1,720,989 research outputs found
Introduction: Re-imagining Economies (after Socialism): Ethics, Favours, and Moral Sentiments
Get PDFThe seduction of craft: Making and value in artisanal labour
Get PDFDrawing on fieldwork amongst lacemakers in Slovakia, this article examines the relationship between practices of making and the production of value in artisanal labour. The author shows that the processes of making challenged artisans’ perceptions of the natural distribution of agency between humans and objects, resulting in feelings of ontological insecurity. Arguing that they perceived this insecurity as a problem of ethics, as well as a problem of agency, she demonstrates how the intellectual and sensual experience of manufacture was constitutive of the ways in which artisans perceived the value of their craftwork. Taking this approach, the article seeks to disrupt the anthropological habit of framing questions about value in terms of domestic economies, global markets and aesthetic regimes, and making in terms of skilled practice, embodied knowledge and knowledge transmission. The author also suggests that scholars ought to pay more attention to the ways in which ethical considerations are grounded in our ontological disposition towards the material world
Giving, Taking, and Getting By::Help and Indifference in Moscow's Temporary Housing Market
No full text(Re-)claiming the social contract: state-society relations in three former socialist towns in the Baltics
No full textThis thesis is an ethnographic study of the social contract between the state and society as imagined and lived by the predominantly Russian-speaking residents of three former socialist towns in the Baltics: Visaginas in Lithuania, Daugavpils in Latvia, and Sillamӓe in Estonia.
This thesis argues that the residents of Visaginas, Daugavpils, and Sillamӓe define “the state” and their relationship with it primarily as a social contract. For Russian-speaking residents of Visaginas, Daugavpils, and Sillamӓe, who are deprived of recognition to various degrees, the social contract offers an ideal of an equal, fair, reciprocal, and perceivably apolitical relationship with the state that they yearn for, yet feel the lack of. Thereby, the language of the social contract becomes a way for Russian speakers to try and claim membership in the national Lithuanian, Latvian, or Estonian collectives as good, deserving, and loyal state subjects. However, I show in this thesis that the social contract is also the only language available to the residents that allows them to challenge the dominant narrative in Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, which often depicts Russian speakers as alien and potentially threatening to the national state.
This thesis then raises the following questions: what is entering into the social contract with the state in Lithuania, Latvia, or Estonia contingent upon, and can the Russian-speaking (non-)citizens effectively challenge the exclusionary state narratives and practices by employing the language of the social contract. The thesis examines how the predominantly Russian-speaking residents of Visaginas, Daugavpils, and Sillamӓe attempt to redefine the very political community of which they strive to become a part, as well as the ways and forms of governance that the residents believe would allow them to achieve their ideal state-society relationship
Taxes for Independence: Rejecting a Fiscal Model of Reciprocity in Peri-urban Bolivia
Get PDFIn a grand, sunny courtyard surrounded by an imposing, pink, colonial-style
building in the center of Cochabamba city, people line up to go through the door
under a large sign that reads “Recaudaciones” (Collections). Clutching beige
folders filled with property deeds, affidavits, and architectural plans, they wait
for hours to enter the hall where the municipality collects taxes on real estate.
The line reflects a cross-section of local society, including the comfortable middle classes and populations on lower incomes, many of whom self-identify
as belonging to one of the indigenous language-speaking groups of highland
Bolivia. Located not five minutes away is one of the city’s national tax offices,
Impuestos (Servicio de Impuestos Nacionales), which collects income tax and
value-added tax (VAT). In contrast with Recaudaciones, only a few people are
lined up here, all of them middle-class professionals. To understand why certain taxes are paid and others are not—why the lines for Recaudaciones are long and
those at Impuestos are short—it is necessary to disaggregate tax and examine
the specific exchanges that each tax involves, as well as the various relationships and imaginaries that they are constituted by and conjure up
The ‘Eurasian’ axis: civilizational identity constructions in contemporary Russian foreign policy: The ‘Eurasian’ axis
Get PDFVladimir Putin first voiced the idea of forming a single ‘Eurasian’ civilizational space in the early 2000s. Today, this idea still resonates in Russian foreign policy discourse. Presenting both European and Asian political models as inappropriate for Russia’s ‘zone of influence’, the civilizational rhetoric found in contemporary Russian foreign policy builds on the prominent concept of a ‘Russian third way’. The notion of Eurasia used in this rhetoric supports the idea of ‘third pole’ that lies between East and West and serves to frame the Russian state as an actor of ‘civilizational proportions’ that supposedly has the unique ability to unite the languages, traditions, customs and cultures of the so-called ‘peoples of Eurasia’. This thesis examines how policy-discursive structures related to a Eurasian civilizational identity have functioned in Russian foreign policy discourse between 2000 and 2020, coupling (i) a longitudinal analysis of foreign policy language to (ii) three contextualizing case studies. Where the longitudinal analysis explores the broad narrative themes surrounding a Eurasian civilizational identity in contemporary Russian foreign policy, the case studies examine how these discourses operate in bilateral relations with those countries Russia considers to be its key ‘Eurasian’ partners: Kazakhstan, China, and Belarus. The study focuses specifically on the spatial, temporal and ethical dimensions of identity construction. In doing so, the thesis unpacks a ‘radicalizing’ trend in Russian foreign policy language under the Putin regime. Whilst the primary research focus is on foreign policy texts published until 2020, the broader analysis ultimately reveals how civilizational identity discourses have offered an ideological basis for Russia’s irredentist foreign policy, which – the thesis argues – has culminated in Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022
Making History, Making Politics:Socialist and Post-Socialist Elite Economies of Favour in Bulgaria and Ukraine
No full textPresenting ethnographic material from contemporary Bulgaria and Ukraine, this chapter shows how personal connections between local (village) political and economic elites, and those who operate at higher levels of the state administration, can be founded on a shared engagement in history. The involvement of political elites in the shaping of official versions of history is a distinguishing feature of their connections and serves to cement their networks and power base. Emphasizing the point that ‘economies of favour’ need not always be about individual advantage, but can also be used to access and distribute public resources and services, Kaneff questions prevailing approaches to the issue of post-socialist corruption. Her chapter illustrates how political connections rooted in socialist history can provide a critique of capitalist modernity and may offer a means of protecting ordinary people from the most devastating effects of post-socialist neoliberal reform
Mass housing renaissance: the case of Moscow
No full textDOTTORATOThis research examines the re-emergence of mass housing construction in Moscow, tracing its transformation from socialist origins to the current market-oriented manifestation. Through a detailed analysis of policy documents, market data, and stakeholder interviews, the study explores how state policies, developer strategies, and homebuyers' decisions converge to shape the city's housing landscape. It discusses the adaptation and transformation of Soviet housing typologies in new conditions, investigating what mass standardized housing means when the state ceases to mandate its design. This research identifies factors driving the persistence of mass housing models.This research examines the re-emergence of mass housing construction in Moscow, tracing its transformation from socialist origins to the current market-oriented manifestation. Through a detailed analysis of policy documents, market data, and stakeholder interviews, the study explores how state policies, developer strategies, and homebuyers' decisions converge to shape the city's housing landscape. It discusses the adaptation and transformation of Soviet housing typologies in new conditions, investigating what mass standardized housing means when the state ceases to mandate its design. This research identifies factors driving the persistence of mass housing models.DIPARTIMENTO DI ARCHITETTURA E STUDI URBANI35BRICOCOLI, MASSIMOGAETA, LUC
Silesian identity: the interplay of memory, history, and borders
Get PDFThis dissertation provides an ethnographic account of contemporary Opavian Silesian identity (or identities) and its negotiations. In particular, it is concerned with the question of how Silesian identity is being negotiated by various social actors in and between the town of Opava and the neighbouring area of HluÄÃn, which together comprise the tourist region of Opavian Silesia. In focusing on Opava and the HluÄÃn area, inhabited by Opavians and HluÄÃns respectively, I not only explore the internal constitution of a group and analyse its narrative accounts, but also pay special attention to the social organisation of the differences between these two groups. The aim of this project is not to address the question of whether Silesian identity exists objectively, which is taken for granted by the majority of scholars working on Silesian identity do, but rather to explore how various social actors negotiate and utilise the concept, including these scholars themselves. I start from the premise that identities are relational, situational, and instrumental, and throughout the dissertation I focus on the groupsâ external and internal contestations, exploring the ways in which various social actors try to overcome these differences. The present negotiations over Silesian identity have proved to be problematic in all their temporalities, as they relate to issues in the past, the present and possibly the future. I therefore investigate how certain versions of the past are being reconstructed and negotiated in the present, how these versions inform and reflect on the present, and the possible implications of this for the future. I consider competing representations of Silesian-ness and competing reconstructions of the past that are related to it through the theoretical framework of âdominant v. demotic discoursesâ and âdifficult heritageâ, focusing on commemoration practices, tourism, the politics of display, and hierarchies of knowledge.</p
Economies of Favour After Socialism
No full textSince the onset of the global economic crisis, activists, policy makers, and social scientists have been searching for alternative paradigms through which to re-imagine contemporary modes of thinking and writing about economic orders. These attempts have led to their re-engagement with fundamental anthropological categories of economic analysis, such as barter, debt, and the gift. Focusing on favours, and the paradoxes of action, meaning, and significance they engender, this volume advocates for their addition to this list of economic universals. It presents a critical re-interrogation of the conceptual relationships between gratuitous and instrumental behaviour, and raises novel questions about the intersection of economic actions with the ethical and expressive aspects of human life.
Scholars of post-socialist politics and society have often used 'favour' as a by-word for corruption and clientelism. The contributors to this volume treat favours, and the doing of favours, as a distinct mode of acting, rather than as a form of 'masked' economic exchange or simply an expression of goodwill. Casting their comparative net from post-socialist Central, Eastern, and South Eastern Europe; to the former Soviet Union, Mongolia, and post-Maoist China, the contributors to this volume show how gratuitous behaviour shapes a plethora of different actions, practices, and judgements across religious and political life, imaginative practices, and local moral economies. They show that favours do not operate 'outside' or 'beyond' the economic sphere. Rather, they constitute a distinct mode of action which has economic consequences, without being fully explicable in terms of transactional cost-benefit analyses
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