Bear skins and macaroni: the social life of things at the margins of a Siberian state collective

Ссорин-Чайков, Николай

doi:10.1017/cbo9780511720628.015

Cited by 20 publications

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“…The "small scale" means here everything but geography. Discussing the barter in Siberia, Nikolai Ssorin-Chaikov demonstrates the wide range of trading networks reaching from Central Siberia to Central Asia (Ssorin-Chaikov 2000).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Untitled

2011

FEJF

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Introduction: World Routes in the Arctic Arctic Workshop at the University of Tartu was created to discuss these and similar issues. The first three workshops plan to focus on the issues of movement and its social, cultural, political or economic impact and therefore bear the subtitle "World Routes". In every workshop, we plan to add papers that focus on regions outside of Siberia to initiate discussion between researchers working in different regions of the North and show similarities or differences in movement all over the area. NOTES 1 This conference and publication was supported by the European Union through the European Regional Development Fund (Centre of Excellence in Cultural Theory CECT).

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Untitled

2011

FEJF

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“…A third cluster of scholars has concentrated on nonmonetary transactions in ethnographies of bribes, gifts, and informal connections accruing around access to goods and services (Caldwell 2004;Ledeneva 1998;Patico 2002;Rivkin-Fish in press). The arguments of this third group have generally been somewhat less oriented toward economic issues associated with barter and demonetization, illuminating, instead, the social construction of personhood and subjectivity through objects (Rethmann 2000;Ssorin-Chaikov 2000).…”

Section: Multiple Currencies and The Politics Of Liquiditymentioning

confidence: 99%

Moonshine, money, and the politics of liquidity in rural Russia

Rogers

2005

American Ethnologist

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In many areas of rural Russia after socialism, moonshine serves as a local currency. In this article, I trace the intersecting circuits of moonshine, rubles, labor, and U.S. dollars in a Russian town to outline an approach to exchange that concentrates on the politics of liquidity—conflicts and inequalities rooted in the relative degrees of exchangeability associated with different transactables. I explore emerging axes of stratification after socialism at several junctures: between husbands and wives; among units of extended families; between moonlighters and their employers; and, through an analysis of ruble–dollar exchanges and Russia's “August crisis” of 1998, between rural households and international currency speculators.

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“…Workers in the factories, as well as communities marginalized from the centres of political life, it has been argued, understood the moral ambiguities of their 'second economy' activities -such as looting, lifting, theft and favours -in an overall context in which the state was not fulfilling its own obligations. Seen as suspicious, alienating and exploitative, the 'state' and its property were dealt with in an interpretative framework of mutual trickery -a relation continuing into postsocialism as well (Wedel 1992;Pine 1999;Ssorin-Chaikov 2000). To an extent, such narratives of "honest bandits" (Ries 2002) and "normal heroes" (Humphrey 2012) resemble very well the post-Yugoslav narratives of statehood and the corrupt dealings of its politicians.…”

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confidence: 99%

Concern for the state: ‘Normality’, state effect and distributional claims in Serbia

Rajković¹

2017

Glas Etnogr inst

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Ethnographies of the post-Yugoslav region often focus on the production of the 'state effect' through narratives of statelessness, namely on the normative imagination evident in the yearnings for 'normal life'. Drawing from fieldwork research in various after-sites of 'Zastava' industrial complex in Kragujevac-from car enthusiasts to the newly unemployed-I explore how such entrenched discursive tropes transform in a context of chronic superfluity in the job market and reliance on the state as the new interventionist hegemon. My interlocutors shared a belief that a significant positive change could only come from the 'state', while simultaneously agreeing that those who were excluded from that state were more morally fit to impersonate its key functions than the very statesmen and bureaucrats were. Turning moral superiority into a distributional claim, they described themselves not only as deserving, but as materially valuable for the state. This process elucidates a new hegemonic framework currently reshaping the Serbian welfare apparatus and social actors' pragmatic adaptations to it.

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Bear skins and macaroni: the social life of things at the margins of a Siberian state collective

Cited by 20 publications

References 0 publications

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Moonshine, money, and the politics of liquidity in rural Russia

Concern for the state: ‘Normality’, state effect and distributional claims in Serbia

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