Two Lenins

Highly innovative and theoretically incisive, Two Lenins is the first book-length anthropological examination of how social reality can be organized around different yet concurrent ideas of time. Nikolai Ssorin-Chaikov grounds his theoretical exploration in fascinating ethnographic and historical material on two Lenins: the first is the famed Soviet leader of the early twentieth century, and the second is a Siberian Evenki hunter—nicknamed “Lenin”—who experienced the collapse of the USSR during the 1990s. Through their intertwined stories, Ssorin-Chaikov unveils new dimensions of ethnographic reality by multiplying our notions of time. Ssorin-Chaikov examines Vladimir Lenin at the height of his reign in 1920s Soviet Russia, focusing especially on his relationship with American businessperson Armand Hammer. He casts this scene against the second Lenin—the hunter on the far end of the country, in Siberia, at the far end of the century, the 1990s, who is tasked with improvising postsoci

The ethnographic turn - and after: a critical approach towards the realignment of art and anthropology.

The ethnographic turn has been the focus of recent debate between artists and anthropologists. Crucial to it has been an expansive notion of the ethnographic. No longer considered a specialised technique, the essays of Clifford and others have proposed a broader and more eclectic interpretation of ethnography – an approach long considered to be the exclusive preserve of academic anthropology. In this essay, we look more critically at what the ethnographic turn has meant for artists and anthropologists. To what extent does it describe a convergence of perspectives? Or does it elide significant differences in practice

Exclusion and reappropriation: Experiences of contemporary enclosure among children in three East Anglian schools

Transformations of the landscapes which children inhabit have significant impacts on their lives; yet, due to the limited economic visibility of children’s relationships with place, they have little stake in those transformations. Their experience, therefore, illustrates in an acute way the experience of contemporary enclosure as a mode of subordination. Following fieldwork in three primary schools in South Cambridgeshire, UK, we offer an ethnographic account of children’s experiences of socio-spatial exclusion. Yet, we suggest that such exclusion is by no means an end-point in children’s relationships with place. Challenging assumptions that children are disconnected from nature, we argue that through play and imaginative exploration of their environments, children find ways to rebuild relationships with places from which they find themselves excluded. This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from SAGE via http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/026377581664194

The Concept of the "Field" in Early Soviet Ethnography : A Northern Perspective

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