WOMEN AND CAPITALISM IN THE CROATIAN HINTERLAND The Practice of Labor and Consumption

In Women and Capitalism in the Croatian Hinterland: The Practice of Labor and Consumption, anthropologist, Nila Ginger Hofman focuses on the socio-cultural forces that mediate women's participation in the labour (both paid and unpaid) and capitalist consumer markets. She does this by examining their everyday lives i.e., their experiences at work and with shopping. Hofman also explores the particular meanings and memories embedded in women's experience of the past. She examines how women remembered the socialist era and how they now participate and negotiate the capitalist present focusing on the spheres of earning and spending. She concludes that participants' narratives demonstrate that 'their day-to-day experiences exist somewhere between the cultivation of capitalist values and the legacies of self-managing socialism' (p. 117). Fieldwork for this study was conducted in Zagreb in 2011 and 2012 during two field trips. Hofman dedicates this work to her research participants who provided her with their lived experiences and memories. Through the prism of gender, class and power she examines how the borders between production and consumption are blurred in the everyday lives of Croatian women. Namely, the author includes women that belong to different socio-economic categories exploring what types of strategies they used and how differences in their educational backgrounds and ages revealed different experiences. Although she employs the intersectional approach (i.e., oppression is not experienced in the same way but is dependent on gender, race, ethnicity, religion, age, and social class, etc.) she did not include women from very vulnerable populations (that she defines as 'desperately poor women with little or no education' p. 21) in this study. To begin with, Hofman outlines pertinent socio-political and legal conditions in Chapter 1 'The Capitalist Hinterland', to understand the labour and consumer practices of Croatian women that in turn helps frame the ethnographic narratives explored in her book. In this chapter, she also introduces the book's theoretical objective and argues that a practice-oriented framework is critical for understanding how working women negotiate the particular transformations of their social environment including their experiences in the labour and consumer markets. Further, she maintains that this is useful for demonstrating the complex ways in which labour and consumer practices are embedded in hegemonic institutions and discourses of power through the practice of everyday life (p. 17). In her discussion of fieldwork methodologies also covered in this chapter, she emphasises 'the importance of contact with ordinary Croatian citizens to capture what ordinary Croatian women felt about the social and political in their immediate environments' (p. 18). As already mentioned, Hofman recognises that Croatian women are not a homogenous entity and how differences in age, education and income have produced different registers in which post-war Croatia is experienced. She aptly acknowledges her own positionality in her deci-