[Sci-tech-public] Mark your calendars -- Anthropology Colloquium, 11/26 @ 4:15 pm

[Debbie Meinbresse]

MIT Anthropology Colloquium

The Making of a Post-Soviet Public:
Exhibiting Gifts to Soviet Leaders at the Kremlin Museum, Moscow, 2006

Nikolai Ssorin-Chaikov (University of Cambridge, Department of Anthropology)
and
Olga Sosnina (Kremlin Museum)


Monday, November 26
4:15-5:30

MIT, Room 16-220

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.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman.mit.edu/pipermail/sci-tech-public/attachments/20071107/a7deec43/attachment.htm