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<font size=6><b>MIT Anthropology Colloquium<br><br>
</b></font><font size=5>The Making of a Post-Soviet Public:<br>
Exhibiting Gifts to Soviet Leaders at the Kremlin Museum, Moscow,
2006<br><br>
</font>Nikolai Ssorin-Chaikov (University of Cambridge, Department of
Anthropology)<br>
and<br>
Olga Sosnina (Kremlin Museum)<br><br>
<br>
Monday, November 26<br>
4:15-5:30<br><br>
MIT, Room 16-220<br><br>
How is the anthropology of socialism to be situated in post-socialist
context? In Autumn 2006, we curated the Kremlin Museum’s exhibition of
public gifts to Soviet leaders. This exhibition is part of our ongoing
research project on Soviet-era gift giving practices. This paper explores
the exhibition not as a presentation of research results, but as itself
an ethnography of post-socialism in its complex discursive and affective
relation to socialism. We discuss such materials as visitors’ comment
books and Russian and foreign media coverage of the exhibition in
relation to our ethnographic self-observations of making and running the
exhibition. The paper charts how a conceptual gesture that ‘we’
(anthropologists and curators) made, in creating a material and visual
presentation of the anthropological concept of Soviet state gift economy,
‘lives’ in and indeed participates in the making of complex
modalities of post-socialism.<br>
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