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1 results

  • 22 - Irrational Presuppositions

  • from Part IV - The Golden State
  • Lisa A. Kirschenbaum, West Chester University, Pennsylvania
  • Book:
    Soviet Adventures in the Land of the Capitalists
    Published online:
    18 January 2024
    Print publication:
    22 February 2024, pp 239-252

  • Summary

    Chapter 22 investigates Ilf and Petrov’s encounters with Russian immigrants, especially the Molokan, Christian sectarian community, in San Francisco. A comparison of their travelogue with the life stories produced by the nearly contemporary project organized by the anthropologist Paul Radin to survey San Francisco’s foreign-born population offers a means of assessing and contextualizing the writers’ more limited fieldwork. Central to Radin’s project – and also, if less explicitly, to Ilf and Petrov’s journey – was the premise that when cultures came into meaningful contact, people on both sides “acculturated.” The chapter argues that Ilf and Petrov acquitted themselves creditably as amateur ethnographers, pushing against their own presuppositions in their efforts to consider their informants’ perspectives.