Brothers Forever. Fraternal Ties and the Dynamics of Obligation in Arctic Russia

Social Anthropology, 2013

On the Politics of Kinship, 2022

In this book, Hannes Charen presents an alternative examination of kinship structures in political theory. Employing a radically transdisciplinary approach, On the Politics of Kinship is structured in a series of six theoretical vignettes or frames. Each chapter frames a figure, aspect, or relational context of the family or kinship. Some chapters are focused on a critique of the family as a state-sanctioned institution, while others cautiously attempt to recast kinship in a way to reimagine mutual obligation through the generation of kinship practices understood as a perpetually evolving set of relational responses to finitude. In doing so, Charen considers the ways in which kinship is a plastic social response to embodied exposure, both concealed and made more evident in the bloated, feeble, and broken individualities and nationalities that seem to dominate our social and political landscape today. On the Politics of Kinship will be of interest to political theorists, feminists, anthropologists, and social scientists in general.

Contents Editorial. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 Alexander F. Filippov, Nail Farkhatdinov Research papers A Rumor of Philosophy: On Thinking War in Clausewitz. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12 Nicolas de Warren “Oh God! What a Lovely War”: Giorgio Agamben’s Clausewitzian Theory of Total/Global (Civil) War . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28 Kristof K. P. Vanhoutte Normalized Exceptions and Totalized Potentials: Violence, Sovereignty and War in the Thought of Thomas Hobbes and Giorgio Agamben . . . . . . . . . . 44 Anna-Verena Nosthoff Humanism as Casus Belli: Carl Schmitt’s Critique of Just War Theory. . . . . . . . . 77 Arseniy Kumankov War and Capitalism: Some Important Theories and a Number of Relevant Facts. . . 92 João Carlos Graça, Rita Gomes Correia Social Practices of Using War Memorials in Russia: A Comparison between Mamayev Kurgan in Volgograd and Poklonnaya Gora in Moscow. . . . . . . . . . . 115 Elizaveta Polukhina, Alexandrina Vanke discussion Models of Conflicts and a New Paradigm for the 21st Century Security Environment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 129 Hrachya V. Arzumanian 10 Theses on War and Social Order: Preliminary Arguments on the Constitutive Functions of Armed Conflicts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 140 Oleg Kildyushov review essays The Philosophical Foundations of the Russian Sociology of War at the Turn of the 19th and 20th Centuries . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 150 Alexander Lunkov Instead of a Review; or, What, and Thanks to Whom, Do We Know About a Man at War? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 173 Irina Trotsuk book reviews Isolated Modernity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 191 Alexander Finiarel Boëne B. (2014) Les sciences sociales et l’armée: objets, approches, perspectives, Paris: Presses Universitaires Paris Sorbonne . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 195 Evgeny Blinov Mortal God—Dying God? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 199 Alexander V. Marey Suppressing the Fear, Taming the Warre: Early Modern “Post-Machiavellian” Politics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 204 Alexander Markov

The dominance of classic political history for many years led to the disregarding of “relatives’ letters” as a crucial source for understanding the formation of the Soviet state and society. These were letters to Soviet officials from ordinary people who perceived the state as a family and imagined its leaders as their close relatives. Broadening a dominant concept in recent Soviet studies, that of speaking Bolshevik, I explore “relatives’ letters”, analysing the fact that their authors were speaking kinship as evidence that reveals the premodern foundations of modern states and uncovers a social practice for generating power in everyday routines. Freed from the constraints of Weberian-modernisationist and Burkhardtian paradigms, I reflect on the ways that seemingly opposed ideas about tradition and modernity, power and kinship, status and marginality, the licit and the illicit infused representations of “Soviet citizenship” and analyse how letter writers justified their connections with the abstract concept of “the state”. “Relatives’ letters” show that the state lived in and through its subjects: Imagining a state as a political family and leaders as close relatives provided a source of identity and contributed to social cohesion in the Soviet empire but also explains the very nature of contemporary informal relationships. Consequently, speaking kinship became a universal political language of governance and the language of ordinary people’s emotional attachment to the paternalistic state.

East/West: Journal of Ukrainian Studies

Revisiting the national past and searching for new heroes has become a common trend in many post-communist states, including Ukraine. An aspect that commonly remains invisible when imagining national heroes is gender. Cossacks and fighters of the UPA (Ukrains'ka povstans'ka armiia; Ukrainian Insurgent Army) exemplify some of the most common historical models of Ukrainian heroes. Although the two warrior groups represent rather different historical periods and are treated as national heroes in different ways, this paper seeks to uncover commonalities between them, while pointing out their specificities. In particular, the analysis here looks at the mechanisms that mythologize and naturalize Cossacks and the UPA as an integral part of the current discourses on national identity and hegemonic masculinity. Separately, we focus on the role played by the far-right party, the All-Ukrainian Union "Freedom" ("Svoboda") in these processes. The paper also addresses broader processes of renegotiation of the national historical narrative and promotion of its androcentric heroic version, which strengthen gender neotraditionalism and social hierarchies in post-Soviet Ukraine.

North American Dialogue edited by Alisse Waterston , 2010

Laboratorium Russian Review of Social Research, 2011

American Indian Culture and Research Journal, 2020

With transition to the state kinship ceases the role of the central organizing principle of society. However, the very social nature of kinship provides the opportunities for manipulating it as ideology in societies of all types. It was typical for early states to represent the state and the sovereign by analogy with the family and its head. Not infrequently the same connotations are exploited for the sake of power’s legitimation in modern states either. However, the ideology of kinship’s exploitation in states should not be confused with the cases of completely another sort. In some societies of the overall complexity level not lower than that of early states (in “alternatives to the state”), one can observe the whole socio-political construction’s encompassment not from above (as it must be in states) but from below – from the local community level, while the community itself is underpinned by kin ties. Here kinship is not only ideology but also the real socio-political background. So, there is no direct conformity between the socio-political (transition to the state) and ideological (departure from the ideology of kinship) processes and this seemingly clear fact should be acknowledged and given due attention by researchers.

Canadian-American Slavic Studies, 2001

eliminate the not infrequent mistakes and typos. The illustrations should be more closely integrated with the argumentation and analysis.. This is an interesting and substantial collection of articles. What it is not, however, is a post-Soviet primer on post-modernism. While the oppositions evident in the topics discussed above fit the current popular framework of conflicting "constructed identities," for the most part this interpretive matrix can either be replaced by older interpretive frameworks with no less, and probably more, explanatory power or is not actually practiced in the articles. The arguments about "constructed identity" by Schleifman and Holquist could just as easily be recast as pursuit of economic selfinterest by locality, center, and Cossackry respectively in an explanatory matrix that predates Marx. Engel presents a case for inclusion of women, using post-modernist terminology-"problematize the narrative"-but otherwise not distinguished from longstanding arguments of feminists. The articles on the Orthodox Church and multiparty politics are straightforward historical narratives with barely a nod to postmodernism. Kosach's article most comfortably assumes the contours of postmodernist argumentation. This is not accidental. T'he post-modernist approach works best when its subject is un-self-conscious. In both Mozhaisk and with the Cossackry folk are pursuing the time-honored practice of naked self-interest, so pointing out that the emperor has no clothes is not particularly revelatory. That does not mean that post-modernism is inapplicable to either Mozhaisk or Cossackry, but it does mean that the sources utilized should come from ordinary people who are un-self-conscious representatives of the Mozhaisk sacredotal vision or the Cossack claim for ethnicity. This collection is valuable because of the content of the articles, and it would have been better had it not been stretched to fit a post-modernist mold..

Oregon Undergraduate Research Journal, 2023

Where there is colonial power, there is Indigenous resistance. Latin America offers many case studies for an analysis of Indigenous cultural survival, historically and to the present day. While some have received considerable popular and academic attention, most have gone comparatively unknown, particularly in the Anglophone academic mainstream. My research aims to address this gap by interpreting processes of cultural reproduction among the Kamëntšá, a culturally and linguistically unique people of the Sibundoy Valley of southwest Colombia. Building on ethnographic data collected during three months of fieldwork with artisans, shamans, land defenders, and community members in the Sibundoy Valley, I argue that the Kamëntšá, while facing cultural, political, and ecological threats on multiple fronts, are engaged in the integral reproduction of their culture to ensure the survival and vitality of their community. The Kamëntšá experience demonstrates the viability of Indigenous cultural survival and autonomy outside of the settler-colonial and neoliberal status quo. I conclude by arguing that Kamëntšá processes of cultural reproduction contribute to ensuring their cultural autonomy, demonstrating the pluriversal dictum that “another world is possible,” and that the Kamëntšá case sheds light on cultural reproduction and autonomy construction as they operate in other subaltern contexts.

HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 2011

Kinship and Behavior in Primates (Chapais & Berman, eds.), 2004

Memory is an organizing phenomenon for both individuals and societies. Memory allows us to organize our past, foster an identity and ensure our belonging to a group1. Memory plays a central role in the shaping of contemporary identities because it helps us re-construct our identity in relation to our past and other people’s past. How does the memory of war shape the second generation’s identity? By using data collected in 26 families of war survivors from Bosnia and Herzegovina, this paper examines how the identity of the second generation is being shaped by their parents’ war experience.