Post-socialist Europe and its “Constitutive Outside”: ethnographic resemblances for a comparative research agenda

The “post-Socialist Europe” label has been criticized for not being able to fully capture post-1989–91 social and cultural processes in Central and Eastern Europe and Russia. While some ask what was Socialist Europe?, I interrogate non-post-Socialist Europe today. This chapter examines, from a historical-ethnographic comparative perspective, present-day fragmented resemblances and disjunctures between Eastern and Western Europe, contextualizing them within their (Socialist) antecedents. By focusing on the local governance of marginalized Romani families in Cluj-Napoca (Romania) and Florence (Italy), I show that in both temporal regimes (pre- and post-1989) the two cities display ethnographic resemblances. However, rather than creating disparities and hierarchies, I point to the importance of ethnographic comparisons between the margins of the “West” and the “East” in order to de-dichotomize and refine our knowledge