Description:
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...
Brief description: Caroline Humphrey is Professor of Asian Anthropology at the University of Cambridge, author of several books, and winner of the J. I. Staley Prize for her landmark book The Karl Marx Collective: Economy and Society in a Siberian Collective Farm.
Review Quotes:
In her stimulating book The Unmaking of Soviet Life, Caroline Humphrey--one of the few anthropologists with substantial field experience in the old Soviet Union--explores changing attitudes to consumption. Consumer desire, she argues, was both aroused and frustrated in Soviet-type societies and 'acquiring consumption goods and objects became a way of constituting... selfhood.'... One of the virtues of Humphrey's book is that the words 'democracy' and 'capitalism'--so enthusiastically invoked by Western commentators in the early years of Russia's 'transition'--are used sparingly.
-- "London Review of Books"