Dr Nikolai Ssorin-Chaikov
Lecturer; Fellow, Sidney Sussex College
email: ns267 [at] cam.ac.uk
Research interests: the anthropology of the state, socialist modernity and post-socialism, exchange theory, aesthetics, history of anthropology, and globalisation; northern Siberia.
My research interests were shaped by my international educational background; they bridge different anthropological traditions, such as Russian and English-language, and different topics such as the anthropology of the state and governmentality, exchange theory, sociology of translation, aesthetics and history of anthropology. In The Social Life of the State in Sub-Arctic Siberia (Stanford University Press, 2003), I developed ethnographic approaches to the state and its everyday life in indigenous Siberian sites defined through a cultural boundary between ‘state’ and ‘nature’. In this book, as well as in current work, I focus on socialist modernity and post-socialism, and the legacies of the Cold War. I have carried out field research among Evenki of northern Siberian, in other parts of Russia, in the UK and USA, and am involved in a number of exhibition projects, including curating the award-winning exhibition of gifts to Soviet leaders at the Kremlin Museum, Moscow.
