The Antagonism of the Postsocialist Collective
While the privatization of agriculture took place over a decade ago in Russia, individual farming has yet to take hold. The economic barriers for the lone farmer are almost insurmountable in most cases. In addition, those who attempt entrepreneurial farming and leave the collective must also be willing to symbolically leave the community. While entrepreneurial endeavors might be appealing to some, and the prospect of the market enticing, for others the questionable moral worth of the capitalist economy has yet to prove compelling enough to inspire abandoning the reorganized collective. The emotional economy, which along with material constraints navigates individuals’ choices in subsistence practices, is elaborated as an alternative to neoclassical approaches to private property. Many rural inhabitants continue to maintain the collective identity of their agricultural work because it is so tightly interwoven with historic socio-emotional concepts of « work », “life”, and « culture ». Based on over a year of fieldwork on a former collective farm, this paper examines the emotional, material and social complexities of privatization in a Russian village.