Interests
I am a cultural anthropologist interested, broadly, in the cultural politics of science and in the intersections between science, the nation-state, and globalization in the former Soviet Union. More specifically, I am currently preparing a book manuscript about the postsocialist transformation in Akademgorodok, a “science city” in Siberia, where privatization, migration and “brain drain,” and changing center-periphery politics within Russia are redrawing the connections between scientific modernity and national progress. I am also interested in theorizing the movement of knowledge across local contexts, particularly the ways in which language and professional identities converge with practices of standardization and rationalization to both produce and obscure differences among local scientific “styles.”
I am also developing a project on the history of anthropological studies of the Soviet Union during the Cold War, focusing on the groups led by Margaret Mead and Clyde Kluckhohn. I am interested in the significance of the collaborations between anthropologists and military and intelligence institutions, the methodologies developed in these projects for studying societies in which anthropologists were unable to conduct field research, and the techniques used to cast anthropology as an applied science with relevance to national security.
I am also currently the convenor of the Soyuz Post Socialist Cultural Studies Website
Publications:
‘An Island of Socialism in a Capitalist Country’: Postsocialist Russian Science and the Culture of the State. Ethnos 70(4), 2005.
‘Civilization’ and its Insecurities: Traveling Scientists, Global Science, and National Progress in the Novosibirsk Akademgorodok. Kroeber Anthropological Society Papers 86, 2001.
Culture Sells: Cézanne and Corporate Identity. Cultural Anthropology 13(2), 1998.
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