Unattached and Unhinged: The Spinster and the Psychiatrist in Liberal Italy, 1860–1922

This article explores the role nineteenth‐century Italian psychiatric sciences played in shaping attitudes towards adult women who never married. Initially in post‐unification Italy unmarried women were largely invisible, while the bachelor appeared to threaten the newly formed nation's fragile political and social stability. In the last decades of the nineteenth century fears about the bachelor faded, replaced by growing concerns about the social dangers posed by the ‘spinster’. Drawing on writings from psychiatrists, anthropologists, sociologists, on patient records from psychiatric asylums as well as popular literature, this article traces the way psychiatric practice and theories transformed the image of the unmarried single woman.     

“We are Reindeer People,We Come from Reindeer.” Reindeer Herding in Representations of the Sami in Russia

Abstract

Reindeer herding, a tourism emblem of the European North, is also part of a long-lasting tradition of objectification of Sami culture in Russia. Sustained in the popular imagination by Russian ethnography, the dominant order's agent for legitimization of Soviet ethnic policies, in the 1990s the tradition of exoticization and “othering” was strengthened by Western anthropological and political engagement with the indigenous debate in Russia, transposing on the Sami the imagery and ideals of the global indigenous movement. Business aspirations to utilize the persistent imagery of exotic otherness gave birth to ethnographic tourism in the Kola Peninsula, Northwest Russia, which markets indigenous culture as an attraction. In this paper, I analyze how these diverse discourses equally reify and exploit the concept of Sami reindeer herding and the effects that such representational economy has on the community.     

From the sublime to the meticulous: Art,anthropology and Victorian pilgrimage to Palestine

This essay focuses on practices of representing the Holy Land, as performed by Protestant British travellers during the Victorian and immediately post-Victorian era. I argue that traveller-artists of the period, such as the Pre-Raphaelite William Holman Hunt, promoted a realist aesthetic that combined spiritual and ethnographic sensibilities in its depiction of sacred scenes. Similar concerns are evident in the writings of nineteenth-century pilgrims to Palestine, who wrestle with issues of "participation" and "observation" in relation to topographical and cultural landscapes that are exotic and yet already rendered partially familiar through biblical narrative. In conclusion, some parallels are drawn with aspects of representation and fieldwork evident among early anthropologists.     

Russia and Syria: explaining alignment with a regime in crisis

This article explores explanations of Russia's unyielding alignment with the Syrian regime of Bashar al‐Assad since the Syrian crisis erupted in the spring of 2011. Russia has provided a diplomatic shield for Damascus in the UN Security Council and has continued to supply it with modern arms. Putin's resistance to any scenario of western‐led intervention in Syria, on the model of the Libya campaign, in itself does not explain Russian policy. For this we need to analyse underlying Russian motives. The article argues that identity or solidarity between the Soviet Union/Russia and Syria has exerted little real influence, besides leaving some strategic nostalgia among Russian security policy‐makers. Russian material interests in Syria are also overstated, although Russia still hopes to entrench itself in the regional politics of the Middle East. Of more significance is the potential impact of the Syria crisis on the domestic political order of the Russian state. First, the nexus between regional spillover from Syria, Islamist networks and insurgency in the North Caucasus is a cause of concern—although the risk of ‘blowback’ to Russia is exaggerated. Second, Moscow rejects calls for the departure of Assad as another case of the western community imposing standards of political legitimacy on a ‘sovereign state’ to enforce regime change, with future implications for Russia or other authoritarian members of the Commonwealth of Independent States. Russia may try to enshrine its influence in the Middle East through a peace process for Syria, but if Syria descends further into chaos western states may be able to achieve no more in practice than emergency coordination with Russia.     

Woman and Violence in Artistic Discourse of the Russian Revolution and Civil War (1917–1922)

This article examines visual and literary representations of violence against women produced during the period. The image of a woman suffering from violence is presented from different points of view in literary art works of the Revolution and Civil War time. It was created and circulated among Red and White camps mainly in accordance with the task of propaganda bodies. Among the object of violence there are allegoric women's figures, symbolising Russia, revolution, freedom, well‐known heroines from literature, historic personages and contemporary women – ordinary victims of civil confrontation and direct participants of the Revolution and war. Men or symbols traditionally personifying masculine origin were nearly always the perpetrators of violence, and the image of the female victim was exploited for the strong emotions it evoked. In most cases physical violence against women was treated as anomaly. But the control of the regime over the woman's emotional sphere had become a standard everywhere.     

Preaching Religion, Family and Memory in Nineteenth-Century England

This article explores the religious selfhood of an exemplary Bible Christian woman, Mary Thorne (1807–1883). Founded in 1815 as a splinter group of Wesleyan Methodism, the Bible Christian denomination invoked an epistemology which stressed the correlation between religious and familial obligations. A close study of Mary Thorne's private writings suggests the tensions which existed within this ideal at the level of everyday life. Her writings open a window on a religious woman's negotiation of her public identity alongside her experiences of marriage, sexuality and motherhood. They show the impact of age, life cycle and memory in the process of self-imagining and commemoration. Critically, they also show how dependent Thorne's self-realisation and presentation were on material signs of her identity. In understanding the varying constructions of Mary Thorne's religious selfhood, I argue we might more fully understand the material cultures that underpinned evangelical religion and domesticity in nineteenth-century Britain.     

Chinese Objects in Eurasian Empire: On the Cultural Meaning of Chinese Art in Russia in the Late 17th–Early 18th Centuries

This article examines special features of “Chinoiserie” or “Chinese fashion” (“Kitaischina”) in Russia from the late 17th to the early 18th century: The reign of Peter the First. It discusses this cultural phenomenon’s historical origins, demonstrates the role of Chinese luxury goods and art objects in the era’s Russo-Chinese cultural exchange, and illustrates how Chinese decorative arts were used in Russian palaces. While Chinoiserie in Russia was influenced by similar trends in Western Europe, it was rooted in the unique history of regular contacts between Russia and the Qing Empire. Chinese objects not only appeared as commodities in the higher levels of Russian society, they also contributed to the prestige of the Russian state. Peter the First had a political purpose behind the collection, display and imitation of Chinese art objects in Russian palaces, as these practices demonstrated the growing wealth and power of newly established Russian Empire, which enjoyed trade connections with the Qing Empire. While contemporary perceptions of China in Russia were derived mostly by the exotic images of export art, ethnographic collections of genuine Chinese utensils, which were founded during that period, also contributed to Russian views of China. This research uses a comprehensive methodology, combining studies of material objects preserved in Russian museums and written sources, including archival records.     

The Multiple Meanings of Troy in Early Modern London's Mayoral Show

Abstract

This paper examines the cultural, scientific and poetic life of ambergris in the seventeenth century, in the context of contemporary theories about smell, and changing attitudes to style and expression. Most widely used as an ingredient in perfumery, this mysterious substance (now known to be the pathological secretion of a sperm whale) attracted significant interest: natural philosophers speculated on its origin, and imaginative writers used it as a trope for the exotic and the powerfully ephemeral. In surveying the appearance of ambergris in natural philosophical writings (including the proceedings of the Royal Society, and works by Browne and Boyle), as well as in botanical treatises, recipe books, travellers’ narratives, and lyric poetry, this paper seeks to recover a sense of the forgotten olfactory codings of the past. It ends with an attempt to place ambergris within the highly nuanced vocabulary of scent employed by Robert Herrick, the most distinguished nose of the early modern age.     

Wissenstransfer auf dem Prüfstand. Europäische Mediziner im Kampf gegen die Pest von Moskau 1771

Foreign knowledge being tested: European physicians fighting the Moscow plague of 1771. – The transfer of Western medicine to Russia increased significantly in the Eighteenth century. Foreign doctors were employed, their writings translated, their education standards copied. But who regarded that knowledge as superior and why? Taking the Moscow Plague of 1771 as a case study, this article examines the crucial role foreign and Russian medical practitioners played during the epidemic. It argues that especially those ideas and practices that were useful for social control filtered into politics and public discourse, but failed to convince the majority of the population.     

The teaching of history in Putin's Russia

During the period since the collapse of the USSR, a number of different history books have appeared in Russia. The book under review was published in Moscow in 2007 and appears to be the first textbook officially endorsed by the authorities. It has stirred up considerable controversy in Russia where liberals have portrayed it as an uncritical eulogy of President Putin and an attempt to gloss over Stalin's record. However, despite its sometimes polemical tone, the book is more nuanced. It is not pro‐Soviet, but is decidedly anti‐western; and claims to provide a new version of Cold War history and of Soviet collapse. It deserves study even by those who reject its arguments, because it throws further light on the emergence of nationalism as a political force in Russia.     

Reorienting the nation: spatio-corporeal imaginaries and Turkey’s father of modern obstetrics,Dr Besim Ömer

In this study, I use a queer theoretical framework to critically assess narratives of reproductive reorientation in the early Turkish republic. I focus on the writings of one of the central medical professionals associated with the Kemalist regime, Dr Besim Ömer. Inspired by Sara Ahmed’s approach to orientation, I undertake a queer reading of Dr Besim Ömer’s writings on reproductive bodies and the spaces that they inhabit. Spatial dimensions of reproductive misalignment and reorientation are especially evident in Dr Besim Ömer’s work between 1923 and 1938. Rural and urban women are written as out-of-line with respect to the presumed national family line of Turkishness, one that extended Turkish bodies from the heroically fertile past and into a successfully (re)productive future. This assessment is predicated upon a spatio-corporeal imaginary: the naturally fecund Turkish woman, a body whose otherwise reproductively inclined tendencies had become misaligned in both the stagnating rural and industrializing urban spaces of the late Ottoman Empire and early Turkish republic. I draw upon Ahmed in order to highlight the slantwise character of desires for properly oriented reproductive bodies and spaces that were in-line with the nationalistic family line of Turkishness; desires that were predicated upon a placeless idealization and an embodied utopia. Spatio-corporeal imaginaries such as these have limited the scope and dimension of what constitutes, as Ahmed describes, ‘a life worth living.’     

The Altai Road: Visions of Development across the Russian–Chinese Border

The Altai Republic is a poor mountainous region of Russia squeezed between Kazakstan, China and Mongolia. A project to build a road connecting Russia with China through the Altai has been conceived within a quadripartite regional co‐operation project, supported by Western development organizations. Yet while at the Chinese side of the border road construction went ahead, in Russia, a coalition of globally connected ecologists, romantic ‘Eurasianists’, nostalgic conservationists and anti‐Chinese xenophobes turned the road into a political hot potato. This case study, in which production and investment are the focus on the Chinese side and environmental protection is key on the Russian side of the border, shows the inadequacy of approaches that pit global capital/international (read: Western) organizations against local (read: non‐Western) resistance or adaptation. China's entry into the politics of international development may be a setback for development critics who have helped engineer a ‘cultural turn’ in institutions such as the World Bank.     

Russia's Europe, 1991–2016: inferiority to superiority

Russia defines itself as a Great Power in relation to Europe and the West. The first part of the article traces how, since 1991, a story about greatness centred on being part of contemporary European civilization has given way to a story of how Russia is great by being superior to a Europe that is now seen as rotten and decadent. The former story spelled cooperation with Europe and the West, where the latter spells confrontation. The second part argues that Russia's superiority complex is unsustainable. It is hard to see how, in the face of the formative structural pressure of the state system, Russia will be able to sustain its superiority complex. A state that does not order itself in such a way that it may either gain recognition as a Great Power by forcing its way and/or by being emulated by others, is unlikely to maintain that status. The costs of maintaining Great‐Power status without radical political and economic change seem to be increasing rapidly. If Russia wants to maintain its status, an about‐turn is needed. Such a turn may in itself be no solution, though, for if Russia does not do anything about the root causes of its perceived inferiority to Europe, then the Russian cyclical shifting from a Westernizing to a xenophobic stance will not be broken.     

Liberalism and nationalism in Russia. Boris Chicherin as a modernist nationalist

This article investigates the link between nationalism and liberalism in Russia by looking at the way the leading spokesman of early Russian liberalism, Boris Chicherin, combined liberal ideas with notions of nation‐building and the idea of the nation as a modernising phenomenon. The article argues that the young Chicherin, at least in the formative years of the 1850s, had an instrumental approach to liberalism. Liberalism served a specific purpose – to integrate the people and shape a community of active citizens so that Russia could modernise. Chicherin was concerned with the formation of a modern nation‐state rather than the establishment of popular rule or political rights. In this sense, his thinking fits well into what, in the context of the Ottoman Empire, has been called modernist nationalism.     

Imperial versus National Discourse: The Case of Russia

Abstract. It is inaccurate and misleading to apply the term ‘nationalism’ to Russia prior to the present day. Both Tsarist and Soviet leaders sought to maintain an empire and not a nation‐state, and their national consciousness was imperial rather than national. The lack of Russian nationalism was crucial for Russian history since it explains the failure of both Tsarist Russia and the Soviet Union. Modern societies cannot be successfully constructed upon the basis of imperial thinking. The absence of Russian nationalism also has significance for nationalism theory. Russia possessed the social, political and cultural characteristics that have been adduced as ‘causes’ of nationalism by a wide variety of scholars, yet Russia failed to develop a nationalist movement. This suggests that what is crucial to modem nationalism is the appearance of a particularist, secular ideology, since the most notable aspect in which Russia differed from Europe was Russia's universalistic, religious and imperialist discourse of national identity.     

Wild Boar (Sus scrofa) Teeth from a Female Burial in Yuzhniy Oleniy Ostrov,Northwestern Russia (c. 6200 cal BC) – Local Rarities or Transported Goods?

Tooth pendants of European elk, Eurasian beaver and brown bear are the most common artefact type in graves at Late Mesolithic Yuzhniy Oleniy Ostrov on Lake Onega, northwestern Russia. In one burial of a 20-35-year-old woman, 18 fragments of wild boar tooth pendants from at least five individuals were found. Wild boar was not a regular part of local fauna in the Mesolithic, and if these wild boars were hunted locally, they were very unusual game. These wild boar tooth pendants may also represent imported goods that came to Onega from a more southern area via exchange. It is also possible that the woman was not local but came from a region where wild boars were abundant and common game for Mesolithic people.     

Writing sex and sexuality: archives of colonial North India

This article focuses on disparate sites and subjects to reflect on and problematize the relationship between sexuality and the archives in colonial north India. I dwell on how ‘recalcitrant’ and hidden histories of sexuality can be gleaned by not only expanding our arenas of archives, but also by decentering and recasting colonial archives. I do so by specifically investigating some of the “indigenous” writings in Hindi, through texts concerning homosexuality, sex manuals, the writings of a woman ayurvedic practitioner, didactic literature and its relationship to Dalit (outcaste) sexuality, and current popular Dalit literature and its representations of the past. The debate for me here is not about the flaws of archival uses but rather of playing one archive against another, of appropriating many parallel, alternative, official, and popular archives simultaneously to shape a more nuanced and layered understanding of sexuality.     

Alternative identity,alternative religion? Neo‐paganism and the Aryan myth in contemporary Russia

ABSTRACT. As in all post‐Soviet states, the Russian intelligentsia has been preoccupied with the construction of a new national identity since the beginning of the 1990s. Although the place of Orthodox religion in Russia is well documented, the subject of neo‐paganism and its consequent assertion of an Aryan identity for Russians remains little known. Yet specialists observing the political and intellectual life of contemporary Russia have begun to notice that the development of references to ‘Slavic paganism’ and to Russia's ‘Aryan’ origin can be found in the public speeches of some politicians and intellectual figures. This article will attempt, in its first section, to depict the historical depth of these movements by examining the existence of neo‐pagan and/or Aryan referents in Soviet culture, and focusing on how these discourses developed in different spheres of post‐Soviet Russian society, such as those of religion, historiography, and politics.     

Russia's European policy under Medvedev: how sustainable is a new compromise?

This article argues that Dmitry Medvedev's term in office, despite the continuity in Russia's foreign policy objectives, brought about a certain change in Russia's relations with the European Union and the countries of the Common Neighbourhood. The western perceptions of Russia as a resurgent power able to use energy as leverage vis‐à‐vis the EU were challenged by the global economic crisis, the emergence of a buyer's market in Europe's gas trade, Russia's inability to start internal reforms, and the growing gap in the development of Russia on the one hand and China on the other. As a result, the balance of self‐confidence shifted in the still essentially stagnant EU–Russian relationship. As before, Moscow is ready to use all available opportunities to tighten its grip on the post‐Soviet space, but it is less keen to go into an open conflict when important interests of EU member states may be affected. The realization is slowly emerging also inside Russia that it is less able either to intimidate or attract European actors, even though it can still appeal to their so‐called ‘pragmatic interests’, both transparent and non‐transparent. At the same time, whereas the new modus operandi may be suboptimal from the point of view of those in the country who would want Russia's policy to be aimed at the restoration of global power status, it is the one that the Kremlin can live with—also after the expected return of Vladimir Putin as Russia's president. Under the current scheme, the West—and the EU in particular—does little to challenge Russia's internal order and leaves it enough space to conduct its chosen course in the former Soviet Union.