Maria Gunko: Violent faces of the Russian state
“Our whole state manifested itself in [Verkhniy] Lars, in a concentrated form: violence, mess, corruption, and indifference” – told me Vadim, who left Russia through Georgia shortly after…
“Our whole state manifested itself in [Verkhniy] Lars, in a concentrated form: violence, mess, corruption, and indifference” – told me Vadim, who left Russia through Georgia shortly after…
After nearly two weeks of violent conflict in Ukraine, it is increasingly difficult to stand back and see the bigger picture. The West has lined up behind the…
The invasion of Ukraine has been a shock not just to Eastern Europe, but to the post World War II international order. While the fundamental tenets of postwar…
Image 1: Shows Tuzla Plenum, 2014 (Photograph by Tamara Opačić from H-Alter, 17 February 2014, http://h-alter.org/vijesti/plenum-je-uvijek-korak-ispred, Used with permission). The space where I li…
This summer, a new billboard in Vilnius Old Town, caught my eye. A healthy-looking man was pointing his finger up and informing Lithuanians, “Don’t Believe the Myths—patients are…
In Shock Therapy: Psychology, Precarity and Well-Being in Postsocialist Russia, Thomas Matza offers an ethnographic account that explores the rise of psychotherapy in post-socialist Russia. Through in…
My research in Việt Nam addresses how medicine, health, and disease function as political and cultural signifiers as well as telegraphing – in the form of epidemiological data…
Page 99 of my dissertation falls toward the beginning of a monster chapter exploring my rural interlocutors’ fight for land rights, encounters with the legal system, and conceptions…
This contribution looks at the implications of how capitalists think about corporate ethics and moral obligations in monoindustrial towns. I present the cases of two mining towns in…
In Health and Wealth on the Bosnian Market: An Intimate Debt, Larisa Jašarević explores the mutual entanglement between the economy, living body and the good life in…
The workshop “Geographies of Markets”—hosted over three days in mid-June 2017 by the Karl Polanyi Institute of Political Economy at Concordia University, Montréal—gave scholars from a wide range…
Sean Guillory of Sean’s Russia Blog spoke with our Publications and Reviews Editor Judith Beyer about her book The force of custom. Law and the ordering of everyday…
Allegra’s thematic thread on #postsocialism is coming to its end. We hope that the eight delicious specialties Allegra served you over the past two weeks have pleased your…
Patterns of food provision and consumption have become objects of increasing concern among both scholars and activists. In the last few decades, the ways in which food is…
This project was inspired by a curiosity in whether people from the former Soviet states, more than two decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union, share similar…
In contemporary political anthropology, ‘the state’ is a curious as if object (Navaro-Yashin 2002). It has come to dominate the sub-discipline since the 1990s. Students of the state…
This piece explores the activities of Afghan merchants in the former Soviet Union especially Tajikistan in Central Asia and Russia and Ukraine. It brings attention to the problems…
Yesterday we opened the AVMoFA’s first summer exhibition – Die SommerWende – and today we are very pleased to meet the artist, Axel Schön, in person and talk…