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Oral Presentation Session
Reviewed by: Anthropology and Environment Society
Of interest to: Practicing and Applied Anthropologists, Teachers of Anthropology in Community Colleges, Students
Primary Theme: Environment and Environmental Inequality
Secondary Theme: The Political
American Anthropological Association 117th Annual Meeting
San Jose, CA
Humans and Others in the Post-Socialist World
Discussant: Dr. Marissa Smith
Chair: KG Hutchins
Organizer: Jessica Madison-Pískatá
Presenters: Dr. Guntra Aistara, Dr. Tatiana Chudakova, KG Hutchins, Jessica Madison-Pískatá
What roles do nonhumans play in political adaptation and resilience in post-socialist states? In
the Ukraine, Cold War nostalgia mixes fear with allure, turning what was once a nuclear disaster site
into a popular tourist destination. As Soviet state funding withdraws from urban planning, packs of
feral dogs roam the city center of Bucharest. Meanwhile, in the Gobi, entrepreneurs scour the
desertifying steppe in search of wild onions, which play a vital role in the burgeoning trade in
fermented horse milk. This panel explores these kinds of more-than-human relations in the post-
socialist world in order to trouble the ‘post’ in both 'postsocialism' and 'posthumanism.'
This session begins with the premise that examining the full networks of human and non-human
participants in post-socialist political life allows us to avoid the pratfalls of 'post-transition theories:'
models of change that take for granted a total rupture between a socialist past and a free-market future
(Burawoy and Verdery 1999, Buyandelgeriyn 2008). The post-socialist context confronts us with the
existence of alternate (and often conflicting) modernities, problematizing the unilateral narrative of
adaptation and resilience, which depends on only one version and trajectory of modernity (Appadurai
1996, Chatterjee 1997, Rofel 1999). Oftentimes, post-human scholarship takes as its foil a Western-
Eurocentric model of the modern 'human,' which assumes a one-to-one relationship between modernity
and market capitalism. Therefore, it runs the risk of only troubling a singular mode of alienation
between humans and their non-human relations. By turning our attention to the intersections of these
'posts,' we can study resilience, adaptation, and political change in a way that avoids reproducing Euro-
centric teleologies and troubles the monolithic 'pre' on which both 'posts' depend.
Guntra Aistara's “Networking Diversities” examines the layered sets of memories, processes,
and relationships that develop through long-term engagements between humans, plants, and animals on
Latvian organic farms, engagements which continuously make and remake post-socialist landscapes and
local sovereignties. Tatiana Chudakova's “When Plants Travel” interrogates the supposed immotility of
plants, tracing the hyper-mobile pathways of exchange of herbal medicines throughout Russia. In
“Pulling Horse and Human Alike” KG Hutchins describes the ways in which the souls of humans and
horses mingle in the body of the Mongolian morin khuur, or 'horse-fiddle,' complicating the categories
of human and animal. Finally, Jessica Madison-Pískatá's “Chains of Decay” takes radioactivity as a
focal point for examining the lives of two uranium mining towns at the peripheries of the former Soviet
world. Each of these papers offers a unique ethnographic perspective at the intersection of post-
socialist and post-human avenues of inquiry.
Marissa Smith
San Jose State University
Guntra Aistara
Central European University
Tatiana Chudakova
Assistant Professor
Tufts University
KG Hutchins
University of Wisconsin-Madison
KG Hutchins
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Jessica Madison-Pískatá
University of California, Santa Cruz
Jessica Madison-Pískatá
University of California, Santa Cruz