Routledge published a book edited by Albert Baiburin, Catriona Kelly, and Nikolai Vakhtin. Graduates of the EUSP Anthropology Department are present among the authors.
In Soviet times, anthropologists in the Soviet Union were closely involved in the state’s work of nation building. They helped define official nationalities, and gathered material about traditional customs and suitably heroic folklore, whilst at the same time refraining from work on the reality of contemporary Soviet life. Since the end of the Soviet Union anthropology in Russia has been transformed. International research standards have been adopted, and the focus of research has shifted to include urban culture and difficult subjects, such as xenophobia. However, this transformation has been, and continues to be, controversial, with, for example, strongly contested debates about the relevance ofWestern anthropology and cultural theory to post-Soviet reality. This book presents an overview of how anthropology in Russia has changed since Soviet times, and showcases examples of important Russian anthropological work. As such, the book will be of great interest not just to Russian specialists, but also to anthropologists more widely, and to all those interested in the way academic study is related to prevailing political and social conditions.
Ed. by: Albert Baiburin, Catriona Kelly, and Nikolai Vakhtin
Routledge, 2012
CONTENTS
Albert Baiburin, Catriona Kelly and Nikolai Vakhtin. Introduction: Soviet and post-Soviet anthropology
Sergey Sokolovskiy. Writing the history of Russian anthropology
Elena Liarskaya. Female taboos and concepts of the unclean among the Nenets
Albert Baiburin. ‘The wrong nationality’: ascribed identity in the 1930s Soviet Union
Konstantin Bogdanov. The queue as narrative: a Soviet case study
Catriona Kelly and Svetlana Sirotinina. ‘I didn’t understand, but it was funny’: late Soviet festivals and their impact on children
Alexander Manuylov. The practices of ‘privacy’ in a South Russian village (a case study of Stepnoe, Krasnodar Region)
Jeanne Kormina and Sergei Shtyrkov. Believers’ letters as advertising: St Xenia of Petersburg’s ‘National Reception Centre’
Mariya Akhmetova. ‘The yellow peril’ as seen in contemporary church culture
Olga Boitsova. ‘Don’t look at them, they’re nasty’: photographs of funerals in Russian culture
Pavel Kupriyanov and Lyudmila Sadovnikova. Historical Zaryadye as remembered by locals: cultural meanings of city spaces
Levon Abrahamian. Yerevan: memory and forgetting in the organisation of post-Soviet urban space.