end of the Soviet Union, economic restructuring, changing national and global markets, migration, new inequalities, and war. But it also tells a story of resilience, of adaptation to change, and of new possibilities opening through education, mobility, and networks of kinship and friendship.

-- Frances Pine, Goldsmiths, University of Lo