Mongolia i Buriatiia: geokul’turnye obrazy prostranstva is a remarkable book that provides fresh insights into ongoing discussions about various representations of space. It contains ten contributions by undergraduate and doctoral students as well as professors—from various Russian (mostly Siberian) universities and with diverse disciplinary backgrounds—who work together in a research group. Most of the articles are based on recently undertaken field research and offer insights into topics that would not otherwise be accessible. The authors share a fruitful interdisciplinary outlook on their common research topic: the signs and symbols of space and culture in a transnational region inhabited by people with a shared ethnic background. Thus, Mongolia and Buryatia present fascinating cases for the investigation of whether ethnic belonging encourages spatial integration or rather follows the traditional division between taiga and steppe.

This collection of articles seeks to understand how traditional culture becomes a commodity and how a commodity can be claimed as traditional culture in everyday life among post-Soviet indigenous peoples. The authors, four young sociologists and anthropologists from Vladivostok, Ulan-Ude, and Saint Petersburg, call for a thorough re-evaluation of the emerging process of cultural commodification in Siberia and offer fresh ethnographic insights into contested social processes reconfiguring group identity and new claims to cultural heritage. These Russian scholars, who trained at Western academic centers such as the Department of Anthropology at the University of Aberdeen (United Kingdom), look at their own societies and localities in Southeastern Siberia and the Russian Far East through the new lens of critical constructivism. Relying on recent theories of ethnicity, cultural geography, and anthropological approaches to locality (Akhil Gupta, James Ferguson, Arjun Appadurai, and Tim Ingold), each author performs a separate study of a specific group, such as students from “the North” in Saint Petersburg, shamans in Ulan-Ude or Nanai and Nivkhi communities in the Amur River region.

Сначала может показаться, что озаглавленная таким образом книга посвящена периферийным сюжетам, являясь реестром малозначимых, с точки зрения историка, мелочей. Однако ее название не должно вводить читателя в заблуждение. Книга и впрямь предстает как коллекция самых разных вещей и слов. Но их ни в коем случае не следует считать второстепенными и несущественными, ибо они определяли саму суть повседневной жизни на протяжении всей советской эпохи или какого-либо временного периода. Банальными они были в том смысле, что едва ли осознавались современниками. Наталья Борисовна Лебина — известная в научном мире как автор и соавтор множества работ по истории советской повседневности — широко раскидывает сети, чтобы уловить как можно больше аспектов советских будней.