Tyler Benjamin Adkins

This project ethnographically examines the temporalities and materialities of forms of life in Russia’s Altai republic. Based on the author’s long-term participant observation of farmers from the Altai national group in rural areas of Siberia’s Altai Mountains, it asks how the material forms of Soviet and post-Soviet history are entangled with the historical consciousness and everyday life of Altai people. While previous studies of the material legacies of Soviet socialism have emphasized rupture, discontinuity, and a present nostalgia for an irretrievable past, this project examines the changes in post-Soviet Altai everyday life not as radical breaks, but rather as situational changes and redeployments of a repertoire of long-standing material forms and practices.