Bibliographic record
Abstract
Kristen Ghodsee. Lost in Transition: Ethnographies of Everyday Life After Communism. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2011. xviii, 206 pp. Illustrations. Appendix. Further reading. $79.95, cloth. $22.95, paper.Told from the twenty-year perspective of hope, pain, defeat, and resilience, Lost in Transition is a mixed-genre volume that conveys the ongoing changes of postsocialism by putting the lives of individual men and women (p. xiii). Kristen Ghodsee does this by interweaving her experiences-first as a California high school student, then as a nineteen-year-old backpacker, and later as an ethnographer of the postsocialist era (p. xii)-with those of East Europeans, primarily Bulgarians. Some of her portrayals of postsocialism derive from chance encounters with people in trains, shops, city streets, and vacation spots; others were gleaned from ethnographic interviews. Still others are based on close relationships; some of Ghodsee's keenest observations came from long-term participation in the kinship and friendship networks of her Bulgarian husband. Altogether, the book combines memoirs and essays written in the first person with ethnographically informed short stories.Although brought out by the same academic press that published her two scholarly monographs, Ghodsee advises her readers that this book, with its bare minimum of footnotes, is intended for students and nonspecialists and not for her scholarly peers (p. xiv). Nonetheless, Canadian Slavonic Papers/Revue canadienne des slavistes asked me to review it, and will do my best to convey the author's tone and intentions to the readers of this journal.Lost in Transition opens in California during the 1980s when, as a teenager, Ghodsee became an expert on the Soviet Union and the communist bloc through participation in the Model UN. That experience convinced her that the Cold War was irrevocably heating up, and by 1989 she was certain that the world was about to end. Ghodsee then dropped out of college, packed a bag, and made her way from California to Europe and the Middle East. She got her first taste of Eastern Europe when travelling by train from Turkey to Germany where she learned that in the constricted maiket of late socialism, Heinz ketchup was valuable contraband (pp. 31-35). After the Berlin Wall fell in November of that year, dystopia turned utopie, and Ghodsee experienced a pervasive feeling of euphoria: I was there, celebrating the end of an era, ecstatically toasting a future that believed would be filled with peace and prosperity for all (p. 17). The rest of the book shows, however, that such optimism did not last for long.Through poignantly detailed vignettes, the author goes on to show that the transitions from state socialism to free market economies and democratically elected governments ruptured a taken-for-granted way of life which brought profound disappointments. In chapter 7 readers join Ghodsee as she conducts an ethnographic interview centering on the question, What was your first memory of the end of communism? (p. 102) Ani, the respondent, replied that she knew something was changing when her class was instructed to quit addressing their teacher as Comrade, and to call her Gospozha (Mrs) instead. …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".