Director of Undergraduate Studies, Anthropology; Professor, Anthropology
1085 S. University Ave., Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1107
phone: 734.764.2333
hours: by appointment (made via email)
About
Alaina Lemon is a socio-cultural, linguistic, and historical anthropologist. She tracks debates about communication and contact as they relate to material struggles over political and social change, especially as they affect people of the Romani diaspora and of Russia, where she conducted years of fieldwork.
Divisions of phatic and other communicative meta-labors, access to media infrastructures, and ideologies of rupture, animation, and affect are themes running through writing based on research in theater schools and on film sets, in Moscow's markets and on the Metro, in kitchens and in front of television sets, documenting encounters among living people and animals as well as drawing from archival and media texts.
Books:
Between Two Fires 2000
Technologies for Intuition 2017
Films:
T’an Bakhtale!: Roma in Russia 1996
Tremors (trailer) 20?? (release date tbd)
Selected articles and chapters:
2025 “Interscaling Intensity,” in Current Anthropology.
2023 Pouchkine, les Tsiganes, et la nostalgie imperiale Russe (ch 1 of Between Two Fires:), Etudes Tsiganes, nos. 72-73 (special issue on Ukraine): 158-189.
2019 “The matter of race,” In Ideologies of Race: Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union in Global Context. ed. Rainbow, McGill University Press.
2018 “Collective Enchantment: Divisions of textual labor behind the Russian stage,” for Russian Performances, ed. Boris Wolfson and Julie Cassiday, UW Press, 235-244.
2015 “MetroDogs: the Heart in the Machine,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 12:660-679.
2013 “Touching the Gap: Social Qualia and Cold War Contact, Anthropological Theory (special issue on Qualia,13(1/2):67-88.
2009 "Sympathy for the Weary State: Chronotopes, Empathies, and Moscow Others." Comparative Studies in Society and History 51/4:832-64.
2009 “The Emotional Lives of Moscow Things,” Russian History 36:1-18.
2008 “Hermeneutic Algebras: Solving for Love, Time/Space, and Value in Putin-era Personal Ads,” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 18/2: 236-267.
2004 "Dealing Emotional Blows: Realism and verbal terror at the Russian State Theatrical Academy." Language and Communication 24/4:313-337.
2002 with Kesha Fikes, “African Presence in Soviet Spaces,” Ann Rev Anthropology 31: 497-524.
2002 “Without a ‘concept’?: Race as discursive practice.” Slavic Review 61/1 (spring): 54-61.
2002 “ ‘Form’ and ‘Function’ in Soviet Stage Romani: Modeling Metapragmatics through Performance Institutions,” Language in Society, 31:29-64.
2000 “Talking Transit and Spectating Transition: The Moscow Metro,” in Altering States:Anthropology in Transition, eds. Berdahl, Bunzl, Lampland. UMichigan Press.
1998 “Your Eyes are Green Like Dollars: Counterfeit Cash, National Substance, and Currency Apartheid in 1990s’ Russia,” Cultural Anthropology 13/1: 22-55.
UM Affiliations
- Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies
- Center for World Performance Studies
- Interdepartmental Program in Anthropology and History
Awards
- 2023 Visiting Scholar at L’Ecole des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS, Paris, France)
- 2019-24 University of Michigan Office of Research grant (support to edit the documentary film Tremors in collaboration with its subjects)
- 2010-11 University of Michigan Institute for the Humanities Fellowship
- 2008 LSA/OVPR Michigan Humanities Award
- 2002-3 International Research and Exchanges Long-Term Research Fellowship
- 2001 Wayne S. Vucinich BOOK PRIZE
- 2001 Heldt Book Prize
- 1996-99 Michigan Society of Fellows
