Olson, Laura and Svetlana Adonyeva. The Worlds of Russian Village Women: Tradition, Transgression, Compromise (original) (raw)

In their well-researched and thoroughly insightful monograph, The Worlds of Russian Village Women: Tradition, Transgression, Compromise, Laura Olson and Svetlana Adonyeva investigate how three generations of Russian rural women relate to tradition. Olson and Adonyeva draw from many years of personal fieldwork as well as from a vast archive of interviews conducted by faculty and students of Saint Petersburg University. The subjects of their study are three Soviet generations of women born between 1899 and 1950; Olson and Adonyeva classify them as follows: those born before the October Revolution (1899-1916), those born from the Revolution through total collectivization of the village (1917-29) and those who came into their youth during the postwar years, but were born between 1930-50 (77). Olson and Adonyeva's critical approach is informed in part by Pierre Bourdieu and Michel Foucault's studies on power relations. Focusing on the ways people exercise agency in negotiating their relationship to culture, Olson and Adonyeva's work illustrates that life-cycle rituals do not simply represent one-sided situations of subjugation, but in fact, when "faced with structures of social control, people react in complex ways, including obedience, transgression, and compromise." (5) The fundamental questions motivating the study are many. The central question, "how do Russian rural women relate to tradition?" is deceptively simple; the answers to that question remain extremely complex. In their interpretations of how women "perform folklore" during life-cycle and calendar rituals for example, Olson and Adonyeva reflect on the "nature of subjectivity and history, agency and tradition" as they seek to further illuminate the continually shifting relationships Russian rural women have with tradition (23). Indeed much of the focus of this monograph is on the theoretical connections between "performing folklore" and the construction of social identity. In performing folklore, Olson and Adonyeva assert, one is able to use "preexisting, shared, symbolic structures (verbal, visual, intonational, gestural, etc.) to construct his or her relationship to a group-that is, to create and recreate his or her own identity" (11).