No 1 (2025)

This article is an introduction to the issue’s special theme on “Ritualism in the Space of a Contemporary City”, by Daria Radchenko, and Andrey Zagorulko and Egor Krykov. Over the past few decades, a language has been formed for public symbolic expression of grief associated with resonant tragedies. This language assumes: the formation of special symbolically loaded memory places in the urban space; manipulation of colour schemes that have symbolic meaning; the use of a repertoire of individual and group commemorative actions. Such commemorative practices arose as predominantly spontaneous actions based on the initiative of individuals and small interest groups. However, in Russia there is a tendency for the state and its actors to appropriate such practices.

The car ceased to be a luxury and became an ordinary means of transportation throughout the world by the mid-70s. At the same time, a large percentage of the world's population became urban dwellers. Therefore, automobile practices, including apotropaic ones, are inextricably linked with urban culture, although some features are semantically attributed to rural community rituals. Most often, the apotropaic rite is performed when purchasing a new car or after repairing an old one. As rituals of this kind, it is aimed at eliminating the dangers and disasters associated with the car. Despite the cultural differences, the rite structurally repeats the everyday ritual practice generally accepted for each region under consideration. Based on the materials of field studies in the cities of Moscow and Tehran, as well as on the analysis of Japanese, Thai and Korean Internet resources, it is shown how elements of the modern post-industrial culture of a large city are introduced into the ritual space.

In the 1920s and 1930s, the scientific and creative community of the young Soviet state was involved in the implementation of the state program “Cinema-Atlas of the USSR”, which implied the accumulation of potential of research institutes and film studios for the production of a documentary film series about the peoples and regions of the diverse, multinational Soviet Union. One of the expressive examples of the parity of ethnography and cinematography in this context was the film “In Bryansk Polesie” (1931). Its creators were, on the one hand, experienced filmmakers, employees of the largest in the country “Soyuzkino” factory, director I.P. Kopalin and cameraman P.P. Zotov, and on the other hand – the famous researcher of the culture of the Eastern Slavs N.I. Lebedeva, representing the interests of the Central Museum of Ethnology. The general architecture of the considered film narrative is a typical example of an early Soviet ethnofilm: the transition of local communities from the “dark past” to the “bright future” is filmed. The article presents the results of the research experience of separating the “Soviet” layer from the “ethnographic” layer in this film document with a focus on its substantive and methodological aspects. It is shown that the film “In Bryansk Polesie” has a multifaceted scientific potential, since it is a multi-layered source for studying both the cultural traditions of the Polesie population and the history of the socialist reconstruction of the region.

The objective of this study was to examine the regional variations in the influence of sociocultural factors, such as fashion and physical beauty, on the somatic features of modern youth. We conducted an analysis of anthropometric data and results of psychological tests from a sample of 836 young men and women aged 17 to 25 from three cities: Moscow (n = 410), Barnaul (n = 189), and Tiraspol (n = 237). Our findings indicate significant regional differences in the distribution of body composition indicators. In the examined samples, young men predominantly internalize athletic ideal of attractiveness, while young women tend to favor a leptosomic ideal. The formation of perceptions about bodily aesthetics is most significantly influenced by social media exposure in the group of young women from Moscow, while family members play a crucial role in all other groups. We identified statistically significant correlations between appearance self-esteem and body composition parameters, elucidating potential pathways through which standards of attractiveness may impact somatic indicators via psycho-emotional processes. We developed original schematic models that illustrate both general trends and regional specificities concerning the influence of sociocultural factors on the physiques of young men and women.

In this article, I consider the manner in which Soviet ethnographers responded to the combination of the difficulties in undertaking fieldwork and the need to meet the normative requirements and expectations of the Institute of Ethnography, Academy of Sciences of the USSR. The analysis will focus specifically on how ethnographers studying foreign countries worked on ethnographic texts, with a particular emphasis on the volumes of the “Peoples of the World” (Narody mira) series, during the period of the seven-year plan (1959–1965). I attempt an examination of fieldwork from the perspective of institutional bureaucracy, thus facilitating a reevaluation of the notion of “scarcity” of fieldwork and the articulation of its nuances. Indeed, the lack of fieldwork in the sense of actual trips and travels did not equate to its absence from the institutional discourse. I further wish to shift research attention from the archive of field materials and diaries to the archive of administrative documentation which, in my opinion, should be examined as painstakingly as fieldwork records in writing any history of fieldwork. Scrutinizing the transcripts of the meetings of the Academic Council of the Institute of Ethnography, I argue that these meetings provided an opportunity for Soviet ethnographers to discuss both the importance of fieldwork and the way ethnographic texts were to be written.

The everyday life of Bolshevik elites had remained for many decades a subject avoided in Soviet research both due to the political and ideological restrictions and the scarcity of the source base that formed under their influence. In connection with the recent anthropological turn in the Russian humanities and the keen interest in the history of everyday life (a branch of historical knowledge that focuses on studying the lifestyle of social groups, the evolution of the inner world of individuals and their relationships with various objects and events), we consider it important to draw attention to the history of development of the empirical and historiographical base for research on the life of Bolsheviks in the 1920s–1930s. We qualify the early stage of development of the Soviet historiography (1920s–1940s) as a period of ignoring the topic of the life of elites, which had to do with an unspoken ban put on discussing the living conditions of the top representatives of the Soviet society. We take the second period (1950s–1980s) – the time of the birth of ethnographic interest in the everyday and ordinary in city life – to be the years of “discovery of the topic”. Finally, we associate the third period with the years of stagnation and the beginning of Perestroika. We characterize the active translation of works by foreign researchers on everyday life and the formation of a shared collaboration space with Western scholars (from the early 1990s to the present) as essential prerequisites for understanding the relationship between the social/political transformation of the Soviet/post-Soviet period and the politics of memory, including the memory of the social establishment of the Soviet society during the period of the “great Bolshevik experiment”.