2009 Recipient

The Davis Center Book Prize in Political and Social Studies, established in 2008 and sponsored by the Kathryn W. and Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University, is awarded annually for an outstanding monograph published on Russia, Eurasia, or Eastern Europe in anthropology, political science, sociology, or geography in the previous calendar year.

Winner: Jessica Allina-Pisano
Title: The Post-Soviet Potemkin Village: Politics and Property Rights in the Black Earth (Cambridge University Press)

Allina-Pisano’s monograph reveals how private property reforms introduced into post-Soviet rural communities, long-organized along notions of collective ownership, led to impoverishment instead of prosperity. She deals with a complex of structural, cultural, and historical mechanisms that contribute to current rural conditions, and does so subtly, smartly, and with compelling style and grace. By uncovering the informal social constraints on formal economic rights, Allina-Pisano explains the transformation of state socialism’s former collective farmers into monopoly capitalism’s new rural proletarians. Her project is especially noteworthy for the extensive and intensive field work, conducted in rural villages in Ukraine and Russia. Meticulously building from the ground up, Allina-Pisano demonstrates that a well-constructed local ethnography offers invaluable insight into the unanticipated outcomes of post-communist economic reform.

Honorable Mention: Scott Gehlbach and Charles King