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6. The Power of Other Worlds: Civilisational Frames and Child-Adult Intimacies in Socialist Childhoods

Chapter of: (An)Archive: Childhood, Memory, and the Cold War(pp. 139–155)

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Metadata
Title6. The Power of Other Worlds
SubtitleCivilisational Frames and Child-Adult Intimacies in Socialist Childhoods
ContributorJennifer Patico(author)
DOIhttps://doi.org/10.11647/obp.0383.06
Landing pagehttps://www.openbookpublishers.com/books/10.11647/obp.0383/chapters/10.11647/obp.0383.06
Licensehttps://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
CopyrightJennifer Patico
PublisherOpen Book Publishers
Published on2024-04-22
Long abstractThis chapter draws on childhood-memory narratives from Cold War socialist and early post-socialist settings to problematize the east-west civilisational hierarchies that often frame accounts of socialism’s ‘less developed’ material and consumer worlds. In the narratives, children’s encounters with commodities from abroad speak not only or directly to the significance of east/west, socialist/capitalist hierarchies in their lives but also to children’s relationships with the adults closest to them and children’s affective experiences of their own maturation. Exploring these dynamics brings scholarship on socialism and post-socialism into fresh conversation with contemporary childhood studies and other work that theorizes how selfhood and intimacy take form in and through specific moments in political economy. To bring the falsely simple oppositions of east/west and adult/child into the same analytical frame is to begin building more nuanced, nimble understandings of how macro-level political economic boundaries can be integral to children’s most intimate forms of self-knowledge.
Page rangepp. 139–155
Print length17 pages
LanguageEnglish (Original)
Contributors

Jennifer Patico

(author)
Professor and Chair of Anthropology at Georgia State University
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2932-8707

Jennifer Patico is Professor and Chair of Anthropology at Georgia State University in Atlanta. A sociocultural anthropologist, she has conducted ethnographic research in both Russia and the United States, with a focus on themes of consumption, class and selfhood in both contexts. Her career in anthropology―and her participation in the Cold War Childhoods memory project― were inspired by her participation in the youth musical production Peace Child in her hometown of Columbia, Maryland and ultimately in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, where she collaborated with U.S. and Soviet teens during the last days of the Cold War. She is the author of Consumption and Social Change in a Post-Soviet Middle Class (Stanford University Press 2008) and The Trouble with Snack Time: Children’s Food and the Politics of Parenting (New York University Press 2020).

References
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