Negotiating Normality: Everyday Lives in Socialist Institutions ed. by Daniela Koleva (review)

As any other work in an as yet seldom frequented field, this book should be seen as a most welcome addition to an emerging body of literature that discusses various aspects of private and everyday life in Communist times and the ways of remembering life under Communism in the post-socialist era in Eastern Europe. Much of the book, authored exclusively by female scholars, is devoted to women's experiences. Even though the volume includes one essay each on Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia, the majority of the essays deal with the Balkan countries, especially the lands of the former Yugoslavia. In spite of the suggestive book title and the ambitious, conceptually oriented introductory essay by the editor, the essays in the book are notable for a wide range of diverse themes, organizing concepts, methodological approaches, and source material. In this respect, the lack of explicit discussion in the book (the introductory essay excepted) about "normality," and about how this "normality" was negotiated in state-socialist daily life, is very surprising.

Historians might find too many of the chapters lacking in contextualization and less than satisfactory in providing a sense of temporality within the Communist era of the particular countries discussed. Sanja Potkonjak's essay (pp. 195-215) discussing the lives of three generations of women under Yugoslav socialism offers little reflection on or questioning of the changes that at least her grandmother and her mother must have experienced under and directly after Josip Broz Tito. When a narrative about lived experience under state socialism is to be assessed, "born in the 1970s" (p. 202) is a rather loose way of determining the age of someone whose experience is being considered. After all, it presumably matters whether the person in question lived through the last short decade of Communist Yugoslavia as a small child (which would have been the case for those born in 1979) or as a teenager or young adult (for those born at the start of the 1970s).

Oral history has been extensively used by many of the authors, which is understandable considering the nature of the project. But the craftsmanship spent on source-critical work, on considering the "demography" of the interviewees, on discussing the nature of the narratives they tell, and on providing the general historical context is highly uneven. For example, the contrast between Eszter Zsófia Tóth's judicious work in her outstanding essay on identity construction in the life stories of former members of the Liberation Brigade of the Budapest Hosiery Factory and Hana Pelikánová's chapter on housing in everyday life strategies under the post-1968 normalization regime in Czechoslovakia is formidable. Pelikánová fails to consider that the stories "ordinary people" tell in oral history interviews are not merely innocent "recollections" conveying facts from the past but also discourses catering to present needs and interests of self-justification. This should have been quite obvious from the "asymmetry" apparent in the narratives in which respondents explained the connection between Communist party membership and access to council flats in their own and in others' cases (pp. 189-190).

Apparently, no essay collection on modern everyday life is conceivable without the presence of Michel de Certeau's ideas about the tacit resistance against the consumerist regime evident in everyday practices of consumers. Valentina Gueorguieva's highly interesting piece, "Resistance in Consumption: In Search of a Negotiating Agent," starts out with a perceptive rendering of de Certeau's theory of consumption as not merely assimilation or internalization but as appropriation. Then she proceeds to discuss the daily consumption of a Mr. Kumanov, a secondary school teacher in Bulgaria, and his family from the early 1960s until the early 1990s. Thanks to Kumanov's meticulous diary entries, Gueorguieva was able to reconstruct the family's food consumption over four decades. Revealing a striking feature of the Kumanovs' eating habits (the fact that they bought very little meat or other ingredients for cooking because they relied extensively...