{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.0383008356545961, 'fraction_numerical': 0.01532033426183844, 'mean_word_length': 5.275109170305677, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Book Review: Jennifer Patico, Consumption and Social Change in a Post-Soviet Middle Class. Stanford, CA and Washington, DC: Stanford University and Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2008. 244 pp. ISBN 978-0-8047- 6169-7

Twenty years after the collapse of the Berlin Wall, politics and economics remain the dominant frames through which the reading public follows the goings-on in the former Eastern Bloc. Jennifer Patico’s ethnography usefully departs from this convention, reminding the reader that both socialism and postsocialism have always been not only about people and power, but also about objects, or, perhaps more to the point, that the conventional distinction between objects, people, and power is as convenient as it is misleading. Consumption and Social Change in a Post-Soviet Middle Class opens by asking a timely and important question: How are the ‘emergent inequalities in wealth and status’ that followed the collapse of state socialism in Russia ‘being recognized, resituated, and perhaps increasingly naturalized as individuals’ economic strategies, consumer possibilities, and political-moral sensibilities nudge against, and gradually begin accommodating themselves to, new logics of value’? (p. 7) Patico is interested in how individuals make sense of the changing ‘relationships . . . between personal merit, social mobility, and their materialization in goods and wealth’ (p.6), and in Journal of Consumer Culture