A01=Melissa L. Caldwell
anthropology
Author_Melissa L. Caldwell
Category=JH
Category=JHMC
charity
christian church of moscow
economic policies
eq_bestseller
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
ethnographic study
ethnography
hunger
international food aid
material needs
modern russia
moscow
muscovites
new russia
nonfiction
post soviet russia
postsocialist world
poverty
refuge
russia
russian aid workers
social currency
social practices
social relationships
social status
social support
social welfare
soup kitchens
students and teachers
volunteers
welfare
western reform
Product details
- ISBN 9780520238763
- Weight: 363g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 16 Mar 2004
- Publisher: University of California Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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What Muscovites get in a soup kitchen run by the Christian Church of Moscow is something far more subtle and complex--if no less necessary and nourishing--than the food that feeds their hunger. In Not by Bread Alone, the first full-length ethnographic study of poverty and social welfare in the postsocialist world, Melissa L. Caldwell focuses on the everyday operations and civil transactions at CCM soup kitchens to reveal the new realities, the enduring features, and the intriguing subtext of social support in Russia today. In an international food aid community, Caldwell explores how Muscovites employ a number of improvisational tactics to satisfy their material needs. She shows how the relationships that develop among members of this community--elderly Muscovite recipients, Russian aid workers, African student volunteers, and North American and European donors and volunteers--provide forms of social support that are highly valued and ultimately far more important than material resources.
In Not by Bread Alone we see how the soup kitchens become sites of social stability and refuge for all who interact there--not just those with limited financial means--and how Muscovites articulate definitions of hunger and poverty that depend far more on the extent of one's social contacts than on material factors. By rethinking the ways in which relationships between social and economic practices are theorized--by identifying social relations and social status as Russia's true economic currency--this book challenges prevailing ideas about the role of the state, the nature of poverty and welfare, the feasibility of Western-style reforms, and the primacy of social connections in the daily lives of ordinary people in post-Soviet Russia.
Melissa L. Caldwell has recently been appointed Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, after serving as Visiting Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Northeastern University.
