SUMMARY:

Katherine Verdery, the first anthropologist to serve as the president of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies, in her presidential address given on November 5, 2005, at the 37th AAASS National Convention, offered her vision of the place of anthropology in the study of east central Europe and the former USSR. She pointed out the constantly increasing involvement of anthropologists in area studies of the region. She connected this trend with the 1960s decolonization movements against European empires, which pushed anthropologists out of the Third World and into the Second. The wave of decolonization in the 1990s following the collapse of the Soviet empire intensified that trend. However, western socio-cultural anthropology has become an object of emulation for scholars in the former Soviet realm, because anthropology – she insists – is not tainted (as it was before) by any prior association with the colonial center or compromises with the Party. Because it had never been an arm of the ideological apparatus, it came to symbolize democracy and the search for objective truth. Therefore anthropologists are best positioned to speak about the post-Cold War transition. Verdery calls upon anthropologists to combine forces with political scientists, historians, and literary studies specialists of the region to create theories and interpretations so innovative that scholars in their respective home disciplines and specialists in other world areas could not ignore them. She predicts that a reinvigorated area-based interdisciplinarity will give shape to the reconfigured activity of creating knowledge in the twenty-first century.