The collection of papers in this volume of The Anthropology of East Europe Review comes from a panel that Nancy Ries and I organized at the 98 Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association held in Chicago, Illinois. The title of this double-panel session (which is the title of this special issue) was “Why Post-Socialism is Good to Think: The Anthropology of Transforming States.” We...

Most studies of solitude have focused on the modern individualized sense of solitude, located or originating in urbanized Western cultures where solitude is seen as a companion to urban modernity. In this perspective the larger historical and cultural context goes almost unnoticed together with the fact that the preoccupation with solitude, in various forms and functions, has been around for a ...

A phatic technology’s purpose is to establish, develop and maintain personal and social relationships. The invention and development of phatic technologies, and their influence on human society, have been accelerating rapidly in the past decade, exemplified by the growth of social networking technologies based on the Internet. To understand this acceleration we propose to analyse the phenomenon...

There is no description of modernity without functional differentiation. The distinction of function systems such as economy, science, art, or religion, is a key to modernity. Modern science, however, applies and implies rather than studies functional differentiation without providing exact definitions of function systems or investigating how many of these systems actually exist. The present ar...

Information systems research and practice have been developed under the combination of scientific and economic reasoning that forms the bedrock of western modernity. Alternative ways of perceiving the value of technical innovation, often manifested in the deployment of ICT in the social context of developing countries, are poorly understood and tend to be dismissed as ‘irrational’. In this pape...

this article reviews the ancient symbolic world, shia and modernity believes in iranian’s mind which are historical link between ancient symbolic world and shie. since the late nineteenth century with the modernization, for exampel civilization, constitutional movement and palavi government, gap created in iranians mind. dispite this gap, iranians mind have symbolic characteristics and are not ...