Since the Cold War, Americans and Russians alike have cultivated a special fascination with the workings and failures of communication. Each has accused the other of media jamming and propaganda, posed competing claims to expression and creativity, and even released mirroring rumors of telepathic connections and interstellar contacts. Technologies for Intuition explores the ways in which people hone techniques to discern and describe channels and contacts, including those that seem weak and failed, or blocked and invisible. Specifically, it explores stagings of communicative "energy" through paranormal experiments in telepathy, drills to build theatrical empathy, and other phenomena. The author examines settings where media and performance professionals encounter neophytes, where insiders mix with foreigners, and where skeptics debate naifs. Moving back and forth across geopolitical borders, the book shows how the phenomena at hand have developed through historical events and relations, in conflict and in conversation. The author suggests that Cold War preoccupations and strategies have marked theoretical models of communication and mediation, even while infusing everyday, practical technologies for intuition.

Since tsarist times, Roma in Russia have been portrayed as both rebellious outlaws and free-spirited songbirds--in each case, as if isolated from society. In Soviet times, Russians continued to harbor these two, only seemingly opposed, views of "Gypsies," exalting their songs on stage but scorning them on the streets as liars and cheats. Alaina Lemon's "Between Two Fires" examines how Roma themselves have negotiated these dual images in everyday interactions and in stage performances.
Lemon's ethnographic study is based on extensive fieldwork in 1990s Russia and focuses on Moscow Romani Theater actors as well as Romani traders and metalworkers. Drawing from interviews with Roma and Russians, observations of performances, and conversations, as well as archives, literary texts, and media, Lemon analyzes the role of theatricality and theatrical tropes in Romani life and the everyday linguistics of social relations and of memory. Historically, the way Romani stage performance has been culturally framed and positioned in Russia has served to typecast Gypsies as "natural" performers, she explains. Thus, while theatrical and musical performance may at times empower Roma, more often it has reinforced and rationalized racial and social stereotypes, excluding them from many Soviet and Russian economic and political arenas. Performance, therefore, defines what it means to be Romani in Russia differently than it does elsewhere, Lemon shows. Considering formal details of language as well as broader cultural and social structures, she also discusses how racial categories relate to post-Soviet economic changes, how gender categories and Euro-Soviet notions of civility are connected, and how ontological distinctions between "stage art" and "real life" contribute to the making of social types. This complex study thus serves as a corrective to romantic views of Roma as detached from political forces.

Since the Cold War, Americans and Russians alike have cultivated a special fascination with the workings and failures of communication. Each has accused the other of media jamming and propaganda, posed competing claims to expression and creativity, and even released mirroring rumors of telepathic connections and interstellar contacts. Technologies for Intuition explores the ways in which people hone techniques to discern and describe channels and contacts, including those that seem weak and failed, or blocked and invisible. Specifically, it explores stagings of communicative "energy" through paranormal experiments in telepathy, drills to build theatrical empathy, and other phenomena. The author examines settings where media and performance professionals encounter neophytes, where insiders mix with foreigners, and where skeptics debate naifs. Moving back and forth across geopolitical borders, the book shows how the phenomena at hand have developed through historical events and relations, in conflict and in conversation. The author suggests that Cold War preoccupations and strategies have marked theoretical models of communication and mediation, even while infusing everyday, practical technologies for intuition.

Since tsarist times, Roma in Russia have been portrayed as both rebellious outlaws and free-spirited songbirds--in each case, as if isolated from society. In Soviet times, Russians continued to harbor these two, only seemingly opposed, views of "Gypsies," exalting their songs on stage but scorning them on the streets as liars and cheats. Alaina Lemon's "Between Two Fires" examines how Roma themselves have negotiated these dual images in everyday interactions and in stage performances.
Lemon's ethnographic study is based on extensive fieldwork in 1990s Russia and focuses on Moscow Romani Theater actors as well as Romani traders and metalworkers. Drawing from interviews with Roma and Russians, observations of performances, and conversations, as well as archives, literary texts, and media, Lemon analyzes the role of theatricality and theatrical tropes in Romani life and the everyday linguistics of social relations and of memory. Historically, the way Romani stage performance has been culturally framed and positioned in Russia has served to typecast Gypsies as "natural" performers, she explains. Thus, while theatrical and musical performance may at times empower Roma, more often it has reinforced and rationalized racial and social stereotypes, excluding them from many Soviet and Russian economic and political arenas. Performance, therefore, defines what it means to be Romani in Russia differently than it does elsewhere, Lemon shows. Considering formal details of language as well as broader cultural and social structures, she also discusses how racial categories relate to post-Soviet economic changes, how gender categories and Euro-Soviet notions of civility are connected, and how ontological distinctions between "stage art" and "real life" contribute to the making of social types. This complex study thus serves as a corrective to romantic views of Roma as detached from political forces.