Petra Rethmann
Biographic Data
| ID | 551240 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Petra Rethmann |
| GIVEN NAMES | Petra |
| FAMILY NAME | Rethmann |
| SIGNATURE | RETHMANN P |
| AFFILIATIONS | McMaster University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-7050-957X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 25 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 57 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 25 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1997 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
Notations on concentration and writing
Notations on Concentration and Writing looks at how writing begins in the body and mind of concentration, and how concentration—rather than being found—may be invited in. In an age of YouTube, Instagram, and so many other media, the path to concentration can be difficult. In this piece, I illuminate how concentration can be made, step by step, through practices of attention
Swamped: On Depression and Vision
Swamped" cracks open my experience of depression by exploring how a specific place-a swamp-acted on me to bring social and emotional injuries, but also modes of seeing that ultimately moved me out of the depression, to the fore. In writing from this specific place, I build on moments in which something-a desire for beauty, the luminosity of blue, the dullness of gray, the vibrancy of lichen, and the slippage between seeing and unseeing-moved into…
The election
The election" tells the story of the 2000 regional election in Chukotka, Russia's northeasternmost part. That year, Lyosha, a Chukchi activist, invited me to assist Indigenous movements with grant writing for Western-based civil society organizations. When I arrived in Chukotka, the election was in full swing and turned out to be more bizarre as-as Lyosha put it-could be believed. The gifting of the oligarch, the lies told by the governor, the dr…
Twilight of the Merkel Era: Power and Politics in Germany after the 2017 Bundestag Election
The Melancholy Monument of the Left
From November 2017 to April 2018, in Mexico City's MuseoUniversitario Arte Contemporaneo, the Russian artistic-activist collectivechto delat (what should be done?) exhibited a number of monuments inmemory of the Russian revolution. In centring on three monuments, in thisarticle I consider the ability of the collective's monuments to inspire politicalmediations on historical potential embedded in revolutionary pasts. I arguethat melancholia does n…
Introduction to theme issue
W hy a theme issue on ethnography and form? Why think about form at all? For many years anthropologists, especially politically oriented anthropologists, have been suspicious of questions of genre, narrative, and form. Consider, for example, the fervent debate that swirled around Michael Taussig's (1986) form-shifting ethnography Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man. In tracing the violent excess of colonialism and the promise of healing amon…
History, revisionism, neo‐nationalism
Imagining our futures in different keys
It almost appears paradoxical, but in these uncertain and anxiety‐ridden SARS‐CoV‐2 times concerns with the social have returned with a vengeance By social here I do not only mean the manifold forms of kindness, solidarity and community that have emerged on so many levels and scales, but also calls for a new kind of socialism, for alternative forms of economic distribution, production and justice To be fair, such calls did exist in queer, feminis…
Violence: Intimate, Tangled, Accruing
Internationalism, temporality and hope: A view from Eastern Europe and the Left
This article examines the politics of temporality and hope in relation to a political imagination generated by constituencies of an East European Left. In looking in particular at how a socialist‐inspired notion of internationalism may serve as a tool to animate future‐oriented political imaginations, the article also marks an argument for rethinking anthropological and Left historiographical practices, and to consider the affirmative valence of …
Political Crime and the Memory of Loss. JohnBorneman. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012. 262 pp
Imagining Political Possibility in an Age of Late Liberalism and Cynical Reason
Inspired by innovative social projects and new political movements, anthropologists have turned to the study of political possibility. In looking at how people imagine and struggle for temporalities and conditions that will afford them the opportunity to exist in ways different from those they are experiencing now, cultural analysts draw on ethnography and critical political philosophy to chart new analytical trajectories and themes. By foregroun…
The Discreet Charm of Lenin
This article takes two postcards of Lenin as their point of departure to ask about articulations of Soviet history as image and kitsch. I am especially interested in the ways in which the dead body or mummy of Lenin comes to symbolize an imagined social coherence that accrues specific political significance after the demise of the Soviet Union. In looking at Lenin's mummy as a site of memory and key to understanding contemporary Russian political…
West German Radical History Seen From the 1980s: Projekt Artur and the Refusal of Political Confiscation
After the Thrill: Global Capitalism and the Search for South African Autonomy
In South Africa, autonomy is frequently called a ‘dream deferred’. This article examines how and why autonomy is considered deferred, and what kinds of post-apartheid economic and political developments have led to this judgment. It traces South Africa's recent political trajectory from the unbanning of the liberation organizations and the release of Nelson Mandela, negotiations between the National Party and African National Congress (ANC), Mand…
Post-communist ironies in an East German hotel
On 1 May 2007, a new hotel opened in Berlin: Ostel. As its name implies, it is located in the former East of the city, now 'Berlin Mitte'. The Ostel joined Berlin's burgeoning hotel scene at a time when Ostalgie - the supposed longing East Germans feel for the past - marked no longer a condition of mourning and loss but had become 'hip'. In this article to carry the analysis of Ostalgie beyond the themes of trauma or resistance into the more play…
Nostalgie à Moscou
Cet article explore les formes contemporaines et émergentes de la nostalgie dans la ville de Moscou. Il examine ce thème à travers le prisme de trois espaces architecturaux qui nous parlent de la nostalgie en tant que condition culturelle et temporelle spécifique, postsocialiste : le Parc des sculptures de Moscou, la cathédrale du Christ-Sauveur reconstruite et le centre commercial de la place Manezh. J'avance que ce qui est à l'oeuvre, sur le pl…
Violence and the Politics of Anthropological Writing
Politique et imaginaire à Tchoukotka, aux confins orientaux de la Russie
Cet article analyse comment, dans la péninsule de Tchoukotka (extrémité orientale de la Russie), un groupe d'activistes autochtones recourt à son imagination afin de susciter des initiatives politiques signifiantes pour les peuples autochtones de la région. Depuis le début des années 1990, à Tchoukotka, les perspectives politiques autochtones ont été sérieusement restreintes par des restructurations politiques et des réformes économiques de style…
Tundra Passages: History and Gender in the Russian Far East
Petra Rethmann, Tundra Passages: History and Gender in Russian Far East, University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001, 219 pages, ISBN 0-271-02068-X (paper).Reviewer: Regna DarnellUniversity of Western OntarioKoriak reindeer herders of Kamchatka peninsula's north-eastern shore have remained frozen in anthropological canon since early twentieth-century ethnography of Waldemar Jochelson Boas's Jesup North Pacific Expedition. Petra Ret…
A Hopeless Life? The Story of a Koriak Woman in the Russian Far East
In Koriak villages on the northeastern shore of Kamchatka peninsula, the idea that Koriak women are morally debauched and domestically inept is frequently met. On the one hand, this idea draws on the bias that Koriak women as mem bers of one primitive, indigenous group in the Russian Far East are slothful and do not exhibit a civilized propriety; on the other hand, it rests on Russian-centred notions of feminin ity. Furthermore, interactions betw…
Skins of desire: Poetry and identity in Koriak women's gift exchange
Koriak women in the northern Kamchatka peninsula in the Russian Far Bast offer gifts of handworked reindeer fur and leather to entice men to become their sweethearts. Examining two love stories involving reindeer herding Koriak women and men, I explore the meaning of the gift as an embodied metaphor that arouses desire and creates seductive subjectivities. Focusing on sewers' creativity, I situate my analysis within a wider discussion on aestheti…
Morality and Cultural Differences
Morality and Cultural Differences. John W. Cook. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. 204 pp
Völkerkunde im Nationalsozialismus: Aspeckte derAnpassung, Affinitat, und Behauptung einerwissenschaftlichen Disziplin
Völkerkunde im Nationalsozialismus: Aspeckte derAnpassung, Affinitat, und Behauptung einerwissenschaftlichen Disziplin. Hans Fischer. Hamburg, Germany. Dietrich Reimer Verlag, 1990. 312 pp
Chto Delat'? Ethnography in the Post-Soviet Cultural Context
The article takes up issues of doing ethnography in the post-Soviet context. Exploring some of the pressing questions revolving around post-Soviet ethnography such as nationalism and identity, it also touches on problems of gender and sexuality. This article is offered as an overview of challenges to post-Soviet ethnography and intends to furnish new ideas for anthropological studies in the post-Soviet context
Skins of desire: Poetry and identity in Koriak women's gift exchange
Koriak women in the northern Kamchatka peninsula in the Russian Far Bast offer gifts of handworked reindeer fur and leather to entice men to become their sweethearts. Examining two love stories involving reindeer herding Koriak women and men, I explore the meaning of the gift as an embodied metaphor that arouses desire and creates seductive subjectivities. Focusing on sewers' creativity, I situate my analysis within a wider discussion on aestheti…
Chto Delat'? Ethnography in the Post-Soviet Cultural Context
The article takes up issues of doing ethnography in the post-Soviet context. Exploring some of the pressing questions revolving around post-Soviet ethnography such as nationalism and identity, it also touches on problems of gender and sexuality. This article is offered as an overview of challenges to post-Soviet ethnography and intends to furnish new ideas for anthropological studies in the post-Soviet context
Internationalism, temporality and hope: A view from Eastern Europe and the Left
This article examines the politics of temporality and hope in relation to a political imagination generated by constituencies of an East European Left. In looking in particular at how a socialist‐inspired notion of internationalism may serve as a tool to animate future‐oriented political imaginations, the article also marks an argument for rethinking anthropological and Left historiographical practices, and to consider the affirmative valence of …
Imagining Political Possibility in an Age of Late Liberalism and Cynical Reason
Inspired by innovative social projects and new political movements, anthropologists have turned to the study of political possibility. In looking at how people imagine and struggle for temporalities and conditions that will afford them the opportunity to exist in ways different from those they are experiencing now, cultural analysts draw on ethnography and critical political philosophy to chart new analytical trajectories and themes. By foregroun…
Nostalgie à Moscou
Cet article explore les formes contemporaines et émergentes de la nostalgie dans la ville de Moscou. Il examine ce thème à travers le prisme de trois espaces architecturaux qui nous parlent de la nostalgie en tant que condition culturelle et temporelle spécifique, postsocialiste : le Parc des sculptures de Moscou, la cathédrale du Christ-Sauveur reconstruite et le centre commercial de la place Manezh. J'avance que ce qui est à l'oeuvre, sur le pl…
Morality and Cultural Differences
Morality and Cultural Differences. John W. Cook. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. 204 pp
Post-communist ironies in an East German hotel
On 1 May 2007, a new hotel opened in Berlin: Ostel. As its name implies, it is located in the former East of the city, now 'Berlin Mitte'. The Ostel joined Berlin's burgeoning hotel scene at a time when Ostalgie - the supposed longing East Germans feel for the past - marked no longer a condition of mourning and loss but had become 'hip'. In this article to carry the analysis of Ostalgie beyond the themes of trauma or resistance into the more play…
Politique et imaginaire à Tchoukotka, aux confins orientaux de la Russie
Cet article analyse comment, dans la péninsule de Tchoukotka (extrémité orientale de la Russie), un groupe d'activistes autochtones recourt à son imagination afin de susciter des initiatives politiques signifiantes pour les peuples autochtones de la région. Depuis le début des années 1990, à Tchoukotka, les perspectives politiques autochtones ont été sérieusement restreintes par des restructurations politiques et des réformes économiques de style…
Swamped: On Depression and Vision
Swamped" cracks open my experience of depression by exploring how a specific place-a swamp-acted on me to bring social and emotional injuries, but also modes of seeing that ultimately moved me out of the depression, to the fore. In writing from this specific place, I build on moments in which something-a desire for beauty, the luminosity of blue, the dullness of gray, the vibrancy of lichen, and the slippage between seeing and unseeing-moved into…
The Melancholy Monument of the Left
From November 2017 to April 2018, in Mexico City's MuseoUniversitario Arte Contemporaneo, the Russian artistic-activist collectivechto delat (what should be done?) exhibited a number of monuments inmemory of the Russian revolution. In centring on three monuments, in thisarticle I consider the ability of the collective's monuments to inspire politicalmediations on historical potential embedded in revolutionary pasts. I arguethat melancholia does n…
After the Thrill: Global Capitalism and the Search for South African Autonomy
In South Africa, autonomy is frequently called a ‘dream deferred’. This article examines how and why autonomy is considered deferred, and what kinds of post-apartheid economic and political developments have led to this judgment. It traces South Africa's recent political trajectory from the unbanning of the liberation organizations and the release of Nelson Mandela, negotiations between the National Party and African National Congress (ANC), Mand…
A Hopeless Life? The Story of a Koriak Woman in the Russian Far East
In Koriak villages on the northeastern shore of Kamchatka peninsula, the idea that Koriak women are morally debauched and domestically inept is frequently met. On the one hand, this idea draws on the bias that Koriak women as mem bers of one primitive, indigenous group in the Russian Far East are slothful and do not exhibit a civilized propriety; on the other hand, it rests on Russian-centred notions of feminin ity. Furthermore, interactions betw…
Chto Delat'? Ethnography in the Post-Soviet Cultural Context
The article takes up issues of doing ethnography in the post-Soviet context. Exploring some of the pressing questions revolving around post-Soviet ethnography such as nationalism and identity, it also touches on problems of gender and sexuality. This article is offered as an overview of challenges to post-Soviet ethnography and intends to furnish new ideas for anthropological studies in the post-Soviet context
Völkerkunde im Nationalsozialismus: Aspeckte derAnpassung, Affinitat, und Behauptung einerwissenschaftlichen Disziplin
Völkerkunde im Nationalsozialismus: Aspeckte derAnpassung, Affinitat, und Behauptung einerwissenschaftlichen Disziplin. Hans Fischer. Hamburg, Germany. Dietrich Reimer Verlag, 1990. 312 pp
A Hopeless Life? The Story of a Koriak Woman in the Russian Far East
In Koriak villages on the northeastern shore of Kamchatka peninsula, the idea that Koriak women are morally debauched and domestically inept is frequently met. On the one hand, this idea draws on the bias that Koriak women as mem bers of one primitive, indigenous group in the Russian Far East are slothful and do not exhibit a civilized propriety; on the other hand, it rests on Russian-centred notions of feminin ity. Furthermore, interactions betw…
Skins of desire: Poetry and identity in Koriak women's gift exchange
Koriak women in the northern Kamchatka peninsula in the Russian Far Bast offer gifts of handworked reindeer fur and leather to entice men to become their sweethearts. Examining two love stories involving reindeer herding Koriak women and men, I explore the meaning of the gift as an embodied metaphor that arouses desire and creates seductive subjectivities. Focusing on sewers' creativity, I situate my analysis within a wider discussion on aestheti…
Morality and Cultural Differences
Morality and Cultural Differences. John W. Cook. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. 204 pp
Tundra Passages: History and Gender in the Russian Far East
Petra Rethmann, Tundra Passages: History and Gender in Russian Far East, University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001, 219 pages, ISBN 0-271-02068-X (paper).Reviewer: Regna DarnellUniversity of Western OntarioKoriak reindeer herders of Kamchatka peninsula's north-eastern shore have remained frozen in anthropological canon since early twentieth-century ethnography of Waldemar Jochelson Boas's Jesup North Pacific Expedition. Petra Ret…
Violence and the Politics of Anthropological Writing
Politique et imaginaire à Tchoukotka, aux confins orientaux de la Russie
Cet article analyse comment, dans la péninsule de Tchoukotka (extrémité orientale de la Russie), un groupe d'activistes autochtones recourt à son imagination afin de susciter des initiatives politiques signifiantes pour les peuples autochtones de la région. Depuis le début des années 1990, à Tchoukotka, les perspectives politiques autochtones ont été sérieusement restreintes par des restructurations politiques et des réformes économiques de style…
Nostalgie à Moscou
Cet article explore les formes contemporaines et émergentes de la nostalgie dans la ville de Moscou. Il examine ce thème à travers le prisme de trois espaces architecturaux qui nous parlent de la nostalgie en tant que condition culturelle et temporelle spécifique, postsocialiste : le Parc des sculptures de Moscou, la cathédrale du Christ-Sauveur reconstruite et le centre commercial de la place Manezh. J'avance que ce qui est à l'oeuvre, sur le pl…
After the Thrill: Global Capitalism and the Search for South African Autonomy
In South Africa, autonomy is frequently called a ‘dream deferred’. This article examines how and why autonomy is considered deferred, and what kinds of post-apartheid economic and political developments have led to this judgment. It traces South Africa's recent political trajectory from the unbanning of the liberation organizations and the release of Nelson Mandela, negotiations between the National Party and African National Congress (ANC), Mand…
Post-communist ironies in an East German hotel
On 1 May 2007, a new hotel opened in Berlin: Ostel. As its name implies, it is located in the former East of the city, now 'Berlin Mitte'. The Ostel joined Berlin's burgeoning hotel scene at a time when Ostalgie - the supposed longing East Germans feel for the past - marked no longer a condition of mourning and loss but had become 'hip'. In this article to carry the analysis of Ostalgie beyond the themes of trauma or resistance into the more play…
West German Radical History Seen From the 1980s: Projekt Artur and the Refusal of Political Confiscation
Political Crime and the Memory of Loss. JohnBorneman. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012. 262 pp
Imagining Political Possibility in an Age of Late Liberalism and Cynical Reason
Inspired by innovative social projects and new political movements, anthropologists have turned to the study of political possibility. In looking at how people imagine and struggle for temporalities and conditions that will afford them the opportunity to exist in ways different from those they are experiencing now, cultural analysts draw on ethnography and critical political philosophy to chart new analytical trajectories and themes. By foregroun…
The Discreet Charm of Lenin
This article takes two postcards of Lenin as their point of departure to ask about articulations of Soviet history as image and kitsch. I am especially interested in the ways in which the dead body or mummy of Lenin comes to symbolize an imagined social coherence that accrues specific political significance after the demise of the Soviet Union. In looking at Lenin's mummy as a site of memory and key to understanding contemporary Russian political…
Internationalism, temporality and hope: A view from Eastern Europe and the Left
This article examines the politics of temporality and hope in relation to a political imagination generated by constituencies of an East European Left. In looking in particular at how a socialist‐inspired notion of internationalism may serve as a tool to animate future‐oriented political imaginations, the article also marks an argument for rethinking anthropological and Left historiographical practices, and to consider the affirmative valence of …
Violence: Intimate, Tangled, Accruing
Imagining our futures in different keys
It almost appears paradoxical, but in these uncertain and anxiety‐ridden SARS‐CoV‐2 times concerns with the social have returned with a vengeance By social here I do not only mean the manifold forms of kindness, solidarity and community that have emerged on so many levels and scales, but also calls for a new kind of socialism, for alternative forms of economic distribution, production and justice To be fair, such calls did exist in queer, feminis…
History, revisionism, neo‐nationalism
Twilight of the Merkel Era: Power and Politics in Germany after the 2017 Bundestag Election
The Melancholy Monument of the Left
From November 2017 to April 2018, in Mexico City's MuseoUniversitario Arte Contemporaneo, the Russian artistic-activist collectivechto delat (what should be done?) exhibited a number of monuments inmemory of the Russian revolution. In centring on three monuments, in thisarticle I consider the ability of the collective's monuments to inspire politicalmediations on historical potential embedded in revolutionary pasts. I arguethat melancholia does n…
Introduction to theme issue
W hy a theme issue on ethnography and form? Why think about form at all? For many years anthropologists, especially politically oriented anthropologists, have been suspicious of questions of genre, narrative, and form. Consider, for example, the fervent debate that swirled around Michael Taussig's (1986) form-shifting ethnography Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man. In tracing the violent excess of colonialism and the promise of healing amon…
The election
The election" tells the story of the 2000 regional election in Chukotka, Russia's northeasternmost part. That year, Lyosha, a Chukchi activist, invited me to assist Indigenous movements with grant writing for Western-based civil society organizations. When I arrived in Chukotka, the election was in full swing and turned out to be more bizarre as-as Lyosha put it-could be believed. The gifting of the oligarch, the lies told by the governor, the dr…
Swamped: On Depression and Vision
Swamped" cracks open my experience of depression by exploring how a specific place-a swamp-acted on me to bring social and emotional injuries, but also modes of seeing that ultimately moved me out of the depression, to the fore. In writing from this specific place, I build on moments in which something-a desire for beauty, the luminosity of blue, the dullness of gray, the vibrancy of lichen, and the slippage between seeing and unseeing-moved into…
Notations on concentration and writing
Notations on Concentration and Writing looks at how writing begins in the body and mind of concentration, and how concentration—rather than being found—may be invited in. In an age of YouTube, Instagram, and so many other media, the path to concentration can be difficult. In this piece, I illuminate how concentration can be made, step by step, through practices of attention
Sociology (15 works) · Political science (14 works) · History (13 works) · Politics (13 works) · Art (12 works) · Law (12 works) · Law (9 works) · History (8 works) · Aesthetics (7 works) · Indigenous Studies and Ecology (6 works)