Anthropological research on the socialist countries of Central and Eastern Europe is often paired with material and memorial culture, property regimes, changing gender roles, ethnicity, or labor models. The immersion of the fieldworker in the realities of socialism remains widely overlooked in the examinations of deep legal, economic, social, and macro-institutional transformations that shaped the respective societies. Therefore, this workshop aims to explore reflections on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria, Slovakia, and Georgia from the 1970s onwards, together with a comparative study about Bolivia. What methodological and ethical challenges did the ethnographers encounter in their fieldwork relationships? How did the institutional setting impact their fieldwork? How did the anthropologist engage with the needs and desires of the studied subjects? How does ethnography play out in other socialist and post-socialist field settings and what can we learn from this comparison? And last, but not least: has methodology changed? How did the anthropologists adapt their methodologies from the 1990s onwards?

By looking at socialism as a resource for recent anthropological debates, the papers will highlight new associations between nation and identity, global and local, history and memory. Thirty years after the collapse of state socialism in Central and Eastern Europe, approaching fieldwork challenges and strategies from an enriching comparative perspective will offer fruitful scholarship prospects.