Koriak women in the northern Kamchatka peninsula in the Russian Far Bast offer gifts of handworked reindeer fur and leather to entice men to become their sweethearts. Examining two love stories involving reindeer herding Koriak women and men, I explore the meaning of the gift as an embodied metaphor that arouses desire and creates seductive subjectivities. Focusing on sewers' creativity, I situate my analysis within a wider discussion on aesthetics and gift exchange to explore the poetic dimensions of the gift. In a final outlook, I ask about the significance of fur production and exchange for
This article examines the politics of temporality and hope in relation to a political imagination generated by constituencies of an East European Left. In looking in particular at how a socialist‐inspired notion of internationalism may serve as a tool to animate future‐oriented political imaginations, the article also marks an argument for rethinking anthropological and Left historiographical practices, and to consider the affirmative valence of utopian imaginations as a form of critical action.
On 1 May 2007, a new hotel opened in Berlin: Ostel. As its name implies, it is located in the former East of the city, now ‘Berlin Mitte’. The Ostel joined Berlin's burgeoning hotel scene at a time when Ostalgie ‐ the supposed longing East Germans feel for the past ‐ marked no longer a condition of mourning and loss but had become ‘hip’. In this article to carry the analysis of Ostalgie beyond the themes of trauma or resistance into the more playful dimensions of what Czech‐French writer Milan Kundera (1992) has called ‘the joke,’ that is, an ironic form of humor ubiquitous in former Soviet and East European contexts. I engage irony as a situated experience and practice chiefly through the ‘artful lens’ of material culture. In focusing on the Ostel's interior, I am especially interested in irony's ‘critical edge’. I argue that it is this edge that makes it possible to open up critical interpretations of German post‐unification history.
RésuméCet article explore les formes contemporaines et émergentes de la nostalgie dans la ville de Moscou. Il examine ce thème à travers le prisme de trois espaces architecturaux qui nous parlent de la nostalgie en tant que condition culturelle et temporelle spécifique, postsocialiste : le Parc des sculptures de Moscou, la cathédrale du Christ-Sauveur reconstruite et le centre commercial de la place Manezh. J’avance que ce qui est à l’oeuvre, sur le plan politique, dans ces lieux est un certain type de dé-idéologisation qui est devenue le « nouveau style » de la Russie postsoviétique. La dé-idéologisation a tourné en norme historique, en mode affective, et j’avance que c’est précisément en raison de ce processus que « l’industrie de la nostalgie » est apparue. Cet article prend l’attachement à la nostalgie au sérieux, mais plutôt que de considérer la nostalgie comme un symptôme sur un plan analytique, mon intérêt se porte sur son examen en tant que condition historique, en tant que réponse temporelle qui apparaît à un moment particulier.
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