Mitja VELIKONJA, Ukrainian Vignettes Essays on a Culture at War. Translated by Sonja Benčina, Los Angeles: DoppelHouse Press, 2025

Abstract

War is never confined to the battlefield; it infiltrates the structures of meaning through which societies understand themselves. The Russian–Ukrainian war has brought unprecedented destruction, but it has also activated intense processes of cultural transformation. In such a context, analysing the everyday practices, symbolic expressions, and identity negotiations that emerge under conditions of threat becomes essential for understanding how a nation sustains its cohesion and agency. Mitja Velikonja’s Ukrainian Vignettes: Essays on a Culture at War offers a rare and insightful perspective on these processes. This hybrid work is at the intersection of visual anthropology, cultural sociology, and conflict studies. The review illuminates Velikonja’s methodological framework – a combination of “barefoot culturology” and heretical empiricism – which emphasizes first-hand observation, reflexive engagement, and semiotic interpretation of wartime daily life. The analysis foregrounds how the book conceptualizes the Russian–Ukrainian war as a total cultural condition manifesting in public space, consumer practices, academic institutions, and ideological discourses. Special attention is given to themes such as urban wartime semiotics, neoliberal transformations, the politics of memory and nationalism, and the symbolic appropriation of everyday commodities as mechanisms of resistance. This book stands as a significant and timely scholarly contribution, expanding cultural war analysis by documenting the micro-realities through which Ukrainian civic agency and collective identity are continually reasserted under violent conditions.