Social security and care after socialism. Focaal - European Journal of Anthropology, No. 50

Author
Rosie Read and Tatjana Thelen

Publisher
New York, Oxford: Berghahn Journals

Year of publication
2007

ISSN
0920-1297

OPAC

Abstract
State frameworks for welfare and social security have been subject to processes of privatization, decentralization, and neoliberal reform in many parts of the world. This article explores how these developments might be theorized using anthropological understandings of social security in combination with feminist perspectives on care. In its application to post-1989 socioeconomic transformation in the former socialist region, this perspective overcomes the conceptual inadequacies of the “state withdrawal” model. It also illuminates the nuanced ways in which public and private (as spaces, subjectivities, institutions, moralities, and practices) re-emerge and change in the socialist era as well as today, continually shaping the trajectories and outcomes of reforms to care and social security.