EDITORS NOTES
Robert Rotenberg   DePaul University

OUT OF THE RUINS: CULTURAL NEGOTIATIONS IN THE SOVIET AFTERMATH
Cathy Wanner   Pennsylvania State University

TELEVISIONS AND COMPUTERS: GIVING NEW NAMES TO OLD TOOLS IN THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF CENTRAL KAMCHATKA
Nelson Hancock   Columbia University

DRINK AND LEISURE: THE SEMIOTIC SIGNIFICANCE OF TWO NEW ENTERPRISES ON A FORMER COLLECTIVE FARM IN ESTONIA
Sigrid Rausing   University College London

PEPSI, PENSIONERS, AND PETER THE GREAT: PERFORMING TEMPORALITY IN RUSSIA
Melissa L.Caldwell   Harvard University

THE BUKHARAN JEWS IN POST-SOVIET UZBEKISTAN: A CASE OF FRACTURED IDENTITY
Alanna E. Cooper Boston University

NEW LEGENDS IN THE REBIRTH OF KHAKASS SHAMANIC CULTURE
Kira Van Deusen

LOST LOCALE, RETURN AND HEALING IN KALMYKIA
Eva Jane Neumann Fridman   Brown University

CONCERTS AND CONSTITUTIONS:  REPERTOIRES OF UZBEK NATIONHOOD
Mary M. Doi   Bryn Mawr College

THE FESTIVAL OF THE HOLY TRINITY (TROITSA) IN RURAL RUSSIA: A CASE STUDY IN THE TOPOGRAPHY OF MEMORY
Margaret Paxson   University of Montreal

WHAT IS CULTURE? SCHEMAS AND SPECTACLES IN UZBEKISTAN
Laura L.Adams   University of California, Berkeley

POST-SOVIET ART AND CULTURE IN CENTRAL ASIA
Farhad Atai   Emam Sadeq University

SHIFTING  METROPES:   SOCIAL ORDER AND CHAOS  ON THE MOSCOW METRO
Alaina Lemon   University of Michigan

IN THE TIME OF THE LIZARD: ON INDIGENOUS PROBLEMS, POST-COLONIALISM, AND DEMOCRACY
Petra Rethmann   McMaster University

WE LOST SOME NEATNESS: MIXED IMAGERY AND RUSSIAN INCOHERENCE
Dale Pesmen

THE TRIAD OF POST-SOCIALISM, POST-COLONIALISM, AND POSTMODERNISM?: FRAGMENTARY MEMORANDA FROM SOUTHERN SIBERIA
Hibi Watanabe   The University of Tokyo

DOUBLE RUINS, DIPLOMATIC SOLUTIONS?
Thomas C. Wolfe   University of Michigan

A BALKANIST IN DAGHESTAN:  ANNOTATED NOTES FROM THE FIELD
Victor a. Friedman   University of Chicago
 

Please address all requests for membership in the East European Anthropology Group ($15/yr. for full-time faculty and  professionals, $10/yr for students and part-time faculty; European subscribers should write for special rates.), institutional subscriptions to the Review ($20), or additional copies of this special Issue ($20) to the managing editor:

The Web Page for the Anthropology of East Europe Review/East European Anthropology Group contains links to most of the previously published articles.  It can be found at this URL:
condor.depaul.edu/~rrotenbe/aeer/
Robert Rotenberg, International Studies Program, DePaul University, 2320 North Kenmore Ave, Chicago, Illinois, 60614. Phone: 312/325-7460; Fax 312/325-7452;
Email: rrotenbe@wppost.depaul.edu.

Evá Huseby-Darvas (EEAG), Behavioral Science Dept.,University of Michigan, Dearborn, MI  48128 evdarvas@umich.edu.
Nancy Ries (SOYUZ), Anthropology, Colgate University, Hamilton, NY 13346; Email: nries@mail.colgate.edu
László Kürti, Film and Book Review Editor, Department of Political Science, Eotvos Lorand University, Egyetem ter. 1-3, 1056 Budapest; Email: lkurti@helka.iif.hu

© DePaul University  1999
ISSN: 1054-4720
 
 

EDITORS NOTES:
Robert Rotenberg
DePaul University

 I am very grateful to fine job that Cathy and Nancy did in pulling together this information collection of papers on current research in Russia and the CIS.  This is a great example of why AEER is such a valuable contribution to anthropological scholarship on the Eastern experience.  I hope you enjoy it.
I will be cruising the AAA meetings again this year looking for contributions to the next year’s volume.  If anyone hears a paper they think should be brought to the attention of our group, please let me know.
The annual meeting of East European Anthropology Group will take place on Thursday at noon at the AAA meetings.  I am sorry that we lost our usual meeting time of Saturday noon.  The fault was entirely mine.  It is thanks to Eva Husby-Darvas, we have a meeting at all.
I have been the editor of AEER for five years.  I think that is enough time for one person to be able to shape the communication between fieldworkers and the scholarly community.  It is time for some one else to take over.  Please let me know if you are willing to do so.  I’ll be happy to explain how I have done it to anyone who wants to try.  It is not as difficult as one might suspect, thanks to the willingness of our colleagues to contribute their work.
This may be a good time to interest a journal publishing group in our enterprise.  Our distribution is stable.  Our contributors are numerous.  The quality is relatively high.  In fact, the only negative I have heard about the journal came from a graduate student who was frustrated that the paper quality never rose above that of conference papers.  I leave it to readership to decide whether a different editorial procress would necessarily result in better papers.
Now come the pitch to pay your dues.  DePaul University supports this journal by paying for distribution and mail costs as these arise.  We then reimburse DePaul at the end of the fiscal year for most, if not all of their outlay.  In the meantime, our dues collect interest.  To keep this system going, we need everyone to contribute their ten or fifteen dollars.  It’s a bargain at current journal rates.  But even more importantly, it is a commitment to the community of East European scholarship.  Your dues make it possible for field workers to have a place to describe their observations and analyses.  As a result, we all benefit from a healthy and open scholarly environment.
I am pleased to announce that in the past year, the Institute for Social and Cultural Anthropology at Oxford University has joined the list of institutions that archive the journal.
 
 

OUT OF THE RUINS: CULTURAL NEGOTIATIONS IN THE SOVIET AFTERMATH
Cathy Wanner
Pennsylvania State University

 The essays included in this volume represent a selection of the presentations given at the seventh Annual Symposium on Cultural Studies of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union at Columbia University on March 27 and 28, 1998.  The theme of the symposium was "Out of the Ruins:  Cultural Negotiations in the Soviet Aftermath" and featured twenty-five presentations.  The Symposium was organized by the Research Network for Post-Communist Cultural Studies (SOYUZ)
and sponsored by Columbia's Department of Anthropology, the Harriman Institute, and the Columbia Graduate Alumni Association.

The conference benefited from the participation of a number of scholars from across the globe.   Although papers ranged greatly across geographic areas (from Kamchatka to Slovakia), and disciplines (the majority of participants were from anthropology, with papers from history, political science, and sociology), in one way or another, all of the papers were based on extensive fieldwork and addressed the processes by which people are trying to reclaim and reconfigure cultural, social, political, economic, religious, artistic, and intellectual authority and identity in post-Soviet times.  While these processes are challenged and circumscribed in most cases by existing structures of power and practice, the Symposium papers depicted many instances of profound cultural and social revitalization.

Many papers took the metaphor of ruins as a starting point, addressing the various "afterimages," to use Symposium organizer David Koester's words, which the collapse of empire leaves.  Papers dealt with the complex ways in which contemporary cultural processes converse with, build upon, and take energy from the remains of the old State.  As semiotician Lily Avrutin noted, every culture need its ruins (metaphoric or physical) because these act as "doorways" into all sorts of sacred things, and offer spaces for ritual journeys into the heart of cultural meanings.  Several speakers and attendees challenged the metaphor of ruins when speaking of the former Soviet Union, critiquing the image so popular in the West of a post-socialist society in decay.  As many of these papers showed, even in situations of impoverishment and marginalization, people devise meaningful local solutions and elaborate social and symbolic systems for coping with all sorts of difficulties brought about by the end of Soviet power.

An anthropological approach is particularly valuable to address these issues.  Although anthropologists have traditionally contextualized localities by linking local happenings to forces in distant places, the globalization of social processes is deepening and expanding this ethnographic practice.   At this historic juncture, ethnographic study in formerly socialist societies takes on increased relevance because of its ability to reveal the ways in which interlocking macro-level structural forces of dependence affect fundamental shifts in patterns of  thinking and daily routines. As these essays attest, ethnographic study of cultural change in the former Soviet Union provides snapshots of history in the making, a contribution which is potentially quite useful to the work of other social scientists.

Taken as a whole, these ethnographic essays reveal not only the logistic, but also the theoretical challenges of conducting fieldwork in such a volatile context.  New categories and concepts of time, space and self are necessary to bear witness to the scope, breath, and pace of change in the former Soviet Union.   For example, a teleologicial trajectory from "developing" to "developed" is so entrenched in many theories that the idea of unidirectional change is taken for granted (i.e., development theory, modernization theory, and even to a degree political economy).  But what we see in the former "Second World," and what our authors depict, is something more akin to "undevelopment," or "de-modernization." So accepted is the assumption of progress that we cannot yet refer to its antithesis except in the hegemonic terms of development and modernization, thereby reinforcing these terms as normative.  Similarly, Western notions of unilinear quotidian time as divisible into equivalent units are also inapplicable.  Such concepts collide with the vestiges of the socialist practice of "etatization" of time, and have led to the emergence of novel cultural forms of temporality.  And yet several authors allude to the lack of vocabulary  to describe and label these hybrid concepts of time and how they frame self-conception.

Time is but one element of fundamental importance affecting perceptions of social change addressed in these essays.  New borders and venues of mobility, such as "economic tourism," migrant labor, and immigration, have further altered concepts of space, locale, and community.  The fall of the iron curtain and the erection of new borders have coincided with the rapid movement of information, capital, and commodities.  All have had enormous consequences for the dynamics structuring communities and for the identity and worldview of their members.  We can no longer assume that individuals living in close proximity to one another share a common culture or sense of solidarity.  Rather, they are just as likely to have more in common with members of a transnational community based on kinship, perceived common heritage, or class allegiance.  This distance from the immediate and closeness to the distant fuels a growing awareness of dispersion and shapes identity politics at this critical juncture.

And yet how does one characterize these new transnational communities?  The Russians living beyond Russian borders in the "near abroad" are sometimes referred to as a "diaspora." But is the situation of these Russians analogous to other diasporas?  Is "diaspora" the best means of labeling this vast group?  These essays suggest that other terms, such as "deterritorialized," "displaced persons," or "ethnic minority," are also problematic.   Rather, they argue, the Soviet penchant for bifurcating identities based on citizenship and nationality is being transformed in some areas where cultural repertoires are increasingly built upon the assumption of  biculturalness and bilingualism.  Qualitatively new types of communities are coalescing as established ones are disintegrating.

Yet, the tensions involved in crafting a nation by launching cultural projects that are blatantly nationalizing are abundantly in evidence in the newly independent states.  The marketplace of identities and the competition among groups to capture the allegiance of individuals reaching far beyond the simple rubric of nation-state is a reoccuring theme in these essays.   Other states, religious organizations, and new media-based influences have a vested interest in the outcomes of these processes of reorientation which prompts them to take an active role in shaping them.  As a Soviet identity begins to fade for some (and continues to tenaciously beckon for others), a burgeoning array of options is available.

In another vein, we see indigenous peoples, especially in Siberia, increasingly looking beyond their borders to global social movements, often those that embrace environmentalism or human rights, as a means of redefinition and empowerment.  With the option of repositioning oneself as a native people, a guardian of the global ecosystem, and accessing the resources that the global environmental movement has at its disposal, the ability of states to categorize indigeneous peoples as marginalized members of the nation-state rapidly diminishes.  It is becoming increasingly difficult for those in power to dismiss the concerns of citizens who inhabit the most remote areas because that is often where the media shines its light.

The aforementioned issues, along with many others, emerge from these essays.  The essays are organized in four sections under the rubrics of  processes of ruination and regeneration, revitalization, identity politics, and forging new frames of analysis.  In the first section, Nelson Hancock's essay looks at the factors shaping Kamchadal identities from the perspective of political economy, and specifically by analyzing the tensions "between a post-structuralist theory of shifting and unstable identity constructs and the material and rhetorical power which images of fixed identities command in the world of politics and economics."  Hancock details how tools used in subsistence fishing have been renamed after modern implements, such as the television and computer, as a commentary on ethnic revival and the so-called transition.

Sigrid Rausing conducted fieldwork at a now defunct collective farm in Estonia.  She examines the "discourse of drink" at two types of establishments, a bar called "Gorbiland" and garden pavilions, and illustrates how signs of Soviet and Western ideology, which can each be read for a depiction of modernity, commingle.

Melissa Caldwell examines new categories of temporality, of what is "new" and what is "old," as seen through patterns of consumption.  As the cultural meanings assigned to temporally distinct categories are reshuffled, she argues that food practices become both markers of time and repositories of time.  When impoverished elderly pensioners are given Pepsi for lunch at a soup kitchen in Moscow, Caldwell wonders, is this the "new generation choosing Pepsi" to which the omnipresent advertisement refers?

Under the rubric of revitalization, Alanna Cooper looks at processes of identity negotiation taking place among the Bukharan Jews in post-Soviet Uzbekistan.  Multiple transnational "imagined communities" with competing understandings of how Jewish identity is transmitted beckon potential members.  Two emissary organizations, Chabad Lubavitch and the Jewish Agency, and the Uzbek state have each articulated guidelines for determining who is Jewish, how a Jewish identity is transmitted, and the implications for citizenship and access to resources.  Yet, Cooper asserts Soviet concepts of identity and Judiasm remain tenacious and further confuse the issue.  Even for those who come to some understanding of themselves as Jewish, a second question awaits, "What kind of a Jew are you?"

Using ethnographic data, Kira van Deusen illustrates how formerly Soviet citizens with little to no connection to traditional Khakass culture are now embracing such traditional practices as musical renditions of old legends, clan rituals, and initiation rites in Khakassia.  By detailing the rebirth of Khakass shamanic culture, she goes on to suggest that this revival has also become the cornerstone of other movements addressing artistic, cultural, and ecological concerns.

Similarly, Eva Jane Neumann Fridman describes the revival of pre-Revolutionary belief systems.  She shows how shamanistic practices drawing on Buddhism serve to distinguish the Kalmyks from Russians and from other ethnic groups. Now that a Soviet identity has collapsed, she argues that such new beliefs and practices reinforce a burgeoning sense of Kalmyk identity.

Mary Doi continues the discussion of revitalization and authentication by looking at how notions of Uzbek identity are articulated in regional dance performances and in constitutional law. Providing an insightful analysis of an Independence Day concert, she concludes that both the Constitution and various art performances are necessary to establish a new social ordering as a people's trajectory to nationhood necessitates cultural underpinnings to constitutional models and laws governing citizenship.

Margaret Paxson examines the changes in the commemoration of Troitsa (Pentecost), a holiday originally associated with spring fertility rites and more recently known as a "graveyard festival" dedicated to remembering the dead.  She analyzes the forces that prompted shifts in the ways that this day has been commemorated over time and the means by which the symbols associated with Troitsa have changed to forge new meanings.  Based on fieldwork in a northern Russian village in 1995 and 1996, she argues that this holiday has served a viable function over time as the society lurched from one political regime to another because its commemorations stand "like milestones in a symbolic timescape."

Laura Adams focuses on two key trends in cultural production in Uzbekistan within a context of pronounced dependence of cultural elite on a beleaguered state engulfed in economic crisis.  She uses holiday spectacles as a lens through which to see Soviet and post-Soviet schemas of cultural change.  Adams notes the degree to which indigenous culture is being privileged over Russian or Western culture and the process by which space is created for regional or ethnic cultural groups to participate in public life.

Farhad Atai's essay focuses on the roll of state cultural policies and state funded cultural institutions, such has Houses of Culture and Writers' Associations, in the Central Asian republics after the fall of the Soviet Union. He analyzes how they are handling the transition to a market economy and assesses what this implies for future artistic and cultural development in the region.

Using the metro as a "topo-trope," Alaina Lemon analyzes the various oppositions, such as past utopia versus present chaos, past dictatorship versus present opportunity, Russia versus the West, which have been articulated in terms of the Moscow metro.  She analyzes the metro as a figurative setting for contested ideologies of a society in transition.  Ultimately, however, she argues that public transit narratives are a means of discussing who belongs in the city and in the nation.

Petra Rethman's essay addresses a crisis experienced by the Koriaks provoked by a rethinking of the ways in which time and history have been marked by them and for them.  Wrestling with inherited narratives and periodizations of Russian history, Rethmann argues that Koriaks are trying to insert themselves into this Russianized framework of historical understanding, which often ignores consideration of non-Russian histories.  She concludes that this is part of a Koriak effort to find a new vision, a new way to communicate their history and relationship to their land.

Dale Pesmen analyzes the metaphors used in everyday speech, particularly the notion of the mythical "Russian soul," to garner some coherence and meaning out of the vast turmoil of the moment.  Her fieldwork is set in Omsk, a city in Siberia facing an absence of "civilization," as her informants suggest, due to the convulsive changes brought about by the slow dismantling of Soviet practices and the often cruel newfangled substitutes for the old "system."

Hibi Watanabe also alludes to the indecipherable hodgepodge of forces and influences that have infiltrated virtually all aspects of daily life and the incomprehensible contagion of change and inertia that it has bred. If Pesmen’s informants were possessed by a sense of "mess," in Buriatia, where Watanabe conducted this research, he was forced to grapple with a "sense of end" as a dominant paradigm for understanding post-Soviet reality.  The triad of "post-ness," as he calls it, post-socialism, post-colonialism, and post-modernism, proves of limited use when attempting to analyze forces of change that are perceived as leading to "the end."  Rather, he suggests, the advent of such momentous change challenges anthropologists to undertake an anthropology of modernity by revisiting previously held assumptions of socialism, colonialism and modernity which have been thrown into question by the collapse of the Soviet Union and its aftermath.

And finally, Tom Wolfe's essay combines the theme of "ruins" in formerly Soviet society with the state of the American academy.  He analyzes the current problems plaguing the academic establishment and what this bodes for the study of cataclysmic change in other regions of the world.  By reconnecting the theme of ruins and regeneration with the ethnographic reality in which many of us live, the essays have come full circle.

Taken together, these essays suggest that unpredictable improvisation is forging new social relations "out of the ruins" of the Soviet system as individuals and states strain to grapple with the surrealism of their daily lives.  The exponential arrival of new cultural influences have effectively banished many old social constraints to the dustheap of history.   The Chinese curse, "May you live in interesting times," has rarely loomed as large.   The "interesting times" in the former Soviet Union are likely to trigger an anthropological version of the same.   As we struggle to name what we see, analyze what it means, and describe what we feel in a rapidly changing context, anthropologists engaged in ethnographic research in the "field of miracles," to use the phrase evoked by Pesmen, are likely to be as enthralled as they are challenged.

It is not too much to say that the work that these and other ethnographers are doing will finally be of great historical value.  It is at the level of day-to-day existence where the most important social transformations occur and where real change takes hold.  When we meet at small conferences such as the Soyuz Symposium or when we pool our work for publication in this special volume of The Anthropology of East Europe Review, it is with a great sense of privilege at being allowed to share some of the life experience of our friends and informants, and of being able to speak and write of the momentous transformations in their world and ultimately in our own.
.

The theme for next year’s conference focuses on changes in the periphery of the former Communist states since the fall of Communism.  This includes changes in the coposition of the periphery (geographical, social, and economic) and changes in relationships between periphery and center.  We are also looking for papers which address how disciplinary approaches to the study of the periphery have changed.  And perhaps most importantly we are looking for the point of view of those in the periphery.  Possible topics include, but are by no means limited to:

TELEVISIONS AND COMPUTERS: GIVING NEW NAMES TO OLD TOOLS IN THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF CENTRAL KAMCHATKA
Nelson Hancock
Columbia University

 At one of the farewell parties marking the end of my fieldwork, I asked my host about the salmon caviar they had set out on the table. No one was touching it.  It was early March, which means the caviar had been packed about six months earlier.  For caviar to keep that long it must be fairly heavily salted and after months in storage it gets bitter and sticky.  Nonetheless, I was a guest, this was a party, and caviar is considered festive.

Along with the caviar which no one was touching, there were salmon pies, fried salmon, smoked salmon, salt cured salmon garnished with oil and onions, various salads made from the beets, garlic and carrots which are stored in cellars, pickled tomatoes and cucumbers, salted cabbage, mashed potatoes and boiled potatoes with butter-fried onions poured over them. Later with tea there were four kinds of jam prepared from local berries. As if all of this wasn’t enough, however, in the middle of the meal, when it seemed that there was no room on the table, a large plate of fried chicken was brought in and presented as a sort of center piece. The chicken was from the US.  The American chicken legs which are sold in Russia are referred to as Bush legs, because they began to appear during President Bush’s administration, and like so many other foreign products in Russia, they provoke a combination of intrigue, contempt and envy. They are said to be unhealthy, tainted with preservatives and growth hormones; they are said to be flavorless, ersatz, unsanitary - people tell stories of Russians dying from eating these chicken legs.  At the same time, they are a common item in many households.  American hot dogs, absent at this particular meal, are spoken of in the same way.  Locally raised beef and pork costs three to five times more than the imported chicken legs, which go for about two dollars a kilo.

The family’s patriarch, a 70-yr. old Kamchadal man, didn’t touch the chicken, and even made a point of reaching for the salmon and grumbling about Bush legs. As his children and grandchildren laughed at him and quickly served up the chicken, I asked about the caviar. I had eaten with this family many times before and knew that they never served caviar, and that Pavel, the grandfather, ate little more than fish and potatoes. On nights when his wife cooked noodles with canned beef, or cabbage soup, or hot dogs, or chicken, she always prepared a portion of fish for him.  On a number of occasions she told me with a certain amused fascination that he eats fish every day. She had moved to Kamchatka forty years ago and still expressed a certain interest in the amount of fish consumed by her husband and some of his relatives. So when I asked him why no one was touching the caviar I was surprised to hear him tell me that he didn’t like caviar. ‘It’s bitter’ he said, and he told me again about how when he was a child his mother fed caviar to the chickens, "whole buckets!"  His father ground caviar into a paste and used it to seal the windows in winter.  Another woman told me that her parents had mixed it with pigment and painted thick layers onto the chimney of the stove in the family’s kitchen.  I agreed that it tasted bitter and asked about all the caviar which is sold in the local market. “Caviar! Caviar!” he started fluttering his hands in a gesture he frequently used to mock popular reverence for something. “All those people in Moscow, they don’t even know what fresh caviar tastes like. They buy this orange stuff because they want to look rich. They don’t even eat it, they just put it on the table.”

This sort of eruption around the subject of caviar is typical for older Kamchadals.  Caviar has become the main source of income in the region’s post-Soviet economy.  Even official figures for unemployment, which are underestimates, suggest that in Kamchatka about 25 percent of the adult population are now unemployed.  Many workers in Russia are technically employed, and they do work, but are not paid for months at a time; and six to ten month pay delays were typical for the people I knew there in 1997 and 1998.  One reason caviar rarely appears on peoples’ tables is that most people only eat it fresh, and thus it is only available when the salmon appear.  More importantly though, caviar is the principle source of cash income in many households. Depending on the time of year, it sells for between eight and twenty dollars a kilo, and compared with homegrown vegetables, wild berries and mushrooms, which are also sold in the market, caviar requires less work and commands much higher prices.

The caviar trade, from the fishing to much of the packaging and transport, is largely illegal, and as a foreign graduate student, it is virtually impossible to measure the yields in such an economy.  However, most people were at least willing to concur with my guess that a 'typical' caviar poacher, in the name of efficiency and convenience, throws about a ton of perfectly good salmon meat back into the river.   Strangely, while it is somehow legal to buy and sell caviar in the market, it is forbidden to sell fish, and while traveling home from the river, it is much easier to conceal a few jars of caviar than it is to conceal large sacks of fish.  Thus, the fishermen discard the meat, and with the profits they earn from the caviar they buy, among other things, frozen chicken legs.  At the dinner table this was a slightly awkward topic because Pavel’s five children, who were in their late twenties and early thirties, want to have chicken on the table.  Most of the Kamchadals of this generation try to distance themselves from the stereotype which my friend Pavel was so proud of.  They tend not to want to eat fish everyday. They want steady jobs with steady salaries and they want to buy their food in stores.  They want to buy cars and rent movies and they want to travel.  The last thing they want is to live by a subsistence economy, and this is partly due to the derogatory connotations of the word Kamchadal. For most people it’s an epithet, a code for uneducated, lazy, simple, and poor. So when Pavel began again, as he had so many times before, to complain about the poachers, about the fish they throw away, the rapidly dwindling salmon populations, and to recount the incredible bounty which he remembered from his youth, his children respectfully quieted him down, poured a round of vodka and changed the subject because they wanted to avoid yet another critique of a lifestyle they themselves had embraced even as they regarded it with a certain ambivalence and even shame.

My goal in this short paper is to introduce a set of tensions and dynamic conflicts which have been exacerbated but not necessarily created by the post-Soviet economic collapse. Kamchatka’s contemporary political economy has brought complex pressures to bear on the ways in which Kamchadal identities are articulated and determined. The remainder of this paper will offer a brief historical overview, and then concentrate on a paradoxical example in which fishing implements (which in many ways resemble the much older variants found in museums) have been specifically renamed  (one is now called a 'television' and the other a 'computer') in a move that distinguishes contemporary 'subsistence' fishing from earlier fishing practices.  Despite fundamental changes in virtually every area of their lives, fish and fishing are still sites through which Kamchadal identity and history are both produced and reflected upon.

The Kamchadals trace their ancestry to both the Itel'mens, who have inhabited the Kamchatka peninsula for over 10,000 years, and also to the Russians, Ukrainians and Americans who came to Kamchatka as traders, hunters and settlers.  The Kamchadal ethnos, as it is presently understood to be distinct from the Itel'men, can be traced to the late seventeenth century, when Vladimir Atlasov founded the peninsula's first Cossack fort, near the mouth of the Kamchatka River.  The Russians succeeded in establishing military authority over the native people in Kamchatka, but it was not until the Soviet era that Russians achieved their goal of consolidating the dispersed natives into towns and villages and instituting agriculture as opposed to fishing and hunting, as the principle lifestyle.  Today, Kamchatka and the entire Russian north is populated principally by Russians and Ukrainians who migrated to these remote frontiers in the 1960's - 80's seeking adventure and hardship pay.  In the post-Soviet era, many of those who have not moved south are turning to the land as the subsidies which supported the Soviet north have dwindled and hunting and fishing represent the most viable endeavors.

The sense of slippage and developmental failure that has accompanied this decline is part of what appears to be a pattern of Russian exploration into the northern regions.  For example, in 1830, writing about his travels in central Kamchatka, Peter Dobell observed that the Russians, "Instead of drawing the native to their mode of living and industry, neglect everything like civilization, and are themselves now quite as wild and uncouth as the Kamchadals, besides being infinitely more vicious" (Dobell:1970 (1830): 51).  Later he concluded with ominous prescience: "I am persuaded the Kamchadals, nay, even the Russians born in Kamchatka, can never be weaned from their fondness for hunting and an uncivilized life, until the country shall become well peopled, and the fish and game much scarcer than at present"(74).  A century later the journal Ekonomicheskaia Zhizn' Dal'nogo Vostoka,(1922-30) which was devoted to the economic development of the Soviet Far East, expressed a similar anxiety over and over again in articles suggesting that the Russian settlers in Kamchatka had adopted the native cultures as much as the natives had adopted Russian culture.

In 1927, in the spirit of the day, the Soviet government solved the problem neatly and definitively by distinguishing between the Itel’men, who were referred to as 'actual natives' and the Kamchadals "the population of the Kamchatka peninsula which calls itself Kamchadal, speaks Russian, and lives settled." (cited in Murashko: 1995)  The real natives were subject to a changing array of cultural improvement schemes which were relatively consistent throughout the north (Grant: 1995), and the Kamchadals lived through the Soviet period simply as locals. This categorical distinction was retracted in 1991, and since then many Kamchadals have been struggling to ensure that they receive special access to natural resources as well as other increasingly elusive benefits which theoretically are the right of Russia's Peoples of the North.

Talk of material rewards based on an elusive ethnicity have provoked a wave of claimants.  This confusion about identifying Kamchadals has reached such a peak, and there have been so many complaints of Russians and Ukrainians passing as Kamchadal in order to receive fishing limits, that there is a drive to foil imposters by registering all of the Kamchadals and entering all of their names into a computer.  One archivist told me that people have offered to pay her to falsify records and produce a forged ethnicity certificate granting them native rights. Reflecting on the stereotype of the Kamchadal as reticent and withdrawn, one man suggested to me that the result of this registration drive would be a data base of people who were surely not Kamchadal.  Supporting this ironic sentiment was a Kamchadal woman who told me that she was not going to register because she would be ashamed (stidno) to appeal to a Russian bureaucrat for proof of her own identity.

The tensions which this history brings to bear on Kamchadal lives mirror certain tensions existing in contemporary anthropological debate.  Theorists and fieldworkers have foregrounded phenomena such as 'deterritorialization', cultural hybridity and ever-shifting borders (political and cultural) in post-colonial contexts.  However, political recognition and future access to natural resources for ethnic minorities such as the Kamchadals often depend on the projection of exactly the opposite, that is images of rootedness and cultural purity. Thus, for example,  James Clifford can rhetorically, and skeptically pose the question:  “What does it mean at the end of the twentieth century, to speak of a ‘native land’?”(1988:275).   Conversely, Talal Asad has warned that one of the unintended effects of over emphasizing hybridity and the proliferation of difference at the end of the twentieth century, is to undermine the authenticity of certain marginalized and disenfranchised groups. He writes that “it is a notorious tactic of the dominating power to deny a distinct unity to populations it seeks to manipulate, to assume for itself the status of universal reason while attributing to others a singular contingency” (1990:473).  The confusion surrounding this ethnic database is just one example of what appears to be almost a global obsession with the Quixotic project of fixing ethnic and racial categories.  In my work I have tried to tack between the positions outlined by Clifford and Asad above, that is, to manage the tension between a post-structuralist theory of shifting and unstable identity constructs and the material and rhetorical power which images of fixed identities command in the world of politics and economics.

To demonstrate this, I want to turn to an example in which Kamchadals have used ironic metaphors to rename tools of a trade which has been changed almost beyond recognition, and in doing so, have, wittingly or not, evaded the trick question of cultural authenticity which more self-consciously nativist projects have fallen into.  During my fieldwork along the Kamchatka River basin in 1997-98, the most prevalent fishing implements were a certain type of net referred to as a 'television' and a gaffing hook called a 'computer'.  Both of these tools are illegal, and thus in the most straightforward manner, the fishermen have circumvented the debate over who is allowed to fish by persisting on such a vast scale that it creates an open secret.  Everyone knows that almost everyone is poaching, and hardly anyone gets caught.   In a more subtle fashion, this naming speaks to the prevailing conditions, and speaks to the changes which confront the Kamchadals and millions of other people in Russia today.

The television is easier to use than the computer and thus more common.  It consists of a three to five meter length of iron bar, a similar length of net and about five floats made from styrofoam or wood. The iron bars can easily be obtained from the numerous abandoned construction sites which litter the landscape like instant ruins. The bar lies on the bottom of the river and the net is held vertically above it by the floats.  It is important that the net is the appropriate height, because if the floats lie on the surface of the water they are easily detected by game wardens. A rope is tied to the bar and fixed to the bank, concealed under bushes or sand. The fishermen check these nets periodically, once a day, or every few hours depending on how the salmon are running.  They remove any fish and toss the television back into the water.  The fish are cleaned immediately and typically, the fisherman walks back to town with only the caviar, having thrown the carcasses back into the river.  The game wardens destroy these nets when they find them, but for the fishermen a television is easy to replace.

No one claimed to know why these nets are called televisions, and when I asked, many people seemed to have never really thought about it.  The first guess was usually based on the rectangular shape, suggesting that the name came from the physical resemblance.  Further discussion often led people to remark on the ironic ways that the name is used, as an innocuous code word for the illegal activity, a code incidentally which worked perfectly as the unemployment rate was soaring and television was a principle activity for many.

The computer is an even simpler device than the television.  It is made from a five meter wooden pole, usually an entire sapling, which has a length of rope attached to the thin end with two fist-sized treble hooks dangling at the end of the rope. The first time I saw these being used, there were five men lined up in along the river bank, roughly 15 meters apart and each was standing behind a tall blind made from piled shrubs. The hooks lie on the bottom of the river and the men stand watching for a fish to swim over, at which point they quickly jerk the hooks up and in one motion haul the fish out of the water and onto the bank. Unlike the television, which is essentially a trap, using a computer requires great concentration and quick reflexes. As with the television, the specific origin or meaning of the name was unclear, but people typically guessed that it  came from the fact that staring at the water resembled working at a computer, sitting still and watching a blue screen all day long.

The men I met on my first encounter with the computer all worked together doing plumbing and building maintenance and they joked about having gotten promotions, now they were working with computers.  This is such a pointed remark precisely because the only people who actually do get paid well and on time at the organizations where they work are administrators and accountants.  It is quite strange in fact to visit some of the ailing industries in the area, such as the collective farm, the chemical fertilizer depot, the heating plants or the timber mill, where deserted fields and machinery belie a bustling accounting department full of administrators and accountants, often sitting in front of computer screens and generally busy using the organization’s resources to operate sideline business ventures. In light of their virtual unemployment, the wry renaming of what is essentially an old fishing technique offered these men endless opportunity to vent, with fairly bitter sarcasm, their sense of disenfranchisement and their anxiety about being left behind in the transition.

The point of this paper has been to outline some of the historical and economic pressures which the Kamchadals are currently negotiating and to describe specific points where the massive shifts in global political economy are creating conflicts and change in Kamchadal lives.  It seems appropriate that the Kamchadal response comes through as an ambiguous dialogue which brings the past into sharp contact with the present.  Pavel’s story about his father caulking the windows with caviar was enough to startle his children into awkward laughter as the ambiguities of the transition were impossible to ignore.  The innovative names which this paper has described serve as scripts or codes which comment on the post-Soviet transition, and leave room for the voicing of Kamchadal experiences without being self-consciously associated with ethnic revival in the way that dance troupes, textbooks and databases are.

References

Asad, Talal
    1990   Multiculturalism and British Identity in the Wake of the Rushdie Affair.  Politics and Society 18(4):445-480.

Clifford, James
    1988   The Predicament of Culture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Dobell, Peter
    1970 (1830)   Travels in Kamchatka and Siberia.  New York: Arno Press.

Grant, Bruce
    1995   In the Soviet House of Culture. Princeton:  Princeton University Press.

Murashko, Ol’ga
    1995   Obsuzhdenie proekta zakona rossiiskoi federatsii osnovi pravovova statusa korennikh narodov severa.
             Etnograficheskoe Obozrenie: 116-121.
 
 

DRINK AND LEISURE: THE SEMIOTIC SIGNIFICANCE OF TWO NEW ENTERPRISES ON A FORMER COLLECTIVE FARM IN ESTONIA
Sigrid Rausing   University College London

Introduction: Semiology and Space

 The concept  of a science of signs is  linked to the notion of an underlying social or linguistic logic, which the signs simultaneously function to reveal and to hide. The dominant concept behind Saussure's semiology, splitting the sign (the word) into the signifier (the acoustic image) and the signified (the  connotation or denotation of the word), was that a structuralist analysis involves looking behind the obvious; not at facts but at the meaning behind facts,  or facts as 'tokens of something else' (Barthes 1993:111).   The signs are organized according to the  social order of the bourgeoisie, which is 'naturalized' with the help of myths, the constantly changing and invented narratives which function to  cover up the economic structures of power within capitalism. According to Barthes, the myths of the bourgeoisie, with their hidden powers of signification,  support the Gramscian hegemony of this particular economic and social order: a social order which is both a function of history and, as a system of power and distinction, constitutive of history (Barthes 1993: 110).

Looking at semiology in the context of the Soviet Union, and of the post-Soviet states, presents, however, a different problem from the context of the West. The particularity of state socialism was that the state created its own comprehensive language of signs, open rather than hidden significations formed by the ruling ideology. All public manifestations  referred to, and were contained by, the state ideology.   The state-produced myths, lacking any ambivalence or mystery, became themselves de-mystified, repetitive and transparent narratives of propaganda towards which some degree of allegiance was demanded.

Let us take  an  architectural example of a sign: a Soviet block of flats. The straight, modernist, lines of the building  signify progress,  the similarity between the flats equality, the reproducibility  of the block the Soviet  model way of living.   All these elements  deliberately reflected the ruling ideology: the blocks of flats were built not only to provide housing, but also to stand as  visible symbols of Soviet ideology.  Ideology, then, was not 'naturalized', in Barthes' sense of the term, where (bourgeois) ideology is hidden by constructed notions of the natural and obvious; 'the way things have always been done' (Barthes 1993:121).  In the Soviet socialist context, the signified, rather than being obscured but implied by the sign, is dominant and encompassing.  The relationship, then, between the sign and the signified  is transparent  rather than opaque. Going back to Barthes again, it is of course the process of mystification in bourgeois societies which produce the mythical narratives, and, conversely, the deliberate clarity (between sign and signified) in socialist  societies which led to the poverty of myths described above.

It is probably worth emphasizing that, in relation to the West, this constitutes a rather different relationship between the building (the sign), ideology, and the state. In  the UK, for example,  a more or less identical block of flats would signal  similar notions of modernity, but the progressive message would be  tempered  by conflicting ideologies concerned with individualism and the virtues of home ownership.  In contrast, in the Soviet context, the denoted (the form) had an open and deliberate relationship to the connoted (the ideology), forming a coherent  narrative.  To some extent, then, the sign and the signified merged,  in the sense that the ideology of the signified/ connoted determined the form of the signifier, moving away from the linguistic analogy and Saussure's and Levi-Strauss'  emphasis on the essentially arbitrary relationship between the signifier and the signified (Tilley 1990: 6).  A block of flats, then, would be built to simultaneously aesthetically  and symbolically embody ' socialism' - progress, modernity, equality - and to reify it in the form of providing standardized housing.

The current aesthetic transformation of the landscape and the cities constitutes one of the most important changes within the post-Soviet state. Below I will focus on a number of signs of the changes, beginning with a discussion of actual signs, the new street signs which point the way to shops or restaurants.  This section, based mainly on material from outside the collective farm, will be followed by a discussion of the local signs of de-collectivization. The analysis will be primarily structuralist,  focusing on the inversion of  the previous ideology symbolized by two private enterprises, located in the culture house and the old workshop respectively. The one situated in the culture house, a private bar, represents  exactly that which the cultural program was designed to oppose, encouraging a form of socializing which has no progressive intent, and which is centered primarily around drinking. The second enterprise is a small scale production of garden pavilions, objects denoting both leisure, i.e. private time, and private space, thus contradicting the ideology incorporated in both the architecture and the function of the workshop itself.  The main objective of this analysis is not primarily to reveal a binary predilection, but rather to illustrate the current transition through an analysis of the range of  the transitory values and ideologies encompassed in the various buildings in the area.

In 1993 to -94, the time of my fieldwork,  the Estonian ruling Isamaa ('Fatherland') coalition was firmly monetarist and pro-market. The ideology of the party  partially and uneasily extended to the ideology of the country, and the ideological fusion between  the new and the old was  expressed in the often stated aim to 'build capitalism' .  The free market was promoted and symbolized by a number of new signs. These tended to be part advertising and part sign-posts, showing the way to various shops, bars or little hotels. The signs were 'Western' in style; big colorful  letters, the shape sometimes pointing in the direction of the signified shop, Western, mostly Swedish, advertising posters sometimes forming part of them. The relationship, however, between the signs and the shops tended to be tenuous. Imposing and well-made signs, often part of a succession of signs leading on towards the goal, might  take you to seasoned little shops which had been there for years, and which  definitely did not  live up to the promise of the signs. For example, in Haapsalu, there where 3 big signs showing the way to an electrical shop, the last one incorporating a colorful Swedish poster promising, 'All you need for the heating systems of your home' . The shop  itself consisted of a small room ,with a few big and clumsy  obsolete-looking electrical instruments arranged on dusty shelves, a toilet bowl  on the floor,  and a small desk at the end, where a very old man sat writing.

On my field site on the collective farm there were two new signs, one indicating the new shop, and the other the private bar. Both signs functioned partly as arrows, with red text on white wood: ' Bar Gorbiland ', and 'Cafe and Farm shop' .  The shop also had some Swedish posters from the food-chain ICA in the window; representations of  obviously Western food,  communicating 'Western-ness' at a glance.  The primary function of these signs,  I would argue, was not advertising, but rather a display of the aesthetics and ideology  of the free market. Certainly in  the village, and to a lesser extent in  the nearest town, there were not enough shops for  any real competition to take place. Everybody knew where the shops were, and which shop to use for what. Since the area gets a significant number of   Swedish and Finnish visitors in the summer, it might be argued that the signs were set up for the tourists. The correlation between the signs and the shops where a Western visitor would conceivably buy anything seemed weak, however. The signs, then,  I would argue, were there not so much for the Western visitors as to proclaim a symbolic allegiance with things Western and capitalist, or in other words the ideology which is seen as replacing the previous socialist ideology.

There was still a  commercial semiotic of communism,  consisting of small and generic signs.  Unlike the Western signs,  however, the relationship between the signs and the signifieds was perfectly aligned: the old and worn signs for the shops awakened expectations which were  consistently matched by the meager reality of the shops themselves.  The formerly ubiquitous slogans, on the other hand, which were posted all over Soviet towns, were dis-aligned with the contemporary reality of the society they signified in a way which might perhaps be compared to the new signs.  Both the new signs and the communist slogans represented allegiance to  a social order and an ideological system. 'Society' and social organization was the realm of the communist signs, proclaiming the solidarity, effort and sacrifice of the present and the past which was to produce the future communist state. During the time of my fieldwork, the  free market signs, in the Estonian context, also implied a hope for the future, when the goods pictured would actually be available, and Estonia would have become a 'normal' Western country again.

The means of the realization of that future was commonly identified as the free market. Both kinds of signs have little relationship with the present, and if the communist slogans were finally associated with the obvious failures of the  system, the capitalist signs seem at least to be regarded with some ambivalence. Whilst they are sometimes regarded as decorations, as in the case  of  the ICA food posters in the local shop,  they are also associated with a global  mass culture which was commonly seen as potentially dangerous both to the national specificity of Estonia, and to the integrity of my informants.  People often, for example, talked about the 'propaganda' of advertising, and the 'unremitting' campaigns for this or that product.  In this context, the struggle to construct and maintain autonomy  within the Russian Empire and, later, the Soviet Union, has clearly had an impact on the discourses about the new order, in the sense that a similar struggle is commonly envisaged vis a vis the West.

Signs of De-collectivization

The collective farm still framed the experience of local life, even though it formally voted itself out of existence in February 1993, with only one vote against abolition. The government, although insisting that each kolkhoz  must decide by democratic vote whether or not to continue, made continuation next to impossible by declaring that any state loan, previously free,  would have a 38% interest rate. The land and buildings owned by the collective farm were at the time of my fieldwork owned by a transitory commission organizing privatization.  De-collectivization, then,  was an on-going process.  Primarily, it had led to a loss of work and security: about a third of the people were unemployed, or worked a few days here and there. People still talked in terms of the collective, however. 'Official' projects, like the restoration of the old manor-house, are associated with 'the collective', and many of the unemployed people worked on and off on the restoration  projects.

Gorbiland: Drink and Culture

There were, however, a number of signs of de-collectivization. The empty flag holders on every building signaled the end of the Soviet Union, whilst the few satellite dishes constituted signs of the new order . The notion of a coherent power structure, or, in Caroline Humphrey' s words, 'domain', with certain defined functions and responsibilities, was breaking down (Humphrey 1993:4). Since the collective farm was defunct, the uncertainty of small local  share companies,  many of them going bankrupt within a few months of starting to operate, was taking over. Of these share companies, there were two in particular which were interesting, standing in clear opposition to the ideology encompassed in the buildings in which they were housed. One of them was the bar, ironically named ' Gorbiland', carved out of the basement of the culture house, with the entry, appropriately, at the back .  You entered through a half broken door,  and went down a damp concrete stair case. The deterioration of the entrance was in contrast to the bar itself: a small cozy room, with 6 tables, sofas and chairs, and a bar at the end. Several different kinds of beer, vodka, Gin (including an Estonian brand of blue Gin named 'Dzinn'), and liqueurs were available, as well as Western soft drinks in cans,  ice-cream, Western chocolate bars, packets of Western coffee, cigarettes, Soviet and Western. The whole place, however, was non-smoking, due to the asthmatic tendencies of the owner. That meant that there was a steady traffic of mostly men coming in and out of the bar, smoking on the stair-case outside, which deterred the more respectable smokers from coming to the bar at all.

One of the most important dividing lines in the community concerned the question of respectability, a question which was most immediately, but not exclusively, defined with reference to alcohol consumption.  This had both a Soviet and a particularly Estonian aspect, which combined to form a ubiquitous everyday discourse of drink. The Soviet state, after its bout of Brezhnevian decadence and corruption, tried to control widespread alcohol abuse by  regulating both public and individual consumption. One of the effects of excessive alcohol consumption in relation to the state was that the drinking worker simultaneously  placed him or herself  outside the domain of the workplace, and enacted a scenario which was anti-ideological: irresponsible, individualistic and nihilistic, the drinkers created an anarchic and transitory  resistance.

Significantly, people who in the West would receive a response limited to somewhere between compassion and contempt were regarded with a certain amount of gleeful tolerance on the collective farm. Regarded as more eccentric than  sick, and certainly as people with some wit or even wisdom,  their position is  gradually changing.  The older alcoholics are now invariably unemployed, and informants commented on their increasing alienation from the new society.  The alienation  is emphasized by the fact that whereas before they were supported by the collective farm, which itself was partially subsidized by the state, they are now barely supported by the new village council, whose available means is limited to the income from the few tax-payers in the area.  It also, however, has to do with a shift in culture: like Michel de Certeau's description of the C16th Everyman, trapped in a common, and humorous, fate, the  collective farm alcoholics  were often described as essentially funny (de Certeau 1988:1-2). Their funniness, however, was dependent on their fate, i.e. their relationship to the state, which simultaneously supported and berated them: the change of state, and the new emphasis on the concept  of individual responsibility and initiative, diminished their humorous potential.

The particularly  Estonian aspect to the question of alcohol can in some ways be defined as a matter of thrift, comparable to the thrift in Simon Schama's  description of the Dutch culture of the Golden Age. The most important factor of that age was arguably the wealth of the republic, the conspicuous abundance which was unsettling both to themselves and to the rest of Europe (Schama 1987: 259). For the Dutch, anti-patrician values merged with anxieties about excessive wealth, to create a moral opposition between permissible and reprehensible foods (the healthy and patriotic cheese and herring, as opposed to partridges, capons, sugar and spices), and strong notions of the dangers of idleness, both to the nation and to the moral state of the individual (164-5, 215). Strict cleanliness in the home was mandatory, and expressive of the battle against the sins of sloth and indolence (388). Old anxieties around wealth-creation in Europe caused the kind of virulent accusations which Schama sees as  analogous to later outbreaks of anti-Semitism (267). The Dutch were condemned as phlegmatic and sluggish, blunt and coarse, 'impervious to rank and honor', described as, 'The buttocks of the world, full of veins and blood but no bones in it. (265)' They were regarded, and regarded themselves, as conspicuously different, as the Nederkinder: the children of a new covenant.

Unlike Holland, Estonia, of course, does not suffer from an 'embarrassment of riches.' The wealth which so disconcertingly made the Dutch a race apart is conspicuously absent in the former Soviet state. The 'apartness'  of the Estonians, however, which through various attributes distinguishes the Estonians  primarily from the Russians, but also from other Soviet peoples,  plays a significant part in the perceptions of national identity. Thrift and honesty, for example,  are regarded as national virtues, whereas the Russians are routinely accused of embodying the corresponding vices, of living for the day with no thought for the morrow, and of getting away with what they can. Russian-ness, then, is identified with a sense of low and anarchic living, and of having no sense of thrift as a virtue. This, in turn, merges with poverty, as was the case with the family I was living with. The husband was an alcoholic, who got by on a string of temporary jobs on the farms, often paid in kind, and the wife was a caretaker at the school.

The husband would often talk about the drunk and bad-smelling Russians, who eat garlic and drink vodka every day, the vodka and the garlic simultaneously denoting 'Russian-ness' and a lack of respectability. Then we actually had some pickled cucumbers with garlic, and I praised them, saying how much I loved garlic. My landlord was visibly happy about this, and told his wife, who hadn't been there - significantly this was during one of her week-ends away when standards used to slip considerably. The cooking then started to improve, in my eyes, with the occasional addition of garlic. It was clear, in other words, that they liked garlic, but assumed I wouldn't, because its status bridges the Russian and the low class, as opposed to the world of the respectable. There is a sense, then, in which class notions, articulated in terms of the respectable or the not respectable, seep into the notions about 'Russian-ness' and 'Estonian-ness', where the 'low class' and the 'Russian' become interchangeable, so that Estonians tend to be equally reluctant to display 'Russian' habits because they seem 'low class' as they are to display 'low class' habits because they seem 'Russian'.¹

The 'apartness' of the Estonians needs to be contextualized in terms of the Soviet nationalities policies as well as the perhaps more ostensibly relevant history of pre-Soviet nationalism. The nationalities policy of the Soviet Union, which  was designed to undermine political  resistance defined as  'bourgeois nationalism',  in fact placed a great deal of emphasis on nationality and national characteristics.  Thrift and order, as exemplified above, were important means of distinctions for the Estonians. In addition, the Russians were often described as sentimental, flattering, collectively minded, cruel, and despotic. Combining the first two with the lack of thrift, they were also, more positively,  generally seen as more hospitable than the reserved Estonians.  The Latvians, similarly,  tended to be regarded as  sentimental and emotionally excessive, expressed through the joke about the Estonians' definition of hell: a group of Latvians sitting around the campfire singing with their arms around each other.  Irony and reserve were seen as Estonian traits, as well as a certain stubborn quiet, reflected, since the land was regarded as constitutive of the people and their characteristics,  in the landscape of low-lying stony fields.

The bar was mainly, but not exclusively, a male zone. Once a week they showed Western videos such as Rambo, or the Teenage Ninja Turtles,  cheaply dubbed into Russian or Estonian, with one voice performing all the parts. Usually they were watched in silence by  clusters of men and boys. The effect was to emphasize the experience of the opposition between the bar and the culture house in the form of a homology: the videos seemed to be to the cultural program of the former collective farm what the bar itself was to the culture house. If the videos  and the bar represented  a fragment of a larger commercial culture which was both tantalizingly  out of reach and, at times, perceived as a threat and an imposition,  then the obsolete cultural program and the draughty dilapidated culture house ultimately represented both the ideology of Soviet socialism, with its particular attitude to rural life, and the failures of that ideology. More specifically, however, the effect was one of absolute opposites: the culture of alcohol vs. the attempts to disseminate 'high culture', the American videos vs. the former weekly  film shows of Russian and European films.  It's as if the  kernel of  daily life which constituted 'culture', in the sense of high culture,  has shrunk and turned around: the vast hall vs. the small bar, the huge film screen vs. the TV screen of the video; 'high culture'  vs. 'popular culture'.

Garden Pavilions: Leisure and Private Space

The second set of opposites  I will focus on here is the workshop buildings and a new  one-man enterprise which rented space  in one of the old workshops. The workshops were used mainly for the maintenance of the collective farm machinery,  vast machines, many of which were now rusting in an enclosure to the back. They are large buildings with broken windows and dirty floors, but like everything else in the community, the value of the floor space was carefully calculated by the commission which rented it out. The firm in question manufactured small wooden pavilions, primarily intended for export to Sweden and Finland.  As  in the case of the bar and the culture house, the new firm is situated within a space which embodies a diametrically opposite ideology to the one expressed in the material culture of pavilions. If drinking constitutes the rougher side of the decadence which  Soviet socialism opposed, pavilions  represented the more genteel aspect of it.  Nabokov, for example, born to a liberal aristocratic family in pre-Revolutionary Russia, writes the following about pavilions in his autobiography:

In order to reconstruct the summer of 1914, when the numb fury of verse-making first came over me, all I really need is to visualize a certain pavilion.'...'I dream of my pavilion at least twice a year. As a rule, it appears in my dreams quite independently of their subject matter, which, of course, may be anything, from abduction to zoolatry. It hangs around, so to speak, with the unobtrusiveness of an artist's signature. I find it clinging to a corner of the dream canvas or cunningly worked into some ornamental part of the picture (Nabokov 1989: 214).

Similarly, the concept of pavilions may have been clinging on to some part of the post-war Soviet culture in Estonia,   providing, perhaps, an unconscious symbol for the project of restoring the pre-war independent republic. Furthermore, the specific connotations of pavilions,  structures of elegance, leisure and indulgence, copied from the grounds of the aristocracy to the gardens of the bourgeoisie, represent a structural opposite to the collective farm agricultural machinery, whose industrial and functional appearance constitutes a representation of modernity frequently used in pictorial representations of the Soviet nation.  The notion of an individual enterprise also, of course,  forms a contrast to the ideological hegemony of the collectives, forming a powerful opposition.  A second homology, then, emerges from the comparison between the production of pavilions and the new private bar,  whereby alcohol was perceived of as detrimental to culture in a similar way as the values incorporated in pavilions; leisure and decadence, were in opposition to the promotion of work as  ideology.

Conclusion

It is of course not surprising that a systemic shift of the kind occurring in the former Soviet Union produces a  number of signs which refer to the contrast between the Soviet and the Western systems, and which therefore lend themselves to a structuralist analysis.  To refer back to the theme of the  symposium at which this paper was presented,  the semiotic significance of the signs described above have indeed come out of the ruins of the former political system.  The point I would like to emphasize, therefore,  is that despite the fact that their absence or presence are no longer dangerous,  these signs  are still  framed within a context of the importance of signs as badges of allegiance; or in other words  an essentially Soviet context.  The contemporary western style streetsigns, then,  are in a sense as political as the old slogans,  and as political as their absence after the Russian revolution, described as followed by  Pasternak, in Doctor Zhivago:

Living in Moscow, Yury had forgotten how many shop signs there still were in other towns and how much of the facades they covered. Some of those he was seeing now were so large that he could read the easily from where he stood, and they came down so low over the slanting windows of the sagging, one-storied buildings that the crooked little houses were almost hidden by them, like the faces of village children in their fathers' peaked cap (Pasternak 1958: 223).

A few pages on, the theme of advertising continues:

There were round red oil tanks on the skyline, and large advertisements on wooden hoardings. One of them caught Yury's eye; it was repeated twice and read: Moreau & Vetchinkin. Seed drills. Threshing machines.  'That was a good firm. Their agricultural machinery was first-rate” (Pasternak 1958:235).

All those signs, of course, were soon to be replaced by Soviet slogans, occupying similarly dominating positions.  The re-instatement of the signs of 'capitalism', therefore, are arguably as political as the Soviet slogans, entangled in the history of the  revolution and of socialism. The significance of a small bar named 'Gorbiland' , and of a one-man enterprise producing garden pavilions, which at first sight from a western point of view seem arbitrary,  is in fact part of the cultural logic of that history.  In time, however, the signs may lose their power to evoke certain ideologies, and may be as taken for granted as they are in the west. Going back to Barthes,  that will be a process of 'naturalization', or of  shielding ideological significance, but it will also be a process of assimilating the signs and the signifieds, adding to the signified ideology of the free market real goods and real services generally obtainable in the west.

References

Barthes, R.
    1993   Mythologies London: Vintage.

de Certeau, M.
    1988   (1984) The Practice of Everyday Life Berkeley, LA, London: University of California Press.

Humphrey, C.
    1993   Lecture presented at the SAE section, AAA  Meetings, Washington D.C.

Nabokov, V
    1989   (1947) Speak, Memory  New York: Vintage Books.

Radzinsky, E.
    1996   Stalin: the First In-Depth Biography Based on Explosive New Documents from Russia's Secret Archives
               London: Hodder and Stoughton.

Schama, S.
    1987   The Embarrassment of Riches  London: William Collins.

Tilley, C.
    1990   Reading Material Culture Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

Textnotes

1. There was also of course a high culture of Russia, which, despite Soviet efforts to the contrary, did not much interest my informants. Urban informants sometimes acknowledged it in the statement that the Russians were 'more intelligent' than the Estonians, who were 'blue-eyed'; 'naive', signifying the implicit association between goodness and innocence. The juxtaposition between the 'blue-eyed' Estonians and the 'cunning' Russians is reminiscent of the Russian wave of anti-Semitism in 1953, in connection with Stalin's invention of the 'doctors' plot', the idea that Jewish doctors, aided by so-called 'Zionists and American Imperialists', were engaged in a plot against the Soviet state. On the 8th of February that year, Pravda published an article entitled 'Simpletons and Scoundrels', listing Jewish names of 'swindlers, saboteurs and scoundrels' whom the 'simpletons', Russians who were no longer sufficiently vigilant, had had dealings with. The article legitimated, and un-leashed, a wave of anti-Semitic violence throughout the country, and may have been part of the preparation for a Soviet holocaust against the Jews, prevented by the death of Stalin in the same year (Radzinsky 1996:542). A quorum of ten are required for public prayer.
 
 

PEPSI, PENSIONERS, AND PETER THE GREAT: PERFORMING TEMPORALITY IN RUSSIA
Melissa L. Caldwell
Harvard University

  In a downtown Moscow metro station, there stands a fast food kiosk where hungry commuters can stop for a quick hot dog or taco. A sign hangs overhead, announcing that "A new generation chooses Pepsi" (Novoe pokolenie vybiraet Pepsi). One morning in early December 1997, after passing through this station, I arrived at my fieldsite, a university stolovaia (cafeteria) that has been converted into a soup kitchen for several hours a day, only to discover that someone from Pepsi-Co, Inc. had made a donation to the soup kitchen and that we, the volunteers, were distributing bottles of Pepsi and Diet Pepsi to the pensioners, refugees, and other low-income Muscovites whom we serve. Although some recipients recognized the Pepsi logo, most asked us to explain what was in the bottles: "Is it water?" "Is it vodka?" Others asked us if the liquid was for drinking or for eating. Still others asked us about the rest of the labeling on the bottles: information and rules to win tickets to an upcoming Spice Girls concert. Were these individuals the members of the "new generation" that Pepsi marketers envisioned?

A few weeks later, in downtown Moscow, between the Central Telegraph Office and the elegant, new Manezh Mall built for the 850th celebration of Moscow, I passed an elderly woman begging on the sidewalk. With a small icon set up in front of her, the woman was kneeling on a flattened cardboard box sporting McDonald's logos. More recently, an advertisement for Pizza Hut appeared on American television. Moving from images of St. Basil's and other historical scenes from Moscow, the commercial featured former leader Mikhail Gorbachev and his granddaughter sitting at a table in one of the Moscow Pizza Huts. After acknowledging Gorbachev, three customers compete to bestow the proper recognition on him. A young man declares that they should recognize Gorbachev for putting Russians on the edge with his reforms. An older man replies that they should recognize Gorbachev for putting them on the edge of chaos. Finally, an older woman interjects that they should recognize Gorbachev for putting them on the edge---of their pizzas. Gorbachev, meanwhile, sits and graciously accepts
the attention.

Poor pensioners drinking bottles of Pepsi and contemplating their chances to see the Spice Girls, an icon on the golden arches, and the virtues of capitalism extolled by mention of a communist leader: although jarring, each of these vignettes provides an example of the multiplicity of temporalities currently in existence in Russia. Metaphors of old and new, past and present, tradition and modernity, and continuity and change circulate throughout the food practices of individuals, as well as through the food-related discourses of the general media. Mary Douglas has argued that "if food is treated as a code, the messages it encodes will be found in the pattern of social relations being expressed.... Food categories therefore encode social events" (Douglas 1975:249). Thus, the ways in which Muscovite producers and consumers use food practices provide a lens for exploring temporal patterns of Russian social life.

Consumption theorists have described many ways in which individuals organize and perform their social lives through food practices. Social categories and values may be expressed through the social codes and meanings inherent in food-related activities (Douglas 1975; Lévi-Strauss 1974; Tambiah 1969), or through the performance of these activities (e.g., Bourdieu 1984; Douglas 1994[1966]; Dumont 1980; Goody 1982; Harris 1985; Ohnuki-Tierney 1993; Watson 1987). The parameters that define and limit these varied practices, codes, and meanings are understood to be predetermined by the larger cultural systems (Bourdieu 1974, 1984, 1990, 1991). In most cases, this process of predetermination occurs through the sedimentation of a social group's past experiences into the cultural system (e.g., Bourdieu 1974; Campbell 1992; Clarke and Koptev 1992; Douglas 1994[1966]; Douglas and Isherwood 1979; Lotman 1990; McCracken 1988). Precedence, history, and memory are the standards guiding social meaning (Appaduari 1988; Handler 1988; Handler and Linnekin 1984). Not all consumption theories, however, proceed from the past or the previous; Wilk (1990, 1994), for example, has described scenarios in which individuals are concerned with future social meanings through consumption performances.

The underlying thread in these analyses is the understanding that social meanings are bound up with temporal systems. The negotiations of individuals through consumption practices reveal larger cultural systems of time. In this article I will look at current food-related consumption practices in Moscow to consider how Russians discuss and experience time in their everyday lives. In particular, I will explore questions of how individuals create, organize, and experience classifications of temporality.

Categories of Temporality

One of the most evident aspects of temporality in Moscow emerges in local categorizations of the progression of time, particularly in relationship to issues of historicity. Herzfeld (1991), Handler (1988), Handler and Linnekin (1984), and Lass (1994) have all described cultural systems in which events understood as being of "the past" reappear in moments in "the present." In such cases as the retelling or physical commemoration of the past in the present, different temporal moments may be understood as coexisting.  This coexistence occurs frequently throughout Moscow. Striking examples come from every kassa (cash register) between November 1997 and March 1998. On January 1, 1998, the ruble was devalued so that 10,000 rubles became 10 rubles. During the last  few weeks of November and December 1997, most kassas sported signs announcing that registers were calculating prices in the "old" currency system. In many shops, prices were listed at both the old and the new rates. With the devaluation on January 1, all prices were supposed to be computed in the new system. The change was not without complications, however. In the days immediately preceding and following the new year, there were numerous warnings and rumors about Moscow consumers who were charged the wrong (i.e., exorbitant) prices for their New Year's meals because banks and credit card companies could not accommodate the change. In one McDonald's restaurant on New Year's Day, crew members calculated amounts with pen and paper and made change by hand because the cash registers could not handle the new system. In addition, as more new notes gradually enter circulation, individuals are increasingly negotiating the old and new currencies, albeit with some confusion. On one occasion a store clerk and I helped each other figure out the equivalency between old notes and new coins. Moreover, during the last three months, signs in kassas have changed from announcements that prices were computed in the "old" system, to announcements that prices were computed in the "new" system, to announcements that prices were computed in both the "old" and the "new" system. Thus, simply to buy consumer goods such as food, Muscovites continually move back and forth between temporal categories such as the past and the present, the previous and the current.

This movement between the past and the present also becomes evident in the names and images associated with consumer products. A new brand of vodka features the likenesses of old rulers such as Catherine the Great, while a billboard for Peter the First cigarettes sports a picture of the cigarette carton, complete with a double-headed eagle, and the large caption "NEW" (Novye).  In a marketing flyer distributed by the company Sovprom, the line of vodka known as "Staraia" is described in this way: "By creating the label 'Staraia,' the company 'Sovprom' has made a step toward the practical rebirth of the best qualities of old Russia. All those things that seem to be irrevocably left in the past, all those things that can render more healthy and improve contemporary life--return with the label 'Staraia'" (author's translation of Sovprom marketing brochure, 1997). The image suggested by this description is that by drinking this vodka, consumers can once again enjoy all the benefits of the past. The marketing brochure for Cristall distillery takes a slightly different, but related, angle: by introducing their products with a brief 1,000 year history of the production of alcoholic drinks in Russia, Cristall marketers suggest that the past provides legitimacy and authenticity in the present (Cristall marketing brochure, 1997). Meanwhile, a marketing brochure from the Dovgan' food company focuses on training and attracting children and young adults as the consumers and directors of the future (Dovgan' marketing brochure, 1997).

In these examples, cultural images of the past, present, and future exist simultaneously. Consumers can make choices according to the past, partake of the past, or even be the future. Temporal categories are no longer distinct; instead they are ever-present as consumers invoke them in contemporary activities and then move between them.  A Russian couple in their late twenties confirmed this idea when they explained that Russian-style beverages are gaining in popularity. The couple argued that in previous times, when Russian beverages were prevalent and Pepsi-Cola and Coca-Cola were new, people started drinking Coke and Pepsi because these beverages were "new" and stopped drinking Russian beverages because they were "old." Gradually the traditional beverages disappeared from the market. Now they are returning and, according to these two individuals, Russians favor them over American colas because the "old" tastes are now "new," and what had been the "new" tastes are now "old."

Finally, at a recent Maslenitsa festival at Victory Park in Moscow, a Russian vendor urged a customer to try the authentic Russian blinis for sale at her table. While the customer watched, the woman poured batter into her electric griddle and cooked the blinis until they were perfectly round and golden brown. At the same festival, a woman dressed in a traditional costume--complete with a string of cookies around her neck--posed for a photograph by asking a young Russian girl--dressed in t-shirt and jeans and holding a cup of tea in a disposable cup--to stand with her. The woman claimed that this would provide a degree of Russian authenticity. At first, the actions of these two women seem at odds with the images of authentic tradition that they are trying to convey. How can real blinis come from electric griddles? What is the significance of a modern Russian girl for the image of a traditional Russian woman? Yet it is the very coexistence of these temporal categories that provides circumstances in which images of the past can emerge and coexist with images of the present. Events, experiences, and meanings that are culturally assigned to temporally distinct categories become the material for performances of the present.

The Management of Time

Different conceptions of temporality also emerge when individuals talk about and demonstrate how they organize time to plan their eating practices. A geologist at the Russian Academy of Sciences told me that one of the most important food changes that has occurred during the last 10 years is the appearance of instant foods. Before instant foods, much of the planning for fieldwork in remote areas revolved not around the research project but around the acquisition, transportation, and storage of food for several months; much of the fieldwork time was then devoted to long hours of preparing the foods. Instant, portable, and available foods have transformed the ways in which researchers conduct and experience fieldwork. A young wife told me that because she works and has little time to cook, she relies on many instant foods. She and her husband even invested in a microwave so that she could heat up kasha more quickly.

This theme of speed also appears in larger images. Two of the most common advertisements on television are for instant soups: in the Knorr cup-of-soup commercials, busy office workers, laborers, mothers, and students take a quick snack break to the jingle of "An instant and it's ready" (Raz i gotova); while the Maggi soup mom can, in a matter of moments, prepare a nutritious and hardy meal for her children, an elegant and romantic dinner for her husband, or an impressive culinary masterpiece for unexpected dinner guests (in this commercial, her husband's coworker or boss). For these individuals, plans do not have to be made in advance; meals can be much more immediate. Thus, time is seen as a commodity, to be used either sparingly or rapidly; and food is the means by which time
is marked.

But not all Muscovites mark time so rapidly or instantaneously through food--as examples taken from the soup kitchen illustrate. In the soup kitchen system, the recipients of the meals--primarily Muscovite pensioners--are registered for one of three soup kitchens that are funded, organized, and directed by the Moscow Protestant Chaplaincy, an international, Protestant religious community. These recipients, known as "guests" within the system, are eligible to eat at their respective soup kitchens five times a week, Monday through Friday, except for when the soup kitchens are closed for holidays. This organizational structure provides almost daily opportunities for guests to eat; in fact, for many guests, a meal at the soup kitchen is the only meal of the day. At the particular soup kitchen with which I have been working, guests work with this daily schedule and carefully contemplate and strategize individual, personal temporal systems by which they eat their meals. Although the meals are called "dinners," they are available only between 9:30 am and 10:50 am, and between 11:30 am and 12 noon. Thus many guests eat their main meal at times that may be more culturally appropriate for breakfast. Guests also have the option of taking their meals home with them. By removing meals from the soup kitchen and eating them at a different time, or even by stretching the food into several meals, these guests actively construct temporal meal schedules that may be different from those followed by their fellow guests and those proposed by the directors of the soup kitchen.

In addition, the temporal order for serving the guests varies according to whether they are eating "now" or "later." Guests who eat in the soup kitchen are usually served, as volunteers see them, before those guests who take their food away. Frequently guests sit with friends and combine their meal tickets, which they present in exchange for a meal, so that an entire table is served at once, thereby creating a social group whose members share a temporality distinct from that of others. Meanwhile, guests who take their food away line up at a table with their containers and are helped on an as-available basis by the volunteers. Whereas guests who eat at the tables are generally less concerned with strict sequential order, those guests who stand in line generally guard the order. On one occasion, a new guest who did not know the system accidentally broke into the head of the line. Whereas the volunteer who helped him was excused, he was scolded severely by the people behind him in line. Other guests, however, rework the temporal system in different ways. Some individuals take meals at the table, thus ensuring that they will be served first, and then transfer the food to their own containers to take home for later, thereby speeding up the first part of the process and delaying the second part. Others delay the entire process by standing in line with their containers and then carrying their containers to the tables and taking an additional meal there.

Guests must also plan both for the present and for the future when they come to the soup kitchen. On a daily basis they must bring both a card that entitles them to a meal, and a spoon with which they eat their meal. Although most guests remember these items, some guests have difficulty; for them, the process of planning for the present from one day to the next becomes problematic. Once guests have presented their meal cards, they must tell the person distributing meal tickets the number of days for which they want tickets. They are entitled to receive tickets for the current day and for the next day, but not for any days more distant in the future and not for days already past. Guests who take their food away can minimize the time they spend collecting food by taking away meals for two days at a time. Although guests who eat in can also minimize this temporal investment, they must be more concerned with planning when they will be hungry. If they eat tomorrow's meal today, what will they eat tomorrow? Even guests who eat only one day at a time demonstrate their concern with the future. A number of guests ask on an almost daily basis "Will [the cafeteria] be working tomorrow" (Zavtra rabotaet?).

Sometimes, however, guests have some food resources of their own and collect extra tickets that they hoard for a future time when the soup kitchen is serving an especially good meal or is giving out an extra food item, such as the oranges that are distributed every Friday (see Verdery 1996 for discussion of hoarding practices and temporality in Romania). The soup kitchen director tries to prevent this hoarding for a distant future time by changing the colors of the tickets every day. This introduces an element of chance into the temporal schema of the soup kitchen: although guests collect tickets for the future, they are never certain when they will be able to use the tickets they have saved. Their future, then, is unknown and beyond their direct control.

Despite the careful efforts of guests to plan for the present and the future, these plans are occasionally thwarted by realities. On one occasion, guests were given a special treat: a plate of sliced carrots in addition to the normal meal. Most guests who take their food away bring only enough containers for the number of meal items and so were short a container for the extra dish. Although some guests combined the carrots with another dish, others refused to mix foods and either left the carrots behind or ate the carrots in the soup kitchen, thereby changing their meal patterns. And, finally, those guests who collect meal tickets for future possibilities run the risk of being discovered by the director and having all their tickets confiscated, thus losing what they had banked for the future.

The volunteers and soup kitchen workers also affect the temporal system of the soup kitchen. The American and European volunteers speed up the movement of time by rushing briskly around the cafeteria, delivering meals, clearing tables, and sometimes generating laughs and criticism among the Russian guests and workers for their speed. By speeding, these volunteers increase the amount of time available for guests to eat. In contrast, the director of the soup kitchen, an African man who supervises the guests, the volunteers, and the cafeteria workers, frequently allows long lines to develop at the table where he dispenses meal tickets. When an American volunteer chided the man for being slow, he responded that he did not need to hurry because Russians love to wait in lines. Thus, this individual decreases the duration of available time by playing with stereotypes about Russisan temporality and withholding available time from the guests. This withholding of time from the guests also emerges in the activities of the cafeteria workers. One of the Russian workers has on several occasions bustled through the cafeteria, sternly demanding that guests hurry up and finish their meals, while another worker tells the volunteers that it the time is over and herds them out the door--while guests are still eating. Yet another worker tries to close the soup kitchen a few minutes earlier than the day before.

The temporal patterns by which the guests eat and receive their food are also distinct from the temporal patterns by which the volunteers, the workers, and the students who use the cafeteria eat their meals. Between 9:30 and 10:50 am, the cafeteria is open only for the guests. Between 10:50 and 11:30, the cafeteria is open only for the students and faculty of the university in which the cafeteria is housed. Guests who arrive during this time are not allowed to enter the cafeteria and must sit on chairs in the hallways. Between 11:30 and noon, guests, students, and faculty eat together in the cafeteria--but from different menus, trays, and dishes, and usually at different tables. Precisely at noon--or earlier if the woman who tries to close early is successful--all of the food for the guests is put away and the meal tickets are locked up. In theory, guests who arrive late are not allowed to be fed. Nevertheless, on the rare occasions when guests do arrive after the noon deadline, they usually still receive meals. In most cases, the guest apologizes profusely to the soup kitchen director and blames public transport; in turn, the director gives a stern warning that the guest should plan better next time and then gives the guest the necessary tickets, admonishing that this is the last time that an exception will be made. Thus, through this exchange about the organization of time--being late and planning for the future--the director and the guest negotiate and alter the temporal boundaries
for eating.

Only after the guests have eaten and left do the volunteers eat. The volunteers are primarily American and European expatriates and African students and refugees, and although all are eligible to eat lunch--from the students’ menu, not from the soup kitchen menu--at the invitation of the soup kitchen program, it is usually only the African volunteers who choose to eat lunch. Their meals, then, are temporally distinct from the meals of both the guests and the other volunteers. This temporal feature of the meals is even more significant because many of the African volunteers have insufficient resources in Moscow and depend on the meals at the soup kitchen. Thus, they too must plan when they will be hungry. Although several African volunteers serve every day, others only serve when they are in need or when there might be special food items (fruit or candy) left over. The soup kitchen director further influences these temporal patterns of hunger by planning daily schedules for the volunteers and determining which individuals can come--and eat--on which days. There is some flexibility in the system and occasionally hungry individuals who do not help serve are allowed to eat. On several occasions, however, these individuals arrived before the noon break and were required by the soup kitchen director to wait in the hallway until the guests' lunch period was completed and the volunteers' lunch period had begun.

Finally, the temporal systems of the larger administrative levels move at different tempos as well. The soup kitchen coordinators and cafeteria administrators set menus, determine amounts, and budget finances according to a two-week period, so that the meal schedules of the guests are determined in advance. In practice, however, these schedules change on a daily basis according to product availability and the management of financial resources. Similarly, the fundraising committee members who procure the monetary and other donations to run the soup kitchen programs oversee the system on an even more expansive time frame. Because these individuals are concerned with receiving enough money to support the soup kitchens several months into the future, their activities in the present are directed at managing hunger in the distant future. In addition, these volunteers influence the passage of calendrical time by determining which holidays will be marked with food. At one meeting, committee members decided which dates during the spring and early summer would be marked as special food days in the soup kitchen. Although the decisions of these individuals usually coincide with larger Russian conceptions about which days are holidays--such as Easter or May Day--the committee members have on occasion created a holiday calendar that differs from the locally constituted calendar. In 1998, the holiday for Men's Day was not marked with food--much to the surprise of many guests who asked about food gifts for the male guests. Women's Day, however, was marked with the distribution of candy bars for both the women and the men of the soup kitchen--thus prompting surprise from many of the male guests. In addition, the soup kitchen was closed for one day to celebrate Women's Day. On Men's Day, the soup kitchen did not close for the holiday. When guests asked why the soup kitchen was open for Men's Day, the soup kitchen coordinator responded that it was simply an ordinary day.

Conclusion

Even the recipients of these food services are moving at different speeds and according to different schedules, so that different tempos and different conceptions about the relationships among the past, the present, and the future are simultaneous within the same community. In the soup kitchen, as in the other situations that I have outlined, food practices are both the markers of time and the repositories of time. In their everyday food-related activities individuals spend time, organize time, and collect time. Yet, as these examples demonstrate, temporal practices can vary widely among individuals. If these practices are understood as different forms of cultural capital, temporalities can be seen as indicative of different social systems. Nevertheless, in contrast to the paradigms outlined by theorists who have described social systems (e.g., Bourdieu 1984; Clarke and Koptev 1992; McCracken 1988), these differences can not be decisively correlated with social differences among Muscovites. Despite negotiations among individuals from different temporal systems over such instances as the definition of days for celebration or the definition of appropriate processes of eating or cooking, there are difficulties with assigning these differences to completely separate social realms. A number of informants have explained that differences among individuals are simply the cultural fodder for the emergence of a singular and indisputable Russianness: "We act as we have always done."

Food practices provide a window for exploring how Muscovites understand and construct a larger cultural system that accommodates the performance of difference or variation. I would suggest that this supports a rethinking of Douglas's thesis that it is the categories themselves that are significant for social relations. Instead, social relations must be understood through critical examinations of both the processes that guide, regulate, and legitimize these categories and the ways that individuals negotiate, enforce, and perpetuate these processes. The boundaries for categories are far more fluid than Douglas, Bourdieu, and others envisioned. Moreover, critical examinations of the processes underlying this food-time-identity paradigm present means to evaluate and understand the ways in which Muscovites experience and negotiate the larger sociopolitical changes that characterize current realities in Russia--such as the juxtaposition of American fast food culture with poor, elderly Russians. In particular, a perspective of Russian temporality as multiple and simultaneous permits further understandings and analyses that can accommodate the very diffuse and seemingly unrelated activities of Russians today.

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THE BUKHARAN JEWS IN POST-SOVIET UZBEKISTAN: A CASE OF FRACTURED IDENTITY
Alanna E. Cooper
Boston University

  As the Soviet Union was forming, the culturally disparate groups of Jews who were scattered across the vast territory which was to become the USSR posed a dilemma for the policy planners.  The ultimate goal in dealing with the Jews was “the extinction of the Jews and Judaism as an independent entity” (Orbach 1982:45).  Given that goal, the question was how to achieve it.  Should the Jews be treated as a singular group and be ascribed nationality status with the aim of bringing them - as national group - into rapprochement and fusion with the other Soviet peoples?  Or should the Jews be denied a collective identity with the claim that they did not constitute a nation, that they would never reach the developmental stage of nationhood, and that immediate steps should therefore be taken to assimilate them into the surrounding peoples? (Pinkus 1984:11-15).

The first approach, ascribing national status to the Jews, would run the risk of tapping into Zionist national aspirations which ran totally contrary to the Soviets’ revolutionary plan.  The second approach, denying the Jews national status, would run a different risk.  By conferring upon the Jews the strange status of non-category - which, paradoxically, is itself a category - in effect, the Jews would become  marginalized from all other Soviet national groups.

Marginalization would lead to anti-Semitism which would, in turn, spark exactly that same group consciousness and identification that the Soviets were seeking to avoid (Blank 1995:52-53).  The dilemma was resolved by conferring nationality status on the Jews and later, by granting them an autonomous oblast in Birobijan.   Both were meager concessions.

Although Jews were given group status and a territory, the importance of their collective identity was de-emphasized.   The Soviets provided them with little state funding for Jewish schools and Yiddish newspapers and journals.  Their possibilities for Jewish national expression through literature, theater and art were limited.  In addition to the fact that their national expression was restricted, Jewish religious expression was also severely restricted as part of the Soviets’ general anti-religious policies.

These policies which attenuated expressions of Jewish identity were furthered by macro socioeconomic forces.  Industrialization and urbanization drew the Jews out of their small town shtetlach (neighborhoods), where all aspects of life were structured around traditional Judaism.   New contact with the non-Jewish world led to an increase in intermarriage, a decrease in the use of Yiddish, and rising interest in Russian arts and literature (Gitelman 1988:163-169).

Despite the Jews’ acculturation to Russian culture and to Soviet ideals, they were unable to escape their Jewish identity.  Their nationality, inscribed on their official documents as “Jewish,” was a stigma activated each time they applied for housing, for employment, or for admission to university.   The Jews of the Soviet Union were therefore said to have reached a state of “acculturation without assimilation” (Gitelman 1985:85).   Culturally, they had achieved the Soviet ideals, yet their Jewish identity remained inescapable.

The Bukharan Jews

Before 1991, approximately 45,000 Bukharan Jews lived in the former Soviet Union.  The overwhelming majority of them lived in the Central Asian republics of Uzbekistan and Tajikistan.  Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, they have immigrated en masse  primarily to Israel and the United States.  Today only about 3,000 Bukharan Jews remain in Uzbekistan (primarily in Tashkent, Samarkand and Bukhara) and a few hundred in Tajikistan.

How and when these Jews of Central Asia began to be referred to as Bukharan Jews is debated.  Historian Mikhael Zand explains that at the end of the 19th century, most of the Jews living in Central Asia were clustered within the confines of the Bukharan emirate. Accordingly, Zand reasons, Russian, British and Indian travelers who came to the region during this period began using the term “Bukharan” to refer to the local Jews (Zand 1988:49).

The Bukharan Jews themselves offer a different reason. They explain that many generations ago, the ruler of Bukhara invited Jews from Persia to join his court.  In one version of the story , the ruler invited the Jews to weave golden carpets for his palace.  In another, he invited ten Jews to Bukhara, each an expert in a different craft.  In still another version, the ruler invited a Jewish doctor from Persia to his palace in Bukhara to treat his ailing wife.  Upon curing his wife, the ruler requested that the doctor remain in Bukhara.  The doctor agreed only on condition that ten Jewish families¹ be allowed to join him.   Although the details of these stories differ, the basic theme is consistent.  The ancestors of the Bukharan Jews arrived from Persia many generations ago.  They settled in Bukhara city which became the center of Jewish life in Central Asia, hence they acquired the name “Bukharan Jews.”  Only later did they spread out to other cities such as Samarkand and Tashkent.  Historians offer no corroboration for this folk-legend.  However, the historical record, like the legend, confirms that the Bukharan Jews are a branch of Persian Jewry.

Today the term “Bukharan Jew” is used in Central Asia as a means to differentiate those who call themselves Bukharan Jews from and those who make up the other segment of the Jewish population in Central Asia, the Ashkenazi Jews.  The Ashkenazi Jews are the newcomers to the region.  The majority of them arrived in Central Asia during World War II, when they fled or were evacuated from their homes in Eastern European USSR.

Like the general Jewish population in the Soviet Union, the nationality of the Bukharan Jews was recorded as “Jew” on their official identification documents. For the Bukharan Jews, however, the meaning of this identity was different than it was for the majority of the Soviet Jews.

Because the forces of industrialization and urbanization were less pronounced in Central Asia than in Eastern European USSR, the majority of the Bukharan Jews in Uzbekistan and Tajikistan did not leave their Jewish mahallas (neighborhoods).  Their extended family structure remained in tact and they continued to live patrilocally in multi-unit homes built around courtyards.  The Bukharan Jews, therefore, had a much weaker tendency toward Russification than did the general Jewish population in the Soviet Union.  Furthermore, they had a much weaker tendency toward Russification than did the Ashkenazi Jews in Central Asia, whose family and community structure had been totally disrupted during the war.

In 1979, 89.8% of the Ashkenazi Jews in Samarkand declared Russian to be their mother tongue, whereas only 17.3% of the Bukharan Jews in Samarkand declared Russian to be their mother tongue. (Zubin 1988: 177) Contrasting rates of intermarriage are also striking. In 1962, an estimated 33.7% of the Ashkenazi Jews in Tashkent married non-Jews, whereas an estimated 7.7% of the Bukharan Jews in Tashkent married non-Jews (Altshuler 1970:31).

In addition to the fact that macro socioeconomic forces in Central Asia differed from those in Eastern European USSR, Soviet policies in the two regions differed as well.  Anti-religious campaigns were not as harshly executed in Central Asia, which meant that throughout most of the Soviet era, the Bukharan Jews were able to continue observing religious traditions.  They ate only meat which was ritually slaughtered and continued to observe key Jewish holidays.  Additionally, religion continued to structure their rites of passage.  For example, religious circumcision for Jewish males was almost universally practiced.  Regarding weddings, accommodations were made to the Soviet ideals, but religion continued to play a most prominent role in marriage ceremonies. On the day that a couple registered their marriage at the ZAGS according to state law, they would don western style wedding garb, a white gown for the bride and a suit and tie for the groom.  After the state ceremony, family and friends would join in a lavish celebration replete with food, drink, music and dancing.  However, when the party was over, the bride and groom would part.  She, still dressed in her wedding gown, would return to her parents’ home and the groom to his.  Although the couple had been married by state law, their family and friends would not recognize their marriage until a few days later when a rabbi would conduct the religious wedding ceremony.

The Bukharan Jews, like the Jews in the rest of the Soviet Union, had “Jew” inscribed as their nationality on their internal passports.  However, for the Bukharan Jews, this was not perceived as a “negative nationality,” that is, a status with restrictions and no content. (Pinkus 1984:16).  Rather, their Soviet assigned nationality was laden with religious content.  An unintended consequence of Soviet policy was that for the Bukharan Jews’ the national identity which the Soviets had ascribed to them became linked to and intertwined with their religious identity.

To illustrate the powerful overlap between these two aspects of identity, I present an excerpt from a taped conversation that I had last year in Samarkand with Yura, a 38 year old Bukharan Jew.  He spoke of the difference between his concept of Jewish identity and my concept of Jewish identity (as he understands it):

According to your faith, you are Jewish.   But according to your passport,  you are a citizen of America.  So when you are at home, you are a Jew.  But when you go on the street you don’t think that you’re a Jew anymore.  You think that you are just a citizen of America.  Among us it’s not like that.  Among us, at home you are a Jew and on the street you are a Jew. In every situation you are a Jew.  With you it’s not like that.  For you, if you leave your house, if you are sitting in a bus or on a plane, you are not sitting there like a Jew, you are sitting  there like a citizen of America.  Among us, it is the opposite.  Among us, everywhere you are a Jew.  You fly like a Jew, you sit like a Jew, wherever you go, you are a Jew.

Yura explains that there is no overlap between my state-assigned identity (American) and my identity derived from belonging to a religious community (Jewish).  For him, on the other hand, these two aspects of identity overlap.  The aspect of his Jewish identity which is assigned to him by state authorities is intertwined with the aspect of his Jewish identity which is derived from his belonging to a religious community.   Note, too, that Yura differentiates between nationality and citizenship.  When discussing my identity, he emphasizes my status as an American citizen.  When discussing his own identity, he places no emphasis on his own status as a citizen of Uzbekistan.   Although his passport does indicate that he is a citizen of Uzbekistan, it is the national identity inscribed on the document which is most salient.   Yura’s civil identity is singular and coherent.  He is a Jew, as defined by both his religious community and his state.

Multiple Perspectives On The Transmission Of Jewish Identity

Independent Uzbekistan inherited the Soviet policy of listing citizens’ nationality on official documents.  Accordingly, the nationality of Uzbekistan’s Jewish citizens continues to be inscribed as “Jew” on their passports and birth-certificates.  Uzbek notions of how national identity is transmitted, therefore, continue to have an impact on local perceptions of how Jewish identity is transmitted.

As a result of major changes that accompanied independence, Bukharan Jews have also been exposed to new ways of thinking about how Jewish identity is transmitted. In 1991, a number of Jewish organizations in Israel and in the United States began sending emissaries to the former Soviet Union.  The emissaries come to Uzbekistan with tremendous financial resources with which they fund schools, informal educational programs, youth clubs, and special activities that are all used as forums to convey ideological agendas.  Stipends are often provided to participants to encourage enrollment and attendance.  In contrast, the dwindling number of Bukharan Jews in Uzbekistan who have not emigrated have lost most of their local leadership and do not have the resources to finance their own activities.  The emissaries have therefore been able to exert great influence on locals’ perceptions of Judaism and Jewishness.

Chabad Lubavitch and the Jewish Agency are two emissary organizations which have a powerful presence in contemporary Uzbekistan.  They approach the issue of Jewish descent differently than the Uzbek state.  Furthermore, the two organizations differ from one another both in their agendas and in their understanding of how Jewish identity is transmitted.

Policy and practice in Uzbekistan:

During the Soviet era, when a child was born to parents of the same nationality, the child was registered in census documents as being the same nationality as his parents.  In cases where the parents were of different nationalities, the census administrator was instructed to give preference to the nationality of the child’s mother (Altshuler 1987:16).

In Central Asia, where the majority of the population is Muslim, the nationality rule differed.  In these regions, in situations of mixed marriages, the locals preferred to register according to the father’s nationality.  This makes sense for a variety of reasons.  Patrilineal transmission of national identity was linked to the notion that Islam is transmitted patrilineally.  It was also linked to patrilocal residence patterns.  When a woman married, she would leave her family’s courtyard and go to live in her husband’s courtyard with her husband’s parents and with her husband’s brothers, their wives, and children.  Her children, therefore, would grow up in their father’s house,  governed by the rules of their father’s kin.  Children in a sense belonged to their father’s kinship unit rather than their mother’s.  So it is no surprise that the Central Asians came to understand national identity as being transmitted through the father’s line rather than the mother’s.

Although the Central Asian understanding of nationality transmission ran counter to the Russian understanding of nationality as primarily matrilineally transmitted, the authorities were flexible in accommodating local notions of descent (Altshuler 1987:245).  Calculating nationality through the father was not instituted as official policy in Central Asia, however it did become the prevailing norm.  The Bukharan Jews also accepted the notion that nationality is transmitted patrilineally.   Hence, children’s Jewishness was understood to be derived from their father’s Jewish identity.

Jewish Emissary Organizations in Uzbekistan:

In recent years, the Jewish Agency, an Israel based organization, established four mission offices in the former Soviet Union.  In 1997,  a total of 350 emissaries were sent from Israel to work in these offices.  The Central Asian mission has several branch offices in Uzbekistan, in addition to a branch office in each of the other Central Asian states.  The branch offices offer Hebrew classes, as well as Israeli folk-dance and Jewish music classes to the local population.  Additionally, they run summer camps, Jewish identity seminars, and special events for Jewish holidays.

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