%I CAMBRIDGE UNIV PRESS
%L discovery10178240
%D 2022
%P 226-227
%O This version is the author accepted manuscript. For information on re-use, please refer to the publisher’s terms and conditions.
%T Socialist Heritage: The Politics of Past and Place in Romania
[By Emanuela Grama. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2019. xviii, 268 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Illustrations. Photographs. Tables. Maps. $60.00, paper]
%X Emanuela Grama's Socialist Heritage: The Politics of Past and Place in Romania is a
compelling exploration of heritage making as state-making through the lens of the postwar
and postcommunist transformations of Bucharest's Old Town. Alternatively known as
Lipscani or 'the historic center,' the Old Town is a revealing lens because the socialist and
postsocialist states mediated their relation with their citizens - their strategies of inclusion
and exclusion - via place and material structures like buildings and objects. The book thus
joins a growing body of historical ethnographies of socialist and postsocialist
transformations, particularly those on property restitution, changing regimes of value, and
collectivization like Katherine Verdery's The Vanishing Hectare (2003) and Gail Kligman
and Katherine Verdery's Peasants Under Siege (2011) or works on elite changes and
continuities such as Szelenyi's "Circulation or Reproduction of Elites" (1995).
%V 81
%A Diana Georgescu
%J Slavic Review
%N 1