{"title":"Julia Obertreis. Imperial Desert Dreams: Cotton Growing and Irrigation in Central Asia, 1860– 1991. Göttingen, Germany: V&R Unipress, 2017","authors":"A. Sokolova","doi":"10.25285/2078-1938-2020-12-3-235-238","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.25285/2078-1938-2020-12-3-235-238","url":null,"abstract":"Книга «Имперские мечты о пустыне» Юлии Обертрайс, профессора Новой и Новейшей истории Восточной Европы в Университете имени Фридриха – Александра (Эрланген-Нюрнберг, Германия) – итог многолетнего изучения истории хлопководства и ирригации в Центральной Азии. Через историю Обертрайс анализирует процесс проникновения и развития европейской модерности в регионе со второй половины XIX века и до 1990-х годов. Говоря о проникновении модерности, автор рассматривает этот процесс как смену парадигм, которая происходит при включении Средней Азии в орбиту Российской империи, а не о модернизации существующего порядка. Автор отмечает, что именно цивилизаторская миссия, которая заключалась в создании нового «модерного» общества на месте традиционного патриархального, была основой проекта освоения Средней Азии как при царском, так и при советском режиме. Это позволяет говорить о преемственности властных дискурсов и практик от дореволюционного периода к советскому и постсоветскому.\u0000Текст на русском языке\u0000DOI: 10.25285/2078-1938-2020-12-3-235-238","PeriodicalId":42805,"journal":{"name":"Laboratorium-Russian Review of Social Research","volume":"19 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2020-12-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"74734902","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Infrastructure of Distrust and Soviet Oncology in the 1940s–1960s","authors":"S. Mokhov","doi":"10.25285/2078-1938-2020-12-3-126-149","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.25285/2078-1938-2020-12-3-126-149","url":null,"abstract":"Alternative cancer treatments have been popular in many countries around the world regardless of their level of social and economic development. This was also the case for Soviet oncology: Soviet patients often turned to alternative methods of cancer treatment instead of official medicine. Scholars have suggested that this was because oncology was a new field of medicine. In its early years (1930s–1950s) oncology had in its arsenal many mutually exclusive theories about the nature of malignant tumors and low effectiveness of treatment. A consequence of this was mistrust among patients and their interest in alternative medicine. Is this explanation suitable for the Soviet case? Are there any peculiarities in the Soviet case that point to uniqueness of the formation of the Soviet oncological system? To address these questions, I analyzed archival documents (diaries and memoires) and data from secondary sources, including available statistics and specialized medical and nonfiction literature on cancer treatments. As the primary theoretical framework I used the sociology of knowledge and the sociology of mistrust. I argue that the Soviet oncological system was founded on the following principles: (1) mass diagnostics; (2) active health education, which convinced people of the curability and effectiveness of medical treatments; and (3) concealment of the diagnosis from patients. To implement these principles, Soviet authorities created a unique infrastructure: dispensaries, health education centers, teaching aids, and popular science literature. However, despite the declared successes, Soviet oncology had low effectiveness and high mortality rates. It worked like this: a low degree of curability as a result of hiding the diagnosis, in the context of widespread education and attempts to recruit people into the diagnostic system. The result was a steady mistrust among patients. The key concept for understanding the peculiarities of the Soviet cancer system is infrastructure. Soviet oncological infrastructure consisted of several elements: diagnostic infrastructure, education infrastructure, and concealment and exposure infrastructure. These elements, working together, form infrastructure of distrust. The material substrate of the Soviet cancer system, its infrastructure, itself is the basis for the production of mistrust, making any attempts to change the system impossible.\u0000Article in Russian\u0000DOI: 10.25285/2078-1938-2020-12-3-126-149","PeriodicalId":42805,"journal":{"name":"Laboratorium-Russian Review of Social Research","volume":"42 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2020-12-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"76417405","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Self-Censorship among Journalists in Tatarstan and in Crimea, a Comparative Analysis: Pierre Bourdieu and New Censorship Theory","authors":"Olga Zeveleva","doi":"10.25285/2078-1938-2020-12-3-150-177","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.25285/2078-1938-2020-12-3-150-177","url":null,"abstract":"This article offers a preliminary analysis of a comparative study of journalistic fields in contemporary Tatarstan and Crimea. This analysis allows us to see how the boundaries of what can be said are established in two different regions of Russia that differ by degree of autonomy from their de facto federal center and by degree of regional involvement in geopolitical conflicts. The article investigates how the state sanctions certain media outlets and journalists and how these sanctions can differ by region and bring about varying adaptation strategies among journalists who are affected. The primary focus of the article is on adaptation strategies in the form of self-censorship. Drawing on 70 qualitative interviews conducted in Tatarstan and Crimea (after Russia’s annexation of the peninsula), the article shows that in the journalistic fields of more autonomous regions that are not involved in conflict journalists value social capital more than other forms of capital. This means that personal connections among people are important for a journalist to become successful, and in these cases journalists are prone to drawing a distinct line between their “private transcripts” and “public transcripts,” to use the words of James C. Scott. In regions that are relatively less autonomous and are embroiled in conflict, symbolic capital, or the capital of esteem and legitimacy of those on the top of the power hierarchy, plays a relatively more important role. In this situation journalists employ a strategy of “mobilizational self-censorship” in their journalistic work, but due to the smaller role of social capital they do not self-censor outside of the workplace.\u0000Article in Russian\u0000DOI: 10.25285/2078-1938-2020-12-3-150-177","PeriodicalId":42805,"journal":{"name":"Laboratorium-Russian Review of Social Research","volume":"56 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2020-12-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87065129","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Zhanna Kormina. Palomniki: Etnograficheskie ocherki pravoslavnogo nomadizma. Moscow: VShE, 2019","authors":"A. Agadjanian","doi":"10.25285/2078-1938-2020-12-3-207-211","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.25285/2078-1938-2020-12-3-207-211","url":null,"abstract":"Жанна Кормина, один из немногих в России серьезных антропологов религии, неслучайно называет свою работу «очерками»: книга именно такова сразу в нескольких смыслах. Во-первых, речь идет не об одном исследовании, а о серии разных сюжетов, описанных на основе богатого полевого и отчасти архивного опыта, накопленного за пару десятков лет в разных частях России (в основном Санкт-Петербург и Ленинградская область, Псковские и Новгородские земли, Екатеринбург и окрестности). Во-вторых, текст книги полон отсылок к разным теориям и концепциям современной антропологии, и в этом смысле перед нами довольно насыщенные обзоры современной антропологии религии (особенно христианства), причем отсылки к разным ключевым работам в них весьма уместны, все они гармонично вплетены в собственный материал автора. В-третьих, книга как бы расслаивается на три пласта, которые соединены друг с другом иногда до нерасторжимости: описание и анализ фактического материала; выявление эмоций и ожиданий появляющихся на страницах разных людей; постоянная исследовательская саморефлексия – проговаривание собственных ожиданий, сомнений, ощущений – своего рода череды этнографических приключений. Кормина – и исследователь, и рассказчик, и собеседник; ее герои так же, как и она сама, свободно перемещаются между разными регистрами текста, оказываясь то хорошими знакомыми, то персонажами рассказа, то информантам.\u0000Текст на русском языке\u0000DOI: 10.25285/2078-1938-2020-12-3-207-211","PeriodicalId":42805,"journal":{"name":"Laboratorium-Russian Review of Social Research","volume":"46 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2020-12-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84955999","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Digitalization of Intimacy: Search for Optics for Digital Parenting","authors":"E. Laktyukhina","doi":"10.25285/2078-1938-2020-12-3-178-195","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.25285/2078-1938-2020-12-3-178-195","url":null,"abstract":"This review article provides a theoretical analysis of the development of digital parenting research. Scholarship in digital parenting may be divided into two corpora of texts: those dealing with the problem of child safety in the digital space and with the problem of ensuring child safety with digital surveillance in everyday life. Analyzing modern concepts of digital parenthood, I mostly focus on the second problem. The essay analyzes the issues of theoretical sources and continuity in the conceptualization of the phenomenon of digital parenting. Proceeding from the thesis that the new sociology of childhood, which is the main engine for the development of parenting research, is methodologically connected with the sociology of everyday life, I address the main concepts of the sociology of everyday life—the structuralist constructivism of Pierre Bourdieu and the frame analysis of Erving Goffman. The purpose of the review essay is to analyze Bourdieu’s and Goffman’s basic sociology concepts as methodological resources for the conceptualization of digital parenting. Turning to Bourdieusian optics, I use the following concepts: social agents, social relations, resources, social practices, and physical space. Establishing links among them allows to observe most of the problems in the field of digital parenting that have appeared in recent years. In particular, one of the most common interpretations becomes clear: digital monitoring of children by parents is defined as a manifestation of a relationship of domination, an asymmetric distribution of power resources between groups of agents—children and parents. In the theoretical framework proposed by Goffman, technological devices that parents use in relation to their children are considered as things that frame these interactions. Conceptualization in the logic of frame analysis is based on the understanding that observation is the process of constituting the daily practices of children and parents.\u0000Text in Russian\u0000DOI: 10.25285/2078-1938-2020-12-3-178-195","PeriodicalId":42805,"journal":{"name":"Laboratorium-Russian Review of Social Research","volume":"56 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2020-12-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"79731486","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Speaker’s Meaning: The Problem of Participation of People with Speech Impairments in Communicative Interaction","authors":"Dmitriy Kolyadov","doi":"10.25285/2078-1938-2020-12-3-100-125","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.25285/2078-1938-2020-12-3-100-125","url":null,"abstract":"The article considers the problem of participation in social activities of people with disabilities from a perspective of face-to-face interaction. The analysis focuses on episodes of interaction between people with speech impairments and staff members of a daycare center during regular group meetings. Communication in such cases may be difficult because of impairments that affect capacities of speech production (e.g., inability to speak, extremely limited vocabulary, problems with articulation) by disabled participants. These impairments lead to the ambiguity of some of their utterances and actions. However, as studies of “atypical interaction” demonstrate, participants can successfully overcome such obstacles relying on the context of interaction—previous sequences of utterances and actions, bodily orientation, posture, gaze direction, interactional environment, current activity, and common background knowledge. Tying current potentially ambiguous communicative act (e.g., gesture or phonetically distorted utterance) to one or another aspect of the context, fully competent speakers demonstrate their interpretation of that act by their subsequent responses. Due to such coconstruction of meaning, their partners with speech impairments get an opportunity to make contributions to the interaction, in other words, to participate in it. However, such contextualizations and interpretations may not only enhance participation but restrict it as well. The article demonstrates how staff members ascribe meaning to some of those ambiguous actions and utterances by tying them to the prior turns in the interaction. However, there is evidence that staff members’ ascriptions probably do not quite agree with communicative intentions of their partners. As analysis of the video recording of these interactions demonstrates, there are aspects of the context that may suggest different interpretations. But these aspects go unnoticed, and this probably leads the people with speech impairments to the loss of partial control of meaning of their actions and reduction of their participation.\u0000Article in Russian\u0000DOI: 10.25285/2078-1938-2020-12-3-100-125","PeriodicalId":42805,"journal":{"name":"Laboratorium-Russian Review of Social Research","volume":"38 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2020-12-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"78809727","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Golfo Alexopoulos. Illness and Inhumanity in Stalin’s Gulag. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017","authors":"M. Nakonechnyi","doi":"10.25285/2078-1938-2020-12-3-212-215","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.25285/2078-1938-2020-12-3-212-215","url":null,"abstract":"В 2017 году в издательстве Йельского университета вышла монография американской исследовательницы Гольфо Алексопулос «Illness and Inhumanity in Stalin’s Gulag». Эта публикация по праву может считаться важной вехой в историографии ГУЛАГа – гигантской системы эксплуатации принудительного труда в СССР 1930–1960 годов. Алексопулос первой за много лет вернулась к ключевым вопросам истории сталинских лагерей, а именно к уточнению числа погибших заключенных и природе институционального насилия самой лагерной системы. Работу Алексопулос невозможно адекватно оценить без учета сложного политизированного историографического контекста проблемы. До открытия архивов в 1989–1991 годах в западной литературе количество жертв в ГУЛАГе оценивалось десятками миллионов. Саму систему образно называли «Освенцимом без печей», где заключенных намеренно уничтожали трудом. Выйти на свободу живым было практически невозможно, и количество освобождений было якобы минимальным (Conquest 1990). Однако, согласно рассекреченным данным центрального аппарата ГУЛАГа, опубликованным в начале 1990-х после распада СССР, из 18 млн человек, прошедших через систему, погибло «только» 1,7 млн, 90% заключенных пережили свое заключение и освободились (Безбородов и Хрусталев 2004; Getty, Rittersporn, and Zemskov 1993). Лишь относительно недавно несколько исследователей (Бердинских 2001; Исупов 2000; Applebaum 2004; Ellman 2002; Khlevniuk 2004) обратили внимание на так называемую «актировку» (досрочное освобождение заключенных по инвалидности) как потенциально значимый фактор в анализе ведомственной статистики освобождений. Согласно мемуарам бывших заключенных, «актирование» позволяло лагерной администрации искусственно снижать коэффициенты смертности в отчетах (Левенштейн 2001). Книга Алексопулос – попытка проанализировать взаимосвязь между «актировкой», освобождением и смертностью более детально.\u0000Text in Russian\u0000DOI: 10.25285/2078-1938-2020-12-3-212-215","PeriodicalId":42805,"journal":{"name":"Laboratorium-Russian Review of Social Research","volume":"8 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2020-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84094209","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Features of an “Irrational” Sociological Interview: If the Informant Is Diagnosed with Dementia","authors":"K. Galkin","doi":"10.25285/2078-1938-2020-12-2-212-220","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.25285/2078-1938-2020-12-2-212-220","url":null,"abstract":"The essay presents an analysis of the interviews and life history of an informant diagnosed with dementia. Special attention is paid to the peculiarities of the sociologist’s work with such material, which, unlike most interviews, is “irrational,” full of semantic failures and contradictions. The usual methods of sociological analysis and interpretation are powerless in such cases, and the researcher needs a fundamentally different approach to the material in order to break through unusual reflections and time collisions and to get closer to understanding the informant. This essay is based on the material collected in the framework of the Oxford Russia Fellowship program in a rural nursing home in one of the regions of Russia and examines peculiarities of conducting andanalyzing interviews with an informant diagnosed with dementia. Furthermore, the author reflects on what the researcher ought to do to find “semantic hints”—connecting bridges between the past and present in the informant’s narrative. \u0000Text in Russian \u0000DOI: 10.25285/2078-1938-2020-12-2-212-220","PeriodicalId":42805,"journal":{"name":"Laboratorium-Russian Review of Social Research","volume":"20 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2020-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87432707","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"“I Can Only Perceive Myself as a Babushka”: Aging, Ageism, and Sexism in Contemporary Russia","authors":"","doi":"10.25285/2078-1938-2020-12-2-124-145","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.25285/2078-1938-2020-12-2-124-145","url":null,"abstract":"The dominant discourse in contemporary Russian society judges aging as a person’s defeat and defines success as the ability to hide the physical and bodily signs of one’s age. Old age is often constituted in public consciousness as the age of decline—declinein learning abilities, physical attractiveness, desires, activity, and so on. Social norms that restrict the behavior of older people should be defined as ageism. Resistance to ageism, in other words resistance to restrictive social constructs, is essential for subjective well-being of older people.\u0000 The purpose of this article is to consider aging in contemporary Russia as a complex phenomenon that consists of certain rules and practices. Is it possible to resist the negative discourse of aging associated with decline? What would aging look like if it was possible to at least partially free ourselves from negative social beliefs about age?\u0000 This research was carried out within a qualitative paradigm. The empirical material is based on 18 in-depth narrative interviews with 10 women and 8 men aged between 60 and 86. The results of the study reveal that existing norms and rules of aging in Russian society are related to the exclusion of older people from the public sphere and discrimination in the private sphere: they restrict the capacities of older people, deny their agency in determining their own goals and abilities to act in their own interest. Older people interiorize these norms and rules, and this leads to self-discrimination and perpetuation of ageism.\u0000Article in Russian\u0000DOI: 10.25285/2078-1938-2020-12-2-124-145","PeriodicalId":42805,"journal":{"name":"Laboratorium-Russian Review of Social Research","volume":"56 8","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2020-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"72474474","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Normativnost' starshego vozrasta: vystraivaya sistemu koordinat","authors":"Elena Bogdanova, Julia Zelikova","doi":"10.25285/2078-1938-2020-12-2-13-21","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.25285/2078-1938-2020-12-2-13-21","url":null,"abstract":"This thematic issue of the journal resulted from an international conference “Aging in Cross-Cultural Perspective” that took place in Saint Petersburg, Russia, on December 14–15, 2018. Organized by Maija Kononen, Professor at the University of Helsinki, and Julia Zelikova, Associate Professor at the North-West Institute of Management of the Russian Academy of National Economy and Public Administration, the conference was based on the project “Between the Normal and the Abnormal: Cultural Meanings of Dementia and Old Age in Finland and Russia,” sponsored by the Kone Foundation and carried out in 2017–2019. Conference discussions shed light on the potential of a cross-cultural approach to aging in diverse sociocultural contexts and made normativity the focal point of the issue of aging.\u0000Text in English\u0000DOI: 10.25285/2078-1938-2020-12-2-5-12","PeriodicalId":42805,"journal":{"name":"Laboratorium-Russian Review of Social Research","volume":"200 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2020-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86834463","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}