Bruce Grant Research Articles

Observing Evolution: Peppered Moths and the Discovery of Parallel Melanism

Observing Evolution: Peppered Moths and the Discovery of Parallel Melanism

Golubev , Aleksey The Things of Life: Materiality in Late Soviet Russia (review)

REVIEWS 589 if diminished in range after the sizeable exodus of Russians and Armenians following independence, remains today a dazzling mix of populations, while rural areas are dominated by ever-more conservative leaders, anxious to please the political centre so as to ensure their continued access to power. What underscores many of these struggles, in turn, are longstanding languages of host and guest that have long underwritten narratives and practices of belonging and estrangement across the Caucasus. How one ends up a guest in the place of one’s birth, on the land where one’s ancestors have lived for generations, is the story being told. If the aphorism holds that the difference between a language and a dialect is that a language commands an army and a navy, Goff presents the full armature by which ‘titular’ keep the ‘non-titular’ at bay, everywhere asserting hierarchy, while also trying hard to not have it show. New York University Bruce Grant Golubev, Aleksey. The Things of Life: Materiality in Late Soviet Russia. Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY and London, 2020. xviii + 220 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Selected bibliography. Index. $39.95; $19.99 (e-book). Turning discourse on its head, this book explores how the material world of the late Soviet period affected individual choices, identities and imaginations. In focusing on the mundane details of the ‘fabric of Soviet everyday life’ (p. 2) Alexey Golubev argues that the interaction among things, spaces and bodies exercised a social agency that cannot be understood by looking only at ideology, structures, or even language. In particular, he directs his analysis toward ways in which objects and the material world helped Soviet people make sense of historical time and their place within society. How does the historian choose the particular objects through which to examine the entangled relationship between things, space, bodies and minds? Golubev assembles a bricolage of examples from late Soviet material culture and examines them with the aid of critical theory. His sources include a rich array of periodicals, especially from the scientific-technical sector, official reports, interviews, films and novels. A concise introduction paints the theoretical and conceptual landscape, and each chapter looks at different collections of things and practices. The initial chapter links the ‘techno-utopian’ (p. 19) visions of early Soviet intellectuals with their manifestations in late Soviet society, examining the relationship between the productivist language of machines and ‘technologies of the self’ (p. 21). The latter includes an analysis of Soviet technical do-ityourself magazines, which encouraged young men to imagine the taming of SEER, 99, 3, JULY 2021 590 space through schemes for home-built cars, boats and planes. Productivist discourse continues in the second chapter, here applied to the popularity (especially for boys) of constructing miniature replicas of historic objects such as naval boats and military planes. Things meet time through collections of these objects, which constructed a historical continuum of military success and Soviet progress. Golubev next looks at the role played by wood, first for architectural preservationists and second for the reproduction of the wooden boats of ancient Karelia. In both examples, advocates of these pastimes link the past and present through the materiality of wood — indigenous, organic and authentic. The second half of the book moves from temporal to spatial considerations of the relationship between selves and things. A chapter explores the apartment building stairwell as the producer of marginal selves, suggesting that historians ofSoviethousinghavedeliberatelyexcisedthestairwellfromtheirviewbecause it resisted control and instead represented all that was unruly and uncivilized: illicit sex, drinking and vandalism. The evidence from marginal selves here is suggestive more than definitive: the argument relies on tangential discussions of juvenile deviance, which official and intelligentsia sources decry but which for Golubev constitutes alternate practices of selfhood. Iron and steel — wellknown as symbols of Soviet prometheanism — are explored in a rich chapter on the place of steel both in distinct orthopedic therapies and in the informal practices of basement body building gyms. Unlike the stairwell gangs, young labouring men who pump iron do not see themselves as marginalized subjects but engage in this body work in order to prepare to be soldiers or to beat up hippies. Rejecting Western models, the late Soviet masculine...

Channeling the State: Community Media and Popular Politics in Venezuela by Naomi Schiller

Reviewed by: Channeling the State: Community Media and Popular Politics in Venezuela by Naomi Schiller John W. Sherman Schiller, Naomi. Channeling the State: Community Media and Popular Politics in Venezuela. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018. The early historiography on the 1998–2013 Chavista project in Venezuela has been broadly positive, a trend reflected in anthropologist Naomi Schiller’s microstudy of media and the state. The basis of the book is the author’s dissertation research under Bruce Grant at New York University, which included extensive fieldwork. A first stint in Venezuela saw the author observing telenovela-watching women in a small rural town, who cared little about the emerging government of Hugo Chávez; subsequent years were spent with the cadre of Catia TVe, a community television station located in a Caracas barrio that became politically wed to the Chavista project, partly through its interaction with ViVe TV, a much larger, state-funded outlet. [End Page 245] The intellectual recipe for Schiller’s study is the familiar mainstream engaged by so many graduate students in contemporary anthropological and historical studies: large portions of James Scott and state formation theory, a smaller dose of Lila Abu-Lughod and media theory, a sprinkling of Gramsci, and a leavening of optimism about the human condition and prospects for a better world. But within this concoction Schiller’s work is wholly microfocused on the thirty staff and roughly one hundred volunteers at the Catia TVe community center. Organizationally, she walks us through the formation of Catia TVe, which predated Chávez, and the station’s pro-Chávez engagement of the 2006 election. She analyzes class dynamics—Catia TVe staff mostly from the urban working class, their Chavista interlocutors mainly middle class. She addresses gender, finding persistent barriers, despite many positive gains. Theoretically, Schiller primarily wrestles with the meaning and potential for change by way of the state, which is itself constantly morphing and resetting possibilities or imposing new limitations, as in the matter of press freedom, with Chávez’s controversial shutting down of a major commercial outlet in 2007. This book is in the mainstream of current anthropological studies and will undoubtedly be appreciated by many. This reviewer—not so mainstream—finds it far too microfocused, and ill-equipped to answer the deeper and far more pressing macroquestions relating to the obvious failure of Chavismo. In a circa 2015 redux, the author does briefly address this failure, tossing up the old mono-export complaint of bygone dependency theory. If macroeconomics can obliterate all the efforts from below to create a better world, then what is the point of studying those grassroots efforts? If positive change does not last, why is it significant? When academics make the decision to interact only with activists, they prejudice their conclusions in ways that cannot explain other critical sociopolitical phenomena. One such glaring gap is the persistent recovery and reinvention of the Latin American political Right. Where do the Álvaro Uribes and Jair Bolsonaros come from? Venezuela will almost certainly see the ascent of a neoliberal rightist regime soon—how shall we explain it? Personally, I wish that Schiller had stayed with the telenovela-watching women in the small farm town. [End Page 246] John W. Sherman Wright State University Copyright © 2021 Association of Global South Studies, Inc

What I Know About Globalization

Bruce Grant welcomes Choi Chatterjee's "Manifesto" for the values it prioritizes, whether environmentalism or the celebration of human diversity. At the same time, he doubts that the concept of transnationalism suits the proclaimed task of conveying human experiences beyond the traditional constraints of territorial, political, and ethnocultural groupness. He does not find that the centripetal forces of globalization necessarily oppose the centrifugal forces of group-boundedness (an assumption central to Chatterjee's argument). Grant also doubts that a renewed embrace of class consciousness can be productive in the twenty-first century, or that prioritizing the morality, authenticity, and survival of humanity is sufficient to overcome the solipsism of group egoism and the risk of human extinction. Finally, Grant questions the viability of the project of "cosmopolitanism from below," given that cosmopolitanism is an exclusively elite and deeply normative phenomenon. He suggests other ways to overcome the restraints of nation-centered writing, such as recognizing pluralism and hybridity and rejecting the model of the sovereign individual in favor of "the dividual," a person who can be constituted only through multiple and competing belongings, allegiances, and interests. He has tried this approach in his own work, first attempting to understand Soviet-era Pacific-rim indigenous peoples as East Asian, and later in studying the region of the Caucasus.

Bruce Grant. The Captive and the Gift: Cultural Histories of Sovereignty in Russia and the Caucasus. Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 2009. xxi, 188 pp. $65.00 (cloth); $21.95 (paper).

Bruce Grant. The Captive and the Gift: Cultural Histories of Sovereignty in Russia and the Caucasus. Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 2009. xxi, 188 pp. $65.00 (cloth); $21.95 (paper).

The Patriotism of Despair: Nation, War, and Loss in Russia. By Serguei Alex. Oushakine. Culture and Society after Socialism. Edited by, Bruce Grant and Nancy Ries. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009. Pp. xii+299. $75.00 (cloth); $24.95 (paper).

<i>The Patriotism of Despair: Nation, War, and Loss in Russia.</i> By Serguei Alex. Oushakine. Culture and Society after Socialism. Edited by, Bruce Grant and Nancy Ries. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009. Pp. xii+299. $75.00 (cloth); $24.95 (paper).

Мы все евразийские

This is a Russian-language version of the presidential address delivered by Bruce Grant, the president of ASEEES (Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies), before the members of the association at the forty-third annual ASEEES convention that took place in Washington, DC, on November 17–20, 2011. Grant suggests his interpretation of the meaning of being “Eurasian.” This interpretation is based on critical observations of recent developments in our field as well as on Grant’s personal experience as a researcher of regions and cultures different from his own. He is less concerned with which countries are included in any given concept of “Eurasia” than with what the promise of these continually shifting alignments offers us as scholars looking for better ways to understand the past, the present, and the future. Grant suggests that the idea of Eurasia, at its core, enables us to move past the same kind of stock-in-trade assumptions about metropoles and hinterlands that have long bedeviled studies of Europe and its colonies. The “Eurasian” approach, in Grant’s interpretation, makes the lesser-known peoples and regions of the world area we study not peripheral to our own ranges of vision, or even to the metropoles that have historically governed them. They are approached as central, unto themselves. Being Eurasian, in this context, is nothing more than a reminder of how difficult it is to keep one’s eyes and ears open to the multiple flows of sense, sensibility, context, and experience that constitute the worlds we seek to better understand. The acceptance of such “Eurasianism” inserts an existential moment into the ASEEES collective project, Grant concludes, a recognition of the impossibility, or perhaps better put, the quixotic project of living in someone else’s shoes, no matter what part of the world we are from, of occupying other times, other spaces, other knowledges, and other lives.

The Captive and the Gift: Cultural Histories of Sovereignty in Russia and the Caucasus by Bruce Grant

The Captive and the Gift: Cultural Histories of Sovereignty in Russia and the Caucasus by Bruce Grant

Bruce Grant, The Captive and the Gift: Cultural Histories of Sovereignty in Russia and the Caucasus. Culture and Society after Socialism series. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009.

Bruce Grant, The Captive and the Gift: Cultural Histories of Sovereignty in Russia and the Caucasus. Culture and Society after Socialism series. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009.

Дар Империи: Взгляд с Гор

SUMMARY: The review article by Vladimir Bobrovnikov is devoted to the discussion of two books: The Captive and the Gift by Bruce Grant and A Look at the Mountaineers, the View from the Mountains by Yuri Karpov. Bobrovnikov situates these two books in the larger historiographical context of studies of the Caucasus, which is dominated by the reductionist perspective of looking at the Caucasus through the prism of empire and conquest and by narrow-minded ethnographic studies. The two books differ from this context by their attempt to understand the region by looking at the interaction between the local population and empire and by their criticism of simplistic orientalist paradigms. Bobrovnikov praises Grant for the breadth of material covered, innovative interpretation of empire as a sovereignty of gift, and the potential of the latter concept to go beyond the conventional view on the history of the Caucasus from the viewpoint of postcolonial studies. He acknowledges the viability of looking at empire in terms of cultural memory, which lies at the center of Grant’s approach. Bobrovnikov criticizes Grant for failure to take into account the historicity of imperial power and local societies associated with the historical dynamics of expansion, conquest, accommodation, and incorporation of the region in the Russian Empire. Karpov’s book is devoted to the analysis of micro-history of mountainous societies based on Jamaat/Jamia in the period of the eighteenth through the nineteenth centuries. Bobrovnikov praises Karpov for “thick description” of social and cultural realities of mountainous societies in Dagestan and for taking into account the factors of social change in the borderland that led to the disintegration of Jamaat/Jamia. Finally, Bobrovnikov contends that historical parallels with present-day realities in Karpov’s book appear unconvincing. Bobrovnikov criticizes Karpov for elements of an essentialist approach in his treatment of Jamaat/Jamia and for underestimating the role of Islam in resistance and accommodation in the North Caucasus. Bobrovnikov’s conclusion is that the two books may be looked at as complementary to each other, although the authors differ in their approach.

BRUCE GRANT and LALE YALCIN-HECKMANN, editors. Caucasus Paradigms: Anthropologies, Histories and the Making of a World Area. (Halle Studies in the Anthropology of Eurasia, number 13.) Munster: Lit Verlag. 2007. Pp. xii, 314. 29.90

Journal Article Bruce Grant and Lale Yalçin-Heckmann, editors. Caucasus Paradigms: Anthropologies, Histories and the Making of a World Area. (Halle Studies in the Anthropology of Eurasia, number 13.) Münster: Lit Verlag. 2007. Pp. xii, 314. €29.90 Get access Bruce Grant and Lale YalçIn-Heckmann, editors. Caucasus Paradigms: Anthropologies, Histories and the Making of a World Area. (Halle Studies in the Anthropology of Eurasia, number 13.)Münster: Lit Verlag. 2007. Pp. xii, 314. €29.90. The American Historical Review, Volume 113, Issue 3, June 2008, Page 951, https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr.113.3.951-a Published: 01 June 2008

Empire of Nations: Ethnographic Knowledge and the Making of the Soviet Union . By Francine Hirsch. Culture and Society after Socialism. Edited by Bruce Grant and Nancy Ries. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005. Pp. xx+369. $59.95 (cloth); $27.95 (paper).

<i>Empire of Nations: Ethnographic Knowledge and the Making of the Soviet Union</i> . By Francine Hirsch. Culture and Society after Socialism. Edited by Bruce Grant and Nancy Ries. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005. Pp. xx+369. $59.95 (cloth); $27.95 (paper).

A Kingpin of Academic Inclusive Fitness: The History and Contributions of Bruce Grant

ONE of the most difficult decisions facing postdocs on the academic job market is where they should apply for jobs. They seek the advice of their supervisors, but their supervisors' world view is colored by their own decisions and experiences. Because most postdocs are at research universities, their supervisors typically overtly or subtly encourage them to apply to similar schools. The implication is that, for scientists to have an impact on their discipline, they must be able to recruit top Ph.D. students and postdocs, which cannot be done as effectively at smaller institutions such as liberal arts colleges. Accepting a job at a smaller institution is often called the “kiss of death” because new faculty members supposedly will be overwhelmed with teaching responsibilities, their research record will suffer, and a later move to a research university will be far more difficult.

Jerry Coyne.

Jerry Coyne.

An Average Azeri Village (1930): Remembering Rebellion in the Caucasus Mountains

In this article, Bruce Grant advocates an anthropological perspective for understanding resistance to early Soviet rule, given that not all anti-Soviet rebellions operated by the same cultural logic. Combining oral histories and archival evidence to reconstruct highly charged events in rural northwest Azerbaijan, where as many as 10,000 men and women joined to overthrow Soviet power in favor of an Islamic republic in 1930, Grant examines moral archetypes of banditry, religious frames of Caucasus life, magical mobility, and images of early nationalist struggle against communism. Exploring what it means to have been “average” in the Soviet Union of the 1930s, Grant invites readers to consider classic narrative framings of periods of great tumult.

The Challenge of Environmental Justice

Frontiers in Ecology and the EnvironmentVolume 1, Issue 3 p. 154-155 Forum The challenge of environmental justice George Middendorf, George Middendorf Howard University, Washington DC, USASearch for more papers by this authorBruce Grant, Bruce Grant Widener University, Chester, PA, USASearch for more papers by this author George Middendorf, George Middendorf Howard University, Washington DC, USASearch for more papers by this authorBruce Grant, Bruce Grant Widener University, Chester, PA, USASearch for more papers by this author First published: 01 April 2003 https://doi.org/10.1890/1540-9295(2003)001[0154:TCOEJ]2.0.CO;2Citations: 2Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat Citing Literature Volume1, Issue3April 2003Pages 154-155 RelatedInformation

The unmaking of Soviet life: everyday economies after socialism

In order to understand today's Russia and former Soviet republics, it is vital to consider their socialist past. Caroline Humphrey, one of anthropology's most highly regarded thinkers on a number of topics including consumption, identity, and ritual, is the ideal guide to the intricacies of post-Soviet culture. The Unmaking of Soviet Life brings together ten of Humphrey's best essays, which cover, geographically, Central Russia, Siberia, and Mongolia; and thematically, the politics of locality, property, and persons.Bridging the strongest of Humphrey's work from 1991 to 2001, the essays do a great deal to demystify the sensational topics of mafia, barter, bribery, and the new shamanism by locating them in the lived experiences of a wide range of subjects. The Unmaking of Soviet Life includes a foreword and introductory paragraphs by Bruce Grant and Nancy Ries that precede each essay.

Bruce Grant, In the Soviet House of Culture. A Century of Perestroikas | Lev Iakovlevich Shternberg,

Bruce Grant, In the Soviet House of Culture. A Century of Perestroikas | Lev Iakovlevich Shternberg,

The Shaping of Soviet Workers' Leisure: Workers' Clubs and Palaces of Culture in the 1930s

In his recent ethnographic history of the Nivkhi of Sakhalin Island, Bruce Grant employs the “Soviet House of Culture” as a metaphor of cultural construction and the “hybrid identities produced by the Soviet state.”Bruce Grant, In the Soviet House of Culture (Princeton, 1995), xi. Yuri Slezkine's rendition of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) as a communal apartment (kommunalka), where each national group had its own room but shared the kitchen, bathroom, and corridors, serves a similar metaphorical purpose, enabling the reader to envision the complexities of superstate–nationality interaction in more familiar spatial terms.Yuri Slezkine, “The USSR as a Communal Apartment, or How a Socialist State Promoted Ethnic Particularism,” Slavic Review 53 (1994):414–52. For the USSR as a “superstate,” see Moshe Lewin, Russia/USSR/Russia: The Drive and Drift of a Superstate (New York, 1995). Both the communal apartment and the house, or palace, of culture were venerable Soviet institutions. Each was the product of the reimagining of sociability in the wake of the October Revolution, representing different types of imagined communities that only subsequently assumed material reality. The communal apartment has been the subject of novels (both utopian and dystopian), film, song, painting, economic and cultural history, and several (absurdist) exhibits.For the treatment of the communal apartment as “the cornerstone of the now disappearing Soviet civilization,” see Svetlana Boym, Common Places: Mythologies of Everyday Life in Russia (Cambridge, MA, 1994), 121–67, quotation on 123. See also Richard Stites, Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution (Oxford, 1989), 200–4, 213–19; and Albrecht Martiny, Bauen und Wohnen in der Sowjetunion nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg (Berlin, 1983), 20–24, 138–58. The avant-gardist artist Ilya Kabakov has made the kommunalka the subject of paintings and exhibits. See Blair A. Ruble, “From Khrushcheby to Korobki,” in Russian Housing in the Modern Age: Design and Social History, ed. William Craft Brumfield and Blair A. Ruble (Cambridge, UK, 1993), 232–33; and Dina Vierny et al., Fondation Dina Vierny-Musee Maillol (Paris, 1995), 128–29. By contrast, little attention has been given to palaces of culture or to the less grandiloquently titled workers' clubs.Western scholarship on workers' clubs and palaces of culture has been limited to the formative decade of Soviet power and the post-Stalin decades. In addition to articles by John Hatch cited below, see Gabriele Gorzka, “Proletarian Culture in Practice: Workers' Clubs, 1917–1921,” in Essays on Revolutionary Culture and Stalinism, ed. John W. Strong (Columbus, OH, 1990), 29–55; and Anne White, De-Stalinization and the House of Culture: Declining State Control over Leisure in the USSR, Poland and Hungary, 1953–89 (London, 1990).

Indonesia. By Bruce Grant. Third edition. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press. Distributed by Paul and Company, 1996. xii, 248 pp. $24.95 (paper).

Indonesia. By Bruce Grant. Third edition. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press. Distributed by Paul and Company, 1996. xii, 248 pp. $24.95 (paper).