Suchergebnisse

Recensione di Michael Taussig, Il diavolo e il feticismo della merce: Antropologia dell'alienazione nel "patto col diavolo", edizione italiana a cura di Alessia Solerio, Emanuele Fabiano, Stefania Consigliere, Roma, Derive e Approdi, 2017, pp. 335.

What does it mean to slow down and who can do it? In recent years, the need to decelerate to avoid environmental and social catastrophes has been evoked more and more often. The world runs too fast, we are now unable to act thoughtfully and really enjoy our life, which always flows at greater speed. And yet, we continually dream of slowing down, of rediscovering more authentic, everyday relationships. We dedicate ourselves to new hobbies, we learn to work with our hands, we plant vegetables on the terrace, we allow ourselves small and short holidays as a moment in which we believe we have regained possession of our existence. But today time has become a privilege and not everyone is allowed to use it. Having time is often a luxury, in the face of thousands of workers who can never slow down. Using the pandemic as the central moment of a suspension of time, we would like to explain what it means to slow down in late capitalist societies and why it is increasingly a question of class. Our slowness, in fact, is always related to the time taken away from someone else.

The paper focuses on consumer culture and domestic sphere in Russia from an anthropological point of view. The authors' attention is reserved on the rules that things and spaces play on the creation of individual identity. Starting to an anthropological and historical methodology (Appadurai, Bourdieu, Kopytoff, Roche) the authors study the rule of the objects in the domestic life. As a place of presentation of self, home informs us on the political national values and the relations between Russian and western consumer culture. The analysis of domestic things is very important to understand the cultural history of Russia, for example to rethink the byt, which encourages a Russian way of life in opposition to western world.