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Statistics and Sufficiency: Toward an Intellectual History of Russia\u27s Rural Crisis

The article examines the impact of the ‘rise of statistical thinking’ and statistical measurement on elite perceptions of the condition of the Russian Empire\u27s post-emancipation peasant economy. Using archival and published sources, it argues that the increased use of statistical measurement did much to concretize in numerical (‘objective’) terms the idea of rural crisis. In particular, the combination of traditional paternalistic concerns about the sufficiency of peasant resources and the use of cadastre measurement yielded an image of the peasant household economy in which the value (the income-producing capabilities) of post-emancipation peasant allotments nearly always fell short of subsistence requirements and tax/payment obligations. Thus, because of how observers measured peasant well-being, it appeared as if peasants had been over-changed for their post-emancipation land allotments and were doomed to exist in a permanent state of crisis

From Commune to Household: Statistics and the Social Construction of Chaianov\u27s Theory of Peasant Economy

Categorization plays an integral part in how we see and interpret the world. This is especially true when we attempt to comprehend the complexities of human society, where the heterogeneity of human activity across time and space demands that some criterion (class, gender, age, profession, etc.) be used to reduce the number of variables examined. From the mid-nineteenth century—as statistics evolved from the simple “political arithmetic” of tax collectors and army recruiters into a potential science of human behavior—categorizing the population became a contentious issue that reflected the social and political agendas of data collectors. At the same time, when data refused to be molded to researchers’ assumptions, the task of putting people and their activities into analytical categories challenged the validity of the categories themselves. In this way, statistical representations and categories became socially constructed knowledge

The Politics of Numbers: Zemstvo Land Assessment and the Conceptualization of Russia\u27s Rural Economy

Historians of statistics are only beginning to understand the politics of numbers that accompanied the rise of statistical thinking in the nineteenth century. In the Russian empire, this statistical awakening opened numerous possibilities for state servitors and the intelligentsia. To officials in St. Petersburg, especially the enlightened bureaucrats who shaped the Great Reforms, statistics held out the promise of providing hard data for the development of informed policies. For educated society, numbers had a profound impact on debates over the nature of Russia’s rural (particularly peasant) economy. Numbers provided a cloak of objectivity for polemics motivated by different visions of the empire’s present and future. In trying to express rural life in numbers, bodies charged with collecting statistical data at various administrative levels had to contend with the fact that numbers are not naturally occurring objects. In measuring, observers convert various phenomena into “stable, mobile and combinable elements” of knowledge that can be used to assess, conceptualize and control. During this process of constructing numerical representations the agendas and biases of the measurer emerge in the choice of method, the creation of categories, and the presentation of data. The tendentiousness of numbers originates in the very process of measurement. Thus, measuring can itself be an inherently political act and controlling the measurement process--the process of constructing numerical representations--becomes a question of power. These are the politics of numbers

Review: \u27States of Obligation: Taxes and Citizenship in The Russian Empire and Early Soviet Republic\u27

Many have portrayed death and taxes as life’s only certainties. Yanni Kotsonis’ book masterfully disrupts many of our certainties about Russian history by examining taxation as a nexus of key categories (state, economy, and people), and the role taxation played in the mutually constitutive processes whereby the modern state, the modern economy, and the modern population came into existence. In Russia, perhaps even more than in other states, ‘new kinds of taxes helped define [create] these categories, introduced a fundamental duality to each of them, and put each in tension with the others’ (8). The modern imperial state thrived on these dualities (particularly those involving personhood) and the new Bolshevik regime attempted to eliminate them once and for all (thereby acting as a truly new regime built upon the foundation prepared by the fiscal practices of the old)

Review : \u27Rural Unrest during the First Russian Revolution: Kursk Province\u27

The provincial, particularly the rural and agrarian, aspects of Russian history have received renewed attention of late. In many ways, the book under review fits well with two other recent publications by Catherine Evtuhov and Tracy Dennison (Tracy Dennison, The Institutional Framework of Russian Serfdom [Cambridge, 2011]; Catherine Evtuhov, Portrait of a Province: Economy, Society and Civilization in Nizhnii Novgorod [Pittsburgh, 2011]), contributing greatly to our understanding of provincial life and peasant economy in imperial Russia. Miller’s thorough study puts Kursk province under a microscope in search of an explanation of the socio-economic causal factors that contributed to violent peasant rebellions in Kursk province during the course of the 1905 Revolution. Making use of a wide variety of provincial and central archival sources, as well as the statistical studies published by the provinces zemstvo, Miller teases out an explanation of why some villages erupted in violence throughout 1905 and 1906, and why others, despite their poorer economic position, did not (indeed, as he points out, some of the villages that rebelled were by no means the most economically disadvantaged in the province). Villages that resorted to violence in 1905-6 tended to be the province’s ‘big villages’, to contain more younger households integrated with, and dependent upon, off-farm employment and—most importantly—villages in which the pre-Emancipation servile ‘norms of reciprocity—rooted in the past—in the interaction between lord and peasant, their personal “face to face” component, and the predictability in the concrete benefits that they ensured for both parties’ (45, original emphasis) had been destroyed. In this, Miller’s analysis of Kursk province confirms the hypotheses on the origins of rural unrest first articulated by James Scott in 1976 (James C. Scott, The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia [New Haven, 1976]). In this case, Miller shows that the dissolution of the mutual ties of economic integration linking the economic fates of peasant and pomeshchik alike (particularly in regard the large latifundia of Kursk province where absentee lords shifted management of their estates to regimes of more market oriented techniques, e.g., requiring cash rents for plowland and access to other resources, renting to non-locals, shifting production to cash crops, etc.) were a major determining factor in whether or not a village resorted to violence or remained calm. It was these villages, where modernity had raised the consciousness of peasants via education and heavy reliance on outside labor markets, and at the same time increased the risk associated with peasant agrarian life by destroying mutual economic ties, that violence aimed at the property and person of pomeshchiki and local officials viewed as their supporters (land captains, police officers) was most heated and sustained during 1905-1906

Census as a Techology of Empire

A census is an example of the social construction of knowledge and the politics of measurement. Measuring people assumes a political significance because it entails converting heterogeneous populations into numbers—stable pieces of knowledge that can be easily combined and manipulated. In constructing such numerical representations, census officials claim to be creating an objective portrait of the population. Censuses, however, also contribute to something less tangible by playing a key role in the creation of what Benedict Anderson has termed an “imagined community.” General censuses provide states with a unique opportunity to unify space and populations with a single instrument. Furthermore, in their quest to secure a statistical portrait of what their polity “is” census officials shape the resultant outcome on the basis of categories derived from their own conceptions of what their polity has been. Measurers’ agendas and biases become objectified in the construction of the census form, the creation of census categories, and the publication of census data. The census-taking component of the imagining process is itself divided between central census administrators (those who create census forms, rules for their completion, etc.) and census workers in the field—local census authorities and enumerators whose own conceptions of what is being counted intrude into the interpretation of rules and the enumeration of people. Ultimately, the numbers derived from the census process are used to reify or alter prior images of the polity and to evaluate, conceptualize and control

Recent Trends in Historical and Literary Study of the Qur'ân

Tren Baru Studi Sejarah dan Sastra Terhadap al-Qur'an. Dua buah karya yang dipublikasikan ilmuan Inggris dan Amerika pada tahun 1971, Hagarism oleh Patricia Crone dan Michael Cook, dan Quranic studies: sources and methods of scriptural interpretation oleh John Wansbrough merevolusi studi baik sastra dan sejarah al-Qur'an maupun masa awal Islam. Tidak satupun dari kedua karya ini mendapatkan pengakuan signifikan dari kalangan ilmuan Islam dan menuai protes keras baik dari ilmuan Barat maupun Muslim. Tanpa memfokuskan pada kedua karya tersebut, artikel ini mengeksplorasi keilmuan Barat terkini dalam kebangkitan dan upaya mereka menakar hubungan antara pendekatan sejarah dengan sastra terhadap al-Qur'an secara tegas menekankan kedua pendekatan ini bukan menjadi ancaman bagi Islam. Pada akhirnya ada potensi signifikan untuk menciptakan pembicaraan kreatif antara Muslim dan non-Muslim tentang karakter dan pesan al-Qur'an yang menyertai munculnya karya-karya oleh berbagai ilmuan yang menulis dalam bahasa- bahasa Barat dalam kurun waktu 30 tahun terakhir