AT HOME
a visual exploration of Russian Jewish culture
RUSSIAN
IN
JEWISH
SPACE
HYBRIDITY
HABITUS
The habitus, a product of history, produces individual and collective practices—more history—in accordance with the schemes generated by history. It ensures active presence of past experiences, which, deposited in each organism in the form of schemes of perception, thought and action, tend to guarantee the correctness of practices and their constancy over time, more reliably than all formal rules and explicit forms.
Members sharing the same collective past are subject to the same habitus and its “immanent law, lex insita, inscribed in their bodies by identical histories.” They will tend to have corresponding, though not identical, responses to the same circumstances, reproducing cultural symbols and practices.
Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice
TRANSNATIONAL
Russian Jews have many homes-- real, remembered, symbolic. The "Russian" networks connect us to a community that spans the world. RUSSIANS are a civilization without borders.
MATERIAL IDENTITY
What is "Russian Jewish"/ Is it a certain look, a sound, a lifestyle?/What does your car or your house or even your address say about you?/Does your accent define or betray me?/Does my stuff speak for me or do I choose how to present myself to the world?
Maybe it's more subtle, intangible, un-namable-- but also undeniable and inalienable from who I am as Russian Jew.
HOMO SOVIETICUS