An Archaeology of the Immaterial

Buchli, Victor

doi:10.4324/9781315714813

Cited by 18 publications

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“…Materiality has provided a revealing site from which to understand the effects of the fall of state socialism on quotidian practices, subjectivities and the generation of value (Collier 2011;Drazin 2002;Fehérváry 2014). The socialist-built environment might not have produced a new kind of communist subjectivity as expected, though the remains still refer to a different ideology of dwelling and a collective idea, since the Soviet architecture was transformed into an instrument of social reform to facilitate a particular project of modernisation (Buchli 1999;Crowley and Reid 2002;Molnár 2013). These remains often appear as 'restless items' (Bach 2017), thus pointing at temporal oppositions with their indirect ways of telling us stories (Hetherington 2001).…”

Section: A Vanishing Object Of Studymentioning

confidence: 92%

Remains of the Soviet Past in Estonia

2018

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The FRINGE series explores the roles that complexity, ambivalence and immeasurability play in social and cultural phenomena. A cross-disciplinary initiative bringing together researchers from the humanities, social sciences and area studies, the series examines how seemingly opposed notions such as centrality and marginality, clarity and ambiguity, can shift and converge when embedded in everyday practices. Alena Ledeneva is Professor of Politics and Society at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies of UCL. Peter Zusi is Lecturer at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies of UCL.By adopting the tropes of 'repair' and 'waste', this book innovatively manages to link various material registers from architecture, intergenerational relations, affect and museums with ways of making the past present. Through a rigorous yet transdisciplinary method, Martínez brings together different scales and contexts that would often be segregated out. In this respect, the ethnography unfolds a deep and nuanced analysis, providing a useful comparative and insightful account of the processes of repair and waste making in all their material, social and ontological dimensions.Victor Buchli, Professor of Material Culture at UCL This book comprises an endearingly transdisciplinary ethnography of postsocialist material culture and social change in Estonia. Martínez creatively draws on a number of critical and cultural theorists, together with additional research on memory and political studies scholarship and the classics of anthropology. Grappling concurrently with time and space, the book offers a delightfully thick description of the material effects generated by the accelerated post-Soviet transformation in Estonia, inquiring into the generational specificities in experiencing and relating to the postsocialist condition through the conceptual anchors of wasted legacies and repair. This book defies disciplinary boundaries and shows how an attention to material relations and affective infrastructures might reinvigorate political theory.Maria This is a book about many things. Originally, it appears as a critique of discourses about the past, and yet it unfolds as an ethnography of pastness that deals with the contemporary city, geographies of affect, generational change and materiality. The work interweaves a number of topics related to how physical and cultural wasting are rarely synchronised, accounting for diverse ways of treating inheritances and the different intensities of urban memory that they generate. By studying the material and social afterlife of the Soviet world in Estonia, I attempt to show the dialectical relation between construction and demolition, and how the need to build something new entails the disinvestment and neglect of the legacies from the old regime. With a fringy anthropology, I explore how the vanquishing over the Soviet world happened on a different time scale from the decay of its legacy, allowing for new availabilities, intricate reappropriations and unforeseen opportunities for recuper...

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Section: A Vanishing Object Of Studymentioning

confidence: 92%

Remains of the Soviet Past in Estonia

2018

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“…Kornai 1992;Verdery 1996] depicted the reality of state socialism as mostly dull and grey, and the possibilities for consumption as inherently insufficient to meet household needs and demands. This argument is understandable inasmuch as these features (a) were the ones most apparent in a comparison of Eastern and Western societies at the time, (b) corresponded with the early anti-consumerist ethos of communist ideology, which limited consumption to human needs [Fehér, Heller and Márkus 1983;Buchli 1999;Gronow 2003]. However, recent literature that uses the present situation in post-socialist Eastern Europe as an additional point of reference describes a more complex picture, in which socialist consumption can also be viewed as challenging and thrilling [Fehérváry 2009: 427-430;Bren and Neuburger 2012: 4] because of its 'prosumer' [Toffler 1980] character.…”

Section: The Specific Features Of Socialist and Post-socialist Consummentioning

confidence: 99%

Discourses of Thrift and Consumer Reasonability in Czech State-Socialist Society

Hájek¹,

Samec²

2017

Czech Sociological Review

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abstract:The article examines how notions of thrift, saving, and frugality were present and active in the state-socialist discourses of economic behaviour and what meaning these notions carried. The research is based on three kinds of data: the official state-socialist public discourse of economic behaviour as presented in transcripts of parliamentary speeches, household guides and manuals, and eyewitness accounts of the state-socialist era recollected in oral history interviews. Such a multi-faceted corpus of discourse data made it possible to examine factual and normative aspects of thrift in state-socialist discourses and compare them with the accounts of everyday practices and tactics that may well contradict the official discourse. The analysis reveals that (a) notions of thrift and saving were strongly present throughout the period in all discourses examined, (b) both terms underwent a semantic shift from a productive to a restrictive meaning over time, and (c) both notions were eventually publicly sidelined by the emphasis on raising revenue. Despite fading from public discourse in the late 1980s, the notion of thrift had by then become instilled in the subjective understanding of the 'reasonable consumer', a concept that can therefore be considered a precursor of the contemporary concept of consumer responsibilisation. keywords: thrift, saving, discourse analysis, socialism, consumers, consumer responsibilisation Sociologický časopis / Czech Sociological Review, 2017, Vol. 53, No. 6: 805-831 https://doi.org/10.13060/00380288.2017 * Acknowledgements: This work was supported by the Czech Science Foundation (grant number 15-04863S). We thank two anonymous referees for their many suggestions, which helped us to substantially improve the paper. We are also grateful to Markéta Fuchs for help with the English. ** Direct all correspondence to: Martin Hájek, Faculty of Social Sciences, Charles University, U Kříže 8, 158 00 Prague 5, Czech Republic, e-mail: martin.hajek@fsv.cuni.cz; Tomáš Samec, Faculty of Social Sciences, Charles University, U Kříže 8, 158 00 Prague 5, Czech Republic, e-mail: tomas.samec@fsv.cuni.cz. Sociologický časopis/Czech Sociological Review, 2017, Vol. 53, No. 6 806 The present-day discursive representation of consumer behaviour in Czech society is marked by a visible inconsistency. On the one hand, experts and the media praise rising household consumption as contributing significantly to the growth of the national economy (or so we are told). On the other hand, insistent warnings, likewise supported by experts, against over-indebtedness, both individual and public, appear regularly in those same media. Uncertainty about what is a 'desirable' level of consumption becomes apparent in the context of household saving behaviour. Czech households' bank savings are relatively high compared to their debts and continue to grow despite almost negative interest rates. Consequently, money-saving Czechs are relatively reluctant to make use of consumer credit or other advanced financial services; ...

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“…An early review of these efforts may be found in Lawrence and Low (1990). Buchli (1999) adds important insights to these engagements by showing "how seemingly weighty, inscribed, and totalizing world views (Blier 1987) or 'spatial logics' (Hillier and Hanson 1984) can be radically subverted. " Buchli's work notes that anthropologists, most often those working in studies of material culture, have formally and carefully recognized a tendency to "posit a direct, iconic, and at times homologous correspondence between an item of material culture and the society with which it is associated, " and that we must attend to the ways control can be exercised at multiple social scales (Foucault 1977;Shanks andTilley 1987, 1992).…”

Section: Soldiering Sustainabilitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Building Green: Environmental Architects and the Struggle for Sustainability in Mumbai

Rademacher¹

2017

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An Archaeology of the Immaterial

Cited by 18 publications

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Remains of the Soviet Past in Estonia

Remains of the Soviet Past in Estonia

Discourses of Thrift and Consumer Reasonability in Czech State-Socialist Society

Building Green: Environmental Architects and the Struggle for Sustainability in Mumbai

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