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Paper short abstract:

In my paper I will try to show how realizing economic projects people use the notion of ‘local administration’ that replaces an individual counterpart in economic relations. This helps avoid hierarchical personal relations and give place to possibility keeping ‘tendency to equality’ in place.

Paper long abstract:

Having accepted the idea of impossibility to find ‘natural’ social equality (Jolly 1987) anthropologists tend to find the new approach to understand equality (Robbins 1994; Walker 2020). On my field data from the Northern part of European Russia I will showcase how local people avoid relations interpersonal hierarchy using the notions ‘TOS (territorial public self-government) or ‘local administration’ and how this let keeping ‘possibilities of equality’ in interpersonal relations. I perceive ‘TOS’ as encompassing category that replaces hierarchical ‘person-person’ relations by a priori hierarchical ‘homo minor-homo major’ relations (Dumont 1980). This replacement helps not to label interpersonal relations as hierarchical and gives way to possibility to keep ‘the common’ in place. If an unemployed person within the framework of such a project receives money from another person (chair of TOS) labelling him/her as ‘TOS’ allows to return the money in forthcoming projects not this person directly but to other unemployed people. This allows slow down inequality growth and give way to the ‘tendency of equality’ (Walker 2020). At the same time in interpersonal relations the possibility to earn some money in a TOS-project is seen from the point of view of ‘gift economy’: it should be returned through the symmetrical possibility to earn something, not through the return of value of the earned money. This case allows us understand how the ‘tendency to equality’ works while social and economic inequalities are present.