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The Unmaking of Soviet Life

Caroline Humphrey

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Description for The Unmaking of Soviet Life Paperback. Series: Culture and Society After Socialism. Num Pages: 288 pages, 16. BIC Classification: 1DVU; HBTB; JHMC; KCS. Category: (G) General (US: Trade); (P) Professional & Vocational; (UP) Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly; (UU) Undergraduate. Dimension: 228 x 151 x 18. Weight in Grams: 400.

In order to understand today's Russia and former Soviet republics, it is vital to consider their socialist past. Caroline Humphrey, one of anthropology's most highly regarded thinkers on a number of topics including consumption, identity, and ritual, is the ideal guide to the intricacies of post-Soviet culture. The Unmaking of Soviet Life brings together ten of Humphrey's best essays, which cover, geographically, Central Russia, Siberia, and Mongolia; and thematically, the politics of locality, property, and persons.Bridging the strongest of Humphrey's work from 1991 to 2001, the essays do a great deal to demystify the sensational topics of mafia, barter, bribery, ... Read more

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Product Details

Format

Paperback

Publication date

2002

Publisher

Cornell University Press United States

Number of pages

272

Condition

New

Series

Culture and Society After Socialism

Number of Pages

288

Place of Publication

Ithaca, United States

ISBN

9780801487736

SKU

V9780801487736

Shipping Time

Usually ships in 7 to 11 working days

Ref

99-1

About Caroline Humphrey

Caroline Humphrey is Professor of Asian Anthropology at the University of Cambridge, author of several books, and winner of the J. I. Staley Prize for her landmark book The Karl Marx Collective: Economy and Society in a Siberian Collective Farm.

Reviews for The Unmaking of Soviet Life

In her stimulating book The Unmaking of Soviet Life, Caroline Humphrey—one of the few anthropologists with substantial field experience in the old Soviet Union—explores changing attitudes to consumption. Consumer desire, she argues, was both aroused and frustrated in Soviet-type societies and 'acquiring consumption goods and objects became a way of constituting... selfhood.'... One of the virtues of Humphrey's book is ... Read morethat the words 'democracy' and 'capitalism'—so enthusiastically invoked by Western commentators in the early years of Russia's 'transition'—are used sparingly.
London Review of Books
This collection of essays attempts to capture the lived experience of change in the history of post-Soviet peoples, who invested radical, western-style reforms from above with meanings that were rooted in the values and practices of the Soviet era. Their confrontations with harsh contemporary practices of privilege and power reveal a process of transformation manifest not through uncompromising and dramatic breaks with the past, but in unexpected combinations and recombinations of the old and the new.
Esther Kingston-Mann
Focaal: European Journal of Anthropology
Having long studied the people of Mongolia and Russia, Humphrey knows well how to tell the new from subtle variations on the Soviet past.
Foreign Affairs
Humphrey provides fascinating insights into the dynamics of the social and economic transition in Russia since the collapse of communism.... This important collection should be in all research libraries and will interest political scientists, economists, and sociologists, as well as anthropologists. Lower-division undergraduates and above.
Choice
Particularly valuable is her dissection of 'corruption.' She argues that people make clear distinctions between the bribe direct, 'generally understood to be reprehensible' because it takes advantage of weakness; other equally 'extralegal' acts, such as the use of personal connections to bypass regulations, which are seen as morally legitimate forms of reciprocal support even when 'favours' are exchanged; and pilfering from the workplace, which decades of 'predatory socialism' made people look on almost as a personal 'right.'.
Rosemary Righter
Times Literary Supplement
These essays have a lot to offer scholars in other disciplines, since they show how anthropological work, even when focused on apparently unrepresentative phenomena at the micro level, can illuminate general processes of social change.... Humphrey is concerned to understand how people construct meaning in their lives, and she demonstrates repeatedly that the legacy of the socialist world remains extremely strong, for example, in the value system that leads to strong prejudices against 'traders' of all types, those who do not 'produce' goods useful to society.
Chris Hann
Slavic Review
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The Unmaking of Soviet Life

Caroline Humphrey

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