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Associate Professor of Anthropology
Ph.D. 1993, Rice University; B.A. 1985, McGill University.
Email:
Research Interests: The former Soviet Union, Siberia, the Caucasus; Azerbaijan; (post-) Soviet cultural politics; shamanism; Islam; cinema; histories of anthropology.
Selected Works:
[Editor] The Russia Reader: History, Culture, Politics [with Adele Barker]. Durham: Duke University Press, edp 2010.
The Captive and the Gift: Cultural Histories of Sovereignty in Russia and the Caucasus. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009.
[Editor] Caucasus Paradigms: Anthropologies, Histories, and the Making of a World Area [with Lale Yalçın-Heckmann]. Berlin: LIT, 2007.
The Good Russian Prisoner: Naturalizing Violence in the Caucasus Mountains. Cultural Anthropology 20, no. 1 (2005): 39-67.
"An Average Azeri Village" (1930). Slavic Review 63, no. 4 (2004): 705-731.
New Moscow Monuments, or, States of Innocence. American Ethnologist 28, no. 2 (2001): 332-362.
[Editor] The Social Organization of the Gilyak, by Lev Shternberg. New York and Seattle: American Museum of Natural History and the University of Washington Press, 1999.
[Editor] Neotraditionalism in the Russian North: Indigenous Peoples and the Legacy of Perestroika, by Aleksandr Pika. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1999.
In the Soviet House of Culture: A Century of Perestroikas. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995.
*Winner of the Prize for Best First Book awarded by the American Ethnological Society, 1996.
Current News / Projects
Updated July 2009 2008-2009 was a time of leave for me and I was lucky to be able to spend much of it traveling. Through the generosity of the Wenner-Gren Foundation I spent fall 2008 and summer 2009 doing field and archival research in Azerbaijan. I continue to work on the history of a small but regionally famous village in the mountains, set midway between the Caucasus capitals of Baku and Tbilisi, and a site of pilgrimage for its Sufi-style shrine. The goal has been to map people’s remembered experiences across the Soviet period and after, particularly in the context of the many religious reforms enacted by the Soviet government and its successors. Through the generosity of a Sabbatical Fellowship from the American Philosophical Society, I was able to spend the spring 2009 term writing, and most recently completed an essay, “Cosmopolitan Baku,” on narratives of pluralism in the Azeri capital after so many centuries of diverse traffic across the region.
A happy event for the year came in the publication of my second monograph, The Captive and Gift: Cultural Histories of Sovereignty in Russia and the Caucasus (Cornell University Press). I first began work on this project when I realized there were few synthetic works on Caucasus society beyond the frames of military history or folklore. The project went on to become a study in how the metaphor of captivity has informed Russia’s experiences with the Caucasus over the past two hundred years, and how actual practices of bride-capture, hostage-taking, and the retreat of brigands into the mountains across the Caucasus present rather different logics of exchange and sovereign rule than is often found in Russian or English-language sources.
As an editor, I have continued work on a long-running, sizeable compilation entitled “The Russia Reader: History, Culture, Politics,” forthcoming in 2010 from Duke University Press. The goal has been to design a single text suitable for scholars and travelers alike, from across the entire period of Russian history, with an emphasis on essays and entries that are foremost readable and even pleasurable, in the spirit of the greater works in Russian literature from which we have drawn.
Along the way, I have been serving as the President for the Society for Cultural Anthropology (SCA), the interdisciplinary wing of the American Anthropological Association. We have opened up a number of new ways for members to both raise the profile of the section, and for more members to take part. These have included the new Gregory Bateson Book Prize, for ethnographic works of a particularly rich interdisciplinary purchase; editorial intern programs at the journal, Cultural Anthropology; and new SCA faculty-student roundtables at the AAA meetings so that student members have more opportunities to advance their work with specialists from outside their own universities. I would really encourage all sociocultural graduate students in our department to become members and to take advantage of the two latter ways of expanding research networks.
This fall I am teaching two undergraduate courses: “Human Society and Culture,” as well as the honors thesis seminar; come spring I will repeat “Human Society and Culture,” and I look forward to doing a new “Ethnographic Traditions” graduate seminar on the former Soviet Union.
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