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Paper short abstract:

This paper investigates the impacts of the Soviet housing regime on contemporary constructions of national values, morality and ‘leading a good life’ in urban Azerbaijan. It argues for the crucial albeit neglected role of urban housing in understanding state politics and citizens’ everyday life.

Paper long abstract:

The aim of this paper is to demonstrate the heuristic value of the house and the relevance of anthropological theory in the context of urban post-/Soviet societies, politics and economies. By drawing on ethnographic and archival data from urban Baku in Azerbaijan, I argue that the house constitutes a central category for the analysis of transformation processes in people's everyday life and state politics. In contemporary and Soviet Azerbaijan, the house can be understood as a 'total social fact' that is of equally crucial importance for citizens' and the state's vision of a proper person and citizen. For Azerbaijanis, the house embodies 'traditional' socio-cultural values and is strongly connected to issues like marriage, family and patrilineal continuity. Furthermore, houses have regained significance for economic prosperity and objectify social status. Generally, having private residential property is seen today as a prerequisite for marriage and has become the basic resource for the reproduction of social and moral values. However, instead of a one-sided, ahistorical cultural interpretation of houses' contemporary importance, my historically-informed ethnography points to the prevalent impact of the Soviet housing regime. In that context, specific registration and mass housing policies made housing the legal basis for all kinds of citizenship and social entitlements. Housing became the main criteria for citizens being recognized as proper persons. I ask, therefore, in how far the Soviet state itself can be understood as a "government of the house" and how it influenced the role of housing in the postsocialist era.