[Sci-tech-public] (no subject)

[Amberly Steward]

Please join us.

 

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.

 

 

Amberly Steward
Administrative Assistant

Anthropology Program

Massachusetts Institute of Technology
77 Massachusetts Avenue
Bldg. 16-267
Cambridge, MA 02139
p) 617.253.3065
f) 617.253.5363  

 

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