2016 Society for Humanistic Anthropology Fiction/Creative Nonfiction Third Prize How Grades Had Been Gotten for Penguins and Money

Abstract

This is a story about penguins and passing grades, about the practices and ethics of informal exchange in 1980s Leningrad and 2010s St. Petersburg, and about things' incommensurability spurring stories. It is, specifically, about one dead penguin: a bird that was killed, found, bought, gifted, found, stolen, and gifted again. [Gifting, storytelling, planned economy, post-Socialism, materiality].