This article considers an instance of magical services in Moscow, where the practitioner adapted western neo-shamanic methods to cater to the problems of the newly rich. The techniques that are ostensibly used for improving business are analyzed as attempts to alter the problematic morality of money making. The semiotic mechanisms of kitsch and magic are compared, and it is suggested that similar mechanisms are involved in the processes of identity construction of the new elites. These semiotic processes are seen as symptomatic of deep changes at the very foundations of cultural cosmologies, resulting from the new openness to the globalized world.
Agamben, Giorgio (1993) Stanzas. Word and Phantasm in Western Culture (trans. Ronald L. Martinez). Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press.
2.
Boym, Svetlana (1994) Common Places: Mythologies of Everyday Life in Russia. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
3.
Csordas, Thomas (1997a) Language, Charisma and Creativity. The Ritual Life of a Religious Movement. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press.
4.
Csordas, Thomas (1997b) The Sacred Self. A Cultural Phenomenology of Religious Healing. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press.
Humphrey, Caroline (1995) ‘Creating a Culture of Disillusionment. Consumption in Moscow, a Chronicle of Changing Times’, in D. Miller (ed.) Worlds Apart. London: Routledge.
7.
Humphrey, Caroline (1997) ‘The Villas of the “New Russians”: a Sketch of Consumption and Cultural Identity in Post-Soviet Landscapes’, Focaal30/31: 85-106.
8.
Kapferer, Bruce (1997) The Feast of the Sorcerer. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.
9.
Krylova, Anna (1999) ‘Saying “Lenin” and Meaning “Party”: Subversion and Laughter in Soviet and Post-Soviet Society’, in Adele Barker (ed.) Consuming Russia. Culture, Sex, and Society Since Gorbachev, pp. 243-265. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press.
10.
Kundera, Milan (1991) The Unbearable Lightness of Being (trans. from Czech by Michael Henry Heim). New York: Harper-Collins.
11.
Lindquist, Galina (2000a) ‘Not My Will but Thine Be Done: Church Versus Magic in Contemporary Russia’, Culture and Religion V. 1(2): 247-276.
12.
Lindquist, Galina (2000b) ‘In Search of the Magic Flow: Magic and Market in Contemporary Russia’, Urban Anthropology29(4): 315-357.
13.
Lindquist, Galina (2001a) ‘Gurus, Wizards, and Energoinformation Fields: Alternative Medicine in Post-Communist Russia’, The Anthropology of East Europe Review19(1): 16-28.
14.
Lindquist, Galina (2001b) ‘Breaking the Waves: Voodoo Magic in the Russian Cultural Ecumene’, in R. Stryker and J. Patico (eds) The Paradoxes of Progress: Globalization and Postsocialist Cultures. Kroeber Anthropological Society Papers, No. 86, pp. 93-112.
15.
Lindquist, Galina (2001c) ‘Transforming Signs: Iconicity and Indexicality in Russian Healing and Magic’, Ethnos66(2): 181-206.
16.
Pesmen, Dale (2000) Russia and Soul: An Exploration. Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press.
17.
Rappoport, Roy (1999) Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity. Cambridge University Press.
18.
Ries, Nancy (forthcoming) ‘“Honest” Bandits, and “Warped People”: Russian Narratives about Money, Corruption, and Moral Decay’, in C. Greenhouse, K. Warren and E. Mertz (eds) Ethnographies in Unstable Places. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
19.
Sabonis-Chafee, Theresa (1999) ‘Communism as Kitsch: Soviet Symbols in Post-Soviet Society’, in Adele Barker (ed.) Consuming Russia. Culture, Sex, and Society Since Gorbachev, pp. 362-382. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press.
20.
Taussig, Michael (1987) Shamanism, Colonialism, and the White Man. A Study in Terror and Healing. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
21.
Taussig, Michael (1993) Mimesis and Alterity. New York and London: Routledge.
