Description:
Bruce Grant explores the long relationship between Russia and the Caucasus and the means by which sovereignty has been exercised in this contested area.
Brief description: Bruce Grant is Professor of Anthropology at New York University. He is the author of In the Soviet House of Culture: A Century of Perestroikas and coeditor of The Russia Reader: History, Culture, Politics.
Review Quotes:
The Captive and the Gift is one of a very few recent anthropological works that explores the gift as a form of state ideology. History, where the study of gift giving is a burgeoning field, has produced a considerable body of work on gift practices in state and empire building, interstate relations, and diplomacy. The main contribution of Grant's rich and innovative research on Russian and Soviet rule in the Caucasus is to shift the scale radically and discuss how empire 'works through altruism and not just force' and, specifically, how the taking of lives, lands, and resources was narrated as forms of imperial giving.
--Nikolai Ssorin-Chaikov "Slavic Review"