دانلود کتاب جامعه استانی روسیه – یک تحلیل تجربی

My long-term empirical study, the generalized findings of which are presented in this monograph, applies exclusively to the provincial society in Russia. It is not the society of large- or even medium-sized cities. It is the society of small towns and rural districts—since rural districts surround the small towns, “localities,” forming together an organic continuity, both spatial and social. Even the small towns (as well as considerable areas of many medium-sized cities) are no or little different from our villages. In this sense, the rural district imposes its way of life, the material and spiritual practices of the population, on the small town, thus “absorbing” (devouring) it. The very system of household livelihoods in small towns is similar, and in some places identical, to that in rural areas. This was so throughout all the decades of my research—especially pronounced in the late 1980s and during the crisis of the 1990s; and still the case at the beginning of the 2020s. Therefore, I believe it reasonable to extrapolate the records of my observations covering 300 of the total 1700 local communities to a significant part of Russia’s population. This part ranges from two-fifths to half of the entire population of the country. In fact, this is provincial Russia. Initially, the purpose of the research was to describe the social structure of local communities, which was then understood quite narrowly, operationally. In fact, the empirically described local grassroots social structure failed to fit class or estate stratification patterns. Neither stratification by household income nor distribution of people by rank in the estate-based state system enables to understand the essence of relations existing between people, families, and social groups within the local community. In addition, these relations and the entire life of the community are associated with the local territorial structure. One does not exist without the other; they mutually determine each other. The physical projection of the community is an organic part of its social structure. Three components of social behavior are inseparable: habitation (in physical space), existence (relationships), and activity (subsistence). Each one has a particular and special structure but is dependent on the other two. In addition to describing relationships between people, it proved necessary to also depict their subsistence patterns—household management and economic practices—which strongly affect the structure of relations. However, household management and economic practices turned out to be associated with the territorial structure, since for subsistence our provincial population relies primarily on the informal and shadow segment of the economy. Livelihoods depend most closely on the resources provided by nature and created by the people themselves on their own homesteads (territories). Therefore, I describe the provincial social structure herein as a three-component system: the territorial structure, subsistence patterns (economy), and the structure of relations in the system of basic oppositions describing these relations (the “us/them,” “active/passive population,” and “upper/lower strata” oppositions). The diversity of essentially ethnographic records required generalization. The four methods I used to typologize local communities proved to be quite heuristic, especially when classifying communities by the degree of their spatial isolation and by the extent of external, government, impact on their development. These tools allowed me to describe the structural features of all the above-mentioned three components by grouping them into just several typical forms. I identified only six types of local communities, which are reducible to four basic types. These two approaches—decomposition into three structural components, on the one hand, and typology of communities based on external principles, on the other hand—made it possible to distinguish several quite clear patterns in the patchwork of provincial life. Besides descriptive exhaustiveness and concision, they also have predictive value. Knowing what type a local community can be classified into—by age, spatial isolation, and impact of public resources on its development (even by the layout of its administrative center)—we can reasonably estimate various aspects of its existence: the structure of the controlled territory; the nature and even types of widespread economic practices of the inhabitants; the structure of the formal segment of the local economy; the composition of the population, including the “us/ them” structure; and even the system of power relations and the determinants of individual status positions. Of course, I do not claim that the predictive value of my typologies is absolute. Provincial communities over the vast expanse of Russia are too diverse to fit readily into the Procrustean bed of sociological concepts.