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Reconstructing the House of Culture
Notions of culture, rituals and their meanings, the workings of ideology in everyday life, public representations of tradition and ethnicity, and the social consequences of economic transition— these are critical issues in the social anthropology of Russia and other postsocialist countries. Engaged in the negotiation of all these is the House of Culture, which was the key institution for cultural activities and implementation of state cultural policies in all socialist states. The House of Culture was officially responsible for cultural enlightenment, moral edification, and personal cultivation—in short, for implementing the socialist state’s program of “bringing culture to the masse...
Nomadic and Indigenous Spaces
This volume is devoted to aspects of space that have thus far been largely unexplored. How space is perceived and cognised has been discussed from different stances, but there are few analyses of nomadic approaches to spatiality. Nor is there a sufficient number of studies on indigenous interpretations of space, despite the importance of territory and place in definitions of indigeneity. At the intersection of geography and anthropology, the authors of this volume combine general reflections on spatiality with case studies from the Circumpolar North and other nomadic settings. Spatial perceptions and practices have been profoundly transformed by new technologies as well as by new modes of so...
Siberian Survival
The Yamal Peninsula in northwestern Siberia is one of the few remaining places on earth where a nomadic people retain a traditional culture. Here in the tundra, the Nenets—one of the few indigenous minorities of the Russian North—follow a lifestyle shaped by the seasonal migrations of the reindeer they herd. For decades under Soviet rule, they weathered harsh policies designed to subjugate them. How the Nenets successfully resisted indoctrination from a powerful totalitarian state and how today they face new challenges to the survival of their culture—these are the subjects of this compelling and lavishly illustrated book.The authors—one the head of a team of Russian ethnographers wh...
Peoples of the Tundra
On ethnographic grounds alone, Zikers book is a unique and valuable contribution. Despite increased fieldwork opportunities for foreigners in the former Soviet Union in recent years, much of Russia and Siberia remains terra incognita to Western scholars, except for specialists who know the Russian literature. Zikers account of the Dolgan and Nganasan peoples of the Ust Avam community is a fascinating analysis of how people adapt their hunting, fishing, and herding not only to the demanding Arctic environment but also to enormous economic and political adversities created in the wake of the Soviet Unions collapse. In this sense, the book fills a gap in the ethnographic literature on Siberia for Western students and, at the same time, serves as a microcosm of the devastating changes affecting rural communities and indigenous peoples generally in a disintegrating former superpower: that is, increasing isolation and a shift to nonmarket survival economies.
The Aesthetics of Decay
In The Aesthetics of Decay, Dylan Trigg confronts the remnants from the fallout of post-industrialism and postmodernism. Through a considered analysis of memory, place, and nostalgia, Trigg argues that the decline of reason enables a critique of progress to emerge. In this ambitious work, Trigg aims to reassess the direction of progress by situating it in a spatial context. In doing so, he applies his critique of rationality to modern ruins. The derelict factory, abandoned asylum, and urban alleyway all become allies in Trigg's attack on a fixed image of temporality and progress. The Aesthetics of Decay offers a model of post-rational aesthetics in which spatial order is challenged by an affirmative ethics of ruin.
Lifestyle in Siberia and the Russian North
Lifestyle in Siberia and the Russian North breaks new ground by exploring the concept of lifestyle from a distinctly anthropological perspective. Showcasing the collective work of ten experienced scholars in the field, the book goes beyond concepts of tradition that have often been the focus of previous research, to explain how political, economic and technological changes in Russia have created a wide range of new possibilities and constraints in the pursuit of different ways of life. Each contribution is drawn from meticulous first-hand field research, and the authors engage with theoretical questions such as whether and how the concept of lifestyle can be extended beyond its conventionall...
Ruins
Between 1991 and 2015, Josef Koudelka completed an epic journey across twenty countries bordering the Mediterranean, stopping at over 200 Greek and Roman archaeological sites, relentlessly researching the beauty of the ancient world. Before the Magnum photographer, nobody had attempted to make such a comprehensive photographic record of these artefacts with so much persistence and so little assistance. In this book, produced in close collaboration with the photographer, Koudelka's aim was to use art to re-appropriate a world that is escaping us and that we could lose - a world where the mind alternates between reason and faith, law and liberty.
Violent Gods
This book is an erudite and elegiac exploration of Hindu nationalism in India today. It offers a revealing account of Hindu militant mobilizations as an authoritarian movement manifest throughout culture, polity, and economy, religion and law, class and caste, on gender, body, land, and memory. Tracing the continuities between Hindutva and Hindu cultural dominance, this book maps the architectures of civic and despotic governmentalities contouring Hindu nationalism in public, domestic, and everyday life. In chronicling concerted action against Christians and Muslims, Adivasis and Dalits, through spectacles, events, public executions, the riots in Kandhamal of December 2007 and August-September 2008, the planned, methodical politics of terror unfolds in its multiple registers. At the intersections of Anthropology, Postcolonial, Subaltern, and South Asia Studies, Angana P. Chatterji asks critical questions of nation making, cultural nationalism, and subaltern disenfranchisement. As a Foucauldian history of the present, this text asserts the role of ethical knowledge production as counter-memory.
Urban Spaces after Socialism
Was geschieht in eurasischen Städten seit dem Ende der Sowjetunion? Wie werden periphere urbane Räume neu konstruiert, angeordnet und reflektiert in Stimmen der Subkulturen und im Alltag der postsozialistischen Stadt? Bei politischen Ungewissheiten und begleitet von Phänomenen der Globalisierung entsteht hier ein Labor spezifischer urbaner Kulturen. Der Umgang mit urbanen Räumen und Symbolen muss neu verhandelt, die Aneignung öffentlicher Plätze von neuen Akteuren erprobt werden. Der Band bietet ethnografische Einblicke in Städte wie Eriwan, Tiflis, Taschkent oder Osh, die diesen Umbruch erleben.
Anthropology of Transformation
This collection of essays is the result of the joint efforts of colleagues and students of the leading social anthropology and post-socialism theorist, Professor Chris Hann. With the thirtieth anniversary of the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 2019 as their catalyst, the authors reflect upon Chris Hann’s lifelong fieldwork in the discipline, spanning regions as diverse as East Central Europe, Turkey, and the Chinese north-west. The collapse of the Berlin Wall naturally triggered a plethora of analysis and scholarly research. Sociocultural anthropology, with its focus on ethnographic study and on the gradual evolution of social relations, sharply contrasted with the emphasis on dramatic rupt...
