Xenia A Cherkaev | Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology (original) (raw)
Books by Xenia A Cherkaev
Cornell University Press, 2023
Gleaning for Communism is a historical ethnography of the property regime upon which Soviet legal... more Gleaning for Communism is a historical ethnography of the property regime upon which Soviet legal scholars legislated a large modern state as a household, with guaranteed rights to a commons of socialist property, rather than private possessions. Starting with former Leningrad workers' everyday stories about smuggling industrial scrap home over factory fences, Xenia Cherkaev traces collectivist ethical logic that was central to this socialist household economy, in theory and practice: from its Stalin-era inception, through Khrushchev's major foregrounding of communist ethics, to Gorbachev's perestroika, which unfurled its grounding tension between the interests of any given collective and of the socialist household economy itself.
A story of how the socialist household economy functioned, how it collapsed, and how it was remembered, this book is haunted throughout by a spectral image of the totalitarian state, whose jealous political control over the economy leads it to trample over all that which ought to be private. Underlying this image, and the neoliberal state phobia it justified, is the question of how individual interests ought to relate to the public good in a large modern society, which, it is assumed, cannot possibly function by the non-private logics of householding. This book tells the story of a large modern society that did.
Stolon Press, 2023
“This perfect essay is a portrait of a fleeting moment, post-socialist, and pre-monopoly capitali... more “This perfect essay is a portrait of a fleeting moment, post-socialist, and pre-monopoly capitalist. It illuminates a very recent time, still present but already shrouded, when excess and desperation held hands and a new economy of faith was born under the benevolent patronage of St. Xenia, who was called by the name Andrey Fedorovich.”
— Claudio Lomnitz, Professor of Anthropology, Columbia University
“A both mystical and prosaic story of a city and its protector saint. Cherkaev says Xenia the Blessed was a fool for Christ; she is a fitting sentinel for a people who, in the enduring absence of certainty and security, remain fools for hope.”
— Nina Serova, Researcher, Sydney
This text is, above all, a grateful testament to a local saint’s continued liveliness. It is a new hagiography, a story of a woman who gave away everything—her house, her money, her possessions, and even her name—who wandered homeless, and who has helped people resolve desperate situations ever since. Retelling the fragmented stories of how people asked for her intervention, and of how, through their actions, new mycelia of power grew on the ruins of the Soviet socialist state, I hope that this essay helps opens a loophole: a space between naïve faith and sociological faithlessness in which we might understand today’s miracles without crushing them by the secular objectivist gaze. Looking through this loophole, this essay retells some of stories I heard about the Soviet collapse and about how people survived it: about gleaning the planned economy’s rubble, chance connections, personal ties, Divine Providence, fast fortunes, and the enclosure of fields.
Photographs by Elena Tipikina
Designed by Ruud Ruttens, Ghent
Printed by AC Dominie, Singapore
April 2023
20pp., 100 × 190 mm, softcover
Edition of 500
ISBN 978-0-6453840-4-8
$16.50 AUD
https://stolonpress.com/catalogue/st-xenia-and-the-gleaners-of-leningrad/
Articles by Xenia A Cherkaev
An Anthropogenic Table of Elements: Experiments in the Fundamental, 2022
What does the history of the periodic table and of cheese-making in the provinces of the Russian ... more What does the history of the periodic table and of cheese-making in the provinces of the Russian Empire have to do with one another? A story of markets and scalability, collectives and elements, standardization and quark (and of milk gone sour).
With Heather Paxson and Stefan Helmreich. in An Anthropogenic Table of Elements: Experiments in the Fundamental, edited by Timothy Neale, Courtney Addison, and Thao Phan. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Anthropology and Humanism, 2022
In a world where super- billionaires build pleasure vessels to vacation in space while their f... more In a world where super- billionaires build pleasure vessels to vacation in space while their fellow citizens live on the streets with their children, it’s not odd to surmise that indefinite global elites want us all dead. It needs us only to suppose a plan where we are told to look for spontaneous order (Hayek 1968). And it is comforting, in a way, to imagine that at least there’s somebody in charge.
The American Historical Review, 2020
This text is, above all, a grateful testament to a local saint’s continued liveliness. It is a ne... more This text is, above all, a grateful testament to a local saint’s continued liveliness. It is a new hagiography, a story of a woman who gave away everything—her house, her money, her possessions, and even her name—who wandered homeless, and who has helped people resolve desperate situations ever since. Retelling the fragmented stories of how people asked for her intervention, and of how, through their actions, new mycelia of power grew on the ruins of the Soviet socialist state, I hope that this essay helps opens a loophole: a space between naïve faith and sociological faithlessness in which we might understand today’s miracles without crushing them by the secular objectivist gaze. Looking through this loophole, this essay retells some of stories I heard about the Soviet collapse and about how people survived it: about gleaning the planned economy’s rubble, chance connections, personal ties, Divine Providence, fast fortunes, and the enclosure of fields.
Cahiers du monde russe, 2018
This article begins with the heroic stories former Leningrad residents tell about making their ow... more This article begins with the heroic stories former Leningrad residents tell about making their own outdoor-tourist gear out of illicitly obtained industrial materials. Reading these stories not as evidence of illicit circulation, but as expressions of ethical claims, I show that they are united by common assumptions of goodness, and argue that these assumptions cannot be understood through analytic frameworks concerned with private, acquisitive interest. Instead, I argue that they must be understood in terms of the “personal:” an idiosyncratic Soviet property regime that was not opposed to, but co-constitutive of, socialist property. Analyzing 1960s political statements, juridical arguments and media texts, I show that the 1961 Third Party Program reforms extended the juridical logic of personal property to personal ethical realms. Specifically, the Program demanded that people place their ethical obligations – to strive for the overall greater good – above their formal obligations to follow letter of the law. By framing necessary but unplanned transactions in the a-legal terms of “mutual aid,” this ethical stance helped the economy appear functional despite its endemic circulation problems.
Environmental Humanities, 2018
The image of totalitarianism is central to liberal ideology as the nefarious antithesis of free m... more The image of totalitarianism is central to liberal ideology as the nefarious antithesis of free market exchange: the inevitable outcome of planned economies, which control their subjects' lives down to the most intimate detail. Against this image of complete state control, the multispecies ethnography of early Soviet institutions gives us a fortuitous edge to ask how centrally planned economies structure the lives of those actors whose biosocial demands can be neither stamped out nor befuddled by propaganda. In this article we examine the institutions of the Stalinist state that could have created the totalitarian service dog: institutions that planned the distribution, raising, and breeding of family dogs for military service. Our narrative begins with a recently discovered genealogical document, issued to a German Shepherd bred by plan and born during the World War II Leningrad Blockade. Reading this document together with service-dog manuals, Soviet physiological studies, archival military documents, and autobiographical narratives, we unravel the history of Leningrad's early Soviet military-service dog husbandry program. This program, we argue, relied on a particular distinction of public and private: at once stimulating affectionate interspecies bonds between dogs and their handlers and sequestering those relationships from the image of rational, scientifically objective interspecies communication. This reduction of human-dog relations to those criteria that could be scientifically studied and centrally planned yielded tangible results: it allowed the State's dog husbandry program to create apparently unified groups of dogs and dog handlers and to successfully mobilize these groups for new military tasks, like mine detection, during World War II.
Социология власти, 2019
Учетная карточка щенка немецкой овчарки, родившегося в блокадном Ленинграде, была случайно найден... more Учетная карточка щенка немецкой овчарки, родившегося в блокадном Ленинграде, была случайно найдена в пакете с канцелярским мусором и теперь хранится в государственном архиве. История этого документа открыла наше исследование межвидовых отношений людей и служебных собак в экстремальных условиях войны и блокады. Факт содержания нескольких сотен крупных служебных собак в осажденном городе долго не оглашался: их спасение считалось неэтичными по отношению к памяти ленинградцев, погибших от голода. Тем не менее породистые собаки, собранные у гражданского населения осенью 1941 года, пережили самое страшное «смертное время» первой и второй блокадной зимы в инженерной воинской части, где они и их вожатые обучались новаторскому методу поиска мин. Саперы с собаками быстро прославились на Ленинградском фронте: они обнаруживали не только мины, но любую взрывчатку, в том числе потайную диверсионную. Наша статья открывает новый ракурс этой истории. Советская теория дрессировки базировалась на «научно-объективном учении о рефлексах». Мы же показываем практическую сторону этой методики: использование служебных собак в военных целях опиралось в первую очередь на личную эмоциональную взаимную приязнь каждого вожатого и его собаки. Формально оставаясь инженерным имуществом, минорозыскные собаки выступали в роли самостоятельных исторических акторов, доверительных партнеров человека. Наше исследование посвящено тому, как сталинская система, не вторгаясь в интимную область личных отношений людей и служебных животных, тем не менее планировала и поощряла такую межвидовую приязнь в военизированных государственных учреждениях, где все было подчинено идеологическому влиянию. Все, кроме врожденного видового поведения самих военных собак.
Новое Литературное Обозрение, 2018
Статья рассматривает историю российских законов, защищающих достоинство и честь. Дореволюционные ... more Статья рассматривает историю российских законов, защищающих достоинство и честь. Дореволюционные правоведы полагали, что юридическая защита нравственного достоинства личности невозможна, ибо не общество, а лишь сам человек может уронить его. Но когда Моральный кодекс строителя коммунизма прописал основы нравственности, закон взял моральный облик и достоинство граждан под защиту в числе прочих нематериальных личных благ. С распадом СССР Моральный кодекс исчез, а защита «чести и достоинства» осталась: сегодня закон определяет достоинство как «морально-правовую категорию», соответствующую общепринятым социальным стандартам.
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"Personal Dignity as Personal Property: Metamorphosis of Russian Laws Concerning Defamation."
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This article examines the history of Russian laws protecting citizens’ dignity and honor. Pre-revolutionary Russian legal scholars assumed that ethical dignity could not be legally protected because it was not contingent on social esteem: it could be tarnished only by the bearer himself. But when the Moral Codex of the Builder of Communism outlined the norms of morality, the law extended its protection to citizens’ ethical dignity, among their other immaterial personal values. The Moral Codex disappeared after the Soviet collapse, but the legal protection of “honor and dignity” remained: today, the law defines dignity as a “moral-legal category,” determined by commonly accepted social standards.
Anthropology and Humanism, 2017
This is a story about penguins and passing grades, about the practices and ethics of informal exc... more This is a story about penguins and passing grades, about the practices and ethics of informal exchange in 1980s Leningrad and St. Petersburg 30 years later, and about things' incommensurability spurring stories. It is, specifically , about one dead penguin: a bird that was killed, found, bought, gifted , found, stolen, and gifted again.
Ab Imperio, 2014
This essay criticizes Alexander Etkind's book, Warped Mourning: Stories of the Undead in the Land... more This essay criticizes Alexander Etkind's book, Warped Mourning: Stories of the Undead in the Land of the Unburied, for analyzing consequences of repressed histories while itself neglecting important historical facts: like the fact of Stalin's post-1956 omission from public discourse. I show that Etkind's texts rely on such factual omissions to denounce the “criminal state” from a position of non-complicity, perpetuating a popular perestroika-era historiographic narrative that today is countered by “patriotic” historiography, which unproblematically unites the Russian people and nation against foreign aggression. The two positions are counterparts, this essay argues, united by a morally unambiguous relationship to the past, and by the omission of factual details that could complicate such an unproblematic identification.
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Статья критикует работы Александра Эткинда о “искривлении горя,” анализирующие последствия политических репрессий в общественной памяти. Однако, в этих работах Эткинд игнорирует исторические факты важные для подобного анализа: например, факт умолчания имени Сталина в официальных обсуждениях после ХХ Съезда. Тем самым автор продолжает популярную историографию перестройки, давшую возможность публично осуждать советский режим не обдумывая личную сопричастность к его злодеяниям. Данная публикация указывает на недопустимость избирательного подхода к истории, так как именно на исторических пробелах строится новое заблуждение: продолжению перестроечной историографии, содержащей пробелы и неувязки, сегодня и противопоставляется новая патриотическая идеология, объединяющая нацию против “внешнего врага,” как в настоящем времени, так и в оценках прошлого.
Essays by Xenia A Cherkaev
American Anthropologist, 2022
Yaar! Pirates of the academic seas, gleaners in the fields of copyright. Ode to sci-hub.
Своими словами, 2022
Это история о советских пингвинах и о студенческих зачетках, об этике и практиках неформальных от... more Это история о советских пингвинах и о студенческих зачетках, об этике и практиках неформальных отношений в Ленинграде 1980-х и Санкт-Петербурге 2010-х, а также о том, как несоизмеримость ценности предметов внезапно становится началом для невымышленных историй и поводом для застольных рассказов. Я расскажу вам об одном императорском пингвине: о птице, которая однажды погибла, была найдена, продана, куплена, стала чучелом, заброшена, найдена, украдена и подарена вновь.
[Перевод статьи "How Grades Had Been Gotten for Penguins and Money" (2017 Anthropology and Humanism 42 (1): 127–34.]
Синдром утраченного рая, 2022
Slavic Review, 2021
Birchpunk: An Android Khoziaistvo on Mars.
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 2021
Hot Spots, Fieldsights: American Fascism, 2021
In pain, we are equal: neither slave nor free, neither male nor female, neither Jew nor chicken.
Society for Cultural Anthropology, Fieldsights – https://culanth.org/fieldsights/they-sow-the-wind-and-reap-the-whirlwind-covid-doubt-in-st-petersburg , 2020
Lacking state-imposed quarantines, we’ve been abandoned to personal choices. Advising us to save ... more Lacking state-imposed quarantines, we’ve been abandoned to personal choices. Advising us to save ourselves and our neighbors by staying home, our governments struggle to keep the wrong doubts from going viral. But accusations of falsity are as bottomless as the hoaxes they try to contain. States accuse each other of spreading disinformation, and scholars show that these accusations are themselves often false, that “an EU-funded body set up to fight disinformation ends up producing it.” The falsity of such accusations of falsity gives fodder for new accusations. And thus the battle against an infectious pandemic becomes overshadowed by the battle for faith, against doubt. In this “infodemic,” America’s Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) urges citizens to do these “three easy things: Don’t believe the rumors; Don’t pass them along; Go to trusted sources of information to get the facts about the federal (COVID-19) response.”
Can a state agency order citizens (not) to believe?
Theorizing the Contemporary, Fieldsights, 2019
"Temporary Possession" series - https://culanth.org/fieldsights/series/temporary-possession - edi... more "Temporary Possession" series - https://culanth.org/fieldsights/series/temporary-possession - edited by Rebecca Empson and Lauren Bonilla. Society for Cultural Anthropology, March 29
Cornell University Press, 2023
Gleaning for Communism is a historical ethnography of the property regime upon which Soviet legal... more Gleaning for Communism is a historical ethnography of the property regime upon which Soviet legal scholars legislated a large modern state as a household, with guaranteed rights to a commons of socialist property, rather than private possessions. Starting with former Leningrad workers' everyday stories about smuggling industrial scrap home over factory fences, Xenia Cherkaev traces collectivist ethical logic that was central to this socialist household economy, in theory and practice: from its Stalin-era inception, through Khrushchev's major foregrounding of communist ethics, to Gorbachev's perestroika, which unfurled its grounding tension between the interests of any given collective and of the socialist household economy itself.
A story of how the socialist household economy functioned, how it collapsed, and how it was remembered, this book is haunted throughout by a spectral image of the totalitarian state, whose jealous political control over the economy leads it to trample over all that which ought to be private. Underlying this image, and the neoliberal state phobia it justified, is the question of how individual interests ought to relate to the public good in a large modern society, which, it is assumed, cannot possibly function by the non-private logics of householding. This book tells the story of a large modern society that did.
Stolon Press, 2023
“This perfect essay is a portrait of a fleeting moment, post-socialist, and pre-monopoly capitali... more “This perfect essay is a portrait of a fleeting moment, post-socialist, and pre-monopoly capitalist. It illuminates a very recent time, still present but already shrouded, when excess and desperation held hands and a new economy of faith was born under the benevolent patronage of St. Xenia, who was called by the name Andrey Fedorovich.”
— Claudio Lomnitz, Professor of Anthropology, Columbia University
“A both mystical and prosaic story of a city and its protector saint. Cherkaev says Xenia the Blessed was a fool for Christ; she is a fitting sentinel for a people who, in the enduring absence of certainty and security, remain fools for hope.”
— Nina Serova, Researcher, Sydney
This text is, above all, a grateful testament to a local saint’s continued liveliness. It is a new hagiography, a story of a woman who gave away everything—her house, her money, her possessions, and even her name—who wandered homeless, and who has helped people resolve desperate situations ever since. Retelling the fragmented stories of how people asked for her intervention, and of how, through their actions, new mycelia of power grew on the ruins of the Soviet socialist state, I hope that this essay helps opens a loophole: a space between naïve faith and sociological faithlessness in which we might understand today’s miracles without crushing them by the secular objectivist gaze. Looking through this loophole, this essay retells some of stories I heard about the Soviet collapse and about how people survived it: about gleaning the planned economy’s rubble, chance connections, personal ties, Divine Providence, fast fortunes, and the enclosure of fields.
Photographs by Elena Tipikina
Designed by Ruud Ruttens, Ghent
Printed by AC Dominie, Singapore
April 2023
20pp., 100 × 190 mm, softcover
Edition of 500
ISBN 978-0-6453840-4-8
$16.50 AUD
https://stolonpress.com/catalogue/st-xenia-and-the-gleaners-of-leningrad/
An Anthropogenic Table of Elements: Experiments in the Fundamental, 2022
What does the history of the periodic table and of cheese-making in the provinces of the Russian ... more What does the history of the periodic table and of cheese-making in the provinces of the Russian Empire have to do with one another? A story of markets and scalability, collectives and elements, standardization and quark (and of milk gone sour).
With Heather Paxson and Stefan Helmreich. in An Anthropogenic Table of Elements: Experiments in the Fundamental, edited by Timothy Neale, Courtney Addison, and Thao Phan. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Anthropology and Humanism, 2022
In a world where super- billionaires build pleasure vessels to vacation in space while their f... more In a world where super- billionaires build pleasure vessels to vacation in space while their fellow citizens live on the streets with their children, it’s not odd to surmise that indefinite global elites want us all dead. It needs us only to suppose a plan where we are told to look for spontaneous order (Hayek 1968). And it is comforting, in a way, to imagine that at least there’s somebody in charge.
The American Historical Review, 2020
This text is, above all, a grateful testament to a local saint’s continued liveliness. It is a ne... more This text is, above all, a grateful testament to a local saint’s continued liveliness. It is a new hagiography, a story of a woman who gave away everything—her house, her money, her possessions, and even her name—who wandered homeless, and who has helped people resolve desperate situations ever since. Retelling the fragmented stories of how people asked for her intervention, and of how, through their actions, new mycelia of power grew on the ruins of the Soviet socialist state, I hope that this essay helps opens a loophole: a space between naïve faith and sociological faithlessness in which we might understand today’s miracles without crushing them by the secular objectivist gaze. Looking through this loophole, this essay retells some of stories I heard about the Soviet collapse and about how people survived it: about gleaning the planned economy’s rubble, chance connections, personal ties, Divine Providence, fast fortunes, and the enclosure of fields.
Cahiers du monde russe, 2018
This article begins with the heroic stories former Leningrad residents tell about making their ow... more This article begins with the heroic stories former Leningrad residents tell about making their own outdoor-tourist gear out of illicitly obtained industrial materials. Reading these stories not as evidence of illicit circulation, but as expressions of ethical claims, I show that they are united by common assumptions of goodness, and argue that these assumptions cannot be understood through analytic frameworks concerned with private, acquisitive interest. Instead, I argue that they must be understood in terms of the “personal:” an idiosyncratic Soviet property regime that was not opposed to, but co-constitutive of, socialist property. Analyzing 1960s political statements, juridical arguments and media texts, I show that the 1961 Third Party Program reforms extended the juridical logic of personal property to personal ethical realms. Specifically, the Program demanded that people place their ethical obligations – to strive for the overall greater good – above their formal obligations to follow letter of the law. By framing necessary but unplanned transactions in the a-legal terms of “mutual aid,” this ethical stance helped the economy appear functional despite its endemic circulation problems.
Environmental Humanities, 2018
The image of totalitarianism is central to liberal ideology as the nefarious antithesis of free m... more The image of totalitarianism is central to liberal ideology as the nefarious antithesis of free market exchange: the inevitable outcome of planned economies, which control their subjects' lives down to the most intimate detail. Against this image of complete state control, the multispecies ethnography of early Soviet institutions gives us a fortuitous edge to ask how centrally planned economies structure the lives of those actors whose biosocial demands can be neither stamped out nor befuddled by propaganda. In this article we examine the institutions of the Stalinist state that could have created the totalitarian service dog: institutions that planned the distribution, raising, and breeding of family dogs for military service. Our narrative begins with a recently discovered genealogical document, issued to a German Shepherd bred by plan and born during the World War II Leningrad Blockade. Reading this document together with service-dog manuals, Soviet physiological studies, archival military documents, and autobiographical narratives, we unravel the history of Leningrad's early Soviet military-service dog husbandry program. This program, we argue, relied on a particular distinction of public and private: at once stimulating affectionate interspecies bonds between dogs and their handlers and sequestering those relationships from the image of rational, scientifically objective interspecies communication. This reduction of human-dog relations to those criteria that could be scientifically studied and centrally planned yielded tangible results: it allowed the State's dog husbandry program to create apparently unified groups of dogs and dog handlers and to successfully mobilize these groups for new military tasks, like mine detection, during World War II.
Социология власти, 2019
Учетная карточка щенка немецкой овчарки, родившегося в блокадном Ленинграде, была случайно найден... more Учетная карточка щенка немецкой овчарки, родившегося в блокадном Ленинграде, была случайно найдена в пакете с канцелярским мусором и теперь хранится в государственном архиве. История этого документа открыла наше исследование межвидовых отношений людей и служебных собак в экстремальных условиях войны и блокады. Факт содержания нескольких сотен крупных служебных собак в осажденном городе долго не оглашался: их спасение считалось неэтичными по отношению к памяти ленинградцев, погибших от голода. Тем не менее породистые собаки, собранные у гражданского населения осенью 1941 года, пережили самое страшное «смертное время» первой и второй блокадной зимы в инженерной воинской части, где они и их вожатые обучались новаторскому методу поиска мин. Саперы с собаками быстро прославились на Ленинградском фронте: они обнаруживали не только мины, но любую взрывчатку, в том числе потайную диверсионную. Наша статья открывает новый ракурс этой истории. Советская теория дрессировки базировалась на «научно-объективном учении о рефлексах». Мы же показываем практическую сторону этой методики: использование служебных собак в военных целях опиралось в первую очередь на личную эмоциональную взаимную приязнь каждого вожатого и его собаки. Формально оставаясь инженерным имуществом, минорозыскные собаки выступали в роли самостоятельных исторических акторов, доверительных партнеров человека. Наше исследование посвящено тому, как сталинская система, не вторгаясь в интимную область личных отношений людей и служебных животных, тем не менее планировала и поощряла такую межвидовую приязнь в военизированных государственных учреждениях, где все было подчинено идеологическому влиянию. Все, кроме врожденного видового поведения самих военных собак.
Новое Литературное Обозрение, 2018
Статья рассматривает историю российских законов, защищающих достоинство и честь. Дореволюционные ... more Статья рассматривает историю российских законов, защищающих достоинство и честь. Дореволюционные правоведы полагали, что юридическая защита нравственного достоинства личности невозможна, ибо не общество, а лишь сам человек может уронить его. Но когда Моральный кодекс строителя коммунизма прописал основы нравственности, закон взял моральный облик и достоинство граждан под защиту в числе прочих нематериальных личных благ. С распадом СССР Моральный кодекс исчез, а защита «чести и достоинства» осталась: сегодня закон определяет достоинство как «морально-правовую категорию», соответствующую общепринятым социальным стандартам.
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"Personal Dignity as Personal Property: Metamorphosis of Russian Laws Concerning Defamation."
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This article examines the history of Russian laws protecting citizens’ dignity and honor. Pre-revolutionary Russian legal scholars assumed that ethical dignity could not be legally protected because it was not contingent on social esteem: it could be tarnished only by the bearer himself. But when the Moral Codex of the Builder of Communism outlined the norms of morality, the law extended its protection to citizens’ ethical dignity, among their other immaterial personal values. The Moral Codex disappeared after the Soviet collapse, but the legal protection of “honor and dignity” remained: today, the law defines dignity as a “moral-legal category,” determined by commonly accepted social standards.
Anthropology and Humanism, 2017
This is a story about penguins and passing grades, about the practices and ethics of informal exc... more This is a story about penguins and passing grades, about the practices and ethics of informal exchange in 1980s Leningrad and St. Petersburg 30 years later, and about things' incommensurability spurring stories. It is, specifically , about one dead penguin: a bird that was killed, found, bought, gifted , found, stolen, and gifted again.
Ab Imperio, 2014
This essay criticizes Alexander Etkind's book, Warped Mourning: Stories of the Undead in the Land... more This essay criticizes Alexander Etkind's book, Warped Mourning: Stories of the Undead in the Land of the Unburied, for analyzing consequences of repressed histories while itself neglecting important historical facts: like the fact of Stalin's post-1956 omission from public discourse. I show that Etkind's texts rely on such factual omissions to denounce the “criminal state” from a position of non-complicity, perpetuating a popular perestroika-era historiographic narrative that today is countered by “patriotic” historiography, which unproblematically unites the Russian people and nation against foreign aggression. The two positions are counterparts, this essay argues, united by a morally unambiguous relationship to the past, and by the omission of factual details that could complicate such an unproblematic identification.
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Статья критикует работы Александра Эткинда о “искривлении горя,” анализирующие последствия политических репрессий в общественной памяти. Однако, в этих работах Эткинд игнорирует исторические факты важные для подобного анализа: например, факт умолчания имени Сталина в официальных обсуждениях после ХХ Съезда. Тем самым автор продолжает популярную историографию перестройки, давшую возможность публично осуждать советский режим не обдумывая личную сопричастность к его злодеяниям. Данная публикация указывает на недопустимость избирательного подхода к истории, так как именно на исторических пробелах строится новое заблуждение: продолжению перестроечной историографии, содержащей пробелы и неувязки, сегодня и противопоставляется новая патриотическая идеология, объединяющая нацию против “внешнего врага,” как в настоящем времени, так и в оценках прошлого.
American Anthropologist, 2022
Yaar! Pirates of the academic seas, gleaners in the fields of copyright. Ode to sci-hub.
Своими словами, 2022
Это история о советских пингвинах и о студенческих зачетках, об этике и практиках неформальных от... more Это история о советских пингвинах и о студенческих зачетках, об этике и практиках неформальных отношений в Ленинграде 1980-х и Санкт-Петербурге 2010-х, а также о том, как несоизмеримость ценности предметов внезапно становится началом для невымышленных историй и поводом для застольных рассказов. Я расскажу вам об одном императорском пингвине: о птице, которая однажды погибла, была найдена, продана, куплена, стала чучелом, заброшена, найдена, украдена и подарена вновь.
[Перевод статьи "How Grades Had Been Gotten for Penguins and Money" (2017 Anthropology and Humanism 42 (1): 127–34.]
Синдром утраченного рая, 2022
Slavic Review, 2021
Birchpunk: An Android Khoziaistvo on Mars.
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 2021
Hot Spots, Fieldsights: American Fascism, 2021
In pain, we are equal: neither slave nor free, neither male nor female, neither Jew nor chicken.
Society for Cultural Anthropology, Fieldsights – https://culanth.org/fieldsights/they-sow-the-wind-and-reap-the-whirlwind-covid-doubt-in-st-petersburg , 2020
Lacking state-imposed quarantines, we’ve been abandoned to personal choices. Advising us to save ... more Lacking state-imposed quarantines, we’ve been abandoned to personal choices. Advising us to save ourselves and our neighbors by staying home, our governments struggle to keep the wrong doubts from going viral. But accusations of falsity are as bottomless as the hoaxes they try to contain. States accuse each other of spreading disinformation, and scholars show that these accusations are themselves often false, that “an EU-funded body set up to fight disinformation ends up producing it.” The falsity of such accusations of falsity gives fodder for new accusations. And thus the battle against an infectious pandemic becomes overshadowed by the battle for faith, against doubt. In this “infodemic,” America’s Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) urges citizens to do these “three easy things: Don’t believe the rumors; Don’t pass them along; Go to trusted sources of information to get the facts about the federal (COVID-19) response.”
Can a state agency order citizens (not) to believe?
Theorizing the Contemporary, Fieldsights, 2019
"Temporary Possession" series - https://culanth.org/fieldsights/series/temporary-possession - edi... more "Temporary Possession" series - https://culanth.org/fieldsights/series/temporary-possession - edited by Rebecca Empson and Lauren Bonilla. Society for Cultural Anthropology, March 29
Конская Порча , 2017
Introductory essay to a collection of stories
Columbia University, 2022
I’ll be speaking at Columbia’s Anthropology department Nov 2 2022 about my forthcoming book, Glea... more I’ll be speaking at Columbia’s Anthropology department Nov 2 2022 about my forthcoming book, Gleaning for Communism. Please come if you’re in NY!
Many thanks to Ededi Adjagbodjou for the fantastic poster – and to Mike Dringenberg for the really incredible cover image, presented here in draft form.
OPEN TO THE PUBLIC! Cornell Nov 4-5 2002, 2022
With this workshop, we focus on gleaning: the widely practiced but long under-theorized right of ... more With this workshop, we focus on gleaning: the widely practiced but long under-theorized right of the poor to take harvest remainders. More than simply the action of destitute people scavenging food, gleaning has been explicitly codified as entitlement and obligation: Leviticus not only entitles the poor to glean after the reapers, but obligates field owners to “not reap to the edge” of their fields, to leave for “the poor and the foreign.” Positing the right of the excluded in terms of the leftover, gleaning is fundamentally feudal: it premises aegis and common provision on the basis of changeless inequality; it formulates welfare in terms of an “excess” that must not be recirculated back into homogenous surplus value. Taking this feudal category as a lens onto our late-liberal world, this workshop asks how gleaning persists today. We invite economic and cultural anthropologists, legal scholars, theologians, historians and activists to discuss such well documented practices as scavenging, moonlighting, hacking, pilfering and coin-shaving with attention to that which is claimed as the leftover. Ultimately, we ask: how do people lay claim to aegis, social provision and their right to a commons today, through and despite liberal idioms of civic equality, lawfulness and smooth circulation?
––– Poster of a 2019 talk –––
The “Soviet” things of post-socialism: A historiography of perestroika gleaned from stories of ho... more The “Soviet” things of post-socialism: A historiography of perestroika gleaned from stories of honorable pilfering. ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||------------------------------------------------------------------------|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| In the early 2010s, I spent some time asking former Leningrad factory workers and engineers about the useful things they managed to make at their late-Soviet workplaces and smuggle home. These things were many and varied – from trinkets to tombstones to kitchenwares – and many were strikingly beautiful. But as I went back over the stories I had recorded about their creation, I realized that many were not actually Soviet at all: many had been made in the 1990s, years after the Soviet Union collapsed. I realized also that my interlocutors had quite a bit to say about “perestroika:” a time, I was told, when collective infrastructures were stolen, dismembered and sold abroad for a pittance, when everything fell apart. And I realized, thirdly, that most of these stories about “perestroika” were themselves set in the 90s: after the actual perestroika reforms [1985-1991] that had inadvertently destroyed the Soviet Union were over.
In this talk, I examine the roots of this historiography. In the stories I heard, the terms “Soviet” and “perestroika” were often two sides of one moral-economy, two ways of interpreting the informal economic transactions of the first post-socialist decade: “Soviet” stressed relations of friendly reciprocity by which people made do in economically hard times, “perestroika” stressed the economic, social and infrastructural collapse brought about by the dispossession of collective infrastructures. But why were these moral evaluations phrased as two factually successive historical epochs? The answer, I argue, may be found in the juridical logic of socialist property relations: in the logic of how individual interests related to the common good in the “socialist household economy,” in both theory and practice.
Этнографический Музей РАН , 2017
На примере становления советских законов о «защите чести и достоинства», я рассматриваю эффект от... more На примере становления советских законов о «защите чести и достоинства», я рассматриваю эффект отмены частной собственности в юридическом дискурсе о существовании морального долга. Опираясь на традиционные для Российской империи христианские представления о интимности нравственных убеждениий человека, дореволюционные правоведы настаивали на том, что морально- этическая сфера человека не может быть подвластна закону. Соответственно, законы о клевете той поры защищали только внешне наблюдаемые проявления социального статуса, но они не защищали “внутреннее достоинство,” которое каждый соблюдает в силу собственных моральных убеждений. В свете отмены частной собственности, советские правоведы вернулись к такому дореволюционному разграничению общественного социального статуса от «частной» и неприкосновенной моральной сферы человека. Новые законы постановили: моральное стремление советского гражданина – это вопрос не частный, а личный. Отныне личное моральное достоинство, так же как и личная собственность, попадают под защиту закона как желательное проявление общегосударственного социалистического строя и общественного порядка.
Columbia Anthropology Alumni Stories, 2022
A conversation about leftovers, collectives and collaboration. Amiel Bize and Xenia Cherkaev int... more A conversation about leftovers, collectives and collaboration.
Amiel Bize and Xenia Cherkaev interviewed by Jasmine Pisapia
HSE Hist and Anth MA, 2023
Animals are historical actors, but not historical subjects. They act in human history according t... more Animals are historical actors, but not historical subjects. They act in human history according to their own species-specific bio-social demands, quite impervious to human ideological demands and ethical standards. And this is why we should study them: the relationships people form with these stubbornly mute social actors often give us social scientists a surprising angle from which to study human worlds. In this class, we explore how historians and anthropologists have studied human relationships with all those non-human others who comprise our lives: the mammals, insects, fish, fungi, microbes that form our human families, bodies, diets, social histories and commodity chains. We will examine the diverse ways these non-humans have been made part of our economic and political worlds as workers, symbols and soldiers. Attention to the non-human requires a delicate theoretical framework. It requires looking past such dualities as subject and object, nature and culture-without simply collapsing them entirely to say that between humans and animals there is no significant difference. By studying how scholars have tackled this uneasy problematic in their ethnographic studies of other species, this class will grapple with the strange fact that "human nature," as Anna Tsing puts is, "is an interspecies relationship."
ВШЭ, 2021
Данный курс ориентирован на изучение студентами приемов жанра академического письма и на ознакомл... more Данный курс ориентирован на изучение студентами приемов жанра академического письма и на ознакомление с основами визуальной грамотности. Курс ставит задачей освоение таких навыков академического письма как: формулирование логических аргументов в тезисах и целевых тематических предложениях, умение прописывать плавные переходы между темами и абзацами текста. Курс преподаст базовые практические навыки: как создавать библиографии и работать с цитатами, как писать, результативно обсуждать и редактировать рабочие черновики, как правильно рецензировать тексты и точно формулировать критические замечания. Исследуя историю визуализации образов в письменной и медийной культуре, студенты к концу курса напишут небольшие эссе используя полученные приемы академического письма, а так же освоят правила краткого рецензирования текстов, написанных коллегами по классу.
MIT Anthropology, 2019
This class is about the concept of culture: an elusive category that anthropologists study, even ... more This class is about the concept of culture: an elusive category that anthropologists study, even while disagreeing about what exactly it is. To approach such confounding questions as what culture is and how culture works, we will focus on how anthropologists have studied, analyzed and represented aspects of it in their texts. We will closely read anthropological accounts of family structure, material culture and exchange, personhood and subjectivity, relations with animals and spirits, perception, language and the work of ethnography.
Class texts include scholarly articles and book chapters, documentary and fictional films, one recently published book-length ethnography and most of a classic book-length ethnography published nearly a century prior. While primarily based on the assigned readings, class discussions will also touch upon our everyday life here in Boston: especially as the latter is represented in the ethnographic accounts that students will themselves create throughout the semester. Class assignments include three short ethnographic projects, four short reading response essays, and one longer final essay.
An introduction to the study of culture, this class gives students hands-on experience with ethnographic practice and a basic understanding of some of the key debates surrounding the object and method of anthropological study. Examining how ethnographers have analyzed others' social organizations and retold others' stories, it asks about the elusive nature of such seemingly obvious notions as subjects and objects, humans and non-humans, gift and exchange, phonemic sounds and culturally relevant meanings.
MIT Anthropology, 2019
An introduction to the ethnographic study of politics, this course examines how anthropologists h... more An introduction to the ethnographic study of politics, this course examines how anthropologists have understood politics to function in various social and economic systems: from small-scale societies to liberal democratic states. Starting with anthropological accounts of the politics of everyday life, we will examine what constitutes the political across several sites: electoral politics, public spheres, bureaucracies and humanitarian governance. Students are asked to read the assigned texts with attention to what is and is not understood to be political. Specifically, they are asked to consider how questions of authority, coercion and violence have been theorized to relate to the question of politics, and how some aspects of social life have been regimented in explicitly non-political ways. What moral imaginaries are opened by the promise of politics, and how do they inform the practical governance of lives?