Standing Bottles, Washing Deals, and Drinking for the Soul in a Siberian City
Author(s)
Pesmen, Dale
Abstract
The practice of setting bottles down in front of people either to gain access to goods or services or to ride up on those bottles into some desired position is a well-known feature of Soviet and post-Soviet culture, but treatment of this issue as an economic exchange-related one’s tears it from its wider context, a wider sense of exchange and a wider sense of value. A bottle presented is not only an economically meaningful gesture but is supremely meaningful in other ways. The calculated bribery of bottles “stood” others often results in hours of drinking together and a shifty transformation of exchange into an intimacy felt to be central to the depth of Russianness. Even when a bottle is not emptied together, what is given may index and invoke a ritual that first and foremost claims to deny the ontological ascendancy of calculated exchange. This paper explores the upward direction of bottles, ways in which it can also be bottles all the way down, and ways in which this sort of slide, which is, I argue, tremendously revealing about Russian culture, occurs. Rituals including alcohol have economic, socio-cultural, philosophical and psychological relations to a master trope in Russian culture, dusha, soul,2 and recent history has brought many of these aspects to the surface.
