An Archaeology of Socialism by Victor s> Buchli (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 56I has undergone, it is a helpfuladdition to the literature.Why that change was such that termslikeautocracyare re-emergingvis-ai-visthe Putinregime is less adequatelyilluminated. Department of Politics J. BIRCH University ofSheffield Buchli, Victor. AnArchaeology ofSocialism. Berg, Oxford and New York, I999. Xii + 228 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. CI4.99. THISbook is a much-needed microcosmic study of Soviet socialism. Its focus is the Narkomfin House in Moscow, designed by Moisei Ginzburg as a habitable monument to life-transformingmodernist aspirationsand built in I928-30. Victor Buchli traces the historyof the House and its residentsfrom the 1930s as faras the late I98os and even, briefly,into the post-Sovietperiod. In the process, he draws on various material: archives, periodicals, other publishedsources,and his own interviews(conductedin Iggo-92). Alongside the microhistoricalnarrativehe gives a cogent account of Soviet ideologies of architecture and design that tends to support the standard periodization: modernist 'bytreform' in the 1920S followed by the emergence of 'petitbourgeois 'values in the 1930s; these were then challenged in the Khrushchev period by a revamped modernism,which was in turncounteractedby a more robust spirit of domesticity in the later Soviet period. Although this general outline is quite familiar, Buchli's account is new and valuable in two main ways. First, it does not present Soviet culture as a static given, but shows it changing over an extended period; it is particularly welcome to see the Khrushchevyears given more than cursorytreatment(althoughthe coverage of the post-war Stalin era is rather thin). Second, the book sets prevailing cultural orthodoxies alongside the everyday practices of successive periods and suggestshow the formerwere reflectedin and enacted by the latter.In the course of his investigations,Buchli makes many strikingobservations. Some of them arepoints of ethnographicdetail (forexample, the use of furniture,or the 'segmentation' of domestic space by means of partitions and curtains). Others are reflections on social change as manifested at the everyday level (notably,the effect of the Terroron the composition and ethos of the House). Still others are more general points of interpretation: the argument, for example, that the onset of Stalinist culture marked a shift from a narrowly prescriptive'denotative'ideology of everydaylife to a looser 'contextual'one (thus, according to Buchli's convincing argument, the 1930S were characterized by 'fuzziness' that required people to act out cultural 'performances' without offering them any guarantees that these performances would be judged satisfactory). But, despite these qualities, the book does not do full justice to Buchli's timely and imaginative project. The text would have benefited greatly from more rigorous editing: misprints and other small errors are distractingly frequent, and the writing could have been tightened up in many places. Strangely for an anthropologist,Buchli does not reflect much on his sources and methods;it would have been fascinatingto know more about his archival 562 SEER, 79, 3, 200 I work and (especially) his fieldwork and interviews. (The author is done no favoursby Berg'sstyle of in-text referencing,which can make elaborationsof thiskind extremelycumbersome.)A more extended and explicit discussionof sourceswould not only have satisfiedthe curiosityof specialists;it would have given the analysis greater force and clarity. Without such clarity, historical anthropologyis apt to seem a problematicenterprise.At times -especially in the section on the I920S (whereBuchli cannot draw on oral history) there is a suspicion that normative materials are made to do too much work. The account of Soviet material culture could have been interestingly'thickened' by using other sources such as newspapers,literaryworksand memoirs, and the significance of the author's case study would have been sharpened by a contextualizingaccount of other Soviet everydayenvironments. Room could have been found for all this extra material if Buchli had shortened his introduction and conclusion. These sections of the book are heavilytheoretical,but do not add much to the force of the book'sarguments; in some ways, in fact, they seem to missthe point of the main text. The central theoretical tenet is that static structuralism needs to be replaced by 'a sensibilitythat embraces radicaldiscontinuity, "undecidability"and conflict' (p. 5). What this seems to mean is that materialcultureshould be interpreted not as a social code to be crackedonce and for all, but...