Gift relations have been traditionally theorized as antinomial to modernity or, within modernity, in the spheres of the personal relations and ideologies of altruism which dwell on the contrast with commodity and often cast themselves as residual, 'traditional' domains. This article explores claims to modernity that were made by public gift-giving to a modern head of state. It examines birthday gifts to the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin that he received from both his Soviet subjects and international leaders and movements and that were put on public display in 1949-53 in the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow. This article interprets gift-giving to Stalin as a dramatic example of socialist intervention in the modernist temporality, and it theorizes the notions of time that were culturally constructed through the socialist state gift economy. This article reflects part of an ongoing research project on gift-giving to Soviet leaders. It is based on fieldwork, oral-historical and archival research with designers, artisans, and ordinary citizens who were involved in the production of the gift items, as well as with curators and other specialists involved in this exhibition and in preservation of these gifts in different Russian state museums.We are in the epoch of simultaneity: we are in the epoch of juxtaposition, the epoch of the near and far, of the side-by-side, of the dispersed. We are at a moment, I believe, when our experience of the world is less that of a long life developing through time than that of a network that connects points and intersects with its own skein. … Time … appears to us only as one of the various distributive operations that are possible for the elements that are spread out in space. Michel Foucault, HeterotopiasHe leads  million people in a landmass of  million square kilometres. His figure is raised fulllength over Europe and Asia, and over the past and the future. Henri Barbusse, Stalin

No abstract

This article reviews recent ethnographies of war that shed light on interconnected states of security at home, international military interventions, and hybrid or rhizomic warfare doctrines. I suggest the notion of hybrid peace to explore global implications of these ethnographic perspectives and to ask what it means to inhabit spaces that are constituted by such hybrid warfare. I argue for the usefulness of Schmitt's “nomos of the earth” and his theory of the partisan to conceptualize this condition and bring together different approaches to warfare.

(2013) The group for debates in anthropological theory (GDAT), The University of Manchester: the 2011 annual debate -non-dualism is philosophy not ethnography. Critique of anthropology, 33 (3). pp. 300-360.

No abstract