Paper short abstract:

Diverse ethnographic material from Chukotka, Russia demonstrates how the taste and olfaction are shaped and employed by the social institutions, from their position of power, to pursue expectations of pan-urban civility.

Paper long abstract:

This paper aims to explore sovkhoizm through sensory aesthetic three decades after the fall of the Soviet Union. It focuses on the taste and olfaction as a synergic realm. These two senses are viewed as both, the mental representations of the sensory stimuli (sensations produced by the nose and the tongue) and the metaphors of cultural values. For the paternalistic reality that employs gustatory and olfactory faculties, I will use the term panolfacton (Yamin-Pasternak et al. 2014:626, drawing on Michel Foucault's panopticon 1975); for the taste I use the term pangusticon. It can be described as the always permanent "Tongue" and "Nose" that exert cultural hegemony over aesthetic and social values and, thus, through sensory experience, assure the automatic consciousness of power. The codes such as delicious/ fragrant or, in contrast, disagreeable/stinky define different social spaces and affiliations; they change over time. Diverse ethnographic material from Chukotka, Siberia demonstrates how the social institutions, from their position of power, use the capacity of these two senses to pursue expectations of pan-urban civility. Here, especially vivid is the power divide in regard to indegeneity and the dichotomy local - incomer. The senses can help us reveal such social dynamics and put it in the context of the recent post-Soviet transformations.