An Archaeology of Socialism

by Buchli, Victor

• ISBN13: 9781859732120
• ISBN10: 1859732127
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1999-02-01
• Publisher: Berg Pub Ltd

Summary

This highly original case study, which adopts a material culture perspective, is unprecedented in social and cultural histories of the Soviet period and provides a unique window on social relations. The author demonstrates how Moisei Ginzburg's Constructivist masterpiece, the Narkomfin Communal House, employed classic Marxist understandings of material culture in an effort to overturn capitalist and patriarchal social structures. Through the edifying effects of architectural forms, Ginzburg attempted to induce socialist and feminist-inspired social and gender relations. The author shows how, for the inhabitants, these principles manifested themselves, from taste to hygiene to gender roles, and how individuals variously appropriated architectural space and material culture to cope with the conditions of daily life, from the utopianism of the First Five Year Plan and Stalin's purges to the collapse of the Soviet Union.This book makes a major contribution to: the history of socialism in the Soviet Union and, more generally, Eastern Europe; material culture studies; architectural history; archaeology and social anthropology.

Author Biography

Victor Buchli is a Lecturer, Department of Anthropology, at the University College London.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements	ix	(2)
List of Figures	xi
1 Introduction	1	(22)
2 Revolution and the Restructuring of the Material World	23	(18)
3 Soviet Hygiene and the Battle against Dirt and Petit-Bourgeois Consciousness	41	(22)
4 The Narkomfin Communal House and the Material Culture of Socialism	63	(14)
5 Stalinism and the Domestication of Marxism	77	(22)
6 The Narkomfin Communal House and Marxist Domesticity	99	(38)
7 De-Stalinisation and the Reinvigoration of Marxist Understandings of the Material World	137	(22)
8 The Narkomfin Communal House and the Material Culture of De-Stalinisation	159	(26)
9 Conclusion	185	(16)
Appendix	201	(8)
Sources	209	(10)
Index	219