Post–Cold War Anthropology as Ideological Blog

“Socialism” as a Culture

During the Cold War, most of the American social science on Russia and the former Soviet Union was directed towards studying what Harold Berman called the “Devil and Soviet Russia” (1958). “Socialism” and “communism” (and “Stalinism”) became the labels that scholars were to use to define the Russian Soviet period empire as something sui generis; entirely different from and non-comparable to other empires of the United States, France, Britain, and Germany (the Nazis), among others, and entirely different from anything that existed before. Using this label served a political purpose. It detached the earlier period of the Russian Tsarist Empire, in which there was collusion with French, British, and partly American companies and their empires, from the later period. It drew attention away from imperialism as a cultural trait worthy of study. It focused the moral criticism and social scientific critique of various forms of genocide that continue to occur and of planetary destruction (lack of sustainability of “developed” countries and cultures or of weaker “undeveloped” countries and cultures) on ideological slogans and on the “enemy” rather than on the reality of cultural processes, in general, and on the US and its allies.

Anthropologists were implicitly trained, as I was during the end of the Cold War, not to sell out the discipline or our integrity for the sake of the militaristic and elite control objectives of Cold War politics or exploitation of cultures. The tenets of the field as applied to those cultures open to anthropological study (that is, not including Russia and Eastern Europe) were to look at political choices as embedded in contexts of geography, climate, economics, and history as both dependent and independent variables or as choices forced by outside pressures. The training was to focus on what people said and what they did, not on slogans or labels and to consider as absurd any belief that a political ideology could define or transform a culture overnight; overriding established practices and beliefs driven by geography and environment. The great Russian authors like Nikolai Gogol, Leo Tolstoy, and Anton Checkov, who wrote about Russian bureaucracy and its officials, and other Eastern European writers like Franz Kafka and Karel Capek, who wrote about their societies “before socialism,” are not treasured today because they were documenting a forgotten era that today’s anthropologists would call “pre-socialist.” They are treasured because their insights into their cultures are timeless; as much alive today as they were during “socialism” or “before socialism.” Russians and Eastern Europeans are aware of the cultural continuities in the behavior of their leaders and their institutions that defy international political labels that euphemistically denote whose enemies they were, when.

Anthropologists have long stood against the simplistic tarring of peoples with broad labels. We knock sense back into those on the warpath against whatever devil they name, showing that not all Arabs are terrorists, not all “socialists” are Stalinists, and that not even all “capitalists” are colonial imperialists. Cultural groups have long traditions that take generations to change. Even if some leaders say they adhere to an ideology, ideologies are largely twisted by cultures to fit into an already existing context that is closer to what they have been doing for generations than the other way around. Collapses of political ideologies are largely the reassertions of underlying traditions or evidence of cultural unsustainability, not failure of political choice. In Russia, the supposed ideology of “socialism” probably disappeared as early as the 1930s, with the behaviors of the Russian empire reasserting itself under Stalin, rather than continuing until the US declared “victory” in the Cold War some 50+ years later. There are good anthropological studies that show that “socialism” actually died in Russia following the death of Lenin (if it even existed then under the “New Economic Policy”) and the purge of the first generation of revolutionary rulers. The rule of Stalin is probably closer to the traditional Russian feudal imperial system than it is to anything one can find in the writings of Marx or Lenin, and many of the “Soviet” symbols and institutions were actually substitutions and transpositions of earlier Russian institutions. (The hammer and sickle, for example, is a transposition of the Russian orthodox cross.)

Nevertheless, rather than look for continuities in Russia that would help understand how Russian culture works, Caldwell accepts the American Cold War dogma painting all “socialist” countries (that is, countries resisting American and European imperial hegemony and siding with the Russians) with the same brush. Rather than looking at earlier ethnographies of Russia, Caldwell consistently references other “socialist cultures” for comparisons and explanations of Russia. To note the absurdity and the strength of the ideology, in Caldwell’s study Cuba, North Korea, and Vietnam are potential sources of explanatory data on what is happening in Russian culture, even though these cultures are all completely different. ^*

Some of these “socialist” countries are in Eastern Europe and there may be similarities for the reasons that classical anthropological ethnographies would reveal – similar environments, material culture, and histories. But all of these comparisons are lost in the work of anthropologists who study “socialist culture” because the variables are thrown out and the only variable of comparison left is “socialism.” In Caldwell’s concluding chapter, “Socialism Revisited,” she hardly writes on Russian culture at all, but speaks of the “persistence of socialist practices and ideologies” into the “second decade of post-Soviet life,” of “neo-socialism” and even of a “socialist worldview…that will continue to color everyday social life into the future” (p. 203).

Despite making these comparisons, Caldwell never defines what “socialism” is, or what makes one country appropriate for comparison with Russia and why it is that she assumes that all “socialist” countries are alike. Is Germany a “post-socialist” culture because of the Nazi (National Socialist) period, that the Nazis, themselves, called “socialist” and that many Russians see as an exact parallel to their system (“white” and “red” “fascism”)? Were there really suddenly two German cultures, a socialist (east) and a capitalist (west) culture that were something other than examples of imperial control and cultural diffusion from other, stronger, cultures whose names are being hidden? Does this trump the idea of a German culture? How many Vietnamese or Korean cultures are there? How long does a country have to be socialist to have a socialist culture? Is Cambodia “post-socialist” because of the short Pol Pot era or is it still possible to study Khmer culture? Are there “fascist cultures”? Are there “capitalist” cultures, and if so, which ones and how are they defined? Is the US a “socialist” culture today if it can be demonstrated that the political powers of its State (military, police), its economic elites and its productive and social institutions are managed much like those in the Soviet Union before its fall? Is the US itself a culture or just an empire that destroys its internal cultures, and is the difficulty of resolving this question why anthropologists want to project the loss of cultural identity and definition on others?

In anthropology, we can talk about the Russian empire influencing half of Germany and the US (empire) influencing the other, and look at cultural change through culture contact. But if we follow the principles of the discipline rather than play ideological politics, we do not simply label cultures by whether they are “enemy” or “non-enemy” and substitute ideological euphemisms to hide the hegemony of cultures (empires). We call things what they are.

The approach that Caldwell takes polarizes our world rather than promotes the anthropological mission of human understanding and protection of deeply rooted differences. We need to be extremely vigilant on the terms and classifications we use or we not only defy our principles as social scientists, we also violate our moral oaths to the peoples we study and who fund our work and our teaching, if not to humanity.

Cultural “Newness”

Along with the idea of “socialist” countries as cultures is the belief, in Caldwell’s work and that of other anthropologists, that countries that now agree to accept the conditions of what US President George H.W. Bush described in 1991 as the New World Order (post–Cold War globalization under US hegemony with the US and former Soviet Union becoming trade partners) are somehow no longer what they once were (or even subject to cultural genocide) and can be labeled euphemistically as “new.” In Caldwell’s subtitle, she describes her study not of the “Russians” or “urban Russians” but of the “New Russia.” What does that mean? Anthropologists know that there is no such thing as a “new” culture overnight. Cultures can adapt or they can be forced to change by more powerful cultures exerting different forms of hegemony, and the goal of our discipline is to study these processes of evolution, influence, and diffusion. The labeling of cultures as “old” or “new” in this context is a code for Cold-War political distinctions that defines countries as “friends” or “enemies” based on how they fit into American economic or strategic interests. By accepting 1991, the year that the Soviet Russian empire disintegrated, as a break between an “old” and a “new” Russian culture, and by purging anthropological studies that look at the cultural continuities that go back to the Tsarist period, Caldwell demonstrates her allegiance to the Cold War political pressures on the discipline.

What is “new” in Russia is the influence of Europe and the US. Caldwell mentions the changes but does not identify their cultural origins or explains the processes of influence. Traditional Russian culture and Russia’s urbanization is being influenced by Western European political, economic, social, and religious institutions, and Caldwell’s soup kitchen is part of that phenomenon. New to Russia are the World Bank’s ideas on the role of government and the IMF’s structural adjustment policy that largely dismantles welfare states and social safety nets. New to Russia is the foreign idea that social welfare functions of government should be dismantled so as to reduce the interdependence between a country’s rich and poor. This is an actual disruption of social networks, rather than their reinforcement, and is counter to what Caldwell seems to be studying. The foreign approach is to put weak and uncoordinated nongovernmental organizations in the place of government. ^* New to Russia is also the UNDP’s idea of “poverty alleviation” through a checklist of Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). The UNDP’s approach undermines the cultural essential of sustainability and the agreements of international law that are supposed to assure sustainability but do not (partly due to anthropologists not holding these institutions accountable to international laws on culture protection and agreements on sustainability).

Caldwell’s reluctance to use statistical and quantitative measures may also be a sign of the impact of post–Cold War politics on anthropology. It reinforces the idea that some things are “new” by preventing actual comparisons with and study of the past. What is not measured and linked to the past cannot be used effectively as a criticism of the present. It is the destruction of history and memory that substantiates a myth that the New World Order is an improvement over the exploitation of the old order. ^*

Ironically, despite the title of Caldwell’s book, the reality is that Caldwell actually concludes that very little seems to be changing in Russia beneath the surface. There is a new subculture (or strata) of nouveau riche who seem to be intermediaries for the West or who are copying Western styles as they use their influence to amass resources. Nevertheless, her general sense seems to be that living strategies and networks are not very different now from what they were before. In other words, her anthropological research is confirming the discipline, but the ideological straitjacket she feels compelled to use to present (or sell) her work, overrides the tenets of the discipline to turn anthropology into journalistic accounts of what is “new.” ^*

Soup Kitchens as an Anthropological Subfield

This idea of soup kitchens as an area of study is also a politicized one. Caldwell could study the entire spectrum of social responsibility, attitudes, and policies towards the poor, or towards the elderly, with the soup kitchen as one example in the larger context. She could study Western institutions and their role in changing Russian culture, using the soup kitchen as an example. But, instead of starting with a segment of the culture, itself, or even of a cultural function or issue (class or valuation of members of society or social roles), she starts with an institution. The institution becomes the community instead of the actual larger community itself, and the institutions that serve it or in which people play roles, become the subject.

A look at Caldwell’s bibliography makes it clear that this is not an isolated case of a weak choice of a research topic. ^* Probably, Caldwell went to the library and looked up every book she could find on soup kitchens, famines, bread, social services, and consumer behavior and then took them out of their cultural contexts to unify the study of a specific type of institution across cultures in the way that political scientists do and that anthropologists used to step in to correct.

This seems to be evidence of a “safe” and trendy copycat anthropology, where studies are repeated and carried out in other cultures where they are inappropriate. The context of the culture critique is lost, but comparisons are assumed to be acceptable because of the approval of the earlier work. Caldwell, herself, says that instead of starting with existing ethnographies of Russia, or of empires, or following a hypothesis and a research question, she was motivated by newspaper accounts of impending famine in Russia. She took her cue from the newspapers, the same way that journalists find stories.

Probably the way Caldwell came to study soup kitchens was also by following the model of what is now acceptable “research” in the universities. Though laboratory, field social sciences courses are few and far between (they mostly disappeared during the Cold War in favor of courses that indoctrinate students with theory in factory and dictatorial settings) and have yet to return, what has taken their place is the “service learning” and “internship” model for credit. Students work in organizations in lackey jobs where they are unable to conduct social experiments, innovate, or test a range of hypotheses, due to their subordinate positions. They only observe and then write papers that are mostly in diary or journal form, for credit. This is exactly what Caldwell has done but on a larger scale – a dissertation, for a year’s work, in a foreign country. It is perfectly safe and politically acceptable. Caldwell does not challenge major international institutions or the Russian government on their aid policies, because she is safely ensconced among the most marginalized Russians in a foreign run charity.

Where will this lead? Will we have the “Anthropology of Soup Kitchens” as a new discipline or subdiscipline? Will there be “Anthropology of Consumer Behavior” to serve corporate marketing firms? (There may be. This is another topic heavily referenced in Caldwell’s bibliography and one of her recurrent concerns.) Will there be courses in “Anthropology of Factory Work” (another area that seems to be emerging) or “Anthropology of the Rich and Famous”? ^*

Anthropology versus Journalism

Today, when it is possible to collect all kinds of data and to even conduct social experiments in Russia in anthropological field work, Caldwell deliberately chooses a personal, journalistic approach without data and defines this as the essence of ethnography. Why? ^*

Though the difference between social science and journalism (or between social science and theology) does not seem to be written down anywhere, it is worth trying to put down on paper what the characteristics are that make a “discipline” disciplined. What is joyful about anthropology is that it actually offers tremendous flexibility in methods and approaches and can be remarkably creative. One can choose to use the discipline as either a science or as humanity (for culture critique). At the same time, both of these paths require adherence to some basic rules.

The Social Science Route

There is a paradox in the anthropology of Russia in the past and today that goes to the heart of the issue as to whether one methodology is enough to define the discipline. It reinforces why Caldwell’s purging of history is so important. Caldwell lived and worked in an internationally funded soup kitchen, physically in Moscow, and became a member of the soup kitchen community. She sees her “participant observer” status, alone, as her claim to being an anthropologist, not the framework required for analyzing culture or the kinds of questions about culture that the discipline seeks to answer. By contrast, Margaret Mead and Clyde Kluckhohn wrote about the Russians without actually observing Russians or participating in activities with them, and even sought to invent a way of studying “culture at a distance” (Mead, 1953). Are Mead and Kluckhohn ignored today because they are no longer anthropologists, by today’s definition? That is what Caldwell’s book and many others seem to say.

To Mead and Kluckhohn, and other classic anthropologists, tools, alone, do not and cannot define the discipline. It is the holistic approach, the theoretical perspectives on cultural processes and change, and questions about culture and humanity that define it. The tools are only a means to answer important questions, not the ends in and of themselves. To those who see anthropology as a social science, there is no contradiction at all between using the “hard facts” and data that Caldwell and many others shun, and other kinds of data, comparisons, or social experimentation and hypothesis testing in complement with or even in place of participant observation. A social science discipline like anthropology can and should have a scientific component and a humanities component and they can work together to raise and answer questions. Scholars need to understand and defend their approach and contribution to this endeavor. ^*

Table 1 offers one quick way of looking at the different approaches (or functions) in a social science discipline like anthropology depending on whether a researcher starts with a scientific perspective (second column) or humanistic one (third column) and whether the approach is comparative (first row), applied (second row) or simply a single case study (third row). Caldwell’s work is a value laden case study and that falls into the category of journalism or propaganda. Without comparative work either as science or humanities, it is neither social science nor culture critique. Nor is she doing applied work, where different concerns can be raised (the choice of values determines whether the application leads to harms or benefits and is developing methods or reinforcing dogma).

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Table 1.

Reasoning Methods and Approaches Used by Different Academic and Non-academic Fields

	Disciplinary approach
Dimensions of a discipline	Objective measures (scientific methodology)	Testing attitudes and values (humanities)
Comparative	Social sciences and social science approaches to history	Philosophy when supplementing social science; culture critique
Applied	Social engineering	Theology (dogma) or doctrine (methods)
Sui generis/case study	History (as simple measurement)	Journalism; history (as story); propaganda

Source: Developed by the author.

What made Mead and Kluckhohn social scientists, in contrast to Caldwell and many others today, is that they followed the discipline of the scientific method. Mead wanted to understand the same phenomena that Caldwell studied – social support and the role of the individual versus the collective in Russia. Part of Mead’s work was to look at child rearing practices and to generate scientific hypotheses about “swaddling”; a form of binding that connected children with care-givers and reinforced their sense of dependency, while also creating a cultural connection to the environment (its harsh winter cold that created a need for social interaction and interdependency). Mead started with a psychological methodology and analyzed photos (spatial relations), curricula, and newspaper accounts. Kluckhohn worked with sociologists to collect household budget and time use data, to reconstruct daily lives as a way to understand survival, interconnections and the working of the culture.

Mead and Kluckhohn’s works and those of others defined culture within a particular environment. They analyzed behaviors as part of a system, with humans and environment (a system of nature, genetics, and material culture). They began with research hypotheses about variables in that environment and then collected data that helped to test those hypotheses. They maintained a sense of distance and objectivity about their subjects. They analyzed and presented data in ways that could be used and understood by others. Generally, their presentations include maps of space and geography; kinship charts; time analysis; relational and network analysis; diet and material culture analysis; and overall diagrams of how the system works, which were once the standard descriptive tools used in ethnography but have also disappeared; replaced by the same block prose of journalism. If previous anthropologists did not wish to follow the works of predecessors, they at least took pains to distinguish why and to offer challenges in the spirit of disciplinary challenge, rather than to simply avoid or ignore. If there were demands to laboriously cite works by others as a way simply to demonstrate political loyalty to the clique, as many anthropologists today demand as a condition of publication or advancement (in the form of academic political patronage), the scientific method offered a way to challenge this politicization. Stripping away the scientific method today leaves and reinforces the patronage system with nothing to challenge it, and perhaps this is what is really happening in Caldwell’s work and that of other anthropologists today.

Caldwell does not use scientific methods. She does not begin with a research hypothesis. She does not process data. She does not use any of the kinds of data presentations that are unique to anthropology or any other social science. Moreover, she is not really comparative in the sense of defining what the entity is that she is studying – urban Russia, Russian culture, international development agents – and what she is comparing it against, by what set of variables.

With the exception of a few photographs, Caldwell’s book, like much anthropology today, is almost entirely block text without a single chart, diagram, or figure. Her photographs are not scientific comparisons and are mostly snapshots of places she visited and worked; some of the pictures were actually taken by her mother and father.

The question then is, is Caldwell’s work and that of other anthropologists who reject the social science approach, culture critique, journalism, or is it dogma, or some combination?

The Humanity Route (Cultural Critique)

If anthropologists choose not to view their work as social science, but as humanity and a way of gaining other perspectives and insight into the nature of human activity and thought, the disciplinary approach is that of cultural critique or interpretive anthropology. The idea of culture critique is to use the experiences of other cultures to challenge the views of what is possible or morally right in one’s own culture. Good anthropology exposes contradictions in values and exposes rituals that blind people to good information that could otherwise change their choices or views of how people actually behave. It tries to understand pathways of change and explain whether alternatives are possible, whether they might be desirable, how they could be attained if they are, or why they are not being pursued.

The idea of many anthropologists today, including Caldwell, seems to be that the methodology and form of the product – participant observation and then footnoted essay format – are enough to qualify as cultural critique or, if there are enough references to one’s own feelings and sense of self in the foreign culture, to qualify as interpretive or reflexive anthropology. But unless there is really a direct cultural critique or perhaps just a phenomenological discovery (that can be anything from ingesting local substances to undergoing rites and observing the changes in perception that occur), what distinguishes it from essay or journalism or just diary?

Table 2 offers one way of thinking about the differences.

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Table 2.

Categories of Critical and Reflective Writing by Academics and Non-academics

	Objective distance applied
Methodological approach	Self or culturally referential	Applied comparisons	Objective
Processed events with social relevance	Critical anthropology	Political essay	Investigative journalism
Processed events with psychological relevance on thought processes and phenomenology	Interpretive anthropology	Philosophical essay	Action journalism
Recounted events	Diary	Feature story	Events log or news story

Source: Developed by the author.

Indeed, the study of Russia has offered a wonderful chance to do culture critique because the Russian and then the Russian “Soviet” empires have been partly different and partly similar to other recent empires, and because Russia is uniquely placed in Europe and Asia, with peculiar climate and geography. Though few scholars have been bold enough to do real comparative critiques of the Russian–Soviet empire with the American empire or others (French, German-Nazi, or English) and have been more likely to force comparisons with China, the opportunity for such comparison has always been there. There was something anthropological in the way of thinking of some political scientists and economists from John Kenneth Galbraith (an economist writing on the “new industrial state,” 1967), Harold Berman (a legal scholar writing on “the Devil and Soviet Russia,” 1958) and Alfred Meyer (a political scientist who worked with Kluckhohn at Harvard’s Russian Research Center). ^*

Today, with Russia becoming a colony (or feudal barony) in the New World Order, studies of Russia offer an excellent opportunity for critiques of the process of globalization, particularly if one studies the interaction between foreign aid institutions or foreign elites and Russians. Caldwell partly tries to do this in examining how “hunger” is defined, and offers some observations on how “corruption” and exchange are defined but she does not really gather enough information or make any consistent argument that would place her work in the category of a critique. ^*

If Caldwell’s book is not culture critique and not reflective anthropology, because it does not fit those categories, what is it? ^* Caldwell’s book seems to fall somewhere in the category of a feature story and a diary of the workings of a social service agency in Moscow, with vignettes on some of the recipients. ^*

There is nothing wrong with anthropologists turning into essayists, diarists, or investigative journalists. They can be good ones. Such work can also be useful to anthropologists as a source of reliable information. With American media largely shut down in presenting the reality in countries like Russia, books that report a different view and are able to be published (something that is not easy today with academic presses since screening criteria largely weight “marketability” and “acceptability” rather than objectivity and reliability) can be especially useful. Even if authors might have to end up self-publishing on the Web or going overseas to do so, they offer a real service. ^*

The problem here is that this book claims to be anthropology but does not ask the questions or link to the disciplinary standards and past work that define the discipline. Instead of offering and testing something new, it is replacing the scientific work and culture critique that were the basis of the discipline with ideological and hedonistic journalism. By claiming to be what they are not, anthropologists are not expanding the categories of work but driving out those that are the basic responsibility of the discipline.

Political Anthropology versus Political Science

Caldwell paraphrases Malinowski towards the end of her study to the effect that “the power of ethnography emerges from the connections that are drawn between the most minute and mundane aspects of daily life…and the larger social fabric in which they are embedded” (p. 196), but it is important to look at this statement very carefully. It is actually a distortion and a revision of Malinowski and the anthropological mission. Caldwell is not alone in redefining the discipline.

What makes political anthropology different from political science is that anthropology places all phenomena back in a systemic whole. The same goes for all of the sub-studies of anthropology – economic anthropology, legal anthropology, medical anthropology, and so on. The goal of ethnography is to explain this cultural holism – to study a culture in a geographic setting and over generations, with a look at how a whole set of variables (political, cultural, social, natural, biological) interrelate and interact. ^* The key to the anthropological way of thinking is not only this holism and the inclusion of a larger set of variables cutting across disciplines but also some very different assumptions about causality. Political scientists think that ideologies are a political choice and that a society can simply become “socialist” or “capitalist” with the passing of an order. Anthropologists understand causality in a richer way. We either reverse the arrow (determining that an “ism” is something that comes OUT of the culture and is influenced by it, in a kind of Darwinian sense of cultures evolving to fit their environments) or posit that causality is two-way and interactive.

Caldwell is defining the links of social relations only to the “social fabric” and not to the material culture and workings of the overall Russian system. That violates the precepts of the discipline. ^*

Something else that Caldwell’s book and others like it indicate is that training in anthropology departments today may not be adequate for field work in complex urban societies like Russia. Political anthropology and legal anthropology are largely an addition to the disciplines of political science and legal studies in the study of complex, industrial societies. In a small society, it may be possible to observe material culture and to simultaneously study the political and legal aspects of culture. But studying an urban society requires specific tools. Caldwell does not think she needs to collect data on the Russian economy, on poverty, on Russian administrative agencies, or on legal entitlements, and that her “tribe” is the people who work or receive aid from the soup kitchen. But, even with Russian language skills, if she does not have at least one other professional or social scientific skill, she is really not that different from a Russian child trying to make sense out of Russian society. ^* Good financial or legal journalists know that they need those degrees to perform effectively. Good archaeologists know that they sometimes need to be experts in fields like astronomy or material construction or botany to really make contributions. Anthropologists like Caldwell are sent to do doctoral research in a complex system with simply language skills and a notebook; not much different from a journalist and possibly not as savvy. The belief that this is sufficient and constitutes scholarly preparation is a naïve and dangerous assumption that undermines rather than builds the field. We need more training and more collaboration with colleagues, rather than more ignorance and arrogance.

Networks and Their Place in Russian Society

Caldwell concludes that networks are important in Russia and more important in Russia than elsewhere. But she has not really mapped out networks in Russia (past and present) and compared them to other industrial or industrializing societies in different and similar environments. ^* If she masters the discipline’s old and new techniques or teams up with a sociologist, this would make a valuable book.

Vulnerability within Russian Culture and Distrust for Formal Procedures

Caldwell says that the Russians rely more on networks than other cultures because their system is more precarious and offers little security. She describes a recent economic crisis but does not do the economic or political analysis to explain whether crises are a fundamental feature of the Russian political culture. In the past, famines were a part of Russian life that reinforced the idea of group behavior and a strong State (well before “socialism”) and can be seen as the reality of Russia’s poor soil and cold climate. It would be interesting to take a closer look at this phenomenon and to try to model Russian culture to see what would need to change in order for the system to be able to provide better security. Perhaps it cannot, perhaps it can. ^* What are the costs, benefits, and risks to the society if it switches over? If Caldwell were to team up with an economist, they might come up with some interesting answers.

Social Class and the Role of Poverty in Russia

Poverty and social class issues are morally and politically charged topics and are perfect for anthropological study. Caldwell makes some assumptions about poverty and social inequality going hand in hand with individual rights and freedoms. Many political scientists dispute this as a false ideology. Some theorists say that poverty actually serves social functions of social order (creating fear among the poor and middle class). Others describe how the poor are “regulated” (Piven & Cloward, 1986). Meanwhile, international lenders in Russia are offering policy advice on how much poverty and inequality is “acceptable” and how these are defined. She might find partners in economics or sociology that would value her perspective combined with their techniques. ^*

Individual and the State in Russia

The issue of the individual and the State and the State’s role or obligation in providing entitlements is largely a legal culture question, though Caldwell has largely ignored the “rights” debate that has often been central to studies of Russia and that is now a key issue in foreign relations with Russia (particularly in the idea of “economic rights,” and partly in human rights). Caldwell does not really tell us why the Russian State is not providing aid today, especially if it is still “socialist” and paternalist, as she suggests. Why is it that foreigners are taking over the State’s role through church charities? Is this part of an attempt by foreigners to weaken the Russian State and break the culture? Are there any attempts by the needy to assert the idea of rights to assistance? There is a long track of literature on Russian legal culture and the idea of justice, and some on Russian concepts of morality that can link jurisprudence with anthropology (Berman, 1950/1963; Butler, 1983; Hazard, 1953; Lempert, 1995).

The New World Order and Its Concepts of the Role of the State in Russia

Caldwell’s study really begs for an examination of the processes of outside (neocolonial) influences on Russia from the major international lenders like the World Bank, from international aid agencies of the UN, and from other development projects, in the ways described earlier in this essay. Caldwell’s description of Russian’s attitudes towards aid does not make it sound particularly “socialist,” though it is very similar to requests in recipient countries throughout the world. If Russia is becoming a “dependent” or “colonized” country, with outside agencies now serving as the paternal “State” in an international form of “socialist” “dependency,” that is much the same as before but simply with another level of hierarchy above replacing the powers and functions of the Russian elites, this process is worthy of anthropological study. ^*

Environmental Relations

Given that Caldwell’s most interesting and most anthropological chapter is on Russian relations with the natural environment and given Russia’s unique environment for an industrial country (including the tremendous poisoning and threat to this environment), the relationship of Russian urban culture to its environment could make a full-length study. ^*