Suchergebnisse

In northwestern Siberia, rivers historically played an essential role in structuring economic, cultural, and administrative space. The rivers' role in spatial perception is reflected in vocabulary of some local languages. With the recent development of roads and railroads, a new way has emerged to structure socioeconomic and political space. The two systems of spatial structuring contradict each other, and their relative importance for different local groups depends on their professional and ethnocultural affiliation. This leads to different perceptions of space, distances, and geographic directions by the members of these groups. Furthermore, since the administrative borders reflect the "river" system, but the administrative power is increasingly projected along the roads and railroads, the conflict between the two systems has a political dimension.

Drawing on recent culture-psychological and cognitive studies on visual perception and processing, this article aims to show how anthropology can benefit from and make a contribution to the study of visual representations. As opposed to common approaches in anthropology, which focus on semantics and content of visual representations, the authors of this study turn the attention from content to the problem of form. The study of form(s) of visual representations provides additional, possibly new, ways how to grasp normally latent, verbally mute, and unreflected aspects of human experience. Furthermore, if culture-psychological findings are correct and the form of visual representations is an indicator of culturally induced cognitive style, and thus of self-construal in a given cultural context, then the study of form of visual representations may well lead to inquiries in how different social and cultural context influences people's visual thinking and representation. Assuming that the form of visual representations differs from one cultural context to another, the authors address the problem of how to relate the difference in cultural and social practices with the differences in cognition and visualisation. As empirical evidence serves, on the one hand, the authors' analysis of drawings made by children in Siberia, and, on the other hand, their recent quantitative pilot study that assessed the perceptual processing and the style of children drawing in the far north of Russia. The article reports on the procedure, findings, and theoretical and methodological conclusions of this study and offers some insights for further research.

Projects constructing ethnicity on the basis of territorial identity have been common in Europe but rather rare in Russia. This paper analyzes two such projects that have been undertaken in the northeast of the European part of Russia: the successful construction of the Komi-Permiak ethnic identity in the late 1920s–30s, and the unsuccessful project of constructing the Iz'vatas (Izhma-Komi) ethnic identity in the first decade of the twentieth century. A comparison of the two projects shows that the primary reason for the failure of the latter was most probably linguistic and terminological: The choice of defining ethnicity in strictly geographic terms has made the project unacceptable for those potential Iz'vatas, whose geographic identity was not properly described by that name. In the case of Komi-Permiaks, the choice of the ethnonym was more geographically neutral, and this contributed significantly to the success of this project.

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 masses." Surprisingly, little is known about its past and present condition. This collection of ethnographically rich accounts examines the social significance and everyday performance of Houses of Culture and how they have changed in recent decades. In the years immediately following the end of the Soviet Union, they underwent a deep economic and symbolic crisis, and many closed. Recently, however, there have been signs of a revitalization of the Houses of Culture and a re-orientation of their missions and programs. The contributions to this volume investigate the changing functions and meanings of these vital institutions for the communities that they serve