Embedded Files
Ilya Gerasimov, Plebeian Modernity: Social Practices, Illegality, and the Urban Poor in Russia, 1906–1916 (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2018).
On the eve of the Great War, every big city in the world turned into a multicultural Babylon overwhelmed by little-educated migrants from the countryside, other cities, and countries. The Russian Empire was no exception. Until recently, the experiences of these people have been reconstructed based on interpretations by educated observers: journalists, legal experts, and scholars. This book provides an opportunity to bypass the mediation of the cultural elite, whose testimonies were predetermined by hegemonic discourses and cultural stereotypes of the time. It argues that we can reconstruct the authentic voices of urban commoners by reading their social practices as a nonverbal language of communication and self-representation. Covering the interrevolutionary decade of 1906–1916, and using criminality as the only well-documented venue of social activism of the lower classes, the book tells the story of the “silent majority” of urban inhabitants in four Russian imperial cities: Vilna (today Vilnius, Lithuania), Odessa (in today’s Ukraine), Kazan, and Nizhny Novgorod (in Russia). Typical social practices are reconstructed from several thousand individual interactions in four localities. The resulting picture represents the distinctive phenomenon of “plebeian modernity,” which shaped the outlook of early Soviet society.
Expanded Table of Contents:
Introduction. The Subalterns Speak Out: Gerasim and the Infamous
Chapter 1. Writing Degree Zero, and Beyond: Reading Social Practices between the Lines
A Late Imperial City as a Foreign Country
In the Language of Social Practices
Through the Prism of Newspaper Reports and Police Records
When Society Writes Back
Plebeian Society
Chapter 2. A Middle Volga City as the Middle Ground: Urban Plebeian Society in Late Imperial Russia in Search of a Common Sense
Multifaceted Diversity at the Core of Empire
When Crime Is Knowledge
Making Sense of Differences through Ethnicization of Politics
Ethnicity-Based Mutual Misunderstandings: Creative and Not
A Mistaken Identity: Between a “Social Persona” and Social Practices
Chapter 3. The Patriarchal Metropolis: Trespassing Social Barriers in Late Imperial Vilna
Vilna: Two Portraits of the City
Polizeimeister Deminskii and Prostitution: Performing Patriarchality in Late Imperial Russia
Prostitution: Beyond Sexuality
An Indecent Proposal: Breaching Social Boundaries
Patriarchality as a Melting Pot
Chapter 4. “‘We Only Kill Each Other”: The Anthropology of Deadly Violence and Contested Intergroup Boundaries
In struggle you will find your rights!
Violence as a demarcation of intercommunal boundaries
Violence as a vehicle for cooperation
Sexual violence
Chapter 5. The Transformative Social Experience of Illegality
I. The moral economy of economic crime: possible explanations
Trust
Rationality
Opportunism
Ethnicity
The norm and real life
II. Anomie and illegality
The erosion of the old social order by illegality
From illegal love to “mutual sympathy”
Epilogue. Gerasim in Power: A Plebeian Modernity
Weathering the Imperial Revolution
The Persistence of Illegality: “The Revolutionary Sense of Justice”
Lifesaving Practices, Deadly Discourse
Page updated
Google Sites
Report abuse