Death in Rural Georgia: A Historical Comparison of Georgians and Ossets in the Kistauri Commune

This article examines the factors influencing age at death in the multiethnic villages, comprised mostly of Georgians and Ossets, in the Kistauri commune in the eastern Republic of Georgia between 1897 and 1997. The data are analyzed with Cox proportional hazards models using age at death as the dependent variable, and ethnicity, gender, marital status, residency status, and year of birth as the independent variables. The results show that Georgians lived longer than Ossets. Individuals who had ever been married lived longer than those who had not. The results perhaps reflect harsher living conditions for Ossets, the ethnic minority, despite Soviet ideologies about equality

Internal and External Ethnic Assessments in Eastern Europe

This paper examines how internal processes of ethnic identification influence external processes of ethnic classification. To do so, it uses survey data from Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania, and Russia, which contain information for ethnic majorities and selected ethnic minorities (Roma (Gypsies) in Bulgaria, Hungary, and Romania; Hungarians in Romania; and Ukrainians in Russia). Respondents’ self-identification of ethnicity exemplifies internal identification, while interviewers’ assessments of ethnicity are used as examples of external classification. Logistic regressions, with interviewers’ classifications of ethnicity as the dependent variable, show how these classifiers use respondents’ self-identification of ethnicity, as well as other social markers (parents’ ethnicity, language, geographical concentration, economic status, household size, and education), to assess ethnicity. The results show that although interviewers are strongly influenced by respondents’ self-identification, they also override it. Interviewers use negative social characteristics (e.g. poverty, low education) to classify respondents as Roma who did not self-identify as such. For the ethnic majority groups in each country, as well as Hungarians in Romania, and Ukrainians in Russia, these variables had the opposite effect or had little influence, though ancestry and language had a strong effect for all groups. Interviewers more often classified respondents as ethnic majorities when the latter claimed to be non-Roma ethnic minorities. The results illustrate how ethnic classification processes differ fundamentally for a racialized group, the Roma, for whom classifications are external and exclusionary, as opposed to other ethnic groups, for whom social classifications are optional and generally inclusive

The Racialization and Feminization of Poverty?

Quite understandably- and quite correctly- poverty is usually studied as a persistent, unchanging social problem that, hopefully, can be ameliorated through specific social policies. Indeed, the biblical saying that, "the poor are always with us" has withstood the test of time. The present volume, however, tackles poverty from a different angle. We ask how poverty changes during an epochal transformation, in this case, the transition from econmies based on socialist redistribution to those based on capitalist markets. We use this major transformation as an epistemological lever to provide insight into the causes and nature of poverty. In the same spirit of drawing on difference as an analytic tool, our approach is also explicitly comparative. We compare and contrast poverty- and what we argue are associated social porcess4es of racialization and feminization- in different countries during this transition. We hope that this approach not only provides sociological insight but also illuminates policy debates.During the past decade, there have been dramatic and sweeping changes in the countries of the former East European communist bloc; all have moved toward a market economy. In some places, marketization has been very rapid. At the same time, however, poverty has increased in all the countries. In this chapter, we offer some hypotheses about the relationship between poverty, markets, and ethnicity in this region and suggest how the evidence from these countries, as reported in the later chapters, addresses these hypotheses

The racialization and feminization of poverty during the market transition in the Central and Southern Europe

Digitised version produced by the EUI Library and made available online in 2020

Virtual Issue: Race in the United States in Social Science History

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