Lifestyle in Siberia and the Russian North is an exciting volume. As a collaborative project it emerges out of ethnographic field research conducted around 2011 in largely non-urban centers, stretching from Chavan΄ga in Russia's northwest to Novoe Chaplino in the Russian Federation's northeast. The foremost goal of the volume's eleven contributors based in Germany, Russia, Slovakia, Scotland, and the Czech Republic is to capture the diversity of lifestyles in those places. A second goal is to examine issues, circumstances, and factors that delimit and make possible individual and social aspirations. In documenting the extensiveness of social realities, desires, dreams, and ambitions in Siberia and the Russian Far East, all contributors also add to documentations and discussions on economic and aesthetic style, as well to debates on technology, mobility, and communication. Overall, Lifestyle in Siberia and the Russian North does not only speak to scholars interested in community transformations in Russia, but also to those interested in non-urban geography, politics, history, and change.
As the volume's title indicates, lifestyle marks the analytical lens through which the dynamics of community transformations in Russia are documented and framed. As Habeck, in his expansive introduction readily acknowledges, lifestyle is a difficult concept for the analysis of societies that mark themselves as non-western and non-European. As a particular orientation in social science vocabulary, considerations of lifestyles emerge out of the context of European sociology, most notably the German critical tradition associated with the names of Max Weber and Georg Simmel—although the American economist Thorstein Veblen also plays a significant role. The idea was then taken up by sociologists that include Pierre Bourdieu, David Chaney, and Anthony Giddens. Although habitually lifestyles tends to be associated with the forces of consumption, all contributors follow David Chaney's claim that lifestyle denotes particular cultural, economic, and social sensibilities—sensibilities that translates into particular narratives of individual and collective selves. It is this approach that marks all contributions as productive for our understanding of lifestyle and change in Russia.
Communities in Siberia and the Russian North do not constitute obvious places to trace issues of lifestyle and change in Russia. Frequently marked by environmental decay, rapid economic change, and hostile meteorological conditions and climates, they are not associated with conspicuous forms of change as, for example, Moscow and St. Petersburg as Russia's most conspicuous urban centers. Yet, as contributors argue, this is what makes the study of lifestyle in the Russian North so fascinating and exciting. Covering the range from the Kola Peninsula across Siberia to the Altai region, Lake Baikal and Irkutsk, Sakha, to Chukotka, in varied ways articles examine the effects of media technology, telecommunication, visual technologies, and economic infrastructures on social selves. In a lovely chapter on lifestyle, Masha Shaw, for example, shows how people's love for rural lifestyles and their decision to live in non-urban places relate to people's affinities for animals and nature. As Luděk Brož and Habeck show, these are also often places to which people wish to travel, even as desires of consumption animates them to make different decisions. Dennis Zuev and Habeck show how technological and historical change that has taken place in the last few decades shapes such decisions, and Joseph Long, Jaroslava Pánáková, Eleanor Peers, and Artem Rabogoshvili correlate changes in lifestyle with the politics of ethno-national revival. As Ina Schröder and Tatiana Barchunova show, role playing and other forms of ludic practice also relate to imaginations of ancestral history and home, and, in turn, shapes lifestyles and selves. Habeck then pulls all of this together in a conclusion on the correlations between lifestyle and change. The analytical picture that emerges from these writings is intricate, complex, and dense.
Lifestyle is a productive tool to mark articulations and stylizations of selves, but it also a productive way to mark the dynamics of social identifications and change. It is interesting in so far as it allows all contributors to grapple with social transformations in Russia. It is expressive insofar as it allows contributors to connect research participants’ social practices and choices with statements they make about themselves, and to understand how the former want to be recognized by others. As a reviewer I would have loved to learn more about the ways in which lifestyle assists research participants in distinguishing themselves from other selves—and not only in fashioning themselves. Insofar as life style not only indexes an analytical optics to assess the vagaries of social change but also a performative enactment of selves, it would be beneficial to expand diagnostic research on lifestyle to understand even better the dynamics of change in Russia.
