The focus of this article is on the relationship between history, identity, and architectural design in a city defined by dispossession and displacement. The former German Königsberg, today's Russian Kaliningrad, was annexed, repopulated, and rebuilt during the postwar Soviet period. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 cast a critical light on this annexation, and problematized the belonging of the city to Russia by territorially cutting it off. Using two urban designs of historicized architecture that developed recently in the city, this article revisits the specific interface between urban history and the material forms that it takes. The against-the-grain case of Kaliningrad, where the relationship between people and the city demands constant reinterpretation, points to a distinct role that made-appear historical architecture sometimes plays, and demonstrates different selective and expressive processes that enable it. To make sense of the findings, the article develops a new subcategory within a more general notion "heritage": the architecture of descent. It is especially applicable in cases of disrupted urban development and repossession.
How do the semantic logics that different words accommodate in different languages map onto studies of social realities internationally and interdisciplinarily? This article is an ethnographic study of obshcheye – a corpus of phenomena pertaining to communal life in Russia. Similar to the English term ‘commons’, it marks the zone of the public – that which is shared and collective. In contrast to the commons, it displays greater semantic polyphony, bringing together social, discursive and affective qualities. Our analysis demonstrates that various semantic subsets of obshcheye sensitize research differently from the commons by indexing different societal concerns. They tune us into a wide set of concerns – with time (not wanting to be ‘Soviet’), ownership (worrying about what is ‘no one’s’), affective connectivity (one sits and waits for a conversation), and the act of caring for people and for spaces. Each word and each relationship in the semantic network reflects what is important to social actors as they go about ordering their lives together. The article concludes that obshcheye is so definitively a semantic network that expunging its conceptual heterogeneity and narrowing the multiple logics to encompass one in particular would amount to analytical reductionism and the impoverishment of social analysis.
Present-day academic work is mostly done in English. What happens, or so the contributions to this monograph ask, when we open a few windows, let in some air, and invite elements drawn from other linguistic traditions into our texts? Doing so does not simply mean welcoming other words. Along with this it also changes the conditions, the terms, that stipulate what is, and what is not, good-proper, interesting, international, academic-writing. To exemplify the way in which the traffic between languages is rarely smooth, here we briefly present some of the conundrums that have arisen as we, the authors, have picked up the phrase that figures as our title-on other terms-and tried to translate itrewrite it-into the other languages that we introduce in the articles in this monograph. In Hungarian, the first phrase that comes to mind is más szóval, which literally means 'with other word' (singular!). This is often used in everyday language, when someone wants to find a better way of saying something. Then there is más feltétellel, which means 'under other conditions'. This sounds more like a legal expression, specifying under what circumstances something can be used. On the cover, you will find más szóval because this captures an interesting tension between sameness and difference. It suggests that by using a different word it becomes possible to say the same thing, but better.
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