“Ties That Matter the Most”. Family Connections in Memory of the Transcarpathian Village Community
“Ties That Matter the Most”. Family Connections in Memory of the Transcarpathian Village Community

Summary/Abstract: This article explores the importance of family and personal connections through a model of informal economy present in a post-soviet, Transcarpathian (Ukrainian) village setting. I examine this informal economy through village residents’ narratives of a politically turbulent past that I collected during my research. Specifically, the memory of the past they recall and share draws on their capacities to adapt to successive regimes and crises throughout the socialist and post-socialist periods. This adaptive capacity is particularly observable in how the homegrown agency of two local family networks during these periods are remembered and commemorated in the community as examples of resilience. The collective memory of these family networks transcends the non-economic, and comprises a local-historical moral anchoring of their choices and activities, one which forms a rationale that continues to act as an incentive for the villagers’ ongoing engagement in a model of informal economy. Further, it remains available as a significant resource that villagers use to emphasise and explain the moral grounding of their current economic lives. This study is based on long-term ethnographic research, and utilises predominantly anthropological theories of the study of memory, socioeconomic transformation as well as various models of informal economy. My work explores here how familial and communal narratives of the past, and physical and public commemorations, shape local perceptions of the perceived and performed (moral) value of people’s economies. I suggest the reason that both family networks (and their past agency) that I focus on here are remembered so intensively is that this remembering depicts the family connections as more than an effective means to pursue economic and material advantage. Indeed, such remembrance is connected to a shared notion of socialisation that in turn informs an economic model of rural community, perceived by my respondents as traditional in this village’s setting.

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