Announcing the release of a new monograph on gifts, time, and leaders
Nikolai Ssorin-Chaikov
Two Lenins: A Brief Anthropology of Time
170 pp. | 6x9 | $25.00 USD |
http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/T/bo26330975.html
In the year of the 100th anniversary of the Soviet revolution, we are delighted to announce a gem of a short monograph on gifts, time, and leaders. Two Lenins is the first book-length anthropological examination of how social reality can be organized around different yet concurrent ideas of time. Why, the book asks, is a singular notion of time insufficient for understanding a given ethnographic reality? The scope of the book is theoretical, yet it is grounded in ethnographic and historical material on Lenin. The Two Lenins of the book title refers to a multiple figure embodied in the two main characters and protagonists of this monograph. The first is the Soviet leader, whom readers will see receiving gifts from American businessman Armand Hammer in early 1920s. The second is a Siberian Evenki hunter who is nicknamed “Lenin” and who improvizes postsocialism in the economic and political uncertainties of post-Soviet transition. Although the material of the book covers the locations from Moscow to Siberia and New York, and the periods of the 1920s, 1960s, and 1990s, the book is neither a study in global history and anthropology nor a “crosstemporal comparison,” but an ethnographic study of the very category of time that we use to bridge different historical contexts.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments ix
List of figures xi
chapter 1 “You will be as Gods” 1
chapter 2 Lenin and the combined fodder 19
chapter 3 An American in Moscow 39
chapter 4 Time for the field diary 69
chapter 5 Hobbes’ gift 95
chapter 6 Modernity as time 121
References 131
Index
Praise for Two Lenins
What time is it? Many. In this incandescent book, we learn that time is always composite, a
relation among things, made of conflicting simultaneities, teleologies, and eternities. Working
through the timely and untimely worlds of 1920s Soviet Russia and 1990s indigenous Siberia,
Ssorin-Chaikov delivers a dazzling brief for how exchanges among market, gift, and state
time have made modernity itself.
Stefan Helmreich (MIT), author of Sounding the limits of life: Essays in the anthropology of biology and beyond
Two Lenins is an ethnographically rich work on comparative exchange and temporalities within and across the hidden interfaces between the realm of bureaucracy (represented by Lenin, the Soviet leader) and the life of the people in remote regions (a Siberian hunter named Lenin). This is an exemplary work towards the development of a comparative anthropology of the formal sectors in their historical and local agency.
Jane Guyer (Johns Hopkins University), author of Legacies, logics, logistics: Essays in the anthropology of the platform economy
Ssorin-Chaikov brilliantly updates an old set of anthropological topics, the multiplicity of social times and the moral economy of exchange. Scaling down from the chronotopes of high Soviet modernity to the everyday lives of Evenki hunters (and their ethnographers) in its aftermath, he provides a nuanced perspective on the politics of time, the nature of Modernity, and the deep imbrication of gift, credit and theft in the making and unmaking of socialist worlds.
Stephan Palmié (University of Chicago), author of The cooking of history: How not to study Afro-Cuban religion
This is a highly original book. It presents an engaging plot made of three different events, places and times: the first takes place in Siberia, by the mid-1990s, and involves a director of a collective farm and an Evenki man, curiously nicknamed Lenin. The second is the story of the encounter of the true Lenin with an American businessman in the early 1920s. The last is the author’s own fieldwork. These three events are skillfully woven together, and discussed within a strong theoretical argument. A great achievement.
Carlos Fausto (Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro), author of Warfare and shamanism in Amazonia
Call for Short Monographs
HAU Books is delighted to launch its third international competition for manuscript proposals for new, state-of-the-art short monographsin anthropology. Proposals selected for publication will be published open access in the Malinowski Monographs series, on Hau Books’ website (haubooks.org) in addition to being printed and distributed in hard copy via the University of Chicago Press. The Malinowski Monographs is one of the last anthropology series in Europe publishing titles in paperback only.
In tribute to the foundational, yet productively contentious, nature of the ethnographic imagination in anthropology, this series honors the creator of the term “ethnographic theory” himself. Monographs included in this series represent unique contributions to anthropology and showcase groundbreaking work that contributes to the emergence of new ethnographically-inspired theories or challenge the way the “ethnographic” is conceived today.
Manuscript proposals may be submitted for short monographs (30,000 - 50,000 words) aimed to develop key concepts or themes of increased relevance (borders, voice, fitness, mistrust, gambling, nonreligion, sincerity, boredom, friendship, anonymity, inequality, austerity) or critique classic categories of anthropological theory (magic, gifts, money, imagination, bureaucracy, play, belief, ethnography).
Manuscript proposals should include:
• Author’s name, email, affiliation, and a short biography.
• A description of the manuscript (1000 words in length), including a working title, proposed aims and scope, and estimated total word count.
• A description of the work’s potential audience and market niche.
Proposals should be as precise as possible, and should meet the following criteria:
• Short-listed authors must ensure that full-length manuscripts will be delivered on schedule (July 2018 or earlier), will accord to Hau’s style-guidelines, and will be blinded for further review.
• Proposals should contain clear evidence that the resulting monograph, if selected, will be authoritative and will meet the highest academic standards.
• Proposals or manuscripts should not be under consideration for publication elsewhere.
• Works of fiction, guest-edited volumes, and unsolicited full-length manuscripts will not be considered.
On the basis of the manuscript proposals received, the Editorial Board of HAU Books will select a shortlist for further consideration, and will notify authors to submit a full manuscript for review. Final reports will be evaluated by the Editor and selected members of the Editorial Board and monographs will then be nominated for publication.
Proposals should be submitted by 15 December 2017
Complete manuscripts will be required by 31 July 2018
Please submit proposals to Katharine Herman, Managing Editor at [log in to unmask] For further details on the book series please contact the Editor at [log in to unmask]
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