Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

The paper examines how post-Soviet transition in Azerbaijan becomes “history in person” and "living with history" through gendered household memories, contrasting intimate recollections with contemporaneous media representations.

Paper long abstract

Following the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, Azerbaijan underwent profound social, political, and economic transformations after more than seventy years of Soviet rule. While these changes have been extensively documented in historical and political accounts, less attention has been paid to how they were lived with, remembered, and morally negotiated within intimate social worlds. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in Azerbaijan in 2025, this paper examines the post-Soviet transition through gendered memories embedded in households. Focusing on siblings and spouses who experienced late socialism and the transition of the early 1990s together, the paper asks how collective memory of this period is differently constructed by women and men, and how these gendered memories engage with, resist, or reinterpret dominant historical narratives. The ethnographic data is based on focus group interviews, in which participants reflected on themes of ethnic cohabitation, economic precarity, and national identity. These discussions were prompted by selected articles from 'Azerbaijani Woman' (1989–1993), a socio-political and literary-artistic monthly magazine published by the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Azerbaijan, allowing participants to respond to contemporaneous media discourses. By comparing first-hand memories with archival media representations, the paper explores how history becomes personal through gendered experiences of social, economic and political change, while also showing how intimate recollections complicate and unsettle official narratives of the post-Soviet transition. In doing so, the paper reflects on the epistemological possibilities of an anthropology that treats history not only as context, but as lived experience.