In-Formation

"Winner of the 2008 Anthony Leeds Prize in Urban Anthropology, Society for Urban, National, and Transnational/Global Anthropology" Xiang Biao is Academic Fellow at the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology and the Centre on Migration, Policy and Society at the University of Oxford. He is the author of Transcending Boundaries. How can America's information technology (IT) industry predict serious labor shortages while at the same time laying off tens of thousands of employees annually? The answer is the industry's flexible labor management system--a flexibility widely regarded as the modus operandi of global capitalism today. Global "Body Shopping" explores how flexibility and uncertainty in the IT labor market are constructed and sustained through concrete human actions. Drawing on in-depth field research in southern India and in Australia, and folding an ethnography into a political economy examination, Xiang Biao offers a richly detailed analysis of the India-based global labor management practice known as "body shopping." In this practice, a group of consultants--body shops--in different countries works together to recruit IT workers. Body shops then farm out workers to clients as project-based labor; and upon a project's completion they either place the workers with a different client or "bench" them to await the next placement. Thus, labor is managed globally to serve volatile capital movement. Underpinning this practice are unequal socioeconomic relations on multiple levels. While wealth in the New Economy is created in an increasingly abstract manner, everyday realities--stock markets in New York, benched IT workers in Sydney, dowries in Hyderabad, and women and children in Indian villages--sustain this flexibility. "Xiang Biao's book opens a fascinating window. . . . Although addressing a profoundly complex subject, it is intended to be read by people with little background in India or familiarity with the IT industry. Global 'Body Shopping' is an enjoyable and easy read, while offering a detailed and sophisticated critique of the unchallenged embrace of global capitalism. It deserves a wide readership among those with an interest in globalization studies and will be particularly useful for people desiring to find out more about ethnographic work that is global in scope."---Nanlai Cao, Pacific Journal of Anthropology "Xiang Biao's avowed goal at an analysis incorporating ethnography and political economic analysis has long been a requirement for scholars interested in the production and maintenance of transnational work and flexible labor. Global Body Shopping more than lives up to this ideal. . . . I strongly recommend this ethnography as essential reading for scholars interested in questions of globalization, transnationality, and flexible labor."---Mathangi Krishnamurthy, American Ethnologist "Xiang Biao tells the fascinating story of how body shopping brought globalization into the lives of hitherto minimally influenced rural youth and facilitated their movement into the highly volatile global arena of information technology . . . he has created a remarkably clear picture of a complex globally dispersed labor chain. . . . Not only does this innovative book provide a strong foundation for scholars interested in this under-researched global labor system, it is a great resource for teaching political and economic geography as well as courses exploring the various facets of globalization."---Monalisa Gangopadhyay, Political Geography "Xiang has produced what may well be the first contribution of a contemporary anthropologist from China to the ethnographic study of global issues. . . . The book is compact, lucid, and jargon-free, making it one of the most accessible ethnographies of how the global migration regime's shift towards temporary skilled labour is changing societies."---Nyíri Pál, Critique of Anthropology "The book provides an important corrective to analyses that ignore the lower end

Paul Rabinow is Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. His recent books include French DNA: Trouble in Purgatory, Essays on the Anthropology of Reason (Princeton), and Making PCR, A Story of Biotechnology. The discipline of anthropology is, at its best, characterized by turbulence, self-examination, and inventiveness. In recent decades, new thinking and practice within the field has certainly reflected this pattern, as shown for example by numerous fruitful ventures into the "politics and poetics" of anthropology. Surprisingly little attention, however, has been given to the simple insight that anthropology is composed of claims, whether tacit or explicit, about anthropos and about logos--and the myriad ways in which these two Greek nouns have been, might be, and should be, connected. Anthropos Today represents a pathbreaking effort to fill this gap. Paul Rabinow brings together years of distinguished work in this magisterial volume that seeks to reinvigorate the human sciences. Specifically, he assembles a set of conceptual tools--"modern equipment"--to assess how intellectual work is currently conducted and how it might change. Anthropos Today crystallizes Rabinow's previous ethnographic inquiries into the production of truth about life in the world of biotechnology and genome mapping (and his invention of new ways of practicing this pursuit), and his findings on how new practices of life, labor, and language have emerged and been institutionalized. Here, Rabinow steps back from empirical research in order to reflect on the conceptual and ethical resources available today to conduct such inquiries. Drawing richly on Foucault and many other thinkers including Weber and Dewey, Rabinow concludes that a "contingent practice" must be developed that focuses on "events of problematization." Brilliantly synthesizing insights from American, French, and German traditions, he offers a lucid, deeply learned, original discussion of how one might best think about anthropos today. "This is an immensely stimulating, riveting work: erudite but highly accessible, wideranging in its curiosity and readings, but coherent. A remarkably mature performance that synthesizes many strands of Rabinow's thought over his career, it speaks articulately to the discontents and predicaments of the present."-George Marcus, Rice University, author of Ethnography through Thick and Thin "A tour de force. Rabinow's book is pathbreaking. It is quite original (and I don't use that word lightly) and promises to bring fundamental changes not only in anthropology in particular but in the human sciences more generally. The writing sparkles with wit, erudition borne with grace, phrases sparingly but uncommonly turned, and, above all, clarity never compromised."-E. Valentine Daniel, Columbia University, author of Charred Lullabies

"Winner of the 2003 Diana Forsythe Prize, American Anthropological Association" Cori Hayden is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley and Research Fellow in Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge. Bioprospecting--the exchange of plants for corporate promises of royalties or community development assistance--has been lauded as a way to develop new medicines while offering southern nations and indigenous communities an incentive to preserve their rich biodiversity. But can pharmaceutical profits really advance conservation and indigenous rights? How much should companies pay and to whom? Who stands to gain and lose? The first anthropological study of the practices mobilized in the name and in the shadow of bioprospecting, this book takes us into the unexpected sites where Mexican scientists and American companies venture looking for medicinal plants and local knowledge. Cori Hayden tracks bioprospecting's contentious new promise--and the contradictory activities generated in its name. Focusing on a contract involving Mexico's National Autonomous University, Hayden examines the practices through which researchers, plant vendors, rural collectors, indigenous cooperatives, and other actors put prospecting to work. By paying unique attention to scientific research, she provides a key to understanding which people and plants are included in the promise of "selling biodiversity to save it"--and which are not. And she considers the consequences of linking scientific research and rural "enfranchisement" to the logics of intellectual property. Roving across UN protocols, botanical collecting histories, Mexican nationalist agendas, neoliberal property regimes, and North-South relations, When Nature Goes Public charts the myriad, emergent publics that drive and contest the global market in biodiversity and its futures. "This is an innovative and fascinating study that powerfully illustrates what the new generation of anthropologists trained in science studies can do. Using a combination of textual, historical, and above all ethnographic methodology, Hayden has produced a thought-provoking analysis of bio-prospecting as it plays out in real time. Her energetic writing and strong story line make this a compelling book."-Rayna Rapp, New York University "Skillfully negotiating politically charged terrain, When Nature Goes Public challenges romantic views of biodiversity and the associated reification of local communities. In so doing, Cori Hayden illustrates how the science of plant genetic resources and the markets for them emerge as contingent products of specific cultural and political practices. With admirable critical balance, she explores the shifting and unpredictable lines between private rights and public properties in global environmental politics and illustrates the law of unintended consequences at work in neoliberal efforts to value indigenous knowledge."-Rosemary J. Coombe, York University

Celia Lowe is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Washington. Wild Profusion tells the fascinating story of biodiversity conservation in Indonesia in the decade culminating in the great fires of 1997-98--a time when the country's environment became a point of concern for social and environmental activists, scientists, and the many fishermen and farmers nationwide who suffered from degraded environments and faced accusations that they were destroying nature. Celia Lowe argues that biodiversity, in 1990s Indonesia, implied a particular convergence of nature, nation, science, and identity that made Indonesians' mapping of the concept distinct within transnational practices of nature conservation at the time. Lowe recounts the efforts of Indonesian biologists to document the species of the Togean Islands, to "develop" Togean people, and to turn this archipelago off the coast of Sulawesi into a national park. Indonesian scientists aspired to a conservation biology that was both internationally recognizable and politically effective in the Indonesian context. Simultaneously, Lowe describes the experiences of Togean Sama people who had their own understandings of nature and nation. To place Sama and scientist into the same conceptual frame, Lowe studies Sama ideas in the context of transnational thought rather than local knowledge. In tracking the practice of conservation biology in a postcolonial setting, Wild Profusion explores what in nature can count as important and for whom. "Wild Profusion is a beautifully crafted ethnography of natures in the making in the Togean Islands of Indonesia. Through lively prose and a brilliantly executed analytics of power, Lowe takes the reader into the complex world of biodiversity conservation in action. Along the way, we meet Indonesian scientists who promote national development projects and negotiate their relations to Euro-American conservation experts, Togean subjects who struggle to assert their own place in the landscape of biodiversity knowledge, and all of the flora and fauna brought to stunning visibility in the dream world of a national park. Lowe also provides us with a bold philosophical meditation on questions of universalism and the particular, the natural and the social, the nation and the colony. Wild Profusion will quickly emerge as a classic text in the new ethnography of conservation science and contested environmentalisms."-Ralph Litzinger, Duke University "This is an extraordinary book: both eloquent and elegantly argued. It presents a clear and compelling argument about 'reason' at the boundaries of the West, and striking portraits of scientists and lay people working at this boundary."-Anna L. Tsing, University of California, Santa Cruz, author of Friction and In the Realm of the Diamond Queen

"Joint Winner of the 2008 Wellcome Medal for Medical Anthropology, Royal Anthropological Institute and the Wellcome Trust" "Winner of the 2008 Diana Forsythe Prize, American Anthropological Association" João Biehl is professor of anthropology at Princeton University. Torben Eskerod is an artist and freelance photographer based in Copenhagen. The two also collaborated on the award-winning book Vita: Life in a Zone of Social Abandonment. Will to Live tells how Brazil, against all odds, became the first developing country to universalize access to life-saving AIDS therapies--a breakthrough made possible by an unexpected alliance of activists, government reformers, development agencies, and the pharmaceutical industry. But anthropologist João Biehl also tells why this policy, hailed as a model worldwide, has been so difficult to implement among poor Brazilians with HIV/AIDS, who are often stigmatized as noncompliant or untreatable, becoming invisible to the public. More broadly, Biehl examines the political economy of pharmaceuticals that lies behind large-scale treatment rollouts, revealing the possibilities and inequalities that come with a magic bullet approach to health care. By moving back and forth between the institutions shaping the Brazilian response to AIDS and the people affected by the disease, Biehl has created a book of unusual vividness, scope, and detail. At the core of Will to Live is a group of AIDS patients--unemployed, homeless, involved with prostitution and drugs--that established a makeshift health service. Biehl chronicled the personal lives of these people for over ten years and Torben Eskerod represents them here in more than one hundred stark photographs. Ethnography, social medicine, and art merge in this unique book, illuminating the care and agency needed to extend life amid perennial violence. Full of lessons for the future, Will to Live promises to have a lasting influence in the social sciences and in the theory and practice of global public health. "Biehl's powerful ethnography beautifully mixes visual and written portraits of those who lived and died as Brazil developed its public health and policy responses to AIDS. The author gives voice to those at the margins--the poor, the homeless, homosexuals, drug addicts, transvestites, prostitutes--who remained stigmatized and invisible as Brazil universalized access to AIDS therapies. . . . Biehl convincingly argues the importance of understanding the history and politics of AIDS pharmaceuticalization, the role of social mobilization, and the invisibility of the marginalized in official statistics and care in grasping the reality of AIDS in Brazil."---E.J. Schatz, Choice "In Will to Live, João Biehl combines critical public health, ethnography, and even a mini epidemiological survey, studying AIDS therapies up, down, and sideways. . . . The running commentary from major decision-makers in the novel Brazilian approach to AIDS provides both insights and rather transparent post facto justifications for the state's regulatory practices. These are nicely complemented by activist and patient critiques throughout the text."---Matthew Gutmann, American Ethnologist "Biehl's ethnography is already a paradigmatic example of how transformations in subjectivities and social experience can be investigated at all levels: personal, social, political, and global. The book is also exceptional, while describing in fruitful ways, complex interconnections that might occur within and across levels of lived experience. . . . I strongly recommend this book to all those interested in pursuing anthropological investigations emphasizing the conceptual significance of lived experience through 'experience-near' analyses and 'thick description.'"---Cristina Redko, Ethos "[João Biehl's] book is important for understanding a complex public health program in a developing country. It is well written; the chapter that contains patients' testimonies is particularly emotional

"Winner of the 2005 Diana Forsythe Prize, American Anthropological Association" Joseph Dumit is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Science & Technology Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is a coeditor of Cyborgs & Citadels and Cyborg Babies and Associate Editor of the journal Culture, Medicine & Psychiatry. By showing us the human brain at work, PET (positron emission tomography) scans are subtly--and sometimes not so subtly--transforming how we think about our minds. Picturing Personhood follows this remarkable and expensive technology from the laboratory into the world and back. It examines how PET scans are created and how they are being called on to answer myriad questions with far-reaching implications: Is depression an observable brain disease? Are criminals insane? Do men and women think differently? Is rationality a function of the brain? Based on interviews, media analysis, and participant observation at research labs and conferences, Joseph Dumit analyzes how assumptions designed into and read out of the experimental process reinforce specific notions about human nature. Such assumptions can enter the process at any turn, from selecting subjects and mathematical models to deciding which images to publish and how to color them. Once they leave the laboratory, PET scans shape social debates, influence courtroom outcomes, and have positive and negative consequences for people suffering mental illness. Dumit follows this complex story, demonstrating how brain scans, as scientific objects, contribute to our increasing social dependence on scientific authority. The first book to examine the cultural ramifications of brain-imaging technology, Picturing Personhood is an unprecedented study that will influence both cultural studies and the growing field of science and technology studies. "Picturing Personhood is one of the few visual-culture studies freed from lame textbook generalizations and predictable criticism. . . . Given that brain imaging is on its way to becoming a decisive factor in the technologies of social control and selection, it is a question of political awareness to study the latest step in the conversion of human beings into visual information."---Tom Holert, Bookforum "Dumit's highly original oral history of how PET was developed and his cultural readings of how it is now being used are chock full of fascinating materials and insights. Among its many strengths, this intriguing book is itself highly interdisciplinary. It enables readers to see how powerful new scientific images constantly collapse into and condense old philosophical dilemmas."-Rayna Rapp, New York University "Ethnographic work on new medical technologies is rare and has an important contribution to make to debates about changing ideas of the body and about the role of medical knowledge in society. Picturing Personhood provides a timely, clear, and useful introduction to the problems and dilemmas of the production and use of PET scanning. It is undoubtedly a key contribution to our understanding of the social impacts of a technology that will become increasingly significant in many settings in the next decade."-Nikolas Rose, London School of Economics

"Winner of the 2009 Best Book on Brazil in English, Brazil Section of the Latin American Studies Association" "Co-Winner of the 2010 BRASA Roberto Reis Book Prize by the Brazilian Studies Association" "Winner of the 2009 Leeds Honor Book, Society for Urban, National, and Transnational/Global Anthropology of the American Anthropological Association" James Holston is professor of anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of The Modernist City and the editor of Cities and Citizenship. Insurgent citizenships have arisen in cities around the world. This book examines the insurgence of democratic citizenship in the urban peripheries of São Paulo, Brazil, its entanglement with entrenched systems of inequality, and its contradiction in violence. James Holston argues that for two centuries Brazilians have practiced a type of citizenship all too common among nation-states--one that is universally inclusive in national membership and massively inegalitarian in distributing rights and in its legalization of social differences. But since the 1970s, he shows, residents of Brazil's urban peripheries have formulated a new citizenship that is destabilizing the old. Their mobilizations have developed not primarily through struggles of labor but through those of the city--particularly illegal residence, house building, and land conflict. Yet precisely as Brazilians democratized urban space and achieved political democracy, violence, injustice, and impunity increased dramatically. Based on comparative, ethnographic, and historical research, Insurgent Citizenship reveals why the insurgent and the entrenched remain dangerously conjoined as new kinds of citizens expand democracy even as new forms of violence and exclusion erode it. Rather than view this paradox as evidence of democratic failure and urban chaos, Insurgent Citizenship argues that contradictory realizations of citizenship characterize all democracies--emerging and established. Focusing on processes of city- and citizen-making now prevalent globally, it develops new approaches for understanding the contemporary course of democratic citizenship in societies of vastly different cultures and histories. "Holston's topic in this impressive study on unequal citizenship is the contrast between Brazil's formal, legal equality and the reality that it is a society founded on civic and juridical inequalities."---J.M. Rosenthal, Choice "Insurgent Citizenship will provoke vigorous debate. But Holston has set the terms for such debate with force and intelligence, and his book will surely be an enduring touchstone for scholars of law, social movements, and urban development."---Brodwyn Fischer, American Anthropologist "Through a masterful blending of history and ethnography, James Holston offers his readers an innovative and compelling way to think about citizenship in Brazil and elsewhere. Insurgent Citizenship shows how, historically, the category of 'citizen' in Brazilian society has been subject to differential rights and subtle gradations that have forced many people who enjoy formal citizenship to resort to illegal arrangements to survive. Perhaps most important, Holston analyzes the struggles of insurgent movements in Brazil's urban 'peripheries' not only to claim inclusion but to reshape the very meaning of citizenship."-Barbara Weinstein, New York University "James Holston has written a landmark book. In this multilayered study, Holston has written an explosive history of modern citizenship. The implications of his work provide fresh insights in Brazilian democracy and its limitations-and suggest ways in which, in fact, Brazil may not be so unique in a world of legalized privileges and legitimated inequalities. A monumental achievement of engaged scholarship."-Jeremy Adelman, author of Sovereignty and Revolution in the Iberian Atlantic "This is a major book, and should provoke significant debate among Brazilianists and beyond. Holston offers a th

Jenny Reardon is Assistant Research Professor of Women's Studies and Institute of Genome Sciences and Policy Scholar at Duke University.. In the summer of 1991, population geneticists and evolutionary biologists proposed to archive human genetic diversity by collecting the genomes of "isolated indigenous populations." Their initiative, which became known as the Human Genome Diversity Project, generated early enthusiasm from those who believed it would enable huge advances in our understanding of human evolution. However, vocal criticism soon emerged. Physical anthropologists accused Project organizers of reimporting racist categories into science. Indigenous-rights leaders saw a "Vampire Project" that sought the blood of indigenous people but not their well-being. More than a decade later, the effort is barely off the ground. How did an initiative whose leaders included some of biology's most respected, socially conscious scientists become so stigmatized? How did these model citizen-scientists come to be viewed as potential racists, even vampires? This book argues that the long abeyance of the Diversity Project points to larger, fundamental questions about how to understand knowledge, democracy, and racism in an age when expert claims about genomes increasingly shape the possibilities for being human. Jenny Reardon demonstrates that far from being innocent tools for fighting racism, scientific ideas and practices embed consequential social and political decisions about who can define race, racism, and democracy, and for what ends. She calls for the adoption of novel conceptual tools that do not oppose science and power, truth and racist ideologies, but rather draw into focus their mutual constitution. "In science and medicine the category of race has not merely survived, it has flourished. In this post-human genome era, it serves as an essential organizing concept for research and presentation of data. How race managed to overcome its past, why it continues to be used, and what the implications are for both science and society, are the subjects of Jenny Reardon's smart, informative, and aptly titled book."---David J. Rothman and Sheila M. Rothman, The New Republic "Reardon has written a valuable book . . . Although Reardon does not provide the story of the HGDP, she offers a useful story of the problems that effort faced."---Henry T. Greely, Science "In this gracefully written, subtle, and thorough account of a failed scientific endeavor, Jenny Reardon effectively accomplishes several important goals. First, she tells a fascinating story of how a well-intentioned scientific effort to explore the diversity of the human species foundered on the shoals of controversy that sprung in part from the fundamental inability of scientists to apprehend the sociopolitical world in which their efforts were situated. Second, she illuminates her analysis with a theoretical perspective that emphasizes the simultaneous 'co-production' of social order and natural order. Third, Reardon is at the cutting edge of new work on race and science that seeks to understand the complex role of new sciences such as genetics in the remaking of racial classifications, identities, and politics. She does all this with impressive clarity, never losing sight of the appeal of the story itself."-Steven Epstein, University of California, San Diego, author of Impure Science: AIDS, Activism, and the Politics of Knowledge "This book ranks as the seminal history of the Human Genome Diversity Project. Jenny Reardon tells an entertaining and enlightening story of the very social and political field of human diversity research."-Alan H. Goodman, President-Elect, American Anthropological Association, editor of Genetic Nature/Culture

Nikolas Rose is James Martin White Professor of Sociology and Director of the BIOS Centre for the Study of Bioscience, Biomedicine, Biotechnology and Society at the London School of Economics and Political Science. His books include The Psychological Complex, Governing the Soul, Inventing Our Selves, and Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political Thought. For centuries, medicine aimed to treat abnormalities. But today normality itself is open to medical modification. Equipped with a new molecular understanding of bodies and minds, and new techniques for manipulating basic life processes at the level of molecules, cells, and genes, medicine now seeks to manage human vital processes. The Politics of Life Itself offers a much-needed examination of recent developments in the life sciences and biomedicine that have led to the widespread politicization of medicine, human life, and biotechnology. Avoiding the hype of popular science and the pessimism of most social science, Nikolas Rose analyzes contemporary molecular biopolitics, examining developments in genomics, neuroscience, pharmacology, and psychopharmacology and the ways they have affected racial politics, crime control, and psychiatry. Rose analyzes the transformation of biomedicine from the practice of healing to the government of life; the new emphasis on treating disease susceptibilities rather than disease; the shift in our understanding of the patient; the emergence of new forms of medical activism; the rise of biocapital; and the mutations in biopower. He concludes that these developments have profound consequences for who we think we are, and who we want to be. "This book offers a much-needed examination of recent developments that have led to the widespread politicization of medicine, human life, and biotechnology. . . . Nikolas Rose concludes that these developments have profound consequences for who we think we are, and who we want to be." "From tattoos to organ transplants, cosmetic surgery to circumcision, obsessive dieting to exercise, the practice of manipulating bodies is increasingly widespread. But have we passed into a new phase of manipulation evidenced by the prevalent use of medicine to adjust our moods, enhance sports performance, slow ageing or alter fetuses? Nikolas Rose . . . argues that a threshold has been crossed into a world of 'biological citizenship' in which humans view themselves at the molecular level, medicine is based on customization, and biology poses fewer and fewer limits on life. For Rose, however, this is not always a bad thing."---Jessica Lovaas, Journal of Biosocial Science "There is much to admire in his account of the forms that such a politics is taking, and I would encourage the reader to engage with this work."---Simon Reid-Henry, Cultural Geographies "Rose's great strength lies in drawing together disparate strands from a variety of sources--from the empirical work of colleagues to policy documents--and neatly labelling and organizing emergent tendencies to invite further reflection, often with a nod (or more) to recent French social theory."---Steve Fuller, Sociology "While philosophers are still trying to bridge the 'mind/body' gap, Nikolas Rose shows that this gap is evaporating under our very eyes. Are we posthumans then? Not necessarily. This long and detailed inquiry considers another, rather incredible, option: a complete rethinking of what the Fathers of the Church used to call 'incarnation.'"-Bruno Latour, Centre de Sociologie de l'Innovation, Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Mines, Paris "The Politics of Life Itself offers a compelling cartography of how practices in human genomics are transforming our social landscapes, reshaping the contours of medicine, citizenship, race, and other political formations. It is sure to be widely consulted and discussed."-Stefan Helmreich, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, author of Silicon Second Nature: Culturing Artificial Life in a Digital World "As a leading inter

Soviet socialism was based on paradoxes that were revealed by the peculiar experience of its collapse. To the people who lived in that system the collapse seemed both completely unexpected and completely unsurprising. At the moment of collapse it suddenly became obvious that Soviet life had always seemed simultaneously eternal and stagnating, vigorous and ailing, bleak and full of promise. Although these characteristics may appear mutually exclusive, in fact they were mutually constitutive. This book explores the paradoxes of Soviet life during the period of "late socialism" (1960s-1980s) through the eyes of the last Soviet generation. Focusing on the major transformation of the 1950s at the level of discourse, ideology, language, and ritual, Alexei Yurchak traces the emergence of multiple unanticipated meanings, communities, relations, ideals, and pursuits that this transformation subsequently enabled. His historical, anthropological, and linguistic analysis draws on rich ethnographic material from Late Socialism and the post-Soviet period. The model of Soviet socialism that emerges provides an alternative to binary accounts that describe that system as a dichotomy of official culture and unofficial culture, the state and the people, public self and private self, truth and lie--and ignore the crucial fact that, for many Soviet citizens, the fundamental values, ideals, and realities of socialism were genuinely important, although they routinely transgressed and reinterpreted the norms and rules of the socialist state.