9320974 Wedel This project involves a cultural anthropologist from George Washington University in a study of the process of foreign aid in five democratizing countries of Eastern Europe. The investigators will study three state factories in Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic, and two state farms in Romania and Albania as they deal with foreign advisers and aid institutions in their effort to get help in privatizing their production. The anthropologists will focus on the ideology, politics and bureaucratic organization of aid in donor societies as well as the dynamic relations involved as donors and recipients negotiate their way towards large-scale technical assistance. Using ethnographic techniques of in-depth interviews and participant observation, fieldwork in factories and farms in Eastern Europe will be coupled with interviews and observations at U.S., E.C., and joint East-West meetings where aid policies are formulated. This research is important because the democratizing process taking place in the former Communist countries of Eastern Europe is one of the major events of our time, and its success is critically important to world peace and prosperity. The actual implementation of international aid programs is not a one-way street of expertise flowing out of the First World into the ex- Second World, but a complex process of negotiation. Increased understanding of the actual behavior involved in foreign aid, and how different perceptions and understandings of each other, different goals and political agendas, and different practices all influence aid outcomes, will be important in structuring future relations between First and ex-Second Worlds. ***
