2014

Honorable Mention: Anya Bernstein
Title: Religious Bodies Politic: Rituals of Sovereignty in Buryat Buddhism (University of Chicago Press)

Bernstein adroitly integrates the study of postsocialism, Buddhism, and transnationalism to investigate how Buryats have “collectively developed…a characteristically Buddhist ‘body politics’” that allows them to maintain “their long-standing mobility—across the spatial borders of national-states and the temporal horizons between life and death, as well as across multiple sites of belonging” (p. 6). Bernstein investigates this Buryat Buddhist body politics across time and space by following the trails of numerous “emblematic” and “exemplary” bodies, such as the dead bodies of famous monks, the celibate bodies of Buddhist monastics, the temporary bodies of reincarnated lamas, the virtually dismembered bodies of lay disciples, and others. This ambitious project necessitated intensive fieldwork in three locations—Buryatia, the Drepung Monastery in southern India, and Dharamsala, India—as well as archival historical research. In examining these “religious bodies politic” Bernstein explores key themes of broad interest in the social sciences: different manifestations and regulations of bodies; intersections of religion and politics; negotiations of morality, and how morality and religion are intertwined; moralities and money/economics; and transnationalism. In this finely-crafted, stirring book, Bernstein shows how “a characteristic mix of the Buddhist, Russian Orthodox, Soviet, and postsocialist body politics, developed by Buryats over the centuries of borderland existence both within the Russian state and across the larger Tibeto-Mongolian world, have enabled extraordinary mobility across space, time, and even across life and death” (pp. 209-210). She argues convincingly that these flows have in fact helped recenter world Buddhism in the postsocialist period.

Honorable Mention: Krisztina Fehérváry
Title: Politics in Color and Concrete: Socialist Materialities and the Middle Class in Hungary (Indiana University Press)

Fehérváry considers the material transformations to Hungarian domestic space from the 1950s to 2000 by tracking five successive “aesthetic regimes,” or “politically charged assemblages of material qualities that have provoked widely shared affective responses” (p. 3). The book investigates both how the aesthetics of everyday experience were politicized in socialist Hungary and how current standards of living—often assumed to be “new” articulations that emerged in the postsocialist period of neoliberalism—in fact have roots in late socialist consumer culture.  Fehérváry gracefully integrates an innovative conceptual framework with impressive methodology and thorough empirical analysis of the connections between socio-political systemic change, the shifting materialities of housing as imagined and materialized, and the production of socially mobilized subjectivities. The author offers an impressive treatment of how this played out in the planned steel city of Dunaújváros (Hungary’s first model socialist town), in greater Hungary, and in the Soviet bloc more generally through a series of postwar shifts. A defining contribution in the scholarship on material culture and changes over time in Soviet and post-Soviet cities, Politics in Color and Concrete is both a highly informative and thoroughly enjoyable read.

Winner: Erin Koch