This book engages with the politics of social and environmental justice, and seeks new ways to think about the future of urbanization in the twenty-first century. It establishes foundational concepts for understanding how space, time, place and nature the material frames of daily life are constituted and represented through social practices, not as separate elements but in relation to each other. It describes how geographical differences are produced, and shows how they then become fundamental to the exploration of political, economic and ecological alternatives to contemporary life.

Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference

New developments in RiPP discovery, enzymology and engineering

Caroline Humphrey. The Unmaking of Soviet Life: Everyday Economies after Socialism. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2002. xviii, 265 pp. Map. Photographs. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $45.00, cloth. $18.95, paper.Caroline Humphrey has an established and well-deserved reputation as one of the leading anthropological specialists on the USSR and its successor states. This book is a collection often essays, all previously published (between 1991 and 2000) as either journal articles or chapters in edited collections, and introduced by Bruce Grant and Nancy Ries. They focus on the diverse ways in which different groups in post-Soviet Russia and Mongolia have sought to cope, both physically (largely, but not exclusively, in an economic sense) and spiritually, with the legacies of the communist past and the often harsh realities of their divergent post-communist situations. While the various situations are often depressing, Humphrey looks for signs of innovation and renovation, and can usually find them in unexpected places.One theme permeating much of the book is that most citizens have been living in a "state of radical uncertainty" and insecurity since 1991. Another is that the political and the economic continue to be too closely intertwined in the post-Soviet world, which helps to explain popular mistrust of the state. A third is that Russia and Mongolia are in many ways still societies in which conceptions of property are fluid and hazy, and in which there continues to be greater commitment to the notion of the collective than is typical in many Western (especially predominantly Protestant) societies.Part One is titled "The Politics of Locality in an Unstable State." It deals primarily with how people cope in a time of breakdown and near-chaos by attempting to create "localities," their own identifiable and manageable spaces. This assumes highly diverse forms, including even identifying goods as insider (ours) and outsider (from somewhere else). Unfortunately, it also often involves exclusion of other people, not just goods, as dislocated groups and individuals seek to bring greater stability into their lives through the construction of identifiable boundaries. Some of the analysis of provincial and village Russia resonates well with Richard Rose's arguments concerning pre-modernity in post-communist Russia.My own research interests in corruption and organized crime meant that Part Two-"Strategies Beyond the Law"-was the most interesting for this reviewer. It examines the ways in which some people have sought to cope by exploiting confusion and desperate need, or by learning ways to make the authorities more manageable and human through bribery, which can soften otherwise hard boundaries. …

The Unmaking of Soviet Life: Everyday Economies after Socialism

Reviewed Medium: book
 Year: 2000
 Pages: xxx + 159
 Publisher: University of Illinois Press
 Prices: $17.95

Contesting the Sacred: The Anthropology of Christian Pilgrimage

Church and state

In recent years, an objective of some Russian Orthodox activists and Church leaders has been the introduction of religious education in state schools which was established in Russia in 2012, following a 2009 Presidential Directive. Today, however, there are two different strands in religious education. On the one hand, there is the state’s emphasis on the bonds between Orthodox Christianity and Russian history, culture and identity. Based on this so-called culturological understanding of religion, the Russian state hopes to use Orthodoxy in nation- and institution-building and in the strengthening of patriotism. On the other hand, while the culturological language is also used in the Church’s official discourse, in practice there are many attempts by Orthodox clergymen and activists to use religious education for the purposes of evangelisation.

Patriotism, Orthodox religion and education: empirical findings from contemporary Russia

The article discusses the religious changes that took place in post-Soviet Russia in the wake of economic crisis and political and social transformations of those times. The Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) received substantial symbolic and material support from the state and many church buildings have been declared as a part of national heritage. The Church promoted ideas that are allegedly in continuity with pre-revolutionary tradition and tend to replace previous beliefs and practices.

'Spreading grace' in post-Soviet Russia

Practising Without Belonging?: Entrepreneurship, Morality, and Religion in Contemporary Russia

This paper's point of departure is that business families are permanently confronted with a dual function: They engage in typical family relations yet also have formal decision‐making processes for business and family strategy. However, large business families—which may consist of several hundred shareholders who own one or more family businesses—are confronted with an additional challenge. Alongside being simultaneously a family and an organization, they also have to establish and maintain notions of membership and modes of communication between distantly related shareholders. This we have called family network or family 3.0. The challenges involved in initiating, shaping and maintaining such networks require new strategic reconsideration in the family itself and an extension of the existing theoretical observations regarding family businesses, thereby establishing the basis for a better understanding of large‐scale business families. For this, we try to combine family business research, organization studies and systems theory.

https://www.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/sres.2684

Tobias Köllner

Papers

Patriotism, Orthodox religion and education: empirical findings from contemporary Russia

'Spreading grace' in post-Soviet Russia

Practising Without Belonging?: Entrepreneurship, Morality, and Religion in Contemporary Russia

The business family 3.0: Dynastic business families as families, organizations and networks—Outline of a theory extension

Religious conservatism in post-Soviet Russia and its relation to politics : Empirical findings from ethnographic fieldwork