Top of CEU Press sales list 2011:
1. Media, Nationalism and European Identities
2. Masterpieces of History
3. Nation, Language, Islam
4. Health, Hygiene and Eugenics in Southeastern Europe
5. Promises of 1968

Download our 2012 Spring/Summer Catalog: New Titles and Backlist

CEU Press has become a full member of the Association of European University Presses

"The book will doubtless serve generations of scholars, whether their interest focuses primarily on the history of medieval Hungary or on the Hospitaller Order". - Crusades

"The contributors to this volume demonstrate how traditional, provincial and nationalist values, referred to as uncivic, still obstruct the European aspirations of the biggest republic of the former Yugoslavia... I most warmly recommend this volume." - International Affairs

Available in Kindle edition:
Higher Education and the American Dream
Prague Tales
Whitehorn's Windmill





Search the full text of our books:


 


A Tale of Two Villages

Coerced Modernization in the East European Countryside



Alina Mungiu-Pippidi, Chair of Democracy Studies at the Hertie School of Governance in Berlin. She is a board member of the International Forum of Democracy Studies and the Journal of Democracy of the National Endowment for Democracy. She is the editor of the Romanian Journal of Political Science and member of the editorial board of the Journal Südosteuropa of Ludwig Maximilian University, Munich. She is also a writer and journalist.

Translated by Angela Jianu

This dramatic story of land and power from twentieth-century Eastern Europe is set in two extraordinary villages: a rebel village, where peasants fought the advent of Communism and became its first martyrs, and a model village turned forcibly into a town, Dictator Ceauşescu’s birthplace. The two villages capture among themselves nearly a century of dramatic transformation and social engineering, ending up with their charged heritage in the present European Union.

"One of Romania’s foremost social critics, Alina Mungiu-Pippidi offers a valuable look at several decades of policy that marginalized that country’s rural population, from the 1918 land reform to the post-1989 property restitution. Illustrating her arguments with a close comparison of two contrasting villages, she describes the actions of a long series of “predatory elites,” from feudal landowners through the Communist Party through post-communist leaders, all of whom maintained the rural population’s dependency. A forceful concluding chapter shows that its prospects for improvement are scarcely better within the EU. Romania’s villagers have an eminent and spirited advocate in the author.”

Katherine Verdery, Distinguished Professor, Department of Anthropology, City University of New York

Contents

List of Tables; Acknowledgements; Chapter 1 The Argument: Chapter 2 Two Villages: Chapter 3 The Construction and Deconstruction of Rural Property; Chapter 4 The Invention of Social Conflict; Chapter 5 The Destruction and Replacement of the Elite; Chapter 6 The Manipulation of Lifestyles; Chapter 7 From the Dependent Peasant to the Citizen-Peasant: The Bases of a Rural Political Culture; Chapter 8 Between the Past and the Future; References; Appendices; Index

The Economist chose A Tale of Two Villages Book of the Week on 29th May 2010. "A dramatic, thought-provoking and sometimes savagely funny account of one of the toughest problems in Europe: the ingrained poverty of the Romanian countryside."

"Alina Mungiu-Pippidi is one of the most outspoken and courageous public figures in Romania. She is a trenchant yet constructive critic of Romanian politics and society and as a university professor has initiated and secured funding for numerous research projects into which she has drawn her students. This volume is the product of one such project and is based on fieldwork carried out in Romania with a group of her students in political anthropology. The book provides a rich and varied discussion of collectivization and its continuing effects. Twenty years after its fall, the Communist Party still casts a long shadow in the region." - H-net online

2010
230 pages
ISBN 978-963-9776-78-4 cloth $45.00 / €39.95 / £35.00

top