MetroDogs: the heart in the machine

Abstract

Dogs in the Moscow Metro, some say, have evolved a unique sentience: they navigate a human‐scaled infrastructure and interpret human motives there. Such assertions about dogs, and encounters with them on public transit, invoke Soviet‐era moral projects that wove sentiment (‘compassion’) and affect (‘attention’) through technical dreams: to erase material suffering and physical violence, to traverse the globe and the cosmos, to end wars and racisms. Dogs, after all, helped defeat the Nazis and took part in the space race. In the Metro now, their wags and barks stir debate about access and exclusion, resonating across assemblages of materials and meanings, social connections and signs. MetroDogs invite us to theorize the ways people extend connections in the moment well beyond the here‐and‐now.

The Year 2015 in Sociocultural Anthropology: Material Life and Emergent Cultures

“…If as Keith Hart said, “Goody remains to this day an anthropologist whose sensibility was formed by long‐term ethnographic fieldwork” (2014:217), he would likely have appreciated the range and diversity of field research represented in these articles. In light of Goody's interest in history (2000), he would likely have been pleased with the understandings of local history that contextualized many of the analyses (e.g., Barkin and Hildebrand ; Fischer ; Lemon ; Sternsdorff‐Cisterna 2105). Given his “profoundly dialectical” approach and his “sustained attack on binary oppositions of all kinds” (Hart :216), Goody may well have welcomed the emphasis on unpredictable emergent cultures.…”

“…As Merrill Singer said, “Other species are full intentional players in interspecies interactions and we must respond to their natures even as we culturally construct understandings and uses of our co‐inhabitants of the planet” (2014:1291). Alaina Lemon () discussed the belief of Muscovites that dogs living in the metro strategize about how to best use the infrastructure, deciding which stations to visit and whom to ask for scraps. Dogs supposedly knew which lines allowed transfers to other lines, offered access to food stands, and were deeper and warmer.…”

“…Sociocultural anthropologists in 2015 were more concerned about the effects of materiality upon people. Authors talked about the ways in which people were affected not only by the actions of other humans but also by infrastructures (Amin ; Lemon ), bureaucracies, and animals (see below). It is in the context of materiality and the tensions it generates that my five themes stood out.…”

Where the Sidewalk Ends: Automobility and Shame in Tbilisi, Georgia

“…Public transportation, including the metro, constitutes an infrastructure of public life in which there was considerable investment under socialism (Jenks 2000). In the postsocialist world, narratives about human potential have been tethered to transport, as Alaina Lemon (2000, 2015) has described in the forms of order and disorder attached to the Moscow metro. In Tbilisi, this has meant that the metro, as a socialist‐era infrastructure, has diminished in status, having become associated with low social class as a consequence of an expanding car culture.…”

Linguistic Anthropology in 2015: Not the Study of Language

“…The linguistic anthropological publications of 2015 show an incredible diversity in their objects of analysis. While the structural, pragmatic, and ideological aspects of language remain central focuses in much linguistic anthropology, many more objects of analysis beyond and besides language have been taken up: from Swedish design (Murphy ) and U.S. jazz pedagogy (Wilf ) to human–insect and human–animal relations (Carr ; Lemon ; see also the 2015 AAA session “Animals as Social Actors” [3‐0470]) and monsters (Brightman ; Manning , ); from typography and script (Choksi ; Faudree ; Jarlehed and Jaworski ) to visitor books at Israeli commemorative sites (Noy ); and from media spectacles of “mass psychogenic disease” in upstate New York (Goldstein and Hall ) to VCDs of Shi'ite recitations in Mumbai (Eisenlohr ). My point here is simply to underline the heterogeneity of empirical focuses, the ways in which linguistic anthropology has stretched its object of inquiry beyond language as such.…”