Inna Leykin
Areas of Interest: My research interests have fostered both my MA thesis and the focus of my doctoral research, which I am currently conducting in Russia. My interest in the anthropology of the gift and the anthropology of Postsocialism were two major motivations for my MA thesis, in which I examined a local economy of favors and its relevance to new economic practices and hew political hierarchies in post-Soviet Russia. This work reveals the ways in which, in post-Soviet Russia, the economy of favors operates as a means to establish new social values and political hierarchies through nurturing and negotiating one’s personal connections. In my doctoral research I further probe my interest in Postsocialist studies in anthropology. My study focuses on the emergent “crisis” of under-population in contemporary Russia and it has been fed and fueled by my theoretical interest in the study of the science of population, kinship and family in contemporary societies, and the history of population and family policies in the former Soviet Union and its succeeded states. Based in Yekaterinburg, a large provincial city with declining population, this ethnographic project questions the ways in which social science becomes a medium of intervention in post-Soviet Russia. Specifically, my research examines how social scientific discourses and state policies construct kinship, family and individual selves as the locus of the population problem. With a goal of understanding social changes not captured in scientific discourses and state policies, my research traces the ways in which ordinary men and women respond to perceptions of crises and population interventions. Exploring the stakes different social actors have in demographic knowledge, my research suggests that an anthropology of population science offers a new vantage point from which to examine the emergence of novel postsocialist relations of power.
Status: Post field
MA Thesis: "Don’t Swear Off Of Beggary and Jail": Privatization, Regional Policies and The Economy of Favors in Putin’s Russia
Dissertation Research: "Reproducing Russians": Population Science, Policy, and Kinship in 21st Century Russia
Previous Degrees: MA, Brown University; BA, Tel Aviv University
Curriculum Vitae: to be posted
Contact Information: inna_leykin@brown.edu
