A Good Barrel is Hard to Find: Infrastructures of Fermentation in a Siberian Village

• In Event: Late Soviet Village II: Things and Infrastructures between Rural and Urban

Abstract

This paper examines the social lives and social effects of fermentation equipment—from wooden barrels to dried animal skins— in the rural, pastoralist villages of the late-Socialist Altai Mountains. Fermented dairy products are a key staple in the Altai diet, and their production is one of the major tasks of domestic life. The vessels in which this fermentation takes place, however, are not inert containers, but, given the microbial cultures they contain, vital parts of the final food product. This paper investigates how the circulation of these infrastructure of dairy fermentation between rural household upends easy binaries of container and contained: not just in the case of food products and their containers, but also in the case of “domestic” work and the social and economic boundaries of the household itself.

Author

• Tyler Adkins, Princeton U