Congratulations to Ilya and Daria and we wish you easy implementation of your projects!

The theme of Ksenia's project is "Should the Sacred Be Accessible to Everyone? Pilgrimage, Tourism, and Spiritual Entrepreneurs in the "Places of Power" of Post-Soviet Russia."

Every second issue of the journal opens with the heading "Forum" — a public discussion on the state and development of anthropology and the humanities in general. The topic of discussion in issue number 56 is "Science and Borders".

On February 4, Associate Professor of the Faculty of Anthropology Mikhail Lurie was featured as a guest of the program "Agora" on the TV channel "Culture". This time the topic of the conversation was one of the most mysterious neurobiological, philosophical and subject  — "Happiness". 

On January 18, Professor of the Faculty of Anthropology Nikolai Vakhtin gave a lecture "Writing on Birch Bark, or How to Negotiate without a Common Language" at the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts. The meeting was held as part of an educational program timed to coincide with the exhibition “Universal Language” (December 16, 2022 – March 19, 2023).   

Congratulations to Ekaterina Khonineva, a graduate and lecturer at the Faculty of Anthropology, on her Ph.D. dissertation: "Semiotic ideologies and spiritual practices in modern Russian Catholicism: anthropological aspects".

The Journal opens with a “Declaration on the Establishment of a New Association of Academic Journals in the Humanities”. The decision to establish the Association was made at the Round Table "Russian Journals in the Humanities in a Changing Academic Landscape,"  held at the European University on March 25, 2022. The declaration was signed by the editors of more than 20 Russian academic journals in the humanities and social sciences.

This talk offers an in-depth analysis of “spatializing culture,” an idea that grew out of my work on the Latin American plaza (Low 2000) and Deborah Pellow’s (2002) ethnography of West African socio-spatial organization and institutions. Through subsequent research and theory-building “spatializing culture” has evolved into a multi-dimensional framework that includes social production, social construction, embodied, discursive, emotive and affective, as well as translocal approaches to space and place.

  The Charisma of Invented Traditions: Religious (and Academic) Communities in the Search for Legitimacy European University at Saint Petersburg Department of Anthropology Center for Anthropology of Religion Committee for the Scientific Planning  

Congratulations to EUSP Department of Anthropology graduate Ekaterina Rudneva on the successful defense of her dissertation for the degree of candidate of sciences in philology.   On May 16, 2019, Ekaterina Rudneva has defended her dissertation "Strategii lingvisticheskoi vezhlivosti v spontannom rechevom vzaimodeistvii" [Strategies of Linguistic Politeness in Spontaneous Speech Interaction] at the Institute of Linguistics of the Russian Academy of Sciences (Moscow).

Did women have better sex under socialism? While individual experience may vary, we can get a vivid picture from expert discourses on female pleasure and male deviance, from state policies and expert input into these policies, together with responses by people who were subject to all these interventions. This talk approaches sexuality as one of the most important terrains in the larger societal project of modernity. By tracing sexual tropes, mores and practices as they change across time and place, one can grasp the changing accents of modern societies.

International Colloquium "Anthropology of Migration: New Research in Russia" Saint Petersburg, March 1-2, 2019th

After the great success of Viagra, pharmaceutical companies have set a new goal: the "female Viagra", i.e. a pill for hypoactive sexual desire disorder (HSDD), the most commonly diagnosed female sexual dysfunction. Each subsequent proposal for the treatment of low desire showed the process of disease mongering in all its glory and simultaneous attempts to strengthen the hypotheses about its biological basis: depending of the drug manufacturer HSDD was supposed to be due to androgen deficiency, disordered pelvic blood circulation, or neurotransmitters imbalance.

Ukraine continues to face one of the worst HIV epidemics in Europe. To date, prevention efforts there have largely consisted of information dissemination and needle/syringe exchange and distribution. In an effort to introduce new, culturally relevant and effective prevention strategies into Ukraine, a team of medical anthropologists and sociologists from the U.S. and Ukraine worked with local HIV activists in Ukraine to create and pilot novel, bottom-up interventions for drug users based on U.S. behavior change theories.

Growing numbers of people today are reluctant to describe their identity and social practices as either religious or secular, and prefer to portray themselves as "spiritual”.

In my presentation I will discuss how the official attitudes to complementary and alternative medicine (CAM), and particularly to folk healing have been changing in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan since proclamation of their independence. Initially, these countries, similar to the other newly independent Central Asian states, strove to confirm their legitimacy through referring to the richness of their cultural heritage, including traditional medical knowledge and practices.

This presentation introduces the initial findings of my new research project on cultural debates about vaccines. The paper focuses on the debates surrounding the connection between the Pandemrix vaccine used in the mass vaccinations in Europe during the 2009 H1N1 pandemic and the reported increase in narcolepsy among vaccinated children especially in Finland, Sweden, Ireland and the UK.

This talk will reflect on the key themes of my book, Population Genetics and Belonging (Palgrave Macmillan 2018). I explore how population genetics has emerges as a means of enacting belonging in contemporary technoscientific societies. I will reflect on the contradictions that underlie the project of discovering genetic roots, focusing on the tensions between global, national, communal and personal genetic belonging. I argue that genetic roots are not discovered – they are enacted through a range of technological, discursive, affective and material practices.

EUSP Anthropology Department graduate Evgeniia Zakharova defended her dissertation "Muzhskie kvartal'nye soobshchestva Tbilisi: struktura i funktsionirovanie [Street-Corner Societies of Tbilisi: Structure and Functioning]" at the Dissertation Council of the Peter the Great Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography of the Russian Academy of Sciences “Kunstkamera” on December 18, 2017. Evgeniia Zakharova was awarded the academic degree of candidate of sciences in history. The dissertation was written under the supervision of EUSP Professor Ilia Utekhin.

EUSP Anthropology Department graduate Daria Dubovka defended her dissertation "Povsednevnye distsiplinarnye praktiki i religioznaia refleksiia v pravoslavnykh zhenskikh monastyriakh postsovetskoi Rossii: etnograficheskie aspekty [Everyday Disciplinary Practices and Religious Reflection in Orthodox Women's Monasteries of Post-Soviet Russia: Ethnographic Aspects]" at the Dissertation Council of the Peter the Great Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography of the Russian Academy of Sciences “Kunstkamera” on December 18, 2017.