Winner of the 2020 Choice Review's Outstanding Academic Titles
This is well-conceived and well-written work of research that is addressed to researchers interested in the social life of Siberia and the Russian Far East. The book successfully meets the aim of contributing to the understanding of the concept lifestyle in the context of modernity and the people’s interaction with the most important social trends that have occurred during the Soviet and post-Soviet period.
—Prof. Dr. Ayse Dietrich, IJORS - International Journal of Russian Studies, N. 9/2, July 2020, available online.
This book draws on a wide range of theoretical perspectives – from Chaney and Bourdieu to Berger, Sontag and Bakhtin – and from ideas about nostalgia to theories of consumption, nation, and ethnicity. The ethnographic detail in each chapter is impressive, and in my view is the real core of the book. It is a resource which will be widely used by Russian, Soviet and postsocialist specialists, by anthropologists, sociologists and geographers, and by anyone interested in cultural studies, material culture and consumption, and place and ethnicity.
—Dr. Frances Pine, Goldsmiths, University of London
Lifestyle in Siberia and the Russian North breaks new ground by exploring the concept of lifestyle from a distinctly anthropological perspective. Showcasing the collective work of ten experienced scholars in the field, the book goes beyond concepts of tradition that have often been the focus of previous research, to explain how political, economic and technological changes in Russia have created a wide range of new possibilities and constraints in the pursuit of different ways of life.
Each contribution is drawn from meticulous first-hand field research, and the authors engage with theoretical questions such as whether and how the concept of lifestyle can be extended beyond its conventionally urban, Euro-American context and employed in a markedly different setting. Lifestyle in Siberia and the Russian North builds on the contributors’ clear commitment to diversifying the field and providing a novel and intimate insight into this vast and dynamic region.
This book provides inspiring reading for students and teachers of Anthropology, Sociology and Cultural Studies and for anyone interested in Russia and its regions. By providing ethnographic case studies, it is also a useful basis for teaching anthropological methods and concepts, both at graduate and undergraduate level. Rigorous and innovative, it marks an important contribution to the study of Siberia and the Russian North.
Lifestyle in Siberia and the Russian North
Edited by Joachim Otto Habeck | November 2019
488 pp. | 52 color illustrations | 6.14" x 9.21" (234 x 156 mm)
ISBN Paperback: 9781783747177
ISBN Hardback: 9781783747184
ISBN Digital (PDF): 9781783747191
ISBN Digital ebook (epub): 9781783747207
ISBN Digital ebook (mobi): 9781783747214
ISBN Hardback: 9781783747184
ISBN Digital (PDF): 9781783747191
ISBN Digital ebook (epub): 9781783747207
ISBN Digital ebook (mobi): 9781783747214
ISBN XML: 9781783747221
DOI: 10.11647/OBP.0171
Subject codes: BIC: J (Society and social sciences), JH (Sociology and anthropology), JHMC (Social and cultural anthropology, ethnography), JFC (Cultural studies), 1DVUA (Russia); BISAC: SOC000000 (SOCIAL SCIENCE / General), SOC002000 (SOCIAL SCIENCE / Anthropology / General), SOC002010 (SOCIAL SCIENCE / Anthropology / Cultural & Social); OCLC Number: 1128978645.
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Note on transliteration
Notes on Contributors
Preface
- Introduction: Studying Lifestyle in Russia
Joachim Otto Habeck - Implications of Infrastructure and Technological Change for Lifestyles in Siberia
Dennis Zuev and Joachim Otto Habeck - Lifestyle and Creative Engagement with Rural Space in Northwest Russia
Masha Shaw (née Maria Nakhshina)
- Holiday Convergences, Holiday Divergences: Siberian Leisure Mobilities Under Late Socialism and After
Luděk Brož and Joachim Otto Habeck
- Spatial imaginaries and personal topographies in Siberian life stories: analysing movement and place in biographical narratives
Joseph J. Long
- Something like Happiness: Home Photography in the Inquiry of Lifestyles
Jaroslava Panáková
- Soviet Kul’tura in Post-Soviet Identification: The Aesthetics of Ethnicity in Sakha (Yakutia)
Eleanor Peers
- Ethnicity on the Move: National-Cultural Organisations in Siberia
Artem Rabogoshvili
- "We are not Playing Life, We Live Here”: Playful Appropriation of Ancestral Memory in a Youth Camp in Western Siberia
Ina Schröder
- A Taste for Play: Lifestyle and Live-Action Role-playing in Siberia and the Russian Far East
Tatiana Barchunova and Joachim Otto Habeck
Joachim Otto Habeck
Appendix: On Research Design and Methods
Joachim Otto Habeck and Jaroslava Panáková
Index
© 2019 Otto Habeck. Copyright of individual chapters is maintained by the chapters’ authors.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0). This license allows you to share, copy, distribute and transmit the text; to adapt the text and to make commercial use of the text providing attribution is made to the authors (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). Attribution should include the following information:
1. Introduction: Studying Lifestyle in Russia
Joachim Otto Habeck
Joachim Otto Habeck
This chapter introduces the key subjects of the book, and the research project underpinning it. It gives an outline of the chapters in the volume, before turning to an overview of the concept of lifestyle in sociological and anthropological literature. It then examines the regional context specific to lifestyle in Siberia, and then considers the concept of lifestyle in Russian social science literature. It closes with a presentation of the general insights obtained through the course of the research project.
2. Implications of Infrastructure and Technological Change for Lifestyles in Siberia
Dennis Zuev and Joachim Otto Habeck
Dennis Zuev and Joachim Otto Habeck
Chapter 2, by Dennis Zuev and Joachim Otto Habeck, paints a portrait of the technological and infrastructural changes that have taken place in our field research sites over the past forty years, and we highlight how these changes have had a bearing on individual perceptions of, and strategies for, travelling, communication, and photographic displays
3. Lifestyle and Creative Engagement with Rural Space in Northwest Russia
Masha Shaw (née Maria Nakhshina)
In Chapter 3, Masha Shaw takes readers to a remote village on the Kola Peninsula in northwest Russia. Inhabitants there have developed specific skills and strategies for overcoming the lack of predictable transport into and out of the village. The resulting isolation fosters creativity and enables individuals to pursue certain life projects that divert from or complement urban ones. Arguably more so than in urban areas, lifestyles in remote villages closely reflect collective practices of place-making.
4. Holiday Convergences, Holiday Divergences: Siberian Leisure Mobilities Under Late Socialism and After
Luděk Brož and Joachim Otto Habeck
Luděk Brož and Joachim Otto Habeck
Chapter 4, by Luděk Brož and Habeck, compares late-Soviet versus present-day expectations of holiday-making and the use of tourism infrastructure, with the aim of assessing the shifting norms of what is desired when one is away from home. Partly, these shifts involve new interpretations of ethnic difference as a resource in tourism, as the display of ethnic symbols gradually underwent a process of commodification. Additionally, tourism and travel are now motivated by ideas of self-fulfilment that markedly differ from those in earlier decades.
5.Spatial Imaginaries and Personal Topographies in Siberian Life Stories: Analysing Movement and Place in Biographical Narratives
Joseph J. Long
Joseph Long continues this line of inquiry in Chapter 5 on the basis of travel biography interviews conducted by himself and other research team members, examining the ways in which "home”, travel destinations, and collectively-held spatial imaginaries come to be woven together in personal topographies. Photo albums and travelogues highlight the value of personal topographies and trajectories in the expression of a specific identity and style.
6. Something like Happiness: Home Photography in the Inquiry of Lifestyles
Jaroslava Panáková
Jaroslava Panáková
In Chapter 6, Jaroslava Panáková discusses how aesthetic conventions and their visual expression are subject to sudden change inasmuch as notions of the self and the collective have undergone modification in the post-socialist period. In addition, she explicates the methodological benefits and challenges of photo elicitation, a method employed by all the contributors in their field researches.
7. Soviet Kul’tura in Post-Soviet Identification: The Aesthetics of Ethnicity in Sakha (Yakutia)
Eleanor Peers
Eleanor Peers
Chapter 7 continues the investigation of aesthetics: Eleanor Peers focuses on performance in a particular group of events, notably public celebrations, aesthetic expressions, and artwork. She analyses the development of lifestyles in late Soviet times with reference to Yurchak’s concept of svoi (communities of "ours”) and provides a careful description of ethnicity and kultur'nost' (which we translate as "culturedness” or cultivated behaviour) in Soviet and post-Soviet times.
8. Ethnicity on the Move: National-Cultural Organisations in Siberia
Artem Rabogoshvili
Artem Rabogoshvili
Chapter 8, by Artem Rabogoshvili, elucidates to what extent attendance at such events, either as a performer on the stage or "just” as a member of the audience, is itself an indicator of a lifestyle that draws explicitly on ethnic affiliation and ethnic symbols. Rabogoshvili investigates the workings of national-cultural organisations in the Baikal region, contrasting old and new diaspora groups, and analyses the different degrees of involvement of individual actors.
9. "We are not Playing Life, We Live Here": Playful Appropriation of Ancestral Memory in a Youth Camp in Western Siberia
Ina Schröder
Ina Schröder
In Chapter 9, Ina Schröder investigates the importance of youth camps in the foothills of the Urals for the enactment and transmission of indigenous culture; these camps aim to enable young people in remote villages to embrace traditional indigenous lifestyles in a positive way and to gain a higher level of self-confidence.
10. A Taste for Play: Lifestyle and Live-Action Role-playing in Siberia and the Russian Far East
Tatiana Barchunova and Joachim Otto Habeck
The protagonists of Chapter 10 (by Tatiana Barchunova and Habeck) are people who participate in live-action role-playing (LARP). Stylisation here is of great importance, in that attire and comportment are highly reflexive and intended to be taken as signifiers. Interestingly, the shift between the two modes of life – play versus ordinary life – usually requires some movement in space, and switching between these two modes is a form of mobility in its own right.
11. Conclusions
Joachim Otto Habeck
The volume closes with an update on current social trends in Russia and a summary of research findings .
The volume closes with an update on current social trends in Russia and a summary of research findings .