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Chris Hann's the Skeleton at the Feast: Contributions to Eastern Book Review: Chris Hann’s The Skeleton at the Feast: Contributions to Eastern European Ethnography. Krista Harper University of California/Santa Cruz Hann, Chris, 1995, The Skeleton at the the family. The bibliographic materials Feast: Contributions to Eastern European alone are a valuable resource for scholars of Ethnography. Canterbury, UK: University of Eastern Europe. Hann provides an overview Kent at Canterbury. Center for Social of ethnographic literature in English on Anthropology and Computing Monographs Eastern Europe, and also includes works by 9. 265pp. $15. ethnographers and historians writing in Polish, Russian, Czech, and Hungarian, If Chris Hann's monograph, The Skeleton at although some well-known ethnographers, the Feast: Contributions to Eastern European such as Tamas Hofer, are given a more Ethnography was to be marketed by a record cursory treatment. label, it would fall into the "B-sides and out- takes" genre, an LP crammed with Highlights of Part One include the chapter experimental pieces of abandoned projects, on boundaries and histories, which covers underplayed nuggets, and alternative the relationships between "European-ness," versions of hit songs. Record collectors "Eastern-ness," and political economy from delight in the unusual, if sometimes patchy, the Middle Ages through the present offering because the compilation provides a transformation from state socialism. The look at their favorite artist at work and chapter on religion and ritual treats both the because it brings to light works that have secular rituals of state socialism and the less commercial appeal. Likewise, scholars relationship between religious groups and of Eastern Europe will delight in Hann's the state, investigating the monograph's idiosyncratic essays on his better-known ethnographies in Polish and Greek Catholic, or Uniate, Church at length. Hungarian villages, his reflections on One of the oldest of anthropology's fields of fieldwork in Eastern Europe and the rise of study, kinship, gets a fresh spin as Hann "transitology," and excerpts from a textbook details the ways in which ethnographers of project that was never completed. Eastern Europe have traced the changing roles of women and household units since In Part One, Hann presents five chapters that the advent of state socialism. Although the he had originally written for a textbook on sections on peasants and nationalism and Eastern European ethnography that was to ethnicity are well-written and reasonably be a collaborative project with Steven thorough as entries in a textbook, these areas Sampson but was never published. These of the anthropology of Eastern Europe are chapters discuss borders and histories, better fleshed-out in other works, including peasant ethnography, religion and ritual, Hann's ethnographies. ethnicity and nationalism, and kinship and In Part Two, Hann presents three essays confusion and disgust when confronted with based on his ethnographic research on alcoholism and wife-beating over the course Hungary's Great Plain and in a southeastern of his research. Hann did not include these Polish village, and four essays which touch instances in his ethnographies, sensing that upon themes of self-reflexivity, the to do so to pander to readers baser, emerging discipline of "transitology," sensationalistic instincts. Yet Hann’s privatization, and discretion in this matter surprised me: in a book that celebrated the particular attention Orientalism. Originally published in paid to women’s roles in the family system Hungarian journals or presented at various in recent ethnographies, I would have conferences in Eastern Europe, these essays expected Hann to give more serious strive for a more complex picture of the consideration to the very real problems, transformation from state socialism and which he encountered first-hand, of suggest that ethnography as an alternative to Hungarian and Polish women. the more triumphalist accounts provided by economists and political scientists within Overall, The Skeleton at the Feast offers and outside of the region. Rather than readers a rewarding collection of essays. merely rehashing Hann’s ethnographies, the Part One is a pleasure to read and would three ethnographic essays take experimental serve marvelously as a textbook for a course approaches to familiar issues: a rural on the ethnography of Eastern Europe. Part community on the Hungarian Two makes a persuasive case for the enduring importance of ethnography in Great Plain is treated as an example of analyzing the cultures of state socialism and Frederick Jackson Turner’s frontier postsocialism. Like a "B-sides and outtakes" hypothesis, Polish Solidarity is viewed from LP, The Skeleton at the Feast is full of the peasant perspective, and ethnic surprises which reward any reader who consciousness in Lemkovina meets Soviet unearths it from the "rare import" bin at the ethnos theory. Perhaps the most thought- store. provoking are the chapters on privatization in Hungary, new forms of Orientalism on the Turkish-former Soviet border, and the emerging specialization of "transitology. Chapter Nine, "A Critique of Anthropological Self-Contemplation," intended as a polemic against "navel- gazing," unintentionally makes a rather persuasive case for more self-reflexive ethnographies. Although Hann argues that the persuasive and scientific properties of ethnography are not enhanced by self- reflexivity, he portrays moments of .
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