1st chapter

Tatyana Mamut, Copyright 2007, page 1

CHAPTER 1:

Futures Lost – The Problem of How to Perestroiitsya

Larissa, economists would say, is one of the losers of Russia’s transition. How

this 49-year-old Russian divorcee could become so raises many questions.1 A well-

educated engineer and factory manager, she commanded a great deal of human capital.

In the final years of the Soviet Union, she had accumulated a small fortune in then-

valuable rubles and privatized a centrally-located large three-room apartment in Saint

Petersburg, and so had access to a respectable reserve of financial capital. She also had

adequate social capital, since Larissa had many, many friends and even more

connections, including several who eventually would become successful after Socialism’s

collapse. Furthermore, she was gregarious, witty, outgoing, and had copious amounts of

energy. Yet ten years after the end of state socialism, Larissa was materially barely

hanging on and her social status had plummeted. According to her, she was simply

unable to perestroiitsya – that is, she was unable to transform herself into a different kind

of person.

The task of re-creating the self is a major problem facing the residents of the post-

Socialist world. Yet the transformation of persons in this context happens not by solitary

decisions and independent actions of individuals. It is part of a larger set of social and

cultural phenomena. There are popular movements, marketing strategies, governmental

directives, business incentives, and multiple processes that seek to re-constitute and re-

construct the perceptions and behaviors of post-Soviet citizens.

1 It is common in the economic literature and discourse to hear people categorized as “winners” or “losers” in situations of economic change (for example, see Brainerd, 1998). Here I employ this term simply a heuristic in reference to these economic categorizations.


The projects that re-create persons -- as they live through, enable, and sometimes

alter or derail economic transition -- are the subject of this inquiry. By tracing how

personhood undergoes reconfiguration as a requirement for a society to enter into the

context of contemporary global capitalism, this study aims to illuminate the lesser-

understood processes that necessarily accompany – and sometimes defy – well-analyzed

economic and political policy. In particular, this work claims that transition from the

Soviet socio-economic order to early 21st century capitalism required and still requires a

concomitant shift in the constitution of the Russian person.2 These processes are

structured by another shift -- that of a transformation of the future – from a future

grounded confidence in the socialist eternity to one in which confidence in the self must

be produced and cultivated in order to stave off the risks that may come in the unknown

tomorrow. In other words, there has been a basic shift in the ground of the future from

an eternal institution to a vulnerable self-reflexive person.

Marketing provides an excellent locus of observation for ethnographic reflection

because it is that arm of the global business community that is charged with the job of

being close to consumers, understanding local culture, and creating new markets by

constructing new symbolic categories as well as new categories of consumers. By

studying marketing and advertising professionals in one of Moscow’s global agency

2 I have chosen the term “person” instead of “subject” for several reasons. First, subjectivity in contemporary anthropological literature draws primarily on the Foucauldian literature and tends to imply “subjectivation,” which already has inscribed within the term a very specific set of claims and assumptions about the subject’s relationship to power which I do not take for granted from the beginning of the study. Second, personhood is an intriguing and productive category particular to anthropology, but has largely been dropped in recent anthropological work; this concept’s link to the human being in a specific time-space milieu is entirely appropriate for the exploration at hand. However, “the self” as formulated by Charles Taylor (1989) and further developed by Liu Xin (2002) is also be an appropriate category for this study, and closely linked to the ways in which I am formulating my concept of the person. In this work, selfhood refers to the particular experience of being a social person, and it is in this sense that the person (a specific social configuration) is related to the self (a particularized experience of being or becoming a type of social person).


offices, this ethnography details some of the important practices and strategies that work

to reconfigure the nature of the person in post-Soviet Russia.

Through an understanding of the effects and stakes of the transformation of post-

Soviet personhood, this study also illuminates the processes that accompany the changes

in Russia’s socio-economic trajectory. In 2005, the United Nations Development Report

reported that Russia was continuing to slip down its Human Development Index list of

177 countries to place 62nd in 2005, between Malaysia and Brazil.3 It is now a

commonplace to recount how in 1991, the world’s leading economists helped set a course

for the nation to embark on a path to restructure the Russian economy. Policy-makers,

including Boris Yeltsin himself, backed by Harvard’s top economic minds,4 assured the

world that Russian society would adjust to market capitalism following a relatively brief

(a few months to a few years) period of structural instability, including inflation and

unemployment. After this “initial adjustment” period, incentives and the natural

functioning of the market should have led to brisk economic expansion as suppliers and

demanders were finally “freed” from the “perversions” of socialist state-planning.

According to the predominant economic thinking, grounded in the belief in a universal

human type -- individualistic Homo Economicus -- the economic models predicted that

restructuring targeted toward rapid price liberalization, asset privatization, and money

supply stabilization would be the most effective way to create naturally-functioning

markets and thereby would lead to economic growth and increases in living standards --

3 The Human Development Index is based on life expectancy, educational achievement, and adjusted real income (http://hdr.undp.org/reports/global/2005/). For perspective, Russia lags behind Slovakia (#42), Uruguay (#46), and Cuba (#52); last year, Russia ranked number 57. 4 For a summary of the role played by Harvard economists in the Russian economic reforms see the article by Sam Husseini and Janine R. Wedel at http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=1018.


since after all Russia also had an extraordinary store of highly-educated human capital, a

modern infrastructure, and enormous natural resources.

Mainstream economic knowledge – the so-called “Washington Consensus” of the

early 1990s – predicted that quick reform toward market capitalism would lead to a better

life for the majority, if not for all, Russians. In order to push these reforms through

quickly, however, the question of whether Soviet citizens would behave as rational

economic actors had to be addressed. A paper published in early 1992 by Shiller,

Boycko, Korobov, and Schelling for the Carnegie Foundation, in an effort to dismiss the

problem5, inadvertently predicted what would become a real problem for economic

policy:

So many people think that such [capitalist] attitudes are fundamentally lacking in the former Soviet bloc that it is popular to refer to people there as homo sovieticus, as though they were a different species of humankind. The idea seems to be that years of living in a communist system has produced a mind set – even a personality – different from that found in the advanced capitalist countries… If this homo sovieticus theory is true, then serious problems will arise in the formerly communist countries as they make the transition to successful market economies (1992, pp. 127-128).

Despite the economists’ protestations against the “homo sovieticus theory,”

serious problems did arise. After Russia implemented the shock therapy

recommendations, “For the majority of those living in the former Soviet Union, life under

capitalism has been even worse than the old Communist leaders had said it would be”

(Stiglitz, 2002, p. 133). According to economic estimates, from 1989 to 2001, Russia’s

5 The authors of the paper object to attitudinal (or cultural) explanations of the observed differences between the economic behavior of Soviets and those living in advanced capitalist countries; instead, the paper argues for a situational explanation. The situational explanation, in this case, would then mean that once the situation were changed through policy reforms, ex-Soviet citizens would naturally and immediately behave like those in advanced capitalist countries and the transition should happen quickly (Shiller, Boycko, Korobov, and Schelling, 1992).


GDP plummeted 40-50%, poverty skyrocketed, and life expectancy dropped

precipitously (Klein & Pomer, 2001; Stiglitz, 2002; Brainerd and Varavikova, 2001).

Immeasurable in the quantitative sense, but no less real, are other outcomes of the market

transition: education and healthcare systems seriously deteriorated, the taken-for-granted

perks of life – free day camps for children, cheap travel for adults, generous vacation

time, inexpensive theater, ballet, and concert tickets, etc. – disappeared, and “stress” (a

word directly imported from English, since the native concept did not exist) became a

new medical, social, and personal reality.

These results of the first ten years of Russia’s transition have caused not only

great turmoil for Russians, but have also created a disturbance within the discipline of

economics6. Economist Gérard Roland writes:

The results of policy advice given to transition countries have been particularly humbling for economists, to say the least, and remain a subject of controversy…. Transition policies have delivered unexpected failures (Russia being one of the most spectacular ones) as well as unexpected successes (China being the best example). (Roland, 2000, p. xvii)

The authors featured in The New Russia: Transition Gone Awry echo these sentiments

and defy the logic of those like Jeffrey Sachs and Anders Aslund who defend their

economic policies to this day by blaming Russian corruption, mafia, and “primitive” legal

institutions: “It is tempting to attribute the disappointments of the Russian economic

6 From 2000-2005, Russia’s GDP has been increasing and wages for the region have steadily increased as well. Although some economists and political scientists cite this as “evidence” that shock therapy is beginning to work, I ask that we look more closely at the situation. First, by early 2005, Russia’s GDP reached the level of pre-shock therapy output; that is, the Russian economy unraveled so deeply in the 1990s despite growth in the early 2000s that the economy, after 15 years of turmoil, massive foreign aid, and foreign investment, is merely back to its pre-1991 level. Second, the vast majority of the growth in the early 2000s is attributed to growth in both prices in and global demand for natural resources, particularly oil. Third, inequality in Russia continues to grow, so that the economic rewards from the growth in the 2000s have gone primarily to the very wealthy in Russia. The fact that the shock therapy reforms predicted none of these outcomes, or the forms that transition would take, still bears gravity and cause for serious reflection. The efforts of some economists to shore up the holes of doubt within economics as a result of these nominal growth figures should surely continue to be questioned.


reform to bad implementation of good policy. Part One of this book offers a much more

sweeping critique…[:] the architects of Russian reform underestimated the requirements

of successful economic transition” (Pomer in Klein & Pomer, 2001, p. 21).

In fact, for those with proximity to the experience of Russia’s economic

transformation, these “requirements of successful transition” are more than a delineation

of calculable factors, however complex these calculations may be. What current experts

are incapable of examining or understanding is the time and effort required for persons to

change themselves in response to the collapse of the world that they have known.

Misunderstood is the actual nature of the person as a cultural form that does not naturally

or automatically conform to standards of Western conduct or thinking. Unpredictable is

how these transformations will occur, or what results they will have. In reality, transition

happens through a multitude of narratives, through the twists and turns of actual lives,

through the practices of persons whose life trajectories and potential are indelibly

intertwined with the fate of Russia.

*************************

“Before [ran’she]” – an abbreviated colloquial Russian term meaning “before the

socio-economic changes of perestroika and the collapse of the Soviet way of life” –

Larissa recalled that her life had been far from ideal since:

“This apartment was a communal apartment. You probably won’t believe it, but there were three entire families living in this one place! The kitchen wasn’t even a kitchen, it was a room for a whole family! We ate in the cafeteria at the factory or just scraped something together at home. It was so crowded! We had no hot water for a long time and went to the factory banya (bathhouse and sauna) every week. And living this way was terrible, it weighed on your soul.”


In fact, much has been written about the predicament of forced communal living

in Russia, the descriptions of which Larissa backed and echoed. However, as her

exposition continued and as she incorporated more details, a far more complex narrative

of what it meant to live in the Soviet world came to light:

“I would say I had much more freedom back then. If you have the choice to buy a BMW but only if you have the money or a pack of Marlboro’s – what kind of freedom is this? Before, life was joyful. I was a top engineer at the factory, and then at the technical institute so I had a good income, but my husband – he was a worker and he got a lot of benefits. We traveled for a month every summer; I have been everywhere: the Crimea, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, the Far East… We went skiing and to resorts to take care of our health, we had the best health care, never worried about money, and felt secure. We ate meat every day, on holidays and birthdays we had everything – caviar, champagne, excellent Georgian wine. We even bought a car and the best furniture. Imported furniture. Through connections, of course. We had confidence life would be good for us, and for our children. This was freedom… And we could feel safe. I had real friends. Although three families lived here and it was very uncomfortable, we were close. We pooled our resources and installed a hot-water heater and improved the bathroom in the apartment. We were friends. Real friends. We could have a good time together.”

By the time Larissa was born in 1952, her parents and grandparents had occupied

the apartment she would later privatize and make her own. The apartment was built in

the 1920s, a solid four-story building with four spacious rooms (one of which had been

converted to a kitchen in the 1980s) connected by a long narrow central hallway. The

apartment building was built near an industrial area of St. Petersburg in order to house

workers’ families, and since the building was occupied entirely by the factory’s workers,

the apartments were built without kitchens or hot water; the factory provided workers and

their families hot meals and a spacious bathhouse. Larissa attended the Pedagogical

Institute and taught kindergarten for two years in the 1970s before she decided that

teaching children was not for her and decided to get retrained as an accountant. When


she became bored with accounting as well, this talented and intelligent woman retrained

once again and became a highly-skilled engineer. Because of her exceptional talent and

personality, she was asked to work at the factory’s Institute as a top-level engineer just

below the rank of Director. At the age of 26, Larissa married a factory coworker and he

moved into her apartment. Shortly thereafter, Larissa gave birth to her daughter. Just a

few years later, her husband left her for a younger woman. Slowly, through the 1980s,

the co-residents of her apartment started to move out: first, her parents were given their

own apartment in a newer building then her brother’s family purchased a new apartment.

When her daughter married an army officer, Larissa registered the couple into her

apartment and immediately privatized it. A few months later, the army moved Larissa’s

daughter and son-in-law to Vladivostok.

By 2001, Larissa was living alone in this spacious apartment sparsely furnished

with a few old beds, tables, chairs, and a couch7, her sole source of income coming from

renting one of the rooms to foreign students and visiting scholars such as myself. During

7 She had sold much of her expensive furniture, her gold jewelry, crystal, rugs, and fine china in the 1990s to survive. By the time I lived in the apartment, the atmosphere was quite Spartan. Soon after shock therapy reforms were instituted and prices began spinning out of control, Larissa ran out of money. How her sizeable stash was so quickly depleted remains a mystery to me (perhaps she lent large sums to friends and family, perhaps she invested in a pyramid scheme). What Gaidar and western economists take as a sign of “flourishing capitalism” and “the market working” – rows of middle-aged and old women lining Russian streets to sell their valued possessions – was described very differently the woman herself who was interpreted to be one of these “budding entrepreneurs.” When Larissa faced the reality one morning that she did not have enough money to feed herself or her daughter, she scanned her apartment for something to sell. The crystal wine glasses went first; they were a gift from her mother who had brought them back from Czechoslovakia. Over the following months, Larissa found herself forced to sell her prized plates, serving pieces, all her gold jewelry, her most valuable personal clothes and shoes, as well as the expensive furniture. It was naked desperation -- not some sort of inherent penchant to truck, barter, or trade – that made her stand on the street corners of Saint Petersburg in order to sell her personal belongings. Several small-time traders I interviewed described similar experiences of going into business; they certainly do not narrate this as a story in which their entrepreneurial drive was “freed,” but as one in which the outcomes of “immoral” shock therapy economic reforms forced them into activities they themselves viewed as immoral and beneath them. For example, a family that owns several successful kiosks in Ivanovo described how they dropped out of their circle of friends when they started trading; they felt they were doing something morally and socially corrupt by trading, and were too ashamed to allow their friends to see that economic necessity had turned a respected, cultured intelligentsia couple into “crass speculators.”


the summer months, she said, this arrangement spoiled her, since she had money steadily

coming in and every once in a while even got a large sum in advance. This spoiling

meant that she would buy a half kilo of fruit at the open air market, some chocolates, or

perhaps even some dried sausage for a special treat. However, Saint Petersburg’s

summer was unforgivingly short and as soon as the summer retreated, life turned harsh:

she had one grey wool shawl she would wrap around herself from autumn through

springtime to attempt to stave off the illnesses that blew in through the old windows she

could neither afford to fix nor replace, and her diet turned monotonous -- with bread,

cabbage, and potatoes the only food she could afford if she wanted to stretch the money

until the next arrival of visitors in May. She had long needed serious dental work and

hadn’t been to a doctor in several years, as doctors usually expected to be paid in the

post-socialist Russia. Besides, she said, she could not spoil herself with the expensive

drugs they would probably prescribe anyway. Instead, to strengthen her health, she went

to the municipal banya (bathhouse) every other week, where for only 12 rubles (less than

50 cents) she believed toxins, impurities, and diseases would be purged from her body.

She also belonged to one of the many new Russian religious organizations that promise

health, longevity, and moral superiority through submission to a guru and strict adherence

to physical disciplines.

Over tea one evening, I took out my voice recorder and decided to ask a more

structured set of questions. Larissa agreed to an interview, and I wanted to know what

had happened that had taken her from a relatively comfortable and socially valued

existence in the Soviet Union to one that seemed so materially precarious and denigrated


in status terms. It was my first preliminary research trip to Russia and the question was

quite simple.

“How has your life changed in the last 20 years?”

“Twenty years ago – it was 1981. Everything was stable. I was with my husband, my daughter was three. My parents were still alive. I was working at the factory, my husband was working at the factory; life was stable. Just, stable. Let’s see -- we went to Crimea to vacation that summer, I went with my daughter for one month, and my husband arrived and stayed with her for another month. My mother spent the last month with her, and so my daughter got to be at the sea for the whole summer vacation. She loved running on the beach and the weather was really wonderful. The next year we went to the Far East, and the year after that we didn’t go anywhere, because we acquired a dacha and had to work on that for the whole summer. We were so happy when we got the dacha. But it is so much work! And it is three hours from Saint Petersburg on a commuter train, it’s like hell.. But the next few years all we did was go to the dacha. I didn’t really mind, though, because I had traveled absolutely everywhere in my schooldays, so I didn’t really have anywhere else I wanted to see. Of course, we still went to resorts or spas for shorter stays, but mostly vacations were spent on the dacha. We had a great collective at the factory, especially for my husband. He never drank and he was very respected. He was an excellent worker, and workers like him had a lot of status. We could get anything we wanted through the factory. One year, we got a refrigerator. Another year we bought a car without waiting in line.”

“And then what happened with you, when everything changed?”

Larissa looked away in silence. She pressed one thumb against her crooked gray

teeth, her large green eyes grew narrower, her forehead furrowed, and her expression

became uncomfortably strained.

“After, you mean after, when Perestroika started? I call this whole period, from 1985 to the present, Perestroika. So starting in 1985, well, all of the sudden the stability of life disappeared. Things started changing in totally unpredictable and unexplainable ways. One day, I came to work and they told me that there was a new policy to pay highly-educated engineers more, so I got a raise from 120 rubles to 500 rubles. I had so much money all of the sudden; I hadn’t expected it and I wasn’t used to it. It was too much money. We bought expensive furniture, we gave some to friends, and we stashed away the rest.”


She paused, as if straining to remember the details of life.

“I’ll tell you, Tanyusha, I can recall nearly everything about the time Before – I remember that a loaf of bread cost 14 kopecks, a kilo of carrots cost 7 kopecks, I could by a ‘sea’’ of food with one ruble. A plane ticket to the south cost 35 rubles, a car cost 5,000 rubles and the best car cost 9,000 rubles. I can tell you where we went on vacation, who celebrated the holidays with us. If you give me a date prior to 1985, I could probably tell you what we had for breakfast! I can remember all the details of life as if it were just yesterday. But then everything gets cloudy; the 1990s, especially between 1992 and 1998, are all mixed up. I don’t really feel I can tell you much about that time because I don’t really remember. Things started changing so fast, it was impossible to keep track of it all, or to create a normal life. I remember people lining up at McDonald’s and then there was advertising for banks [pyramid schemes such as MMM]. It was all mixed up. I just stopped remembering because nothing made sense anymore.”

In other interviews with over 50 other Russians in 2004, ranging in age from 30 to

65, half of whom are socio-economically upwardly-mobile and the other half

downwardly-mobile,8 I found that people echoed the story of a loss of temporal

grounding and a feeling of existential confusion immediately the collapse of Soviet life:

“In the 1980’s there were hopes and ambitions to have a normal life, stability, comfort. That was lost.” (Eugene, 47, manager) “Our parents’ lives were more stable and peaceful. It’s impossible to tell anything today. You have no idea what will happen tomorrow.” (Marina, 40, telephone operator) “In the Soviet Union, I knew exactly where I would be in five years from now, ten years from now; I had absolute confidence in my future. Now I cannot expect anything.” (Elena, 39, teacher) “[Before Perestroika,] I was confident in tomorrow’s day. I wanted to go to college, to get married. Then, everything was understandable. In the Soviet Union, everything was understandable. Before, I took a beach vacation every

8 These interviews were conducted with the aid of a professional outside research agency in Moscow at the end of my fieldwork in July, 2004. A Russian market researcher with whom I had developed a close relationship was very interested in my work and agreed to recruit a diverse group of Moscovites and conduct a set of semi-structured interviews with them around the topics that interested me. These interviews allowed me to hone my understanding of the phenomena I identified in earlier, more in-depth fieldwork.


summer; but now the only thing I understand is that it’s impossible for me to go anywhere.” (Ira, 38, engineer) “Before 1989, I was full of hope. I had colossal plans. Complete stability, I had no confusion about where to go to college, how to live. I was completely sure about my life and my future.” (Tanya, 31, teacher)

This concern about the past and the loss of temporal grounding in the present are

hallmarks of the fact that the post-Soviet condition is characterized by a significant

conversion experience. A transformation is underway, and people state over and over

again that the courses of their lives are changing monumentally – as a result of the loss of

the temporal structure of life, which in the Soviet period, was anchored in the Soviet

Future.

Victor Pelevin’s popular novel about the Russian advertising industry and the

transition to capitalism in the 1990s, Generation P, begins by chronicling a similar set of

thoughts and emotions experienced by the main character of the novel, a university-

educated linguist and poet, Tatarskii, who represents a characteristic type of person of the

early 1990s:

And then something unexpected happened. Something started happening to the eternity to which Tatarskii had decided to devote his entire work and life. This, Tatarskii could not understand entirely. After all, eternity – in any case, this is what he had always thought – was somehow unchangeable, indestructible, and independent of constantly-changing world events…. It turned out, that it was not entirely that way at all. It turned out, that eternity only existed as long as Tatarskii believed in it earnestly, but nowhere behind the façade of his belief, in reality, did it exist. For in order to earnestly believe in this eternity, it was necessary for others to share this belief – because belief, which no one shares, is called delusion. And with the others – even those who had taught Tatarskii to focus on eternity – something strange started to happen. It was not that they started to change their previously-held views, no. The space, the context itself to which those views had been directed (a view is always directed somewhere after all) started to turn around and disappear, until all that was left of it was a microscopic dot on the outer window of the mind. (2003, p. 16, my translation)


In response to the devastation of the eternal future – a future that turned out to be

in reality nothing more than a shared belief, the kind of belief that one could devote a life

to and build monuments for – Pelevin’s icon of the era, Tatarskii, first responds through

denial. Finally, the fictional Tatarskii finds that he is nothing but a leftover artifact of

history, like an old pair of outdated boots, which although they are made out of the finest

leather, are not needed by anyone anymore. When Tatarskii recognizes himself as this

outmoded relic, he writes in his diary: “When the subject of history disappears, then all of

its objects disappear as well” (2003, p. 18). In order to emerge from his denial, he locks

the future away into a dusty glass jar on the outskirts of memory and enters the world of

post-Socialism. “As soon as eternity disappeared, Tatarskii found himself in the present.

It turned out, that he had absolutely no knowledge of the world, which had managed to

create itself around him in the space of the last few years” (2003, p. 19). While the

world looked, smelled, and sounded the same as the Soviet world, in the wake of the loss

of the eternal future which anchored it, held it together, organized it, and made sense of

it, this world was seemingly unknown and unknowable. To live in it, Tatarskii would

have to learn. And change.

In line with Pelevin’s story, Larissa, along with a large number of ex-Soviet

citizens, discovered that economic transition and the loss of the Soviet eternity

necessitated a transformation of self. She observed that people around her started to

change: one friend borrowed a large sum of money from her and never returned it, her

nephew tricked his own mother-in-law out of her apartment, and friends with whom she

had spent holiday after holiday began to disappear from her life. Several of her friends

and neighbors started trading or went into some kind of business. “They became


different people,” she said, “and now I do not socialize with them, except for the girl

upstairs – but only when we cross paths on the stairs.” After recounting how others had

changed and become winners of the transition, while she struggled to hold on to the

vestiges of her former status and lifestyle, she said declaratively: “Others could remake

themselves [perestroiitsya], but I cannot.”

Yet Larissa’s life, world, and consciousness had changed; after all, under her own

initiative, she had contacted an organization to host foreign students in her home for

income. Furthermore, although she claimed she was an ardent “non-believer” in all

things religious and spiritual during the Soviet period, she discovered religion in the mid-

1990s and became involved with a group based around the teachings of Ivanov, a Russian

nationalist spiritual leader. The reason she became involved in this group in 1999, she

said, was that “My soul and my body were yearning for a change, for an exit. I couldn’t

do the things that others did, and I was so tired because I was living without meaning. I

realized that God helps people who try to find a path, who find meaning.” During the

three months I lived in Larissa’s apartment, I observed how she structured her days

around Ivanov’s teachings. Every morning at 6:00 am, this thin 49-year-old woman

would go outside with a bucket of cold water, barefoot, with tousled curly blonde hair

and dressed in only a bikini, recite a prayer, and pour the water over herself. She

repeated this exercise two more times every day, before preparing each meal. Her dietary

disciplines required that she eat certain types of food only with others, and she tried to go

to the countryside as often as possible, since swimming in natural lakes and working on

the land were two more requirements of her regime. Much of her time was spent reading

her guru’s texts and talking on the phone with friends who also practiced these teachings.


The point she was trying to make in the statement is not that she hadn’t been able

to change, but in saying that she could not remake herself by stating that she could not

perestroiitsya9, she was referring to a specific trajectory of the transformation of persons

that is historically intertwined with the socio-economic reforms of Perestroika. While

there are a multitude of different trajectories for remaking the self in Russia today, many

of which are of a spiritual or religious nature,10 there is an implicitly acknowledged path

of self-re-creation that people refer to as perestroiitsya, and this is the one most

prominent, most discussed, and most hegemonic. It encompasses the creation of Russian

persons who are economically rational, highly mobile, oriented toward the consumption

of foreign brands, and most importantly, who are self-confident and self-reliant.

After losing belief in the eternal future, Generation P’s hero Tatarskii embarks on

a journey to transform himself. He turns to the world of marketing, which according to

renowned popular author Pelevin is the sphere which changes the structure of

consciousness of the people who work in it at the same time that it changes the

consciousness of the masses.11 In the novel, Tatarskii gets a job in advertising through a

friend, where “He was supposed to change this kind of [Soviet] consciousness.

Specifically, his main task was to adapt Western advertising concepts to the mentality of

the Russian consumer” (2003, pp. 35-36). His efforts are rewarded, and he becomes a

9 For simplicity, the term perestroiitsya (self-transformation) is used consistently throughout the text in this one form, without conjugating the term or changing it to agree with the subject. Speakers of Russian may find this a little annoying, since this is grammatically incorrect, but to change it throughout the text would cause a greater deal of confusion for non-Russian speakers. 10 “Some people found God, other people started drinking,” Larissa said about how people who are unable to perestroiitsya were becoming transformed, “Moral strength is what I am trying to cultivate.” 11 During my fieldwork in Russia, over a dozen people mentioned that I should read Generation P when I mentioned I was studying the effects of marketing on social change in Russia. The popularity of the novel, as well as Russians’ claims that it contained many insights about the post-Soviet predicament and social environment of the 1990s lead me to use it here in order to help outline some of the problematics I explore in this study.


successful self-made advertising executive, a type of “new Russian,” after authoring

several successful advertising campaigns, one of which was for a fictional version of The

Gap chain of clothing stores which would earn a smile from anthropologists as well as

from those who are familiar with the post-Soviet experience:

“RUSSIA WAS ALWAYS NOTORIOUS FOR THE GAP BETWEEN CULTURE AND CIVILIZATION.

NOW THERE IS NO MORE CULTURE. NO MORE CIVILIZATION. THE ONLY THING THAT REMAINS

IS THE GAP. THE WAY THEY SEE YOU.” (2003, p. 92)

The Twinned Transformation According to Norbert Elias, “The human person is an extraordinarily malleable

and variable being…. [and] periods of transition give particular opportunities for

reflection” (1994, pp. 402 & 440). And it is such an opportunity that the contemporary

moment in Russia offers. It is no coincidence that the term for restructuring the self,

perestroiitsya, is the reflexive form of the word Perestroika, the era of economic

restructuring of the Soviet planned economy begun in 1987 by Mikhail Gorbachev and

revamped by shock therapy policies introduced in 1992. The term “Perestroika” literally

means “rebuilding” or “restructuring” and consists of a prefix, pere, which means “to do

over,” stroi, which means “build,” and the suffix ka which turns the word into a noun.

The term commonly refers to the Gorbachev-era economic reforms which were coupled

with glasnost’, a set of policies which opened up the media environment to new forms of

critique of the Soviet system which had up to then been strongly limited. During the late

1980s, Perestroika led to a massive upheaval in both economic systems and in everyday

citizens’ systems of cognition; while food shortages commonly erupted in completely


unpredictable places at unforeseen moments, and newspapers, magazines, and TV

programs began to criticize failures of state Socialism and publicly question the

inevitability of the Soviet eternity. The media, always enormously popular in the Soviet

Union, exploded during this era, as people tried to make sense of the social upheaval

underway through media sources (Wolfe, 2005). The era of Perestroika – socio-

economic restructuring -- did not end with the collapse of the Soviet Union, but continues

into the current moment as post-Soviet economic policies such as the social benefits

reforms of early 2005 still create socio-economic upheavals. Many Russians, along with

Larissa, call the very-late-Soviet era up to the present “Perestroika,” one continuous

moment of economic and social change that necessitates personal change.

Linguistically, perestroiitsya is simply the reflexive of the term perestroi; both

terms have the same prefix as well as root, and the tsya suffix makes the literal meaning

of perestroiitsya “to restructure oneself” or “to reorganize oneself.” As a word, it has no

particular meaning and could in theory refer to any kind of self-restructuring – mental,

spiritual, or physical. For example, the word could be used to refer to a reorganization of

the body following any major surgery. However, perestroiitsya is never used in this way.

According to my informants, when the word emerged in the late 1980s, its usage often

had an ironic valence, as Soviet citizens expressed doubts about government policy

through use of ironic punning on Perestroika policies. However, in a few years, the irony

in the word diminished greatly, and Nancy Ries noted in her book Russian Talk, that in

the late 1980s and early 1990s, that there were already “widespread…refrains” such as:

“’We must become different people!’ ‘We must rebuild (perestroit’) our very selves.’”

(Ries, 1997, p. 119). In my numerous conversations with people in which the term


perestroiitsya was brought up between 2001 and 2005, there was no sense of irony or

sarcasm in its use. The changing socio-economic conditions that had changed the stakes

of self-transformation in post-Soviet Russia made the term perestroiitsya serious and

replaced the irony with grim literality.

In common Russian usage today, the reflexive perestroiitsya can have two

meanings. One usage of the term can mean simply getting a new job. Yet in my

fieldwork, I found that when people changed jobs in the same sector, they did not use that

term.12 However, when they changed many aspects of their lives, including their

profession as well as their set of friends, the style of their apartments, their mode of

transportation, their personal image, and their moral constitution, the term perestroiitsya

was often used. As Xin Liu has observed in the case of post-socialist China, a similar

problem – Becoming Other -- is

not simply that someone has changed his profession as a result of the changes in society at large… [but] also the character change,… a radical shift in the understanding of what one is or ought to be. Becoming Other is a process by which a reconfiguration of the self as a moral space takes place (Liu, 2002, p. 134).

It is in this larger sense that the challenge of Perestroika is framed within the challenge

of how to Perestroiitsya – in other words, the “discontinuity of personhood” (Liu, 2002,

p. xi) or the problem of how to become a completely different sort of person – morally,

ethically, socially.

In contemporary popular media, this issue is frequently referred to as the

intractability of the “Soviet mentality” – at times characterized as lazy, corrupt,

dependent, pessimistic, alcoholic, or inexplicably communal. This mentality had to be

12 For example, I encountered quite a few people who changed jobs within the marketing industry or within the field of journalism; none of them used the word perestroiitsya when telling me they got a new job. Instead, they used terms such as “new workplace” or “new job.”


changed. Most frequently, this it is described as “irrational” and “inefficient,” since

Western journalists find instances of behavior that defy their rational expectations time

and again. In a 2004 poll conducted by Ekho Moskvy, a popular Moscow radio station,

59% of Russians surveyed stated that “people’s mentality is in the way of Russia’s

economic development” (BBC Monitoring, 1 Jan 2004), suggesting that even Russian

people believe the stereotype. While the press plays up the flaws of the mysterious

Soviet mentality, the Russians I interviewed have a more pragmatic and transparent point

of view about the relationship between economic restructuring and the transformation of

the self:

“Life now requires that we think about ourselves. No one takes care of you. A lot of people were able to perestroiitsya (change themselves), they were able to change their mentality and are doing well now. But it is very hard to change yourself if you were raised in one type of mentality, but I see people around me changing themselves, so it is possible and realistic.” (Tanya, 31, teacher) “I understood that you couldn’t rely on anything or anyone else, you can only rely on yourself. At first I was not this kind of person. But now I changed myself. At first I was very unconfident. Now I have started becoming more self-confident. I did many things to move forward, to change myself and my position. I read magazines. I went to conferences and training sessions to develop myself.” (Bella, 35, manager) “Perestroika happened, and I felt that I had to perestroiitsya (change myself). My job had not paid me in months, and all I had was my dog. I had to step over myself to start breeding and selling puppies; at first it was really difficult, I was ashamed because I had a Soviet mentality and an advanced university degree. But then it became normal.” (Galina, 50, teacher) “I re-oriented myself. Before, I was a romantic…. But now I am starting to reorient myself to become a serious businessman. I took a management course and started working in business.” (Gennadi, 48, office manager) “In connection with perestroika, we all perestroiitsya (changed ourselves). I got a degree in economics. In order to make more money, my husband, my daughter, and I all started working in a private firm.” (Lena, 45, computer programmer)


Indeed, in these conversations and in the lives of Russians today, the twinned nature of

transformation is evident: the economic unites with the personal; macro-level Perestroika

and the everyday problem of how to perestroiitsya are indelibly linked. While popular

Western academic perceptions of Homo Sovieticus were orientalist and derogatory in

their content, the spirit of understanding the nature of the Soviet person as culturally and

historically specific needs to be revisited. In other words, the alternative to crude Cold-

War caricatures of Homo Sovieticus is not de facto Homo Economicus, but a

reformulation of the understanding of personhood in the Soviet world. Such a

formulation is necessary to comprehending the nature of the struggles that the

transformations in society, economy, and personal trajectories engenders in the present

moment.

An examination of how these transformations13 are related sheds important light

on how, in the mid-1990s, the best-planned economic reforms wrought devastation on

hundreds of millions, and on the economic growth in regions most affected by the

process of perestroiitsya in the early 2000s. Understanding the inability of current

economic thinking to adequately grapple with phenomena that are epistemologically

outside the purview of economic knowledge yet conceptually and empirically intertwined

with the functioning of the economy is one of the major starting points for this study.

Timothy Mitchell has demonstrated in the case of Egypt how the economic knowledge

used to produce reform policies necessarily ignored the “forms of leakage, network, 13 I should be clear that the word “transformation” implies both rupture and continuity in the phenomena that I am describing. As this study shows, the transformations of persons as well as of economy are very much informed by historical process: by revolutionary processes as well as continuing practices. My research clearly shows that the macro-frames of the world have been displaced in the early 1990s to be replaced by new systems of economic rationing, marketing, and media, while also documenting how many Soviet (and pre-Soviet) conceptualizations and behaviors on the ground are resistant to change and have real tractability over time.


energy, control, violence, and irrationality” that affected the outcomes of the reforms

(Mitchell, 2002, p. 300). This view is relevant to the case of Russia as well – the

economic reforms planned by economists created entirely unpredicted outcomes; one of

the ways in which the predictions failed is that people simply did not react the way they

were supposed to, the way the models had expected them to behave. In other words,

economic knowledge is inherently partial – at best, it can give us an adequate yet

incomplete understanding of the macro-level processes of economic restructuring.

Anthropological knowledge, too, is partial – and what it offers in this study is an

understanding of the processes of personhood transformation that are interdependent with

economic transition. By considering the two forms of knowledge -- the two twinned

phenomena of Russia’s transformation together -- scholars may elucidate a more

complete and more adequate picture of socio-economic change.

I argue that the story of Russia in the era of Perestroika is unfinished without

attention to the processes that are overlooked by economists because the economic

discipline simply has no way of examining and making sense of categories such as

personhood. Yet, without attention to an understanding of what kinds of persons enact,

undermine, and sometimes derail economic processes, the story of post-Soviet Russia

will remain incomplete and we are unlikely to understand how it was that the world’s

leading economists, armed with good intentions and extensive resources, engineered

plans that unintentionally gave rise to so much corruption, inequality, stress, disease,

death, and hopelessness in an entire region. We must, as scholars seeking robust and

sophisticated analysis, seek explanations beyond simple scapegoat rhetoric about inherent

Russian corruption, legal primitivism, or a faulty sequencing of reforms. An adequate


account of economic transition can only be developed by incorporating an understanding

of how the transformation of Homo Sovieticus into a form of Homo Economicus occurs --

and if and through what processes it occurs at all.

Personhood and Belief as Economic Institutions

The dominant school of economic thought at the turn of the 21st century,

neoclassicism, has been critiqued heavily by anthropologists as well as by select

sociologists for its views of human beings as being socially-disembedded, unemotional

slaves to rational calculation. This preeminent strain in economics, rational actor theory,

is the framework within which many people understand human behavior when it comes

to producing, consuming, and exchanging. In other words, a very narrow understanding

of a de-socialized, culturally impoverished Homo Economicus is presumed to be the

starting point for thinking of all economic action (Slater, 1997, p.43). Yet

anthropologists since Malinowski have critiqued this conception of Homo Economicus in

a variety of times and places, providing concrete evidence for a more nuanced

understanding of human economic behavior, its motivations, and its often unexpected

workings and outcomes.

A small group of economists has recently taken up anthropological research to

break with the neoclassical line of thought that guided the policies of shock therapy

reform in Russia. Called New Institutional Economics, this school pushes the boundaries

on rational actor theory and proposes that political and legal institutions influence

economic decisions, behavior, and outcomes. Institutions, writes economic historian and

new institutional economist Douglass C. North, are rules, conventions, and norms that


serve as “rules of the game in society” that guide human decisions and action (North,

1990, p. 3). As such, institutions help to set our priorities, shape our ways of interpreting

the world around us, and create a sense of stability or social order that allows our actions

to seem both common-sensical and meaningful. Institutions take both formal and

informal forms: the former includes laws, contracts, written rules of conducts, etc, while

the informal are more nebulous, including such things as trust, norms, and expectations.

Both types of institutions are grounded on what these scholars call “mental models” of

reality, and are defined as subjective understandings that shape behavior (North, 1990,

p.111).

Using this framework, North then turns to several anthropological studies to

demonstrate that institutions matters for economy, and as such economists must learn

how to account for society, culture, law, and religion in their analyses since these kinds of

institutions are the fundamental “underlying determinant of the long-run performance of

economies” (North, 1990, p.107); additionally, “ideas, organized ideologies, and even

religious zealotry play major roles in shaping societies and economies” (North, 1990, p.

44). Institutions are not just peripheral, therefore, to economic study, but are the

constituent building blocks of economic behavior, and thence economic performance and

outcomes.

How, according to this view, do institutions emerge? How and why do they take

form in specific ways, at specific historical moments? And how do they change?

Culture and belief form the ground for institutions. The model proposed by

Mantzavinos, North, and Shariq (2004) for social change is the following:

“reality” > belief > institutions > specific policies > outcomes


Complementing North’s earlier emphasis on religious belief and ideology as being

critical institutions, this model makes belief the critical link in understanding how

institutions come into being. Shared beliefs, the authors contend, are crystallizations of

mental models, which in turn account for informal institutions. However, in this piece of

writing as in others, the shared mental model continues to be an obscure, though critically

important, black box. While there is some reference to cognitive psychology in

explaining how people behave given the preconditions of shared mental models, there is

no robust conceptualization of how these are formed, other than the constant reiteration

that they are related to belief (see Denzau & North). We return to this problem in a few

pages in order to find the analytical structure that will help understand how belief, as an

economic institution, can be understood.

For the new institutional economists, the question of how institutions change is

crucial, since the outcomes of economic policies are always dependent on the extent to

which institutions, especially informal institutions, can change in response to those

policies or as a result of them. According to their theory, there exist entrepreneurial

agents of change who reinterpret the incentive structure embodied in the institutional

framework in a new way, and thus begin to alter the institutions themselves (North, 1990,

p.83). These individual entrepreneurs are constrained by institutions, but unlike other

actors in the socio-economic field, they seem to be agentive enough to chip away at and

destroy that very structure. Individuals in this formulation, seem to “rise above” their

social milieu in order to break out of, and thereby transform, the institutional framework

(North, 1990, p.100).


There is a serious problem with this “big rational man” theory of institutional and

socio-economic change. Namely, individualistic entrepreneurs who feel that they can re-

interpret rules themselves are formed by specific social and cultural institution, and are an

instantiation of a specific social and historical context. The form of person or agent that

appears in a given place and time is itself linked to certain formal and informal

institutions. Drawing from well-known anthropological studies that argue personhood is

itself a type of cultural institution, (ie. Mauss, Geertz), it would be illogical to assert that

institutions change as a result of a specific instantiation of the very same cultural

institution. In other words, individuals are fully embedded within and are the products of

cultural institutions, so it would be illogical to assert that they are the sole engine of the

transformation of institutions. A better approach to institutional change is needed, one

that does not necessitate or pre-suppose the existence of individualistic entrepreneurs

who are able to hold themselves at a distance from the social-cultural context of which

they are a part. In other words, a conceptual apparatus that would allow us to understand

institutions formed by agents at the same time as agents are formed by the institutions.

Practice theory, discussed below, offers such as framework. This framework allows for

the conceptualization of institutional change without placing individual entrepreneurs

outside the cultural system.

The second problem arises from the interpretation and use of “embeddedness,” a

popular term for economists and sociologists focusing on institutions. Many of the recent

studies structure their arguments in terms of “embedding in” – that is, they see a causal

relationship that poses one variable as dependent and another is independent

(Granovetter, 1985; Uzzi, 1996). Thus, for example, a study of the social institution of


trust would ask how different levels of social trust (the independent variable) affect

economic relations (the dependent variable). In other words, social and cultural

institutions are exogenized from the study, or determined to be outside the model through

abstraction. In the real world, this abstraction does not exist. In the real world, trust is

determined by forms of economic relations at the same time as economic relations are

determined by trust, for example. The concept of “embeddedness” was in fact a counter-

argument to the efforts of limitation and abstraction that modern science imposed by

separating the economic from the social, moral, cultural, and religious. Thus,

embeddedness is not a concept that contains a theory of a “within” or “without.” To

speak of embeddedness in the anthropological sense, would be to speak of co-determined

relations, a theory of “embedded with.” In order to understand the particular stakes and

shape of this critique, a further exploration of the anthropological tradition is needed;

here we start with Weber.

At the turn of the century, Max Weber countered a view of the “economic

determinism” propagated by the classical British economists with his famous study, The

Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Capitalism, he argued, is not a natural

progression of human economic activity based a natural, rational order that guides human

behavior; instead, it is an historical result of different social forces that created or limited

the emergence of modern capitalist society. While other economists were extolling the

rationality of the modern age along with the end of superstition and religion, Weber

sought to show how the two were still inextricably linked: “One of the fundamental

elements of the spirit of modern capitalism, and not only of that but of all modern culture:

rational conduct…was born…from the spirit of Christian asceticism” (Weber, 1976, p.


180). Arguing that to study economics one first had to “understand…the manner in

which ideas become effective forces in history,” (especially, for Weber, religious

ideology [Weber, 1946]), Weber challenged the assertion of economists that the study of

economic action should resemble the objective study of the physical sciences (Giddens’

introduction to Weber, 1976, p. 8).

Karl Polanyi is widely credited as the originator of the argument that economy is

always and necessarily embedded within society, and that to speak of an autonomous

economic sphere of action would be to fall into theoretical abstraction which ultimately

must directly contradict empirical reality and the facts of history. Largely inspired by

Weber’s “protest against the brushing aside of primitive economics as irrelevant to the

question of the motives and mechanisms of civilized societies” as well as his work on the

relationship between economics and religion in various societies (and especially Weber’s

well-known work on the development of Calvinism as a necessary condition for the

emergence of modern capitalism), one of the central theses of The Great Transformation

is that “man’s economy, as a rule, is submerged in his social relationships. He does not

act to safeguard his individual interests in the possession of material goods; he acts so as

to safeguard his social standing, his social claims, his social assets. He values material

goods only in so far as they serve this end” (Polanyi, 1944, pp. 45-46). Thus all

economic action and all market activity refer to a non-economic basis, and economic

analyses can never be severed from the actual social and cultural problems to which

economic statistics and economic crises refer. In other words, there is no such thing as

“economy,” but only activity which is considered moral or immoral, proper or improper,

socially desirable or socially destructive. The economic world-view that separates and


partitions out the economic from the non-economic is an impossible misconception

which ultimately fails over and over again, as any real historical study must show.

Nevertheless, this misconception has, in an exceptional moment called the modern West,

created a series of violent interventions by the state at the expense of society in order to

foster a “self-regulating market,” which must be, in the end, an impossibility and

inevitable failure. Polanyi advocates an informed intervention into this utopian illusion

of a disembedded and autonomous free market propagated by mainstream economists

and politicians – one that would, indeed, build upon real knowledge of the relationship

between economic activity, social life, and human principles (Polanyi, 1944, pp. 249-

258B). Taking embeddedness into account means comprehending the co-constitution of

economy, society, morality, culture; one does not exist outside the other and therefore no

one of them can be treated as an independent variable.

These two errors regarding the relations between institutions and economic

outcomes can be resolved only, at the present moment, through the anthropological

method. This method is not tied to the epistemology of dependent and independent

variables and its conceptualizations of the world allow for a more nuanced approach that

allows the researcher to make sense of co-constituted, interdependent phenomena, such

as economy, society, and culture. For the purposes of this study, Bourdieu’s approach to

practice theory is particularly insightful and useful. It allows for an alternate view of how

“rules of the game” both function in societies and lay the groundwork for a less

problematic approach for how they change. Practice theory posits the interdependence

of two elements – habitus and field – that are mutually determined by while determining


one another. Additionally, the theory gives us a robust understanding of how core belief,

or doxa, works to organize the social world without reverting to a cognitive black box.

In short, scholars interested in institutions have made great headway in showing

that economic performance and outcomes are not autonomous, as the neoclassical

economists would argue, but are deeply influenced by the social and cultural milieu that

guides economic behavior. This work goes beyond that rationale to show how

personhood and belief are crucial pieces to the arguments about institutions and

embeddedness, and thereby how they influence economic behavior. In order to

understand how whether and how any economy can be transformed, questions about the

transformation of personhood and belief must be posed in tandem. This project is such

an exploration, and the answers to these questions are ultimately both intuitively obvious

as well as surprisingly unsettling.

Transforming the Person & Making Demand: A Global Marketing Project

This study investigates the processes by which human beings are being re-formed

in their behaviors, beliefs, habits, needs, preferences, and rationality interdependently

with the continual renewal of global capitalism. The re-organization of the person is

critical to the functioning of a capitalist economy since one of the primary errors in the

planning and implementation of the reforms of the early 1990s was that economists

assumed Russians, as modern educated subjects, were a form of Homo Economicus --

that type of utility-maximizing individual who unquestioningly believes in the

inalienability of private property, in material destitution as an appropriate form of

punishment for individual failure, and in the price rationing system as the best way to


distribute goods. What the economic reformers denied is that they were dealing with a

different type of person, one previous scholars have called Homo Sovieticus, a socially-

constituted subject who believes in the inalienability of social goods such as housing,

medical care, transportation, and cheap bread, and in social value as the morally superior

way to ration scarce goods. Furthermore, this type of person is entirely focused on a

stable temporal horizon, or a Soviet eternity which seems to be beyond question (Brom,

1988, p. 23).

An important piece of the puzzle in making sense of the enormous GDP and

welfare decline in the 1990s is that the constitution of the Russian person was

incongruous with the structure of the economy following the shock therapy reforms.

Subsequently, as Russians have been undergoing the process of perestroiitsya, we are

beginning to witness economic growth in certain areas of the society where the processes

of self-restructuring specific to global capitalism have been most rapid.

The primary site I have chosen for this study is a major global marketing network,

which consists of one of the largest advertisers in the world, its advertising agency, and

its consumer research firm. After the Soviet future faded and eternity disappeared, when

the world became strange and unfamiliar and a “chasm of unbelief opened…to cast

people into a state of radical uncertainty” (Humphrey, 2002, xvii), marketing

organizations were charged with the task of changing people’s habits and creating belief

in branded products. In an environment where belief in the stability of the future, in

work, education, health care, rubles, and friends had been demolished, they offered belief

in the friendliness of McDonald’s, the youthfulness of Pepsi, the prestige of BMW, and

the social confidence of Speed Stick. Studying this powerful and influential network


allows a window into the strategies for the re-creation of persons underway in the post-

socialist world. While they are charged by their global directors with the task of adapting

advertising for products developed abroad for Russian consumers, they frequently find

that first they must actually develop the need for the product, create the target consumer,

and identify a logic by which the consumption of a literally foreign product would make

sense to a Russian person.

Within months of the August 1991 coup that would mark the final days of the

Soviet Union, consumer goods producers, marketing consultants, and advertisers

streamed through Moscow’s international Sheremetyevo airport in hopes of profiting

from the ex-Soviets’ mythical “pent-up demand.” By 1998, the Russian advertising and

consulting industries were booming, their offices filled with expatriate professionals from

the US and Western Europe who often received salaries three or four times greater than

they would have made in their native countries. Foreign cigarettes, beer, and personal

hygiene advertising competed alongside ads for domestically-grown pyramid schemes,

dairy products, and political rhetoric. Products were imported and advertising campaigns

aired within days, as opposed to the regular schedule of months required in other parts of

the world. When there was no time or budget to have anything new created, ads from

overseas were just sent over, translated, and aired in Russia. Pelevin’s fictional account

parodies this era, when “crazy money” was thrown around on marketing campaigns and

when just about any message seemed a good one.

The financial crisis of 1998 ushered in a new age for the Russian advertising

industry, as many of the largest ad agencies closed their doors when their foreign

executives (paid in dollars) could no longer be paid by the money coming in from clients


(often paid in rubles). In 1999, the paradigm of advertising changed in two ways: first, as

the cost of media started to increase and advertisers were running out of cheap public

space to colonize with their billboards, the emphasis turned increasingly to crafting

advertising specifically tailored to the Russian market as opposed to dubbing

commercials from abroad into Russian. Second, those employers that had employed the

largest number of expatriates had suffered the most in the 1998 crisis, so agencies

adopted a strategy of developing native Russians in the field of marketing. Both of these

trends led to an increased emphasis on the expertise tied to tailoring advertising

specifically to the Russian consumer, and to manipulating her (for more on the topic of

how local ad agencies structure messages specific to certain cultural contexts, see

Mazzarella, 2003). These developments in the Russian advertising industry raised the

stakes for understanding the specificity of the post-Soviet person and for developing

marketing technologies to change the person’s beliefs, behaviors, and everyday habits.

During my time in the field, there were dozens of agencies operating in Russia,

however only a small handful commanded the arena. Basic Insight14, a premier global

advertising agency in Russia, has been so successful and influential in part because it has

invested heavily in the Planning department of its Moscow office. Planners are the

professionals in an agency charged with developing expertise on consumers. They

research people’s everyday lives and cultural habits, dig up “consumer insights,” and

write advertising strategy that will ultimately bring the ostensibly unarticulated needs and

wants of consumers into perfect union with whichever company has hired their services.

They employ myriad consumer research methods, including “participant observation”

14 I have fictionalized the names and identifying details of all corporations and individuals in this study in accordance with UC Berkeley’s Committee for the Protection of Human Subjects requirements.


and “fieldwork” to delve ever deeper into the lifeworlds of their intended audiences.

Planners also use segmentation, a technique which divides up the population into

different categories of persons or intended persons, assigning to each category a different

demographic and psychographic profile, including their current as well as future needs

and values. In their work, planners always find relevant consumer insights, and the brand

turns out to always, almost magically match some unmet need of the population –

because this matching up is of course invented in the planners’ minds. Because planners

not only describe their target consumers as they are, but also how they would like them to

become – what their future needs, values, spending patterns, and behaviors should be as a

result of the advertising, planners are not simply analysts of consumers; they are

strategists and creators of the consumer. By developing and investing in this particular

arena of the advertising business, this company has managed to become one of the

leading advertising agencies in Russia. Its specialization in understanding the current

Russian person and creating the new Russian consumer has allowed the agency to reap

high profits from its clients.

Say Advertising, another premier global ad network and the agency on which

much of this ethnography is based, instituted a new global process for the creation and

management of advertising called “The Brand Belief System.” Its motto is simply:

“Building Brands by Building Believers.” The aim of advertising is not simply on

creating brands anymore, but quite literally on creating new “believers” – that is, making

persons who are loyal to the brand. Furthermore, the announcement of this new agency

positioning was a full-blown “religious revival,” complete with a gospel choir, Revival-

era posters, and evangelical speeches. By the end of 2002, all 84 regional offices of this


global ad agency implemented the Brand Belief System as the primary and central focus

of their advertising development. Advertising has -- quite literally -- become evangelical,

as Michel De Certeau has noted (De Certeau, 1984, p. 180). Shortly after the

implementation of the Brand Belief System and following several changes in the

agency’s structure, Say was awarded the prize of Russia’s “Agency of the Year.”

In effect, what today’s successful global ad networks seek to do is not just to sell a

product, but to create the consumer who will fit the promise of the brand so closely that

they will identify with it. Since the strategies, images, and brand equities for many of the

brands advertised in Russia are developed in global or regional hub offices abroad, the

values of the brand do not and cannot change. Thus, it is the local Russian advertiser’s

job to find the consumer who will fit the values of the brand. And where no such

consumer exists, it is their job to create such a person. As this ethnography will detail, in

countries undergoing radical social transformation, this often means constituting

configurations of new behaviors, values, and discourses from the ground up. In their own

terms, it means creating “belief,” and in anthropological terms, it means re-structuring

habitus and reconstituting the person. Belief, for the marketers and consumers I studied,

is one of the key problematics of marketing in post-Soviet Russia. For Russians living in

the wake of the destruction of a socially shared belief in the “Soviet eternity,” belief

became a highly problematized concept -- whom to believe, what to believe in, and how

to believe became key questions for Russians attempting to reconstitute themselves in a

new socio-economic environment. For the marketing professionals, selling brand

messages that were both believable and that could retain their force in a place where

social belief had collapsed radically and suddenly was a constant preoccupation. In order


to create belief, the marketers understood, they needed to change the everyday habits and

understandings of their target consumers. In other words, to create belief in their

branded products, they would have to change the constitution of the Russian habitus, and

doing so would alter the configuration of the post-Soviet person.

An Inquiry into Belief Conversion and Habitus Change

As noted earlier, perestroiitsya is more than a mere change in material conditions.

It is a moral and ethical reconstitution of the person that entails a transformation in the

sphere of belief; in other words, perestroiitsya can be analyzed as an “act of conversion”

in which the person is transformed on many different levels of being. The marketers

involved in the project of transforming Russians into contemporary global capitalists and

consumers themselves work within the idiom of “believing” in brands, “evangelism” of

brand messages, and in contemporary marketing theory, the act of purchasing is, without

irony, called “conversion.” According to Webb Keane, “the project of becoming self-

consciously ‘modern’ can resemble that of religious conversion” and requires changes in

“assumptions about material things and language” (Keane, 2002, p. 67 & 68) – changes

that resonate deeply with the work of marketers and advertisers in post-Soviet Russia.

These observations not only allow a deeper understanding of how marketing works in

today’s global environment, but also force us to reconsider categories of the secular and

the religious as we notice how religious discourses, categories, and forms animate the

formation of modern, secular global capitalist economies.15 In order to begin to

15 This analysis goes beyond Weber’s thesis in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Weber’s argument is that Protestant beliefs created the conditions for the rise of capitalism and then created an “iron cage” whereby even when religiosity and the Protestant faith gave way to secular society, the ethic of hard work and asceticism in consumption continued to underlie the functioning of capitalism. This study


understand how advertisers and marketers take on the project of converting”post-Soviet

Russian persons, the concepts of belief, habitus, and conversion must be examined.

The work of Robert Bellah (1970) and William F. Hanks (2001) have identified

two different modes of believing: those connoted by “belief in” statements, and those

which are conveyed through “belief that” statements. “Belief that” denotes a mundane

everyday mode such as the statement: “I believe that the library closes at 11 pm.” These

are often “tacit assumptions” or unconscious taken-for-granteds about the world that may

never be expressed. The expression of a mundane belief may sometimes call it into

question and the revision of this type of belief can occur easily since there is little to no

investment in mundane beliefs (Hanks, 2001, pp. 12-18).

Monumental beliefs, on the other hand, can be characterized as “fervently held

convictions about the nature of reality” (Hanks, 2001, p. 5). These convictions are the

stuff of “monument building” and are grounded in deeply-held faith and committed

practice (Hanks, 2001, p. 8). The key distinction between the two types of belief in

Hanks’ formulation, I believe, really comes down to this: change of monumental belief

would necessitate a process of conversion -- a re-orientation of “a whole constellation of

assumptions and expectations” (Hanks, 2001, p. 18) -- whereas to change a mundane

belief, all I would have to do is “convince you, but I need not try to convert you” (Hanks,

2001, p. 14). The distinction proves useful for some formulations, as Hanks

demonstrates, but this particular formulation of “belief in” versus “belief that” also has a

hidden limitation.

illuminates how secular marketers rely on the discourses and practices of past and present missionaries to do capitalist work; it is not only the vestiges of religious rationality that remain in the contemporary world, but religious practices and the secular practices of capitalism are often very similar and sometimes even compete in the same spheres.


While in ordinary English-language usage, this distinction of two types of belief

statements certainly exist, I would argue that the two definitions of belief are not

differences in kind, and hence are not properly two categories of belief, but are actually

hierarchized sets. “Belief that” statements are nested within and are contingent upon

monumental beliefs that anchor them. What interests me here, framed within the

ethnographic context that I am working in, is a definition of belief that bridges practical

reason or mundane everyday experience and monumental convictions about the nature of

reality. The conception I propose frames belief as a union of action and conviction -- a

“mode of behaviour as well as a mode of thought,” to use Evans-Pritchard’s terminology

(Evans-Pritchard, 1976, p. 33).

This formulation of the term “belief” is congruent with Thomas Kuhn’s uses of

the term. For Kuhn, belief can be both the authoritative scientific paradigm as well as

smaller incremental beliefs that are inherent in and either supported or countered by

scientific practice (Kuhn, 2000, pp. 109-117). A “body of beliefs” in his formulation is

then a unit which encompasses small beliefs that can change incrementally (and thereby

become anomalous for a certain period of time) which then affect the entire structure of

belief. The emergence of a scientific paradigm – in his own words a change in belief –

hinges on a series of “small incremental changes of belief” which result in small changes

in rationality of explanation, detectable usually only in retrospect to the historian (Kuhn,

1990, pp. 112-113). The framework that orients scientific practices then is co-constituted

with the practices themselves, since the practices of science have defined the framework


through a long historical process. The work does not start from zero – it is contested and

changed but is always framed by and in relationship to what has come before.16

Kuhn’s “body of beliefs” formulation in many ways is reminiscent of Evans-

Pritchard’s “web of belief” concept. Evans-Pritchard’s ethnographic account of

witchcraft, magic, and oracles among the Azande posits a central question: how can we

explain why and how these perfectly intelligent people believe in the power of witches,

the authority of chicken oracles, and the effectiveness of magical spells? The explanation

is complex, and has rightly become one of the foundational ideas of anthropology. To

posit that the Azande ascribe to a few irrational superstitions, and therefore their faculties

of reasoning are faulty or under-developed would be a mistake; instead, “they reason

excellently in the idiom of their beliefs, but they cannot reason outside, or against, their

beliefs because they have no other idiom in which to express their thoughts” (Evans-

Pritchard, 1976, p. 159). The entire Azande view of the world is incomparable to ours,

and thus separate beliefs that might seem irrational through one view are entirely rational

and consistent through another. This is because:

All their beliefs hang together…In this web of belief every strand depends upon every other strand, and a Zande cannot get out of its meshes because this is the only world he knows. The web is not an external structure in which he is enclosed. It is the texture of his thought and he cannot think his thought is wrong. Nevertheless, his beliefs are not absolutely set but are variable and fluctuating to allow for different situations and permit empirical observation and even doubt. (Evans-Pritchard, 1976, p. 109)

In this poetic formulation, belief consists of small strands, intertwined to form a whole

with some coherence. Yet the coherence is never complete. A strand can come undone

and the pieces of the whole might cease to hang together. Perhaps we might reason that 16 This resonates with Goodman’s statement: “Worldmaking as we know it always starts from worlds already on hand; the making is a remaking” (Goodman, 1978, p. 6).


many strands might come undone – but this is where Evans-Pritchard fails to go as far as

Kuhn: in Evans-Pritchard’s functionalist explanation, unraveling the web would be

impossible, and the contradictions that he observes are always knitted back into the fabric

of belief (Evans-Pritchard, 1976, p. 57). Even the witch-doctor in this story, who knows

his cures are fakery, still finds himself trapped in “the same tangle of knowledge and

error” (Evans-Pritchard, 1976, p. 117) since the integrity of the system of belief must

always be maintained.

Yet there is some room for maneuver and perhaps even some slippage. In the last

chapter, Evans-Pritchard writes:

I have emphasized the coherency of Zande beliefs when they are considered together and are interpreted in terms of situations and social relationships. I have tried to show also the plasticity of beliefs as functions of situations. They are not indivisible ideational structures but are loose associations of notions…. In real life they do not function as a whole but in bits… Hence a single event may evoke a number of different and contradictory beliefs among different persons.

(Evans-Pritchard, 1976, p. 221) Perhaps then, the author was imagining that the web was not woven quite as tightly as an

Egyptian-cotton shirt; instead it might just hang together loosely like a pair of fish-net

stockings: entirely transparent and full of holes, but highly suggestive and somewhat

authoritative nonetheless.

The effects of belief are far-reaching; regulating modes of thought and conduct, as

well as shaping, to a certain extent, material reality. Belief’s reign over human life

extends from the interior of the individual mind to the everyday habits of social life and

even to our understanding of the nature of the universe. Yet this powerful force is not a

static monolith, but an edifice of loosely-woven strands, usually fraying at the edges.

There may be holes and unexpected slippages in the system, as well as the possibility of


radical belief transformation. Insofar as belief constitutes life, it is also constituted by it;

that is, its very effectiveness as a mental and social force is that it is instituted through an

invisible process -- this invisibility allows for belief’s characteristic taken-for-

grantedness, its assumptive tacitness.

And how is this whole web constituted and instituted? From where does it spring,

and how can it come to be an unquestioned anchor of life? According to Pascal, “There

are three sources of belief: reason, custom, inspiration” (Pascal, 1954, #245). While

reason and divine inspiration might certainly compel the few toward belief, it is custom

that occupies a privileged space in Pascal’s writings on belief:

Custom is the source of our strongest and most believed proofs. It bends the automaton, which persuades the mind without thinking about the matter. Who has demonstrated that there will be a to-morrow, and that we shall die? And what is more believed? It is, then, custom which persuades us of it…. We must get an easier belief, which is that of custom, which, without violence, without art, without argument, makes us believe things, and inclines all our powers to this belief, so that our soul falls naturally into it. It is not enough to believe only by force of conviction, which the automaton is inclined to believe the contrary. Both our parts must be made to believe, the mind by reasons which it is sufficient to have seen once in a lifetime, and the automaton by custom, and by not allowing it to incline to the contrary. (Pascal, 1954, #252)

The force of belief acts on or persuades the mind, and so in this formulation the mind is

not generative of belief. In another formulation, it shapes the activity of the mind, but

arises from custom: “belief is an act of the mind arising from custom” (Hume quoted in

Needham, 1972, p. 72). Hence belief emanates from custom or habit – the mundane

everyday experiences of life, passing under the radar screen of active reasoning.

Habituation is “easier belief” because we fall into the habit of believing without arduous

proofs; we consent to the everyday modes of existence that implant belief and constantly

reinforce it with neither the threat of violence nor the promise of beauty. By inclining the


heart to “believe without reasoning,” faith is created unconsciously, almost naturally

(Pascal, 1954, # 284). The heart, as the organ of emotion, mediates between the mind

and body; thus a heartfelt inclination to believe would affect both the work of the mind

and the body.

Inspired by Pascal, Pierre Bourdieu situates belief more precisely in the body:

“Practical belief is not a ‘state of mind’, still less a kind of arbitrary adherence to a set of

instituted dogmas and doctrines (‘beliefs’), but rather a state of the body” (Bourdieu,

1980, p. 68). States of the body, in turn, “give rise to states of the mind” (Bourdieu,

1980, p. 69). Belief is instituted in persons and social life not through a cognitive

function, but through the dispositions17 of material bodies moving through the social

universe. These motor schemes or dispositions enact belief at the same time that they

constitute it. But this happens, again, under the radar of reason, behind the back of our

conscious mental faculties: “the acquisition of belief, that of the continuous, unconscious

conditioning that is exerted through conditions of existence as much as through

encouragements or warnings, implies the forgetting of acquisition, the illusion of

innateness… belief, or any other cultural acquirement, can be experienced simultaneously

as logically necessary and sociologically unconditioned” (Bourdieu, 1980, p. 50). It is

almost as if as the body moves, its osmotic encounter with social space produces innate

belief – since it is silently absorbed through the skin, it has physical and mental effects

while resisting objectification. To the actor, the product of this process of sociological

conditioning tends to appear innate and unconditioned, utterly unquestioned and

unquestionable.

17 This dispositional view of belief is also attributed to Wittgenstein’s writings, according to Needham (1972, p. 56 & 103). Disposition here is defined as closely related to an inclination.


This version of embodied belief -- always emergent in the person as the body

articulates with society -- is closely linked to the notion of habitus (Bourdieu, 1977, p.

72). Habitus for Bourdieu is an unconscious disposition carried in everyday life by social

actors. Their tastes, actions, and interpretations of events are informed by their particular

habitus -- as "a transposable disposition, armed with a set of perceptual and evaluative

schemes that are available for general application, inclines its owner towards other

cultural experiences and enables him to perceive, classify, and memorize them

differently" (Bourdieu, 1984, p. 28). Evans-Pritchard noted how the Azande also were

“inclined” by their idiom of belief to perceive, classify, and memorize experiences

differently than the outsider, a carrier of a different habitus or an actor interpreting

experience through a different idiom of belief.

However, habitus requires another element to produce and reproduce itself: that of

its homologous other -- the concept of field. The field, a “space of positions and

position-takings,” is the social context within which an actor finds himself, and which

constitutes habitus. Any field – and there can be many overlapping and hierarchized

fields within a single actor finds herself – is organized around a central doxa, a firmly-

held belief. This belief is often unarticulated and invisible to the actors in the field, yet it

grounds and validates the entire system of values that structures the field. This is a type

of “monumental belief” in the specific context, and it holds together the sensibility of the

web of beliefs, discourse, actions, and behaviors one finds in any given field. In

Bourdieu’s formulation, without the presence of a doxa, a field cannot exist. And in this

formulation, the articulation of habitus and field is the engine that reproduces the social

structure.


Yet by bringing Bourdieu’s concept of habitus into play invites the criticism that

his work has been much subjected to: that the analysis is relevant only to social

reproduction, whereas questions of social change employ other conceptual frameworks.

Indeed, in the study of post-Soviet society, the pertinent question is of course that of

radical social transformation. And after all, beliefs and habitus do change. Accounts of

these transformations are common in studies of evangelical Christianity; anthropologists

have noted that the spread of Christianity has had enormous historical success at

redefining the structures of belief and changing everyday habits (even the most intimate

practices) among millions of people. Advertising, too, has proven to be a commanding

force in the large-scale transformation of beliefs.

Thomas Kuhn’s description of scientific “belief conversions” upsets this

theorization, in that the conversion emanates from within the converted group. In Kuhn’s

narrative of scientific paradigm shifts, there are no missionaries from afar instilling a new

set of practices and no external forces which urge the transformative process along.

Instead, science – that is, a “body of belief” (Kuhn, 1962, p. 4) or “conceptual web”

(Kuhn, 1962, p. 149) that shapes perception of the physical world, the practices of

interpreting that world, and the theories available for explanation of natural phenomena --

goes through endogenously-conceived crises and revolutions in thought. These

revolutions change the perceptual and methodological norms of science radically so that

ideas of the pre-revolutionary phase are entirely incommensurable and are usually labeled

mere “superstitions” or “error” by post-revolutionary science (Kuhn, 1962, pp. 2-4).

The stability of a certain paradigm still rests on authority in Kuhn’s formulation,

but that authority emanates from an internal mutual consensus of the accredited scientific


community; in other words, the hegemonic force is not one that asserts control over

people. Instead, if it is hegemony at all, it is a type of hegemony that is voluntarily

instituted as an implicit contract among practitioners to agree to a certain worldview in

order to work toward a collective goal more effectively (Kuhn, 1962, p. 11). It is through

this truly consensual way that the scientific community defines the limits of action and

thought within its community. In this case, to speak of “domination” might not be

appropriate, since by choosing to enter a specific field of science, members voluntarily go

through a self-transformation that will bring their mode of thinking in line with that of the

mainstream scientific paradigm while ensuring their success in the scientific field by

ascribing to the perceptual schemes, theoretical frameworks, and legitimated practices of

“normal science” (Kuhn, 1962, pp. 11-20).

The transition from one paradigm of normal science to another is in this account a

radical break in thought:

Just because it is a transition between incommensurables, the transition between competing paradigms cannot be made a step at a time, forced by logic and neutral experience. Like a gestalt switch, it must occur all at once (though not necessarily in an instant) or not at all…. The conversion experience that I have likened to a gestalt switch remains, therefore, at the heart of the revolutionary process.

(Kuhn, 1962, pp. 150 & 204)

The inspired flash of the breakthrough scientist must occur within a pre-set “crisis” in the

discipline, however, for the new paradigm to be acknowledged and adopted. Even so, the

adoption of a new paradigm must be initially implemented through a process of

incremental individual-by-individual acceptance – and “decision[s] of that kind can only

be made on faith” (Kuhn, 1962, p. 158). The faith must have some sort of rational basis,

to be sure, such as explaining a certain set of phenomena more accurately and elegantly


than the previous theory – but it is not a rational decision, it is fundamentally a shift in

belief based on faith. Kuhn’s work on belief change helps us to reexamine assumptions

about the necessity of explanations based on instituted authority; instead, he offers a

narrative of how mass transformations can emerge endogenously from within

communities without giving up the tacit hegemonic taken-for-grantedness of belief

paradigms (that is, their doxa).

In anthropology, few texts on the topic of the large-scale reconstitution of habitus

rival the Comaroffs’ two-volume account of the transformative effects of Protestant

missionaries in South Africa. While these evangelical Christians came to the “dark

Continent” explicitly to save souls, a much more expansive transformation occurred

through their work: the project of saving souls and inspiring belief hinged on the ability

to change more mundane, everyday practices. Changing the habits and customs of dress,

architecture, hygiene, and health were not tangential to transforming religious belief.

These mundane materialities were the very frames for reconstructing a new web of belief

in South Africa. Through a long and complicated process, then, changing small-scale

habits had a large-scale result: the unexpected emergence of a new mode of being, an

entirely new configuration of personhood/consciousness that no one, including the

missionaries, had fully imagined or predicted.

While for the missionaries themselves, the most important undertaking of the

missionary project was the conversion of the natives’ beliefs, for the Comaroffs, the key

question is the institution of a new political hegemony through the reconstruction of

habitus. The Comaroffs concept of hegemony draws heavily from Bourdieu’s theory of

practice and refers:


To that order of signs and practices, relations and distinctions, images and epistemologies…that come to be taken for granted as the natural and received shape of the world and everything that inhabits it. It consists, to paraphrase Bordieu (1977:167) things that go without saying; things that, being presumptively shared, are not normally the subject of explication or argument (Bourdieu 1977:94)…. In a quite literal sense, hegemony is habit forming… [It] consists of constructs and conventions that have come to be shared and naturalized throughout a political community…[It] homogenizes… Hegemony, at its most effective, is mute. (Comaroff & Comaroff, 1991, pp. 23-23)

If we were to stop at this definition of hegemony, its relation to what we identified as

collective, monumental belief would be quite striking indeed. Even the passages from

Bourdieu’s Outline of a Theory of Practice correspond to two sections on collective

belief (doxa) and habitus, respectively. According to Raymond Williams, hegemony is a

broad concept indeed:

It is a whole body of practices and expectations, over the whole of living: our senses and assignments of energy, our shaping perceptions of ourselves and our worlds. It is a lived system of meanings and values – constitutive and constituting – which as they are experienced as practices appear as reciprocally confirming. (Williams, 1977, 110)

Yet the concept of hegemony cannot be extricated from a context of overt

political domination of one group by another; Williams goes on to state that hegemony is

a “culture which has also to be seen as the lived dominance and subordination of

particular classes” (Williams, 1977, 110). Infusing this into a reading of the Comaroffs’

narrative, the world is thus split into two main divisions: the subordinate world of

Setswana (Tswana culture) and dominating Segoda (European Culture). The story

unfolds as Segoda infiltrates and imprints its own forms over Setswana:

The making of hegemony involves the assertion and control over various modes of symbolic production: over such things as educational and ritual processes, patterns of socialization, political and legal procedures, canons of


style and self-representation, public communication, health and bodily discipline, and so on. That control, however…must be sustained over time and in such a way that it becomes, to all intents and purposes, invisible. For it is only by repetition that signs and practices cease to be perceived or remarked; that they are so habituated, so deeply inscribed in everyday routine, that they may no longer be seen as forms of control – or seen at all. It is then that they come to be (un)spoken of as custom, (dis)regarded as convention. (Comaroff & Comaroff, 1991, p. 25)

This almost-invisible process of constructing a new hegemony hinged on the work of the

Protestant missionaries, who in the Comaroffs’ view, were the “human vehicles of a

hegemonic worldview” (Comaroff & Comaroff, 1991, p. 310). Yet the encounter – “the

long conversation” -- between Setswana and Segoda was not simply a one-way street;

while the evangelists were bringing European culture to the African frontier and forever

altering Setswana, they were also deeply affected by the “native” modes of life. The

evangelists’ consciousness was re-molded conjointly (although not nearly as dramatically

as was the African consciousness) as they encountered their subjects of conversion. As

the process unfolded, it ultimately produced hybrid styles, architectures, discourses, and

beliefs instead of a simple transplantation of European ways onto African soil.

Not only is hegemony never total, as Williams (1977:109) has insisted. It is always threatened by the vitality that remains in the forms of life it thwarts… The hegemonic is constantly being made—and by the same token, may be unmade. (Comaroff & Comaroff, 1991, p. 25)

Perhaps this is a bit of hyperbole on the Comaroffs’ part, for nowhere in their volumes

was the effectiveness or success of the European imperial/missionary project actually in

peril or even in question. Ultimately, it amounted to an “internalization of a set of

values… a colonization of the indigenous modes of perception and practice” and the role

of the missionary was not constitutive of, but actually “decisive in the imposition of a

new mode of being” (Comaroff & Comaroff, 1986 p. 2). In Of Revelation and


Revolution, the authors and the readers know implicitly that Segoda will ultimately

triumph. It comes down, simply, to a question of how, and through what means.

The body’s vernacular habits -- dress, health, hygiene, home environment -- were

key objects for these practices of transformation and the reconstitution of persons. As

Niklaus Largier has also noted, in the Christian religious tradition, the idea that bodily

“practice & exercise (gymnasia) are the key elements to the constitution of the inner

realm of experience” has a long history dating back at least to the Middle Ages (Largier,

p. 5). From the missionary point of view, to incline the Africans toward God, they would

have to wash and civilize them first; for “inner and outer transformation go together”

(Comaroff & Comaroff, 1997, p. 227). Barbarous demeanor and décor were seen to be

surely incongruous with internal Christian faith (Mackenzie quoted in Comaroff &

Comaroff, 1997, p. 274). A “revolution in habits,” the Comaroffs argue, formed the

foundation for the possibility of South African “revelation” in spirit. Furthermore, “that

revolution…had to be systematic, methodical, total. It had to run to the very core, and to

all corners, of Tswana social being (Comaroff & Comaroff, 1997, p. 119). The most

important instrument to wage this revolution at the missionaries hands was themselves:

acting as role models, always clean, well-mannered, and hard-working, the Protestant

evangelists hoped to inspire the “natives” not through the word of God, but through

personal example of their own everyday works – “the mundane signs and practices of

European modernity” (Comaroff & Comaroff, 1997, p. 120). Hoping to stimulate

mimetic practices, it would seem, might inspire a mimetic (and therefore Christianized)

consciousness.


In this account, the transformation of belief is intertwined with colonialism and

the overt forms of power and control that are intrinsic to the colonial domination. In fact,

many accounts attribute the stability of belief or the possibility of its transformation to the

authority that backs (or co-exists) with belief. Evans-Pritchard notes that unquestioned

belief in the poison oracle is “backed by the political power of the princes and by

tradition,” while the web of belief within which the Azande exist legitimates political

authority (Evans-Pritchard, 1976, p. 61). Likewise, Needham quotes Hume, Hampshire,

and Wittgenstein who have argued that “beliefs are in fact largely accepted, from

tradition or from some other source of authority, so that there is not that disjunction

between believing and accepting” (Needham, 1972, p. 77). Likewise, De Certeau states

that political or some other forma of authority must be established for the existence of

beliefs (De Certeau, 1984, p. 178). Thus, in these accounts at least, some type of power

and domination seem to be always implicated with belief, as it is with Bourdieu’s doxa.

The collapse of one structure of belief and the institution of another, in this conception,

might be unthinkable without some sort of external power to upset the traditional norms

of authority.

A Crisis of the Person: Habitus and Belief in Post-Soviet Russia

As the world grounded in the authoritative force of state socialism and belief in

the immanent communist future faded, Russians began to act unpredictably; instead of

feeling freed from the oppressive distortions of state socialism and embarking on

American-style capitalism, post-Soviets started behaving “badly”: drug and alcohol

abuse, prostitution, and suicide rose sharply; mafia rings organized quickly; and pyramid


schemes were created and collapsed within months.18 Few had expected the transition

would be so difficult, perhaps because few Western experts believed in the power of the

belief in Soviet eternity. That hegemonic belief had generated an entire material and

mental universe – a social field – which in turn engendered the Soviet habitus.

At center of Bourdieu’s theory of field lies doxa, the belief that goes unquestioned

and structures the hierarchies of positions that comprise it. Once the doxa of Soviet life –

the future -- dematerialized, the field necessarily disintegrated. A Soviet habitus, in other

words, found itself without a field.19

In the larger global context, of course, there was another field – that of global

neoliberal capitalism, with its doxa of

utilitarian individualism: in particular, its celebration of the virtues of the disciplined, self-made man; of private property and status as signs of personal success, poverty as a fitting sanction for human failure; of enlightened self-interest and the free market, with its “invisible hand,” as the mechanism for arriving at the greatest public good. (Comaroff & Comaroff, 1991, p. 60)

Yet because belief in this doxa had not been instituted or internalized, the (ex-)Soviet

habitus found itself incongruous with that context. As the economic reforms shocked the

society into the milieu of global capitalism, Russians found themselves out of position,

and out of proportion, with the space of positions and position-takings of the context they

were being thrust into. Furthermore, many of the most esteemed positions were, for

Russians, among the basest and most immoral positions within the Soviet context (for

example, Caroline Humphrey describes her informants’ views on “speculation,” or

18 There were, of course, a relatively small group of people who were able to transform themselves quickly after the collapse of state socialism and become successful capitalists; most of these people, however, had had foreign friends, contacts, or some material link to capitalist culture in the late-Soviet period. By and large, this group consisted of the St Petersburg and Moscow intelligentsia (see Yurchak, 2005). 19 The field within which Larissa’s personhood is constituted is incongruous with the project of perestroika, and thus although she has emerged as a different person, she has not perestrooiilas’.


market trading and retailing, in the post-Soviet period). The hegemonic world order of

neoliberal capitalism was incongruous with the structures of their being.20

This devastation of belief in the future had another effect as well on the person.

As a complex of social relationships, the person in anthropological terms is not the

biological individual, an autonomous actor with preferences that emerge sui generis.

Steven Lukes, in conclusion to a set of essays on The Category of the Person, writes:

Mauss, and most of our contributors, expand the category of the person in another direction, seeing it rather as a structure of beliefs [italics in original].

For them, the ‘anatomical structure’ that has ‘taken on’ a ‘succession of forms’ is, I suggest, a set of very general beliefs that can perhaps be seen as involved in the attitudes indicated and as underlying the varying forms of ‘law, religion, custom, social structure, and mentality’. These beliefs can best be seen, perhaps, as a series of answers to some of all of such very general questions as: What distinguishes human persons from other conscious agents? How are we to understand the relation of the individual to society? How does the self relate to the roles it plays, and to its ends, or purposes? In what does the unity of an individual’s life consist? … [The accounts in this volume] discern an underlying structure of belief beneath the varying cultural forms [of the person]; and they interpret these forms as expressing or representing that structure, more or less adequately. (pp. 285-286)

In other words, underneath the specific expression of personhood lies a structure of

belief. This belief can be said to anchor and hold together what it means to be a person in

a given society. Related to doxa, the underlying foundational belief, and therefore to the

social context or field, the person is also a carrier of habitus.

The person as the subject of study in this work can be found at a specific instance

of the articulation of habitus and field. The person is constituted by the beliefs that

undergird field as well as by the specific habitus carried by it; that is, the person is

emergent as a set of social relations created as a result of an articulation of habitus and

20 According to Bourdieu, in a short passage on the hysteresis effect, habitus, which is supposed to allow the actor to successfully navigate various situations, finds itself ill-fitted with a new situation: “Practices are always liable to incur negative sanctions when the environment with which they are actually confronted is too distant from that to which they are objectively fitted” (Bourdieu, 1977, p.78).


field in a specific instance. Elements of the sets of these social relations are present in

both habitus and field, and only through their intersection can the person as a meaningful

actor who carries recognized social value take shape.

The loss of the Soviet future, or in Pelevin’s terms, the shared belief in eternity,

uprooted the entire structure of life. When the doxa of Soviet society was proclaimed a

baseless sham from both within and without, Russian persons were supposed to naturally

and quickly transition to acting as good capitalists, entrepreneurs, and consumers in the

West would. But of course, habitus does not work that way. Re-structuring habitus

would require a project worthy of significant investment. Or more accurately, a

multitude of projects, all with the same goal: to re-frame Russian life in terms that global

business could profit from, today and in the future. These projects re-encode the social

future as one filled with calculable risk and uncertainty, but a future that can be managed

through specific regimes of production, and more importantly consumption. Since the

doxa of the certain future has crumbled, the doxa of a different kind of rationally

predictable yet personally uncertain future is being formed in its place.

Re-thinking Post-Socialism: A Focus on the Future

Up to now, most academic work on post-socialism has emphasized the negotiation

of the Soviet past and the post-Soviet present, between the continuities of past habits and

mentalities versus the present changes in material circumstances. Within anthropology in

general, studies of social change likewise emphasize the role of memory and cultural

history to make sense of the present moment. This study breaks with that tradition. It

argues, instead, that the most important locus for making sense of the realities of post-


socialism is neither the present nor the past, but the future. It argues that comprehending

today means understanding the battle to triumph over the tomorrow.

Or, as Russians say, the problem of how to recapture “confidence in Tomorrow’s

Day” (“uverennost’ v zavtroshnem dne”).

The Soviet future – Tomorrow’s Day -- was the moral foundation for Soviet

society, and thus the basis for the constitution of the person in the Soviet era. The habits

and structures of life, the discourses and logics that wove socialism together, were all

built on the foundation of the future – both the doxa and the telos of state socialism itself.

Marxism-Leninism, after all, is a teleological faith at its core, structured around a

narrative of forward movement toward an impending state of communism. Without the

justification and unwavering belief that the Future will be superior when it is communist,

the moral constitution of socialist life begins to waver, allowing for the possibilities of

that life to crumble, disintegrate, and collapse.

To be clear, I am not arguing that the past and nostalgia do not matter, but how

they matter can be interpreted differently. Once the anchor of Soviet society and

morality – the Eternal Future – disappeared, the past became invalidated. Of course, the

personal and social memories of life “before” are ever-present and discussed, but the

underlying morality that structured and made sense of that life has been socially de-

valued and proclaimed a sham. They are mere recantations of past events that once were,

and are no more without a direct transference of those experiences into the experience of

the present. There remains little true value in the realities of the past. These memories

are usually recounted as vestiges of a naïve way of life, described as the worldview of a

child before the realities of life set in, with little relevance to the actuality of today’s post-


socialist world. Thus, for post-Soviet people, the past matters not as it relates to the

actual past of State Socialism and the experiences of today, but in how it functions as

being discredited and lost. There is an experiential break between the past and the

present, although there continue to be many continuations in the material existence of

people. The key point at which the experiential break occurred was a the loss of belief in

eternity, or the disappearance of the future horizon.

Xin Liu’s The Otherness of Self explores very similar processes of temporal

unmooring and self transformation. This inquiry into the “genealogy of the self in

contemporary China” explores the re-configurations of narratives that structure the self

through the pre-revolutionary period to the post-Socialist moment. Narrative, or the

stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, allow us to make sense of the world in which

we live and our place in it; through these stories, the person becomes conscious of

himself. Both person, as a complex of social relations and beliefs, and self, the internal

consciousness of ourselves as a person, emerge through narrative. The structure of

narrative, in turn, rests on the configuration of social temporality. Narratives constructed

before China’s revolution emphasize the “yesterday-ness” of today; that is, the

experience of the present always remained pregnant with the past, a past that anchored

and made sense of all experience: “present-ness is…a presence of the past as the present”

(Liu, 2002, p. 162). During the Maoist period, experience always carried the connotation

of tomorrow, and “the today-ness of today was implicated in the tomorrow-ness – the

future of communism”; thus, there was no present, no experience, without reference to

the communist future (Liu, 2002, pp. 162-163). Finally, in contemporary China, today

does not refer to either yesterday or tomorrow – it has almost become dislodged from


past or future in a sense, in that present-ness only refers to itself (Liu, 2002, p. 163). One

of the results of this temporal un-mooring is that many people find they “cannot

remember anything” (Liu, 2002, p. 179) since they entered the world of post-socialism.

In other words, writes Liu, “time has lost its temporality” (Liu, 2002, p. 180) – it no

longer makes sense in a narrative framework that hinges on a succession of moments,

anchored together by a central framework of interpretation. There is no longer any basis

for understanding present experience or its place in the succession of time. If the present

refers to only the present, then where is the narrative structure? One of Liu’s main

arguments is that those people who have remade themselves, who have become different

sorts of persons in the context of Chinese capitalism, are no longer able to meaningfully

narrate their lives, nor to articulate where it should be going. They are unable to interpret

the significance of experience and have lost a sense of direction: “Life goes on, but the

perspective and orientation of life have begun to disappear” (Liu, 2002, p. 169).

Similarly, the significance of the loss of the future for the post-Soviet experience

should not be overlooked. Before the collapse, present-ness was always pregnant with

the eternal future. The narrative of lives pivoted upon an implied social “forever.” In the

transitional moment, however, when the future ceased to be everlasting, Russians, like

Chinese, experienced a deep temporal displacement that could not be explained through

an examination of the past. The post-Soviet moment casts our attention on the need to

focus on the future, and to the configurations of intention, expectation, and potentiality

that are key to understanding the reconstruction of both personhood and society.


Today’s Global Missionaries

Just as there were economists and policy-makers who crafted the macro-economic

reforms of Perestroika, there are strategists who are working to develop and shape the

process of perestroiitsya. The most influential group of these strategists is the marketers

who invest billions of dollars into creating new systems of needs, new everyday habits,

and new modes of being in Russia today. Not only are they the arm of global business

that is charged to reach out to consumers, but in the Russian context, advertising touches

virtually everyone’s life, since about 97% of the Russian population watches television

regularly and the consumption of printed media is widespread21 (TNS Gallup, 19

September 2003). Of course, the marketers’ intention is not explicitly to create a new

form of person, but to increase the sales of their product by crafting a narrative of hope

and confidence, social, romantic, or economic success around the brand. However, just

because their intention is purely economic does not mean that the effects they are having

do not extend to the social or moral. Charged with creating belief in brands,

manufacturing consumer needs, and altering consumption habits, the consequences

marketers have on society often reach far beyond the scope of their explicit intentions,

and even beyond their imaginations. As the Comaroffs have shown in the case of

evangelical Christian missionaries in South Africa who intended only to save savage

souls, and not to alter their way of life, the work of instituting new spiritual beliefs had

21 While a large number of Russians still do not have running water, almost all have a television at home and watch a great deal of TV, especially in the dark winter months. The Soviet state successfully brought electricity and media to almost all Soviet households, so that today, I found that even in a small village in eastern Buryatia, a family that needs to carry its household water 15 minutes from the local well will know the all the storylines to “Sex and the City” and will be able to distinguish the imagery of a Nike commercial from a Reebok ad.


profound and often entirely unintended effects on the Africans’ form of everyday living,

personhood, and social structure (Comaroff & Comaroff, 1997).

In fact, marketers unintentionally yet necessarily alter the forms of personhood in

Russia, since the business environment of capitalism depends upon a strong belief in

utilitarian individualism; both the consumer and the employee must be a form of Homo

Economicus in order for business to function. In the Comaroffs’ formulation, the primary

engine for the creation of this kind of individualistic person is the “recasting of mundane,

routine practices” (Comaroff & Comaroff, 1997, p. 31). By altering habits in the arenas

of living space, movement, personal hygiene, and other aspects of everyday experience,

marketers insinuate new forms of value, shame, hope, confidence, and personhood into

the texture of the post-Soviet life-world.

As Elias has noted, “civilized” capitalism necessitates not only changes in routine

everyday habits and the emotional structures that underlie them, but it also requires a

specific relationship to the future, one of an expanded timeframe that calls for rational

calculation and internalized discipline. Although the transition from the Middle Ages to

modernity that Elias describes has a different structure of temporal change than that of

the transformation of socialist to post-socialist society, thinking about the “training” that

is required to instill a new relationship to time remains insightful (Elias, 1994, p. 381).

The heightened sense of uncertainty and anxiety experienced by people in times of

change coupled with the knowledge that without a favorable position within the network

of civilized capitalist society one would perish creates a form of discipline that does not

need explicit physical force to back it. While those transitioning from socialism to

capitalism were long embedded within these networks, the emotional structures which


couple with them – the feelings of anxiety and uncertainty – were not present in the same

ways within the Soviet universe. Thus, the rationality necessary to preserve one’s

material life within modern society was of a different nature since the eternal was stable,

and future outcomes relatively knowable.

************

This ethnography traces the modalities by which persons are transformed through

global strategies and practices of marketing in the wake of the loss of confidence in

Tomorrow’s Day. When Soviet eternity disappears, the narratives marketers create

through advertising seek to re-enframe the human being in a world where the future is

uncertain and frightening, but where hope shines through if only one believes in the

promises of brands. Although certainty and stability in tomorrow will never be regained,

the viewer of advertisements is offered a choice to believe in the brand, and to trust that

this belief will help him to regulate and direct his own future direction.

In 2002, I contacted several US and UK executives of large multi-national

advertising agencies with the request of studying their Moscow office. After receiving

the name of an executive whom to contact in Moscow, I literally knocked on the door of

the agency and asked for his time. “Really?” he asked jokingly, “you want to study us?”

The idea seemed absurd to him, at the same time that the topic struck him as important.

But being a good businessman, the real thing he wanted to know was: “During the time

you will be at the agency, what will you do for us?”

Fortunately, I had had experience in the industry and during the twelve months I

spent at the agency, could help type up presentations, facilitate meetings, and write up

notes from focus groups. My greatest asset, however, was my native English, and


particularly my knowledge of English jargon. While there were several expatriate native

English speakers at the agency, I was the only one who was a native Russian speaker as

well. I got to know everyone in the agency quickly, including the receptionists, as people

started calling me to come to their desks and help them to understand or translate

presentations, American advertisements, and emails from abroad. Almost immediately, I

started being invited to observe their client meetings, focus groups, and industry events

which led me into contact with other marketing professionals. An added asset was my

position as both an insider and outsider of the culture; although I was born in the Soviet

Union, my family immigrated to the US when I was just four years old, making me a

cultural “Amerikanka” but one who was still “one of ours” (“nasha”). This led to some

confusion, as people often didn’t know who I was when they first encountered me – a

Russian or a foreigner22 – but it turned out to be a great benefit, since people generally

said they felt that they could be as open with me as with an insider, yet understood that

they needed to explain many things in detail, as to an outsider.

As I made more and more connections and as more issues in relation to the

advertising work came up, my own fieldwork slowly started to seep outside the walls of

the agency. In addition to clients and researchers, I interviewed bank executives, retail

consultants, professional trainers, journalists, and analysts. As consumer credit exploded

on the advertising scene during my time in Russia, I started to track consumer credit

offerings. As shopping habits began to shift, I surveyed different retail environments in

and around Moscow. And when I noticed that the advertisers I was studying were often

22 After attending an agency-client meeting once, a member of the client team came up to me and asked, “My colleague and I spent the whole meeting wondering – are you Russian or American? I wagered 50 bucks that you are foreign.” The bet was called off when I said I was born in the Soviet Union and raised in America.


referring to specific strategies for marketing to people in the “regions,” I got on the train

and started traveling in the direction of the Far East, stopping in or around Kazan’,

Ekaterinburg, Novosibirsk, Barnaul, Krasnoyarsk, Kansk, Irkutsk, Ulan-Ude, and

Barguzin to see for myself how marketing was developing and persons transforming

outside the more familiar territories of Western Russia.

While anthropology claims neither exhaustiveness nor representativeness for the

validity of its claims, my desire is to give a balanced and authoritative account of the

processes in Russia that I am describing. Because I was able to study several of the

biggest and most influential global advertisers in the world, because the agency network

allowed me total access to all of their materials, conversations, and executives (including

to materials and executives overseas), and because I was careful to speak to many people

who differed in background, education, location, and age, as well as to both people who

were “winners” and “losers” of the transition, I hope this work indeed strikes this

balance. While this study may be more sweeping than traditional small-scale or single-

site ethnographies, I believe there is value also in tracking writ-large processes such as

behemoth marketing networks if our goal is really to try to understand the increasingly

integrated and expansive configurations of the contemporary world in which we find

ourselves.

The book is organized into two parts, each consisting of two chapters each. Part

One examines the constitution of the Russian marketing industry and the dispositions, or

habitus, that are associated with it. Since Russian marketing and advertising were largely

developed by multinational corporations and global agencies, particular attention is paid

to the relations between the global field of marketing and the Russian advertising


industry. The Part Two is a detailed analysis of the techniques, strategies, and

advertising practices of marketing work, particularly focusing on advertising campaigns

for cleanliness and hygiene products. While there are gestures as to how these large-

scale strategies effect the consumption patterns of ordinary Russian citizens, the emphasis

of the study is on the marketing practices themselves.23 The analysis in this work

demonstrates how forms of personhood are strategically formulated, new economic

logics are created, and the socio-economic order is transformed. Nonetheless, the process

is open-ended and there are unintended and unforeseen consequences to the Twinned

Transformation underway in Post-Soviet Russia. Understanding that the processes of the

transitions in personhood and political economy are indelibly linked directs us as well to

a better understanding of human futures – not as a realm of prediction and forecasting,

but that of intentional strategies that often lead to unexpected trajectories of change.

23 There is a wealth of work being done on the changes in post-Soviet consumption patterns; a short list includes the work of Jane Zavisca, Jennifer Patico, and Kristen Ghodsee. The uniqueness of this study is its access to the multi-national advertising industry; thus, it outlines in detail the development and distribution of the marketing campaigns that work to transform consumption patterns as well as the feedback mechanisms that exist within the marketing industry to respond to transformations in the everyday habits and beliefs of their consumer audiences.

1st chapter

Documents

economic transition

economic literature

economic categorizations

russian person

perestroiitsya larissa

situations of economic

adequate social capital

future grounded confidence