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Центр независимых социологических исследований, Санкт-Петербург
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Центр независимых социологических исследований, Санкт-Петербург
Калифорнийский университет в Лос-Анджелесе
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© 2011 Laboratorium
Стр.1
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INTRODUCTION
5 Elena Bogdanova, Mischa Gabowitsch. The Russian
Field: Views from Abroad. Introduction
ARTICLES
24 Ivor Stodolsky. A Multi-Lectic Anatomy
of Stiob and Poshlost’: Case Studies
in the Oeuvre of Timur Novikov
51 Meri Kulmala. Russian State and Civil Society
in Interaction: An Ethnographic Approach
84 Katharina Klingseis. The Power of Dress
in Contemporary Russian Society:
On Glamour Discourse and the Everyday
Practice of Getting Dressed in Russian Cities
178 Julia Lerner. TV Therapy without Psychology:
Adapting the Self in Post-Soviet Media. Summary
181 Anika Walke. Memory, Gender, Silence:
Oral history in (Post-)Soviet Russia and the Blurry
Line Between the Public and the Private. Summary
BOOK REVIEWS
ВВЕДЕНИЕ
14 Елена Богданова, Михаил Габович. Русское поле:
взгляд из-за рубежа. Введение
ИССЛЕДОВАНИЯ
155 Ивор Стодольский. Мультилектическая анатомия
стеба и пошлости: исследование творчества
Тимура Новикова. Резюме
165 Мэри Кулмала. Взаимодействие государства
и гражданского общества в современной России:
этнографический подход. Резюме
171 Катарина Клингсайс. Власть гламура
в современном российском обществе.
Значение одежды и внешности в городской
культуре. Резюме
116 Юлия Лернер. Теле-терапия без психологии,
или Как адаптируют Self на постсоветском
телеэкране
138 Аника Вальке. Память, гендер и молчание:
устная история в (пост-)советской России
и призрачная грань между публичным
и приватным
РЕЦЕНЗИИ
184 Carole Sigman. Clubs politiques et perestroïka en Russie: subversion sans dissidence. Paris : Karthala, 2009.
Risto Alapuro
187 Mari Ristolainen. Preferred Realities: Soviet and Post-Soviet Amateur Art in Novorzhev. Helsinki:
Kikimora Publications, 2008. Ольга Ткач
191 Elisabeth Gessat-Anstett. Une Atlantide russe: Anthropologie de la mémoire en Russie post-soviétique.
Paris : La Découverte, 2007. Михаил Габович
195 Carole Ferret. Une civilisation du cheval : les usages de l’équidé de la steppe а la taïga. Paris : Belin, 2010.
Emilie Maj
198 Svetlana Stephenson. Crossing the Line: Vagrancy, Homelessness and Social Displacement in Russia.
Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006. Анастасия Милая
201 Анна Новикова. Современные телевизионные зрелища: истоки, формы и методы воздействия.
СПб.: Алетейя, 2008. Александра Яцык
204 Ekaterina Melnikova et al., eds. Granitsa i liudi: vospominaniia sovetskikh pereselentsev Priladozhskoi Karelii
i Karel'skogo Peresheika. Sankt-Peterburg: Evropeiskii universitet v Sankt-Peterburge, 2005. Anika Walke
REREADINGS
АРХЕОРЕЦЕНЗИЯ
207 Kate Brown. A Biography of No Place: From Ethnic Borderland to Soviet Heartland. Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 2004. Елена Никифорова
Harold Garfinkel (1917–2011): in memoriam
210 Андрей Корбут. Гарольд Гарфинкель: каталог одной жизни
214 Нона Шахназарян. Vis-à-vis с Гарфинкелем. Социолог очень здравого смысла
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218 ABSTRACTS
227 Guidelines for authors and reviewers
237 Authors
222 АННОТАЦИИ
230 Информация для авторов и рецензентов
240 Авторы
Стр.4
5
T
HE RUSSIAN FIELD: VIEWS
FROM ABROAD. INTRODUCTION
Elena Bogdanova, Mischa Gabowitsch
Elena Bogdanova, researcher, Center for Independent Social Research. Address for
correspondence: CISR, P.O. Box 55, 191002 Saint Petersburg, Russia. bogdanova.
nova@gmail.com.
Mischa Gabowitsch, research fellow, Einstein Forum Potsdam. Address for
correspondence: Einstein Forum, Am Neuen Markt 7, 14476 Potsdam, Germany. mischa.
gabowitsch@einsteinforum.de.
This issue of Laboratorium presents a selection of papers that grew out of a
conference titled Russian Field: Views from Abroad, which took place in Saint
Petersburg in May 2009. The idea behind the conference was to invite foreign
ethnographers who have undertaken fieldwork in Russia to present their research to
an audience of Russian colleagues—in most cases in Russian. The disciplinary
background of participants was less important than their use of ethnographic
methods in the broadest sense, and thus the conference program featured
contributions from anthropologists, sociologists, political scientists, oral historians,
and even an art historian. The one condition for participation was that the scholars
invited should have been trained outside of Russia.
The gathering, organized by the Center for Independent Social Research (CISR),
was in part modeled on a conference that had taken place in Tübingen (Germany) ten
years earlier, entitled Inspecting Germany (see Hauschild and Warneken 2002). Just
as that conference had broadened German scholars’ understanding of their home
country by confronting them with views from abroad, so the foreign researchers
gathered in Saint Petersburg would—the organizers hoped—provide their Russian
colleagues with new perspectives on aspects of life in Russia that they were taking
for granted. In the spirit of the late Harold Garfinkel, who served on Laboratorium’s
advisory board, the foreign presenters were expected to shatter Russians’ routine
perceptions of what is normal, rendering familiar practices strange and therefore
open to discussion and further study.
In one sense, the experiment was doomed from the outset.
What had made the Tübingen conference, and the resulting volume, so original
was that confronting foreign views of Germany was a relatively new challenge for
German ethnographers. While Germany’s modern self-image as a nation has been
constructed in dialogue and confrontation with some of its neighbors, especially
France, German philosophers, anthropologists, historians, and linguists had become
used since the late 18th
century to pontificating about the supposedly less advanced
© Laboratorium. 2011. Vol. 3, no. 1:5–13
Стр.5
6
INTRODUCTION
societies of Eastern Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas. That engagement proved
extremely productive for their understanding of their home country, but it remained
the Germans’ prerogative to draw the relevant conclusions. Because of Germany’s late
arrival to the scramble for maritime empire, its situation differed from the classical
colonial predicament of Britain and France that has been the main focus of
postcolonial critique. Yet the intellectual imbalance was similar: in the 19th
20th
and early
centuries, the world’s most influential academic community found itself squarely
on the exporting side of the global marketplace of meaning. Thus the reversal of
perspective attempted in Tübingen proved extremely productive: ethnographers from
the Global South, or even from industrialized countries with intellectual traditions
that are very different from Germany’s own, could provide a truly original perspective
on practices that had hardly ever been studied by outsiders, from dog-walking and
flea markets to the everyday treatment of ethnic minorities. Similar experiments
have enriched the study of other former colonial powers or countries that continue
to be intellectually and economically dominant. At their best and most constructive,
empirical studies of metropolitan societies inspired by Frantz Fanon, the Subaltern
Studies Group, or whiteness studies manage to illuminate previously unreflected
practices and contribute to these societies’ self-understanding.1
In particular,
scholars from traditionally Muslim countries such as Talal Asad (2003) have furnished
some of the most incisive analyses of exclusionary mechanisms in Western modernity
in recent years.
The Russian case is obviously different: from its inception, the academic study
of Russia was driven and organized by foreigners (Poe 2000), or at the very least in
constant dialogue with foreign interlocutors. Sustained attempts to nationalize
science and create distinctive Russian versions of disciplines such as history,
anthropology (ethnology), and sociology began in the early 20th
century and
continued throughout most of the Soviet period. Yet despite—or perhaps because
of—these attempts, Russia remains a peripheral player in the international social
sciences, and like most scholarly communities across the world, Russian social
scientists continuously import their conceptual apparatus and research questions
from the West. This process has been debated under the heading of academic
colonization (Csepeli, Örkény, and Scheppele 1996) and continues despite occasional
attempts to reverse the flow, as in Dominic Boyer’s and Alexei Yurchak’s use of the
late Soviet term stiob in their analysis of contemporary American culture (Boyer and
Yurchak 2010) or influential but infrequent borrowings from early-20th
century
Russian authors such as Lev Vygotsky or Nikolai Kondratiev. Given these differences,
was it foolish to expect anything radically new from Western ethnographers qua
foreigners? Perhaps not quite as foolish as it might appear.
1
For a recent example in which a Kenyan anthropologist provides an ethnography of his U.S.
colleagues, see Ntarangwi 2010. Russian-raised or Russian-trained researchers now participate in
this wave of reverse ethnography. Although their work so far has mostly focused on “ethnic” themes
such as Russian-speaking immigrants in Western countries (see e.g. Darieva 2004, Lakizyuk 2007,
Roberman 2007), they are also slowly beginning to venture into comparative ethnography
(e.g. Pachenkov 2008).
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ELENA BOGDANOVA, MISCHA GABOWITSCH. THE RUSSIAN FIELD: VIEWS FROM ABROAD
derived from the study of Western countries, as attested by the spread of catchwords
such as civil society, modernization, or gender2
The concepts most often imported into the Russian social sciences are those
. Yet by the 1980s, Western
ethnographers started making original contributions to the study of Russian society
by focusing on phenomena that had been overlooked both by their Russian colleagues
and by those Westerners interested mostly in political and economic macro-processes.
Caroline Humphrey, who began her fieldwork in Buryatia as early as 1966, described
everyday life at a collective farm in that region, beyond Cold War ideological clichés,
in a case study that was originally published as early as 1983; Michael Burawoy and
Kathryn Hendley (e.g. 1992) were interested in the sociology of industrial labor in
provincial Russia at a time when this was perhaps the least fashionable topic among
their Russian colleagues; and in what is perhaps the best example, Nancy Ries
uncovered some of the mechanisms underlying everyday conversations in perestroikaera
Moscow in her Russian Talk (1997). In each of these cases, and a number of others,
it was precisely their solid Western ethnographic training, coupled with a focus on
what seemed most alien and exotic to Western observers and most bland to Russians,
that allowed these authors and many others to offer unexpected observations and
influence further studies by Russian authors.3
Daniel Bertaux’s study of
intergenerational social mobility, Teodor Shanin’s peasant studies, a large Helsinkibased
research project on social change and cultural inertia in Russia, Jürgen
Feldhoff’s work on industrial sociology, and Hilary Pilkington’s research on youth
cultures are but a few examples of research projects with a strong ethnographic
component that were conceived by foreign scholars in cooperation with Russian
colleagues and later gave rise to independent studies carried out by Russian
ethnographers.4
In more recent times, the ethnographic study of post-Soviet realities, in both
Russia and the other successor republics of the USSR, has proliferated across
disciplinary boundaries. English-language anthropologists have produced a sizeable
literature on the postsocialist condition that integrates the Russian field into the
overall experience of the neoliberal wave that has transformed countries from
Mongolia to Cuba and from East Germany to Vietnam from production-oriented
planned economies to capitalist, consumption-oriented societies. Often ignored by
Anglophone authors, no less sophisticated studies of individual countries have
2 See Hann and Dunn 1996, especially the introduction and the chapter by Steven Sampson,
for a highly relevant distinction between Western realities and Western models.
3
Another work worth mentioning here is The Eye of the Whirlwind by the Norwegian social
anthropologist Finn Sivert Nielsen, a study of meaning-making, everyday life, and the weakness of
the Soviet state in early-1980s Leningrad that was completed in 1986 but only published in 2003
(in Russian) and 2006 (in English).. Presented by the author with only slight exaggeration as “the
only anthropological field study ever to be carried out in a Soviet urban context,” that book did not
prove as influential as those cited due to its late publication date, but has achieved a degree of
fame among scholars of, and in, Saint Petersburg.
4
Berto, Semionova, and Foteeeva 1996; Shanin, Nikulin, and Danilov 2002; Gronow, HaavioMannila,
Kivinen, Lonkila, Rotkirch 1997; Šeršneva and Feldhoff 1998; Pilkington 1994.
7
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8
INTRODUCTION
emerged out of long-standing traditions of Russian/Soviet area studies in France,
Finland, the Netherlands, and the German-speaking countries5
. However, ethnographic
methods are also increasingly being adopted by political scientists (e.g. AllinaPisano
2007 and, more generally, Schatz 2009), and even the literary discipline of
Slavic Studies has recently seen calls to engage with the disciplinary apparatus of
anthropology (Platt 2010).
Despite some cross-fertilization, in particular between anthropology and
ethnographic sociology, there remain significant interdisciplinary differences in
perceptions of the Russian Field and the extent of its specificity. Yet in addition to
this divide between research perspectives, there are important generational
differences in approaches to the unity of Russia as an object of study. They, too, are
highly relevant to this issue.
There is a generational evolution on perceptions of the Russian Field that mirrors
the integration of increasing numbers of Russians into global processes—or at least
international ones, since intellectual exchange between Russia and non-Western
countries remains sporadic at best. The idea to organize a conference on the Russian
Field was most enthusiastically received by older foreign colleagues—many of them
immediately began to reminisce about the peculiar conditions of doing empirical
research in Soviet Russia, which perhaps provided the most colorful, and the most
intellectual productive, experiences of their entire professional biographies. For the
generation that came of scholarly age before perestroika, in the era of systematic
surveillance, formidable travel restrictions, and interminable kitchen debates,
Russia’s alterity was, and is, a given. That is precisely what makes the Russian Field
so fascinating. Younger ethnographers have more reason to question Russia’s
specificity. For a number of reasons, however, not least the desire to focus on views
of the Russian Field by researchers active today, the conference organizers decided
not to include papers on the Soviet period.
With the easing of travel restrictions since the second half of the 1980s, scholarly
biographies have become much more diverse, and there are now many scholars who
would be hard-pressed to give a simple answer to the question of whether they are
studying the Russian Field as foreigners or locals. These include Russian-trained
sociologists or anthropologists who have achieved professional success abroad;
Russians who have undergone additional training in ethnographic methods in the
West following a Russian education in the humanities and social sciences or unrelated
fields; authors fully or partly raised in Russia but wholly educated in the West; those
whose professional biographies have oscillated between Russian and Western
institutions; those trained in Russia but frequently holding visiting fellowships in
the West; and those born and raised in Western countries, but who have perfected
their mastery of the Russian language and academic culture to a degree that makes
them fully-fledged participants in Russian scholarly debates. Incidentally, all of
5 See Rogers 2010 for a useful discussion of the English-language literature on postsocialism.
Concerning studies from non-Anglophone countries, in the context of this introduction, suffice it
to mention a few examples related to Russia: Alapuro, Liikanen, and Lonkkila 2004; Favarel-Garrigues
2007, Gdaniec 2005; Gessat-Anstett 2007; Lonkkila 2011; Visser 2010.
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ELENA BOGDANOVA, MISCHA GABOWITSCH. THE RUSSIAN FIELD: VIEWS FROM ABROAD
these types of biographies are represented among the members of Laboratorium’s
editorial and advisory boards; all of them were represented among participants in
the Russian Field conference; and in each category there are those who routinely
publish their findings in both Russian and Western languages. Not that restrictions
on doing fieldwork in Russia have disappeared entirely: one participant, Gilles FavarelGarrigues,
was unable to attend the conference because he was refused entry to
Russia due to his work on policing economic crime, and one of the authors of this
introduction was detained by the authorities near Nizhnii Novgorod the previous
year while engaged in participant observation at an anarchist tent camp. Yet such
clampdowns are a far cry from Soviet restrictive practice; in fact they are similar to
what might happen to empirical researchers in other parts of the world, including
Western Europe.
Approached thematically, there are those who go to Russia to study the unusual:
that which they do not find in their own societies, such as communal apartments or
Soldiers’ Mothers. Others focus on things that are familiar from their societies of
origin yet take on specific forms in Russia: democracy, civil society, the Self. Not
least—but by no means only—as a consequence of the above-described generational
shift, there is now less of the former and more of the latter. The Russian Field is
becoming a collection of Russian cases. As in all ethnographic research, cross-cultural
estrangement remains a useful tool; but it can no longer be assumed that the cultural
boundaries to be crossed are those between Russia and foreign national cultures. As
in any other case, the boundaries may just as well be those of age, social milieu, and
manner and degree of inclusion in processes of international mobility. Thus our
preliminary conclusion is that there is no single Russian Field today, and yet the
impulse of making the foreign gaze productive for an understanding of the familiar
remains as productive as ever. Beyond enhancing Russian researchers’ understanding
of their own country, this dialogue will also, we hope, prompt them to think more
about the larger international and theoretical relevance of their findings from Russia,
a line of thinking which has been notoriously weak in the Russian social sciences
(Gabovich 2008; Gabowitsch 2009).
This brings us to a final point worth mentioning before introducing the papers
selected for this issue: why are there no non-Western authors, no papers by scholars
of Russia from India, Japan, Nigeria, or Brazil? Certainly not for lack of trying: indeed,
the conference call was circulated as widely as possible in international networks.
Yet there was not a single non-Western application: whether this was for purely
logistical reasons, because of non-Western countries’ weak integration into research
networks, or for some other reason, we don’t know. However, integrating non-Western
views of Russia, and perhaps especially those from former Soviet republics and Soviet
satellites in the developing world, remains an important objective for internationalizing
the Russian scholarly community’s research agenda.
Each one of the five research papers featured in this issue takes in-depth
empirical study in a particular segment of the Russian Field as a point of departure
for making claims that have a larger relevance, not just for the study of Russia but to
their discipline as a whole. Ivor Stodolsky’s expositon of what he calls multi-lectic
9
Стр.9
10
INTRODUCTION
anatomy is perhaps the most ambitious in this regard. Using the work and audience
perceptions of Saint Petersburg artist Timur Novikov as a case study, Stodolsky
develops a method for modeling cultural phenomena and their impact that bears
some resemblance to classical versions of structuralism while being especially
attuned to contemporary forms of popular culture. Although his method was partly
developed in critical dialogue with anthropological theories of stiob (ironic
distancing) derived from the study of Soviet and post-Soviet culture, it is completely
independent of the Soviet context. His triad of Raw, Cooked, and Packaged cultural
artifacts is likely to see interesting applications outside the Russian Field in the
future.
Each of the other papers in this issue may be said to take a theory of supposedly
universal relevance and test its assumptions against empirical data found in the
Russian context.
Meri Kulmala, a political ethnographer, addresses widely held Western theories
of how civil society interacts with the state, in general and specifically in the Russian
context. Against the liberal and the statist model, which despite their significant
differences assume that the two entities are completely distinct and separate, she
argues that there are numerous interconnections and overlaps between the two. This
is perhaps a case where both the subjects studied—Russian Karelians concerned
with the welfare of disadvantaged groups—and the ethnographer who studies them
have profited from a transnational, in this case Finnish-Russian, perspective: both as
a practice and as a theoretical model, the close cooperation and partial identity
between civil society organizations and the state is well-known from the Scandinavian
context. By focusing on this feature and suggesting that its implications may be
relevant to Russia as a whole, Kulmala contributes to developing a more nuanced
understanding of Russian society, some of whose geographical margins may indeed
no longer be understood outside their interaction with neighboring countries.
Katharina Klingseis, who brings ethnography to cultural studies and more
specifically to the study of fashion, finds that the differences between Russian and
West European uses of dress outweigh the similarities. Russia today may be one of
the best places to study the social functions of glamour since, unlike the post-1968
West, glamorous dress and behavior remain ubiquitous here and may indeed have
become more prevalent in the post-Soviet social transformations. Russian women’s
emphasis on outward markers of femininity may look strange and uncannily conformist
to emancipated Westerners; yet the stricter formal rules that continue to govern
post-Soviet outward appearances, Klingseis’s argument seems to imply, also provide
some of the freedom inherent in all rigid yet generally accepted frameworks of
behavior that were swept away by the Western cultural revolution’s calls for unfettered
authenticity. In this case, the study of the Russian Field may serve to bring some of
the peculiarities of West European societies into sharper relief and question their
claim to universal validity or evident superiority.
Julia Lerner focuses on another feature of contemporary Western societies that
is often assumed to have at least potential universal validity: the therapeutic
emotional style that makes the Self and its problems the centerpiece of public
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