“The unevenness of modernizing processes and the coexistence of modernizing and counter-modernizing trends create a kind of zoning of people’s lives. Some spheres are rational and advanced, where calculations and sober views prevail, while others are given over to religious and quasi-religious regulators.”
–Vladimir Magun on the “Zoning of life: private and public”
The rich mix of articles in this triple issue of the Russian Social Science Review offers myriad examples of Vladimir Magun’s observation above. Unmanageable institutional complexity, aggressive “othering,” and the hollowing out of norms, ideals, and standards of truth condition the subjective experience of contemporary life, while increasingly insistent demands for absolute loyalty from one or another claimant of authority promise relief from those tensions. Following some historical context, our selections from Russian-language scholarship in the fields of anthropology, economics, philosophy, political science, psychology, sociolinguistics, and sociology offer a kaleidoscopic reflection of this complicated terrain.
—P.A.K.