A Note from the Guest Editor.

The collection of papers in this volume of The Anthropology of East Europe Review comes from a panel that Nancy Ries and I organized at the 98 Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association held in Chicago, Illinois. The title of this double-panel session (which is the title of this special issue) was “Why Post-Socialism is Good to Think: The Anthropology of Transforming States.” We asked panelists to investigate how lived experiences of post-socialism might challenge the tenets of anthropological knowledge. Does post-socialism undermine common (both popular and academic) modes of theorizing modernity and post-modernity, empire and post-colonialism, capitalism, globalism, law, and community? We hoped that the papers would reveal the variety of unexpected ways in which local narratives are employed to negotiate these categories and would explore the often convoluted (and contested) practices through which alternative forms of citizenship and community come into being.