"Your Eyes Are Green like Dollars": Counterfeit Cash, National Substance, and Currency Apartheid in 1990s Russia

Tourism, Charity, and Profit: The Movement of Money in Moroccan Jewish Pilgrimage

“…Yet, my demonstration that charity and profit are intimately linked in rituals of pilgrimage exchange indicates that 1 take heed of what Appadurai has similarly identified as the "exaggeration and reification of the contrast between gift and commodity in anthropological writ ing" (1986:11). 1 want to conclude by emphasizing how my argument resonates with critiques of exclusivist approaches to gifts and commodities (see also Bloch 1989; Hermann 1997; Lemon 1998;Yan 1996).…”

Hermeneutic Algebra: Solving for Love, Time/Space, and Value in Putin‐Era Personal Ads

“…To disrupt this way of depicting Value in terms of Time/Space, we could consider how the “Iron Curtain” blocked some movements but enabled others. These subtleties reveal how the image of a Soviet Union cut off from “the rest” of the world is misleading, too extreme (see also Lemon 1998). 15…”

“…At any rate, while the students focus on defining “H.E.,” the teacher continues past them, to push Marie to discuss its unexpected value in this equation: most personal ads specify a desired level of education, but Trifunova addresses a reader “ without H.E. !” After seven Soviet decades in which college and graduate‐level education had been the most esteemed of officially sanctioned measures of Value (see Dunham 1976) and among the most visible and convertible forms, surpassing even wages or cash (see also Pesmen 2000, Lemon 1998). Why would Trifunova want a partner without higher education?…”

“…38 38 Discourses of “normality” in formerly socialist states often imagine standards of living in the West (see Berdahl 1998; Fehervary 2002). Note, though, a contradictory complexity here: the teacher not only calibrates the “normal” to familiar material measures (not to the West) but also counts money in dollars, not in rubles (see Lemon 1998). …”

Post‐Utopian Irony: Cuban Narratives during the “Special Period” Decade

“…With the disintegration of the Soviet Union, they no longer see socialism as a realistic alternative; thus, they cynically portray the current conditions as "resistant socialism" (Creed 1999). They frequently quote the ironical comments of their informants to make fun of their informants' situation themselves (e.g., Lemon 1998). Likewise, citing Cuban informants' words that could be taken as both ironic and unironic, Hernández-Reguant (2005) and Holgado Fernández (2000) compare them to the dissidents' and Cuban exiles' discourse.…”