Serguei Oushakine
Associate Professor of World and Russian Culture, Altai State Technical University, Barnaul, Siberia, Russia

"Replacing a Loss: Memories in Books and Stone"

Monday, 8 March 2004
12:00 p.m.
336 Ingraham
1155 Observatory Drive

Sponsored by
The Center for European Studies
The training group in gender (femsem), Dept. of Sociology
The Center for Russia, East Europe, & Central Asia (CREECA)
and
The Institute for Legal Studies (ILS)

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How does trauma become a trauma story? Is it because loss can be recuperated only through constantly re-instating rituals of mourning? In his presentation, Serguei Oushakine will explore how a group of mothers in a Siberian city dealt with the deaths of their sons, soldiers killed in the Afghanistan and Chechen wars. By analyzing the Mothers' strategies of public self-presentation, he draws attention to the mechanisms through which state organized violence becomes domesticated and personalized.

Serguei Alex. Oushakine is Associate Professor of World and Russian Culture, Altai State Technical University, Barnaul, Siberia, Russia. His research focuses on the strategies that Russians have used to adapt to the ideological, cultural and symbolic void left by the collapse of communism and its associated institutions. His work has appeared in Cultural Anthropology, Public Culture, Ethnos, and Theory Culture and Society. He received the 2000 Annual Award For Young Scholars for the best work in the field of social sciences from the Russian Academy of Sciences and won the Europe-Asia Lecture Competition 2000 for his work on post-Soviet aphasia. He has edited two recent books in Russian (on Russian masculinity and the new Russian family) and has published more than two dozen articles in top Academy of Sciences journals in Russia. Serguei Oushakine received his Kandidat in political science from St. Petersburg State University and is finishing his American Ph.D. in anthropology at Columbia University.