INTRODUCTION

This article examines various gendered dimensions of memory in everyday life and, in particular, how the memory of everyday life contrasts with the deliberate and formalized remembering in funeral rituals (yas) in an Azerbaijani village setting. On the one hand, I focus on the way the socialist past is remembered in everyday social interaction; on the other, I explore ways of evoking memory and mnemonic practices in funeral rituals, which entail notions of ritualized and sacred time, as well as performative forms of memory. To complement the double focus on gendered memories and the uses of memory in social interaction, I look at how and why certain types of evoking and working with memory may have changed from the socialist to the post-socialist period.
The literature on memory is vast indeed.^[1] In the field of anthropology, Maurice Bloch, Johannes Fabian, and others have built upon the notion of memory as a property of individual psychology and underlined the praxis side of memory. In contrast, Paul Antze and Michael Lambek, in their introduction to the volume Tense Past, set the aim of the collected essays as: “[imagining] memory as practice […] Memories are produced out of experience and, in turn, reshape it.”^[2] Of these two concepts of memory, this article is concerned with the latter: social memory produced in practice. Memory is social (but not necessarily collectively accepted) insofar as it is remembered and cited in a social context.^[3] The first type of memory produced in everyday life is primarily the personal version of “what happened” and “how it really was,” but it is still produced in a social context, even if it is a personal memory. Hence, memory is subject to complex acts of remembering, contestation, and experience, and is part of the social, political, and economic life before becoming collective memory.^[4] Memory, in this case, is a product of social interaction – only after such interaction might an articulated representation of the past become a social construct to be endorsed as collective memory.^[5]
Memories of the socialist past in the village of Täzäkänd in western Azerbaijan are related to the social life around the sovkhoz (state farm) and kolkhoz (collective farm). The sovkhoz and kolkhoz were the main economic and social institutions in which most of the adult village population participated until about 1996, but had been almost completely dissolved by the time I arrived in Täzäkänd in 2000. The social life around these institutions is not reflected in the official local history. Most of this social life, such as conflicts, jealousies, love affairs, and relations of favoritism and corruption, were either too petty to be recorded or too significant (at the local and sometimes at the national level, such as the corruption surrounding the fulfillment of the cotton plan), and hence too dangerous as knowledge and as a source of power. The way these past events are evoked (remembered) involves a very matter-of-fact type of social interaction, bordering on gossip and individual memory, interacting with various local historical representations, and employing various rhetorical forms like mockery, riposte, and boasting. They are therefore contestable to some degree, such that one person might challenge the way an event is remembered by another. As Lambek states, “if memory is approached as claims, then it is understood to have addressees, interlocutors who can in turn support or confirm, cast doubt upon, or challenge them.”^[6] Hence individuals, in their act of remembering certain events and persons, make claims about the significance of past experience and make statements about new and old forms of social and moral practice.
I would like to explore this changing and interactive quality of memory, especially the social dimension of its production: how memory is articulated and put to work in a social context, that is, in interaction with other people’s memories and in everyday life. This focus necessitates turning away from identity and individual memory, and toward social-interactive aspects of memory, like contestation, rhetoric, and the art of speech and communication. Jennifer Cole, who has been studying social memory and colonial and postcolonial subjectivity in Madagascar, called this process “the work of memory” and proposed to seek it in everyday life, in small talk, in gossip, and in daily encounters between neighbors, former colleagues, friends, and acquaintances.^[7] In a similar argument, Lambek and Antze suggested that “[m]emories are acts of commemoration, of testimony, of confession, of accusation. Memories do not merely describe the speaker’s relation to the past but place her quite specifically in reference to it: As assertions and performances, they carry moral entailments of various sorts.”^[8]
Another aspect of the working of memory is the way in which certain mnemonic objects become associated with realms and places of memory^[9] – and how they can be forgotten.^[10] This problem of forgetting has been central in the work of Jennifer Cole, who has struggled with the puzzle that the Betsimisaraka in Madagascar seem to have forgotten their brutal colonial past.^[11] Similarly, despite the prevalence of places of memory and mnemonic objects from the Soviet past (such as broken machinery, rundown and unused buildings, and empty fields of the former collective farms), the Azerbaijani villagers were selectively forgetting or remembering in particular ways, namely through distancing, idealizing, and depersonalizing the Soviet past in some social contexts or remembering them primarily in gossip or rhetorical confrontations. This “architecture of memory,” which, as Johannes Fabian suggested,^[12] shapes the topoi and mnemonics, warrants an exploration of how the Soviet past is currently in the process of becoming only or primarily a memory of the distant, impersonalized, and idealized past.^[13] Forgetting or idealizing certain events is also a social act; individuals in their everyday interaction employ strategies of gossip and rhetoric, consciously or unconsciously forget, idealize, and change the past, and their way of employing memory will be challenged to the degree that the social circumstances and social context allow. In this article, I primarily study not only where and how individuals assert their place in society and the community through remembering, evoking memory, or forgetting the past in everyday life interactions, but also how they assign others to specific social places in the past, and how individuals comment on the sociability and morality of others through the working of memory. Furthermore, I intend to explore how the powerless rural women use memory as social critique, even at the micro level, in the everyday life of post-socialist rural Azerbaijan.
The instances of individual and everyday remembering contrast with the remembering that occurs in more formalized settings, such as lamenting rituals (yas), in which moral claims are embedded in religious and ritual language and articulated in formalized ritual structures. Memory in sociological and historical studies has been more frequently associated with formal occasions and collective ceremonies and thought to be embedded in bodily practices understood as rituals.^[14] Through rituals and ceremonies, memory is thought to become collective and hence immortalized. Funerals are rituals for remembering and redefining the relationship between the living and the dead. They entail highly formalized structures and aim to invoke and control emotions. In the Azerbaijani case, they are also media for working out the significance of gender notions and roles, as well as for generational positioning.^[15] Given this formalized and ritualized form of memory, I examine how these two forms of remembering interact with one another. In other words, I look into how the same social actors engage in and work through the two forms of remembering in order to talk about social change and social morality.

THE ETHNOGRAPHIC SETTING

The village of Täzäkänd, a settlement on the main railway between Baku and Tbilisi, had a population of 7,239 in 2002 and consisted of 1,764 households. Täzäkänd was also one of the settlements of German colonists and had been a prosperous grape growing area around the turn of the 20th century.^[16] The agricultural production system and land was turned into a sovkhoz in 1929. Named after Äzizbegov,^[17] the sovkhoz was one the first few established in the socialist Azerbaijani Republic. A kolkhoz was established in the same year, and by 1934, 73% of the households had been recorded as collectivized. Täzäkänd’s borders as an administrative unit (känd soveti), as well as those of the sovkhoz and kolkhoz, changed several times during the Soviet era. The village unit was primarily incorporated into the agricultural and administrative structures of the Äzizbegov sovkhoz, which also had a wine and cognac factory in the village. A majority of village residents were employed by one of these sovkhoz and kolkhoz structures or their respective supplementary production, sale, and service institutions like the MTS (machinery and tractor station), gas station, various depots and repair workshops for machinery and products, etc.
The agricultural produce in the region consisted of grapes and cotton, especially in the late 1960s. Azerbaijan’s political leadership – partly within the framework of the so-called “socialist competition for increasing production” – continued increasing the cotton production plans through the 1980s, until Azerbaijan (along with Uzbekistan) was accused of a large scale corruption and fraud involving beefed-up production declarations (the pripiska scandals). The district of Şämkir and the village Täzäkänd were strongly affected by this scandal; the sovkhoz and kolkhoz directors and some local party leaders, as well as numerous bookkeepers, received lengthy prison sentences. Some of the accused even committed suicide. Since then, cotton production has fallen significantly. In the late 1980s, Gorbachev’s anti-alcohol campaign had additional detrimental effects on the region and on Azerbaijan in general. Between 1985 and 1993, nearly half of the vineyards in Azerbaijan were destroyed, as Gorbachev’s campaign led to a reduction of demand for alcoholic beverages, at least for legally produced ones.

MEMORY AND HISTORY IN EVERYDAY VILLAGE LIFE

Here I would like to come back to the question of what sort of memory is evoked in the everyday life of the village, especially when the socialist past is presented in an anonymous and general way. This type of memory follows a frequently cited nostalgic but anonymous pattern and shows a remarkable consistency in many post-socialist rural settings.^[18] The nostalgic memories of the former good times are produced in everyday life and as parts of everyday conversations between neighbors, friends, colleagues, relatives, and acquaintances – conversations that are bounded by the social context of the gathering and by social relations. On the whole, the stories that are told are open to contestation when they evoke relations to specific people, such as the involvement of this or that person in a local case of corruption and self-enrichment, but when the memory of corruption, for instance, is made anonymous by claiming that all were practicing some form of corruption, they cultivate more consensus than contestation. The nostalgic memories of the past, therefore, belong to this category of shifting between the personal (politically correct, but individual and specific) and the collective-anonymous (politically correct, as long as the collectiveness is underlined). More specifically, the following themes recur in everyday conversation:

a) The abundance of money. People talk in general about the abundance of money and the availability of goods in the Soviet period, even if the goods were not of the best quality. The references are especially to the period after the 1970s, when the villagers experienced an easing of restrictions on trading their agricultural products and became fairly prosperous. The villagers are said to have renovated or newly built their houses in this period, when weddings and invitations were plentiful, and there was a general sense of overall wealth. One neighbor of mine in Täzäkänd, for instance, gave the example of how men in those years had trouble choosing in which restaurant to spend their money, visited one after the other nearly every evening, and could invite their male friends to eat and drink with them. Today, he added, many men are ashamed to meet their friends in a coffee house, because they feel pressure to offer friends a cup of tea (which they can no longer afford). They would prefer to stay home and away from coffee houses in order to avoid the social disgrace of not being able to afford generosity among friends and acquaintances. This idealized interpretation of wealth and abundance will not be challenged as long as it remains general and depersonalised, e.g., “everyone earned money through salaries,” and does not take into account those who had better and privileged access to the favors of party officials and hence better means of bribing and accumulating wealth and status.

b) The abundance of food and produce, especially grapes and wine. Even if there is a wide variety of food and agricultural produce available at the weekly village market ten years after independence, villagers still emphasize that certain kinds of produce and food products, or rather certain kinds of access to food products, are not as available as they had been in the socialist period. My host in the village, Könül, a teacher at the local public school, bitterly remarked one day how the village women used to complain about the quality of cheap bread they could buy at the local sovkhoz bakery during Soviet times. But today even if the quality is so much better, and it is no longer the sovkhoz bakery, but the same bakery owned and run by a private owner and co-villager, not all can afford to buy bread daily and women are now forced to bake their own at home. This is drudgery, given the electricity cuts and shortages of other sources of energy needed for baking and cooking. Often women have to run between neighboring houses in the middle of their bread baking time, because the electricity might be turned off or the gas might run out and cannot be replaced due to the shortage of cash. Not only is cash scarce, but the conditions of production have become harder.
Similarly, the abundance of grapes from the vineyards is remembered in sharp contrast to today, since almost all the vineyards have been destroyed and women have trouble finding enough locally grown grapes, or enough vine leaves to collect for making traditional Azerbaijani dishes. Again, an interesting detail in this story is that it was the local residents, the kolkhoz and sovkhoz workers, who cut down the vineyards, not only on the orders of the local agricultural bureaucrats administering Gorbachev’s policies, but also due to neglect and plunder of the last agricultural resources of the vineyards after 1991. Land was left idle, the wood of the grapevines was cut and burned for heating and cooking, and the iron wires and cement poles of the vineyards were sold or used for construction. Hamını dağıtıblar (everything and all got destroyed) is the common description for the situation of the vineyards; the reference is usually anonymous and generalized, indicating that all (but no specific) people took part in it. Memories of individual involvement in plundering the property of the former kolkhoz and sovkhoz are evoked very rarely, hardly in social contexts, and at most in the form of gossip and personal slander, usually exchanged between two or three individuals in a secretive and conspiratorial manner. Hence, the anonymity of the past abundance of food works only in this generalized and idealized context, in which single individuals are not mentioned in relation to their responsibility for providing for or destroying the abundance.

c) Memories of social status and distinction through work in the kolkhoz or sovkhoz. Job status and social distinction within the kolkhoz and sovkhoz structures are also remembered in everyday life with nostalgia. For women especially, distinction and status through work in the agricultural production systems seem to have been the major way of becoming a part of what may be called the “official” local history, in the sense that their status and achievements were recorded. The state had an organized system of honoring and rewarding people’s achievements in agriculture, from being mentioned in the local newspaper or other written records of socialist history and getting medals of the “heroes of socialist labor” (sosialist ämäyi qährämanı), to becoming deputies in the Azerbaijani Supreme Soviet. Such women were and still are referred to as “heroes” and remembered as having an entry in the Soviet Encyclopedia or having been cited in a newspaper or journal. Titles such as brigadier or manqa başçısı (head of production unit) are still in use today. In fact, such names and such women are cited primarily when the local bureaucrats are asked to draw up a list of prominent people in the village.
On the whole, the personal merits of the woman or man in question would not be challenged in public. Nevertheless, the abuse of such state supported recognition through seeking privileges for family and kin are issues mentioned in private gossip contexts, but not in larger social gatherings, if one is not keen on causing disruption in social relations or slandering a particular person.
These past titles and distinctions are no longer renewable and gender inequality has become especially visible, since women today do not have such work organizations and hierarchical bodies punishing or rewarding them for their work, and hence no means of distinguishing themselves within the village context. Work these days is performed for survival or (for a minority) accumulating wealth and does not receive much organizational or state level attention. The way women (and men) found themselves as historical figures and got cited in local official histories, in newspaper articles, in yearbooks, etc., is certainly a micro-version of the official history. Rubie Watson correctly refers to the way such history writing was marked by a particular genre and form of writing: anything that had to do with the “official” was tainted.^[19] Nevertheless, such history writing and peer recognition is still remembered with nostalgia, since unlike today, this was the main (and often the only) way for claiming socially and politically recognized distinction.

d) Everyday memories of the quality and scientific technology of agricultural production, related to work conditions and the goals of “socialist production and progress.” Many remember and talk about how they were carrying out experiments to improve quality and productivity. Women who had become brigadiers or agronomy (agricultural technicians) in the vineyards or in wine production remembered with enthusiasm how they had been experimenting, learning, and improving techniques and scientific methods of agricultural and food production. The issue had more to do with (real or imagined) intellectual involvement than with their own promotion and distinction. Such intellectual challenge seems to have become a thing of the past as well. As such, these memories of a “scientific past” in rural production structures were also idealized and depersonalized, and certainly are flavoured with the Soviet discourse of progress and development. Nevertheless, men and women do identify their own biographies with this progress and scientific development and clearly miss these elements today, even if they also shared much of the darker sides of the corrupt kolkhoz and sovkhoz regimes, with false plans and production figures, and with stolen goods and equipment from these institutions. Similar to the evocations of the idealized and collective past of abundance, this nostalgia for the scientific past is also generalized and depersonalized, and not evoked in relation to individual scientific achievements, but as collective and anonymous enterprises, even if the person speaking remembers the scientific achievements in which she or he was involved.

e) Remembering the business of social life and the lack of time in the Soviet period. Finally, people remember how everyday life was dominated by their work lives. Neyran, for instance, who had been an accountant and party secretary in the sovkhoz, remembered how they hardly found time at the workplace to have a chat over a cup of tea, which would require the minimum courteousness of finding time for one another as host and guest. She also recalled how they had to rush from one meeting (iclas) to another and how they traveled to other districts, villages, and towns and came home late in the evening. Such business in life is rare these days; those women who have any paid jobs at all usually have only a few hours of work (such as teachers), are paid less, and have lots of leisure time – not always filled with leisure activities but with securing food, house keeping, caring for children, etc., activities that under the former system were largely subsidized by the state. Hence, as Neyran notes, there is all this time now but there is hardly anything exciting going on, anything to challenge their intellectual and social capabilities, or anything with social meaning and significance. The idealization and generalization inherent in these stories and memories present a strong contrast with today’s realities, even if the individual “real” pasts may have been different, such that one was pretending to be busy, or that one was pretending to engage in serious political discussions in the many iclas meetings that lasted so many hours.
These examples illustrate the primary change in people’s everyday life, namely that during the communist period, most activities were collectively shared, whereas today individuals must struggle on their own.

GENDERED POST-SOCIALIST LIVES AND MEMORIES OF FORMER TIMES

Most of this discourse about the anonymous and collective past underlines the change in the texture of everyday life. Men and women who left home daily to go to work have lost this aspect of everyday life since the mid-1990s and hardly hope to retrieve it ever again. Keeping busy is not only about earning a living, but also about daily routines, structures of everyday life and meaning, boredom, or the possibility of taking part in a social life outside the home and neighborhood. Unemployed men nowadays either go to the coffee shops in the morning and come home for lunch and dinner, or go to some of the leftover institutions like the remaining post-MTS (machine and tractor station) company, which now employs about ten people but does not pay them. In Soviet times, at the height of its organizational capacity, it used to employ around 1,000. Other men engage in agriculture activities or trade, which helps sustain their self-esteem and, for some, provides funds for ostentatious displays of wealth in the form of new big houses, lavish wedding and circumcision ceremonies, and other kinds of conspicuous consumption.
Women, on the other hand, are no longer employed by such agricultural production institutions; the only public institution left for them is the school. Access to jobs and teaching posts has become a tough and even vicious arena of competition, intrigue, gossip, anxiety, intimidation, and hope. In the end, it is women teachers alone who have a socially legitimate reason to leave home everyday for work. Women who trade on the market do not do this everyday, especially if they are producers themselves; if they are alverci (petty traders, who buy and sell others’ agricultural or non-agricultural products), they have a different daily rhythm of everyday life, depending on where, how often, and what they trade.
Women have lost the social spaces and contexts in which they used to compete for recognition, social status, and privileges with other women and, of course, within a mixed community of women and men. All the social arenas that were available to them in the socialist past for facing and challenging a rival, for making new alliances or cultivating already existing ones through strategic gossip and lies, through evoking memory, or applying purposeful forgetfulness are restricted or disappearing after the dissolution of the former institutional frameworks and spaces for collective activity (apart from the remaining few fields that I describe below).
In a way, these men and women are similar to “the dispossessed” as described by Caroline Humphrey: “The dispossessed are people who have been deprived of property, work entitlements, but we can also understand them as people who are themselves no longer possessed. That is, they are no longer inside the quasi-feudal corporations, the collective ‘domains’, which confer a social status on their members…”^[20] The difference with Humphrey’s “dispossessed” is that people in the Azerbaijani rural context have received some property through the privatization of former state and collective agricultural lands, but nevertheless have lost their entitlements to state support and their social status. They still need to build up their personal reputation and social recognition through successful use of work and production strategies, now as individuals and/or as kin groups, and they have to develop new fields for displaying their success and for seeking recognition.
Given that the former collective domains offered the possibility of distinction (as a hero of socialist labor), but also allowed for subversion (through corruption, “illegal” trade, favoritism, etc.), what are the social settings still available to women for claiming social status and recognition today and what role does memory play in these settings?

YAS RITUALS AND THE STORY OF MILA

Below I describe funeral rituals (yas) as entailing mechanisms for gendered social strategies. Yas rituals are, of course, traditional in the broad sense of the term, but I argue that they have gained new significance in the new political economy.^[21] These rituals involve large scale and elaborate systems of food, money, and gift exchange, and contain prescribed forms of lamenting (singing and crying for women and restrained behavior for men). Recently Ingrid Pfluger-Schindlbeck has argued that the structures and textual pattern of lamenting in rural Azerbaijan reveal ties of kinship, as well as gendered notions of motherhood and sibling bonds between women.^[22] I explore here less these implicit notions of binding and kinship in funeral rituals and more the social obligations and the gendered strategies for forging these obligations on others. I take Mila’s preparation for the yas of her daughter as a case study.
Mila was born and has lived all her life in Täzäkänd. She is referred to as “Rus” (Russian) Mila, because of her ethnic Russian mother (who was nonetheless also born and has lived in the village). Her father was Azeri, and had been a sovkhoz director and later a bookkeeper in Äzizbegov. Mila, now in her early fifties, worked in the sovkhoz in her youth and, after she divorced her drunken husband in 1970, started earning her living by sewing. She gave birth to three daughters, but the youngest one died after an illness in 2000. Mila lives next to her surviving two daughters in one of the sovkhoz flats; these flats are very poorly maintained and could be considered among the worst lodgings in the village.
Mila’s reputation and status in the village is controversial. Being a divorced woman, as well as having one divorced daughter (whose children live only with their mother), she and her daughters are often subjects of gossip and targets of implicit or explicit accusations of prostitution. Yet Mila has a sharp tongue and is known for her loud, furious, and public confrontations with her challengers and enemies. She strategically and scrupulously employs her memory and knowledge of things past and present. She was, for instance, one of the few women who dared to publicly challenge the newly elected mayor of the municipality with corruption, which she claims to have taken place during the mayor’s former position as the head of the sovkhoz liquidation committee. She has also been leading a dispute against a rather wealthy farmer, to whom she sold the land share that she had received after privatization. The farmer, Tahir, did not pay in full and Mila was trying to use all her connections with the local authorities, as well as other strategies, to put pressure on him to pay. I met her regularly on the bus to the district center, where she went almost daily to try to have an audience with the governor or one of the less influential authorities dealing with privatization and land issues. She frequently used this traveling time to air to her disagreements with Tahir to her co-travelers or to accuse the mayor of trying to prevent her from defending her rights and getting her payment. Such public slander and aggressive gossip damaged Mila’s reputation: according to some village residents, Mila was a shameless woman making public accusations and visiting the authorities every day without showing the proper restrained behavior that an “honorable” woman would be expected to show. On the other hand, villagers agreed that her sharp tongue was effective and that she was effectively defending her rights through her (perhaps shameless) perseverance.
In March 2001, Mila was getting ready to hold the first anniversary of her daughter’s death (ili). Attendance at the successive funeral rituals on the third, the seventh, and the fortieth day after death (üçü, yeddisi, qırxı), and then the anniversary (ili), depends normally on the social distance from the mourning family. Usually kin, friends, and neighbors attend these, depending on whether they want to strengthen or weaken existing social ties to the family of the dead. Funeral rituals also involve payments; on the third, seventh, and fortieth day after death, when people come to the yas, they contribute a sum of money; one person at the meeting keeps a list of payers and the amount paid (siyahiyä yazılmaq). One is obliged to pay at least once and to attend at least one of the rituals. For the anniversary, the family of the dead sends out an invitation for the ritual feast, which follows the same pattern of the previous rituals: women arrive around noon for at least two hours of praying, lamenting, and crying, while men are served food, which is considered a “gift for the dead,” (ehsan) during women’s laments; women are served food after they finish crying (ağlaşmaq) and have washed their faces with rosewater (gülab).
In Mila’s case, despite the gossip about herself and her daughters, many and almost all influential villagers attended her yas rituals. I was told that many went because they were afraid of Mila’s sharp tongue, that is, that she would renounce them and employ her deliberate memory of other individuals’ past deeds in public. Many were scared of her use of everyday social interaction, where she could deliberately remember and evoke certain social relations and make accusations challenging others. For her ili ritual, she not only invited a long list of close and distant neighbors and villagers, she also used gossip and public denouncement as a strategy to collect money for the ritual feast. She went as high up as the district governor to claim this money. The costs of funeral rituals have the ultimate moral legitimacy and ideally deserve moral support from all.
The ritual, performed by women, contains structured and formalized modes of remembering and lamenting, contrasting the evocations of memory in everyday life. The female guests are encouraged and expected to remember, cry, and say laments for the dead, but also to remember their own dead by paying the qadın molla (female Muslim priest) for salat (a brief prayer citing the Prophet’s name).
The structure of this funeral ritual allows for the leveling of inequalities among the participants by establishing equal links between the dead and the living. Through the citations of the names of the dead, the guests and the immediate relatives perform the ritual collectively, whereby the past inequalities of fame and social status are temporarily neutralized. Through sharing the suffering and jointly turning private mourning into collective memory of the dead, a certain kind of effect – what Turner has described as status elevation and status reversal – is achieved. Turner states that “life crises provide rituals in and by means of which relations between structural positions and between the incumbents of such positions are restructured, often drastically.”^[23] Similarly, sharing the memory of the dead, and hence collectivizing the mourning, in this case allows the participants of yas to recast the significance of the past and the present and place their social status on equal footing with that of others: their relatives are dead, despite former differences of fame and wealth, and the living all suffer the same loss through death. The structural formulas of lamenting shape this sharing: women express their individual loss and share their suffering with ritual formulas like “öz sözünü de, can sözünü de” (say your own words, words coming from your heart). When one woman sings her lament, expressing her painful loss of a beloved kin, others respond “ay can, vay can” (oh your heart, alas your soul), underlining and taking part in the sorrow of the lamenting person.
Hence, these two aspects of the yas ritual, sharing the food and costs, and collectivizing private memories of the dead, are social mechanisms still open to women for reassessing and realigning their social relations within the new domains of their non-work social lives.

CONCLUSION

Memory of the social life of the kolkhoz and sovkhoz is framed in everyday conversations and transformed into an anonymous past of an active social life and material and intellectual abundance. This process of idealizing the past depersonalizes it as well. How certain individuals were active agents of this past is dealt with mainly by forming alliances or setting challenges in the new social relations, through, for instance, employing gossip and public slander. The contested and problematic character of the relations and events from these former lives is reactivated and remembered in the few remaining social and collective contexts, such as yas rituals. Here the formalized religious and ritual part of the ceremony acts as a leveling mechanism by establishing equality among all the dead; death equalizes all, men and women, rich and poor, powerful and powerless. On the other hand, the social and economic component of the ceremony, where paying guests are recruited through various forms of appeals and social pressure, allows women (more so than men) some space and means for recognition and for challenging the new modes of social and economic mobility.