Jennifer Patico
Assistant Professor
Ph.D., New York University, 2001
Research Interests: Consumption and Material Culture; Postsocialism, Globalization and Capitalism; Gender and Feminism; Russia/Postsocialist Europe
Jennifer Patico earned her Ph.D. in sociocultural anthropology from New York University in 2001. She has conducted ethnographic fieldwork in St. Petersburg, Russia (1998-99, 2003, 2004), where she has investigated how people who were once part of a Soviet professional middle class have struggled to get along in a newly marketized and often disheartening Russian economy. Her forthcoming book Culture on the Market: Consumption, Globalization and Change in Urban Russia examines questions of class, morality, and notions of value as they were being debated and re-construed by St. Petersburg consumers in the late 1990s and early 2000s. More recently, Dr. Patico has begun research on the international matchmaking industry in Russia, focusing specifically on marriage/introduction agencies that match Russian women in St. Petersburg and beyond with American and European men. This project asks how “economic interest” and more idealized, “disinterested” relationships of marriage, kinship, and love are defined and experienced by involved actors – and what happens when potentially conflicting models of moral and economic organization come into dynamic interface in the context of transnational matchmaking.
Selected publications:
2005 “To be Happy in a Mercedes: Culture, Civilization and Transformations of Value in a Postsocialist City.” American Ethnologist 32 (3): 479-496.
2003 “Consuming the West but Becoming Third World: Food Imports and the Experience of Russianness.” Anthropology of East Europe Review Spring 2003 (Volume 21, no. 1), pp. 31-36.
2002 “Chocolate and Cognac: Gift Exchange and the Recognition of Social Worlds in Post-Soviet Russia.” Ethnos 67(3): 345-368.
2002 “Consumers Exiting Socialism: Ethnographic Perspectives on Daily Life in Post-communist Europe.” (Co-authored with M. Caldwell.) Ethnos 67(3): 285-294.
2001 “Globalization in the Postsocialist Marketplace: Consumer Readings of Difference and Development in Urban Russia.” Kroeber Anthropological Society Papers, Volume 91, pp. 127-42.
2001 “The Paradoxes of Progress: Globalization and Postsocialist Cultures.” (Co-authored with R. Stryker.) Kroeber Anthropological Society Papers, Volume 91, pp. 1-8.
