Since the debate on the past and present of Central Europe among
emigré writers and intellectuals in the 1980s the urban history of Central and Eastern Europe has become a vivid research field in the German and English historiography. It also went alongside with the ‘spatial turn’ in historiography which claims an importance of space in historical analysis. The review essay discusses three books by two German and one American scholar representing three different perspectives on urban history in the ‘age of extremes’: the city as a space of experience (Lviv), the city as a palimpsest (Grodno) and the microhistory of a city through the lens of a tenement and its residents (Warsaw). All three books demonstrate that urban history beside or even because of its methodological eclecticism off er important insights into the history of society. It illuminates processes of integration, exclusion and annihilation on a local level and integrates them into a macrohistorical analysis as well as into the history of modern social, cultural and political identities and loyalities, emphasising their situativity and fluidity. and Článek zahrnuje poznámkový aparát pod čarou
The article takes a parochial academic anniversary in Britain as an occasion to reflect on ensuing changes of paradigm in social anthropology, notably the rejection of evolutionism and the neglect of history that accompanied the,fieldwork revolution' led by Bronislaw Malinowski. In the light of this discussion it is argued that the ,anthropology of postsocialism' of recent years should not content itself with ethnographic studies of transformation but would benefit from engaging more seriously with multiple layers of history as well as with adjacent social sciences. It is further argued that social and cultural anthropologists should form a common scholarly community with the ,national ethnographers', since these two styles of enquiry complement each other; but such integrated communities remain rare, in Britain no less than in east-central Europe.
In the following essay-manifesto, Contradictions editor Joseph Grim Feinberg lays out his view of the journal as a platform for confronting the central contradictions of post-communism, working through the problems of Central and Eastern Europe in global context, and seeking the continued contemporary relevance of the history of emancipatory and critical thought. Contradictions, he writes, should enable philosophy and its neighboring fields to engage with this region, at this moment, while telling world history something that no other time or place has told it before.