Anything Can Happen: Everyday Morality and Social Theory in Russia

The language and the sensibilities of social theory are used differently, and to different purposes, by experts and "laymen." But they are increasingly shared, challenging the "meta" status of social theory vis-a-vis analytics employed by the subjects of anthropological analysis.;This dissertation draws on ten months of ethnographic study in Russia, a country that offers a unique perspective on the issue of epistemology and native social theory. Focusing on those born in the 1970s, it illuminates the life-worlds of people who have lived through profound social and historical transformation. This postsocialist space has been shaped by decades of mass indoctrination with a sociocentric, socialist, and modernist social philosophy, producing a kind of "vernacular Marxism" among its population.;This dissertation examines vernacular Marxism in popular discourse, especially in talk about morality, the constitution of subjectivity, and techniques of the self. It shows how something often deemed to be an ideological or performative aspect of the "has-been" Soviet project continues to shape everyday morality and practical ethics. Vernacular Marxism considers not only the tension between the individual and society, but also between two forms of communal life, characterised here as the Collective and Communitas. Subjectivity is commonly perceived through a material-metaphysical lens as a resource and an exchange of "energy." Consumption and the relationship to material objects are complicated by anti-fetishist imperatives. Everyday reasoning is influenced by dialectics, modernisation, and historical materialism.;Asserting that vernacular Marxism is more than a "local ideology," this work discusses the epistemological and ethical questions that arise when some routine "meta" analytics are applied to social reality that is already structured by social reflexivity. Rather than evaluating the fit between these analytics and social reality, this dissertation argues that scholars must be attuned to the mutual dislocation of their own knowledge and that of their "informants," all within a flat epistemological and ethical hierarchy.