Monthly Archives: February 2015

Till Mostowlansky on ‘Moscow Provisioning’

I received a link to a short article by Till Mostowlansky today on ‘Moscow provisioning’ (moskovskoe obespechenie), a phenomenon that Till also explores in his remarkable dissertation on the Trans-Pamir highway (‘Azan on the Moon’).  In it, he makes the important point that ‘Moscow provisioning’ was qualitatively different from the other forms of additional payments that workers in particularly remote, cold or high-altitude regions of the Soviet Union received. It signalled a particular form of social, material and aesthetic connection too, in which Moscow literally ‘multiplied’. As Till says there:
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Upcoming review of Peter Finke Variations on Uzbek Identity

I’ve recently reviewed Peter Finke’s 2014 monograph, based on his Habilitation dissertation, Variations on Uzbek Identity: Strategic Choices, Cognitive Schemas and Political Constraints in Identification Processespublished by Berghahn. The review will shortly be out in the Asia Pacific Journal of AnthropologyI’ve uploaded a pre-print version of the review here.  The first paragraph is pasted in below:
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