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Nancy Ries, Russian talk: Culture and conversation during perestroika. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997. Pp. xii, 220. Hb $39.95, pb $16.95.

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 October 2000

Andrea Ágnes Reményi
Andrea Ágnes Reményi
Affiliation:
Linguistics Institute, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Post Office Box 701/518, H-1399 Budapest, Hungary, gyori@sunserv.kfki.hu
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Abstract

What makes Russians Russian? Is it a special national character, or their common emotional or intellectual spirit? Ries helps us get rid of these slippery essentialist commonplaces with her interpretative anthropological study of Muscovites' everyday private talk around 1990. Her effort is outstanding in both description and theory: Few have undertaken to describe and analyze Russian (or Eastern European) urban everyday discourse from the anthropological perspective, as she does (though recent macro-studies and studies of public discourse are more numerous). At the same time, she creates and defends a thesis of everyday talk as a vital medium of social value creation and maintenance – as it constructs “Russianness,” in her example.

Type
REVIEWS
Information
Language in Society , Volume 29 , Issue 3 , July 2000 , pp. 444 - 446
Copyright
© 2000 Cambridge University Press

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