Economics, Oikonomia, Domostroi: Introduction to the Anthropology of Household

Abstract

This article is an introduction to the issue’s special theme on “Economic Anthropology of Household Outside Metropolitan Areas in Contemporary Russia”, featuring contributions by Lidia Rakhmanova, Aleksandra Kasatkina, Daria Tereshina, and Polina Yarovaya. This article contributes to rethinking economic anthropology in terms of culturally specific categories under study. It does so by revisiting the role of household in the genealogy of “economy,” and specifically by looking at Russian terms domokhozaistvo and domostroi. The article shows how domokhozaistvo harks back to oikonomia as Aristotile’s “art of running household” and the new testament’s divine management of the world as god’s home. In turn, domostroi evokes the name of the 16th century Moscow courtly instructions that combine these classical Greek and Christian connotations. The article also suggests thinking through the implications of the Aristotilian categorical foundation of the “economy” in ways in which it is part to an oikonomic ethical judgement based on the state of exception. This allows us, on the one hand, to rethink economic anthropology as part of the anthropology of ethics, and, on the other, to reconceptualize its ethnographic methodologies which “case studies” frequently follow the non-typical and are not necessarily representative.