Historians and social scientists analyzing the contemporary world unfortunately have too little contact and hence miss some of the ways that their interests overlap and the research of one field might benefit another. I am, therefore, extremely grateful that the Journal of Consumer Research has invited me to share with its readers an overview of my recent research on the political and social impact of the flourishing of mass consumption on twentieth-century America. What follows is a summary of my major arguments, enough to entice you, I hope, to read A Consumers' Republic (Cohen 2003), in which I elaborate on these themes. Although this essay is by necessity schematic, the book itself is filled with extensive historical evidence and is heavily illustrated with period images. In tracing the growing importance of mass consumption to the American economy, polity, culture, and social landscape from the 1920s to the present, I in many ways establish the historical context for your research into contemporary consumer behavior and markets. I hope you will …

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A Consumers' Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America

The study of borders has undergone a renaissance during the past decade. This is reflected in an impressive list of conferences, workshops and scholarly publications. This renaissance has been partly due to the emergence of a counternarrative to the borderless and deterritorialized world discourse which has accompanied much of globalization theory. The study of borders has moved beyond the limited confines of the political geography discourse, crossing its own disciplinary boundaries, to include sociologists, political scientists, historians, international lawyers and scholars of international relations. But this meeting of disciplines has not yet been successful in creating a common language or glossary of terms which is relevant to all scholars of borders. Central to the contemporary study of borders are notions such as 'borders are institutions', the process of 'bordering' as a dynamic in its own right, and the border terminologies which focus on the binary distinctions between the 'us' and 'them', the 'included' and the 'excluded'. Borders should be studied not only from a top-down perspective, but also from the bottom up, with a focus on the individual border narratives and experiences, reflecting the ways in which borders impact upon the daily life practices of people living in and around the borderland and transboundary transition zones. In positing an agenda for the next generation of border-related research, borders should be seen for their potential to constitute bridges and points of contact, as much as they have traditionally constituted barriers to movement and communication.

The lines that continue to separate us: borders in our `borderless' world

Memory is often embodied in objects--memorials, texts, talismans, images. Though one could argue that such artifacts operate to prompt remembrance, they are often perceived actually to contain memory within them or indeed to be synonymous with memory. No object is more equated with memory than the camera image, in particular the photograph. Memory appears to reside within the photographic image, to tell its story in response to our gaze.

Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, The AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering.

The Jewish Question

Book Review: The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship

The last several years have witnessed the birth and boom of a nostalgia industry in the former East Germany that has entailed the recuperation, (re)production, marketing, and merchandising of GDR products as well as the ‘museumification’ of GDR everyday life. This paper interrogates a distinction between ‘mere’ nostalgia and socially sanctioned commemorative practices by tracing the social lives of East German things, including their paths, diversions, and recuperations, in the context of eastern Germany's transition to a late industrial society. I seek to elucidate not only the social, political, and economic conditions that have produced the recent explosion of ‘Ostalgie’ (nostalgia for the East) in the former GDR, but an interplay between hegemonic and oppositional memories as well. In flaming resistance to western German hegemony in terms of product choices and mass merchandising, I argue, practices and products of ‘Ostalgie’ both contest and affirm the new order.

‘(N)Ostalgie’ for the present: Memory, longing, and East German things

When the Berlin Wall fell, people who lived along the dismantled border found their lives drastically and rapidly transformed. Daphne Berdahl, through ongoing ethnographic research in a former East German border village, explores the issues of borders and borderland identities that have accompanied the many transitions since 1990. What happens to identity and person hood, she asks, when a political and economic system collapses overnight? How do people negotiate and manipulate a liminal condition created by the disappearance of a significant frame of reference? Berdahl concentrates especially on how these changes have affected certain 'border zones' of daily life - including social organization, gender, religion, and nationality - in a place where literal, indeed concrete, borders were until recently a very powerful presence. Borders, she argues, are places of ambiguity as well as of intense lucidity; these qualities may in fact be mutually constitutive. She shows how, in a moment of headlong historical transformation, larger political, economic, and social processes are manifested locally and specifically. In the process of a transition between two German states, people have invented, and to some extent ritualized, cultural practices that both reflect and constitute profound identity transformations in a period of intense social discord. "Where the World Ended" combines a vivid ethnographic account of everyday life under socialist rule and after German reunification with an original investigation of the paradoxical human condition of a borderland.

Where the World Ended: Re-Unification and Identity in the German Borderland

The dominant focus in transition studies to date has been on economic and political factors--analyses generally conducted at the national or international level. The essays in "Altering States" instead bring us a closer look at what has been happening in everyday life in urban contexts in Germany, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Austria, Hungary, Romania, Armenia, and Russia.The contributors to the volume--all anthropologists--use ethnographic methods to make visible problems and challenges that have until now been obscured. From synagogue restoration in Eastern Europe to gay tourism in Prague to the politics of rock music in Hungary, specific, local topics lead the authors to confront difficult questions of individual agency and discursive practices in the move away from socialism. Broader themes touched on include race and ethnicity, sexuality and postcoloniality, the politics of environmental restoration, and memory and remembrance in the politics of history."Altering States" will fill an important gap in the study of transition in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. It will appeal to anthropologists, political scientists, and sociologists and will be accessible to undergraduate and graduate students alike.Daphne Berdahl is Assistant Professor of Anthropology, University of Minnesota. Matti Bunzl is Aaron and Robin Fischer Professor of Jewish Culture and Society and Assistant Professor of Anthropology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Martha Lampland is Associate Professor of Sociology, University of California at San Diego.

Altering states : ethnographies of transition in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union

Immediately after the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, one of the most pervasive media images consisted of East Germans on a frenetic, collective shopping spree. For many western Germans, as well as for much of the world, the “triumph” of capitalism and democracy seemed to be reflected and confirmed in the “consuming frenzy” (Konsumrausch) of the “Ossis” (East Germans). Although these images of consumption following the collapse of socialism were new, they were structured by and contributed to a dominant narrative of “democratization” and national legitimacy in which access to consumer goods and consumer choice are defined as fundamental rights and democratic expressions of individualism. Indeed, many observers have since suggested that the transitions of 1989 were not about demands for political or human rights, but for consumer rights (e.g., Bauman 1992; Borneman 1992; Drakulic 1991). They were also, I would add, about consumer rites—about the making of citizen-consumers.

The Spirit of Capitalism and the Boundaries of Citizenship in Post-Wall Germany

Preface by Michael Herzfeld Acknowledgments Introduction by Matti Bunzl Part 1. Washington, D.C. 1. Voices at the Wall: Discourses of Self, History, and National Identity at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Part 2. Kella 2. Consumer Rites: The Politics of Consumption in Re-Unified Germany 3. "(N)Ostalgie" for the Present: Memory, Longing, and East German Things 4. "Go, Trabi, Go!": Reflections on a Car and Its Symbolization over Time 5. Mixed Devotions: Religion, Friendship, and Fieldwork in Postsocialist East Germany Part 3. Leipzig 6. The Spirit of Capitalism and the Boundaries of Citizenship in Post-Wall Germany 7. Local Hero, National Crook: "Doc" Schneider and the Spectacle of Finance Capital 8. Expressions of Experience and Experiences of Expression: Museum Re-Presentations of GDR History 9. Goodbye Lenin, Aufwiedersehen GDR: On the Social Life of Socialism Notes References Index

Daphne Berdahl

Papers

‘(N)Ostalgie’ for the present: Memory, longing, and East German things

Where the World Ended: Re-Unification and Identity in the German Borderland

Altering states : ethnographies of transition in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union

The Spirit of Capitalism and the Boundaries of Citizenship in Post-Wall Germany

On the Social Life of Postsocialism: Memory, Consumption, Germany