Everyday Post-Socialism

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xxvii

   PDF

2. Spaces and Places

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 1-1

      PDF

   2. Introduction: The ‘Worthless’ Dowry of Soviet Industrial Modernity

      • Jeremy Morris

      Pages 3-51

   3. Blue-Collar Personhood After the Factory

      • Jeremy Morris

      Pages 53-85

   4. Informal Economy: Going Underground but Coming Out of the Shadows

      • Jeremy Morris

      Pages 87-121

   5. A Woman’s Kingdom? Affect, Care and Regendering Labour

      • Jeremy Morris

      Pages 123-148

3. Unhomely Presents: Uncertain Futures

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 149-149

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   2. Unhomely Presents: Trauma and Values of Endurance Among Older People

      • Jeremy Morris

      Pages 151-188

   3. No Country for Young Men: Encountering Neoliberalism in Transnational Corporations

      • Jeremy Morris

      Pages 189-211

4. On Personhoods in Place

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 213-213

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   2. Intimate Ethnography and Cross-Cultural Research

      • Jeremy Morris

      Pages 215-231

   3. Conclusions: Making Habitable Lives in Small-Town Russia

      • Jeremy Morris

      Pages 233-248

5. Back Matter

   Pages 249-261

   PDF

This book offers a rich ethnographic account of blue-collar workers’ everyday life in a central Russian industrial town coping with simultaneous decline and the arrival of transnational corporations. Everyday Post-Socialism demonstrates how people manage to remain satisfied, despite the crisis and relative poverty they faced after the fall of socialist projects and the social trends associated with neoliberal transformation. Morris shows the ‘other life’ in today’s Russia which is not present in mainstream academic discourse or even in the media in Russia itself. This book offers co-presence and a direct understanding of how the local community lives a life which is not only bearable, but also preferable and attractive when framed in the categories of ‘habitability’, commitment and engagement, and seen in the light of alternative ideas of worth and specific values. Topics covered include working-class identity, informal economy, gender relations and transnational corporations.

• Russia
• informal economy
• labour
• habitability
• deindustrialization
• social class
• everyday life
• work
• post-industrial
• anthropology
• Post-Soviet
• blue-collar work
• transnational corporation
• industry
• poverty
• identity
• working class
• russian and post-soviet politics

“Morris’s ethnographic approach is an immersive one. … this book can confidently be placed on undergraduate and graduate reading lists for courses that relate to contemporary Russia and its recent past across many different disciplines, as well as general courses on comparative post-socialism or informal practices.” (Mark B. Smith, Slavonic and East European Review SEER, Vol. 97 (2), April, 2019)

• University of Birmingham, UK , Birmingham, United Kingdom

  Jeremy Morris

Jeremy Morris is Co-director of the Centre for Russian, European and Eurasian Studies (CREES) at the University of Birmingham, UK. A disciplinary pluralist, his research aims to capture the actually lived experience of neoliberal and post-socialist transformation in Russia. He is co-editor of The Informal Post-Socialist Economy (2014) and Informal Economies in Post-Socialist Spaces(Palgrave, 2015).

 

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