When Russia’s first branch of McDonald’s opened in Moscow 23 years ago, the event was celebrated by many as a step in the direction of the free world of consumption. Others, however, immediately saw the arrival of the hamburger empire as a sign of the country’s westernization. Yet there is nothing new about cultural transfer: At the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Dittmar Schorkowitz studies how this process unfolded during the encounters of Eurasian populations in the Middle Ages.
International Max Planck Research School for the Anthropology, Archaeology and History of Eurasia (ANARCHIE