1970–
An ethnographer of the social costs of the post-1989 transition
Traveling through Eastern Europe after the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 became the turning point that led her to study both the hopes and costs of the transition.
Kristen Ghodsee is an American anthropologist and scholar of Eastern Europe whose ethnographic work examines how socialism and the transition from it shaped ordinary lives, especially women’s lives. Drawing on fieldwork in Bulgaria, she has studied socialist achievements alongside the losses of transition, recovering material experiences often obscured by triumphalist anti-communist narratives. Co-authored with Mitchell A. Orenstein, Taking Stock of the Shock compares economic and social indicators after the 1989 revolutions and argues that the gains of transition were distributed unevenly. Her work neither idealizes socialism nor accepts its replacement as an uncomplicated success, insisting that the consequences of capitalism must be assessed through evidence and people’s lived experience.
Activities and affiliations
Career Timeline
- 1970Born in San Diego, California, United States
- 1992B.A. in creative writing and theater arts, University of California, Santa Cruz
- 1990년대M.A. and Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley
- 2005Published The Red Riviera, an ethnography of women’s work in Bulgaria’s Black Sea tourism industry
- 2012Received a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship
- 2017–현재Professor of Russian and East European Studies, University of Pennsylvania
- 2021Published Taking Stock of the Shock with Mitchell A. Orenstein
- 2022–현재Chair of Russian and East European Studies, University of Pennsylvania
- 2023Published Everyday Utopia
Related historical events
Red Nostalgia and the Critique of the Anti-Communist Narrative
Tracing the post-1989 transition through fieldwork in Bulgaria, Ghodsee has focused on which material experiences the dominant narratives of that transition erased. In 2004 she published one of the first articles to treat Communist nostalgia in Eastern Europe through a gendered lens. Earlier work on Ostalgie in the former East Germany and on Yugo-nostalgia in the successor states of socialist Yugoslavia had centred on consumer aspects, treating such longing as a necessary phase that post-Communist populations had to pass through in order to break fully with their pasts. Ghodsee's concept of "red nostalgia" instead addressed how individual men and women experienced the loss of the real material benefits of the socialist past: not a wistful glance back at lost youth but the basis of an emerging critique of the postsocialist era's political and economic upheavals.
She has also studied the politics of public memory concerning Communist states, World War II and the Holocaust in Bulgaria. According to Ghodsee, the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation is a conservative anti-communist organization that seeks to equate communism with murder, by erecting billboards in Times Square declaring "100 years, 100 million killed." She argues that the foundation, together with counterpart conservative organizations in Eastern Europe, seeks to institutionalize the "Victims of Communism" narrative as a double genocide theory equating the Nazi Holocaust (race murder) with the victims of Communism (class murder). She considers the 100 million estimate favoured by the foundation dubious, since its source is the controversial introduction to Stephane Courtois's The Black Book of Communism. She has said this effort intensified around the 2008 financial crisis and can be read as a response by economic and political elites, fearful of a leftist resurgence amid devastated economies and extreme inequality in both East and West, to the excesses of neoliberal capitalism. Her objection is that discussion of Communist achievements such as literacy, education, women's rights and social security is usually silenced, while discourse on communism focuses almost exclusively on Stalin's crimes and the double genocide theory.
In her 2017 book Red Hangover she argued that the triumphalism of Western powers at the end of the Cold War, and the fixation on linking all leftist and socialist ideals with the horrors of Stalinism, allowed neoliberalism to fill the void, undermining democratic institutions and reforms and leaving economic misery, unemployment, hopelessness and rising inequality across the former Eastern Bloc and much of the West, which in turn fuelled far-right nationalism. Alongside this she has advocated "literary ethnography," presenting ethnographic data through narrative tension, dialogue and lyrical prose. Influenced by Clifford Geertz's "thick description," she argues that literary ethnographies are often "documentary ethnographies," exploring the inner workings of a culture without subsuming observations to a specific theoretical agenda. Her 2011 book Lost in Transition combined personal ethnographic essays with ethnographic fiction; some reviewers judged it a story told at the expense of theory, while others found it readable and compelling.
This work has drawn scholarly controversy. In a 2014 essay in the European Journal of Women's Studies, the philosopher Nanette Funk grouped Ghodsee among "revisionist feminist scholars" who uncritically tout the achievements of communist-era women's organizations and ignore the oppressive nature of authoritarian regimes in Eastern Europe. Ghodsee responded that if the goal of feminism is to improve women's lives, eliminate discrimination and promote equality with men, there is ample room to reconsider the "women-friendly" policies of state socialist women's organizations. She notes that much recent scholarship aims to show how communist ideology could lead to real improvements in women's literacy, education, professional training, access to health care, extended paid maternity leave and reduced economic dependence on men. This stance illustrates her position that the outcome of the transition must be assessed through evidence without idealizing socialism.