Nancy Ries
Biographic Data
| ID | 90845 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Nancy Ries |
| GIVEN NAMES | Nancy |
| FAMILY NAME | Ries |
| SIGNATURE | RIES N |
| AFFILIATIONS | Colgate University |
| ORCID | 0009-0000-4508-2976 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 14 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 163 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 14 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1997 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2023 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Forum 58
Linguistic anthropology taken as a union of linguistics and anthropology in the study of language and culture was established more than a century ago. In recent decades, one can observe signs both of its gradual integration into the Western anthropological project, and of a its certain esotericization and marginalization. In Russian academia, a stricter division of labor is normal: ethnographers deal with culture, philologists and linguists deal …
Cruel Speech
This paper interrogates the official purveyance of exterminist rhetoric in Russia's war on Ukraine, with a particular focus on state media discourse. Over decades, the Putin regime has constructed an overarching system of intertwined narratives about Ukraine, centred on historical and geopolitical fables and exhortations to violence, and conveyed via repetitive tropes and tones of speech. These are ritualistic semi-scripted televised discussions …
Jokes and the Walls of Consciousness
In authoritarian countries, jokes can allow citizens to mock the system’s absurdities, but they also reinforce the boundaries of speech and thought. A study of humor in Belarus puts the country’s current protests in a new light, just as the old quiescent mentality may be changing
Thugocracy
In this paper I analyze the Trump, Putin, and Zuma regimes as “thugocracies”: projects of sophisticated state capture, through organized crime networks at every level of scale, and utilizing complex arrays of mafia tactics, personnel, and practices. With a basis in first-hand ethnography on the modalities of the mafia in Russia in the 1990s, I delineate critical interconnections between thugocrats operating in South Africa, the Russian Federation…
"Afterword to "The New War Frontiers and the End of Postsocialism
Frontiers are locations of geopolitical assertion, reification, definition, and experiment, whether physical or symbolic, spatial or temporal. The papers for this special Slavic Review Forum examine important linked and parallel frontier-forming practices. These practices span the postsocialist space yet also, as several authors argue, negate that chronotopic and sociopolitical identifier. Frontier-reformulation practices include ideological cons…
The Kremlin and the Thieves' World
A definitive history of organized crime in Russia shows how political leaders have long used gangsters to serve the state's purposes
Potato Ontology
Asked to explain the mechanisms of everyday survival in Russia, many people answer with one word: "potato." Potato is a key factor in subsistence throughout postsocialist countries, but potato discourses and practices serve as well to dramatize the stark devolution of state-society relations and the ceaseless industry of the population. This essay posits potato as an axis of practice, around which myriad gestures of labor, exchange, and consumpti…
Russia in Transition
Russia in Transition: The Films of Sergei Loznitsa (Factory; Portrait; The Settlement; The Train Station). Dir. Sergei Loznitsa. Russia in Transition, vols. 1, 2, 3, 4. New York: The Cinema Guild, 2006. 30 min., 28 min., 79 min., 24 min. Color and black-and-white. $599.00, sale of video or DVD as a set. - Volume 67 Issue 2
Uncertain Transition
Uncertain Transition: Ethnographies of Change in the Postsocialist World. Michael Burawoy and Katherine Verdery. eds. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999. vii. 322 pp., figures, index
“Honest Bandits” and “Warped People”
Anthropology and the Everyday, from Comfort to Terror
Radical critiques of ethnography from within and outside the social sciences in the last decades 1 have not displaced from anthropology the role of intensive fieldwork, the study of some aspect of the world or human experience from within communities frequently, in some dimension, not "ours" and not "us." In terms of location, situation, and power, these typically have been communities affected but not privileged by (and often not at all enchante…
The Politics of Dead Bodies
The Politics of Dead Bodies: Reburial and Postsocialist Change. Katherine Verdery. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999. xvi. 185 pp., illustrations, figures, table, notes, references, index
Russian talk
As one of the first Western ethnographers working in Moscow, Nancy Ries became convinced that talk is one crucial way in which Russian identity is constructed and reproduced. Listening to the grim stories people used to characterize their lives during perestroika, and encountering the florid pessimism with which Muscovites described the unraveling of Soviet governance, Ries realized that these dire tales played a crucial role in fabricating a sen…
The Russian Concept of Work
The Russian Concept of Work: Suffering, Drama, and Tradition in Pre- and Post-Revolutionary Russia. Anna Feldman Leibovich. Westport, CT: Praeger, 1995. 166 pp
Russian talk
As one of the first Western ethnographers working in Moscow, Nancy Ries became convinced that talk is one crucial way in which Russian identity is constructed and reproduced. Listening to the grim stories people used to characterize their lives during perestroika, and encountering the florid pessimism with which Muscovites described the unraveling of Soviet governance, Ries realized that these dire tales played a crucial role in fabricating a sen…
Potato Ontology
Asked to explain the mechanisms of everyday survival in Russia, many people answer with one word: "potato." Potato is a key factor in subsistence throughout postsocialist countries, but potato discourses and practices serve as well to dramatize the stark devolution of state-society relations and the ceaseless industry of the population. This essay posits potato as an axis of practice, around which myriad gestures of labor, exchange, and consumpti…
Uncertain Transition
Uncertain Transition: Ethnographies of Change in the Postsocialist World. Michael Burawoy and Katherine Verdery. eds. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999. vii. 322 pp., figures, index
Anthropology and the Everyday, from Comfort to Terror
Radical critiques of ethnography from within and outside the social sciences in the last decades 1 have not displaced from anthropology the role of intensive fieldwork, the study of some aspect of the world or human experience from within communities frequently, in some dimension, not "ours" and not "us." In terms of location, situation, and power, these typically have been communities affected but not privileged by (and often not at all enchante…
The Politics of Dead Bodies
The Politics of Dead Bodies: Reburial and Postsocialist Change. Katherine Verdery. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999. xvi. 185 pp., illustrations, figures, table, notes, references, index
Cruel Speech
This paper interrogates the official purveyance of exterminist rhetoric in Russia's war on Ukraine, with a particular focus on state media discourse. Over decades, the Putin regime has constructed an overarching system of intertwined narratives about Ukraine, centred on historical and geopolitical fables and exhortations to violence, and conveyed via repetitive tropes and tones of speech. These are ritualistic semi-scripted televised discussions …
Thugocracy
In this paper I analyze the Trump, Putin, and Zuma regimes as “thugocracies”: projects of sophisticated state capture, through organized crime networks at every level of scale, and utilizing complex arrays of mafia tactics, personnel, and practices. With a basis in first-hand ethnography on the modalities of the mafia in Russia in the 1990s, I delineate critical interconnections between thugocrats operating in South Africa, the Russian Federation…
Russian talk
As one of the first Western ethnographers working in Moscow, Nancy Ries became convinced that talk is one crucial way in which Russian identity is constructed and reproduced. Listening to the grim stories people used to characterize their lives during perestroika, and encountering the florid pessimism with which Muscovites described the unraveling of Soviet governance, Ries realized that these dire tales played a crucial role in fabricating a sen…
The Russian Concept of Work
The Russian Concept of Work: Suffering, Drama, and Tradition in Pre- and Post-Revolutionary Russia. Anna Feldman Leibovich. Westport, CT: Praeger, 1995. 166 pp
The Politics of Dead Bodies
The Politics of Dead Bodies: Reburial and Postsocialist Change. Katherine Verdery. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999. xvi. 185 pp., illustrations, figures, table, notes, references, index
“Honest Bandits” and “Warped People”
Anthropology and the Everyday, from Comfort to Terror
Radical critiques of ethnography from within and outside the social sciences in the last decades 1 have not displaced from anthropology the role of intensive fieldwork, the study of some aspect of the world or human experience from within communities frequently, in some dimension, not "ours" and not "us." In terms of location, situation, and power, these typically have been communities affected but not privileged by (and often not at all enchante…
Uncertain Transition
Uncertain Transition: Ethnographies of Change in the Postsocialist World. Michael Burawoy and Katherine Verdery. eds. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999. vii. 322 pp., figures, index
Russia in Transition
Russia in Transition: The Films of Sergei Loznitsa (Factory; Portrait; The Settlement; The Train Station). Dir. Sergei Loznitsa. Russia in Transition, vols. 1, 2, 3, 4. New York: The Cinema Guild, 2006. 30 min., 28 min., 79 min., 24 min. Color and black-and-white. $599.00, sale of video or DVD as a set. - Volume 67 Issue 2
Potato Ontology
Asked to explain the mechanisms of everyday survival in Russia, many people answer with one word: "potato." Potato is a key factor in subsistence throughout postsocialist countries, but potato discourses and practices serve as well to dramatize the stark devolution of state-society relations and the ceaseless industry of the population. This essay posits potato as an axis of practice, around which myriad gestures of labor, exchange, and consumpti…
The Kremlin and the Thieves' World
A definitive history of organized crime in Russia shows how political leaders have long used gangsters to serve the state's purposes
"Afterword to "The New War Frontiers and the End of Postsocialism
Frontiers are locations of geopolitical assertion, reification, definition, and experiment, whether physical or symbolic, spatial or temporal. The papers for this special Slavic Review Forum examine important linked and parallel frontier-forming practices. These practices span the postsocialist space yet also, as several authors argue, negate that chronotopic and sociopolitical identifier. Frontier-reformulation practices include ideological cons…
Thugocracy
In this paper I analyze the Trump, Putin, and Zuma regimes as “thugocracies”: projects of sophisticated state capture, through organized crime networks at every level of scale, and utilizing complex arrays of mafia tactics, personnel, and practices. With a basis in first-hand ethnography on the modalities of the mafia in Russia in the 1990s, I delineate critical interconnections between thugocrats operating in South Africa, the Russian Federation…
Jokes and the Walls of Consciousness
In authoritarian countries, jokes can allow citizens to mock the system’s absurdities, but they also reinforce the boundaries of speech and thought. A study of humor in Belarus puts the country’s current protests in a new light, just as the old quiescent mentality may be changing
Forum 58
Linguistic anthropology taken as a union of linguistics and anthropology in the study of language and culture was established more than a century ago. In recent decades, one can observe signs both of its gradual integration into the Western anthropological project, and of a its certain esotericization and marginalization. In Russian academia, a stricter division of labor is normal: ethnographers deal with culture, philologists and linguists deal …
Cruel Speech
This paper interrogates the official purveyance of exterminist rhetoric in Russia's war on Ukraine, with a particular focus on state media discourse. Over decades, the Putin regime has constructed an overarching system of intertwined narratives about Ukraine, centred on historical and geopolitical fables and exhortations to violence, and conveyed via repetitive tropes and tones of speech. These are ritualistic semi-scripted televised discussions …
Sociology (11 works) · History (6 works) · History (6 works) · Political science (6 works) · Anthropology (5 works) · Art (5 works) · Computer Science (5 works) · Eastern European Communism and Reforms (5 works) · Ethnography (4 works) · Law (4 works)