Agenda

05 Oct 2026 14:30

LAB DEA - Xenia Cherkaev: Legally Ownerless Dogs and Their Curators

Aula Geymonat, 1st floor

Lab DEA: Laboratorio demo-etno-antropologico presents

XENIA CHERKAEV
Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle

Legally Ownerless Dogs and Their Curators: Indeterminate Property as Theory of Governance

Monday, 5 October 2026, 14.30–16.30
Aula Geymonat, 1st floor
Palazzo Malcanton Marcorà

Drawing on long-term ethnography with animal control workers in midsized Russian towns, this talk examines the task of the curator [“kurator”]: a person who personally manages legally ownerless dogs. Curators might themselves physically feed and care for street-dogs, or pay an animal shelter to keep such a dog kenneled, or crowdsource funds for vet services. The relation they have to the animal is formalized, but its entitlements and obligations are nowhere defined. This indeterminacy, the talk suggests, creates a space for personal obligation and stewardship within an otherwise hi- ghly formalized culture of regulation.

Xenia Cherkaev is a Senior Researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthro- pology. She is interested in how questionably legal but ethically righteous action enlivens formalized legal systems, and in how dome- stic and synanthropic animals become the objects and subjects of law. Her book Gle- aning for Communism: The Soviet Socialist Household in Theory and Practice was pu- blished by Cornell University Press (2023). A co-edited special issue on Gleaning is for- thcoming in History and Anthropology.

Organized by

Dipartimento di Studi Umanistici; LAB DEA

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