TY - JOUR
T1 - The Quantity of Style
T2 - Imaginary Consumption in the New Russia
AU - Oushakine, Serguei Alex
N1 - Funding Information:
I want to thank Kim Lane Scheppele, Art Redding, Miglena Nikolchina, Alexei Yurchak, Elena Iarskaya-Smirnova and Bruce Grant, whose comments and suggestions helped to frame my understanding and interpretation of the students' essays. The project would not have been possible without financial support of Program on Gender and Culture (Central European University, Budapest) and the USIA-IREX Alumni Small Grant Program.
PY - 2000/10
Y1 - 2000/10
N2 - This article analyses 178 essays written in April 1997, in which Siberian students (15-22-year-olds) described their understandings of Soviet and post-Soviet realities. The main change between the two regimes is perceived in these essays as the change in patterns of consumption. Moreover, as the essays indicate, the new Russian style of consumption, usually associated with the style of the new rich classes in Russia, finds its fullest representation in the figure of the ‘new Russian’ man. The article suggests that students' attempts to envision unfamiliar patterns of wealthy consumption bring with them the reproduction of their own cultural dispositions and habits. Being unable to easily come up with adequate cultural signifiers that could homologically represent the distinctive economic location of the new rich, students chose to follow the path of quantitative rather than qualitative representation, expressing ‘the taste of luxury’ in terms of the ‘taste of necessity’. Along with this subjective factor, that is, the students' own cultural dispositions, the prominence of the quantitative factor in their descriptions of the new Russian style of consumption is determined by the absence of a developed field of post-Soviet cultural production, which could have provided the new Russian style with distinctive status symbols.
AB - This article analyses 178 essays written in April 1997, in which Siberian students (15-22-year-olds) described their understandings of Soviet and post-Soviet realities. The main change between the two regimes is perceived in these essays as the change in patterns of consumption. Moreover, as the essays indicate, the new Russian style of consumption, usually associated with the style of the new rich classes in Russia, finds its fullest representation in the figure of the ‘new Russian’ man. The article suggests that students' attempts to envision unfamiliar patterns of wealthy consumption bring with them the reproduction of their own cultural dispositions and habits. Being unable to easily come up with adequate cultural signifiers that could homologically represent the distinctive economic location of the new rich, students chose to follow the path of quantitative rather than qualitative representation, expressing ‘the taste of luxury’ in terms of the ‘taste of necessity’. Along with this subjective factor, that is, the students' own cultural dispositions, the prominence of the quantitative factor in their descriptions of the new Russian style of consumption is determined by the absence of a developed field of post-Soviet cultural production, which could have provided the new Russian style with distinctive status symbols.
KW - cultural production
KW - gender
KW - post-soviet
KW - projection
KW - symbolic shortage
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U2 - 10.1177/02632760022051419
DO - 10.1177/02632760022051419
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:0034288554
SN - 0263-2764
VL - 17
SP - 97
EP - 120
JO - Theory, Culture and Society
JF - Theory, Culture and Society
IS - 5
ER -