SUMMARY:

In his comments on Katherine Verdery’s research agenda setting address, Mikhail Krom sympathizes with the call to refresh the analytical paradigms and instruments of the disciplines that are concerned with the study of the postcommunist region. He further poses the question of a possible interdisciplinary dialogue between the historical science and anthropology, the latter being the most innovative field with respect to challenging master-narratives and bringing in the cultural and human dimension into social knowledge. However, Krom observes that the reception of anthropological innovations has already been underway in the historical profession of the postcommunist field. He analyzes studies done in the framework of historical anthropology to explicate the ongoing interdisciplinary dialogue between anthropologists and historians. The author draws on his own research of the borderland interaction between Muscovy and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries to substantiate the thesis that the anthropological logic of understanding and reconstructing semantic patterns of behavior is most conducive to studies of imperial spaces and their borderlands. Krom concludes his reflections with the hypothesis that the future advancement of scholarship will be achieved through the relativization of disciplinary boundaries rather than projection of one disciplinary method on the range of social sciences and the humanities.