| With the end of communism in 1989, the Czech Republic and its Eastern European neighbors began sweeping processes of economic transformation. Those processes thoroughly restructured property relations at all levels of society. The social fallout of these processes has raised serious questions---not only about the politics and economics of post-socialism, but also about the moral implications of the transformation itself. Current literatures on post-socialism understand the transformation in purely political-economic terms; they analyze its effects through quantifiable measures of economic exigency and political preference. This dissertation claims that in the Czech Republic, economic transformation is a profoundly moral experiences. Czechs understand the transformation in terms of complex and competing moral discourses, informed by diverse understandings of Czech history and culture. Without a thoroughgoing understanding of the moral context of property ownership, the experiential stakes of post-socialism can only remain opaque to the outside observer.; During twenty-one months of anthropological fieldwork in Olomouc and Prague, I examined the ethics of property ownership as it emerged around the process of Jewish property restitution. The predicament of Jewish property presents a topic both rich with its own ethnographic particularities and rife with the moral discourses central to Czech post-socialism. Property restitution refers to the legal return of confiscated lands and buildings to their previous private owners. It also indicates a moral process by which Czechs have tried "to come to terms" (vyrovnat se) with the perceived injustices of the old regime. In chapters one through four, I follow restitution cases through the legal system in order to adduce the competing discourses about law, history, and morality that make property and private ownership such problematic categories. In chapters five through seven, I examine discourses about property and ownership beyond the courtroom, in order to explicate the historical contexts and cultural conceptions that enter into contemporary reasoning, both legal and otherwise. Ultimately, I suggest that the state finds itself in a double bind: while contemporary legislation reflects many Czechs' desires to right the wrongs of the past, it does so by institutionalizing a morally suspect regime of private property ownership. |
