DIY modernity: rethinking socialist experience from the temporal perspective

Zinaida Vasilyeva

Journal of Contemporary Central and Eastern Europe, 2025, vol. 33, issue 1, 15-30

Abstract: Since the early 2000s, the material culture of DIY in socialist societies has attracted increasing scholarly attention. It has often been examined through the lens of consumption – as a response to scarcity in planned economies, as a form of resistance to state power, or as a means of subject formation. While acknowledging and building on the role of DIY material culture in the formation of subjectivities, I argue against the consumption framework. Drawing on anthropological theories of time, I contend that the analytical language of consumption studies is often misleading because it denies DIY material practices coevalness—a place in the shared present – and traps our thinking within the moral and analytical binaries of the Cold War. As an alternative, I adopt Warnier’s concept of mise en objet to reconceptualise the relationship between subjects, material environments, and dominant socio-economic and political structures outside existing temporal hierarchies. This framework shifts the focus from consumption to the culturally specific ways in which individuals engage with materialities, thereby reframing DIY practices as sites of alternative modernity rather than an anachronistic practice. This perspective challenges teleological narratives of progress and calls for new economic imaginaries.

Date: 2025
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DOI: 10.1080/25739638.2025.2476860

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