Suchergebnisse

In search of salvation on the Stroganov estates -- Faith, family, and land after emancipation -- Youth : exemplars of rural socialism -- Elders : Christian ascetics in the Soviet countryside -- New risks and inequalities in the household sector -- Which khoziain? Whose moral community? -- Society, culture, and the churching of Sepych -- Separating post-Soviet worlds? : priestly baptisms and priestless funerals

This article examines several documentary films made by and about the Russian oil industry in the period from 2003 to 2016, with a particular emphasis on the ways in which they portray intersections between oil and post-Soviet "life." It divides these films into two major sub-genres: the corporate documentary (2003-present) and the conspiracy documentary (most widespread after about 2012). Corporate documentaries have been instrumental in fashioning new, post-Soviet links between the oil industry and everyday life, especially through "commodity chain" documentaries shown widely on television and in other media. The conspiracy films of the 2010s then extended these commodity chains into the realm of shadowy international cabals and, in some cases, fantastic alien worlds. Together, these sub-genres speak to the cultural imagination of life in Russia as a petrostate, complete with agents and victims, usable pasts and presents, and a variety of energopolitical subject positions that viewers might inhabit and shift among. Although oil documentaries and science fiction generated around the world have long imagined non-hydrocarbon energy futures for humankind, recent Russian oil documentaries in both sub-genres envision a world in which oil and human life will become ever more tightly enmeshed.

In addition to its established interest in the relationships among states, corporations, and communities near extraction sites, recent anthropological and allied interdisciplinary interest in oil extends to encompass pipeline infrastructures, financial and commodity markets, reserve estimates and calculations, international legal battles, and the creation of geological, environmental, and petrochemical knowledge. This review suggests that, across these issues and around the world, two analytic issues have emerged as topics of special interest: temporality and materiality. The former includes the ways in which the oil complex shapes senses of cyclical boom and bust, of acceleration and deceleration, and of past, present, and future. The latter includes the ways in which humans encounter, transform, and represent various qualities and properties of oil as a substance.

In the Perm Region of the Russian Urals, the oil company Lukoil-Perm has worked with regional state agencies to design and administer hundreds of grants for "social and cultural projects" and embarked on other development initiatives over the last 15 years. This article argues that the resulting field of state and corporate power is productively understood as an "energopolitical regime" and suggests ways in which this analytical perspective adds new dimensions to the study of post-Soviet transformations and to the social science of energy and politics more broadly.

Petrobarter--the exchange of oil for goods and services without reference to monetary currency--has been a widespread and underappreciated practice among corporations, states, and state agencies over the past half century. Analyzing this practice with reference to anthropological theories of barter adds to our understandings of two significant and intertwined concerns in contemporary social science: (1) the production and reproduction of inequality at various scales, from subnational regions to the international system as a whole, and (2) the generation and fate of mobilizing political imaginaries that challenge the abstracted, universalizing imaginaries so often associated with monetized exchange, especially in capitalist contexts. Barter exchanges featuring oil are, therefore, as analytically significant as the much more commonly studied transactions of oil and money. Ethnographic and historical case studies of petrobarter are drawn from the Perm region of the Russian Urals in the post-Soviet period and the global oil trade in the early Cold War. This view from the perspective of the socialist and postsocialist world, it is argued, provides an instructive counterpoint to the many existing studies of oil and money, both in and beyond anthropology, that are situated in the European-American colonial and postcolonial periphery.

SUMMARY:
Даглас Роджерс рассматривает книгу Ушакина в контексте литературы о травме и постсоветских трансформациях. Роджерс указывает, что Ушакин объединил интерпретации нескольких "сообществ потери" в Барнауле и создал, таким образом, возможность для оценки символического постсоветского порядка в целом. Однако он не показал, каким образом рассматриваемые "сообщества потери" – ветераны чеченских войн, солдатские матери и националистически настроенные ученые – принадлежат (или не принадлежат) к общему или нескольким социальным полям. Исключение социального аспекта из анализа постсоветского символического порядка, с точки зрения Роджерса, является недостатком исследования и может порождать непонимание. Именно игнорирование какой-либо барнаульской специфики позволяет Ушакину делать выводы об общем символическом порядке в России в целом, считает Роджерс. Блестящий анализ дискурсов потери не сопровождается в книге пояснением того, как они включены в каждодневные практики. Исключение социального аспекта проявляется и в тенденциозном отборе теоретических источников анализа. Роджерс отвергает интерпретацию книги Ушакина, высказанную Марком Липовецким, предположившим, что провал демократической революции в России имел прежде всего культурные корни. Роджерс видит в этом объяснении вариант хорошо знакомого нарратива российской отсталости – Россия вновь упустила свой шанс в силу психологического своеобразия ее граждан. Роджерс выступает за социализацию того образа сообществ потери, который создал Ушакин, и психоаналитического метода, который он положил в основу своего анализа. В частности, этого можно достичь посредством изучения того, как индивидуумы и сообщества (например, солдатские матери) позиционируют себя по отношению к государству. При таком подходе анализ должен учитывать символические и моральные аспекты их признания или непризнания. Роджерс предлагает также некоторые продуктивные направления исследований, основанные на вкладе Ушакина в антропологию постсоветских обществ. Они ориентированы на изучение политики [не]признания, с одной стороны, и социологизации исследуемых психологических механизмов и практик – с другой (последний тезис он иллюстрирует на примере исследования Эмили Мартин "Шизофренические прогулки. Мания и депрессия в американской культуре").

This is the introduction to a cluster ofSlavic Reviewarticles that argue for retaining and expanding the analytic rubric of postsocialism beyond the era of "transition" and beyond the conventional borders of the former Soviet bloc. With primary attention to recent developments in anthropology, Douglas Rogers outlines and evaluates three strategies for unbinding postsocialisms: exploring connections and circulations that lead outward from the formerly socialist world; embarking on new kinds of critical projects that call categories of western social science into question; and developing new varieties and vectors of comparison, especially among socialist and postsocialist contexts around the world. Each of these strategies builds upon and extends the work of the first two decades of research on eastern European and former Soviet postsocialisms. Each also points to significant areas of recent scholarship that new research on postsocialisms is primed to join.

The rapid and pervasive changes of the past decade and a half have thrown the political field wide open across the former Soviet bloc. An extensive array of actors has laid claim to the mantle of the postsocialist state, seeking to siphon off its resources, to leverage its putative power, and often to do both in the same breath. At the same time, others have fled the institutional and discursive purview of the state, taking advantage of the near disappearance of centralized authority in the early 1990s to stake out powerful non- and quasi-state domains. The density of these strategies, which in practice have been complementary as often as contradictory, has made for nothing short of an ethical thicket for postsocialist citizens and state functionaries alike.