LibrariesGoSolaruLearnWebMailDirectoryMapEventsIndex

Dr. Jennifer Patico

Jennifer Patico earned her Ph.D. in sociocultural anthropology from New York University in 2001. She has conducted ethnographic fieldwork in St. Petersburg, Russia (1998-99, 2003, 2004), where she has investigated how people who were once part of a Soviet professional middle class have struggled to get along in a newly marketized and often disheartening Russian economy. More recently, Dr. Patico has conducted research on Russian-American internet matchmaking, investigating this highly contested phenomenon from the perspectives of clients (Russian and Ukrainian women and American men) and matchmaking agencies as well as examining its treatment by public policy and mass media in the U.S.

Courses taught:

  • Introduction to Cultural Anthropology
  • Anthropological Theory
  • Qualitative Methods in Anthropology
  • Gender and Power in Ethnographic Perspective
  • Consumption and Material Culture
  • Anthropology of Self and Emotions

Personal interests:

I first became interested in anthropology – though I didn’t yet know what it was called! – when, as a teenager, I traveled to the Soviet Union as a part of a performing arts exchange program. While at that time, in 1988, the Cold War was already drawing to a close, the American and Soviet teens who participated in the program had little idea of just how radically the world was about to change. We were grateful for the opportunity to be able to interact with one another on a daily and intimate basis during the month we spent together in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, and we were passionate about the possibility of teaching others in our countries that the “evil” enemies on the other side of the planet were in fact as human as us. In addition, I was fascinated by the tastes, smells, and sights of a new culture, and experienced painful culture shock upon my return home. I committed myself at that point to learning Russian and to pursuing a career that would allow me somehow to “translate” Soviet culture to my compatriots at home. In college, I discovered that anthropology was the perfect field in which to do this, and while the Cold War has ended, I continue to enjoy anthropology’s ability to broaden our perspectives on the world and to foster empathetic understandings of the positions and experiences of others. In fact, the dissolution of state socialism and introduction of capitalist economy in Russia has produced a shifted set of discourses, encounters, and struggles that make ethnographic illumination more valuable than ever.

Research Interests: Gender and power; globalization and social change; capitalism and concepts of the self; consumption and material culture; Russia and postsocialist Europe

My current research project is a study of the booming international matchmaking industry – particularly its Russian-American contours – and the contestation it has inspired in the United States. The research aims at a closer analysis than has been attempted before of the experiences, motivations, and ideologies of the variously positioned actors who participate in the industry and the public debates that surround it: Russian and American clients as well as agency owners and employees, feminist activists, and others. Drawing upon interviews and participant observation in St. Petersburg, Russia and in the U.S. as well as internet ethnography, I suggest that recent contestation about international marriage brokering can be analyzed as a source of valuable insights into emergent social tensions, experiences of structural change, and shifting gender politics in the U.S. and Russia respectively, as well as transnationally.

Previously, I conducted field research in St. Petersburg, Russia on consumerism, experiences of social change, and local conceptualizations of class and the morality of capitalism. this research culminated in my 2008 book, Consuption and Social Change in a Post-Soviet Middle Class (Stanford University press and Woodrow Wilson Center Press). In the next few years, I plan to return to the anthropology of consumption with a study of children's food and its relationship to parenting and notions of self and success in an Atlanta community.


Select Publications

2010 "Kinship and Crisis: The Embedding of Economic Pressures and Gender Ideals in Postsocialist International Matchmaking." Slavic Review, forthcoming.

2009 "For Love, Money, or Normalcy: Meanings of Strategy and Sentiment in the Russian-American Matchmaking Industry." Ethnos 74 (3): 307-330.

2009 "Spinning the Market: The Moral Alchemy of Everyday Talk in Postsocialist Russia." Critique of Anthropology 29 (2): 205-224.

2008 Consumption and Social Change in a Post-Soviet Middle Class. Stanford University Press and Woodrow Wilson International Center Press.

Read a review in Foreign Affairs of Dr. Patico's book.

2005 “To be Happy in a Mercedes: Culture, Civilization and Transformations of Value in a Postsocialist City.” American Ethnologist 32 (3): 479-496.

2003 “Consuming the West but Becoming Third World: Food Imports and the Experience of Russianness.” Anthropology of East Europe Review Spring 2003 (Volume 21, no. 1), pp. 31-36.

2002 “Chocolate and Cognac: Gift Exchange and the Recognition of Social Worlds in Post-Soviet Russia.” Ethnos 67(3): 345-368.

2002 “Consumers Exiting Socialism: Ethnographic Perspectives on Daily Life in Post-communist Europe.” (Co-authored with M. Caldwell.) Ethnos 67(3): 285-294.

2001 “Globalization in the Postsocialist Marketplace: Consumer Readings of Difference and Development in Urban Russia.” Kroeber Anthropological Society Papers, Volume 91, pp. 127-42.

2001 “The Paradoxes of Progress: Globalization and Postsocialist Cultures.” (Co-authored with R. Stryker.) Kroeber Anthropological Society Papers, Volume 91, pp. 1-8.