This thesis builds on the conceptualisation of exchange 'formatting' provided by Callon and Latour [1997] and analyses the role of money and labour as formatting tools in food exchanges among the inhabitants of the town of Totma in the Vologodskaya Oblast in the north of Russia. The choice to include or exclude money along with the investment of labour in mutual or one-sided manner not only marks but constitutes the distinction between a singular commercial transaction and a gift exchange embedded into a chain of other exchanges proper to the context of a particular relationship. The material on which this paper is based was acquired over the course of two separate expeditions in July of 2023 and August of 2024.

This honours' thesis critiques ‘dwelling perspective' [Ingold] and the temporality of landscape by looking at the narratives of personal space, including home in a small north Russian town. The thesis argues that a drawn map works as a medium allowing to introduce space as an inseparablepart of a personal narrative which is simultaneously similar to and different from Ingold’s metaphor of a snail’s shell that was not discussed in his work. In doing so, the thesis looks at the heuristic possibilities of Ricouer’s configuration of time and narrative-external ‘time of the narrative' which is a part of narrated human experience and the inner ‘narrative time'.

This honours thesis addresses forms as well as heuristic limits of the performativity theory by focusing on the long-term, processual conversion in a Pentecostal church in St Petersburg. The thesis contribution is, first, to highlighting long term conversion as opposed to its single event character, which is normally the emphasis in the anthropology of Protestantism [Harding, Keane, Robbins]. Yet, second, it is to consider full conceptual implications of this long-term persecutive from the point of view of theories of performativity. The thesis explicates an analytical conflict in the understanding of agency in this process. Western perspectives on agency [Austin, Bourdieu, Butler, Latour] focus on how informants perceive the interaction between their own agency and that of other non-human subjects. The thesis' critical point is to question human-centered approach to agency as well as secularist non-human view of it at the expense of the informants' view who see it as a balance of human and God’s agency. The paper rethinks the distinction between different types of agencies thus questioning the applicability of performative theory for the conversion process as such.

The article is devoted to the ethnography of space and time of one esoteric shop in St. Petersburg — the Witches' Shop. The author bases the study on the approach to the study of space proposed by Setha Low, but adds to it also an analysis of time. The novelty of the work for the tradition of shopping research also lies in the fact that the focus of the article is not on buyers, but on sellers. The article thus provides an ethnographic description of the chronotope and its role in shaping the image of the Witch Shop at the intersection of cultural and social meanings.