Synopses & Reviews
What Muscovites get in a soup kitchen run by the Christian Church of Moscow is something far more subtle and complexand#151;if no less necessary and nourishingand#151;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 communityand#151;elderly Muscovite recipients, Russian aid workers, African student volunteers, and North American and European donors and volunteersand#151;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 thereand#151;not just those with limited financial meansand#151;and how Muscovites articulate definitions of hunger and poverty that depend far more on the extent of oneand#8217;s social contacts than on material factors.
By rethinking the ways in which relationships between social and economic practices are theorizedand#151;by identifying social relations and social status as Russiaand#8217;s true economic currencyand#151;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.
About the Author
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.
Table of Contents
List of Illustrations
Note on Transliteration
Preface
1. Transnational Soup
2. Making Do: Everyday Survival in a Shortage Society
3. From Hand to Hand: Informal Networks
4. The Forest Feeds Us: Organic Exchange
5. Strategic Intimacy: Communities of Assistance
6. The Mythology of Hunger
7. Socialism Revisited
Epilogue
Notes
Works Cited
Index