Surface Engineering

The article analyzes extracts from video recordings of court sessions in Russian, where one of the participants demonstrated misunderstanding. The main method of working with the data is conversion analysis. The focus is on the interaction between specialists (a judge or a lawyer) and non-specialists (a defendant or a victim), namely the functions and mechanisms of code switching from official legal language to everyday colloquial language and vice versa. Such code switches are interpreted as a kind of intralingual translation, which is conceptualized in terms of a) linguistic aspects of simplification of the complex information, b) status-role functions of interaction between participants and conditions of institutional communication, c) differences in the way systems of professional and lay knowledge are organized. Through switching between the official and the colloquial codes during the hearing a specialist can accomplish various actions: find out the true intentions of the interlocutor; monitor the interlocutor’s reaction to his speech, regulating the degree of its formality; check the achieved degree of consistency; encourage the layman interlocutor or reformulate his words using the legal terms. The analysis reveals a number of strategies of varying degrees of complexity and intentionality for restoring understanding, which can be achieved on a technical or on a deeper level.

The book Gleaning for Communism: The Soviet Socialist Household in Theory and Practice by Xenia A. Cherkaev analyzes the concept of socialist property and its impact on grassroots economic practices. By analyzing how the “Soviet” appears in the narratives of workers and employees of former Soviet enterprises recorded during fieldwork in St Petersburg in the 2010s, Cherkaev offers us an anthropological view of Soviet everyday life through political economy and ethics. According to Cherkaev, the major periods of Soviet history (War Communism, NEP, Stalinism, the Thaw, and Perestroika) can be viewed through the prism of an ethical understanding of socialist property embedded in changing legislation. To understand how Soviet society emerged and how the Soviet state suddenly vanished into thin air, she examines the evolution of these regimes from 1917 to the early 1990s. At the same time, Cherkaev makes an important contribution to the history of ideas and intellectual history as she consistently traces the emergence, development, transformation, and decline of the concept of “socialist property” (“socialist economy”) from the early post-revolutionary years to the collapse of the Soviet Union. Cherkaev’s work will be an important contribution to scholarship on late-Soviet social and economic history.

The article fills an important gap in the history of Russian (Soviet) physical anthropology. Based on previously secret archival papers discovered by the author, the history of anthropological research in prisoner-of-war camps on the territory of the USSR in the 1940s is revealed. Following the example of anthropologists during World War I, Soviet anthropologists, led by Viktor Bunak, initiated and carried out an extensive research program under the auspices of the Presidium of the USSR Academy of Sciences in close cooperation with the NKVD authorities. The published archival materials strictly document the work of the scientists, who in 1943 proposed the idea of this large-scale study, and presented the project to the Deputy Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars, Andrey Vyshinsky. The immediate permission to conduct the expedition was personally given by Lavrentiy Beria. The project was carried out in 1944–1946 under strict secrecy, which also was extended to the publication of its results. Specific information is provided on the conduct of anthropological research in a number of prisoner-of-war camps, the composition of the expedition, instructions, and methodologies. The article analyzes the reasons why the entire history and results of this project remained classified as secret until the collapse of the USSR. The article is preceded by a review of anthropological research by Russian (Soviet) scientists involving special contingents as informants, explaining why special contingents (army conscripts, military personnel, mentally ill individuals, prisoners in prisons and camps) were actively used in anthropological research.

The article examines the narratives, ideas and cultural practices that exist in the Arkhangelsk cultural space and represent to an external observer the pages of the Soviet history of the village of Lyavlya associated with the mass extermination of people in the 1920s–1950s. The cultural memory of Lyavlya as a place of violence was created by parishioners of the Church of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary and the leadership of the Arkhangelsk diocese. The result of their activities was the formation of a narrative about the history of Lyavlya and the particularization of the memory of the victims of violence. For memory actors, the fate of modern Russia is inseparable from the fate of the Orthodox Church, and the people who died in Lyavlya appear as martyrs for the faith and “heroes of the spirit”. Processions of the cross to burial sites provide an opportunity for their participants to legitimize ideas about the special role of Russia in the Orthodox world and the exclusivity of the Russian people. The fate of the dead clergy and laity, according to memorial actors, serves as evidence of the uniqueness of the Russian nation and its special mission to preserve Orthodoxy. Recently, interest in the topic of the traumatic past has faded. The author shows how the memory of traumatic legacies is constructed through ceremonies, memorials and publications.

The reviewed book The Pedagogy of Images: Depicting Communism for Children, edited by Marina Balina and Sergei Oushakine, is dedicated to Soviet children’s book illustrations of the 1920s–1930s, which had an ideological function. The introduction and sixteen chapters written by different authors demonstrate a variegated picture in which there is a place for avant-garde artistic experiments, educational projects and discussions about children’s books. Illustrations for books that were not related to politics did not come into the focus of attention of the authors of the collection, but nevertheless the coverage of the material is very wide. Different chapters examine how paper, nature, electricity, vezdekhodnost (goeverywhereness), time, the death of Lenin, the Red Army, the proletariat, and “Americanism” were represented in children’s illustrations. Due to involvement of many researchers, the book presents different approaches and methods of visual analysis borrowed from visual studies, art criticism, and history. Not all the authors are convincing in their analysis, but the publication of this collection is undoubtedly an important event in this field of study, even though illustrations for children of the 1920s and 1930s are well-studied.

The present review of the Russian translation of Sergei Kan’s book Lev Shternberg: Anthropologist, Russian Socialist, Jewish Activist constitutes a literary experiment. It endeavors to engage in a dialogue, presented in the form of a letter, with the central figure of the book, Lev Shternberg, the co-founder of Soviet and Russian anthropology, regarding the significant transformations it has undergone throughout the 20th century and the first two decades of the 21st. The author pays close attention to the social and political contexts of these changes and how they affected the interpretations of Shternberg’s persona and ideas in Soviet times and today. This experiment extends the author’s reflections on the necessity of revisiting the history of anthropology and reintegrating it into the field itself. As American anthropologist Alfred Irving Hallowell suggested in the 1960s, we should conceptualize “the history of anthropology as an anthropological problem.” By this, the author intends to reconstruct a dialogue between the history of anthropology and the communities with whom anthropologists have engaged, as well as to foster connections between the history of anthropological ideas and ongoing discussions both within and beyond the discipline. These changes, as the author argues, have the potential to significantly expand the styles of anthropological writing and reveal new genealogies of anthropological knowledge.

This article discusses the production of a critical anti-ageism project. In this case ‘anti-ageism’ is an emic name for a small-scale web community of several readerships and groups that emerged in 2012 in VK social media. Its participants aim to stand against ageism, meaning discrimination against children and adolescents based on their age. Anti-ageists identify themselves as innovators who produce new ways of imagining children’s roles and challenging the social order. In 2015 their rhetorical strategies changed from producing evidence about personal trauma to formulating texts in the technique of critical social theory. The last ones include condemning ageism as a total system, and various situations and social relations as oppression, exploitation, or domination of children and adolescents, whatever the forms in which they occur. With oppression as a key strategically deployed rhetorical trope the discourse of anti-ageist VK web communities invites comparison with the tendencies of the academic and activist critique of dominant and repressive categorical apparatus. At the same time, the anti-ageists redefine the collective understanding of justice by proposing new visions of children’s agency and scenarios of children’s behaviour. The mechanisms of transfer of interpretive techniques of critical theory, especially the choice of cultural allies of anti-ageism, are presented from the perspective of digital ethnography and placed in the context of sociopolitical changes with attention to the material or technological landscapes and the modes of sociality of specific web fragments. The second part of the article demonstrates how anti-ageism is not only articulated on the internet but also embodied in the social imagination of participants in anti-ageist web communities. Transferring the oppression of children and adolescents from a textual motif into a technique that anti-ageists use in imagining and representing themselves and others opens up the prospect for a discussion about the place of critical theory in the scenes of everyday life.

Vladimir Propp interpreted the fairytale with all its episodes and images as a narrative correspondence to the initiation rites described in Africa, Australia, Melanesia and South America. For him, the motif of clashing rocks was the equivalent of monstrous jaws swallowing adolescent boys. For the authors of the Encyclopedia of Fairy Tales, this motif is a borderline inside the universal opposition between life and death, ours and others. Here we present the systematized data on the world distribution of the narratives that describe dangerous objects which, while remaining in the same place, constantly or occasionally produce rocking, swinging, spinning or other movements. The absence of such an image in Africa (outside the Maghreb) is an argument in favor of its emergence not in the African homeland but after the peopling of Eurasia, possibly in the Central Asian — Southern Siberian region. The most numerous and different versions are recorded in North America. In the Old World, many cases are known from the circumpontic region. In Australia and Melanesia, the motif is known but its versions there are rare. Its spread before the beginning of the peopling of America is beyond doubt. There is no correlation between the “clashing rocks” motif and forms of social organization or economy. Inside particular areas, the variants of the motifs easily replace each other. Most often, the motif is either an obstacle on the border of the supernatural world or a weapon controlled by a demonic person.

Developing an idea of his previous book Give a Man a Fish (2015), the new publication by James Ferguson deepens the theoretical basis for such a distributive policy as universal basic income. The author considers it necessary to review the prevailing grounds for the distribution of resources, namely labor and citizenship. Referring to materials from southern Africa and scholarly works about huntergatherer societies, Ferguson introduces yet another ground for distribution — presence. A rather open-ended “Being here, among us” in a literal sense of the word can be enough to guarantee the rightful share. Providing anthropological arguments Ferguson not only explains the necessity and possibility of a new global distributive policy, but also declares that the analytical potential of the presence concept should be developed. In the review this approach is associated with the theory from the south by John and Jean Comaroff. Besides, from the reviewer’s point of view, in Presence and Social Obligation Ferguson creates one possible theoretical ground for anarchism. Therefore it is noted that the book under review could be a starting point for rethinking the place and the role of anthropology in political projects.

How do contemporary Russian workers, caught up in the mechanisms of the seasonal labor market, conceptualize work and leisure? Fieldwork among seasonal berry pickers in Karelia shows how commercial picking, through which some Russians make a living, escapes from the field of definitions available to them: “rabota” as employment and “otdykh” as time free from employment. The article attempts to find out what causes such classificational indeterminacy. The author shows how these causes are not only to be found in the specific organization of seasonal labor relations, but also the opposition of commercial picking to “rabota” and “otdykh” on the basis of the hierarchy of experiences of labor relations from the past and present. In such a case, the definition of “rabota” and “otdykh” is almost always defined through images of wage labor. Such images are linked in this article to what might be called a mode of perception of the mode of production. The author concludes that the dichotomy of “rabota” and “otdykh” becomes an instrument of vernacular critique through which workers navigate the labor market.

This book written by Sergei Kan is dedicated to Lev Shternberg (1961–1927), who was a major Russian ethnographer and public figure, one of the founders of the so-called Leningrad school. The Russian translation of the book is reviewed. The large-scale study, rich in archival sources from all possible collections (American Philosophical Society, American Museum of Natural History, the Kunstkammer, RAS Archives, etc.), has been written in the best traditions of the prominent historian George Stocking’s approach. The reviewer notes several undoubted merits of Kan’s work. The main one is an attempt to place the Russian scholar’s research in the context of the Western anthropology of his time. One of the most profound ideas of the book concerns the assessment of Morgan’s influence on Sternberg’s work, and, in a broader perspective, on the development of the social sciences in Russia and the USSR, where, according to the author, social evolutionism played a much more progressive role than in Europe or the USA. That theory served rather to confirm the necessity of social reform, and neither then nor later was it associated with the reaction in the natural sciences, Eurocentrism, and white racism that Boas saw in it. At the same time, the edition under review contains a few inaccuracies and factual errors, some of which were already present in the original edition, while others have arisen due to a not entirely accurate translation.

This article precedes a selection of papers written as a result of the seminar on the anthropology of bureaucracy in modern Russia. The text offers a brief overview of the development of research into bureaucracy, where studies are mainly made in a polemic with Max Weber’s model of the “ideal” bureaucracy. It considers the most significant works that preceded the emergence of an interest in bureaucracy on the part of social scientists, written in the fields of political science and sociology and united by the method of participant observation. The authors pay attention to the difficulties in distinguishing the anthropology of bureaucracy as an independent field, which, on the one hand, is integrated into political anthropology and on the other hand, tends towards the social studies of professions. The article suggests understanding the anthropology of bureaucracy primarily as a certain viewpoint focusing on how management is implemented and how the “state” is reproduced and felt within bureaucratic institutions. The authors distinguish several popular areas in the field of social research into bureaucracy: critical works analyzing primarily the structural violence of bureaucrats against citizens through client classifications, bureaucratic arbitrariness, etc.; works that focus on the moral and affective aspect of bureaucracy, including the moral dilemmas of employees and their feelings; works devoted to the material world of bureaucracy, where documents become important participants in social interaction; research on the experience of interaction with bureaucracy as a client. In addition, the article provides an overview of existing studies (mainly) of the street-level Russian bureaucracy, performed using anthropological methods within the boundaries of different disciplines.

Needs assessment (oсenka nuzhdaemosti) is a legal procedure in the Russian welfare system to determine whether citizens qualify for social benefits and, if so, to what extent. The article examines one of the Russian state agencies conducting this procedure. Public officials of the agency examined are typical “street-level bureaucrats” according to Michael Lipsky’s definition. They interact with citizens face to face and determine in what form certain services will be provided by the state and whether they will be provided at all. The creation of the agency has meant a redistribution of power in the social sphere in the region, a fragmentation of the process of prescribing and delivering social care and, at least formally, a stricter separation between the decision-making process and the work carried out according to it. The article analyses how, in the face of this fragmentation, as well as the introduction of new tools for automating decision-making, the space of discretion — the ability at a local level to influence and, in some cases, determine the way work is carried out — is preserved. The research was carried out using qualitative methods, predominantly through interviews. In addition, documents were analyzed and observation was conducted. The author demonstrates how the emerging “gaps” in the social sphere are overcome and the professional and ethical categories of the bureaucrats determine the implementation of the needs assessment process, in particular the evaluation procedures.