The volume is a new contribution to anthropological literature on migration and migrant media in Europe after the fall of the Berlin wall. It is an ethnographic study of arrivals and pathways of incorporation processes of post-Soviet Russian speaking immigrants (Russian Jews and Russian Germans) in Berlin and in London. The study looks at the ways they construct and represent their identities in public spaces. The author explores how ethnic and social boundaries are negotiated by immigrants in everyday life and to what extend Soviet connectedness and ethnic belongings stretch across borders in old and new homelands.
Further Russkij Berlin offers a comparative perspective on immigration to Germany and Great Britain. As such, it provides a good setting for the study of changing post-socialist ethnicities, social solidarity, and the role of nation state in emerging transnationalism. It makes a case for ethnography of media (newspapers) producers, products and consumers with extensive reference to recent debates on modern diaspora identity and growing meaning of transnational ties. The book provides ethnographic insights into German and British institutional policies. It also charts the incorporation of foreigners (in particular of Russian speakers) and how they are perceived as "foreigners" and at the same time as "new citizens" with "ethno-cultural duties" in the modern German society.
The author opens with an introductory essay mapping recent approaches in anthropology of migration and media. She then illustrates the points by giving data from her own field work conducted in Berlin and London between 1997-2001. This is followed by substantive chapters on key changes in ethnicity and representations of Russian speakers in German and British media, interplay of formal and informal modes of migrants media production, and examples of new world mapping and cultures of identity.
Overall, this book engages theoretical issues in anthropology about migration and communication across borders. Russkij Berlin will be of interest to students of anthropology, media studies, and cultural studies.
Russkij Berlin is a German PhD thesis in Anthropology (European Ethnology) defended in July 2002 at the Humboldt-Universitþt zu Berlin and published in September 2004 as the volume No 9 of the book series "Zeithorizonte. Perspectiven Europþischer Ethnologie" edited by Wolfgang Kaschuba, Professor and Director of the Department for European Ethnology, Humboldt-Universitþt zu Berlin. "Zeithorizonte" is engaged with processes of cultural and social changes in European societies.
Tsypylma Darieva is a Research Fellow at the Max Plank Institute for Social Anthropology, Department of Integration and Conflict.
Order directly from the publisher.
Publication date: 7/1/2005, 304 pages,
25.90 EUR, br., ISBN 3-8258-6966-0