Resource Rent from the Oil and Gas Sector and the Russian Economy

Three specialists on Russia's oil and gas sector examine the process whereby resource rent has been extracted from oil and gas production and distributed within the Soviet (and later Russian) economy. A particular focus is on changes in the way such rent now is collected and allocated to different levels of the territorial-administrative hierarchy as a result of a transition from command to market economic relations. Special attention is devoted to the introduction of new taxation regimes and other mechanisms of rent extraction and redistribution. 4 tables, 42 references.     

The Concept of Truth in the Komi Hunting Stories

Abstract

We analyse the Komi hunters' story-telling as the integrated way of knowledge transmission and communicating vernacular beliefs. We intend to demonstrate that although vernacular beliefs regulating hunting story-telling are widespread in the North, local practices enable us to reveal peculiarities of the tradition in a nuanced way. Our study is based on annual collaborative fieldwork trips to the Komi hunters, which began in 1996. During these years, we have recorded tens of hours of hunting stories and background data for the topic. Analysis of this material is based on the concept of vernacular mimetic mode of representation. We revealed that the Komi narrators communicate hunting skills and magical beliefs in the process of story-telling. The notion of “truth” is an important conceptual device that frames the story-telling practice. We discuss the Komi hunting narratives using an interpretation of vernacular ideology that we label the “aesthetics of confusion”. We will argue that in the vernacular understanding of hunting narratives, the Komi have a seemingly ambivalent and fluid, but at the same time strict, approach to the poetics of story-telling.     

KAUP 2014: ARCHAEOLOGICAL EXCAVATIONS & RESEARCH HISTORY

The article is a report on field activities of 2014 at a renowned location of Kaup forest near Wiskiauten/Viskiautai, nowadays Kaliningrad oblast of Russia, and a sentimental journey through the research history in a region at the crossroads of ancient communication webs, and more recently – of diverse political agendas. Field activities focused on the so‐called Barrow 1, the only known mound at Kaup dated to the Neolithic, otherwise dotted with burials of the Viking Age. It was an attempt to reconstruct barrow architecture, which has resulted in a deconstruction of previous views based on rather scarce excavation reports of the 19^th – early 20^th century. The Neolithic barrow of Kaup remains a unique testimony of the social complexity and spatial awareness of the early 3rd millennium BC when Europe was under the spell of the Corded Ware and other related cultural phenomena.     

The Tripolye culture: Centenary of research

The Tripolye culture of the sixth and fifth millennia B.P., which spread over the territory of what is today Ukraine and Moldova, holds a special place in the prehistoric archaeology of southeastern Europe. This major European culture of the Copper Age existed for about 1500 years and survived as a rudiment of painted pottery cultures until the beginning of the Bronze Age. Its archaeological embodiment is highly diverse, expressive, and distinctive. Forming the eastern fringe of the Balkan-Danube early farming cultures, the Tripofye culture came into close contact with the world of the nomadic steppe herders, and both influenced their culture and was, in turn, influenced by them. This article attempts to synthesize the Tripofye culture archaeology on the occasion of the recent centenary of its investigation.     

Das Tocqueville Problem: Individualism and Equality between Democracy in America and Ancient Regime

This article argues that there is a major inconsistency between Tocqueville's arguments about individualism and equality of conditions as described in his books Ancient Regime and the Revolution and Democracy in America. In the latter, which is the basis for conventional analysis of Tocqueville in America, individualism is taken as a spontaneously emerging feature of the modern, enlightened society, heralding the European future. In the Ancient Regime, however, leveling individualism is conceptualized as a by-product of the centralizing political dynamic of the modern European state, crushing all intermediate sources of social authority. If we accept this theory, America would be the last place one would expect to find individualism or equality, because the American institutions of a modern, centralized state were much weaker than in Europe, yet Tocqueville does look to the United States as such an example. It is argued in this article that the different genealogies of individualism developed by the French thinker cannot be satisfactorily reconciled; the alternative approach suggested here is to combine Tocqueville's analysis from Ancient Regime with modern historical research about early England and America which confirm them, making the analysis of individualism from Democracy in America largely superfluous.     

Provocation Versus Performativity: Launching la littérature coloniale française in 1909

In 1909, the colonial newspaper La Dépêche coloniale launched an enquiry entitled La Littérature coloniale de la France comparée à celle d'Angleterre. It was through this initiative that the idea of a ‘French colonial literature’ first caught wider public attention and generated polemics in literary circles and beyond. The aim of this article is to study the aesthetic and ideological agendas driving the enquiry and the polarised reactions it produced, from a sociological perspective inspired by Pierre Bourdieu's work. The author argues that La Dépêche coloniale's questionnaire encoded a set of assumptions designed to guide the answers and impose a vision of colonial literature, rather than elicit debate. One of the respondents, Pierre Mille (1864–1941), preferred provocation: in a piece published in a high-circulation daily Le Temps ahead of the results of La Dépêche coloniale's enquiry, he proclaimed Rudyard Kipling to be the model colonial author, only to conclude that French colonial literature was inexistent. The ensuing debate marked a watershed in the conceptualisation and the institutionalisation of French colonial literature, by setting in motion a process that would be brought to completion in the interwar period.     

Some Notes on the Biography of Maria Manasseina

A short note about the life and personality of Maria Manasseina (also known as Marie von Manassein, Marie de Manacéine), a Russian woman-doctor of the second half of the nineteenth century, a pioneer in biochemistry and experimental somnology.