Yuson Jung's Balkan Blues: Consumer Politics after State Socialism is a clearly written ethnography based on extensive fieldwork conducted for shorter and longer periods between 1999 and 2015 in the capital city of the European Union's poorest country, Bulgaria. The book details how middle-class Bulgarians in Sofia struggle to balance unequal access and unreliable choice in their everyday consumption. As Jung explains, “while there are numerous goods and services in the postsocialist era, the things that the average Bulgarian consumers can afford or trust in terms of their quality are relatively limited” (15); consumption is seen “not [as] something emancipative but agonizing” (77). Their strivings unfold in a practical and ideational context in which socialist experience of and post-socialist expectation regarding the implication of the state in consumer affairs awkwardly articulate with EU integration priorities and neoliberal antiregulatory principles. Critical points in this context are gradually introduced with each chapter.

Chapter 1 examines grievances provoked by the widespread presence of mente products, and emphasizes how frustrated consumers wonder why the state permits them (mente translates as “counterfeit, knockoff, relatively low and shoddy quality, inauthentic and unoriginal,” 44). Starting from the example of the hard currency store—a state enterprise known by the acronym CORECOM, which is sarcastically reimagined as “correction of communism” (47)—Chapter 2 shows that the socialist state positioned itself as accountable for both the successes and failures of its social policies, and that this historical experience shapes current understandings of consumption. Chapter 3 details the ways consumer NGOs—which were established not so much as grassroots initiatives but as top-down projects during the EU integration process—try to educate consumers to make better-informed choices and protect their rights. They also recognize the foreignness of these notions and the legitimacy of the local demand for a more responsible state. Chapter 4 focuses on heating, housing, and seaside vacations. These are “needs” that the socialist state largely satisfied, and that socialist citizens learned to regard as central to their “existential normality.” Today, however, one must strive to secure these. Consumption practices in these domains can thus be understood as “expressions of civic engagements”: they manifest consumers’ fears and frustrations and, equally important, articulate “their shared future visions as members of their societies” (129). Chapter 5 and the epilogue wrap up this discussion of consumer politics after state socialism. As an EU member state, Bulgaria is unable not to follow the neoliberal model. In light of the legacy of state socialism, however, “ordinary” Bulgarians continue to consider the state “an important category” in negotiating and facilitating their rights and responsibilities despite living in “the era of neoliberal globalization in which the category of the state is often eclipsed by the market” (77). “The postsocialist condition” (77) brings to the foreground what Jung rightly assumes to be a widespread demand for the realignment of citizen-consumers, the state, and the market, so that a “better life” is within everyone's reach.

In addition, an appendix provides a detailed presentation of Jung's fieldwork in Sofia, including the key detail that her interlocutors were middle class (in terms of education and occupation, rather than financial standing). This information could have appeared earlier in the book, and its implications for the analysis explored. In addition, this focus on middle-class Sofians could have benefitted from better contextualization. Missing from the book are details about socialist and postsocialist consumption that other ethnographies of rural and provincial Bulgaria provide.

Theoretically—and this ensures that the book is a valuable contribution to bodies of literature on consumption and the state—Jung argues that we need to recalibrate our understanding of consumption. In the last decades, the hegemonic neoliberal discourse has left its mark on the scholarly analysis of consumption as well, numerous studies situating it exclusively in the domain of the market and framing it preponderantly in terms of choice. Today we witness not only the growth of material abundance, however, but also of social inequality and poverty. Hence, it is important to (re)approach consumption not only as an issue of choice, but also of access. Moreover, nowadays we often hear calls for the state to uphold its responsibility to protect its citizens. Therefore, it is crucial to address choice not only as an individual matter, but also a matter of civic engagement and to take into consideration the role of the state in the development of consumer culture.