Женская устная история: Ген-дерные исследования по Андреа Пето (review)

279 Ab Imperio, 1/2010 Anika WALKE Женская устная история: Ген- дерные исследования / Сост. Андреа Пето. Бишкек: “Центр издательского развития”, 2004. Ч. 1. 339 с., библ.; 2005. Ч. 2. 512 с. ISBN: 9967-11-193-3. With the publication of The Frontiers Reader1 in 2002, English-reading scholars were provided with a selection of essays on the practice and interpretation of women’s oral history , mostly published in the journal Frontiers between 1977 and 2001. A similar approach guided the first of two volumes of Zhenskaia ustnaia istoriia: Gendernye issledovaniia (Women’s Oral History: Gender Studies), offering a Russian-speaking audience canonical texts on conducting oral history research about or with women. Most of these papers were previously published in English or German, the oldest, Sherna Berger Gluck’s “What’s So Special about Women’s Oral History,”2 in 1971, and the relatively recent “Gender:AUseful Category of HistoricalAnalysis,” by Joan W. Scott,3 in 1986. The second volume assembles several papers produced within the Open Society Institute’s International Women’s Program, focusing on collecting and analyzing oral histories by women in CentralAsia, the Caucasus, Ukraine, Russia, and Moldova for educational and research purposes. The eighteen chapters of this volume address women of ethnic minorities, women in conflict and postconflict situations, women and Islamic practice, and the impact of post-Soviet transition on women. The translation of texts by Berger Gluck or Scott as well as the instructive writings of Paul Thompson and Alessandro Portelli about the general value and specificities of oral history is commendable and will be useful for those beginning to work with oral history, especially students. At the same time, the collection may leave some scholars unsatisfied, as none of the texts reflects more recent debates within the oral history movement , such as those concerning the intricacies of personal memory, its dynamic relationship with cultural memory, or the construction of subjectivity and identity in the moment of narration. This absence is in line with many authors’ adherence to a binary system of gender and their reluctance to consider the social construction and relationality of gender categories. In addition to Joan 1 Susan H. Armitage, Patricia Hart, Karen Weathermon (Eds.). Women’s Oral History: The Frontiers Reader. Lincoln, NE, 2002. 2 Sherna Berger Gluck. What’s So Special about Women’s Oral History // Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies. 1971. Vol. 2. No. 2. Pp. 3-17. 3 Joan W. Scott. Gender:AUseful Category of HistoricalAnalysis //American Historical Review. 1986. Vol. 91. No. 5. Pp. 1053-1075. 280 Рецензии/Reviews always be room to celebrate achievements such as the program and the publication, editors owe their readers an outline of the academic, ideological , and historical parameters of the publication. The second volume assembles a variety of papers that resulted from the work of the International Women’s Program in post-Soviet countries. Most of the papers analyze a small number of women’s narrations about their lives, especially about the changes in their lives in the aftermath of the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Topics are addressed in four sections: the emergence of the movement for gender equality in modern Russia; the transformations in women’s education as well as professional and family life in the Central Asian republics of the former USSR; women’s experiences of the civil war-like conflicts in many of the Soviet republics in the early 1990s; and the role of women in the reconstruction of religious communities and movements in the former USSR. The collection thus addresses a century of women’s lives in the Soviet Union and its successor states, touching upon questions of citizenship , education, migration, and the relations between center and periphery . The reader has a chance to learn about truly marginalized experience; the lives of Soviet citizens, women and men, in the CentralAsian repubScott ’s piece, Joan Sangster’s review of feminist debates and their impact on oral history is an exception here. Sangster’s concise analysis of the effect that larger scholarly trends have on oral history, such as the emergence of poststructuralist approaches, deserved a more prominent place in the collection. Her analysis indicates why the inclusion of texts on biographical research (Elena Meshcherkina), religious discourse (Barbara Stowasser, Marianne Kamp) and anthropological field study (Lila Abu-Lughod) in the book is...