No 6 (2024)

This article is an introduction to the issue’s special theme on “Economic Anthropology of Household Outside Metropolitan Areas in Contemporary Russia”, featuring contributions by Lidia Rakhmanova, Aleksandra Kasatkina, Daria Tereshina, and Polina Yarovaya. This article contributes to rethinking economic anthropology in terms of culturally specific categories under study. It does so by revisiting the role of household in the genealogy of “economy,” and specifically by looking at Russian terms domokhozaistvo and domostroi. The article shows how domokhozaistvo harks back to oikonomia as Aristotile’s “art of running household” and the new testament’s divine management of the world as god’s home. In turn, domostroi evokes the name of the 16th century Moscow courtly instructions that combine these classical Greek and Christian connotations. The article also suggests thinking through the implications of the Aristotilian categorical foundation of the “economy” in ways in which it is part to an oikonomic ethical judgement based on the state of exception. This allows us, on the one hand, to rethink economic anthropology as part of the anthropology of ethics, and, on the other, to reconceptualize its ethnographic methodologies which “case studies” frequently follow the non-typical and are not necessarily representative.

The article explores ethnographically how taiga and river huts in the Middle Ob River, which exist in their rhythms in parallel with rural and urban forms of life, transform gender roles and qualities that do not fit into the notions of proper behavior and practices of men and women – neither as understood by local residents nor from the researcher's point of view. On the one hand, zaimka, which includes various buildings, is a landscape phenomenon, remarkable for its non-trivial position in the space between the wild taiga, the village, and the city. On the other hand, where a masculine world order seems to reign, zaimka problematizes gender divisions and shows that it is the female “constitutive” absence that is critical and influential. Drawing on the experience of shared hut visits, conversations, rumors, and joking, I show how gender duality is dismantled not through the notion of the “individual” at the hut, but through the distribution of masculine and feminine elements in the space of hut life with the help of the notion of “dividual” as a “distributed personhood” in the spatial dimension and “distributed self” as a language for describing different forms of subjectivities.

Drawing on the case of the repair of a peasant house by residents of a dilapidated (and also being restored) Orthodox monastery in the Russian North, the article raises the question of the relationship between theology and economics of economic ethics. The ethnographic analysis of this article focuses on the categories of “labor” and “work” in the practice of restoration and on the example of the hegumen of the monastery and his wards. My argument is that the spiritualization of “labor” and the theological understanding of the “laborer” in the context of the restoration of the Church is opposed to the economic (secular) strategies of “work” and “worker”. The hegumen inscribes the reconstruction of the destroyed peasant house into the general concept of the restoration of the church, which is carried out in the conditions of modernity and its challenges. The restoration of the Church seems to the hegumen and his wards not so much a “work” to repair cultural monuments, but a “labor” to return to the pre-revolutionary way of life, which is the prototype of a utopian paradise, Holy Russia. “Labor” and “work” are different by their temporalities: work is aimed at the result in the future while labor as spiritual practice is grounding for the return to the past. The article examines how the methodology of the ideal types of connection between Protestant ethics and capitalism (Weber) can be applied in the context of Orthodox economic ethics (Zabaev) through Weber's “understanding” methodology. The purpose of the article is to point out the inconsistency of binary oppositions used to interpret labor and work practices in an Orthodox monastery, and the need to consider them in the context of the historical continuity of practices and their meanings.

The article attempts an inquiry into what exactly was the Church feast in the Olonets region of Russia during the period from the late 1640s through the early 1680s. Drawing on the comparative analysis of materials from the archival collection “Olonets Military Commander’s Office” and 17th/18th-century census books, I examine the variety of celebrations, their participants, regional differences and interconnections, as well as the elements and constituents of festive culture and the functions of the Church feast. There is evidence pointing to the participation of peasants in Church feasts and to the fact that their family celebrations and other events of household importance were often timed to the latter. In the region where so called chernososhnoe peasantry (peasants working on state lands) prevailed and traditions of communal self-government were strong, parishes functioned both as religious and as land associations. Consequently, Church feasts meant simultaneously the time for holding celebrations, conducting important economic transactions, and administering communal matters. In ethnographic literature, there has been a rather common opinion that, among the Karelians and Veps of older times, Church feasts were special events for kin relatives only; however, I argue that it should be reassessed, since the new data attest to the presence of participants from different patronymic groups and land communities in these celebrations. In fact, Church feasts were instrumental in strengthening the positions of ethnic groups living in the region, intensifying interaction among them, and shaping local cultural traits.

We approach informal fisheries in the Murmansk region by employment of the concept of M. DeLanda. DeLanda’s concept mainly associates with the construction of a horizontal ontology, as an alternative to the traditional vertical structures that advocate a hierarchical understanding of the world and the exclusivity of humans. M. DeLanda’s horizontal ontology allows considering different-level components of fishing in two interdependent axes: 1) “material – expressive”; 2) “synthetic – variable”. The analysis of these axes allows us to analyze the problem of the lack of positive attitude of local population to the abundance of pink salmon, which is one of the most significant material components of the assemblage of informal fisheries in the Murmansk region. The theoretical explication of this problem is connected with the possibility of realising the synthesis of material elements, which – in themselves – are connected with different spheres of life activity. Historical and spatial plots show various aspects of the connection between the material and expressive poles of fish assemblage, and reveal the possibility of scaling the informal practices of the North particularly, in the Murmansk region. Pink salmon has the potential to change assemblage through exteriority – the inclusion of external elements. Figure of a salmon occupies a position between the material and the expressive stabilizing the assemblage of northern informal fishing and embodying the community's identification with place and its history. Solidarity sets patterns of behavior that define not only “us” and “them” but also the many in-betweens. Informal norms reflect perceptions of the image of the “golden mean” in fishing in the North. The connection to history and to a place, manifested in local identification, opens up the possibility of altering the agency of pink salmon in terms of expressivity.

The content of the article, as well as of my previous publication in Etnograficheskoe Obozrenie, is the reconstruction of the Proto-Afrasian cultural vocabulary, which is a unique source of information on the ancient history of the West Asian-North African-Mediterranean area of the Late Mesolithic-Early Neolithic period, not yet properly appreciated by archaeologists and prehistorians. In this case, we are talking about two groups of terms – for watercraft and for metals (including their processing and products from them) and about the proto-language period of the early Afrasians and their closest descendants – North Afrasians (who spoke a common ancestor language of Semitic, Egyptian, Libyo-Berber and Chadic), whom the author identifies with the creators of the Natufian and Post-Natufian archaeological cultures of the Levant. These proto-languages began to split successively into dialects, which grew into the known (and possibly some extinct and unknown to us) linguistic taxa in the last third of the 11th millennium BCE (namely, Proto-Afrasian, which includes, beside the above-mentioned languages, the South Afrasian – Cushito-Omotic branch) – the first third of the 10th millennium BCE (Proto-North Afrasian). Presented in the article are the etymologies of the reconstructed Proto-Afrasian terms: ten relating to watercraft and navigation, and ten relating to metals. The article has an additional purpose of evaluating and rating the results obtained.