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.

The goal of the Jewish Agency is to strengthen Jewish identity among all those who have the legal right to immigrate to Israel,  and to encourage those individuals to resettle in Israel.  According to the Jewish Agency,  those who have the right to immigrate to Israel are delineated by Israel’s immigration law, called the “Law of Return.” It states:

1. Every Jew has the right of repatriation in the State of Israel.  Those who are considered Jewish are: those who are born to a Jewish mother or those who have converted to Judaism.

2. Anyone who has a Jewish parent or a Jewish grandparent is also included in the Law of Return.

According to this law, only matrilineal descent is relevant in determining Jewishness.  However, in the clause that specifies who is included in the Law of Return, both matrilineal and patrilineal descent are relevant.  Accordingly, an individual who has a Jewish father and a non-Jewish mother is not considered Jewish by the Israeli State.  However, that individual is allowed full rights of citizenship in Israel.  Furthermore, despite the fact that she is defined as a non-Jew by the law itself, she is encouraged to “repatriate,” or “return home.”  This paradox opens up the meaning of  “Jewish identity” and “Jewish homeland” to ambiguous interpretation.

Chabad Lubavitch, another emissary organization with a strong presence in Uzbekistan, is a Jewish ultra-Orthodox Hassidic sect.  One of the group’s distinguishing features is their missionary work.² Chabad Lubavitchers are encouraged to venture out across the globe from their centers in New York and Israel to remote Jewish communities with weak religious infrastructures.  Their goal is to help Jews maintain their religious practices and to bring them closer to Orthodox Judaism.

The six to eight Chabad emissaries currently in Uzbekistan fund and run religious schools that are attended by approximately 450 students.³  Now that the locally trained ritual slaughterers have all immigrated from Samarkand and Tashkent, it is the Chabad emissaries who insure that kosher meat is available in these cities.  Chabad also assists in running and maintaining the cities’ local synagogues.  Additionally, Chabad funds and organizes community-wide celebrations on Jewish holidays such as Passover and Purim.⁴

Chabad’s understanding of who is a Jew structures their disbursement of resources and their interactions with the locals.  For example, when individuals request admittance into a Chabad adult education course, (for which students are paid a significant stipend), their requests are denied if Chabad does not consider them to be Jewish.  As part of the Orthodox movement, Chabad recognizes only matrilineal transmission of Jewish identity. Conversions to Judaism are recognized only if they are performed according to Orthodox Jewish law.⁵

In sum,  the Bukharan Jews are now exposed to three different lenses through which their Jewishness is defined and transmitted:

•  Legal national identity as defined by the Uzbek state which is transmitted patrilineally
•  Legal identity as defined by the State of Israel which is transmitted matrilineally (but with much ambiguity)
•  Religious identity as defined by Orthodox Jewish law which is transmitted matrilineally

Lena was born to Russian non-Jewish parents.  She and Arkady, a Bukharan Jew,  studied together at the university in Samarkand and fell in love. Lena and Arkady were married in a Jewish wedding ceremony  in the early 1970s.⁷  When their son Sasha was born, he was circumcised according to Jewish ritual.  Until recently, no one had ever called into question Sasha’s Jewishness, which was understood to have been inherited from his father.

Last year, Sasha and Diana decided to marry.  Diana is a Bukharan Jew who was born in Samarkand, as were her parents and grandparents.  Rabbi Shaulov, a Chabad rabbi in Samarkand,⁸ said that he would not perform the wedding ceremony for Sasha and Diana because Sasha is not Jewish. Rabbi Shaulov told Sasha that if he wanted to marry Diana in a Jewish ceremony, he would have to convert to Judaism.  Sasha was told that to convert,  among other things, he would have to show strict adherence to Jewish tradition and law.⁹ All involved were upset by Rabbi Shaulov’s decisions and they decided to send Sasha’s paternal grandfather to speak to him.  He asked Rabbi Shaulov: “Why are you doing this?  Sasha likes the Jewish laws, he observes the Sabbath.  But that does not mean that he has to go to the synagogue to pray every day. Afterall, there are so many people who are Jews who do not even know anything about being Jewish.”

“That does not concern me,” Rabbi Shaulov answered.  “That does not matter to me.  They are Jews, and Sasha is not a Jew.”

Rabbi Shaulov claims that Sasha is not a Jew despite the fact that Sasha is considered (by himself, his family, the state authorities, and perhaps even by Rabbi Shaulov) to be a Jew according to the state definition.  Rabbi Shaulov also claims that Sasha, who was not born a Jew according to religious definition, can become a Jew by following all Jewish traditions and practices.  In other words, Sasha can create his own Jewish identity through action.  This notion constitutes a radical departure from Soviet nationality policy which hinged identity on blood ties and had no relation to belief or practice.

Fractured Jewish Identity

During the Soviet era, the structure of Jewish identity as understood by the Bukharan Jews was in accordance with local understandings.  Due to severely restricted ties with Jews abroad, conflicting notions that could have been drawn from the wider Jewish world were sealed out.  Since the dissolution of the USSR and the arrival of the emissaries, the definition of Jewishness has taken on new forms.  Multiple authorities have opened possibilities that did not exist before so that it is no longer clear who is a Jew or what it means to be a Jew.

To examine how the Bukharan Jews negotiate this issue, I return to my discussion with Yura.  As part of a survey, I presented informants with fabricated scenarios and then asked them questions about the stories.  One such scenario was as follows:

Larissa’s parents are both Jewish by nationality. However, they  did not observe any of the Jewish holidays or traditions at home, and they never told Larissa that she was Jewish.  When Larissa was 16 years old, she found out that her parents were Jewish.  Like her parents, she was not interested in religion and did not observe any of the Jewish traditions or holidays.  When Larissa was 21 she married Yevgeny.  Now they have two children.  Yevgeny is Russian by nationality.  Larissa and Yevgeny do not observe any of the Jewish religious traditions or holidays.

After presenting this text, I asked, “Are Larissa’s children Jewish?”  In answer to this question, Yura replied:

Larissa’s children are not Jews.  They were raised without the holidays,  the practices, and the traditions and the Bible is very foreign to them. They will be considered Jews only if they follow the Bible one hundred percent.  But by nationality they are Jews.   Among us, among Jews, nationality goes by the mother.

This complex comment deserves careful analysis.  Yura says that Larissa’s children are not Jews because the “Bible is foreign to them” and they do not know or practice the Jewish traditions.  However, he also says that they are Jews because their mother is Jewish.

What are the implications of the fact that Yura understands Larissa’s children to be both Jews and not Jews at the same time?  This question becomes even more difficult when Yura’s last statement is analyzed, “Among us, among Jews, nationality goes by the mother.”  The term “nationality” as used in the former Soviet Union was generally reserved for state assigned national identity which, in Central Asia, was understood to be transmitted patrilineally.  Yura, however, now perceives of another type of Jewish nationality, one defined by his own religious community (matrilineally).  Had he continued his statement, he might have said, “Larissa’s children are Jews by our nationality, but by their nationality they are not Jews.”

The statement “they are Jews and they are not Jews” is a logical contradiction.  Yet Yura does not perceive the contradiction because Jewishness for him has unraveled.  The tight knot between religious and national identity has been undone.  Accordingly, Yura can no longer respond to the question “Are you Jewish or not?” with a simple “yes” or “no.”  Now his answer is, “It depends on who you ask.”

In light of Yura’s new fractured sense of Jewish identity, we return to his statement:

Among us, at home you are a Jew and on the street you are a Jew.  In every situation you are a Jew.

In this statement Yura refers to Jewish identity as it existed before the Soviet Union dissolved and before the emissaries began to arrive. That was before the unraveling, when the Jews still saw their religious identity and national identity as intertwined.  In those days, being a Jew “at home” and “on the street” meant that being defined a Jew by internal authorities (the local religious community) was the same as being defined a Jew by external authorities (the state).  It meant that primordial Jewish identity, which was inscribed on the body,¹⁰ was the same as imposed Jewish identity, which was inscribed on the passport.

Interestingly, Yura’s statement “at home you are a Jew and on the street you are a Jew” is made in the present tense, yet it refers to a time passed.  Yura speaks here as though none of the emissaries’ teachings have penetrated his consciousness.  How is it that this is the same Yura who says that Larrisa’s children are both Jews and not Jews?

Before answering this question, we turn to a few statements recently issued by President Islam Karimov during a formal address to a group of Jews from England:

. . . . Over the course of many centuries of living together with the Jews on the territory that was [to become] our country, there was never a single violent incident directed against the Jewish nation. . . . . .

Judging by the manner in which the Uzbeks . . . . .  relate to the Jewish national minority, I believe it is possible to ascertain how [strongly] we in Uzbekistan uphold the rights of national minorities and the rights and freedoms of the individual (Karimov, 1998).

Although Karimov unequivocally claims that the Jews have been treated justly and have suffered no persecution, his very statement marginalizes them.  They, a “national minority,” are juxtaposed to “we in Uzbekistan”  and  are excluded from the category “Uzbeks.”

 Perhaps Yura is able to utter both statements:

“At home you are a Jew and on the street you are a Jew”

“Larissa’s children are Jews and they are not Jews”

without perceiving the contradiction because he simultaneously views his Jewishness from within and from without.  Through the eyes of the emissaries, he sees the distinction between Jewish religious identity and national identity.  While through the eyes of the state authorities, he is sees that there is still no distinction between the two.  Which of these perspectives - that of the local non-Jews or that of the foreign Jews -  is the view from “within” and which is the view from “without” is unclear.  They seem to switch back and forth like an optical trick.  The wine goblet which had been foregrounded slips into the background to make room for the facing profiles, and then suddenly reverses positions again.

Those Bukharan Jews who remain in Uzbekistan struggle to negotiate their Jewish identity as they continually contend with these oscillating perspectives.  For those who immigrate to Israel and the United States, the problem takes on new dimensions as the next chapter of identity negotiation unfolds.  In their new homes, the question “Are you Jewish or not?” becomes expanded to include a second part: “… and if you are, then what kind of Jew are you?”

References

Altshuler, Mordechai
    1987   Soviet Jewry Since the Second World War: Population and Social Structure.   New York: Greenwood Press.

    1970.  Some Statistics on Mixed Marriages among Soviet Jews.  Bulletin on Soviet  and East European
               Jewish Affairs 6:30-32.

Blank, Naomi
    1995   Redefining the Jewish Question from Lenin to Gorbachev:  Terminology or Ideology?  In Jews and Jewish Life
              in Russia and the Soviet Union.  Yaakov Ro’i, ed. Pp. 51-64. Essex: Frank Cass.

Gitelman, Zvi
    1985   The Abridgement of the Rights of Jews in the Field of Nationality, Culture and Religion.  Soviet
               Jewish Affairs 15 (1):79-87.

    1988   A Century of Ambivalence: The Jews of Russia and the Soviet Union, 1881 to the Present.
               New York: Shocken Books.

Karimov, Islam
    1998   Speech presented in Tashkent “to the delegation from the Simon Weisenthal Center.”   Unpublished manuscript.

Krupnik, Igor
    1995   Soviet Cultural and Ethnic Policies towards Jews: A Legacy Reassessed.  In Jews and Jewish Life in Russia
               and the Soviet Union.  Yaakov Ro’i, ed. Pp. 67-86. Essex: Frank Cass.

Orbach, William
    1982   A Periodization of Soviet Policy Towards the Jews.  Soviet Jewish Affairs 12(2):45-62.

Pinkus, Benjamin
    1984   The Soviet Government and the Jews 1948-1967.  Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Zand, Mikhael
    1988    The Jews of Bukhara and the Russian Conquest of Central Asia (Hebrew). Pe’amim 35:47-82.

Zubin, M.
    1988    Jews in the District of Samarkand in 1979: A Statistical Survey (Hebrew). Pe’amim 35:47-82.
 

Endnotes

1. A quorum of ten are required for public prayer.

2. Their missionary work is only with Jews.

3. About 120 in Samarkand and 330 in Tashkent.

4. The approach of the Shehebar Sephardic Center, the emissary organization with the strongest presence in Bukhara city, differes form the approach of both Chabad and the Jewish Agency. The situation in Bukhara city, therefore, requires separate analysis.

5. The definition of "Orthodox Jewish law" is not always agreed upon by those who consider themselves to be Orthodox. This complex debate will not be addressed here. Simply note that Chabad generally does not consider the conversions that were performed in Uzbekistan during the Soviet era to ahve been in accordance with Orthodox Jewish law.

6. Names have been changed to protect the informants' privacy.

7. In cases of intermarriage, the Bukharan Jews would allow a Jewish wedding ceremony (huppa and kiddishin) to be performed between a Jewish man and a non-Jewis woman. After this ceremony, the woman was considered - by the local Jews - to have "converted," or more accurately, to have "accepted Judaism." It was expected that when she would move into her husband's family's home, she would observe the religious laws as they were practiced in the home.

8. Rabbi Shaulov is actually a Bukharan Jew himself. He was born and raised in Uzbekistan. In recent years he has been strongly influenced by Chabad. During the period of my field work, he was an important liaison between the local Jewish population and Chabad abroad.

9. Chabad understandings and local understandings of "strict adherence to Jewish tradition and law" are often not in accordance.

10. through circumcision.
 
 

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

 Khakassia is a land of majestic mountain and steppe beauty, full of fresh and salt-water lakes. Located near the geographic center of Asia, it is thought by many to be the birthplace of Turkic culture. The Khakass call their land "the sunny world,” and their ancestor a white wolf. The Sayan mountains separate Khakassia from Tuva in the south and west, while its northern reaches connect with the forests of the Krasnoyarsk territory.

During the communist period there were major changes in the traditional way of life, which became divorced from the cycles of nature. A large hydro-electric dam (Sayano-shushenskaya GES) has made for significant change in the climate. Especially damaging to Khakass culture was the rapid rise in the non-native population. Today's most important problem is that the ethot in terms of prejudices and policies against native culture,  poverty and ill health. Unemployment and the influence of the mafia and rapacious religious cults make new additions to Khakassia's social problems.

As in many parts of Russia today, a powerful revival of native culture is going on. Three lines contribute to this revival: consultation with hereditary tradition through the voices of the elders and ethnographic and historical literature, elements left from the Soviet era, and contacts with the outside world. Central to this revival are the ancient Khakass philosophy and practice of shamanism, and their long and rich oral tradition.

To illustrate these three lines, I would like to introduce briefly the practice of one contemporary shaman, and then go on to some new legends which have been appearing in the last few years, building a bridge from the past to the present. In the words of one Khakass philosopher, “New legends are a serious factor in the revival of the ethnos (Anzhiganova 1997).”

A Contemporary Shaman's Practice

Tatiana Kobezhikova is a hereditary shaman. As in most Siberian traditions, the gift can pass down either the female or male line, and shows up in childhood. In Tania's case, her parents were distressed when she began to predict what was about to happen, and could see auras around people. Since shamanism was forbidden and severely persecuted in the Soviet period, they tried to dissuade her from developing her talent. Since the fall of the Soviet Union she has practiced more and more openly, with support from her family. Recently she sought consecration from hereditary shamans in Tuva and Mongolia. She has made a costume and drum, and her practice involves traditional methods of soul retrieval and divination.

Kobezhikova received a western-style education in Soviet institutions, including fluency in the Russian language. She now uses knowledge gained during post-graduate work in archaeology together with her psychic ability to help archaeologists locate and interpret sites. She also runs a clinic (which for funding purposes is called a Laboratory of Traditional Medicine,) in two rooms in an obshchezhitie, or dormitory/hotel in the city of Abakan. This setting has limited her in terms of drumming and long ceremonies, but at the same time opened her practice to a wide spectrum of clients.

Kobezhikova has contacts with the west through reading the works of Michael Harner and Carlos Casteneda. Meetings with foreign psychiatrists and anthropologists result in exchange of ideas and methods. It is possible that contacts with the outside world may lead to financial support for her efforts to revive all methods of traditional healing in Khakassia. At least she is receiving publicity (Van Deusen 1997:1-15; 1998:22-29).

What emerges from the union of these three lines is something unprecedented in the history of shamanism. (It is worth noting that the shamanic tradition has always been extremely flexible, adapting to changed conditions and the influx of new ideas.) Tania practices traditional soul-retrieval and divination, as well as healing through energy channels, massage, and herbal medicine which are not typical of traditional shamanic practice. She has also developed a practice which I am calling eco-tourist shamanism, in which she guides people through the many sacred sites in Khakassia, helping them to feel the energies of the earth, and developing rituals which contribute to personal growth and ecological awareness.¹ Her practice adapts tradition to today's largely urban conditions and needs.

Cultural Revival

The revival of shamanic tradition fills important needs in the spiritual life of the Khakass, and also serves as an inspiration to their artistic, political and ecological movements. More even than individual healing, today's shamanic practice focuses on healing the ethnic group as a whole. In Khakassia the revival of culture involves individual inspiration and creativity rather than the setting up or imposing of new authoritarian structures. Individual creativity is honored in the arts as well as in shamanic practice—all are seen as evidence of the shamanic gift. Some of the people I was introduced to as “shamans” are actors, singers, philosophers and musical instrument makers, as well as traditional healers. Politics is considered a valid arena for creativity, and also for competition and trickery, time-honored parts of shamanic tradition. Life stories are being told in reference to traditional beliefs, giving inspiration and warning to those who follow.

Khakass scholars like Larissa Anzhiganova and Alexander Kotozhekov are reconstructing ritual and legend, and they have played a central role in raising the consciousness of rural people during the formation of the new republic (Anzhiganova 1997). Scholars and shamans consult each other regularly, if somewhat uneasily. Khakass music and epic now appear in the national theater, carrying spiritual and ecological messages, while just a few years ago they were viewed as quaint remnants of a primitive past.

An important focus of today's movement is clan ritual, with attention to genealogy, ancestry and especially to the importance of specific places sacred to families and clans, and to others that are power points on the earth. Many of these places are in the mountains, home of ancient spirits who appeared in the past as helping spirits of shamans. Mountains appear in epic and tale as the meeting place of heaven and earth, and a route for approaching the upper world.

Contemporary Legends

People have begun to make direct contact with these ancient mountain spirits, and their experiences turn into new legends that are inspiring the rebirth of culture. Today's legends involve survival, rebirth, initiation, creativity including the interaction of male and female energies, the vital role of music, and most importantly, respect for nature and the land. Certain people have changed the focus of their lives entirely as a result of the experiences and visions that result in these legends. They have begun to concentrate on helping their people. Others tell of how they were offered the shamanic gift in Soviet times, how they refused it and what happened as a result.

In the past the singer of epics, or khaidzhi, enjoyed a position similar to that of the shaman. These storytellers, who performed in a type of throat singing called khai, came from their own ancestral lineage and underwent initiation like shamans. They showed talent from childhood, and were respected for their clairvoyant abilities. Storytelling was understood as a healing art. Today's legends are told by new khaidzhi, and also by folklore collectors, philosophers, actors, and even elderly people speaking on the radio. Like shamans, the legend-tellers work toward healing the people as a whole.

One contemporary story connected with singing is that of an elderly musician named Itpekov. He was sitting at home  one evening playing his chatkhan (zither) when a little old woman with snow-white hair and a bright face appeared unexpectedly before him. The chatkhan is the sacred instrument of storytellers, and he had felt compelled to take it up after his retirement. “The old woman's clothing amazed him with its former wealth, being made of satin and silk. But it was in a pitiful condition: all torn, with threads pulling out. After they had drunk tea in silence, she told him she was Chir Ine, the mother spirit of all the Turkic peoples. `I am the mother spirit and I am dying,' she told Itpekov. `You need to help revive your culture and the people themselves, so that I won't die. You, the Khakass, are my eldest son among the Turkic peoples.' Not at all long ago Chir Ine had been young and beautiful, she said, because the Khakass people were living according to their customs and traditions. They worshipped her because she was the Soul of the People. When the people is alive and blossoming, she too is well. But now the Khakass have stopped worshipping the spirits of Fire, Water, Mountain, and Taiga. They are forgetting their language, losing their culture. If this continues further, the people will die—the Khakass will hang themselves, drown themselves, kill one another (Anzhiganova 1997).” Chir Ine taught Itpekov her song, which he often sang and now others sing too.

Itpekov's story and song are eloquent statements on the shamanic themes of rebirth, initiation through meeting with spirit, and respect for the land. They point the way to contemporary action by combining shamanic philosophy with politics and ecology.

Another story with similar themes of initiation through meeting the mountain spirits is that of the sculptor Slava Kuchenov. The specific spirits he met were khai eezi—the spirits of singing khai, which leads to the art of the khaidzhi, or epic singer.

Kuchenov had received his formal education in Leningrad and returned to his homeland with no sense of traditional culture—torn off from his roots. He went to visit an aunt in a far-away village, walking a long way to get there through the mud. When he arrived, he cleaned his boots and went to bed. In the night someone woke him and took him out through the steppe to the mountains. Something happened to him there, a deep transformation based on meetings with spirits. He was told he must learn five musical instruments, including the chatkhan played by khaidzhi, the khomus (a bowed string instrument² ), and demir-khomus, a kind of jaw harp played by shamans. Some of the things he was told were to remain secret. Then he returned to his aunt's and went back to bed.

In the morning he woke up and thought it had all been a dream, until he saw that his boots were muddy again. After this experience he began to play music and became an adept khaidzhi. He now composes his own poems similar to heroic epics, using classic and contemporary themes. He has become a professional actor and singer, although he had no previous background or education in those fields (Anzhiganova, Kotozhekov, Kazachinova 1997: personal communication).

The instrument maker from whom Kuchenov commissioned his instruments, Petya Topoev says that the meeting with the khai eezi happened at the confluence of two rivers, a meeting place of the physical and the spiritual. The instruments he made had unusual shapes, designed according to the instructions of the spirits that Kuchenov met.

The same instrument maker told me a story of his own meeting with spirits—this time with the spirit of a warrior who sleeps in the mountains. Topoev went out to the mountains with a newly finished drum. An instrument gets its soul from being played outdoors, consecrated by the spirits of nature. Only then does it find its own voice. His brother had played the new drum and said it would be a warrior's drum.

Topoev went up to a place where he could see five peaks, and there he played. Beside one peak a big sleeping warrior appeared. Another warrior was trying to wake him. Topoev stopped playing and the two warriors disappeared. When he began to beat the drum again, they reappeared and the sleeping warrior moved around, as if he were about to awaken and get up. At this, Petya was frightened and ran away! (1997: personal communication.)

His story relates to an old legend about a sleeping warrior of the past. In the sixteenth century a hero named Tadar-khan (or Amyr-sama in Tuvan) jumped the mountains into Khakassia from Tuva and became a great leader. He was defeated by the Mongols and went away to sleep in the mountains. Legend says that he will come to life when the time is right, and save the people. Another view on this story is that the warrior, also known as Khoorai-khan will return when the material world ends and people are spiritually reborn. V. Ya. Butanaev thinks it is possible that Buddhist Shambhala is located in the Sayans and that this legend refers to that tradition (Butanaev 1996:13).³

Topoev says that it is possible to see things like the sleeping warrior near places on the earth with a strong geo-magnetic force. Many of the kurgans and standing stones are located at such places. Once when he was sitting near one of the stone figures, near the confluence of two rivers, he saw the stone start to emerge from the ground. He saw the stone take the shape of a yurt, then a face. He thinks it was the face of a legendary female warrior (Akh kyz) who vowed she would not marry until she drove her enemies from the land. When she died she was buried near that place. He also ties this into the idea of the sleeping warrior who will come to life and save the people.

Female warriors are not at all unusual in Turkic and Mongolian epic tradition, where many if not most of the heroes are women. Khakassia's greatest epic is about several generation of female warriors, among them the beautiful and powerful Altyn Aryg. She and her ancestress Pis-Tyzykh were born in a white cliff. They had many adventures, involving talents for shape-changing and the ability to bring the dead to life.

When I was in Khakassia in 1997, Altyn Aryg was the subject of a new battle—in the theater. A children's theater company called “Skazka” had produced “Altyn Aryg” using puppets and masked actors. Many local people were horrified that the masks were so truly frightening. Children were crying at the show. Colors were dark. One side of a heated discussion said that Altyn Aryg should have been shown as beautiful, while in this production she had the qualities of a witch. Others feel that since the masks were made according to the visions of the actors and artists, it was acceptable to portray the characters as truly horrifying. The argument continued about interior and exterior beauty, whether the concept of female beauty should be seen through male eyes only, and about goddesses who carry destruction within their beauty. But the main thing seems to be the political question of Khakass culture being shown in its ugliest, scariest side. Also involved are issues of how the theater uses imagery and traditional culture to make money. The consensus in that room held with the idea that Altyn Aryg should be shown beautiful, not only as a woman but as a representation of the highest in Khakass culture.

References:

Anzhiganova, Larissa.
    1997   “Renaissance of a Culture: How Khakass Shamanism Survived and Flourishes Today” Active Voices: The Online
               Journal of Cultural Survival. www.cs.org.

    1998    “Khakass Shamanic Recovery” Shamanism 11(2).

Butanaev, V. Ya.
    1996    Traditsionnaya kul'tura i byt Khakassov [Traditional Khakass Culture and Way of Life].  Abakan:
                Khakasskoe knizhnoe izdatel'stvo.

Kharatidi, Olga
    1996   Entering the Circle: Ancient Secrets of Siberian Wisdom Discovered by a Russian Psychiatrist. San Francisco:
              Harper SanFrancisco.

Van Deusen, Kira
    1998   “Shamanism and Music in Tuva and Khakassia” Shaman's Drum, No 47, pp 22-29.

    ____   “The Voice of the Mountain Spirit: Contemporary Shamanism in Siberia” 1997. Active Voices: The Online Journal
               of Cultural Survival. www.cs.org.

    ____   “Shamanism in Khakassia Today” 1997. Shamanism vol 10, No 1: 11-15.

Notes

1. I have also seen a similar practice in Buriatia, where shaman Valentin Hagdaev runs spiritual excursions on Olkhon Island through the Baikal Parks Service.

2. This can be confusing, since in Tuvan the word khomus refers to the temir-khomus or jaw harp. A Khakass stringed khomus made by Topoev has the shape of the sacred swan.

3. Russian psychiatrist Olga Kharatidi also believes that Shambhala, in Russian called Belovodia, is located in this area---she says in the Altai mountains.

Thanks to: Larissa Anzhiganova, Galina Kazachinova, Tatiana Kobezhikova, Alexander Kotozhekov, Petr Topoev.
 
 

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

 During the last two weeks of October 1996, I often waited in the main square of Elista for Schura, the healer, frequently delayed at home by inopportune needy patients, a welcome sight when she does appear lighting up the square in her dark red suit and blue turban; healers do not work by appointment, but are always accessible - a useful principle to keep in mind as we rattle away from the square in an old overcrowded bus to a more distant district of Elista to visit another healer who looks at water.

Life is moving forwards in Kalmykia, in fits and starts.  Life seems normal now in many ways, even with its disappointments and limitations; yet every one of the Kalmyks have experienced, or were affected by the loss of their homeland, the loss of their locale and hence the disruption of their cultural and religious life.

It is the argument of this paper that with the collapse of the Soviet system, it has become possible for prerevolutionary belief systems - shamanistic practices and Buddhism - to revive, and with their revival to bring along and support the burgeoning sense of Kalmyk identity.  Shamanism, unlike Buddhism which is based on a written canon and institionalized church and ministry, is particularly sensitive to loss of specific locale.  Shamanic practices are therefore more fragile, more easily disrupted by loss of homeland and potentially more difficult to revive unless the memory of these practices remains.  Buddhism, on the other hand, has a more clear-cut process of regeneration, given input - lamas, teachings, religious texts - from abroad coupled with state support.

Even though the Kalmyks began to return from exile in 1957, shamanic practices of healing, according to healers I have spoken with,  were not in evidence until the mid-1980s when there was apparently  a more receptive environment.  When I was in Kalmykia in the fall of 1996, I met with and observed a number of healers - all of whom considered themselves shamans - that is, they all had spirits with whom they communicated and who aided them in their healing work with patients.  Often they used Buddhist prayers and implements, which relates to a long and tangled history of the suppression of shamanism by Buddhist lamas in the 16th. century in Mongolia, resulting in a somewhat truncated and syncretic form of shamanic practices that came with the Oirat Mongols to the present Kalmyk regions (Heissig 1953).  It was, however, the healers’ ability to tap into this other, shamanic source of strength which gave them the power to heal.  It was remarkable to observe the resurgence of healers - both lamas and shamans - in Kalmykia.  I met with healers at the Badma Center for Healing in Elista, in the village of Ik-Chonos, and in various private homes within and outside Elista.  Sometimes I watched or even participated in healing sessions and always I listened to their narrations, often notable for the healers' perceptions that exile and loss of homeland had led to subsequent loss of Kalmyk traditions - and the need to regain these traditions and the linked Kalmyk identity now.

Illustrative of current shamanic practices of healing and issues of Kalmyk identity, the following account of Schura, Alexandra Semenovna Konokova, is presented.  Schura is a very active healer, who also has a great awareness of Kalmyk tradition and culture and of the need to regenerate Kalmyk ethnic identity.  I was fortunate to be able to spend time with her and her mother, also a healer, discussing these matters and observing her healing practices.

Schura was born in 1946 in the Krasnoyarsk region.  She became a teacher of Russian language and  also began to do some healing occasionally. For the last 10 years she has been  healing full-time and has a busy healing practice with an average of 7 or 8 people coming to her home everyday.

Schura has very clear-cut ideas about those aspects of Kalmyk culture and religion which are important for her, and for the Kalmyk people.  She said there are now many women and men who are healers in Kalmykia, young as well as old.  She herself heals doctors and nurses, using herbs and Buddhist prayers, as well as shamanic prayers for the Kalmyk variant of the Belii Staretz, an old white man associated with special prayers to the earth and animals.  On the second and sixteenth of every lunar month is the day of the Belii Staretz. On this day it is good to carry out a ritual of sprinkling for the cleansing of cattle and possessions, since the Kalmyks worship the Belii Staretz as the protector of the universe and the caretaker of the year.  Therefore on this day it is necessary to read the Mantra of the Belii Staretz:

Om namo sulu tumu doka tulu tun
Om tulu tulu dnya cuuxa xa xa xa (Omakaeva 1995:39).

In addition to specific shamanic rituals for the God of the Earth and water, there are also Buddhist rituals associated with the God of the Spring (water) "Üres" and Festival for the Earth "Troitsa".  This festival celebrates small animals and is considered Buddhist but comes from shamanistic practice. There is a spirit underworld, called "xovdg-shivdk" and this spirit in animals and people needs to be fed with candy or other small food items, but not prepared foods.

She also noted the importance for the Kalmyks of shamanic rituals at the time of death when   there is a need to propitiate and give food to the Gods of the Earth, water and air.   After a person has died there is still a continued connection between the dead and the living, sometimes manifested in the spirit of the dead person who will come to a living relative in a dream and draw energy from them.  Schura believes (or has observed in her practice)  that this still happens to people, although she said that after 70 years of Atheism people have lost their traditions - they don't understand that the spirit of the deceased is sucking out their energy - and hence they don't know what to do to heal this problem.

Schura comes by her gifts of healing in the traditional way: she has ancestors who have been healers.  Schura's maternal grandfather healed cows and horses.  Her father also healed animals and was a bone-healer for people, although this was not his only work.  But her mother, age 91, who lives with her, is (or was) a healer.  She is known as a "boo" or shaman, but she herself does not openly admit to that, preferring to emphasize her Buddhist practices.

Schura’s mother recalled how they would pray at home.  She had learned Buddhist prayers in the Kalmyk language, which were translated from the Tibetan - one of which she recited  during the time of deportation.  Remembering the old lamas from pre-revolutionary times,  she recalled how little boys would study to become lamas.  Schura told me of 300 year old prayer beads which had been handed down in her father's family from generation to generation and were saved by her mother and then given to Schura's oldest brother.  Schura has other old prayer beads which belonged to a Lama Tepkin Sharv-baksh who taught in Tibet before and during the time of the Russian Revolution.  When he died in 1979, his relatives gave these beads to her mother because she was a very devout believer.

Schura's mother participated for many years in a prayer group of 15 to 20 women.  They gathered every three months and chanted Buddhist prayers, some also in Kalmyk language.  Sometimes, Schura said, these groups of women were invited when a child was ill or 49 days after a death and they would cleanse the house of bad influences and misfortunes by reciting Buddhist prayers.   During the time of deportation these groups hardly met, but if they did, they were much smaller and met secretly.  Schura told me also that during the period of exile her mother was afraid to heal because she was afraid of the militia police who might come around; her standard answer was “my nichevo ne znaem” - “we don’t know anything”.  But she has told her daughter how herbs can heal cancer.  Schura says her mother is “iasno” - clear-sighted, meaning that she can foretell the future from prayer beads.

Schura began to heal people after she had been ill with sicknesses for many years.  She said she was constantly sick until she started to heal others.  Suffering with appendicitis and gynecological problems, unable to carry through a pregnancy, she had five operations, took medicines and tablets, developed an allergy to medicine and it was only when she began to use herbs and began to heal people that she stopped being sick and felt well and energetic.  This account is typical of one of the most commonly described features in the "calling" to become a shaman: healers almost always suffer from chronic and incurable sicknesses until they finally give in to the demand of the spirits to become a shaman and to practice this calling, whereupon they become asymptomatic.  The other criterion for becoming a shaman is to be of the right ancestry - that is, to have shaman-ancestors in their lineage.

Schura's spirit helpers are the Belii Staretz, the Buddha Maitrea , the medicine Buddha, the Green Tara - the goddess of universal compassion, who is especially helpful for women and children, and has special powers to help overcome dangers, fears and anxieties and to grant wishes - and Avalokuteshvara or the Buddha of compassion, the White Tara who also has power to grant long life and help the practitioner overcome obstacles, danger and distress (Batireva 1991: Illus. #6).  These deities come by themselves to Schura when they are needed.

Doctors and nurses come to Schura for healing and often refer patients to her, evidently feeling that she has special skills for healing which the medical profession itself cannot call forth.  A case in point was a young nurse who came to see Schura for massage.  She had problems in her abdominal area, and while Schura was gently massaging her abdomen she spoke with her about her menstrual period, about her fears of pregnancy, about problems with her husband and her desire to get pregnant.  She gave her a recipe for taking water so many days before menstruation, so many days after in order to achieve the desired result.  After the massage, the girl put on her bra and shirt and put some money on the table in front of the tankas of the buddhas and bowed three times formally with clasped hands.  Not all patients are able to pay in cash in these difficult times, explained Schura.  They may pay in products such as foodstuffs instead; Schura's sunporch was filled with watermelons (payments from patients?),  and when I was there I saw a patient bring fruits.

Massage and touch was an important part of of Schura's practice.  A mother brought her young child to Schura daily for massages.  The little boy, aged fifteen months, exhibited symptoms of distress, lying like a limp fat doll on his stomach and wailing.   Schura massaged his stomach and talked to him.  The child had no energy at all and apparently could not walk, nor even move in his mother's arms in an energetic manner.  Schura showed the mother exercises she could do with the child. She placed dark brown square packets on his back and rubbed him with a black cerdolite stone which, she explained, gave cosmic energy when a person had weak energy.  Other shamanic implements she used in the treatment of other patients were an ebonite pencil used for massage, a copper 5-kopek piece for healing, and a silver coin from  1925, which was originally a church medal minted by Soviet authorities and was considered useful for cleansing from illnesses. When the treatment of the little boy was concluded, the mother gave him money to put on the table in front of the tankas.  She bowed, holding the baby, and the baby bowed with her solemnly to the altar-table.

Theoretically, the healer is working on the assumption that symptoms, whether physical or emotional, are caused by bad energy coming from a disappointed or dissatisfied spirit of a departed relative.  Once the needs of this spirit are satisfied, then the symptoms will be alleviated and/or positive energy will return to the patient.  For example, I observed the following case: a young man, who had consulted Schura previously, came to her for healing. Schura began to talk to him and do some massage.  Then she asked him whether anyone in his family had died.  Her patient  said: "Yes, my aunt Katya died 10 years ago."  Schura told him what to do. "Make tea, give it to the soul of Aunt Katya."  She then actually saw the spirit of Aunt Katya drinking tea, the tea going down her body and she heard the spirit say 'thank you.'

Schura  told me that this patient had originally come to her because he had large lumps on his hands which could not be cured.  After the patient had gone home from his first consultation, Schura saw a little babushka (grandmother) who had died when the patient was 10 years old.  She wanted to eat.  He had told her that his grandmother liked to eat.   She said she wanted a head kerchief and hot food.  The little babushka began to pray and to thank Schura.  She bowed three times and prostrated herself.  When the patient returned to consult with Schura, she told him about the little grandmother and what to do to please her.  He was so grateful that, filled with emotion and remembering his grandmother, he began to cry.  Having made the appropriate offerings to the spirit of his grandmother, the lumps on his hands disappeared.

As noted in the instance above, communication between the shaman and the dead person can be very helpful for the patient.  The soul of the dead person talks to Schura and she tells the sick person "He wants vodka, bouillion, food - you must go home, prepare a hot tea, give it to an old woman or an old man and then they will remember this (deceased) person".  She says she can look at a person and see clearly the spirit of the dead person as if he were alive.  She knows this is the spirit of that person, and she even knows how he died and what catastrophe caused his death.  She sees various gods of that person - God of the Earth, little grandfather , "domovoi" (spirits of the house), xozzyan of the house (the master or caretaker).  She says that she sees so much but she cannot and does not tell all because if she told everything she saw, many atheists might think she is (mentally) ill and be afraid and not believe her.  So she (very cleverly, like a western psychotherapist!) phrases her thoughts into a question, such as "Was there someone who died"?  She also is testing herself, wanting to know if she saw correctly.

Schura's use of massage, bio-energy concepts and healing of physical as well as mental disorders is quite typical of Kalmyk shaman-healers; an integral component of her ability to do this healing is the strength she draws from her personal protective spirits.  Locale comes into play in that her ability to heal is bound up with her identity as a Kalmyk person, and this was an identity that was maintained by her mother even in the period of exile and hence has become a basis for her daughter's strength as a healer.  Schura believes that the loss of homeland and the experience of exile and separation from locale has been disastrous for the maintenance of Kalmyk traditions and religion.  In that sense, the restoration of locale (coupled with strong religious traditions from her mother) has impelled her towards healing in the traditional Kalmyk manner now that it is permissible to practice openly.   Despite the loss of locale, however, Shamanism, or the internal connection to the spirit world, can regenerate, given a renewed association with the homeland.  In this new period of Kalmyk life, with the connection to the Kalmyk homeland, the regeneration of Buddhism and Shamanism have supported and sustained the emergent sense of Kalmyk ethnic identity.

Buddhism, as an element of this ethnic identity, has always held a foremost position in the construction of Kalmyk ethnic identity.  When the Kalmyks, Oirat Mongols from Mongolia, migrated to the present Kalmyk areas in the 17th. century, they were observant Buddhists. A flourishing Buddhist culture developed so that by 1917 there were more than 100 kuruls (temples) in Kalmykia in which about 3000 clergy lived. In the 1930s all their lamaseries were closed and destroyed.  Thousands of Kalmyks died in this repression, including lamas; sacred texts, if not salvaged and buried in private household gardens, were burned.  What had been a magnificent and flourishing Buddhist culture, with grand temples, vast monasteries, and thousands of lamas was completely destroyed or left to ruins (Bakaeva 1994:26).
 In 1988 there were no Buddhist temples in Kalmykia.  In 1990 the first house of prayer was opened in the city of Elista; in the summer of 1995 when I was there, there was a constant flow of people of all ages into this small temple, especially during the morning when the monks were reciting prayers.  The regeneration of Buddhism, possible after 1990, began cautiously but has continued steadily.  In 1993 the President of the republic, Iliumzhinov, established a Department of Religious Affairs, with the aim of supporting the Buddhist religion.

By October 1996 there were 14 kuruls operating in Kalmykia, and 6 centers of Buddhist learning.  All new kuruls and temples were constructed with the support of the state.  The President of the republic gave his personal support for the construction of the new kurul designed by Volodia Gilyandikov on the outskirts of Elista; the dedication on October 1, 1996 was attended by 33,000 people of all ages and generations.   The new kurul is very large and well decorated, with wall paintings on the exterior entrance side and open terraces on the second floor from which the monks can blow trumpets to call people to prayer.  Plans are already underway to expand the  temple which will allow more people to pray together and to house a library.  A total of 8-10 buildings is projected for this site (which will be typical of Buddhist monasteries, characteristically places of prayer, learning and residence for fairly large groups of monks and novices).

The Kalmyk scholar Elza Bakaeva has noted how important the renaissance of Buddhism has been for the development of ethnic identity among the Kalmyks.  One of the main problems is the need for education, not only of the laity but also of a whole generation of young lamas who will be able to staff the new kuruls and instruct those who come to pray.   In 1991 a Buddhist center for youth was opened with the main aim of religious education.  The Dkharma Center, for older lay people, was opened in 1992, and in 1995 the Karmapa International Buddhist Institute (known as KIBI) was founded for monks and lay people.  In its first year KIBI had eleven students, Russians and Kalmykians.

Five students have been able to complete their studies in Ulan-Baator, Mongolia in the highest Buddhist school; these monks are now working in the rural regions of Kalmykia - Yashgul, Tsagan-aman, Ketechineri, Lagan and in the kurul in Elista.  Having travelled to Iki-Burul and Yashgul in the summer of 1995 to visit small kuruls there, I can testify to the great value the people of the local regions place upon the existence of a place of prayer, whether it is a converted school-house, or a small hall where 50 people can gather in front of a few tankas and religious objects.

What seems to be most important to the lay-person is the opportunity, after so many decades of repression, to practice Buddhism openly, even without fully-fledged lamas available.  In the small kurul in Iki-Burul a woman testified that when she was 16 years old in the 1930s there were many monks in that region.  Under persecution they took off their monk's clothes and became ordinary people.  In 1943 her family was deported to Siberia where her 7-year-old son died.  They brought objects with them to Siberia and tried to do all necessary rituals to maintain the practice of Buddhism there.  Another woman, now 82 years old, who said she had been working "for the Reds", testified that they had destroyed Buddhist temples and artifacts. Fourteen monks from this kurul, who had received education in Tibet, were executed in 1930; she knew these monks because her parents both had service in the kurul.  Then, in 1942, when the Germans came they took all religious objects.  She still has a rosary from her mother.  She was 26 when they were deported to Siberia in 1943 and had two children, one of them a son who died in Siberia (testimonies in Iki-Burul, July 3, 1995). These narratives were corroborated by many others; what distinguished them also was the fact that this was literally the first time these people were able to openly talk about their experiences. It is difficult to ascertain whether Kalmyks spoke much among themselves about these experiences but according to Zhukovskaia (1993:88) until the mid-1980s Kalmyks avoided writing or speaking about the deportation period and it was mentioned only briefly in scholarly historical writings.

It also was clear that despite the fact that all traces of Buddhism were destroyed and it was impossible to practice the religion in a public place for more than 60 years, yet people conserved whenever possible religious artifacts and texts. Bound together with the resurrection of Kalmyk language and culture, new museums of history show ecology, herding economy, Kalmyk costumes, the period of exile, and religious artifacts. The close interrelationship between Kalmyk Buddhism and Kalmyk identity as a people with a language, specific culture and historical unity which has been maintained despite the drastic disruptions of the Soviet period, indicates that these connections have a long and deep history.

Ethnic identity for Kalmyks - their sense of themselves as a people - is bound up with their deeply ingrained practice of Buddhism and of Shamanism.  Shamanism, a form of religious practice that by definition communes with the ancestral spirits as well as the spirits of nature and of a specific physical place, is especially vulnerable to disruption by loss of locale.  Hence, exile from their territories propelled the Kalmyks into an alien world devoid of familiar homes and kin.  It weakened their ability to practice   Buddhism by destroying all their temples and religious artifacts, and separated them from Shamanism by removal from sacred locale and spirits of these places - in effect, robbing them of their own ethnic identity and any psychological means to access it.

Volodia Gilyandikov's account of his family's exile and return to Kalmykia is perhaps the epitome of the Kalmyk experience, bringing together the themes of displacement, loss of language, culture, land and then return to homeland with the gradual acquisition of house and hearth, profession, Kalmyk language and Buddhist religion.  Volodia, the architect of the Buddhist temple near Elista, narrated a life history which embodies some of the most characteristic features of the Kalmyk experience of the Soviet period.  Volodia's father was in the Red Army during World War II.  Upon his return to Kalmykia, he and his family, like all the other Kalmyks, were given two hours notice on December 28th, 1943 to collect their things before being deported by train.  Three days later the Kalmyks arrived in northern Siberia and were dispersed into different settlements: Magadan, Vladivostok, Sakhalin, Norilsk, or Tumen, all areas north of the 50th parallel.  The Gilyandikov family was deported to Tumen in the far north of Siberia near the 60th parallel, where Volodia was born in 1950.

In Siberia his family lived in an army barracks with some electricity, but used kerosene lamps.   Many people died due to the extreme cold in Siberia and the lack of adequate clothing and household possessions.  The Kalmyk language was not allowed to be spoken in school and if caught speaking it, a person could go to prison.  Volodia's mother worked in a factory, his father in a forest cutting trees.  Although officially there was no religion, his grandmother did small Buddhist rituals on Buddhist feast days.   She poured butter into metal dishes and said short prayers, but there were no prayer books.  Volodia's grandmother also practiced some shamanic healing. He remembers that when he was a small boy four or five years old, he was afraid of something unknown. His grandmother covered him with a white sheet, heated hot metal and put it into a water container which she held over his head.  Then she took out the metal form and read it for the shape which indicated what the fear was - a dog or another animal.  Apparently this procedure cured him of his fear.  Volodia also noted that old men and women practiced  healing with massage of the limbs or of the head.

When the Kalmyks were allowed to return to Kalmykia after 1957, he said they wept and kissed the earth after their absence of 13 years.  Volodia returned with his family in 1959.  Since their original housing had been destroyed, his father's brother came back first and built a dwelling, then his family came and they all lived together.  At first when people returned they lived in tents while they quickly built a house, moving in once the walls and roof were up, despite the dirt floors and lack of plumbing.

In 1957 he first started to study Kalmyk language in the 5th. grade one hour per week.  His parents didn't speak the language and his grandmother knew Kalmyk but felt afraid to speak it during the period of exile.  Now his daughter, age 7, goes to a school where she studies Kalmyk, English, German, and, of course, Russian language.  She corrects her father's writing of her name in Old Kalmyk!  Volodia has worked as a professional architect for many years, designing major government buildings and monuments in Elista, the capital.  He not only designed the new Buddhist temple but is also the architect of a pavilion which encloses a huge figure of Buddha in the central park.

The Kalmyks' recent experience in 1943 of exile and dislocation, spiritual as well as physical,  from a homeland, was only the latest in a series of disruptions.  It is in documenting these losses of locale that a foundation can be laid for understanding how Buddhism and Shamanism, wrapped into Kalmyk ethnic identity, were able to be maintained or lost their connection with the Kalmyk people.

The Kalmyks are western Mongols, part of the Oirat tribes.  They originated in Chinese Turkestan and northwestern Outer Mongolia, first unified under Khan Esen in the 15th. century in the course of fighting the Ming dynasty.  As a result of opposition to the increasing power of the Manchus and conflict with eastern Mongolian allies of the Manchus, a group of Oirats, later known as the Kalmyks, moved westwards during the first two decades of the 17th. century into Russian areas north of the Caspian Sea, near the lower Volga.

Historically,  the relationship between the Kalmyks and the Russians was, at best, uneasy.  In 1941 the Kalmyk region of the Soviet Union was invaded by the German army.  The Kalmyks, Soviet citizens, fought with the Soviet Army in World War II and although there were many distinguished heroes among them, occupation of Kalmykia by the Germans for six months starting in August 1942 gave the Soviets reason to fear Kalmyk collaboration with the enemy - this was the justification for the deportation order of December 27, 1943.  When the Soviet Army regained the Kalmyk territory in 1943, they liquidated the Kalmyk ASSR and deported all the Kalmyks with two hours notice to Sakhalin Island as well as to other parts of Siberia.  Approximately thirty percent of Kalmyks died during the deportation (Zhukovskaia 1993: 90).

Only in 1957, after Stalin’s death, were they permitted to return to their former territories.  On July 29, 1958 a decree restored the Kalmyk ASSR minus two provinces which remained part of the Astrakhan Oblast.  One of the significant results of this deportation was the absolute silence in the public sphere in the Kalmyk Republic concerning these events and years of exile, a silence only broken in the spring of 1989 during perestroika with the showing of a film in Moscow (Zhukovskaia 1993:88).

As can be seen in the above account, the rebirth of Buddhism now is seen as an integral part of the reestablishment of Kalmyk ethnic identity.  Buddhism as an institutionalized religion with its specific prayers, objects and images of veneration, priesthood and temples, is, with State support, rebuilding its traditions and practices.  Given an active input from the Dalai Lama and the opportunity to bring Tibetan teachings to Kalmykia, many Kalmyks are now practising Buddhism and displaying Buddhist icons and religious objects in local museums of Kalmyk culture.

Kalmyk ethnic identity is also expressed by traditional shamanic healers who were long compelled to hold their practices in secret.   In her practice Schura honors Buddhist and Shamanic deities who are related to the earth, air, land and water springs.  She stresses the importance of the Old White Man, a shamanic deity particularly connected with the earth and the specific place where people live.  When the Kalmyks were exiled, they were able to take a few small Buddhist objects with them, but Shamanism, with its close relationship to the deities of a specific locale, does not allow for such portability.  At most, according to these accounts, old women remembered some healing practices which they were able to do, thus maintaining some continuation with their traditions.  Exile, therefore, is more destructive for Shamanism than for Buddhism but, on the other hand, once the reconnection to the homeland is made, the possibility of shamanic healing arises when a more permissive environment exists.  In the new atmosphere of religious freedom after 1990, shaman healers also have reappeared, now able to connect more freely with old traditional Kalmyk customs and with the local ancestral spirits - and hence contribute to the development of ethnic identity.

References Cited

Bakaeva, E.P.
    1994   Buddism v Kalmikii (Buddism in Kalmykia).  Elista, Kalmykia: Kalmitskoe Knizhnoe Izdatelstvo.

Batireva, S.G.
    1991   Starokalmitzkoe Iskusstvo (Old Kalmyklian Art).  Elista, Kalmykia: Kalmitskoe Knizhnoe Izdatelstvo.

Heissig, Walter
    1953   A Mongolian source to the Lamaist Suppression of Shamanism in the 17th. Century.  Anthropos: Revue
               Internationale d'Ethnologie et de Linguistique.  Vol. 48, fasc.1-2.  1-29., fasc. 3-4.  493-536.

Omakaeva, Ellara
    1995   Kalmg zurkha.  Mergul.  Kalmitskaya astrologuya.  Molitvi.  Elista, Kalmykia.

Zhukovskaia, N.L.
    1993   The Republic of Kalmykia: A Painful Path of National Renewal.  Anthropology and Archaeology of Eurasia,
               vol. 31, No. 4. 85-101.
 
 

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

Introduction

 A well-known Uzbek musician told me that music was "in the blood,” tapping the veins in his arm to make sure I understood.  He explained that his children were fine musicians although he had taught them nothing.  To be a musician, rhythm had to be in the blood, "Just a little," he said, but it had to be there.  For him, the ability to play Uzbek music was a hereditary, intrinsic capacity.

When the new Uzbek constitution was adopted in 1992, I noticed that it too could be seen as defining the meaning of "Uzbek."  Pivotal notions in the constitution included designation of the state language, policies toward languages and cultures of minorities, and perhaps most importantly, discussions about citizenship.

I became curious about what "Uzbek" meant in the two realms of expressive arts and law.  What repertoire of models of nationhood does a comparative study of Uzbek expressive arts and laws suggest?  I will explore this question using data about the Independence Day Concert of 1994, the Uzbek constitution and related statutes.

Background

During field research I conducted in Uzbekistan (summer 1992, 1994) about the political uses of dance and the expressive arts in the Soviet and post-Soviet periods (Doi 1997), I found that the Soviets used dance companies featuring unveiled female dancers to publicize new roles available to women under Soviet rule, and to build an “Uzbek” national consciousness.  In the curriculum of the state dance schools and in the repertoires of professional dance performers, "Uzbek" dance was actually a composite of three historically disparate regions--Khorezm, Bukhara and Farghana.  Each region had its own distinct dance form.  The distinctions were reflected in programs by dances representing each region, with characteristic costumes, gestures and music.

In 1994 the professional dance companies in Tashkent marked a similar cultural taxonomy of Uzbek dance.  There were five major companies:  The Bahor (Spring) had a repertory of all three regional styles as did the Shodlik (Joy) and Yulduz (Star) companies. Shodlik company also included some of the few professional male dancers I met in Uzbekistan.  Yulduz was affiliated with the state television and radio station.  Three companies specialized in  Khorezm, Bukharan and Uyghur dance.The professional dance heritage of the Soviet period, then, reflected a notion of "Uzbek" nationalism constructed on the basis of regionalism.

The Concert

The Ministry of Culture was responsible for planning and producing the 1994 Independence Day concert.  Choreographers, composers, and directors created works meeting the Ministry's specifications.  All of the professional artists involved in the production worked for the state.  Adult amateurs and children from each of the nation's provinces also participated.  The President of the Republic and ten thousand national and international dignitaries attended the concert, which aired nationally on August 31, the eve of Independence Day.

The program called for unity based on an illustrious history and equally promising future, while acknowledging ethnic and geographical diversity.  To provide a context for discussing two examples from the program, I will provide a brief synopsis of the two-hour program.  The first segment of the program interspersed historical sketches about the pre-Soviet and Soviet periods with songs and dances representing minority groups such as Tajiks, Azerbaijani and Koreans. The second part featured children performing songs and dances about their provinces. The program closed with appearances by the country's most well-known popular music (estradni) singers.

An illustration from the first, historical segment of the program recalled the Central Asian astronomer-king Ulughbeg.  He was portrayed as a mature man in a turban and pale flowing robe reminiscent of Persian miniature paintings, standing next to a young man in a white turban and golden tunic and pants.  They were surrounded by sparkling dancers depicting the constellations Ulughbeg studied in his observatory in Samarkand. Ulughbeg gave the young man a metal sphere, saying that he was handing the earth to his student (shogurd), the new generation.

The reference to Ulughbeg as an illustrious forebear of the Uzbek people was actually a gloss over a complex intertwining of strands of ethnicity and kinship.  Ulughbeg ruled in the Samarkand during fifteenth century (1394-1449).  Ulughbeg himself was the grandson of the Central Asian ruler Amur Timur, who was a descendant of Genghis Khan. Ironically, Uzbeks rose to historical prominence in the sixteenth century when they defeated Ulughbeg's descendants under the leadership of Shaybani Khan.¹  Thus, claiming Ulughbeg as "Uzbek" was an assertive interpretation of Central Asian history maximizing the Uzbek domain through both space and time.

Another historical scene recalled the outbreak of World War II when Uzbek men joined forces from all over the Soviet Union.  The scene commemorated the enlistment of the men, and the adoption of children from all over the Soviet Union by Uzbek families.  A pick up truck with rows of children rolled onto the stage.  Couples embraced the children and slowly left the stage in new family groupings as a narrator recited a well-known verse with the refrain "You are not an orphan now."  The scene resonated with cultural knowledge about a blacksmith's family which had adopted children from each of the Soviet republics.  Their generosity had been commemorated by a statue and building in downtown Tashkent called Halklar Dostligi or "The People's Friendship."

Viewed together, these scenes about a Central Asian monarch and children of all nationalities seemed to say that while the Uzbek people have a great and long historical legacy of descent from Amur Timur and Genghis Khan, and of cultural and scientific achievement from the great madrasas in cities such as Samarkand, they are also generous.  From the Soviet period, people of all nationalities came to the Soviet Union, and became literally part of the Uzbek family.

The second section of the program celebrated the rich histories and cultures of the nation's provinces. Children from each province performed songs and dances representing their region.  Some of the directors and choreographers of the provincial groups were alumni of the central state-sponsored dance training and performance programs in Tashkent.  Although a few choreographers used themes such as children's games as a source of motifs, most used the vocabulary and patterns of professional national dance.  The trilogy of dance forms taught in the state choreographic school, once used to represent the three major regions of Farghana, Khorezm, and Bukhara, became a resource to portray local identities of twelve provinces.

Interestingly, after local officials viewed the dress rehearsal, the number for one province, Jizzakh, was cut.  Although I was unable to find out exactly why, murmurings among dancers suggested that the number lacked a distinct regional character.  An Uzbek friend explained that Jizzakh was a relatively new province, thus had little distinctive identity. The limited information I was able to gather about this incident suggests that the ability to claim roots to pre-Soviet times was important in establishing a regional character. Overall, the portrayals of the various provinces suggested a trend towards greater pluralism and recognition of all of the nation's geographic communities.

The third and final portion of the evening showed estradni, or popular music singers.  Some were accompanied by Uzbek dancers, using the movement motifs of classical Uzbek dance to enact the lyrics of popular songs.  Many people, both performers and non-performers, told me that estradni began in the late 1970s and was started by the group Yalla.  The music combined Uzbek folk melodies and lyrics with contemporary electronic instruments and arrangements.  Yalla had been inspired by the work of the Beatles.  When I conducted my field research in 1992 and 1994, estradni music was a staple at events and cradle parties attended by young and old, in both urban and rural regions.

The dances were as syncretic as estradni music.  They used the costumes and movement vocabulary of classical Uzbek dance to enhance the mood and lyrics of the popular songs.  Gestures were often mimetic, acting out lyrics about themes such as love, longing, and women's beauty.  For example in one number, a woman in a red traditional flowing dress and jeweled headpiece swirled and dipped using gestures from the lyrical Farghana style of classical dance.  In front of her, male and female couples on roller skates swept across the stage in arabesques, all to the accompaniment of a female vocalist in a clinging red sequined gown and a throbbing synthesizer.

To summarize, the concert was rich in images of plurality within unity and included a broader range of geographic identities than the trilogy of Farghana, Bukhara and Khorezm which dominated dance in the Soviet period.  Diversity was marked in terms of the primordial bases of kinship and geographic origin.  The third, contemporary part of the program neatly bridged past and present, Uzbek and "Western" through the hybrid genre of estradni music and dance.

Primordial and Civil Ties

The Independence Day Concert, then, appealed to what Clifford Geertz ([1963]1973:259) referred to as "primordial attachments," which he defined as the 'givens' or assumed 'givens' of social existence such as kinship, religion, language, region or custom.  Geertz contrasted communities united by primordial ties with communities united by civil affiliations.  Civil ties were characterized primarily by a "vague, intermittent and routine allegiance to a civil state, supplemented to a greater or lesser extent by governmental use of police powers and ideological exhortation (id)."  Having found primordial ties expressed on the stage, I expected to find the foundation of a twentieth century nation-state defined by two characteristics often associated with such polities:  an impartial exercise of power over a specific territory (see, e.g. Held 1983:1). More importantly, I expected to find an emphasis on civil rather than primordial ties.  My expectations were only partially met.

The Constitution

As I expected, the constitution does establish the familiar structure of a nation-state as an entity exercising power over a specified territory.  Article 3 establishes that the state frontier and the territory of Uzbekistan shall be inviolable and indivisible.

At first glance, the constitution also appears to reject primordial bases of identity and to adopt an even-handed stance towards all groups within its borders.  For example, Article 18 says “All citizens of the Republic of Uzbekistan shall have equal rights and freedoms, and shall be equal before the law, without discrimination by sex, race, nationality, language, religion, social origin, convictions, individual and social status”(emphasis added).

The thorny issues of language and nationality, however, return in provisions addressing language and minority peoples.
Article 4 provides:

The state language of the Republic of Uzbekistan shall be Uzbek. The republic of Uzbekistan shall ensure a respectful attitude toward the languages, customs, and traditions of all nationalities and ethnic groups living on its territory, and create the conditions necessary for its development (emphasis added).

To further explore the significance of primordial ties, I looked at who would be considered an "Uzbek" citizen under the new constitution.  The criteria for citizenship are particularly interesting on this point.   They demonstrate a complex interplay between the notions of jural citizenship, kinship and geography.  The constitution provides that Uzbek citizenship shall be acquired or forfeited according to statute.  The statute governing Uzbek citizenship provides two basic ways of acquiring Uzbek citizenship²:  1) Birth; or 2) Naturalization after residing in the borders of Uzbekistan for 5 years.

For a brief period after adoption of the law, expatriate individuals who could prove birth or prior permanent residence in the borders of Uzbekistan could become Uzbek citizens without having to meet the residence requirements.  The basic provisions therefore stress the territory of birth or residence as the primary basis of citizenship.

The issue of citizenship becomes more subtle, however, in provisions governing the citizenship of children.³  These sections articulate the role of kinship and territory in determining citizenship.⁴  A child's citizenship follows that of its parents.  Territory is a secondary factor which comes into play only where the citizenship of the parents is problematic.  For example, a child born outside the borders of Uzbekistan to parents who are both Uzbek citizens is an Uzbek citizen.  Where the parents citizenship is unknown or nonexistent, or a child has no parents, a child's birth or residence in the territory of Uzbekistan will determine the child's citizenship.

The Uzbek Constitution established and is based on the notion of a nation-state as an entity which exercises power over a specific territory.  It also incorporates the notion of the state as impartial, recognizing equality of all citizens as a basic norm.  The constitution, however, also establishes a new social order on the basis of primordial factors of language and nationality. It reverses the Soviet period hierarchy which made Russian the language of the elite.  It addresses the nationalities issue, by encouraging the advancement of the languages and cultures of the republic's diverse peoples.  The citizenship laws stress a third primordial factor, kinship and descent, as the primary determinant of citizenship, and refer to geographic origin when kinship is problematic.  For the constitution, the question of defining Uzbek citizenship principally devolves into an issue of blood.⁵

Conclusion

Comparing notions of "Uzbek" in the realms of the expressive arts and law,  the Independence Day concert presented a rich kaleidoscope of images appealing to history, genealogy, geographic origin as well as Uzbekistan's role as a member of the contemporary world community.  Although Constitution established the general framework of a nation-state,  the citizenship laws, however, returned to the primordial characteristic of membership --descent--as the key criterion for Uzbek citizenship.  Territorial boundaries, a fundamental aspect of a nation state, were secondary.  The Independence Day Concert expressed a wider repertoire of meanings of “Uzbek” than the Constitution.

The importance of primordial characteristics in the Uzbek Constitution and laws governing citizenship may also shed light on our understanding of the relationship between a people’s trajectory to nationhood and their constitutional models.
A member of the Uzbek intelligentsia told me that the Uzbek drafters consulted with French legal scholars.  Shortly before the Constitution was adopted, one of the drafters published an article in a local newspaper in which he interviewed Michel LeSage, a French legal scholar (Saidov 1992). LeSage noted parallels between the Uzbek and French constitutions in the organization of the executive branch.  According to press coverage, the final document therefore resulted from scrutiny of the French constitutional model.⁶

Why was the French constitutional model more appealing than, say, the United States model?  Martin Rogoff (1997:2-3,13-16), a legal scholar, says that one of the key differences between American and French constitutional law is that the American constitution is concerned with limiting the powers of government while French constitutional law focusses more on displacing a social hierarchy.  For the United States  constitutional framers, checks and balances among the executive, legislative and judicial branches were of primary concern. The French republic, on the other hand, arose out of a rebellion overturning an aristocracy.  It foregrounds the Declaration of the Rights of Man establishing a more egalitarian social order.  The French constitution establishing the framework of the government, is secondary.  To illustrate the difference between the two systems, Rogoff points out (id at 74) that the first case which might be said to involve judicial review of a legislative action arose in 1803 in the United States⁷ but did not occur in France until 1971.⁸

Taking Uzbekistan's transition to independence into account, it is possible to speculate why the French model was more attractive to the framers of the Uzbek constitution. Like the United States, Uzbekistan was part of a colonial empire.  Unlike the United States, however, Uzbekistan did not attain independence through armed conflict against an overbearing external power.  Emerging from the fall of the Soviet empire, the Uzbek government's primary aim was affirming and legitimizing a new social ordering.  Uzbekistan's route to sovereignty, and hence its constitutional preoccupations, can be seen as similar to the French example.  For the framers of the Uzbek constitution, social ordering was paramount. As an independent, "Uzbek" republic rather than a Soviet satellite. In both its arts and its laws, internal issues of plurality and unity among the residents of Uzbekistan, based on language, nationality, and geographic origin were of primary concern in building the new nation.

I would like to acknowledge generous funding from the Indiana University Skomp Fund, the Indiana University Center for Global Change and World Peace, IREX and the National Science Foundation made the research for this presentation possible.  I would also like to thank Khairulla Ismatulla and the Uzbek Consulate for their assistance.

References

Bauldauf, Ingeborg
    1991  "Some Thoughts on the Making of the Uzbek Nation,"  Cahiers du Monde russe et sovietique, XXXII(1),
              janvier-mars pp.79-96.

Bregel, Yuri
    1991  "Turko-Mongol Influences in Central Asia," Turko-Persia in Historical Perspective, edited by Robert L. Canfield.
              Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press.

Doi, Mary
    1997  “From the Heart: Marginality and Transformation in the Lives of Uzbek National Dancers 1929-1994"
              Ph.D. Dissertation.  Indiana University.

Geertz, Clifford
    [1963]1973  "The Integrative Revolution:  Primordial Sentiments and Civil Politics in the New States" in The Interpretation
               of Cultures.  Basic Books.

Held, David
    1983  "Introduction:  Central Perspectives on the Modern State" in States and Societies, edited by David Held.
              New York:  New York University Press.

Herzfeld, Michael
    1992   The Social Production of  Indifference:  Exploring the Symbolic Roots of Western Democracy.
               Chicago:  University of Chicago Press.

Ludikowski, Rett R.
     1993  "Constitution Making in the Countries of  Former Soviet Dominance:  Current Development"  Georgia Journal of
               International and Comparative Law 23(2):155-267

Rogoff, Martin A.
    1997   "A Comparison of Constitutionalism in France and the United States" Maine Law Review 49(21):21-84.

Saidov, A.
    1992  "Ozbekiston Konstitutsyasining Loyiihasi Frantsuz Hukukshunosining Nazarida"  Ozbekiston Owozi,
              December 2, pp. 1-2

Notes

1. For example, Yuri Bregel (1991:60-1) argued that the influx of tribes calling themselves "Uzbek" in the sixteenth century under Shaybani Khan was a substantial migration and not simply a change in name by peoples already resident in Central Asia. Addressing ethnonyms at the beginning of the twentieth century, Ingeborg Baldauf (1991:236) noted the contested and changing meanings of "Uzbek" as a) "descendants of the invaders from Dashti Kipchak" or b) a "Turkic speaker of Turkestan" who was not Kazakh, Kyrghyz or Turkmen.

2. Law of the Republic of Uzbekistan entitled "On Citizenship of the Republic of Uzbekistan" ("Citizenship Law"), Articles I(4), II(12) and II(17).

3. Citizenship Law Articles II (12)-(16).

4. In legal terms, the two bases are characterized as ju solis, the notion that citizenship is determined by place of birth and
jus sanguinis, citizenship following citizenship of a child's parents. Black's Law Dictionary. St.Paul: West Publishing
Company 1990.

5. Michael Herzfeld (1992:28-34) has discussed the importance of blood as a metaphor in nationalist ideology.

6. Constitutions of several other former Soviet republics selectively incorporate arrangements from constitutional models including those of France, Germany, and the United States (see e.g. Ludikowski 1993). An extended comparative analysis beyond the scope of this paper would be necesary to determine whether particular clauses of the Uzbek constitution draw on models in addition to the French. At this point,my only intention is to note the prominence of the French example in developing and publicizing the new Uzbek constitution.

7. Marbury v. Madison, 1 Cranch 137.

8. Liberte d'Association
 
 

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

  It is possible to suppose that within the rubble of post-Soviet ruination and fragmentation lie pockets of continuity; that perhaps even in the face of tumultuous social change there are deeply wrought parts of collective memory that assert and reassert themselves.  If this is the case, the rough beasts of social and cultural bricolages can take on familiar faces.  This paper explores such a supposition by looking at data that is drawn from one village in the Russian north and, more specifically, a battle for power over a single day in the yearly calendar.

I. 'Troitsa on TV'

In early June of 1995, the celebration of Troitsa was newsworthy in Russia. Along with the regular pastiche of soap operas, game shows, war movies & advertisements, there was an entire news program dedicated to this holiday.  It had two parts.  First, excerpts from a church service were featured.  Standing in one of Moscow's glorious churches, Patriarch Alexei II was seen performing the service and explaining to the congregation some of the meaning of this sublime holiday.  Candles were lit.  There was solemn religious music.  The second part of the news took us to an entirely different space.  Here, the traditional "folk" expression of the holiday was featured: there was a display of the brightly woven "traditional" clothes of the Russian peasantry from hundreds of years ago, and the celebrations of the pagan "festival of the birch tree" which was supposed to be linked to Troitsa much as how Easter is linked to Spring Equinox festivals. Indeed, on the news and other programs throughout the day, you could see slightly overaged maidens singing in idyllic nature scenes while men played balalaiki and sang along.  The TV had two contrasting focal images: church solemnity (on the one hand) and idyllic nature (on the other) where this bifurcation roughly corresponds to a widely accepted view of Russian religion: that it is marked by “dvoeverie” or two-faithededness--a kind of syncretism that allows for a back and forth between sober religiosity and near-precious folk expression.

I spent two Troitsas in the northern Russian village of Anufrievo.  I can say without hesitation that these television programs would not have prepared me for what I saw on this holiday.  Not only was there a noticeable absence of singing maidens, birch twigs and colorful get-ups, almost no one went to church on that day.  But the day was certainly celebrated. People came to Anufrievo from miles, even hundreds of miles away in order to honor this day. They came in 1995 and 1996 (when I was living there) --as they came all through the Soviet period--to their rodina and to their ancient graveyards.  They came not to sing any particular song or light any particular candle, but to remember their dead, converse with their dead,  drink and dance to them until they could drink and dance no more.  This is a real holiday with a real function.  The parts of the holiday that are in the news are the parts most irrelevant to this function.

II. The Problem of Memory and Calendar

This is not a paper about how traditions are dying. On the contrary, it is about how the deep part of memory asserts and reasserts itself even in the face of aggressive opposition; how the "powers that be"--whether represented by official religion or the state--do in fact exert their power over memory, but fail to overcome it.  Russian peasants have historically found themselves in the midst of struggles for control over collective memory--between the competing hegemonies of the church, the Soviet State, and their own village order. The festival of Troitsa--a holiday that has roots in ancient Slavic religion and one that has survived over the centuries by taking on various forms, including Orthodox and Soviet ones--is a poignant example of the degree to which these powers can battle to reign over memory, but also the degree to which they are ultimately incapable of doing so. The first aspect of this paper will be to briefly map the various expressions of the holiday of Troitsa with reference to the symbolism that defines them.  I will not use theological models, but will draw from what villagers have told me about what they in fact do and what they remember doing on Troitsa. The second aspect  will be to consider the crucial problem of competing ideologies and hegemonies in rural Russia and how, in effect, the calendar generally (and Troitsa specifically) become a crucial battleground in this fight.

There are many ways to go about demonstrating how this battle over memory is fought.  I will concentrate quite literally on the grounds of the battle, that is, on the symbolic dynamics of place.

III. Some background:

Troitsa, or The Day of the Holy Trinity, is a holiday that has indeed bounced around among several "owners".  It takes its name from the "Trinity" and in Russian Orthodoxy, it is the day that commemorates the very subtle concept of "Sophia."¹  It is no surprise, however, that the holiday has pre-Christian roots, the beginning of June (where it is situated) being such a very good time to worry about how your newly-planted crops will fare in the coming months; whether there will be enough rain or too much, whether the sun will hide itself or burn the soil.  Agricultural technology for individual farmers is largely non-mechanized in Anufrievo--particularly with regards to private plots; villagers use horses for plowing, and scythes and sickles for hay and grain harvesting.  In such a context, planting and harvesting are marked by arduous labor and guess-work where the stakes are extremely high.  Because of the notable lack of change in agricultural methods over the centuries , the tension that permeates the spring--"June tension" as it were--remains nearly as pronounced today as it in the pre-Christian centuries.

There are certainly disputes about the deeper meanings of many of the pre-Christian holidays in rural Russia.  Without getting into this debate (Propp goes over it in some detail in Russkie Agrarnye Prazdniki 1963) we can generalize that pre-Christian Troitsa is tied to spring fertility rites: specifically involving drawing land fertility from the force of the dead ancestors.  In its not-too-distant practice, it also has indeed involved certain fussing over the birch tree--on Trinity, girls from the village of Anufrievo would take birch branches  from the forest and bring them into the village.  According to literature on the subject, these branches had some link to the souls of the ancestors.  But today, in rural Russia, Troitsa is a graveyard holiday, a holiday of the dead and of the newly burgeoning soil.  More about this later.

The co-opting of this holiday by the church was no unusual feat.  In Russian Orthodoxy, as in Western Christianity, there are several sacred milestones in the calendar that are shared between paganism and Christianity--the Easter egg and the Christmas tree being easily traceable pagan vestiges in the West.

In the lifetime of the villagers of Anufrievo, the festival of the Holy Trinity was celebrated in two official ways. I begin with the description of these official observances, starting with the places where these celebrations were housed. It will be clear that the  physical placement of the holiday celebration has much to say about deeper calendrical habits.

IV.  Elbowing in. Who are the memory tamers?

A. Church

In the centuries that crawled towards this one, the Orthodox church exerted all kinds of efforts to rein in the wild pagan traditions of rural Russia--steeped, as they were,  in the precariousness of the agricultural cycle.  It had trained men as priests (sometimes against  their will) and sent them to the far-reaches of the empire; it set up monasteries; it tied itself with the Tsar and the State.  Even with these concerted efforts, the church calendar took a good six centuries to establish itself more or less in rural Russia.²  In that time, it managed to give a new face to many of the pagan holidays: Winter Solstice celebrations became Rodzhestvo and Kreshchenie; End of Winter Carnival became Maslinitsa; Spring Rites became  Easter, Troitsa, etc.  Orthodoxy, in effect,  pulled people out of the fields and forests and homes where these days had been observed before Christianity had established itself, and drew them into the confines of the church, where people were made to stand and listen and to quiet the rhythms of their song and dance.

In the distant memories of childhood, many villagers in Anufrievo remember their parish church that stood on an island in the middle of lake Borbozomskoe.  In the winter they could walk to it over ice; in the summer the boat ride there would take 10 minutes.  Baptisms took place in this church, as did regular and holiday services. Most generally, the church, was a place that villagers--over the centuries--had learned to come to in order to turn towards higher powers in the hope of receiving protection or succor.  The icons in the churches were particular conduits of grace, not only over  the suppliant, but over the church grounds itself.  There have been heated arguments  about the degree of "depth" of rural Orthodox faith.  While some philospohers claimed that all "true" Russian religiosity sprung from the souls of the peasants, others said that their beliefs were superficial at best.  Regardless of this problem, it can be reasonably assumed that the church was treated by villagers as a special space--one where invocations could be made, and one that housed particular sorts of otherworldly figures: mediating saints and a heavy handed khoziain-God.

The church on lake Borbozomskoe was destroyed in 1934.  Some of the people of Anufrievo witnessed this event--traumatic because it showed the sure and hard hand of the State working its way into even these backwoods.  It is commonly understood that the destruction of churches is an unpardonable crime against sacred space.   Even if Orthodoxy had failed to thoroughly insert its theology, it had not failed to invest its space (i.e. church) with otherworldly powers.  If the izba traditionally housed (as it still does) a domovoi (khoziain doma), and the forest housed a leshii (khoziain lesavoi), the church housed another kind of khoziain--one who could rage against you if you crossed Him.  Crimes against churches--that is, destroying the church and its icons--would curse not only the perpetrator, but his descendants.³

So if villagers only very vaguely remember actual Church ritual, they do remember a place of power that was destroyed.  The church, it can be said, is housed in the memory of these villagers as a sort of opaque symbol.  It is not filled with theological details, but is invested with otherworldly powers of a certain character.  The physical church is gone, but the idea of church space remains.  In any case, most villagers in Anufrievo have been to church only once or twice in their adult lives.  They don't understand church language and they can't recall the details of church ritual.  One young man in Anufrievo told me that he has been hesitating to visit a church for the first time in his life; that to cross the threshold of a church was "a big step."

Anufrievo does have one resident who is a regular churchgoer.  Weekly, she climbs onto a bus and rides for an hour and a half to Belozersk to get to the only active church in the region.  On Troitsa, she became one of the actors in an emerging argument over which day Troitsa should be properly celebrated.  News was wafting into the village that there was some objection to going to the graveyard on the Sunday of Troitsa: that that day should be spent in church, remembering the dead there.  On Saturday a visit to the graveyard was acceptable, but on Sunday, the dead should be left to rest ("pust' pokoiniki otdykhayut").

It appears that this is a kind of power struggle with the church, and at another level, for power over memory. In spite of the rumors of church dissatisfaction, crowds gathered at the cemetery on Troitsa, along with families and distant relatives from far away towns and cities.  No one had to be told what to do there.⁴  Clearly, the church was making some move to overcome the dominance of this well-established graveyard practice.  Rising in power now, the church is not only striving to reclaim the Russian soul for God, but to re-address other pagan practices (such as the healing/sorcery practice of koldostvo). In the region of Belozersk, religious books were on sale with titles like Do Not Participate in the Affairs of Darkness,⁵  a threatening critique of traditional sorcery.  In spite of efforts like these, most villagers today do not go to church on Troitsa.  The body can only be in one place at a time and on that June day, most village bodies make pilgrimages not to the houses of Orthodox authority, but again, to the soil that houses their dead.

B. Clubhouse (Dom Kul'tury)

Troitsa had a Soviet expression as well.  Much more recent in the memory of villagers than Troitsa church services (if not more vivid in the recollections of villagers) were the "days of the birch tree", planned by kul'trabotniki and overseen by the regional "culture" administration. Kul'trabotniki were charged with planning activities in the remote village areas, including celebrations of the new Soviet holidays, dances, plays, "agitation" of Soviet ideals and atheism, and, importantly, keeping watch over the successes and failures of the kolkhoz.  In villages, the clubhouse was the locus of all these activities: from light-spirited dances, to admonitions for poor kolkhoz returns.  A cheap, easy, symbolically poignant way of making a clubhouse was to simply lop the cupola off the top of a church, take out the icons, give the whole thing a good paint-job, add some posters about the value of labor, and perhaps a krasnyi ugolok--a "holy [red] corner" dedicated to images of Lenin. The church, the reiner-in and power-provider, was transformed into  the local house of imported Soviet Culture.

The Soviet "day of the birch tree" was described to me by a woman who had worked as the kul'trabotnitsa for over 30 years.  The birch tree, she explained, was a symbol of beauty.  On the holiday that was once Troitsa, they would bring rows of beryozki branches into the clubhouse and girls would dance under them.  They would recite poems and sing songs in praise of the birch tree. "Birches are good for the pochki (kidneys) and can clean dirty air," she added.  There was a program for children on this holiday (with events like flower-naming contests) and in the later part of the evening adults would sing and dance.

Like the church, it was partly the job of the clubhouse to literally bring people in.  Rein them in. To have them sit and listen and, once again, subject them to external judgements and authority.  Intentional or not, it also served to mix symbolic space.  It took activities (like dancing and singing) that had been traditionally performed in the open air (the fields, the forest, the graveyard) and brought them inside--placing them in a sometimes tense, administrative, space, an odd and not altogether comfortable mix.  There were practical considerations to bringing these festivals inside: when partying outside, village boys regularly waged a sort of ritualized intervillage gang-warfare.  The clubhouse was one way of keeping this violence under wrap as well.  It was relatively sterile.

The celebration of the birch tree was also pretty sterile. It was supposed to be a cheery paean to the Russian folk, and it managed to take some of the right elements (girls, birch trees, songs) but literally decontextualized them. Like the church before it, the Soviet state had rewritten the calendar and placed within it its own holy days: using the calendar as one of its demonstrations of ideological muscle.  Interestingly, where the church had turned pagan holidays into religious ones, the Soviets had subsequently taken the religious holidays and made them into pagan "lite."  The day of the birch tree could be very cute, with children reciting nature poems, but if, in fact, the pagan part this holiday was about fertility in June--just when the land is starting to feel the warmth of it powers--no play about the medicinal virtues of the birch tree would unleash this primal force.  Any symbolic power these elements had seems to have gotten lost in the translation. In the past several years, with no one to plan "the day of the birch tree," the holiday shriveled up along with trips to the church.  On the other hand, trips to the graveyard on this day, never stopped.

The celebration in the clubhouse shared with the church celebration this aspect of pulling people into controlled space.  The church packed a symbolic wallop that the clubhouse did not seem to inherit, even while often physically standing on the
same spot.

V. Deep memory:  the graveyard

The family is a deep line, a rod, a root, a rod. Ancestors must be taken care of for life to run smoothly.  This means "remembering" them on their Saints' name days and on other holidays designated for remembrance, like Troitsa.  Indeed, the Orthodox calendar is flooded with days on which the dead should be remembered.  Propp points out that the yearly ritual cycle of remembering begins at Christmas, where the family dead are remembered in the home, and culminates at the graveyard festival of Troitsa.

"Remembering" most often involves toasting the deceased and saying a few words to them.  It also means, on Troitsa, taking care of the graves of the dead and not letting them get grown over with weeds.  There is agreement that the ancestors can help or hinder your life situation, depending on how well you remember them. According to Orthodoxy, a person's soul should go "up to heaven" forty days after death (thereby exiting this human world and going into the "heavenly kingdom").  The  common beliefs include, however, the idea that the dead stay rather close to their rodina.  They are available for help, when necessary.

On Troitsa, one goes to the cemetery. One brings food and drink and materials to clean up the site of the graves of your relatives.  The family that I went with the first year brought a rybnyi pirog (fish pie), candies, some vodka, berry juice and a sickle to cut the grass around the grave.  Family plots are often fenced off with an iron gate. Inside the gate, there are grave stones, a benches and a makeshift table.  Individual families gather at their plots and sit and toast their deceased.  They report the goings on during the year, how well they worked, how family members were getting along.  This part of the Troitsa ritual establishes bonds with the members of the long, old familial line--usually the paternal line. Such bonds bring force and protection to a given family line.  They set things right for the coming agricultural cycle.⁶

If the first order of the day is remembering and caring for one's own dead, the next task is to visit the graves of others and drink to the dead of other families.  In this way, you wander from grave to grave, beckoned by families: "Come! remember my husband! Come, remember my son!"  Stories are told of life and death:  "You never knew my babushka!  She was a good woman!" Sometimes you cry at untimely deaths.  The oldest people in Anufrievo had lived through revolutions, wars, famines, political upheaval, and the physical and psychic ills that followed in the wake of these events.  Here, at the graveyard, the village can mourn its dead--but more than that, it can draw power from the dead.  As the day wears on and the graveyard rocks with drunkenness, some threshold is crossed. People go home and continue their drinking and some begin to sing and dance.  What had been wailing becomes another cri de coeur.

Near the end of the day in the graveyard, pshionaia kasha (or rice or some other grain) is scattered over the graves as it is thrown before a casket in a funeral procession.  Some villagers say that this is "just a tradition" and others say that it is so the birds who at the grain would also remember the dead.  By the logic of Propp, this is a reinforcement of the hope that life-force will be taken from the dead ancestors and placed into the earth where it can bring about life and sustenance.

As it is faithfully practiced, Troitsa indeed seems to serve two functions. First, it binds the living and the dead into a common sense of "svoi" (one's own).  A community--some of the members of which have passed to another world and have access to its forces--reestablishes itself.  After all, the first sense of rodina is not Mother Russia, but motherland⁷-- the place that gave birth to me and that houses the dead that are mine. Rodina is the place that extends to the edges of svoi.  It is the earth that houses one's own people.  Coming to the graveyard and remembering the familial and the village "rod" unifies the community and serves a second purpose as well.  It allows the living to take advantage of the force that the dead--as a collective unit--have access to. Their force can help make the soil fertile; help coax that force into the stuff of life.  And what could be more  crucial to a farmer without an irrigation system, without tractors and combines--who must watch the weather every hour of every day to out-guess its capriciousness and bring out the bounties of the land?

Troitsa is the day on which this remembering crescendos--as it is, one would hope, the time when the fertility of the land is most firmly ensured.

The point of this paper is simple.  The deeply pagan expressionof Troitsa lasted because it continues to serve a meaningful function.  It is fixed in memory for a reason.  Though not adorned with maiden song or church hymns, it has its own music: its function is crucial to the physical, social and metaphysical operations of the agricultural community.  Calendars, it can be said, are socially congealed memory; their commemorative days stand like milestones in a symbolic timescape.  In this sense, the most basic pagan expressions of this holiday form the most deeply cut pathways in the landscape of memory.  It is not without a certain irony that in spite of the Soviet state and the Orthodox church, this critical function is fulfilled at a fundamentally local level, indeed, at a brazenly local level—rendering, at this level of memory's landscape, those great powers irrelevant.

References

Clément,  Olivier
    1995   L'Eglise Orthodoxe.  Paris: Presses Universitaire de France.

Dunn, Steven and Ethel
    1967   The Peasants of Central Russia.  New York:  Hold, Rinehart and Winston.

Froianov, I. Ia. et. al.
    1991  "The Introduction of Christianity in Russia and the Pagan Traditions."  In Russian Traditional Culture,
              edited by Marjorie Balzer.  Armonk, New York: M.E. Sharpe.

Hubbs, Joanna
    1988   Mother Russia:  The Feminine Myth in Russian Culture.  Bloominton and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.

Vlasov, V.G.
    1991   The Christianization of the Russian Peasants. In Russian Traditional Culture, edited by Marjorie Balzer.
               Armonk, New York: M.E. Sharpe.

Propp, V. Ia.
    1963    Russkie Agrarnye Prazndniki. Leningrad:  University of  Leningrad Press.

Propp, V. Ia
    1974   "The Historical Bases of Some Russian Religious Festivals." in Introduction to Soviet Ethnography, edited by
               Steven P. and Ethel Dunn.  Berkeley: Highgate Road Social Science Research Station.

Ware, Timothy
    1991   The Orthodox Church.  London: Penguin Books.

Notes

The research on which this article is based was made possible by generous support from the Social Science Research Council, the International Research and Exchanges Board, and the University of Montreal.

1. Which represents the three aspects of God united in one sublime whole. Sophia here means "wisdom."

2. Froianov, I. Ia. et. al. 1991. "The Introduction of Christianity in Russia and the Pagan Traditions" in Soviet Anthropology and Archaeology. Winter 90-91, vol. 29, (3).

3. I heard several such stories in Anufrievo and its surrounding villages, where early communists participated in the destruction of local churches suffered curses on themselves (untimely deaths) and the long line of their descendants (with punishments such as sickness and, worst of all, the inability to produce heirs).

4. Unlike on Easter, which was celebrated in the clubhouse of Anufrievo for only the second time in the village's recent history. The local kul'trabotnik had taken it upon himself to prepare a presentation on the meaning of Easter, digging way back into the Old Testament for his research. Disappointingly for him, the villagers were almost singularly disinterested in his speech and much more excited about digging into the potluck food and drink they had all brought for the celebration. The point, with regards to Troitsa, is that no explanation, justification or urging is required to get this holiday going. It needs no authority. It is in the hands of the villagers themselves.

5. ne Uchastvuite v Delakh T'my (1992), Father Vitalii Osipov.

6. this argument is treated in some detail in a chapter of my dissertation entitled, "Setting Space Right: Harnessing Otherworldly Powers and Healing."

7. Formal, distant Mat'Rossiya vs. close Mama Rodina.
 
 
 

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

 “What is culture?” is potentially an irritating question.  Although I do not intend to provide a clear answer to this question in this paper, I am not asking it rhetorically.  The question “what is culture?” is rather an interrogation of the schemas that my informants and I use to understand culture.  Schemas are both representations of knowledge and information processing mechanisms (DiMaggio, 1997: 269) which are applied in the enactment and reproduction of social life (Sewell, 1992: 8).  Schemas are a way to refer both to cognition and agency, linking the way we are taught to think about our world to our ability to react and adapt to it, linking institutions with individuals.  The schemas I will be discussing in this paper refer specifically to the way people think about and produce culture, which I am using in this context to mean the arts.

In this paper I propose that there are particular ways that culture producers trained in the Soviet system think about culture, and that we can identify a set of Soviet cultural schemas which continue to influence the arts in post-Soviet societies today.
My analysis is based on a year of fieldwork in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, studying the cultural elite.  In order to understand these Soviet schemas, I also explore my own schemas of culture and contrast them with what my informants say and do as they produce culture.

Concerns about Culture in Post-Socialist Societies

One good way to begin thinking about schemas is to figure out what people take for granted as common sense versus the “points of concern” that occupy them (Laitin, 1986: chapter 5).  The back and forth process of ethnographic understanding allows us to gain some insight into what both we and our informants take for granted and what concerns us.  I will begin by discussing what concerns me.  In the next section I will outline the Soviet schema for culture and the way my common sense about culture was interrogated by my informants.

There are three main issues that concern me about culture in the post-Soviet world.  The first issue is the changing value placed on indigenous culture versus Russian or Western culture.  The second issue is the participation or marginalization of various regional and ethnic groups in public life.  The third issue is a pair of problems experienced by the cultural elites in the former Soviet Union, namely the consequences of the economic crisis and the dependence of culture producers on the state.

Even during the Soviet period, it was not the case that indigenous cultures were ignored or repressed in favor of full-scale Russification.  While Russification was the official policy as well as the common practice, indigenous arts were supported by the state and by local communities through organizations ranging from musical ensembles at the local house of culture to the world class national dance troupes of Tashkent.  When looked at from the point of view of cultural capital (Bourdieu, 1984), Russian culture clearly had more value in political and economic transactions, but indigenous culture was valued in other situations and on a different scale.  In some places like Ukraine, indigenous cultural capital is being re-valued and derussification campaigns are being waged (Wanner, 1995).  In Uzbekistan however, Uzbek cultural capital is still placed on a different scale from Western (including Russian) culture, limiting its higher value to certain situations.  For example, in the holiday theatrical spectacles that were the main focus of my research, Western culture is used to demonstrate Uzbekistan’s equality with other nations, while Uzbek culture is used to demonstrate pride in heritage.  Both are important to Uzbekistan’s cultural elites, but they serve different purposes and are evaluated differently by outsiders.

The second issue is the degree to which various regional and ethnic groups are allowed to participate in public life in the newly independent states.  The case of Russians in Estonia or Latvia is the most extreme example, but the marginalization of various groups is a problem in many places.  In Uzbekistan, the participation of ethnic groups in public life is channeled through national cultural centers which have very limited autonomy from local authorities.  The cultural expression of Russians, Tatars, Koreans and other large ethnic groups in Uzbekistan is largely limited to their own community, with the exception of festivals which feature performances of stereotypical ethnic folk culture.  In other realms some of the guarantees offered to Russians and Russian speakers by the Soviet system are no longer in effect; ethnic quota systems in education and hiring are not used and many schools are offering classes in Uzbek only.  On the other hand, the government of Uzbekistan is putting some emphasis on the development of regional identities and cultures, replicating the Soviet empire writ small within its borders.  The Ministry of Cultural Affairs is devoting time and energy to get ensembles from each region to refine the expression of their own “local color” for display in festivals locally, nationally, and internationally.

Finally, there is the problem of economics facing the cultural elite.  Nostalgia for the Soviet past is strong, especially among performers who became used to touring throughout the Union and internationally.  The money for trips abroad dried up years ago and many elites express concern that their art is suffering from lack of interchange with professionals from other countries.  The international market for cultural products from Uzbekistan is largely limited to colorful folk song and dance, which results in a marginalization of Uzbek culture to a “token” ethnic group of exotic Central Asia.  The free market, often with the help of Western funding agencies, supports a few theaters and popular musicians who blend Uzbek and Western instruments, music, and production styles, but for the most part artists in Uzbekistan continue to depend on the state.  The state puts limits on creative expression and, as during the Soviet period, encourages a great deal of kitsch.¹  The state in Uzbekistan carries on the Soviet tradition of using culture as an ideological tool, and it is this key concern of mine which leads to the clash between the Western and the Soviet cultural schemas.

What is Culture?  The Soviet Schema

Historians (e.g. Slezkine, 1994; Suny, 1993) tend to characterize Soviet nationality policies as a combination of European romantic nationalism, Russian cultural imperialism, and Soviet state centrism.  In Uzbekistan, culture producing institutions were intimately connected to Soviet nationality policies, therefore we can’t talk about the Soviet schema for culture separate from the Soviet schema for nationality.  The way that the Soviet state institutionalized culture, and therefore the schemas of culture producers today, can be broken down into four related theories:

1) A theory of the state that encompassed all aspects of public life including culture and the arts.

2) A theory of group identity: integration into the larger state is pursued through the manipulation of (usually) ethnic identity.  Each people had to have its own set of cultural institutions, each people had to have its own distinctive arts.

3) A theory of cultural development: the culture of a group evolves in accordance with the stages of the group’s socio-historical development, although change can be forced.  The development of culture is the responsibility of the state; unhealthy forms should be eliminated and healthy forms should be encouraged.

4) A theory of social engineering - the primary purpose of cultural products is the betterment of the people according to the designs of the state.

First, using data from my fieldwork I will illustrate how the elements fit together into a schema, then I will conclude by looking at the broader implications of the Soviet schema for post-Soviet cultures.  My fieldwork in 1996 focused on the multimillion dollar theatrical spectacles the government of Uzbekistan sponsors on national holidays.  The time, resources, and attention of nearly the entire artistic community of Tashkent are devoted to these bi-annual holiday performances on Navroz (the Zoroastrian spring equinox holiday) and Independence Day (September 1).  On these holidays a variety of festive activities are held throughout the country, but the main event is a 90-minute song and dance extravaganza on one of the central squares of Tashkent which is attended by thousands and watched on television by millions.  I study these spectacles not simply as texts which reflect ideas about culture, or as outcomes wholly determined by ideological dictates from the top, but as the end product of a process involving individuals and institutions (Becker, 1982). Therefore I focus mainly on the festival production process, where the struggle within the elite becomes visible.

The Theory of the State

The first element of the Soviet schema, the role of the totalizing state, is still hegemonic in Uzbekistan.  This is not an unfamiliar concept as it was the basis for most Leninist states which made all aspects of life the business of the government.  From the perspective of the Soviet cultural schema it is difficult to imagine that culture can exist without state control.  When I explained to one of my informants that the United States doesn't have a ministry of culture, the response was, "well who directs [ypravliaet] culture, then?!"  The idea that cultural institutions would direct and support themselves sounds improbable if not alarming to many Uzbek cultural elites, who fear the market more than the state.  While artists resent the state meddling in their creative affairs, the idea of the Ministry of Cultural Affairs playing an active role in the arts is rarely questioned.  For the first few years of independence, the Ministry's role shifted away from heavy-handed censorship, a positive change from the perspective of this theater director:

Before, even when we picked out a play ourselves, it was subject to approval from Moscow and locally, from those who were controlled by Moscow, and they said if we could perform it or not.  Now we ourselves chose a play, find an author, a playwright.  When a playwright brings a play to the theater, if the collective likes it we include it in our repertoire.  The dramaturg or the head of the theater goes to the Ministry of Culture and shows a certificate that his play was accepted, he comes back here and we can put on the play.  Just through his own efforts he can accomplish it all.  Before, it was different.  First they  said, "first we will have to read it and if it passes inspection, then we'll tell you if you can put it on or not.

This relative freedom may not last long, as the policy on repertoire selection has yet to be decided by the newly formed UzbekTeatr organization.  The Ministry has begun a process of re-centralization, uniting all state-run theaters, dance ensembles, and musical groups under governing organizations respectively titled UzbekTeatr, UzbekRaqs, and UzbekNavo, all under the direction of the Ministry.²  When I asked a Ministry official about this re-centralization and its effect on the independent development of the arts, he responded, "Well if the government is giving them money, then why shouldn't we have a say in what they're doing?  We have to have quality control after all.  You should see what some of the theaters in the provinces are putting on these days!  Besides, if they want to find sponsors, then let them run themselves, be our guest."  But with the state controlling most resources needed to create performance arts (venues, printing presses, bureaucratic regulations), even events with outside sponsorship find it hard to mount a production in independent Uzbekistan.

The Theory of Group Identity

The second element, a theory of group identity, is clearly illustrated by the attitude towards ethnic participation in holiday spectacles.  During the Independence Day spectacle, a group of dances is devoted every year to “Friendship of the Peoples," a familiar Soviet trope.  Here we touch again on my concern about the symbolic participation in public life of non-Uzbeks in Uzbekistan: does the friendship go beyond sharing the same stage for 10 minutes a year?  No doubt it does; people of all nationalities work together in Tashkent and since 1989 there have been relatively few inter-ethnic incidents.  Still, the Soviet schema dictates how and when nationality should be emphasized in a holiday performance.  Even though the cultural centers who were charged with the responsibility of putting together a number didn’t particularly want to devote their time and energy to the spectacle, they were more or less commanded to participate by the Organizational Committee of the holiday.

Uzbekistan's holiday performances clearly show the staying power of the Soviet definition of nationality, which set up a strict hierarchy of nations, nationalities, and peoples, along with creating objective definitive boundaries between ethnic groups.  Kyrgyz and Kazakhs, for example, are at the same level in the hierarchy as Uzbeks because they are both independent republics, while Tatars and Koreans rank a notch lower because they are among the many "peoples of Uzbekistan."  Since holiday spectacles are divided up into different thematic blocks (sets of songs, dances, and props), these differences place differently ranked ethnic groups in different blocks.  Thus, the organization of the holiday spectacle forces a distinction between ethnic groups that belong in the "friendship" block, such as Tatars and Koreans, and those that belong in the "Turkestan, our common home" block, such as Kyrgyz and Kazakhs.

The boundaries that exist in the minds of the spectacle producers showed up several times in discussions of a particular number which had elements that "didn't belong" in that block.  For example, the Sirdaryo region incorporated Kyrgyz performers in Kyrgyz costume into their original program for Independence Day, but were told by the Orgkom to "lose the Kyrgyz," who belong in the Turkistan block, not the regional block.  Even though the director of the Sirdaryo ensemble felt he was fulfilling the instructions to "express the regional character," by showing the importance in his region of citizens of Uzbekistan who happen to be ethnic Kyrgyz, this did not fit with the Orgkom's paradigm of "regional character."  Diversity is allowed in the representation of regions, but it must be intra-Uzbek diversity.  Ethnic diversity goes somewhere else.

The Theory of Cultural Development

The theory of cultural development is one of the more interesting aspects of the Soviet schema and deserves a bit of elaboration since it's not as obvious as the first two.  From this perspective, nations with more developed economies also have more developed cultures, thus Russian culture is more developed than and superior to Uzbek culture.  However, thanks to the efforts of the Soviet state to develop Uzbek culture, it now has achieved a status almost equal to Russian culture.  Uzbek culture was developed through the importation of European forms, such as ensemble dancing, which were combined with Uzbek cultural content, such as traditional dance movements (Doi 1997).

The Soviet schema for culture was not identical to Soviet cultural policies which dictated that culture be national in form, socialist in content, and international in spirit.  Rather, the schema is more of a reflection of how things actually worked in practice, where the distinctions between form and content, national and socialist, quickly dissolved.  In reality, some aspects of indigenous culture were considered progressive while other were considered unhealthy.  Thus the state encouraged the formation and performances of women's dance ensembles which combined the "healthful" expression of feminine vigor with the political agenda of combating the "unhealthy" seclusion of women in Uzbek society.

In holiday spectacles, the schema of cultural development again is expressed in the thematic blocks.  Folk costume, song, and dance are used to represent Uzbekistan's national culture as a whole, as well as the cultures of its regions and peoples.  Examples of this range from the "friendship of the peoples" block mentioned earlier to the patriotic pop songs done with a smattering of folk instruments among synthesizers and electric drums, accompanying dancing girls in modern-styled national costume.  Contrast these blocks with the "military," "sport," and "international" blocks of the Independence Day spectacle, which feature largely European clothing, music, and styles of movement.  Military uniforms, gymnastic moves, and Tchaikovsky are used to show Uzbekistan's place in the world, while silk dresses, delicate hand movements, and national instruments indicate a particularly Uzbek identity.  I never heard a member of the cultural elite referring to these national forms as primitive, probably since during the Soviet period they saw these forms "developing," thanks to state patronage.  On the other hand, the tastes of the elite for the Soviet versions of these developed arts over their earlier versions indicates that the schema of cultural development is still in place.

This split between the folk/ethnic and the national/international is also present in the different themes of the spectacles Navroz and Independence Day.  Both are valued by the Uzbek elite, but different kinds of culture are clearly put to different uses.  As one choreographer said:

I'm not conservative, but Navruz is a folk festival so it should have more national music and instruments.   We don't need orchestras, even orchestras of national instruments.  It  should be pure folk.  Independence Day is an entirely different matter.  During Independence Day we should show what we have gained in the past year.  In  agriculture, in sports, culture, military technology, art, literature, etc.   There we should say, here's what we are Uzbekistan.  Orchestral music is also part of our achievements, classical ballet is an achievement, our young military men, these are our achievements but they don't belong
in Navruz.

Authenticity and purity in Uzbek cultural forms wasn't of interest to many of the people I interviewed.  In general, the feeling among my interviewees seemed to be that there was something of a renewal taking place that didn't involve bringing back "authentic" culture from the past, but rather gave the freedom to express some of what had been repressed during the Soviet period, and the opportunity to do more of what had been allowed during the Soviet period.  The revival of traditional Uzbek culture is considered a healthy form of development today, as is continued state support of Western cultural forms.  Some parts of traditional Uzbek culture are still considered unhealthy, however, such as anything that might be labeled "religious extremism."  It is also taboo to explore criticism of the present government or to present too complicated a picture of the new national heroes of Uzbekistan such as Amir Timur or the writer Fitrat.³  People talked of building a new Uzbek cultural "arsenal" which would differ from Soviet cultural repertoires, but since all of this is channeled through official government organs, a great deal of institutional inertia and continuity with the Soviet period is to be expected.

The Theory of Social Engineering

According to Soviet specialists, holidays were ideal as a pedagogical tool because they appealed to people of all cultural levels while at the same time lifting all of them to a higher level.  Holidays, therefore, couldn't be just for fun; they had to serve as a means to self-improvement and enlightenment  (Genkin, 1975).  This aspect of the Soviet cultural schema ties up the other three nicely, as we can see using the case of Uzbekistan's national holidays.  The state is in charge of producing the holiday spectacles with the goals of defining national identities (especially Uzbek identity), of developing culture through the forum of the spectacle which brings progressive ideas to the public, and of guiding the people in a way that serves the state.
 As the quote above about showing off the achievements of Uzbekistan shows, the spectacles on Navroz and Independence Day aren't just for fun and entertainment.  Independence Day is playing a role in building a national patriotic identity, and Navroz is seen as a way to educate the people, especially youth, about their forgotten traditions.  These functions of national holidays can be seen in any country, but in Uzbekistan they express not just through their themes but through their very organization a particularly Soviet approach to the social utility of the arts.  When I asked one of the spectacle directors what his goals were for the holiday, he said:

First and foremost, it is Navruz's job to mobilize people to work.  There are several crops that Uzbekistan now grows in sufficient quantity to meet  its own needs.  And even from ancient times, people had this festival  to get ready for the great task ahead.  So that's the main goal of the festival, to help people get ready to work.  The second goal is to illustrate our myths.  Art always draws on life, and therefore through imagery and symbolism, through the media of dance, music, and art, creates [words unclear]  Therefore it also aids the development of the arts, especially ethnic arts.

Another example that shows how the organization of holidays functions as a form of social engineering comes from the way Tashkent elites perpetuate a process of cultural objectification taught to them by the Soviets.  During the Soviet period, experts on folk culture created new, "national" forms of dance and music by sampling and adapting regional forms for European style public performance.⁴  As one choreographer put it:

What the Soviet choreographer would do was to make the dancers face the audience: 'raise your head!' they would say, 'it looks better that way.'  They cleaned up the movements, standardized them...The Soviets would want them to throw back their shoulders, or something, so that it's no longer the way the people would do it at home, but for the audience.  They thought it looked better that way, and now that's how everyone does it because that's how they've seen it done.

Today the same process showed up in the preparation for the "regions" blocks in the Navroz and Independence Day spectacles.  Uzbekistan has 12 provinces (viloyati) and an "autonomous region" inhabited largely by the Karakalpaks, who are considered a distinct nationality separate from the Uzbeks but are included in the "regions" block because their "native territory" is within the borders of Uzbekistan.  These provinces are administrative districts that don't always coincide with ethno-cultural differentiation, but in some cases it seems that drawing administrative boundaries encouraged regional differentiation.  This is certainly true today, with pressure coming from the holiday organizers to have each region express its own character.  These regional differences are of great importance to the producers of Uzbekistan's holiday spectacles.  One of the main conflicts between the performers and the organizers of the regions block was that of insufficient differentiation among the regions.  Many of the people involved in holiday production complained that the regional ensembles didn't turn out different enough from each other.

They didn't express the range of cultures in Uzbekistan and the show ended up being monotonic.  We need to work on differentiating our dances, for example, to work on the development of our arts. Even the professional collectives have become similar to each other.  They should each develop their own style.  We should have competitions, etc. maybe we need to have a symposium for choreographers to fix this.  One collective should have a Bukharan flavor and another should have a Khorezm flavor.  But of course the very basis of all of this should be folk art.

The basis may have been folk art, but in the end the art of the people gets transformed into the Tashkenters' vision of what real regional folk culture should look like.  The directors of the regional ensembles had been given instructions to prepare material that reflected the region's unique characteristics as well as that region's achievements of the last five years, but their ideas, such as singing about the region's sweet melons, were laughed at by the cultural and political elites in charge of the spectacle.  In the end it didn't matter what the natives thought was significant about their region, but what the Tashkent organizers thought would be emblematic and glitzy.  Yet after imposing conformity to the top-down definition, the organizers complained that the regions' performances turned out too similar, that they failed to express their own regional flavor.  This example ties together all the elements of the Soviet schema, and brings me back to my concerns about state control and participation in culture.

Conclusion: Soviet Schemas and Post-Soviet Cultures

Now I'd like to come back to my points of concern, the things that, to me, aren't commonsensical about cultural production in Uzbekistan.  The four aspects of the Soviet schema of culture I just outlined stand out for me because of the concerns I raised earlier: the evaluation Uzbek culture in its role as a resource for renewal and a basis for identity, the role of non-Uzbek and regionally distinctive groups in forging a multi-ethnic national identity, and the combination of economic pressures and continued control by the state.  These concerns were prompted by what I saw, and in turn led me to formulate a systematic understanding of the schemas employed by Uzbekistan's cultural elites.  This is why I have been discussing the Soviet cultural schema in conjunction with my own understandings and assumptions: the analysis of the former is dependent on the latter.  My concern over the Russification of Uzbek culture probably stems from the part of my schema that says cultures can't be ranked in terms of development; that pluralism is good and no one should be forced to adopt alien cultural practices in order to improve their life chances.  My concern over the participation of different groups in public life is related to my understanding of the benefits of a lively and diverse civil society, and my mistrust of nationalist ideologies.  My concern over the economic and political pressures is related to my contradictory impulses to resist the intrusion of the forces of capitalism into Uzbekistan while at the same time believing that state control stifled healthy creative expression and produces bad art.

The most striking difference between the two schemas is the relationship between culture and politics.  While I found ways to translate my ideas about pluralism and market forces into ideas my informants could understand, my distrust of the state in its role of directing culture was something most of my informants couldn't understand.  However, a few people in Tashkent share my concerns about state-run culture, and they are concerned for the same reasons as I am.  The role of the state in cultural production isn't just a concern from a creative point of view, but also from the point of view of civil society, as Goldfarb (1980) has shown.  Mark Vayl (1998) writes about his experimental youth theater, the Ilkhom, serving in the 1970's as a forum for the development of independent ideas, a space for the formation of opinions not directly dictated by the government.  Any organization that brings people together to solve problems, be it a theater or an organization for women entrepreneurs, serves to build civil society.  This process is hindered greatly, however, when the state is unwilling to relinquish its control over any sector of society, as seems to be the case in Uzbekistan today.

References

Abdurahimov, Bahodir
    1998   “Madaniiatga Investitsiia Jalb Etish [Attracting Investment in Culture].” Gulistan :5-7.

Becker, Howard
    1982   Art Worlds. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Bourdieu, Pierre
    1984   Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.

DiMaggio, Paul
    1997   “Culture and Cognition.” Annual Review of Sociology 23:263-87.

Doi, Mary Margaret
    1997   “From the Heart: Marginality and Transformation in the Lives of Uzbek National Dancers, 1929-1994.”
               Ph.D. Dissertation, Indiana University.

Genkin, D. M
    1975   Massovye Prazdniki. Moscow: Enlightenment.

Goldfarb, Jeffrey C.
    1980   The persistence of freedom : the sociological implications of___Polish student theater. Boulder: Westview Press.

Laitin, David
    1986   Hegemony and Culture: Politics and Religious Change among the Yoruba. Chicago & London:
               University of Chicago Press.

Sewell, William
    1992   “A Theory of Structure: Duality, Agency, and Transformation.” American Journal of Sociology 98.

Slezkine, Yuri
    1994   From Savages to Citizens: Russia and the Small Peoples of the North. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Suny, Ronald Grigor
    1993   Revenge of the Past: Nationalism, Revolution and the Collapse of the Soviet Union. Stanford: Stanford U. Press.

Vayl', Mark
    1998   “Paradoksy o Teatre i Obshchestvennom Mnenii [Paradoxes of Theater and Public Opinion].” Ijtimoiy
               Fikr/ Obshchest-vennoe Mnenie/Public Opinion 1:96-98.

Wanner, Catherine
    1995    “Educational Practices and the Making of National Identity in Post-Soviet Ukraine.”
               Anthropology of East Europe Review 13/2.

Notes

1. On the relationship between state-sponsored mass culture and kitsch, see Boym 1994, especially p. 16.

2. For information on this reorganization proces, see Bahodir Abdurahimov, "Madaniiatga Investitsia Jalb Etish [Attracting Investment in Culture]," Gulistan 1/1998 pp.5-7.

3. See the criticism of various scholars from Uzbekistan and elsewhere in Ozbekiston Adabiyoti va San'ati, 24/3409, June 13, 1997.

4. Mary Doi in her dissertation (1997) on dancers in Uzbekistan found that this process of experts and professionals defining regional cultures goes back to the very beginning of the development of Soviet Uzbek culture. She also found that this resulted in a standardization and homogenization of dance styles.
 
 

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

Introduction

 The political consequences of the breakup of the Soviet Union have been subject of interest and scrutiny by the outside world since it happened in 1991. A very important area that was deeply affected by the collapse of the communist regime - and yet has not received much attention - is artistic and cultural activities.

A unique outlook provided the basis for the development of a comprehensive system of artistic and cultural activities throughout the Soviet Union.  An important feature of the system was its uniformity, with similar institutions in each republic and central control from Moscow.  This was because of the importance placed on art and culture in Marxist-Leninist doctrine, which sought to discard the  “undesirable” elements conducive to bourgeois proclivities and behavior.  The doctrine called for an overwhelming role by the state in guiding cultural activities; hence, the necessity to have a uniform and comprehensive cultural policy. During seventy years of communist rule, an elaborate system was created with its own institutions to centrally manage, support, and direct art and culture in the Soviet empire.

With varying degrees, art and culture have become freed from the obligation to serve the state ideology.  Moscow’s central control and support has also vanished, but the system with its institutions continues to operate in  the newly independent states. So do the norms, values, definition and purpose of art, as defined under the Soviet system; they will live on until they are gradually replaced. The absence of Moscow’s central control and support, along with economic difficulties has disrupted artistic and cultural activities in many of the newly independent states. This has been especially true in the newly independent states of Central Asia.  As these republics are trying to come to terms with their new status as independent nation-states, they have to address the question of art and culture and its place in their new societies.

This paper takes a look at the institutions that support artistic and cultural activities, training, promotion, budgeting, and policy making in the five republics of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan. It is a report on the status of art and culture in post-Soviet Central Asia. This study started in 1992 and is based on over one hundred interviews with officials, musicians, dancers, writers, and singers, as well as visits to centers of art and culture in  the republics of Central Asia (excluding Uzbekistan). As similar institutions exist in each republic, of each category only one is discussed. Thus, a conservatory of music in Kazakhstan, a typical house of culture in Kyrgyzstan, and the writers association in Turkmenistan etc. are dealt with in some detail. In the end an attempt will be made to foresee where art and culture are heading in these countries.

Under the Soviets, state support was universal, covering both indigenous and Western art and culture.  Western classical music, opera, ballet, theater, and cinema were introduced  to the region in the 1930s.  Students were sent to conservatories in Moscow, Leningrad, and Kiev.  Others were trained under Russian masters in their own republics.  Indigenous art and culture, too,  received attention;  systematic study of folklore was undertaken and  traditional songs and dances were recorded and performed professionally.  Russian choreography was incorporated into traditional dances, and elements of Western music, such as orchestration and harmonization, were introduced into the traditional music.

There was one exception: religious art was forcefully opposed.  Thus, calligraphy, Islamic architecture, and the maintenance of historical  monuments of religious significance suffered tremendously.  Furthermore, the changing of the alphabet to Cyrillic in the 1930s dealt a severe blow to the languages and literatures of the Central Asian peoples, bringing about the eventual weakening of those languages.

Artists as the Elite in Society

The Soviets defined specific criteria for artistic and cultural activities.  Within this framework, professional artists enjoyed a privileged life.  The State - the sole patron of art  -  commissioned their work and rewarded them liberally with bonuses, vacations in seaside resorts and trips throughout the Soviet Union and abroad. A very important feature of the system was the job security granted to artists, freeing them from anxieties concerning unemployment and the retirement years.

Accomplished artists were granted honorary titles.   In addition to prestige, the titles brought them extra pay and privileges.  The honorary titles were as follows:

With the breakup of  the Soviet Union the third category lost its raison d’être, but the other titles are still granted to meritorious artists.  The procedure is as follows:  Each year, artistic groups (orchestras, theaters, etc.) nominate one or more of their members.   Upon approval of  the Artists’ Association, the nominations go to the ministry of culture.  The ministry in turn introduces the nominee(s) to the office of the president that confers the honors.  There is a similar system for honoring accomplished writers and poets.

The Elder Brother Mentality

The state acted as the “elder brother” and provided for  the community. With the collapse of the Soviet Union that support has disappeared. Concert tours and exchanges of singers, dancers, and writers, traditionally organized through financial support from Moscow, are a thing of the past.  The political leadership in the newly independent states of Central Asia is left with the responsibility of managing artistic and cultural affairs in their countries.  The infrastructure is there,  so are the managerial skills needed for the task, but the absence of central coordination and diminishing financial support has had a negative effect on the artistic community.   Of the more than one hundred individuals interviewed in the course of this study, everyone believed in the necessity of the state’s dominant role as the “elder brother.”   While the community has welcomed the changes brought about by the breakup of the Soviet Union, it has been deeply disappointed with  the disappearance of the security and support which used to be offered by Moscow.  A sense of nostalgia for the “good old days” is all too obvious.

The Transition to A Market Economy

The deterioration of artistic and cultural life is not caused by the absence of Moscow’s role alone.  The transition to a capitalist economy and free market system has exacerbated the situation.  In most of the newly independent states the economy is in shambles.  Industrial and agricultural production have dropped, inflation is rapidly eating away the purchasing power of the public, and unemployment is rising at an alarming pace.   This has resulted in the depletion of the resources that the new governments have at their disposal.  Governmental commitment to supporting art and culture has not changed, but it can hardly match what Moscow had to offer in terms of financial resources.

The transition to the market system has seriously affected art and culture in another way as well.  The “elder brother” mentality and the total lack of experience in operating within the market system on the part of the government officials, artists, and the public as a whole, have left the artists and the writers in a state of confusion.  An example will illustrate the problem.  Under the Soviet system the state commissioned writers to produce books according to the guidelines provided.  A writer would thus be asked to write a novel in a kolkhoz setting, glorifying the working spirit of the local community.  He would be allowed to stay in a “production house” (a seaside villa on the Caspian, for instance) while working on the book.  Like others, he was an employee of the state and  would receive a guaranteed monthly salary.  In addition, he would receive a bonus for writing a good novel.  He would use his time and talent to complete the project.  Once he submitted the manuscript, he needed not worry about printing, publishing, and distributing the book.  Upon approval of his work by the Writers’ Union (a powerful arm of the state), the Union handled the rest of the work.  Throughout, market considerations were irrelevant.   Books would be sent to officials and government agencies in large numbers and go on sale to the public at heavily subsidized prices.

Today, in most cases the state no longer commissions work.  Writers have to decide the topic and the content of their books.  Since publication and distribution of books are no longer automatic, they have to know what the public wants and is willing to pay for.  In the absence of a market mechanism this is not possible.  The publisher is equally in the dark about the market and does not know whether the book would sell.  The high cost of paper, imported with hard currency, and other printing expenses is an added obstacle.  Yet another problem is the dwindling purchasing power of the public.  The economic crisis that has ensued since the breakup of the Soviet Union has forced the people to seek second jobs in order to make ends meet.  They are left with an income that is spent on essential commodities alone,  and with  little leisure time to indulge in reading.

The Talent Drain

An unfortunate outcome of the political upheavals and the economic crisis in Central Asia has been a sudden wave of emigration of artists from the region to Russia, Europe, and Israel, especially among Russians, Germans, and Jewish citizens of the republics.  Western genres of art have suffered most.  Thus, Central Asia has lost its best artistic talents to the outside world at a time when they are needed most.   Dwindling income, concerns about job security, fear of discrimination, and uncertainty about the future have been mainly responsible for the emigration.  The lure of a better life in the West as perceived in Western films has further expedited the flow of emigration.   In Tajikistan, the talent drain has reached tragic proportions.   The civil war has almost totally eliminated certain genres of artistic expression while seriously undermining others.

The Major Institutions of Art and Culture

Artistic and cultural activities take place in various institutions, the most important of which are the filarmoni, the state radio and television, the houses of culture, the artists’ and writers’ associations, academies of science, public libraries, and museums.  The ministry of culture and the executive committees in each town and village are responsible for the administration of such activities at the macro and micro levels, respectively.

Ministry of Culture

The ministry of culture is the most important institution involved in artistic and cultural activities.  It is responsible for planning, budgeting, administration, and coordination of all such activities.  Because of the absence of the private sector, the ministry is the main employer of artists.   Since independence, certain activities in the private sector have begun in some republics.  This is by no means the norm, however, and such activities will continue to be in state hands for a long time to come.  There are amateur musicians, dancers, and artists in villages and small towns, but even their activities are facilitated and supported by the state.  Before independence, ministries in each republic acted as branches of the ministry of culture of the Soviet Union.  Most planning, budgeting and coordination was done in Moscow, but since then, these responsibilities have been taken over by the ministry of culture in each republic.  Independence has almost eliminated the coordination between the republics.
The ministry has various directorate generals and departments charged with overseeing and administration of a wide range of activities.  Typically the ministry of culture has departments in charge of people’s productions (handicrafts, and traditional arts produced in small towns and villages), museums and public libraries, amusement parks, orchestras, and dance groups.

State Filarmoni

The state filarmoni is a unique institution found in all the independent republics. It houses various orchestras, music ensembles, and dance groups - both traditional and Western.  It is the main center for performing art.  Typically, the filarmoni is situated in a majestic building in the capital, and has facilities for rehearsal and performance of art.

State Radio and Television

The state radio and television occupied a critical position in the Soviet Union.  It was an invaluable tool at the hands of the state in shaping public opinion and influencing people’s culture.  It remains an important institution in the newly independent states.  In most republics the state radio and television has its own orchestras and dance groups, which occasionally perform live concerts.  Because of the importance attached to this institution, the state radio and television has always been independent of the ministry of culture, being directly under the supreme council and receiving its budget from the military and communications establishments.  The president of the state radio and television has had the status of a minister.   With the rapid improvement in communications technology and the expansion of the global satellite network, the electronic media are assuming an even greater role in influencing culture.

Since independence, private stations have been granted licenses to operate in the republics of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Turkmenistan.  As private enterprises these stations carry commercial advertisements promoting mainly consumer goods.  A good portion of their programming is filled with commercially produced Western films; quality programs reflecting Western high culture are rarely aired.  As such, the private television stations have virtually become important tools in promoting consumerism and a restricted aspect of Western culture.

Academies of Science and State Universities

Academies carry out research in various fields whereas state universities are primarily responsible for education.

Artists’ and Writers’ Association

These associations were in effect part of the government, playing a critical role in regulating the activities and lives of the artistic and literary community.  The associations’ dual role as both advocate of the literary and the artistic community and as the state’s censoring agency has been particularly interesting.   In the post-Soviet era each independent republic’s  association remains an important institution.

Houses of Culture

Houses of  Culture were the cornerstone of Soviet cultural policy.  They were founded in every town and village as centers for social gathering and meeting, where state-sponsored activities could take place.  Houses of culture vary in size and in terms of the facilities they offer.  A house of culture has one or more auditoriums for amateur performers, meeting room(s), a vocational training center, and a library.  In the villages, amateur actors and musicians can borrow costumes and musical instruments during their performance at the house.

The Ministry of Culture in Tajikistan

As in other Central Asian republics, the ministry of culture is in charge of supervision and management of most cultural activities.  Professional theaters, ballets, operas, orchestras, libraries, museums, amusement parks, archeological institutions, as well as provincial amateur cultural centers are all under the authority of the ministry.  The ministry has separate departments that include the Bureau for Preservation of Historic and Cultural Monuments, and “the Center for People’s Productions” (handicrafts, artworks, music, etc.).  The ministry of culture also owns manufacturing enterprises and workshops, one of which produces musical instruments.

The Center for People’s Productions

This was part of an organization based in Moscow with nine branches throughout the Soviet Union.  In Tajikistan, it was turned into the Center for People’s Productions. The center, which primarily has a consultative and supportive role, only deals with amateur activities.  It has three departments.

The Department of Cultural and Recreational  Activities.
The Department of People’s Handicrafts and Artistic Activities.
The Publication Department.

The Department of Cultural and Recreational Activities is in charge of amusement parks.  This includes managing recreational facilities and holding festivals in the parks.  These parks are typically managed by the executive committees of the municipalities.  The Department of Handicrafts and Artistic Activities has four branches:  music, dance, theatrical activities (circus, traditional theaters, and narration of folk stories), and graphic arts (painting, photography, design, etc.).

The center is involved in a wide range of activities.  It sends experts to provinces and regions in this mountainous country to tape local tunes and dances.  These tapes are studied and analyzed at the center.  Based on these, it publishes educational literature on local customs, music, and dances, and makes it available to other interested amateur musicians, dancers, and artists.  These publications have almost completely stopped because of lack of money.

The center has a working relationship with the Academy and the School of Fine Arts in Dushanbe.  They  hold joint seminars for directors of the houses of culture. The autonomous region of Badakhshan has an independent center.  The center oversees, and is in contact with, houses of culture in all fifteen regions and provinces in the country, but it does not have branches in them.

The Cultural Foundation of Tajikistan

The Cultural foundation of Tajikistan was created on 11/28/86 along with similar foundations throughout the Soviet Union in the Gorbachev era.  This was the brainchild of academician Likhachev.  The foundation has a board of directors whose members are chosen from among prominent academicians and governors.  As a creation of the Gorbachev era, the foundation is independent of the state.  Its budget comes through activities like organizing lotteries, selling books, and showing films. The foundation is a non-political establishment whose goal is the promotion of cultural activities.  In spite of its small size, the foundation has already done a formidable job.

Theater in Tajikistan

Theater came to Tajikistan in the late 1920s.  The first state theater group was founded in 1929 in Dushanbe.  Today there are eleven state theater groups in the country. Theater artists used to have a tenure for life and enjoyed all the benefits granted to the artistic community.  Things have changed drastically since then.

Aharun Theater Group

During perestroika artistic activities blossomed.  In those years a number of independent theater groups started operation, but only one, Aharun, has survived.  Despite the determination and hard work of the group, even Aharun’s continued operation is in doubt.

The group was founded in 1988 in Dushanbe.  “Independent” is a misnomer since even Aharun receives 60% of its budget from the municipality of Dushanbe.  The group earns the other 40% itself, through selling tickets and other means such as donations.  The disastrous economic situation resulting from the civil war has caused a serious reduction in both sources.  The worsening economic situation is not the only problem.  Lack of security on the streets and the nighttime curfew  force people to rush to their homes after work, leaving them no time to spend in theaters.

All members of the group are graduates of reputable schools of the former Soviet Union.  Unlike state theater groups, Aharun signs one-year contracts with its new employees, and renewal of the contracts are not automatic.  Unless outside help comes to the rescue, Aharun will meet the same fate as that of the other independent groups.

Folklore Studies in Tajikistan

Folklore studies have a special place in Tajikistan.  These studies have traditionally been carried out at the Rudaki Institute of Language and Literature in the Academy of Sciences.  The institute has a department that conducts research in the field.  The eight researchers of the institute go out to the villages and towns three months a year and make recordings.  They do not restrict their studies to Tajikistan.  All areas with Tajik population are covered.  In fact, a large part of their research has been among the large population of Tajiks in Uzbekistan. (Though officially registered as Uzbeks, the majority of the residents of the cities of Samarkand, Bukhara, and the villages in that area of Uzbekistan are Tajik.  In fact, the number of Tajiks in Uzbekistan is apparently higher than those in Tajikistan).

Behzad Museum of Art and History in Dushanbe

Founded in 1934, the Behzad Museum of Art and History in Dushanbe is Tajikistan’s most important museum.  The  museum building is one of Dushanbe’s architectural  highlights, but the contents of the museum do not live up to its facade.  As all museums in the capitals of the former Soviet republics, it has a section on natural history, a section on the history of the republic as interpreted by the standard socialist view promulgated by Moscow, and a section on art collections.  There are 57,000 items on display at the museum.  Aside from stone and wildlife samples of the region, few original artworks are actually on display in the Behzad Museum.  They are mostly replicas, the originals being kept in the museums in Moscow, Leningrad,
or Tashkent.

Almaty Kurmangazy State Conservatory in Kazakhstan

Almaty State Conservatory is one of the best conservatories in  the CIS. Founded in 1944, it celebrated its 50th anniversary in October 1994.

Applicants to the conservatory typically come from music schools.  These are four-year institutions that are found in provinces across the country.  Admittance is highly competitive and is adminstered through annual entrance examinations.  The students entering the conservatory, therefore, already have a knowledge of theory and experience in playing a musical instrument.  A group of applicants sign up in the school without taking the entrance examination.  These come from  among the staff of state institutions and music schools.  They are sent by their employers, who pay for their education, for training or acquiring special skills.  The conservatory admits another category of  students as well.  These are “people’s artists” from villages who have not had any formal music education, and who nevertheless exhibit outstanding talent.  The school offers a special two-year preparatory program for these students.

The conservatory has 850 students, 250 of which are signed up in the People’s Music program.  The ethnic composition of the students has undergone a drastic change.  Whereas previously  the Russians from all over the Soviet Union made up the majority of the students, today they are mainly Kazakhs.  Students from neighboring republics like Kyrgyzstan, and other countries such as China, South Korea, and Mozambique have also been admitted at the request of their governments.  The conservatory has lost a large number of its talented staff since independence.  They were mainly Russians, Germans, and Jews who migrated to Russia, Germany, and Israel. The brightest graduates of Kazakhstan’s music conservatory are lured to Moscow, Saint Petersburg, and  the West for better pay and more promising careers.

This is the only music conservatory in the republic of Kazakhstan. Almaty Kurmangazy State Conservatory, itself, is going through very hard times.  The budget barely covers staff salaries and the student scholarships.  No money is left for the maintenance of the present facilities, growth of the institution, oversees tours, or even sending of the staff abroad for
further training.

National Film Company of Kazakhstan

As in the rest of Central Asia, cinema came to Kazakhstan in 1940s.  Because of the War, the film industry in Moscow moved eastward.  A number of outstanding Kazakh actors and directors emerged as a result.  Cinema, like  other art forms, has been financed by the government.  During perestroika, private studios were permitted to operate.  Today, there are twenty five private studios in Kazakhstan.  Kazakh Film is a government owned film company.  Because of financial difficulties there are plans to turn it into a public company.

The National Film Company acts as a de facto ministry of cinema.  It has 17000 employees and branches in the nineteen provinces of the republic.  It produces films and  manages and regulates the industry.  The company created a committee to receive proposals from film-makers.   Those that are approved by the committee will receive financial support  and other necessary facilities.

Previously, the entire budget would be supplied by the state, while today the government has a supporting role.  Additional funds should come from elsewhere.  Various ways of acquiring funds from alternative sources are under study.  One such alternative tried by the National Film Company is joint ventures with foreign film companies.  Joint projects with the French and with the Russians have been undertaken.  Funding remains a major problem.

The House of Culture in Tukmuk, Kyrgyzstan

Tukmuk is an industrial town whose population is 70% Russian.  The House of Culture in Tukmuk has an auditorium with a capacity of 540 persons, a library, a ballroom, a smaller auditorium, a discotheque, a barber’s shop, and additional space for miscellaneous activities.  The smaller auditorium is reserved for amateur musicians and dancers who perform for local audiences.  For performances, the house also provides them with musical instruments and costumes.  Two amateur people’s theater groups are permanently housed there - one Russian and one Kyrgyz.  The house also has a senior citizens’ chorus and an amateur contemporary band that performs Russian folk songs.

Almost all of the town’s social activities and gatherings take place here.  On the average every two to three days there is an event held in the house. The house of culture also offers vocational training courses, such as typing and sewing, for the public at a fee.  These classes used to be free.

The house of culture in Tukmuk, as all houses of culture, receives its budget from the state.  Since the introduction of perestroika, it has been allowed to charge for its services and earn supplementary income.  Forty two people work full-time in the house.  This includes everyone from the doorman to the director.  There is a membership fee, half of which goes for subsidizing the classes offered by the house.

Opera and Ballet in Kyrgyzstan

As in other Central Asian republics, opera and ballet were introduced by the Russians.  After more than half a century, many Kyrgyz artists have joined the field.  However, compared to other genres of music and art, opera and ballet have the highest percentage of Russians and Germans in them.  The official emphasis on Kyrgyz culture since independence has cast a shadow of uncertainty over the future of the Russian community.  This uncertainty, coupled with diminishing financial support for artistic activities, has lured the best and most promising ballet and opera stars - many of whom are Russian - to Moscow or Western countries.  Despite that, opera and ballet have maintained their place among Kyrgyzstan’s art and culture.  The most prominent opera ballet theater is the one in Bishkek.  Meldobaev State Opera Ballet Theater was founded in 1937 and is thus one of the oldest cultural institutions in Kyrgyzstan.  It has five hundred employees, eighty of whom are ballet dancers.

State Radio and Television Company of Kyrgyzstan

The head of the company, who is designated by the president, has the ranking of a minister and takes part in cabinet meetings when necessary.  The company has offices in the capitals of all the six provinces of the country.  There are various departments in the company.  These include information, economics, social affairs, children’s, youth, music, and international relations departments.  Twelve hundred people work for the company, 570 of whom are artists, singers, dancers, and musicians. The State Television Company also airs films produced by Telefilm, a government owned company that produces films for the state television.  It, too, is facing severe financial difficulties.

The National Library of Kyrgyzstan

The Library is sixty years old. There are fifty four libraries in the provinces and twelve hundred in the villages. They are all part of a network of libraries in the country.  The National Library does not belong to the network.  Before independence, it too belonged to the Soviet system of libraries centered in Moscow, which included all the libraries, large and small, in the empire.   Every library had a contract with the central book distributing agency, according to which books published in Moscow would be received by the libraries throughout the Soviet Union.  That system is no longer in operation.  The government has ordered that a copy of every book published in the country to be sent to the National Library. The library also purchases books
on its own.

The library is under the ministry of culture and receives its budget from there. The purchasing power of the library has been reduced considerably. Whereas previously 150,000 books were received annually, today the figure is only ten to fifteen thousand.  The library is not a specialized one, but rather a general library carrying books in all different fields.  It holds over 5,000,000 titles.

Membership used to be free, but today there is a nominal fee.  University students, researchers, and the general public are the patrons of the Library.  Scholars from scientific and research institutions constituted up to 70% of the members.  But today most of the members are students. Books are loaned out to researchers and scholars for up to twenty five days.  Up to ten books can be loaned to each individual, but students can not borrow books for reading outside of the library.

The Writers’ Association of Turkmenistan

The association had various bureaus, including short stories, poetry, translation, and a bureau that was responsible for approving membership of new applicants.  The latter has been eliminated.  In fact, since independence, the Writers’ Association has lost almost all of its power and prerogatives. There is a fund to which each member contributes, and which  helps retired members.  The association owns a resort in the town of Firuza for members and their family.  Both the fund and the resort existed under the Soviet regime.  The association has two hundred members.  Young poets and writers are not members of the association. Only those who have established themselves in the writers’ community, and have published at least one book, are admitted.

Books that are approved are handed over to the Government Publication Bureau.  The bureau takes orders from provinces and decides the number of copies that will be printed.  Writers can publish their works independently, but it would cost a lot and is beyond the means of most members.  The shortage of paper, and obsolete printing facilities, is a problem.  The association’s magazine, Diyar, is printed in Turkey for better quality.

The Institute for Preservation of Manuscripts in Turkmenistan

The restrictive policies of the Communist Party in the 1920s on books written in Arabic - especially those considered to be religious - resulted in the burning and burying of thousands of valuable manuscripts.  Since independence an institute has been created for the preservation of manuscripts. It is hoped that the institute will be able to locate and gather the manuscripts from across Turkmenistan.

Conclusion

The seventy-year communist rule managed, with reasonable success, to inculcate in the minds of its peoples a sense of citizenship of a grand political unit called the Soviet Union. Under that system artistic and cultural activities were directed, supported, and monitored by the state. A system of institutions was created that managed every aspect of art and culture. The system rewarded artists, musicians, and writers liberally and placed them among the political elite in Soviet society. The state was the sole patron of art without whose support and sanction artistic and cultural activities could not take place. The central support and coordination from Moscow afforded the community the possibility to travel throughout the empire and around the world. It also provided them the opportunity to present their work to a large audience beyond their own republics.

The breakup of the Soviet Union has inevitably brought into question the role of art and culture in society.  Along with the disappearance of Moscow’s support and direction there has appeared a sense of confusion and, in some cases, chaos in the Central Asian states.  As the peoples of Central Asia are trying to come to terms with their new identity as citizens of independent nation-states, the issue of cultural identity becomes even more relevant.

Predicting where art and culture is headed in Central Asia will, to a great extent, be a matter of guesswork. One may, however, assume the following with some degree of certainty:

1- The content of art and culture will increasingly become free from socialist ideology.

2- There will be no major changes in the role of the state. The state will remain the main patron of art for some time to come.

3-The institutions that presently support artistic and cultural activities (the filarmony, houses of culture, etc.) will continue to be the main centers for such activities in Central Asia.

4- The transition will not be homogeneous; rather, it will be different in each republic. The degree of change will depend on various factors, including the degree of continuity in the political structure of each country after independence, the level of relative prosperity, the presence of social tensions or civil wars, the degree to which each republic will be in contact with the outside world, especially the West.

Based on these assumptions, one may hazard a guess as follows.

-In Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan, where there has been the least amount of change in the country’s political structure, and minimal disruption in the economic activities, art and culture will continue to flourish under state control and patronage. The state will continue to determine the content of art and culture. However, rather than socialism it will be centered more around nationalism and ethnic identity.

-In Kazakhstan, where there is a large and influential Russian minority, the emphasis on Kazakh identity will be less pronounced, though present. The influence of Western culture will be more than that in Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan.
-In Kyrgyzstan, where meaningful attempts have been under way to move towards a democratic state, freer expression of artistic and cultural sentiments will probably be observed. With it one may assume that the state and the institutions created under the Soviet system might, in the long run, have a diminished role in art and culture.

-In Tajikistan prospects for artistic and cultural activities seem bleak.  The smallest and poorest republic in Central Asia, it is one of the richest in terms of art and culture.  The civil war that erupted shortly after independence has caused the disintegration of the society and  the deepening of the economic crisis has seriously undermined artistic and cultural activities.  Thousands of writers and artists have either been killed, become refugees, or emigrated to other countries.

Art and culture have been undermined in Tajikistan in yet another way. The concentration of the Tajik population in Central Asia is in the cities of Samarkand, Bukhara, and the Ferghana valley, which today are part of Uzbekistan. Dividing Central Asia into distinct republics based on the ethnic population in each region was an arbitrary act by Stalin that took place mainly for political considerations rather than actual ethnic character of each region.  Major centers of Tajik population and culture were placed under Uzbek suzerainty. Under the Soviet Union such divisions were not of great significance; as citizens of the Soviet Union Tajiks could move freely to Uzbekistan. Today, newly erected national borders separate three milion Tajiks of Tajikistan from up to seven milion Tajiks in Uzbekistan.  With the Uzbek government keen on promoting Uzbek identity and culture, state support and funding for Persian language, literature, and culture goes for promotion of Uzbek culture instead.  These are the concerns that are vehemently expressed by Tajik intellectuals.

- Finally, the media may prove to be the most important agent of cultural change in Central Asia. Private television stations and satellite programs are becoming powerful agents in promoting Western style consumerism and a restricted aspect of Western culture.

Acknowledgements

This paper is based on a study, originally meant for UNESCO, that started in 1993.  The information was gathered mainly through visits to centers of artistic and cultural activities and interviews with officials of ministries of culture, radio and television organizations, heads of writers’ associations, writers, musicians, dancers, librarians, etc. Some of the individuals interviewed were the following:

In Kazakhstan, Mr. Alpiyev, Deputy Minister of Culture; Baghdad Teleganov, Director of Sazgen Music and Dance Group; Dr. Kaskabasov, member of the Academy of Science; Professor D. Kaseynov, Rector, Almaty Kurmangazi State Conservatory; Leyla Beketova, President, Television and Radio corporation of the Republic of Kazakhstan; Kinis Duisikiev, Director, the Symphonic Orchestra of Television and Radio; Oraz Rymshanov, President, National  Film Company of Kazakhstan; Naymanbayev Kaldarbek, First secretary, Board of Writers’ Union; Dr. Kaskabasov, Professor of Philology, Member of the Academy of sciences; Professor Erden Zada-uly Kazhibekov, Director, Center for Oriental Studies.

In Kyrgyzstan, Osman Aqan Ibrahimov, Deputy Minister of Culture; Mr. zalleqbek, Director, The House of Culture in Tukmuk; Mr. Karimbayev, Director, Bishkek Filarmoni; Hesengol Jom’ebayev, Director, Qanbar Khan Folklore Music and Dance Group; Tilgin Tomotoyov, Director, Qaramalda Orazov People’s Instrument Orchestra; Asel Bashev, Director, Aqmaral Dance Group; Asan Dzhakshylykov, First Secretary, The Writers’ Union; Amirbek Osmanov, First Deputy Director, State Radio and Television; Zoya Esambayova, Director, The National Library; Mr. bazarbayev, Minister of Culture.

In Tajikistan, Mr. Taleb, Deputy Minister of Culture; Mr. Azizmorad Rajabov, Director, Center for People’s productions; Zafar Nazem, Director, Ganjina Music Ensemble; Professor Mohammad Jan Shakurov, Member of the Academy of Science; Askar Hakim, President, Writers’ Association; Mr. Hamza, Director, Cultural Foundaton of Tajikistan; Farrokh Qasem, Director, Aharun Theater Group; Borzu Abdurrazaqov, Director, Mayakawski State Russian Dramatic Theater; Ata Mohammadjanov, President, Association of [Theater] Artists; Professor Rawshan Rahman, Director, The Institute for
Folklore Studies.

In Turkmenistan, Yurlaman Nuriev, Director, Chartash Mohammad People’s Instruments Orchestra; Bayram Khodanazarov, First Secretary, The Writers’ Association.
 
 
 

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

Dissident, émigré author Sinjavsky closes the story "Little Jinx" with a grim Metro image:

Just imagine for the sake of clarity an escalator in Moscow's deep-se Metro. (They)  were being taxied by conveyor from the world beyond to meet the bloodless party of exhibits, while we were plunging down the shaft, finding ourselves powerless to distance ourselves from or merge with the parallel flow, unconsciously scanning the hierarchy of wide-browed statues being erected from the bowels of the earth with their tensely propped profiles thrust forward, as if they shunned intersecting with or accidentally running into our sinister stream, which was slowly and inexorably dispatching us downward. And who knows? The next time we might have been able to swap places on the conveyor belt; but for some reason that didn't dawn on anyone. Each kept to his own little stair, avoiding the opposite stream. Exchanging glances or greeting with a nod seemed out of the question (1992(80):78).

Compare to this a joke sent by a Moscow reader to Argumenty i Fakty in July, 1996:

A drunken "New Russian" boards a tram and says to the driver: "Let's go to Lesnaja, I'll give you ten thousand bucks!" "What? Sir, there are no rails!" "Well, lay them. I'll pay a lemon (a million)!" So the repair brigade lays rails. The tram moves slowly in the right direction. But when they approach the building there is a problem: the tram's way is completely blocked by mounds of earth, metal, and building materials. "Oh, I forgot!" The passenger slaps his brow, "Yesterday I rerouted the Metro this way!"

The Moscow Metro is a background for moral narratives about both social order and chaos. Like watching the news, riding public transit was how Moscow saw itself, where the masses each day encountered thousands of other faces, fellow citizen or alien.  But the structures of the Metro alone did not determine the twists of their tales.¹  Public transit narratives may seem grounded in concrete spaces, but they achieve that appearance of forceful validity because they intersect other, familiar images of authority, culture, and belonging. In the 1990s, the Metro is an obvious backdrop for talk about social order and disorder, for alongside symbols of the former state, signs of both trade and poverty have multiplied and become more visible there.

Rather than dwelling on iconography or iconoclasm in the Metro, I focus here on the Metro as a topo-trope, a figurative setting for various contesting ontologies of a society in "transition."²   The Metro stands for, alternately, totalizing glory or uniform repression AND social chaos or freedom AND conformity or cultured sociability.  Verbal, visual, and textual representations achieve these various aims by placing and “fitting” social activity within images of the Metro’s infrastructure.  Today, I draw from media, literature, and conversations inside the Metro, about it, and above it.³

The Metro is a figure for both social order and disorder; on the side of order, it stands for either political utopia or totalitarian repression, and actions in it are painted alternately as signs of conformity or culturedness.

Soviet descriptions pegged capitalist transport as having been built without order, "haphazardly" for profit; the communists would construct instead a well-planned passage to the future: "Before the Revolution, public transport in Moscow was very underdeveloped--there was hardly any tram service (Kiss, 1963)." In the present, a 1960’s guide for Hungarian visitors adds, everything is "up-to-date" and "automatic," from laser-equipped turnstiles to the trains themselves ("an electronic machine drives the high speed train instead of a human driver," which remained a fantasy). A guide for English speakers promises the future will bring "pedestrian underpasses with moving sidewalks" (Moskovskij Metropoliten, 1978). These descriptions showcase socialist modernity, the building of an infrastructure for a future social order.

The Moscow Metro can still evoke both utopian dreams and irony about them--hammer-and-sickle coats of arms remain impressed into the light blue, metal siding of some cars. Moscow stations differ impressively from each other. Adorned by glowing marble, chrome, stained glass, intricate statuary, and mosaic work, each is a lived-in monument to socialism. The metro systems of socialist-bloc capitals such as Prague and Budapest can not evoke quite the same sense of memory. Central European metros assumed Soviet tunnel design and imported the cars from Moscow (Mytischy), sans hammer and sickle,⁴ but the stations are uniformly decorated, socialist iconography low-key or non-existent.

In Moscow, only tourists spend much time peering curiously into the bronze gun barrels dangling from the oversized hands of Revolution Square heroes or up at the sparkling, mosaic sky at Majakovskaja. Still, millions pass through these stations every day, and they are not immune to those carved and inlaid signs. On the contrary, their readings of them change: favorite stations fall from grace, as when rumors circulated that the delicate marble used to build the pillars of Kropotkinskaja (prided for softly intricate lighting) had been mined from the Bolshevik-destroyed Church of  Christ the Savior, now being rebuilt across the street from the station.

Yet, in contrast with maps of former Soviet territory, Metro maps have hardly changed, though some include advertising.⁵ Nor is the iconoclasm much celebrated in the West what post-Soviets cite most--many say they "forget" the new names. Many station names that echo Soviet ideology and institutions, such as Oktjabrskaja, Shosse Entuziastov, and Chkalovskaja, remain untouched. Mocking or affectionately blasphemous nicknames existed all along, such as boroda for the former Karl Marx station, but the renamed stations were not actually endowed with those names--Karl Marx is now Teatral'naja.

The Metro, in fact, continues to regulate many stable social practices, as most people rely on public transit, remaining a reference for calibrating practice to time and place. People still direct visitors by Metro cars and platforms: "Take the radial line, not the circle line, sit in the first car from the center, and wait for me on the platform." The hour the Metro closes (1 a.m.) still regulates, though it does not end, nightly sociability.

Official Soviet discourse, of course, emphasized social stability and unity; the first stations were supposedly built by "thousands of volunteers" who kept up shifts even during the war (Moskovskij Metropoliten, 1978), the tunnels providing shelter during German air raids, a function memorialized in film.⁶  The meters added each year signified social enthusiasm, while the building of Metros in Prague, Budapest, Sofia, Zagreb, Warsaw, Calcutta, and Pyongyang, with Soviet advisors and plans, testified to friendship of the Peoples. The Metro harmonized with the city plan. As tour guides were instructed to inform: "The scheme of the Metro corresponds to the plan of the city, repeats its historically laid radial-ring surface plan (GKPIT)." " According to the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, socialist Metro  design fit social needs better than did capitalist city trains--no rattling, above-ground structures, no gap, and the underground halls were designed according to "the method of socialist realism," so that the "impression of pressing weight" is absent and "pylons, columns and arcades emphasize lightness, freedom and spaciousness" (1954:331). The Metro was also cheap ("in the future," public transit was going to be free) and the price of passage remained stable, the 5-kopeck fare not changing from 1935 until 1991.⁷

Many of these proud assertions were fair. Still, dissident and émigré writers disdained the Metro as a Stalinist imposition: "The skyscrapers and the Moscow metro, the canals and dams were constructed only for him" (Groys, 1987:122). The "enthusiasts" who built the Metro become, in their accounts, forced labor. The belief that the Metro was "for" father Stalin is reinforced by tales of a secret underground link to the Kremlin from his Moscow dacha (thus explaining the duplicate lines between Arbatskaja and Kievskaja Stations). Besides manifesting Stalin's personal mania for monumental building, the Metro, like the Soviet railway network joining all points to the Moscow center, is a trope for totalitarian ordering of modern space and motion.⁸ Svetlana Boym (1994:228) likens urban gridding under socialism to "official narratives that cut through the city like the Utopian lines of Stalin's Metro, the most efficient in the world."

More recent accounts of key events at the break-up of the USSR parallel such denunciations of dictatorial, modernist gridding, even showing contempt for Metro passengers as themselves political automatons. Foreign or elite memoirs of the coup described public transport as a site of general apathy or reactionary politics, as did the then director of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL):

Of course, all too many Muscovites kept their heads down, waiting to see which way the wind was blowing before voicing any opinion about events. And there were several in buses and the subway who even argued in favor of the junta, hoping for a return to the Brezhnev stagnation when at least there was something to buy in the shops (Elliot, in Bonnel et al., 1994:292).

The evidential "of course" perhaps reveals more about faith in the RFE/RL mandate to propagate democracy as true representatives of a "free world" than it does individual lack of "democratic" conviction within the hearts of "all too many Muscovites," represented by anonymous public transit riders.

During and after the August 1991 coup attempt, the Western media extolled itself for shaping events. Foreign correspondents emphasized the role of Radio Free Europe, the BBC, U.S. Embassy satellites, or CNN, while Russians highlighted Xeroxing and telephone-calling. Certainly foreign media affected the content of rumor and information, and enabled montages of local with faraway events (Boym, 1994:217-220). However, mass media accounts about mass media (made and preserved using these same media) remain the authoritative memory, over the accounts of people walking the streets and Metro paths during those days. The media ignored the agency of people who lacked direct access to media or electronic communications, who instead acted on information they gleaned in the streets or on the Metro.

During August 1991, I was living five bus stops from the station farthest south, Prazhskaja.  In that station's underpass, people gathered in small clusters, as they had throughout the Metro and on streets downtown that day. Late on the second day of the coup, just outside the turnstiles, a woman returning from the center informed listeners what had happened to Gorbachev. She, too, stressed foreign sources and how the "putsch" had shut down television--but she herself had heard this information by word of mouth, on the street. Likewise, multitudes learned to tune into the migrating frequencies of the single, independently broadcasting radio station Ekho Moskvy (Echo of Moscow) because the numbers had been pasted onto Metro walls and cars and in the streets, along with Yeltsin's declaration.⁹ People read these notices and discussed them on the spot, arguing and interrupting. Indeed, had the coup planners shut down the Metro, the people who poured from the station nearest the Parliament Building (appropriately already named Barrikadnaja (Barricade), in honor of wars past) could not have arrived to hedge it. Metro travelers may stand for political troglodytes or apathetic drones, but the Metro was in fact the single reliable vehicle for bringing the crowds to the site of the resistance.¹⁰

Some of the same people who denounce the Metro as an emblem of totalitarianism simultaneously insist that resistance and disrespect for order is Russian national character, bred by unjust and invasive rules. This nature is also represented through tropes of transit--scorn for traffic lights and transit fares  are frequently cited as evidence: "The Russian person, from the very beginning, is raised to disrespect the law, to show contempt for the rules of traffic and to try to get out of paying the fine if the police stop him" (Kirpichnikov, 1996). Boym evokes a traffic light example in a vignette about the surprise of a Russian in the U.S. who saw an American stop at a crosswalk light moments after a Gulf War protest, and thus contrasts perceived American worship of law to Russian disdain for rules:

For the Russian accustomed to routine violations of everyday prohibitions and cynical about the laws because they were part and parcel of the official order, this combination of simultaneous protesting and observing the rules is nearly inconceivable. In Russia, driving through a red light when the police are not watching is an acceptable practice; there, public opinion would be more critical of eating ice cream on the subway, a practice classified as foreign or "uncultured" behavior. (Boym, 1994:289; Italics added by author)

This example of resistant spirit opposes “culture” to “law”. Most anthropologists might find such a distinction suspicious, perhaps motivated by ideology. Did prohibitions on eating ice cream in the Metro arise organically from Russian culture?  More likely, social expectations about public decorum were in fact inculcated by the very socialist policies that people claim to scorn, the various liquidations of bad hygiene and illiteracy , among other civilizing projects.¹¹

Looking at a few more Metro "traffic rules," whether enforced or self-enforced, will illustrate the complexity. Upon entering any above-ground station, one faces a row of turnstiles operated by tokens or, since 1996, magnetic cards. The turnstiles have mechanical arms that open and shut like scissors. Every so often, if one passes through them too fast for the red laser eyes to register, they clamp shut, which is more frightening than painful. Once inside, there are no controllers--the men who appear suddenly on Moscow's busses or trams to check tickets punched by the honor system (as in many European undergrounds). On ground transport, fellow passengers can see who punches a ticket or not: in the popular 1970s comedy, Gentlemeny Udachi (a pirate moniker), the pudgy hero rushes to his seat without punching his ticket, fumbles out his transit pass to wave "Edinij, Edinij!" The moment is familiar--for not everyone "rides rabbit," so-called because you have to keep jumping off when controllers approach. On Metro cars, however, there are no such dramas of conscience--if a person tries to use a counterfeit pass, it is at the turnstile.

Near the turnstiles, in a glass booth, sits an elderly metro worker wearing a red armband; she checks monthly passes (though perhaps not so thoroughly, as people do slip by with counterfeit or incorrectly subsidized discount passes) and watches the vestibule for suspicious activity. Few actually try to cheat the system--plenty wait in line to buy tokens. By 1996, after a rash of bombings on Russian transport, special OMON forces in bullet proof vests stood near the turnstiles, as well.¹²  Another worker, armed with two telephones and a microphone, sits in a glass booth at the bottom of the escalators. She regulates the direction of the escalators and behavior on them: when delinquent teenagers roll coins down the banisters or sit on the stairs, she chastises them over the intercom or warns, "Comrades, clear the space to the left" if people are blocking that side. At least she used to--by the mid-1990s, she hardly can be heard over tape-recorded advertising of vacation trips to Egypt. Still, the passing lane remains clear--hardly anyone needs to be told the rule, and if they transgress, those around will loudly tell them to clear the left.

There are no such booths at the bottom of Metro escalators in Prague or Budapest (they sit elsewhere), and the rule to leave the left clear, written in several languages near the escalators in Budapest, is neither enforced nor much valued there.  While working in Prague in 1995-96, I was visited by Russian friends who, seeing this behavior, declared Czechs to be "dikie ljudi!" (savage, wild people). Thus, what people see as valid "traffic rules," written or unwritten, differs, and Russians do not have a monopoly on transgressing them.  Conversely, just as that American stopped for a red light after a protest,¹³ the Russians who came to the parliament building during the 1991 coup by Metro refrained from eating ice cream, but did not ride escalator banisters or clog the left aisle. They, too, combined resistance with observing traffic rules. The case for a peculiarly Russian (or peculiarly post-socialist) distrust of authority and structure seems not to hold, any more than the case for their backward conformism. "Even" in Russia, Metro pedestrians can simultaneously protest some rules and observe others.

This discussion of resistance and complacency allows us to analyze statements about social order or disorder that are set in the Metro as strategic rather than descriptive. While some use public transit to stand for good old--or bad old --order, it also can be a backdrop for social chaos.

In 1995-96, the media frequently depicted the Metro as a setting not of conformity and order, but for the chaos of transition. The mushrooming of commerce around the Metro had indeed changed social rhythms of transit: hawkers filled transfer tunnels and underground crosswalks, Metro pedestrians hesitated over bubble gum or extremist newspapers,¹⁴ combining tactics of shopping and commuting.

The rise of commerce was most visible at Metro stations. Of course, well before 1991, one could purchase official maps pinpointing state shops next to Metros. Informally, certain stations were long known for what was speculated near them. Near the stations, there always had been newspaper kiosks, ice cream stands, and ticket booths (along with the occasional woman semi-illicitly peddling flowers). A few opened onto large, semi-official produce markets. Still, most commerce in the Metro was prohibited until the 1990s, when the underground transfer tunnels became incredibly more dense with small-time hawkers.

One factor that set Metro trade apart from commerce in other venues--and makes it more available for political rhetoric--was its stark visibility. Even by the 1990s, space for shops in prominent or central buildings was limited and expensive. Many that existed had draped windows or were off the common paths connecting public transport. Only locals knew them. Not so the newer shops in the metro underpasses and streets just above them; they are both on the way and made almost entirely of glass. Everything inside them is immediately visible; it all "throws itself into the eyes," as a Russian phrase goes. At first, non-state kiosks were made of plywood, and trade at the subway entrances or in underpasses was conducted on precarious folding tables or cardboard boxes. Some of these remain, but more permanent structures have edged closer to the metro proper, transparent materials being the favorite medium.

This visibility of shopping is only somewhat comparable to the calmer, more institutionalized commerce inside the Prague or Budapest Metros. There, one sees display cases for aboveground shops, closed-in newspaper or flower stands, shops set fully into the underpass walls rather than built like barnacles along the sides, even full-scale chain boutiques. In fact, most well-trafficked shops there are located safely overhead, within stone walls, and not alongside transport. In Moscow, ever more merchants line the underpass walls with glass casings wide enough for a few goods, a stool and a sales person. These glittering surfaces narrow the pedestrian walk space.

What is more, these surfaces potentially contrast with the glowing social realism farther down. While the walls of metros in other post-socialist states are covered by advertisements, those down inside the Moscow Metro are not--there is no room for them among the statuary, built into the very architecture of the columns. Both communists and democrats, reformists and conservatives express surprise or outrage that Stalin's metro is precisely the setting for the most visible new sites of commerce and signs of class division, merchants above and beggars below, sitting under those happy, marble socialist maidens and heroes. Perhaps the platforms housing the monumental murals seem less profane than the transfer passageways, and, as at churches, merchants are not allowed on the platforms, while beggars are not driven off so quickly and work even in the cars.

Even liberal authors call the juxtaposition shocking, though preferable to the previous order:

We always said we had no homeless, but they were hidden from the public's view. Now we have beggars in the Metro. This is terrible, but normal. But to collect war invalids and expel them to a place to die--this is not normal. I prefer terrible freedom to clean totalitarianism (Alexander A. Kabakov, quoted in Williams, 1996).

More extreme writers read the transgressions of refugees, hawkers, or homeless as unlawful, inappropriate, and foreign.  The Metro is place where unrestrained migrations sit side by side with the litter and leavings of commerce, where order has degraded:

Most comfortable for the "businessmen" with outstretched hands is the Circle Line. . . The Metro, stinking foulness nowadays, piled with trash. . .attracts them with large numbers of people (you always find kind ones), warmth (especially winter), and protection (though order here is not what it used to be, it still holds up). (Modestov, 1996)

Social disorders are imagined as human waste--people out of place. The above excerpt framed a journalistic piece calling for the return of movement restrictions, laws prosecuting begging and "leading a parasitic life" that were rescinded in 1993, although the propiska system is still in effect.

Economic liberals in Russia and some Western sociologists have argued that constraining population movement is incompatible with market reforms,¹⁵ while advocates of restrictions claim that the return of harsher punishments for "leading a parasitic life" would return a lost economic and social order.¹⁶ Such debates recall emigre scholar Paperny’s (1975(93)) depiction of oscillation between movement/fluidity ("Culture One") and stasis/repression ("Culture Two"). While Paperny's metaphoric schema may be overly binary, so too are the equally figurative 1990s calls for social order and return of restriction of movement and population. Paperny's essay was, in fact, re-published in Russian in 1996 in Itogi (the joint venture with Newsweek).

Conclusion

Those interested in depicting the current state as stable use images of public transit as a backdrop to depict a benign order that combines new and old.  Consider a video clip that aired repeatedly throughout 1996 in a series of shorts made for television, titled Russkij Projekt, which varied humor and nostalgia with soft social propaganda:  Early morning darkness. A famous aging actor plays a tram driver; there are no passengers. A happy golden light fills his tram and lights his features. A beautiful, young, jean-jacketed actress emerges from a doorway on rollerblades as the tram passes and, catching a hook on the back of the tram with an umbrella, lets it pull her, the wind blowing her pale, blond hair. She releases her hold as the tram approaches the main building of Moscow State University, and skates off into that Stalinist birthday cake structure. The title of the clip appears under the tram: "This is My City." Here, sexy traffic rule-breaking is combined with a working infrastructural transit order inherited from the past, as embodied by the elder driver and the Stalinist skyscraper, to produce a patriotic and cozy statement about belonging in the capital.¹⁷

The examples at hand offer varied oppositions--of past utopia to present chaos, of past dictatorship to present opportunity, of wealth to need, of Russia to the West, of patriots to refugees to terrorists. None of these are generated by some sum of individual encounters with spaces or strangers within the Metro; immediate spatial experience underdetermines the construction of ideologies about social order. The oppositions are reproduced by interlocutors who cite from many arenas--accounts from which their own even come to resemble.

Thus, pictures of the social order in public transit related to political and social concerns about movement, money, and people. What talk about transit is really about is who should be included in the city, in the nation.

This essay is excerpted by permission of the University of Michigan Press, from a collection titled Altering States: Ethnographies of Transition, eds. Matti Bunzl, Daphne Berdahl and Martha Lampland. "Forthcoming from the University of Michigan Press, Fall, 1999."    The original paper, “Talking Transit and Spectating Transition: The Moscow Metro,” goes on to explicate connnections between visual and discursive constructions of racial and economic categories, the connections between “vnezhnij vid” (external appearance) and ostensibly ethnic proclivities.

References

Basso, Keith
    1988  "'Speaking with Names': Language and Landscape Among the Western Apache," in Cultural Anthropology
              3/2:99-132.

Bonnel, Victoria E., Ann Cooper, and Gregory Freidin, eds.
    1994  Russia at the Barricades: Eyewitness Accounts of the August 1991 Coup. New York: M.E. Sharpe.

Boyarin, Jonathon, ed.
    1994  Remapping Memory: The Politics of Timespace. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Boym, Svetlana
    1994  Common Places: Mythologies of Everyday Life in Russia. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Buckley, Cynthia
    1995  "The Myth of Managed Migration: Migration Control and Market in the Soviet Period." Slavic Review, 54/4
              (Winter) 1995: 896-916.

Condee, Nancy
    1995  "The ABC of Russian Consumer Culture," in Soviet Hieroglyphics: Visual Culture in Late Twentieth Century
              Russia. ed. Condee. Indiana U. Press, Pp.130-172

de Certeau, Michel
    1988   The Practice of Everyday Life. trans. Steven Randall. Berkeley: The University of California Press.

Efimova, Alla, and Lev Manovich, eds. and translators.
    1993   Tekstura: Russian Essays on Visual Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Fitzpatrick,  Sheila
    1993  The Cultural Front, Power and Culture in Revolutionary Russia. Ithaca, NY: Cornell U. Press.

Foucault, Michel de
    1984  "Space, power and knowledge," an interview with Paul Rabinow, The Foucault Reader, ed. by Paul Rabinow.
              New York: Pantheon.

GKPIT (Gosudarstvennij Komitet SSSR po Inostrannomu Turismu. (State Committee of the USSR for Foreign Tourism)
    1984  Moskovskij Metropoliten (Metodicheskie rekomendatsii k ekskursii). Moscow.

Groys, Boris
    1993 (87)  "Stalinism as Aesthetic Phenomenon," in Efimova and Manovich. Pp. 115-126.

Humphrey, Caroline
    1995  "Creating a Culture of Disillusionment: Consumption in Moscow, a Chronicle of Changing Times." In Worlds Apart:
              Modernity Through the Prism of the Local. Ed. Daniel Miller. Routledge: New York.

Kirpichnikov, Aleksandr
    1996  "Korruptsija i Zakon v Russkom Soznanii," Zvesda, no.1: 159-169.

Kiss, Csaba
    1963  "Foldalatti Moszkva," ("Underground Moscow," in Moszkva es Kornyeke (Moscow and Its Environs. Budapest:
              Panorama. Pp 88-92. (translation used here by Miklos Voros)

Modestov, Nikloaj
    1996  "V Metro za Podaianiem" (In the Metro for Alms) Krestianskaia Rossiia, January 29-February 4 and excerpted
              in Moskovskaia Pravda, April 3, p.16.

Bolshaja Sovjetskaja Entsiklopedija
    1954  "Moskovskij Metropoliten im. L. M. Kaganovich":330-332

Moskovskoe Metro
    1978  Moscow:Moskovskii Robachii

Paperny, Vladimir
    1993(75)  "Movement - Immobility," in Efimova and Manovich.

Stites, Richard
    1992   Russian Popular Culture: Entertainment and Society since 1900. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Sinyavsky, Andrej
    1992(80)   Little Jinx, translated by Larry P. Joseph and Rachel May, Evanston: Northwestern University Press.

Textnotes

1. See Foucault (1984), for instance, who argues that architectural structure do not not determine social relations or subjectivity, but that they are "rigorously indivisible."

2. I use the term with the usual caveats (to avoid assuming a transition "from" something "to" something else) but preserve it here as a term used by Muscovites.

3. See Basso, 1988: "[S]tatements about the landscape may be employed strategically to convey indexical messages about the organization of face-to-face relationships and the normative footings on which these relationships are currently being negotiated." (223)

4. The oldest line of the Budapest metro recently was refurbished, and the non-Soviet style cars that operate on it were used as stages for the 1995 opening. It is worth observing how diplomatic changes will affect public transport infrastructures in the former socialist bloc, the old division of labor in production: Hungary's Ikarusz plant made the buses. Prague made the tram cars, and Moscow made the subway cars. While Budapest sports shiny new Ikarusz buses, many of their counterparts in Russia are decades old, and newer buses there are second-hand Mercedes (in some cities, such as in the Urals town of Perm, these buses still bear German-language ads).

5. Until the 1950s the Metro was actually named in honor of Kaganovich.

6. Such as Cranes Are Flying (1959).

7. In 1984, average salaries ranged from 150-300 rubles a month. As of 1996, one Metro token cost 1500 rubles (an average salary was about 700,000 rubles a month at the beginning of the year).

8. De Certeau devotes a short chapter to comparing train compartments to prison cells. See also Spivak (citing Kierney, cited also in Boyarin, 1994): "[the train] is a widely current metonym for the unifying project of territorial imperialism" (1989,284).

9. The radio station changed frequencies several times a day to escape jamming.

10. Not only that, but pieces of the Metro itself (sections of escalator) and of other transport (entire tram cars) were important barricade material during the coup attempt.

11. See, for instance, Fitzpatrick (1993).

12. OMON was a special "swat" unit of the police, heavily armed and armored.

13. Muscovites rarely face the choice to ignore a "don't walk" sign in any case, since most pedestrian crosswalks pass under the streets, not above them. Moreover, drivers weigh transgression against possible fines--pedestrians against serious injury.

14. Several authors have focused on the contents of hawkers' tables in the 1990s, on the fascinating jumble of contradictory, formerly banned stuff for sale, some with comparisons to Benjamin's observations of NEP-era commercial license (Boym, 1994; Condee, 1995). Here, I focus on the location of commerce, rather than the arrays of things sold or their origin (cf. Humphrey, 1995).

15. See Buckley (1995:896).

16. In effect, lack of propiska stopped movement less than it "prevented migrants from integrating themselves into distribution networks in restricted cities" (Buckley, 1995:896).

17. Metro building also continues apace in the capital and in the provinces. In May of 1996, Yeltsin laid the first ceremonial stone for the first Metro station in Ufa, capital of Bashkirya. Meanwhile, in the capital, metro construction (costing 4 trillion dollars a year in 1996) and architectural renovation projects are at the center of Chicago-style debates linking corruption, waste, and the Mayor's office.
 
 
 

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

 During the surprisingly wet summer on the northern Kamchatka peninsula in 1994, a Koriak man in the village of Tymlat spotted a lizard. When he retold the incident, his face was livid with shock. The grayish small reptile, he said, had been fast to vanish into the cleft between two stones but he had seen her glassy eyes and red double-tongue. His audience was unnerved. One of the women explained that the animal’s appearance suggested destruction and harm. People began to debate the question of how the lizard would play a role in bringing ill to the community. Some villagers argued that only the family and closest relatives of the man who had noticed the lizard would be concerned; others argued that only the community would be plagued. Yet amidst the battle of opinions that waged in Tymlat one certainty at least held true: the lizard had made her appearance on the stage of history.

Like most animals in northern Kamchatka the lizard is endowed with extraordinary powers. There are already mentionings of its destructive faculties in 18th century ethnography (for example, Krasheninnikov 1755), and there are other indications that further understanding of her potent significance. In northern Kamchatka, as in any circumpolar region of the world, the lizard is a rare guest. As a reptile the lizard is distributed all over the world, yet she turns up only occasionally and in unpredictable intervals in arctic or sub-arctic regions. This suggests that part of her powers came with her rarity; in the villages of northern Kamchatka the appearance of the lizard is a sporadic yet special event.

In the boardrooms of policy-makers and the high halls of academe it is easy to dismiss the appearance of the lizard as an insignificant event in the making of history. After all, by appearance a lizard is no more than a quick yet small-sized reptile, seemingly disconnected from history and rational thought. In the modernist imagination, indeed, the lizard is most of all a mythic object. As a site of either romantic fascination or brazen disdain, the lizard is no match for the complexities of the modern world. Yet Koriaks reaction at its appearance suggests a different interpretation. They refuse to affirm the view of the lizard as an object of historic innocence; rather, the lizard points to the shape of future events. I begin this essay then with the awareness that the lizard is not just an atavistic survival of the magical imagination or an exotic site of endogenous, localized knowledge. It is, I suggest, rather a site of displacement within powerful discourses of history.

In this spirit, the object of my exercise is then to rethink and challenge some of the ways in which the history of indigenous peoples in northern Russia has been perceived. There are two frameworks that stand out as I write on the writing of history with regard to the Russian North. The first historic plan invokes metaphors of decay and death (for example, Schindler 1997) to define the history of northern indigenous peoples in Russia as a matter of apocalyptic doom or “extinction.” This is an understanding of the world that situates Koriaks within a discourse of endangerment that leaves little room to explore and see the creativity and originality of their efforts to tap the power of governments and local administrations. The second framework analyzes the recent, seismic shifts in post-Soviet Russia as an expression of a positive politics of identity; it sees not death but increasing freedom from the constraints of coherence. In point of fact, there has been a widespread tendency to embrace the demise of the Soviet Union as a historic rupture, as the final moment in ushering out this epoch. Gregory Freidin (1994), for example, casts the Soviet Union’s dissolution as liberating; Russia is now a “decidedly post-colonial Commonwealth of Independent States.”

At first glance, these views appear as mutually opposed. In the way in which the first view invokes only bleakness and thwarted hopes, the second one celebrates polyphony and a liberating disengagement from the coherence of political identity. Yet even though these views seem at odds with one another, there is a common historical assumption that ties them together. Both perspectives advocate a historical view of rupture and break; both views posit conditions of before versus after. Even though both views differ in analysis and outlook, they strike a similar chord in relation to their structural frameworks of history. They both imply a linear narrative of succession.  Within such a framework there is not much room for the history of the lizard; it’s history is not progressive but thematic. The lizard challenges the assumptions of either progress or decay in one particular moment of time. She forces us to attend to the predicaments of an indigenous peoples for whom all histories of successive governments and administrations are structurally the same.

Moreover, poverty and unemployment created a desolate atmosphere, pressing down on the village like the heavy clouds hanging constantly above the shore. Men drunken with schnapps staggered along the sludgy roads. Frightened by others and themselves they tried toothless smiles. Children hid away from school; their games mimicked adult predicaments. Jesting imitations of drunkenness transformed distress into play, and boastful stories mirrored adults’ veilings of angst-ridden selves. Women hurried between home and work; they felt exhausted by financial worries. The village was a pained place for living.

Like most Koriaks I knew, The Bear did not like to spend much time in Tymlat. As a passionate hunter and accomplished herder he preferred the life in the tundra. It was also in these lands of torrent rivers, open grass-plains, marshes and bogs that he had received his name. Indeed, his name kept reminding him of one particular incident that had forged this name. Years ago, when The Bear was still a young man, two zoo-keepers from the game park in the city (Petropavlovsk-Kamchatskii) had approached him. Looking for several bear cubs they wanted to exhibit to the public eye, they asked The Bear if he would assist them in their search. And so he did. Knowing the region well, The Bear found two newly born cubs in the neighborhood of a well-hidden cave. First he snared them, then he narcotized them. Traveling by boat to the city, The Bear gave them over to the zoo. At first it seemed as if things were all right. There were no repercussions, and no special events troubled him. Yet years later, when The Bear was already a grown-up man, married twice, and the father of nine children, his namesake took revenge. The animal that had given The Bear his name killed one of his eldest daughters who worked as a forestry manager in the densely wooded area around the city of Khabarovsk. A bear fell upon her, tearing her from limb to limb. In the village this grueling event caused a stir. All dismembered body parts had been arranged in a coffin and sent to Tymlat. But The Bear refused to believe that the person in the coffin might be his child. Distrustfully he opened the casket only to realize that the dismembered body parts were his daughter, indeed. The Bear had unrightfully taken from the land what was not his; now the land took from him.

Thus The Bear explained how in youth he had just once violated the equilibrium that defines the relationship of humans with the land; thus he grew up to become an influential elder and community leader. In the village The Bear was recognized as a masterful herder because he had spent most of his lifetime in the tundra as a reindeer herdsman. To The Bear tending and watching reindeer was a meaningful way of making a living. When I lived in The Bear’s camp in the summer of 1992 for several months in the tundra he offered his knowledge to me by way of apprenticeship and learning. By traveling with him and the herd I began to learn how to look at reindeer as one of the most important beings in the Koriaks universe. Where I at first saw only animals that looked much alike, he taught me how to differentiate between the different grayish and brownish shades of reindeer fur. Where I at first saw only healthy animals, he taught me how to tell weak from strong. He tutored me in the ways a herder can assist cows to give birth to their young; he reminded me never to touch a calf: each heifer refuses a calf with human smell.

The Bear had gained his accomplished knowledge through long years of care and expertise. As a boy he grew up in the tundra; later he became a well-known leader of one reindeer brigade in Tymlat’s collective farm. It was as a leader that The Bear began to experience and see the destructive force of a state-endorsed economy in the northern tundra. For example, the authority of defining reasonable migration routes for reindeer herds were no longer with the herders but with the state Sporadically, knowledgeable herdsmen were asked for their opinion but then regional administrators took such advice rarely into consideration. Migration routes were now envisioned on the drawing boards of mostly inexperienced, extra-regional officials who paid more attention to the fulfillment of an economic plan than the well-being of animals and the land. There were other problems as well. Too many herds grazed in too small a state-defined piece of land; the size of the herds exceeded the capacity of pastures to support all of them. At the same time, diseases began to spread.

In seeing that regional administrators were not very perceptive to local concerns, The Bear began searching for opportunities that would allow others and him to craft a possible future. He challenged regional authorities on several occasions; he shook his fist when he talked about his family’s and his neighbors’ plight; and he raised his voice in scorn when he raised charges against the short-sightedness of the state. Yet he was also looking for some answers in the midst of injustice and discrimination. He found one answer in the winter of 1991 when the whole country was beginning to fall apart. The Bear decided to withdraw the animals of four reindeer brigades from Tymlat’s collective farm and created his own business: “Schamanka.”

This was a bold move on the part of The Bear, yet he was able to succeed because he was recognized as an experienced and circumspect man. The vision of The Bear engendered much excitement among his followers. First, the animals were no longer considered state property but reinstated as family and private wealth. Second, regional authorities would be sued for the injustice afflicted on Koriak families and their subsistence economy. Third, the traditional, family-based system of reindeer husbandry should be restored. And fourth, profitable business connections with North American and Japanese entrepreneurs were to be forged. This was an ambitious plan, indeed. It involved both local and extra-regional elements. Families were attending to their own herds; international business relations should guarantee the continuance of reindeer husbandry while making a profit.

Certainly, in the first days of The Bear’s endeavors things went well. Regional authorities were helpless in the face of mayhem and a continuous series of incessant political events. Increasing numbers of foreign entrepreneurs came to visit the peninsula. The Bear invited them all to take a look at the animals taken care of in Schamanka’s pastures. His visitors were impressed. They bought meat and hides, and ordered reindeer horn. In his dealings with them The Bear showed much economic acumen, and the enterprise flourished. In Tymlat he was a powerful and respected leader. But at the height of his success problems slowly emerged. One of the most pressing and serious problems was that many of the young herdsmen who worked for The Bear did not know much about herding techniques, or, in that case, reindeer husbandry at all. As part of a younger generation who had fully grown up under Soviet state governance they had not been brought up in the tundra but in the boarding-school system that pervaded the entire northern peninsula (and the rest of Siberia and the Russian Far East). As boarding school students they had been placed under the tutelage of the state to learn from the start, unlike their parents, the ways of the state. They were unfamiliar with the kind of wisdom and herding knowledge that comes only with long years of painstaking care and expertise; to teach them the proper knowledge involved a laborious process that would take years. At best young herders had spent the two school-free summer months with their parents in a camp in the tundra; this was not enough to gain the needed savvy and skill.

Inexplicably, in his leadership The Bear showed little patience with their pains; he screamed and howled when inexperienced young men touched new-born calves; when they drove the animals at high speed; and when they did not notice the rocky schisms and creeks into which reindeer may fall. As a result, the number of animals in the herds began to decrease. In the village people began to talk about the rashness and quick temper of The Bear; young men complained and villagers began to doubt his ability to run a business well.  Such talk was particularly incited by the realization that the economic vision of The Bear faced serious competition that in 1992 nobody could have foreseen. In the northern market economy of reindeer meat and antler trade Alaskan herders, in particular, enjoy long-standing and trustful relationships with Japanese and Korean buyers. These were relationships with which The Bear could not compete.

As an elder and a leader The Bear was increasingly criticized for his inability to professionally run the business and to treat herders well. Matters took a general turn for the worse. Schamanka threatened to fall apart.

When I visited the peninsula again in 1994 it was, however, obvious that mismanagement and the painful deficiency in herding knowledge were not the only reasons for the economic struggles The Bear faced. In the course of global expansion, financial crisis, and Russia’s general opening to the West unexpected challenges worsened living conditions in Tymlat and the situation of The Bear. In the wake of some of the world’s most bulwark empires (for example, Soviet Union, South Africa, Eastern Europe), and the general demise of communist command economy that had underpinned the party’s domination, Russia was empowered to believe that it could progress only if it followed the road to mass consumption prosperity. As one communist, political system passed away, Western values and economies mounted the throne. On the northern peninsula the disconcerting effects of such unprecedented sway are highly visible today. Recently, the demands of an ever-expanding mining industry threaten to lay waste big strips of the land. The increasing privatization of communally used hunting and fishing grounds now disentitles Koriak women and men from further use. And the careless depletion of fish stocks by international fishing floats ferments rage and agitation in northern villages. Koriaks have begun to think and talk about effective forms of social mobilization; they insist on their rights. For the first time, the idea of industrial progress and technological development is meeting the limits of the world’s resources. As a result, international corporations and nations progress ever deeper into indigenous lands. For Koriaks, does this mean that they have to abandon their own vision and projects to settle for a chronically disadvantaged position in the global hierarchy? The world’s insatiable demand for gold and other resources hinders their own local vision of development. The Bear and his followers, and his local critics, will need substantive monetary means and legal power in this ever expansive moment.

Certainly, in describing Koriaks’ perspectives in such a way I am turning the provocation of the lizard into my own. Yet provocations may be needed in these times. Those who work to move the story of The Bear to center stage find themselves struggling with a set of received assumptions: the narrative of an always advancing history of successive administrations and the periodization of European-influenced notions of linear and not thematic time. Insofar as the academic and public discourse of history is concerned, that is, “history” produced at the institutional site of the university and in public magazines and papers, Russia remains the sovereign (even in the face of its death), theoretical subject, and the focal point of most post-Soviet histories. There is then a particular way in which all these histories tend to become variations of one master narrative that, variably, could be called “Progress,” “Innovation,“ or, “Democratic  Change.”

In such a view of history Russia is at the center of national history, the kind of history that Dipesh Chakrabarty (1992) calls “hyper-real”. She defines the national centers of history as hyper-real because they refer, always and only, to certain figures of the imagination while their geographical referents remain somewhat indeterminate. That Russia works as a silent referent in the world’s historical knowledge itself becomes obvious in a highly ordinary way. The story of The Bear is rooted in national time. Most Koriaks feel a need to mediate and place their challenges in frameworks of Russian history; reporters, social planners, and social scientists do not feel the need to reciprocate. They produce their stories, narratives, and ideas in relative ignorance of non-Russian histories; indigenous visions of history do not concern too many. This is a gesture that Koriaks cannot return. They cannot afford an equality or symmetry of ignorance at this level without running the risk of perpetual disadvantage and deprivation. Because it is with reference to such ideas that they are, always and once again, imagined again.

What has the lizard to say to this? Quite a lot, it turns out. To conclude that the colonial age is over, or that the new times are solely marked by decay, is premature. It is crucial not to move too quickly, to curtain off once and for all critical inquiries on a historical movement whose effects still impinge on people’s lives. In the villages of northern Kamchatka the notion of historical ruptures and breaks is a distinctly pointless idea. With The Bear they see some surprising and complex continuities between the time of Soviet outreach and the late twentieth- century era of post-Soviet interventionism, and global expansion.  In their efforts to question and argue the vision of political superpowers Koriaks encounter the financial spell of Japan, Germany, and the U.S., and, in the name of capital growth, they are likely to experience one ecological disaster after another: poisoned water, depleted fish stock, toxic soil, denuded land. The story of the Bear is situated in this context, but it is not rooted in its acceptance. He and others work hard to avert the effects of this.

In doing so The Bear does not draw his models, his power, and his vision from a cultural space outside the state; rather he locates and practices his politics within that state. Through his efforts to “do business” he creates his own vision of development and community survival. These efforts spill into others. Within the New Order politics of Russia, from village administration to the highest political level, Koriaks are constantly forced to negotiate democracy for themselves. They have to find ways to communicate to others their relationship to history and their land. Finding new ways to tell about these are, for them, central concerns: they cannot take lightly the warning of the lizard but they – may be – can find, at a moment of crisis, ways to reassert themselves.

Note

This is an extended version of a talk given at the Symposium at Columbia in 1998, and at the Annual Meeting of the Canadian Anthropological Society. I would like to thank the symposium organizers for making the meeting possible, and  participants for their engagement and support. I also would like to thank Dennis and Alice Bartels for the invitation to deliver this talk in their session.

References

Chakrabarty, Dipesh
    1992  “Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History: Who speaks for “Indian” Pasts?” Representations 37: 1 – 26.

Freidin, Gregory
    1994  “From Under The Rubble: Meaning, National Identity, and Social Justice in Russia after Communism’s Collapse.”
              The Yale Journal of Criticism 7(1): 229 – 238.

Krasheninnikov, Stepan
    1755  Opisanie Zemli Kamchatki. Sankt Peterburg: Pri Imperatorskoi Akadem.

Schindler, Debra
    1997  “Redefining Tradition and Renegotiating Ethnicity in Native Russia.” Arctic Anthropology 34(1): 194-211.
 
 

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

 In a 1991 article I showed how a widespread and traditional Western condemnation of mixed metaphor is rooted in principles related to those used to judge sanity and morality in people, coherence and autonomy expected of structures and systems, and realism in visual imagery, qualities that are systematically conflated (Pesmen 1991). Eclecticism, which appears often in contexts of so-called development, transition, and other worlds perceived as being "out of joint," has, for the same reasons, also been called infertile and sterile: life cannot result from flawed unions. As Stephen Pepper (1942:112) writes, nothing sewed together from the legs of one specimen and the wings of another will ever move on its own. I found these notions of coherence in early post-Soviet discourses of national and ethnic character and in descriptions of current shortages of reality, nature, life, validity, morality, form, and civilization, and images of riddles, hybridity, paradox, mystery, unclarity, monstrousness, and chaos. But given these discourses, and although space and time in urban Siberian where I did fieldwork, were fragmented, imperfections were often coopted as valuable aspects of national character.

Metaphors join in matrimony not only two terms, but their visualizable worlds; taking up a cross-scent or making impure unions seems to adulterously abandon a world of potentialities. After several such leaps critics move from moral censure to ontological motion sickness, calling mixed metaphor disgusting, nauseating, and spoiled. By examining these prohibitions, I showed ways in which a world's reality is a matter of habit and habitual ideals, as is a picture's realism. Mixed metaphor, by violating certain habits, may shatter our persuasion that a given picture reflects reality. Realism is, Nelson Goodman (1978) writes, an honorific term . What we consider meaningful seems to promise or deliver something coherent according to some ideal or project (cf. Harries 1968:145). But this passion for a meaningful unitary world is satisfied variously at different times (Goodman 1978:20). We constantly shift models, neither noticing our opportunistic flexibility nor including it in our picture of reality.

Whenever conversation touched on post-Soviet disorder, a doctor I knew remarked “vot eto nasha russkaia dusha," “now that’s our Russian soul.” She even called declining respect for the Russian language "Russian dusha, soul," adding that one must live this life a long time to understand russkaia dusha. If, as Robert Barrett (1987) has written, an integrated, unbroken individual is the Western ideal of a "person" with a grasp of "reality," descriptions of Russian national character and sumasshedshaia, bezumnaia, crazy, insane, life have long invoked ill-formedness, schism, formlessness and disorientation. As Korolenko said in 1917, “The Russian soul has no skeleton … or we have too little of it” (Sinyavsky 1988:259).

The romantic Russian soul, russkaia dusha, an important image in non-Russian cultures as well (Pesmen 1998), is often treated as a "deep" "place" where images and opposites struggle. Souls are felt to be alive insofar as they are internally unresolved. Confrontations with paradox or multiplicity result in a heightened sense of life. A historically and still popular explanation for allegedly "schizophrenic" Russian psyche, culture, and "system" is that East and West meet there. Though most of my Siberian friends were proud to participate in their homeland’s vastness, they also often orientalized themselves, opposing their netsivilizovannaia, uncivilized, vostochnaia, Eastern, sistema to what was civilized, cultured, Western. Then they often upped the ante, as my friend Svetlana did when she said: "We have an Eastern-type despotism. Only there they have some sense of measure. Here they do whatever they can get away with. Russia: enigmatic to the point of no return," do bespredel'nosti, to boundlessness, a word that in 1992 resonated with bespredel, popularized prison slang for chaotic rebellion.

In everyday life, flawed or absent coherence was often attributed to that "boundlessness." If a troubled career or multiple talents were evidence of the scale and potential of one person's soul, Russia and Russian character were, like the Eurasian landscape, understood, inhabited, and presented in narratives, jokes and remarks as too vast to be virtuous, neat, rational, or stable, vital Russian prostor, expanses, and razmakh, expansive behavior, allegedly dooming any efficiency or attention to petty detail. A joke I heard in 1992  tells of a foreigner who falls into one of the then-eternal construction pits in Moscow, breaking a leg. He wants to sue [at this point many Soviets already laughed, in reference to their incredible lack of such recourse]. He tells the judge that "in civilized countries" there are little red warning flags marking construction sites. The judge thinks, then asks the foreigner how he entered the USSR. “By train." "Didn't you see a big red flag on the border?"

My friend Mila mentioned that "unfinished projects and angles” were “among our character traits. We lost some neatness, some order." Both internal conflict and sublime scale imply wholes that can't be trivialized by what Bakhtin called monologic explanation. Such imagery can be traced at least to medieval Orthodox hesychasm's prioritizing of the irrational, by which human beings could experience things which far transcended their “rational understanding.” Aspects of what Victor Turner (1969) calls liminality are coopted as soulful nature, using passion, parody, pollution, drink, inferiority, complaining, and foolishness to invert, negate, or shift at any perceived threat of classification.

Among other meanings I found in everyday speech, netsivilizovano, uncivilized, could imply absence of moral order, rule of law, rule of anything predictable. When I said I was studying Russian culture, people always asked me to let them know if I found any. People both craved politeness, ease and order and ridiculed "civilized" countries' insincere, naive banality. They implied that Russia was wild because of its stage in cultural-economic evolution or by nature. In the early 1990s, people found themselves accumulating capital in primitive ways, and blamed Lenin, Stalin, and Gorbachev.

1990s Russians' discourses of themselves as primitive featured mention of Africa, Chukchi, monkeys, or papuasy.¹ One strain targeted Soviet infrastructure and khaltura, shoddy workmanship. Dazhe v Afrike, “Even in Africa …,” which originally meant "everywhere," became common in remarks such as "Even in Africa public transportation is better than here." But post-Soviet poverty was often called African in order to then say how much more spiritual Russians were than Africans. If, as Elias writes, the discourse of civilization expresses Western self-consciousness, when Russians engaged in what Leerssen (1996:37-38) calls auto-exoticism  it was partially in the voice of Western self-consciousness, partially in one responding to it, German Kultur against the "external shell" of Zivilisation, in turn answered by specifically Russian and Soviet voices.

Foucault (1970) offers Borges' so-called "Chinese encyclopedia" to show how juxtaposed points of view, though labeled "exotic" or "foreign," make us aware of our own thought's limitations. "Ekzotika" was how some Russians explained my interest in their incoherent picture. Common also were ironic quips on how interesnaia, interesting, or ves‘laia, merry or fun, the country was, and about service "na grane fantastiki," verging on science fiction. I noticed a particularly interesting meaning of "primitive" when a curator asked me if her exhibit on local history looked like African art. When I expressed surprise, she explained: "We make everything ourselves, out of nothing." So "uncivilized" could imply using "magic" to jerry-rig new things out of bits of old ones, significantly called nothing, and absence of division of labor. Situations seen as governed by self-interest were also uncivilized. A synonym for such dearths of healthy culture was, one man told me, "In one word, Russia. Where everyone is engaged in what he should not be engaged in."

If, in the Eastern Orthodox church, this world is seen as "nothing," "a shadow, a dream" (Harakas 1990:51), late-Soviet and early post-Soviet byt, modes of everyday life, were in many ways “not real life” (Pesmen 1998). Again, though, surface messiness and lack of structural elegance were often taken to indicate integrity on "another level," internal integrity. Epithets indicating such attitudes to Russia's holy disorganization and complexity were the exclamations Rossiia!, Sovetskii Soiuz!, sibir'!, and Aziia!²

Textbooks occasionally condone mixed metaphors in literature when they express or generate appropriate moods. In other words, a domain may be fractured or bricolaged (Levi-Strauss 1962) if it is to be experienced formally, as indicative of disorder itself. Thus when Hamlet takes arms against a sea of troubles, critics call him impassioned, distracted, confused, states in which metaphors mix and which supposedly characterize Hamlet’s fragmented internal "space." Such hypothetical spaces defy us to understand "where we stand," as Foucault (1970: xvi) says, the site on which propinquity of these things would be possible. The former Soviet Union, as the significantly dated map at the head of this essay implies, was such a site. "Only here," people said, "could things work like this." This cartoon map also alludes to a popular Friday night television game show, Pole chudes, “field of miracles." Modeled on an American show, "Wheel of Fortune," the Russian version was named after a setting in the mythical geography of Aleksei Tolstoi's version of the Pinocchio story, Buratino.

A man told me that the mentality behind the similarly popular phrase strana durakov, land of fools, was born of the Petrine reforms. "If you change too fast," he said, "people don't understand. We all became Russian fools." His dating is off; the Primary Chronicles imply that even proto-Russians were incapable of making order, and the "fool for Christ's sake" certainly also predates Peter. But this man's use of two points of view is astute: 18th and 19th century nationalists formulated a inexpressible, unmannered, unpredictable, unmeasurable Russian soul in opposition to supposed European rational articulation, precision, delimitation, and predictability (cf. Rogger 1960, Williams 1970, Greenfeld 1992), imagery still current in the 1990s. When someone labeled Russia or part of it “theater of the absurd” or “circus” or displayed appreciation of the aesthetic that Bakhtin (1984) says erases barriers between genres, systems, and styles, a voice which valued coherence was implied to be refuted.

Passing a children’s playground, a friend marveled at low metal structures which, like all monuments to the degrading incompetence of “our Soviet system,” were, he said, “good for nothing but for little kids to trip over.” He grinned. “But they really trip, from the depths of their souls.” Then we passed a factory. He said that part of a process involving warheads registered on radiation therapy gauges at the oncological center and vice versa. “No joke,” he said. "Rossiia." Only one word (and others of its genre) could adequately gesture at this life.

Important members of this genre were the terms sistema, system, nasha sistema, our system, nasha sovetskaia (or sovkovaia³) sistema, our Soviet (or post-Soviet) system. Siniavskii (1988:xi) calls sistema "so extraordinary that even those who grew up in it see it as a monstrosity or alien environment; one, however, in which they belong." This is part of a sistema which my friends called variously "no system at all," "hard and soft boiled at the same time," and vinegret  (a party salad of vegetables, contingent on availability, chopped up or shredded into bits the diversity and equality of which Borges’ “Chinese Encyclopedia” would envy) These descriptions may imply an unsystematic sistema, but their form certainly encapsulates and values the inchoate coherently, points at mess and inexpressibility neatly.

That outsiders cannot possibly "understand" is a theme in everyday talk and popular comedy routines.⁴ What's more, Russians have long claimed that not even they themselves understand sistema and their enigmatic dusha, soul. Nikitenko, in 1867, claimed that though Russian spirit stood for "great, meaningful essences," no one in Russia understood them (Cherniavsky 1969:196). But even without understanding, by using or correctly responding to such dense, wry comments, people shared consensus on the meaningfulness of their mess. Another summary was marazm, funny the way a doctor called the sterilizing room in his hospital the funniest place there. Calling a context some form or other of psychiatric hospital or madhouse (psikhbol'nitsa, durdom, psikhushka) or otherwise nenormal'no, in Bakhtin's (1984:168) words, "laughed in the face of horror,” while at the same time affirming entire narratives unnecessary to formulate because they were suffered together.

Russia was not only mythologized as a site of ideal disorder and monstrous abomination; juxtaposed objects, tactics, economic systems, and styles were heterogeneous. Rossiia! or russkaia dusha! explained how nuclear disasters were hushed up, remarked on an entrance to a public toilet by metro token or on the exorbitant cost of humanitarian aid at kiosks which also offered toxic instant coffee, underwear, newspapers of varied dates and “vodka” or “cognac” bottles with misspelled English outside and stolen industrial alcohol inside. Leather miniskirts in mink berets stepped over drunk quilted peasant jackets in dog fur hats outside rotting apartment blocks looming over ornately carved houses, exchanged for cars by workers paid in canned meat and shoes of useless sizes. The radio asked how the same Supreme Soviet could declare both the October Revolution or November Coup and Christmas national holidays. In spring it broadcast congratulations to those celebrating May 1st "as well as those not celebrating what ought not be celebrated." People jokingly greeted each other with the slogan "Peace, Labor, May!" and responded "Voistinno voskres!", “Truly, He is risen.” Taxes appeared and vanished. Overnight, street corners sprouted pyramids of ketchup; the next day there was only one bottle, at the market.  Between a pair of socks and a pig's head. Time was fragmented as people debated planting their gardens according to astrology or almanacs and then used both, and as they forgot where they were going to queue up for whatever was available, causing gridlock as other people waited for them elsewhere.

This texture can, of course, be explained as a by-product of socioeconomic change, corruption, and a shortage economy in which money was weak and networks strong, but such explanations were not usually interesting to people. Although “sovetskaia sistema”  explained when things did not work, that sistema also had an invisible hand; I heard that though the Soviet system had been corrupt and the stores empty “every family had somehow gotten approximately what it needed." A table set for guests condensed people's life stories, talents, temperaments, opportunism and luck in buying, hoarding, sharing, gardening, canning, stealing, bartering, bribing, and calling in debts. Yet when women worked this system to materialize a meal, people called them volshebnitsy, magicians, speaking in the voice of naive observers who see only strana chudes, a "Land of Miracles." As the Soviet sistema began to disintegrate, many people who hated it still complained that dusha was dying. One man told me, launching into a special military industrial lament,⁵ that "Lately dusha has become undirected … lost its steering, like a missile with no guidance system."

Concurrently with late Soviet use of the word sistema, hippies adopted it to describe their counterculture.⁶ Sistema, though often discussed as dusha's loathsome nemesis, was overdetermined with enough of the right stuff to be revitalized as newly soulful.

Fernandez (1982:562-565, 1986) brilliantly describes how Bwiti knowledgeable ones mix metaphors, "cross-referencing domains" into "spaces" where, "by condensation, extension, expansion, and performance of metaphoric predications," aspects of a broken cultural life seem to be reconciled. Perestroika and early post-Soviet Russia also featured challenging fragmentation, in the face of which individuals systematically wove images of emptiness, failure, incompletion, and communitas into identity, a fabric made dense by conflation of different definitions and contexts into the condensed unity of words like soul, system, or Russia; seeming incoherence seemingly reconciled by an apparently higher principle.

Now this portrays pictures of wholes in their best light, integrations that help. But such pictures also have an element of what Karsten Harries (1968:75-6, 149) calls kitsch; by offering the solace of a simplified image of humans and groups as coherent, they are in bad faith. As Adorno said, inverting Hegel's dictum, "the whole is the false" (Adorno 1974:50). One note at this point: I want to make it clear that, although I have used the Russian case here, I began this study with broadly Western notions of coherence, and my critique here includes my own soul and my own culture. This said, the coherence without which common sense refuses to confer the honorary title of real is, I suggest, kitsch; it only soothingly appears to reveal identity. What's more, creation of realistic wholes is fully continuous with how ethnicity is constructed, politicized, and made violent. Identities created by exaggeration, conflation, and generalization and felt to be authoritatively real are made to be manipulated.⁷

One tactic of dusha, soul, is to coopt daily life by denying it reality, affirming solidarity and the unfinalizable depths in a potlatch of self-defamation. In a 1992 joke, Bush, Mitterrand and Yeltsin come before God. Bush asks God when things will be OK, really OK, in America. God thinks and says "50 years." Bush bursts into tears and leaves. Mitterrand asks God when things will be OK, really OK, in France. God thinks and says "100 years." Mitterrand bursts into tears and leaves. Yeltsin then approaches God and asks him when things will be OK, really OK, in Russia. God thinks, bursts into tears and leaves. The size of dusha, its “depth,” like the scale of the so-called "mess" in Russia, seem to defy reckoning in part by exploiting the fact that no person, group, or culture is a coherent whole, but is rather moments, impulses, tropes, approaches, habits, and practices. Soul is one way of giving this a clear form, the form of the unclear and unformed, of the transcendently huge or deep, of what may be more messed up than God is powerful. In critique and complicity, the Russian soul, like most, searches for coherences and rebels against them. Dusha, soul, identity, and other illusory wholes are modeled on timeless moments generalized in the image of reason.⁸

References

Adorno, Theodore
    1974 .  Minima MoraliaTranslated by E. F. N. Jephcott. New York, NY: NLB.

Bakhtin, Mikhail
    1984  Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Barrett, Robert
    1987  Schizophrenia and Personhood. manuscript.

Cherniavsky, Michael
    1969  Tsar and People: Studies in Russian Myths. NY: Random House.

Fernandez, James W.
    1982  Bwiti: an Ethnography of the Religious Imagination in Africa. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Fernandez, James W.
    1986  Persuasions and Performances. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Foucault, Michel
    1970  The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Random House.

Goodman, Nelson
    1978  Ways of Worldmaking. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company.

Greenfeld, Liah
    1992  Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Harakas, Stanley Samuel
    1990  Health and Medicine in the Eastern Orthodox Tradition. New York: Crossroad Publishing Co.

Harries, Karsten
    1968  The Meaning of Modern Art. Edited by J. Wild, Northwestern University Studies in Phenomenology and
             Existential Philosophy. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.

Leerssen, Joep
    1996  Remembrance and Imagination: Patterns in the Historical and Literary Representation of Ireland in
             the Nineteenth Century. Cork: Cork University Press.

Levi-Strauss, Claude
    1962  The Savage Mind. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Lloyd, David
    1993  Anomalous States: Irish Writing and the Postcolonial Movement. Dublin: Lilliput.

Nikitenko, A. V
    1893  Zapiski i Dnevnik, 3. St. Petersburg.

Pepper, Stephen
    1942  World Hypotheses. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Pesmen, Dale
    1991  Reasonable and Unreasonable Worlds: Some Expectations of Coherence in Culture Implied by the Prohibition of
             Mixed Metaphor. In Beyond Metaphor: The Theory of Tropes in Anthropology, edited by J. W. Fernandez.

Pesmen, Dale
    1998  The Russian Soul: Ethnography and Metaphysics. Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of Anthropology, The University
             of Chicago, Chicago.

Rayport-Rabodzeenko, Jennifer
    1998  Creating Elsewhere, Being Other: The Invented Spaces and Selves of St. Petersburg Youth, 1990-1995, Ph.D.
             Dissertation, Department of Anthropology, The University of Chicago, Chicago.

Ries, Nancy
    1997  Russian Talk: Culture and Conversation during Perestroika. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Rogger, Hans
    1960  National Consciousness in Eighteenth-Century Russia. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Sinyavsky, Andrei
    1988  Soviet Civilization: A Cultural History. Translated by Joanne Turnbull. New York: Arcade Publishing.

Stocking, George W., Jr.
    1992  The Ethnographer's Magic and Other Essays in the History of Anthropology. Madison: The University of
             Wisconsin Press.

Turner, Victor
    1969  The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. Edited by V. Turner, Lewis Henry Morgan Lectures
             1966 - Cornell Paperbacks. Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press.

Williams, Robert C.
    1970  The Russian Soul: A Study in European Thought and Non-European Nationalism. Journal of the History of Ideas
             31:573-588.

Notes

1. Soviet children read of the travels of Russian ethnographer Nikolai Miklukho-Maklai (1846-1888) in New Guinea in the 1870s and 1880s (cf. Stocking 1992:212-275). The publication of his diaries in 1923 and his collected scientific works in the 1950s certainly is the origin of this usage of term papuasy to refer to primitive society. As Stocking notes, "the age-old European dream of the Noble Savage" was definitely a presence in Mikluho-Maklai's writing (ibid.:231).

2. I discuss elsewhere (Pesmen 1998) obscene or rude phrases referred to as "porusski".

3. Sovok (p. sovki), lit. dustpan, is derogatory slang for "post Soviet," implying a jaded, hyperboloically crude type with no trace of (communist or any "higher") ideals. This late- and post-Soviet Person was imagined as frazzled, run down, internally and externally shoddy.

4. I discuss this theme in discourse and practice in Pesmen 1998. During the early 1990s Zadornov performed a sketch on how only Soviets can understand Soviet jokes. He would move from there to marveling at the eclectic inventiveness mandated by "how we live" and to how he "loves" "monstrous" Soviet types such as shop clerks who lack the muscles and brains to smile.

5. On laments, cf. Ries 1997.

6. Cf. Rayport-Rabodzeenko 1998 on youth culture sistema.

7. Cf. David Lloyd 1993:89, 98-9.

8. This paper is a short version of chapter 15 in Pesmen 1998.
 
 
 

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

 #1 Have you [H.W.] been in India? I've seen Indian movies. They were very beautiful. Especially the actresses. In former days movies used to be shown in the club. Two times in a day! From six o'clock for children, from nine for adults. But now there is nothing, because of the shortage of gasoline. This is why we didn't receive our pensions yesterday. That reminds me ... Recently, I heard, someone dies every ten days. A maintenance man was drowned in the river. A teacher had been suffering from hypertension, and died. And most recently, chabanka (a shepherd woman) died. How old was she ... not beyond fifty... yes, forty-nine years old, I think. Of cancer. She would have soon been able to receive her pension, for she had five children; but didn't live her life. She had worked as chabanka in otara (flock)--where you also have been--it's very hard work [informant crying]. Her youngest child is still a baby. The rate of deaths increases while the rate of births is low. In this year only ten children have been born so far. Everyone will die. No future. Until what age are human beings able to be active? Until childhood, teens, twenties, thirties ... Not until fifties. [Woman, fifties]

#2 In former days there were public bathhouses. But there are none now. How do people who don't have any baths live? People have become susceptible to disease. In former times sanitation was widespread. Nothing works now. The goods are Chinese. And the toilet paper Czech! Where have our goods gone? There's nothing among us. A terrible time has come. Ah, how terrible! [Woman, fifties]

While I was conducting my anthropological fieldwork during the summers of 1996 and 1997 summers in the Selenga District, Republic of Buriatiia, Russian Federation, I was always forced to think about the end. This impression was inspired mainly by daily discourses presented to me by many informants in two villages, Tokhoi and Noekhon, where I researched my theme, "The socio-cultural transformation among the Buriats after perestroika." Many villagers have a strong sense of the end, living in the current socio-economic situation. In that case, the end of what? If asked, they would loudly give an answer: "the end of the Soviet Union" or  "the end of communism!" How can we capture the sense of "the end of something" in the context of social theories?

It goes without saying that the collapse of the Soviet Union and the demise of the Cold War have had an enormous impact upon social theories and intellectual thought. One may recall here immediately, for example, the well-known article by Francis Fukuyama entitled "The End of History?" (1989). In that short article he expressed with Hegelian nuances the final triumph of Western democracy which had been the only rival of socialism until then. His standpoint nevertheless does not suit the Selenga Buriats. This is not because they have not obtained a democratic regime and stability, but because they think that the democracy, which should follow the end of "totalitarian" Soviet-type socialism--as defined by numerous Soviet watchers--has not come to them.

#3 Under Lenin, Socialism was a good idea. Everything was transformed and changed after Stalin. I, of course, don't exactly read the books of Lenin, and so this is my opinion. If it means a previous one, I don't want to return to communism. The current situation is neither socialism nor capitalism: mere disorder. There is no expression other than it. Perestroika is just a word. The situation turned out to be worse. [Perestroika is] An empty word. [Man, twenties]

Instead of an opportunistic opinion such as Fukuyama's, we can find other frameworks which are intricately intertwined: post-socialism, post-colonialism, and postmodernism. This triad of post-ness is one of the most popularized concepts used in the literature of human sciences now. If this assumption is useful for analyzing contemporary societies after perestroika, what will be the implications of "post-ness," in the scope of modern anthropology?

Fragment I: Change or continuity in economic reforms?

The first point to be discussed concerns post-socialism. Regarding the disintegration of the socialist bloc in Eurasia as an advent of post-socialism means not the replacement of it by capitalism or Western democracy, but reconfiguration of still existing socialist structures in nonsocialist regimes. Thus, what we can perceive through them is not just change which occurs now, but continuity which may be called the legacy of socialism. In other words, as Steven Sampson (1991: 19) and Katherine Verdery (1996: 11) point out, it is after the breakdown of socialism that we can understand more precisely in what way actually existing socialism worked.

For example, I would like to focus attention on the kolkhoz (a collective or corporate farm. Under the Soviet system, see Humphrey 1983). In the Soviet period, kolkhozes were all-encompassing institution: they functioned not just as a productive unit in rural areas but also as one of infrastructure for cultural activities. They helped villagers to build a museum, to organize of folklore contests, and still remained a linchpin of collectivization--by which I mean here the formation of collective or communal mentality of villagers other than the very Soviet policies in 1920-30s. However after perestroika these kolkhozes were forcibly refashioned. In the village of Noekhon the "Twentieth Party Congress" kolkhoz was reorganized in May, 1992, into the "Noekhon Collective Enterprise (kollektivnoe predpriyatie)," according to the Russian "Code of enterprises and enterprise activities" adopted in December of 1991. In Noekhon this resulted in the privatization of 52% of land and of 73% of productive funds. In reality, however, this new enterprise drastically lost its productive force and means, and was 1,307,000 rubles in the red in 1996. Economic and cultural activities became more individualistic than they had been. The villagers nevertheless emphasize even now the collective or communal way of life at the discursive level. Here we can conjecture what village life was like in the socialist era.

But, I somewhat doubt whether we can reconstruct the real way of life under socialism from the data collected in post-socialist days, because information about the socialist way of life narrated by the villagers is a reassessed one in terms of the current socio-economic difficulties. In Soviet times kolkhozes were a state institution, one of the cells directed for total management and control of economic society, and one of the devices of "colonialization of lifeworld by system," if I may echo David Anderson's argument (1992) based on the Jurgen Habermasian problematic. The Soviet kolkhoz, however, is now remembered by the villagers as a working place where labor was fully provided, and where workers were able to receive proper wages. Let us hear an informant's narrative about the kolkhoz in Tokhoi.

#4 Everything was common in the Commune. So were houses. In contrast the kolkhoz was good. We earned wages according to how much we worked. Everyone made efforts also in the private sector and saved money. Everyone worked for all his worth. But now, the situation has changed. The number of alcoholics are increasing, and people don't want to work seriously. Even if you find work, you can't receive any money. [Man, fifties]

That is to say, the kolkhoz is remembered in their now-existing worldview as like a security zone of private life, not like a state apparatus which restricted personal economic activities in private plots. We can here put our finger on the reconfiguration of remembering after perestroika, and therefore, many scholars of (post-) socialist studies embrace the problem of memory as a core theme (e.g. Grant 1995; Skultans 1998; Watson ed. 1994).

Needless to say, I am not of the agnostic opinion that we cannot inquire into Soviet society on the basis of fieldwork carried out after its complete collapse. The point I want to make is that in order to investigate the contemporary atmosphere in the post-socialist societies we had better emphasize aspects of change rather than continuity. The collectivity-oriented discourses by the villagers of Noekhon are not so much the byproduct of the socialist socio-cultural structure but rather a representation of the villagers' sense of community reshaped and re-imagined in present circumstances--circumstances which they think have been caused by the "from above" transition or transformation. Approached in this way, post-socialist study may be defined as the study of societies wherein a generative process of a new kind of community or collective society occurs which had been until now understood by Soviet watchers--whose discussions are criticized by Chris Hann with ethnographic sensibility (ed. 1990; ed. 1993)--merely as socialist mentality (collectivism) contrasted strikingly with its capitalist counterpart (individualism).

Fragment II: Soviet and ethnic cultures

The post-socialist conditions, secondly, could be labeled post-colonial in the former Soviet periphery, because the Soviet Union had in itself more than 130 ethnic groups, and because it is usually believed that the Russian-dominated Moscow government, as the center of a multinational empire, oppressed non-Russian nationalities, who in turn demanded national autonomy and proclaimed independence in the name of perestroika. This is why Carrere d'Encausse titled her monograph as L'Empire Eclate (1978), which has nowadays become a prophetic naming. When Soviet ideology and national policies aimed for ethnic consolidation through cultural colonization of non-Russian territories (characterized as Stalin's notable phrase "socialist in content, nationalist in form") broke down, this post-socialism also meant post-colonialism.

Although compared with European Russia, the Caucasus and Central Asia, ethno-national movements in Siberia were rather weak, noteworthy among Buriat intellectuals is their emphasis on the Asianness and the Orientalness of Buriat culture and traditions (cf. Humphrey 1991). Such regional orientation towards the East and even Occidentalism contrasts with the so-called Euro-centrism one of the common landmarks of post-colonialism all over the world the peculiarity of the stress by Buriat intellectuals lies in the fact that their viewpoints are anti-Soviet, but not anti-Russian. According to arguments by I. S. Urbanaeva (1992; 1993), historical philosopher and ethnographer, the twentieth century is an age when human beings became contradictory to their own nature, when many nations have been in conflict with each other, and when the West and the East have opposed each other. The supra-national concept of "Baikal culture" gives an alternative--where humanity and nature have coexisted as a kind of a biological niche. She argues that this Baikal culture is an Inner Asian one, and that the Baikal region is not on the periphery of it, but, on the contrary, is central.  Thus Urbanaeva attempts to show a perspective by which she thinks the Buriats could overcome their ethnic isolation. Her arguments go beyond Russia, for she proceeds to say that Europeanization is dangerous to Russia as well as to Buriatiia.

Philosopher and cultural anthropologist, Z. P. Morokhoeva's discussions (1994; 1995) are more sophisticated than Urbanaeva's, which have some right-wing implications in the ethnopolitics of Buriatiia (Zhukovskaia 1994:10). Morokhoeva states that while Western civilization has lost a traditional "model of world"--as she defines culture--which can harmonize human beings with nature, personality, society, culture and nature to form an indivisible unity in the Eastern model of world. This is why the East can grapple with ecological problems more thoroughly than the West. Because Buriatiia land stands at the crossroads of the West (Russia) and the East, it is possible in Buriatiia to construct a civil society which allows for the growth of personality and respect for human rights in a European sense, and, at the same time, to have a renaissance of ethnic culture. We can find another discussion of the problematic interrelationship between ecology and moments of ethnic revival in Ecological Traditions in Culture of Inner Asian Peoples (Abaev ed. 1992). According to these authors, Inner Asian peoples have traditionally and historically fostered ecological culture, and because of this, their culture holds a unique position in the context of worldwide ecological issues. It provides, the authors continue, not only voices of nature preservation but also ideal or spiritual backgrounds concerning the symbiosis of men and nature. For instance, shamanism is affirmatively evaluated as a religious form of their cohabitation, and Buddhism as an ideal of the uncertainty of human existence.

Taking into consideration the pre-existing, dominant Soviet ideology one of the components of which is an ideal of rapid industrialization and modernization, we might assess these discussions as post-colonial. However, it cannot be overlooked that it is almost only the intellectual class that creates discourses which link post-Soviet ideological space and an orientation towards the East or Oriental culture. Although an acquaintance in Noekhon told me, "I believe Buddhism is a more peaceful and ecological religion than Christianity and Islam," ordinary people use the concept of culture with connotations different from the discourses of intellectuals. For the man in the street, the end of the Soviet Union connotes culture in the Soviet sense, that is, socialist modernization or enlightenment. This drives us to the third question of postmodernism.

Fragment III: Between Postmodernism And Modernization

In what manner does postmodernism relate to post-socialist phenomena? Of course the term postmodernism has various definitions. Maryon McDonald says that  the "invention of 'post-modernism' and analyses of socialism have been closely linked" (1991: 20). Keeping the East European case in mind, Zygmunt Bauman argues that "what collapsed was the most decisive attempt to make modernity work," for "communism was thoroughly modern in its passionate conviction that a good society can only be a carefully designed, rationally managed and thoroughly industrialized society." (1992: 167, 222)  Ernest Gellner's famous insistence on "enlightenment rationalism" (1992) derives from his assumption that the contemporary ideological map of the world has ceased to be binary (e.g. liberalism vs. socialism), and that the relativism he criticizes is fashioned as postmodernism and is a "claustrophobic and isolationist" option. In this respect, his argument is anti-postmodernist as well as post-socialist. Whatever the term postmodernism means, post-Soviet conditions may be called post-modern. But in what historical and local context?

As I have said, we notice the sense of an "end of something" among the Selenga Buriats. Their assessments of the current "disorder" (#3) are made with reference to images of the Soviet period which has collapsed. At least as far as I observed, no villagers and not even self-professed communists expressed the position that they should like to return to a socialist or Soviet regime. They make no claims on the future based on their memory of a" stable" life in the Soviet Union. The villagers instead reassess post-Soviet conditions, and merely lament them as they witness the present decline of Soviet culture.

#5 We're accustomed to the socialist meaning of culture. In the sense of lifestyle, I mean. It's about how people live, say, schools, study, films, technical colleges. The former days were good. But everything is destroyed now. Everything is destroyed. In the past life went well. Basically. I don't know what will come tomorrow. I don't know. We may know it while we live. In principle we lived our own times. For children and grandchildren ... what's coming? [Man, fifties]

 Generally speaking, the core of Soviet cultural policy had two dimensions which were inseparably linked to each other: the invention of an official ethnic culture according to ethnic articulation, and the creation of a Soviet culture as a form of new civilization beyond ethnicity. The former process resulted mainly in a widespread establishment of cultural organizations (e.g. ethnic folklore ensembles, ethnic museums and so on). The latter was concerned with the socialist enlightenment (cf. Grant 1995). Among the largely illiterate Siberian native peoples at the time of the Russian Revolution, this dimension meant kul'turnoe stroitel'stvo (cultural construction); that is, education, the invention of an alphabet, and building cultural institutions for a modern way of life (e.g. reading rooms, bathrooms, krasnie ugolki ("red corner," lounges), dom kul'tury (house of culture) or clubs, libraries, schools, etc.). It is for this very reason that when they lament the current hardship, the first informant refers to movies in the club, the second to bathhouses, and the last to socialist lifestyle. The reason why studies of material culture were highly developed in Soviet ethnography lies in the foregoing definitions of culture. Soviet culture is equal in one context to cultural amenities, which have been "destroyed" (#5) and have ceased to function in the social structure.

The villagers have no alternative perspective on Soviet ideology and culture, although they severely criticize the repression of Tibetan Buddhism by the government and have a few relatives who were arrested, purged, and in some cases sent before the firing squad under Stalin's terror. For them, the collapse of the Soviet Union is experienced as the end of culture defined as a modern way of life and as material progression. On the basis of the emic definition of "better" culture, the Selenga Buriats distinguish themselves both from the Western (Irkutsk) Buriats ("lower" shamanists than Buddhists) and from the Mongols who they think are "culturally-lower" due to the insufficiency of modernized culture. But they themselves in turn have been recently forced to undergo a malfunction of culture and have lost any coordinates for evaluating their position in a culturally-evolutionist process, the ideology of which was made during the Soviet era. Viewed in this light, post-Soviet conditions may be regarded as postmodern in the sense that the end of the Soviet Union provoked a malfunction of culture which has been defined and experienced through modernization and a modern style of life.

Concluding Remarks

Using the triangle key terms, I have sketched out some aspects of a "sense of end" among the post-Soviet Selenga Buriats. The picture given above cannot be applied to all the post-socialist areas. There is, for instance, a strong and future-oriented symbol of "Western Europe" or "Return to Europe" among the Czech masses who consider themselves to be "a highly cultural and well-educated nation" and therefore have detested being classified as "uncultured" East Europeans (Holy 1993: 208). One can hardly find such a "hopeful" goal being pursued in Southern Siberia. Nevertheless, it is misleading to say that the Selenga Buriats are now apathetic.

Pointing out the Janus-faced processes of destatization and restatization in post-socialist Eurasia, Verdery (1996: ch.8) defines the atmosphere as feudalistic--a parceling of sovereignty or authoritative structure. This formulation is true (even to some extent in capitalist states). Because the terminology of feudalism to some extent suggests a historical evolutionist theory--although Verdery also rejects teleological thinking (pp. 227f.)--I prefer instead to define it more modestly from Southern Siberia as the end of rapid modernization planned and installed from the above according to the evolutionist ideology of progress and its effects and aftermath. Buriat problems are concerned with the modernization process and are common to residents in post-industrial states.

The conclusion of this report has far-reaching implications for us. Shocked by the impact of post-colonial studies and cultural studies, contemporary anthropology has shifted to the post-modernisms with an emphasis on multivocal ethnography (e.g. Clifford 1988; Marcus and Fischer 1986). On the other hand, I would like to insist that we do not need postmodern anthropology, but anthropology on modernity--postmodernity, if one wants. Social theories have been composed until now of a series of binary pairs (e.g. capitalism vs. socialism, community vs. modernity, society vs. the state, individualism vs. collectivism, and so forth). But these dualistic frameworks, the distinction between anthropology which deals with "primitive" Gemeinschaft and sociology with "modernized" Gesellschaft, may not be useful especially for the post-socialist studies. In this light, studies of contemporary Eurasia and East Europe where such a binary or dualistic approach so far has been dominant in academic worlds mandates a radical transformation of methodological thinking of anthropology.

This research was supported in part by a grant from the Japanese Ministry of Education, Science and Culture.

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

 This paper is based on the premise that the title of the conference is best understood in the conditional sense as in "as if there were a way out of the ruins."  I will argue the necessity of thinking about two ruins, not one: the first is that of the American university, and the second is the one located in Russia.  I want to argue that we who are in the former place for all or most of our time, and who only visit that latter place for shorter or longer stays, need to think about these two places together, in the same breath, as part of the same dilemma.  I am not referring to any need to "bridge the gap" between these places, as if it were simply a matter of bringing more of "them" here and finding ways to send more of us over there.  This was an imperative of not so long ago, and it remains important, it is just that it is no longer the kind of practical task to be solved now.  Today it is more a matter of stepping back and asking what kind of scholarly project might be put in motion that could with time generate the power to act upon those various forces that have established these endemic ruins.  I will begin by briefly suggesting how the contemporary American university is "in ruins."

First a necessary note of caution.  The claim that the American university is in ruins is of course a hyperbolic construction, and I should make clear that I do not mean to suggest that the physical and emotional suffering of millions of Russians is on par with or equal to the intellectual and practical confusion of tens of thousands of reasonably well-fed and sheltered academics on this continent.  On the other hand there is my conviction that both these ruins share some of the same history, and that genealogical research into one of these subjects must sooner or later encounter the other.  Again, do not try to see a causal argument from history in what I am going to say: the Russian ruins were not "caused by" the crisis in American universities, nor did the crisis in American universities come into being as a consequence of the long collapse of the Soviet Union, which, after all, we might date to 1968 or thereabouts.  And yet there is some sense in which these two phenomena should be examined together, so that the present might be better understood and some kind of orientation to the forces guiding these ruinations might be shaped.  So what do I mean by the crisis in American universities today?

This is certainly an immense topic, but I would like to make two general points.  The first is that there is a disconnect, which nearly every university teacher I know remarks upon and struggles to negotiate, between their assumption that the classroom is a site for intellectual experience, growth, challenge, exploration, productive confusion and disenchantment, and students' assumptions about the meaningfulness of their time in class.  This sentiment is stronger wherever evidence for the immediate utility of the subject is weaker; this means that classes in the social sciences and humanities are places where this disconnect is to be experienced in the most intense way.  This mismatch between teachers and students can be explained in many ways, but it seems to me that one source of this lies in the fact that students are already saturated with so many fragments of ideas received in every context of socialization that they cannot recognize the university as providing something different than that which the media provides.

It would be nice if we could then criticize the media and other pseudo-educational experiences and celebrate the university as providing an alternative kind of experience, but this would be missing the fact that one dimension of the university is in the direction of media spectacles and the need for constant publicity.  The result for students is a seamless kind of flow between the world and the university, instead of the constant making and remaking of the experience of crossing the border between the two, with all the anxiety such entries and exits from national spaces have.

The only place where media is as yet not allowed is the classroom; as yet there are no "Microsoft Lecture Rooms" at the University of Michigan, there are no seminar rooms with the Nike swoosh behind the table or above the blackboard, although we should brace ourselves to react to this event when it comes.  We can still say that classrooms are places where some teachers seek a fundamental autonomy from the mediasphere.

The problem is that the intellectual operations that students bring to the classroom are more and more out of synch with the kinds of operations teachers see as necessary for the creation of critical thought.  This is evidence not only of the failure of high schools to provide the kind of intellectual and experiential foundations for thinking about the world (although that may be a part of it).  Teachers must constantly grapple with the fragments, with the pieces of thought, with the haphazard and randomly interrupted currents of impressions that are rarely brought into to any kind of focus in order to be seen as a (temporary) whole.  Universities have extended this problem by becoming in the last three decades so socially and culturally heterogeneous and market driven.

This may not sound like a description of ruins, but I'm getting to that.  The ruins come into view as we combine this problem of the social context of higher education with the centrifugal forces that have been tearing apart apparently stable fields of intellectual inquiry.  The positive spin on this is to call it natural, inevitable, and to sanctify it with the term "interdisciplinary."  A more genealogical approach would argue that interdisciplinarity is no doubt many things, but in part it is the result of the erosion of national purpose that lay within the core of most disciplinary identities as they took shape in the 1950s.  In other words, the specifically American nature of the knowledge produced by and for universities is almost gone.  Until the last decade or so the national mythology was a part of the genetic codes of the disciplines; the pieces of myth indispensable to the conduct of the Cold War were essential to the problems of departments and fields.  These are the discursive practices Edward Said identified nearly two decades ago as being the post-war version of the Orientalizing project.  He suggested that even those disciplines most removed from the construction of America's place in the world shared the aura of connection to America's national vision of social order.  These are all too familiar: the infallibility of scientific expertise; the intolerance of other cultures' ways of organizing life and meaning; the persistent redefinition of problems in terms of the practical and the theoretical, etc.  It is apparent today, though, that disciplinary knowledge is increasingly disconnected from those deep currents of "national purpose."  "Deconstruction" and each of those linguistic, reflexive, and cultural turns were significant quakes that jolted loose English and anthropology, sociology and history, from their ambition to justify the standing of America in the postwar world.  And all the reactive attempts to re-center knowledge on American foundations has only revealed the weakness of the national mythology, and the naked manipulation necessary for any display of American sentiment.

Of the many consequences of this process, the one that deserves special thought is that of the identities of disciplines that have traditionally specialized in the study of other cultures, nations, or places.  The platform of national purpose provided these disciplines with a firm foundation, and the disciplines in turn provided a channel of national vision on to the external world.  In the case of anthropology there are the obvious optics of culture and personality work that assisted the war effort during WWII, the area studies model that helped during the Cold War, and the more practical channel provided by the development projects of the 60s and 70s.

This is no place to take a stab at describing the problems of the discipline of anthropology as the next millennium dawns.  Suffice it to say anthropology and anthropologists can no longer simply assume the relevance of their place in the pantheon of the liberal arts; that some people might imagine it is no longer necessary to have anthropology departments in the future; that what has made these disciplines special in the past can now be incorporated into the curricula of schools of business, public health, or engineering.  In other words, it is worth thinking about how we as anthropologists of Russia and the former Soviet Union who feel a connection to traditions of Marxist, humanist, and/or post-modern criticism might react to the demand to justify our relevance within the university of future.

Thus the ruins become visible when we stop to consider the entire palette of relationships that teacher/scholars/writers have with the social world that sustains them and within which they are supposed to play a significant role.

Holmes is worried most of all not about Russia, but about Liberalism, and Russia's plight presents us with a lesson we should learn about Liberalism.  He argues that there simply is no liberal society in Russia today because there is no effective state that can support the infrastructure of liberal forms of life.  Liberal societies, he writes, depend on a strong, efficient state with the power to do the minimal but necessary things that liberal publics demand: the enforcement of contracts, the supervision of the physical safety of its citizens, the collection of taxes and the operation of impartial courts, etc.  In Russia, by contrast, there is a "grave crisis of governability...an incoherent state tenuously connected to a demoralized society" (Holmes 32). He supplies a familiar list of horrors:

Symptoms of internal disarray are ubiquitous: prison outbreaks, railroad bandits, soldiers begging cigarettes in public places, packs of dogs on the streets of provincial cities, unrepaired oil leaks...The debility of the Russian state not only inflicts suffering on Russians, but also is the source of new specters haunting the West: more Chernobyl-style meltdowns, over-the-counter sales of nuclear know-how to rogue states, the proclaimed technical and financial inability to liquidate existing weapons, shamefully maintained oil tankers, a contagious disease crisis that may eventually threaten Europe, organized crime activity metastasizing alarmingly abroad, the inability of the central government to live up to its obligations (as in the case of NASA's space station), a questionable command-and-control system, and lack of coordination among the defense and foreign ministries on questions vital to neighboring states  (Holmes 31).

The "government lacks resources and purposes, and...incumbents are more keen on harvesting kickbacks and insider giveaways than on solving public problems."  "While not especially oppressive (with the important exception of Chechnya), the government is fragmented, unaccountable, and seemingly indifferent to the plight of its citizens.  Social services atrophy and life expectancy plummets, while ordinary Russians, expecting nothing from politics, eke out a living on their own."
The defeat of liberal reforms is most clearly visible in the wall of indifference separating state from society.  Corrupt incumbents, uninterested in oppression, live in a separate world from depoliticized citizens.  Moscow, a sparkling enclave that misleads foreign observers, also symbolizes the total disregard of the Russian rich for the Russian poor. (Holmes 33).

These citations are taken from only the first three pages of the nine page article.

Anticipating some objections, I should make clear that this account has its problems.  Holmes is not a Russian or Soviet specialist.  He is a student of the history of Liberalism.  He describes Russian society in order to remind the readers of  oThe American Prospect of the importance of the state in governments constructed on liberal principles, a fact that the currently popular critique of American "big government" overlooks.  In other words, his generalizations about Russia could be read as being culturally insensitive, ethnocentric, and partial.  Such a criticism raises its own problems, however, but I want to defend the utility of Holmes' descriptions to my interests because he creates in the reader who has something more than a casual interest in Russia an immense discomfort.  It is this discomfort that I would like to now highlight.

As I mentioned above, this bleak picture is no doubt too simple.  On the one hand, we might react: What student of Russian history could ever seriously think that Russia will become a liberal state like the liberal states of the West?  And on the other hand, we hear as we read the article a little voice reminding us that it will take time to make Liberalism real in Russia; if we wanted, we could reassure Holmes that Russia will build liberalism like Merrill-Lynch builds its reputation: one investor at a time.  But there is yet another voice we can hear that questions the very framework of Holmes' worldview, and in particular his assumption that liberal institutions came primarily from liberal ideas, that Russia is yet another place where political ideas are simply being put "into life," as the old Soviet phrase had it.

A number of obvious questions should be addressed to the article.  There is our hunch that the picture Holmes paints needs remixing, recoloring, redrawing; we could productively ask: How might an anthropologist supplement this article?  What kind of cultural knowledge could adjust this image of ruins?  What is Holmes missing by not being on the ground, in the language and culture, near the people?

I would not dispute the fact that this description leaves out a great deal, but I would still argue the relevance for thinking about the big picture within which the Russian ruins are evolving.  And this big picture must include at least some reference to the realms of governmentality within which daily life is lived.  It would, I fear, be a serious mistake to assume that the level of daily life explored by anthropologists could somehow show that the macro analyses of systemic social breakdown are simply wrong.  But at the same time we cannot simply celebrate the more spectacular sides of the contemporary Russian spectacle, assuming that culture (whatever that is) always pulls through, as for example the culture of the woodland tribes of native Americans is pulling through in the casinos of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.  And on the other hand it is difficult to imagine any non-Russian anthropologist arguing for the rightness of some form of Russian nationalism as a legitimate strategy for coping with the devolution of society.

One response to this question of the placing and placement of anthropological knowledge in the complicated intellectual terrain of post-communism might begin by answering another question: Is the most compelling task faced by Russians the construction of the Russian state so that it can establish and guarantee liberal rights?  This is certainly the implication of Holmes' article.  Another approach, more congenial to an anthropological sensibility, might be to set aside establishment of liberal rights that descend from the 18th century, or rather to leave them to the political scientists, and to focus instead on the amorphous, evolving nature of the personal and cultural interactions that constitute democracies.  At first glance this might look like I'm setting aside the 18th century only to be able to take it up again, but I am speaking of democracy here as something to be rethought in particular settings of culture and identity and not as procedures to be legislated.  This means thinking about those ideological constraints that prohibit the emergence of cultural forms around which democratic processes might coalesce.

We can find some assistance here in William Connolly's description that at the heart of democratic forms of life as they have appeared in the West is an agonistic discursive conflict between identity and difference.²  The democratic political and social systems that derive from Western European roots somehow acknowledge the problem and have evolved elaborate ideological mechanisms to control it: Difference is spun off as Otherness, and Otherness then congeals around Identity, and the cycle goes around again with the splintering off again of Difference.  This language may be foreign to some, but it is simply shorthand for referring to the fact that modern politics is increasingly and inevitably a politics of identity.  For Connolly, this fact means that a reinvigorated political life within and between states requires that individuals come to understand their own subjectivities as a product of situated plays of identity and difference.

I would like to highlight one point that Connolly emphasizes about this condition of contemporary democracy.  This is his questioning of the sufficiency of the idea of sovereignty as defining the way that individuals can relate to the world.  He points out that the most important social issues no longer exist within the neat confines of states; more and more are our social issues inherently inter-and trans-national.  He suggests that we "supplement and challenge structures of territorial democracy with a politics of nonterritorial democratization of global issues."  Many anthropologists are experts at living a nonterritorial life, although the creation of a non-state diplomacy that would seek to tunnel beneath both states and worldwide financial institutions to connect with other collectivities in other states is of course a problem beyond any single field or discipline.

This is of course a vague formulation.  It is in part a product of feeling caught between two significant ruinations.  I would like to end by at least placing on the table the possibility that SOYUZ might want to expand its role from facilitating largely North American scholarly connections to participating in a kind of diplomacy that might contribute to the reshaping of both classrooms and formerly "classless" societies.

To begin with the obvious: such a diplomacy might be organized around pedagogical initiatives that could involve the internet, although we would have to be aware of the ability of the kind of diplomacy I'm talking about to be absorbed into the channels of "connection" already naturalized by Microsoft and other mass media conglomerates, and to realize the differing modes and meaning of access to technology here and there.  In a larger sense, however, it is not so much one more channel by which to connect a group of Russians and a group of Americans that is necessary, as a kind of interaction  not solely marked from the outset by "CULTURAL DIFFERENCE," by the problem of representing America to Russia and representing Russia to America.  Perhaps some kind of publishing venture could be started by Soyuz dedicated to the anthropological illumination of the contemporary cultural conditions that various groups in both places are struggling within.  (For example, Americans might seek to illuminate the condition of living in a society where pre-adolescents commit murder at the playground because their girl-friends broke up with them.)  How can new "diplomatic channels" be used in order to develop in both groups a sense of the struggle to lead a life with integrity, however that may be defined?  How can both groups that enter into negotiation (using both here as a shorthand for what are of course collections of backgrounds, traits, histories, and problems, not "Russians" and "Americans") establish interests in common, that is, how can transnational publics take shape outside the always present channels already created by consumption?

Perhaps the effort should be focused more on developing curricula about one's own country, but with the collaboration of the other side's scholars and teachers, who would know what kinds of questions are most compelling, interesting, or prone to misunderstanding.  What would an anthropological curriculum about American society and history look like, anyway?  How should we teach our own dilemmas to students from another culture?  And how should we prepare ourselves to read and think about their dilemmas?  Perhaps these are the kinds of questions upon which a new practice of diplomacy might found itself.

Endnotes

1. Stephen Holmes, "What Rusia Teaches Us Now", The American Prospect, July/August 1997, pp. 30-39.

2. William Connolly, Identity/Difference (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991).

3. Costas M. Constantinou, On the Way to Diplomacy. Borderlines, Vol. 7 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996).
 
 

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

INTRODUCTION AND DISCLAIMER

 The Republic of Daghestan has received very little attention in the West.  Chenciner (1997) is the only full-length account in English based on first-hand visits mostly in the late 1980's and early 1990's.  Wixman's (1980) excellent study had to be based entirely on secondary sources, and Bennigsen and Wimbush (1986:146-81 et passim), while quite useful, is basically encyclopedic and somewhat dated.  Since Daghestan is still difficult to get to, potentially unstable, and only infrequently visited by Western scholars (mostly linguists), I am offering this account of my recent visit there (16-20 June 1998), modestly supplemented by some published materials.  My intent is basically informative and impressionistic, and I do not attempt to give complete coverage to many topics worthy of further research.  This account does, however, update some items covered in the aforementioned works and makes some observations on Daghestan with respect to language, identity, the political situation, and a comparison with the another unstable, multi-ethnic, identity construction site, i.e., Balkans, particularly Macedonia.

BACKGROUND

Daghestan is the third most populous Republic in the Russian Federation (after Bashkortostan and Tatarstan; Osmanov 1986:24).  The northern half of its current territory, consisting of the Nogai steppe and the Kizljar region settled in part by Terek Cossacks, was added in 1922, after the fall of the North Caucasian Mountain Republic (1918-21) and the establishment of Soviet power (see Broxup 1992).¹ Between the definitive Czarist Russian defeat of Shamil in 1859 (see Broxup 1992 and Gammer 1994) and the revolutions of 1917, the Daghestan Oblast’ consisted of a group of districts — some of them former principalities ruled by khans, shamxals, naibs, utsmis, etc., others groups of free villages — defined roughly by the rivers Sulak and Samur in the north and south, respectively, the Caspian sea on the east and the Caucasus peaks on the west.  It is this region that more or less constitutes the Daghestan of medieval Arab geographers, who referred to it not only as the ‘land of mountains’ (which glosses Turkic Daghestan) but also as the Mountain of Languages (Sergeeva 1996:107).² In this region, which is roughly the size of the state of Vermont, there are approximately thirty indigenous languages belonging to the Northeast Caucasian (or Naxo-Daghestanian) language family (see appendix), as well as two Turkic (Kumyk and Azeri) and one Iranian (Tat) language.³ It is a classic example of what Nichols (1992:17-21) calls a residual zone.

GETTING THERE IS NOT THE FUN

After more than 15 years of studying Lak (one of the five largest languages in the Daghestanian branch), I finally had a chance to travel to the place where it is spoken when the ninth meeting of the European Caucasian Society was scheduled for Daghestan’s capital, Maxachkala, in June 1998.   I had not gone sooner because Daghestan was closed to Americans until 1989 or so, and subsequently I was too occupied with events in the Balkans (see Friedman 1996). Owing to a small uprising in the center of Maxachkala on May 20-22, however, almost all the Russian participants canceled their participation in the conference and the Russian Foreign Ministry announced that it would not accept the Daghestanis’ guarantee for the safety of foreigners and would refuse to grant them permission to go to Maxachkala.⁴ So the conference was canceled, and I began to wonder if I would ever see Daghestan.  When the Russian visa that I had already applied for came, the day before my scheduled departure, with Maxachkala included despite the insistence that it could not be done, I therefore decided to go ahead and try to do some field work.  Thanks to the help of a colleague at the University of Leiden I was able to contact a linguist at the Daghestan branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences and arrange for a brief visit.

Visitors to and from Maxachkala are given special treatment due to the sensitive political situation in Daghestan and Chechnya, which is on Daghestan’s western border, and  I was politely interrogated by immigration officials upon my arrival at the airport.  (Identity incident:  When the immigration official asks “Nationality?” and I answer “American” he replies that there is no such nationality, that that is citizenship, and he means nationality [nacional’nost’].  I could have made things easier for him by answering “Jewish”, which would have fit his categories, but I decide to insist that my nacional’nost’ is “American”.  He relented after a guard assigned to the Chechnya-Daghestan border with whom I had struck up a friendship during our two-day wait for a plane at Vnukovo Airport in Moscow said that indeed in America they do things differently and that “American” does count as a nacional’nost’.)  The nice soldiers kept me company as young men in camouflage khakis patrolled the airport with submachine guns.  Then my colleague arrived with a friend with a car and we drove off into the night.

MAXACHKALA

There is a police checkpoint leaving the region of the airport, another on the road between Kaspijsk and Maxachkala (the airport is south of Kaspijsk, which is south of Maxachkala), another when we get to the southern end of Maxachkala, and another about a hundred meters from my colleague’s apartment, on Shamil Boulevard (only recently renamed from Kalinin Prospekt; the huge, new bas-relief bust of Shamil a few hundred yards from my colleague's apartment is the first monument in his honor in Maxachkala) .  This part of Maxachkala reminds me of Tirana or of Skopje several years after the terrible 1963 earthquake:  Blocks of apartments set down on the dirt with no real streets between huge, broad boulevards.  The boulevards are empty, but in the courtyards a few groups of young men are hanging around.  I  am glad I am with my colleague as we pick our way over the rubble and around chunks of cement to his apartment.  His wife has tasty dumplings with salty thickened yogurt ready.  My colleague explains that he could put me up in a hotel, but they don’t really “have the conditions” what with the general lack of security, so he hopes I don’t mind staying at their house.  Of course, I am happy to do so.  I fall asleep to the barking of stray dogs and awaken to the crowing of roosters.

Daghestan resembles the Balkans in many respects.  People are proud of their tradition of hospitality.  The normal pace of life has the kind of slowness to it that actually seems to be the world norm outside of Northwestern Europe and such former colonies as the US and Canada.  (However, the rapid increase in cars in recent years lends a more frantic atmosphere to the streets.)  There is an intermingling of Christianity and Islam, with the presence of Islam being as strong as in the southern Balkans.  Many women wear a type of head scarf that is typical of Islam.  (According to one account, about 10% of the population of Daghestan have converted to the Wahhabi sect of Islam, whose puritanical and expansionist ideology has been a source of on-going local tension.)  The savory smell of shashlik on open grills is like that of kebabchinja roasting on similar grills in Macedonia.  Men are fond of drinking, although the ritual is like that of Albanians (and Georgians; cf. Holisky 1989) involving elaborate toasts and the avoidance of drunkenness no matter how much alcohol is consumed.  As in Albania, there is a living tradition of blood feuding.  Like the contemporary Balkans, there are many ethnic groups whose current manifestations are of relatively modern origin and significant interethnic tensions, although Daghestan is considerably more complex in this respect.⁵

But there are differences, too.  In Skopje, for example, many Muslim men wear white pill box caps proclaiming their adherence to Islam, Muslim women often wear a special cut of pale green or brown raincoat that substitutes for a chador, and one still sees occasionally people on the street wearing traditional Albanian or a Romani clothing.  In Maxachkala, hem lines are generally ankle length, but many women wear sleeveless tops.  The number of white caps on the streets is much smaller, and I saw only one women in a traditional Caucasian dress.  It was a gorgeous red-velvet and sequined affair, with tight wrist-length sleeves, a narrow waist and form fitting at the hips then flaring out.  She was probably on her way to a wedding.  There are as many women on the street as men.  There are no salient mosques in Maxachkala except at the edge of town, where the Turks are building a huge replica of one of Istanbul’s main mosques.  There is also a new mosque right outside the gates to the airport.  There are no salient churches either, so in that sense Maxachkala lacks the cultural character of a Balkan town.  It is too young (built by the Russians in 1858, when it was named Petrovsk), and spent half its life under the communists.⁶ In a sense, Maxachkala feels like an Albanian or Macedonian town without any Muslim or Christian monuments.   It is like a Russian border town on the Caucasian edge of the Arabo-Turko-Persian world.  Apart from a few nineteenth century buildings near the sea shore, a couple of parks, and a fascinating ethnolinguistic complexity, Maxachkala does not have much to recommend it.  Rose bushes wither in the brown dust as cars and mini-vans serving as communal taxis rush hither and thither.  The earth is baked dry, the air is hot, dank, and dusty.  Despite the humid heat, it is clear from the vegetation that this is not a tropical climate.  Poplars and willows attest to the fact that Maxachkala has cold winters as well as hot summers.  The first floor windows of all the buildings have bars on them, indicating a certain level of crime, but the bars have nice decorative patterns, and the actual entrances to apartment buildings do not have the security locks of Moscow.  Moreover, people leave their doors open during the day if someone is home.

I spent my first morning at the Institute working with Lak linguists.  That afternoon my colleague’s brother took me to the Bookstore of the Nationalities, which is actually, just a bookstore with one shelf of books each for Lak, Lezgi, Dargwa, and Kumyk, two for Avar, and nothing for Tabassaran.⁷ The other 90 or so shelves were all Russian books.  (Most of the nationality books were poetry, a few were children's books, history, folklore, and guides to Islamic prayer.)  It turns out that the situation for Daghestanian languages isn't really all that good in Daghestan. The languages are all quite vital in the villages up in the mountains, even those that are limited to just a village or two, so they cannot be described as genuinely endangered.⁸  Nonetheless, when people move down to the cities they end up Russified and their children often do not learn their parents' language(s).  (Sociolinguistic example:  I was told by a colleague that a Lak student meeting a Lak professor on street in Maxachkala who addressed the professor in Lak rather than Russian would be considered to be engaging in excessive familiarity.)  There is not much official support for any of the languages.  Thus, for example, it was only in 1991 that a weekly newspaper in Lak began to be published in Maxachkala (until then, there had only been local press in Lakkia, much like neighborhood newspapers in the US), there is one hour a day of radio in each of the five Daghestanian languages, and no regular television programming in any of them.  (There are occasional folklore TV programs.)  Thus, my experiences as someone interested in Lak were similar to those I had when I first went to Macedonia in the early 1970's, or even Albania in more recent years:  People were grateful and touched and sometimes bewildered that I was interested in their language.  A feature here similar to my ealry experiences in Macedonia but different from the modern situation is that speakers of other Daghestanian languages accepted my interest in Lak as a general affirmation of the worth of the languages of Daghestan.  To be sure, an Avar would prefer to see an interest in Avar, but there was a sense of Daghestani linguistic identity that reminded me of the old days in the Macedonia, where if you knew one of the local languages people were impressed, but they then asked you if you knew other local languages and were even more impressed if you did.  There was a sense of local multilingualism as a source of pride.  This is still the case in the oldest Balkan generation, but not among the younger ones, among whom knowledge of Great Power languages (especially English) is the source of pride.⁹

LAKKIA

The next day I finally got to Lakkia.  The original idea was to take a bus, but everyone said that the Russians would check all the passengers’ documents and not let a foreigner like me into the mountains (especially to Lakkia, since the Xachilaev brothers to be discussed below come from there), so my colleague arranged to rent a car and driver and also set it up so that we would go with a Lak linguist and native of Kumux, historical capital of Lakkia and source for the dialectal base of the literary language.  I sat in the back with my Lak colleague drinking beer and taking notes.  There was only one check point on the way out of Maxachkala, and all they did was look at the driver’s papers.  We passed through the town of Bunajksk (formerly Temir-Xan-Shura) beyond the first range of mountains, and then at last we were on our way into the mountains for which Daghestan was named.  It is about 90 km from Maxachkala to Kumux as the crow flies, but the drive takes four or five hours.  (Actually most of the road is asphalted, just very mountainous.  Apparently the road to Lakkia is better than the one to Avaria.)  We passed through the predominantly Wahhabi and ethnically Dargi village of Karamaxi, where on 23 May a group of 25 policemen attempting to investigate an attack on a police post two days earlier had been surrounded by villagers and forced to flee and one policeman was killed (see also note 16).¹⁰  We leave Kumyk territory, pass through part of Avaria, and then Dargi territory, including the aul of Xadzhalmaxi, which was the first village in Daghestan where, in 1986 or ‘87, the people rose up cut the head off their statue of Lenin.  Finally we get to Cudaxar, the last Dargi village before Lakkia, we cross a bridge and drive through a narrow defile and out onto a small plain surrounded by high mountains.  Lakkia at last!

 Just inside Lakkia is a monument to Garun Saidov, a colonel in the White army who wrote poetry, drama, and translations into Lak.  It is so badly in need of restoration that if I had not been told what it was, I would not have known.  Row after row of mountains extend to the horizon, on which are visible peaks covered with eternal snows.  Beyond that is Rutul territory, then Lezgistan and Azerbaijan.  I am reminded in a way of the Grand Canyon.  Of course the formations and geological histories are entirely different, but both present magnificent panoramic views that bear awe-inspiring witness to the forces of nature.

Despite the altitude, Kumux is not much cooler than in Maxachkala, but the air is clean and dry, so the warmth is not unpleasant.  We drive to the town hall past a sports palace decorated with ancient Assyrian motifs (probably intended as references to Urartu or Sumer, cf. the use of Hittite motifs in Turkey).  At the town hall we go up to the second floor and join the mayor and other assembled dignitaries for toasts with red wine and little pale yellow apricots the size of quinces.  It is a series of formal toasts and we are all standing.  The toasting was not in a fixed order after the mayor’s first toast and our Lak colleague’s responding toast, but more on the basis of inspiration.

Next we go downstairs to the assistant mayor’s office for informal toasts with konyak.  The office is decorated with a map of Daghestan and three pictures:  the cosmonaut Musa Manarov, the first Lak (and Daghestani) in space, Lenin in a gold frame, and a calendar proclaiming:  “50 years of victory 1945-1995” with a huge picture of Stalin.  (It is generally the case in the Caucasus that Stalin is much admired because he came from the Caucasus.)  There are six of us seated at the table, one  50 ml shot glass, and a 375 ml bottle of konyak.  Starting with the assistant mayor and proceeding around the table to his right, each person proposes a toast over a glass full of konyak and drinks.

During the toast listeners may exclaim “Amin!” (Amen) or “C’ulu anu!” (Be healthy).   If a toast is directed at someone at the table, that person may respond with an expression of thanks.  In general, like the Gjupci of Ohrid and some other Albanian-speaking Muslims, but unlike both Georgians and Russians, Daghestanis to not drink the entire glass.  The glass is then refilled and passed on to the next person, who proposes a toast and drinks, and so on.  However, if a person is especially moved, he will drink all or most of the contents of the glass, which is considered a mark of special sincerity.  When a drinker is draining a glass in a particularly demonstrative fashion, others may accompany his drinking with the repeated exclamation “Lawgunni” (‘It has gone’), apparently in imitation of the Russian custom of chanting “Pij do dna” (‘Drink to the bottom’) on such occasions.  The themes of the toasts relate to the occasion that has brought us together, to the guest, the hosts, to Daghestan, and so on.  (At a traditional Daghestani gathering, the first toast would be to the occasion and the last to The Prophet or to Stalin).  After two complete rounds of toasting the gathering broke up and our Lak colleague took us around Kumux, showing us the mosque, the former residence of the Khan, the fortress that was reconstructed in 1970, the mountain where maidens go on 22 June (the start of summer) to pray for a husband, his parents’ house, etc.

Kumux reminds me very much of mountain villages in Macedonia and Albania:  rutted stony paths, some houses with walled courtyards so that the streets have the effect of solid walls with occasional doors, elsewhere unwalled houses.  Everywhere we go we are warmly greeted and asked to stay the night, just as in the mountain villages in the Balkans.  These mountains are much higher, however.  We have Lak dumplings (xunk’ra) in lamb broth with lots of garlic and other delicacies at a cousin’s house.  More toasting with wine and vodka.  We leave as night is falling and get home around midnight.  There is one checkpoint at the entrance to Maxachkala, but they let us pass without stopping.

BACK TO MAXACHKALA

The next day I did more fieldwork at the Institute and left some materials to be xeroxed (16¢ a page — but at least it is available when the electricity is working).  I also visited the radio station, where they had promised to let me copy archived tapes of the one hour a day Lak radio program.  The station is up in the hills at the southwest edge of Maxachkala.  The hillside is dotted with luxurious mansions in an orientalized style.  This neighborhood is known locally as “Santa Barbara” and is inhabited by novye dagestanci  (‘new Daghestanis’, the local equivalent of novye russkie 'new Russians', i.e. the nouveau riche, all of whom a presumed to have acquired their wealth by illegal or questionable means.)  At the radio station we walk down a long corridor past six doors each labeled for one of the five official Daghestanian languages plus Kumyk.  Lak is the last.  Unfortunately, the technicians have all left for the weekend, but by coincidence we have arrived just as they are about to begin the day’s Lak broadcast (4 PM), so they let me into the authorized-personnel-only studio to tape it.  The program consists of about 15 minutes of news, 15 minutes of Islamic religious songs in Lak, and a half an hour of a genre of urban popular music known as “stage songs”.

After this we go shopping, and on the way we pass through the central square of Maxachkala where the May uprising took place.  The huge statue of Lenin stands at one end of the square, the parliament building, which was occupied by the rebels, at the other.  The flag flying over the building is not that of the Republic of Daghestan but that of the Russian Federation.  (Both consist of three horizontal stripes, but the Russian is white-blue-red while the Daghestani is green-blue-red [according to Ryan 1997:169, green is for agriculture and hope, blue for the Caspian sea, and red for fidelity and courage].  During the uprising, however, the rebels hoisted a solid green flag as a symbol of political Islam.)  This is my first substantive walk along the streets of central Maxachkala.  The cafes have names like Covkra, Balxar, Saxli.  (I thought this last was Georgian for 'house', but it turned out to be Avar for 'health'; the /l/ is voiceless.)   A military convoy drives by as well as a couple of antique busses with destinations written in the Arabic script.  One more trip to the Institute where — mashallah! — the electricity is back on and my xeroxing is ready.  We return to my colleague's via some narrow passageways lined with stalls so he can pick up a few things and then into a central courtyard surrounded by apartment blocks where we chance upon an itinerant tight-rope walker (pahlaman in Lak; the Lak aul of Covkra is renowned for such acrobats.  Apparently they do not come often to the city, so this is a rare and fortunate occasion).  The rope-walker is accompanied by a clown in khakis whose head is covered by a ski mask decorated with woven horns and red outlines of the facial openings (a traditional Caucasian design), wielding a long tree-branch as a cane, and two musicians (zurna [shawm] and davul [drum played with sticks]).  The clown capers around shouting in Russian to attract an audience (and, later, to collect money; when anyone gives anything the clown asks his name [he does not approach women] and loudly declares the amount to all present and calls down the blessings of Allah on the donor).  The rope-walker, a gray-haired man in good shape wearing tight black pants and a bright saffron satin shirt, performs various feats on the tight rope stretched at the level of a garage roof (which he uses as a platform).  He walks, bounces, dances, twirls, spins, does the act blindfolded, sits on a chair, and rides on a bicycle all to the accompaniment of the zurna and davul.

My colleague's wife was going to make Avar dumplings (xIink’al) for me, but there was a gas shortage that day and she could not get the water in the big pot to come to the rolling boil essential for making them, so we have roasted chicken instead.  After dinner my colleague brings out the vodka and we begin toasting.  The first toast is to the occasion, then to our parents, then to children and family, he toasts to peace and friendship with America, I  to peace and friendship with Daghestan, then a couple of his friends drop by.  Great discussions of current events and inter-ethnic relations.  More toasts.  We all take turns on the final to toast to each other and, inshallah, I will visit Daghestan again.

The next day we have a brief visit to the Republic art museum.  We drive there through streets with walled courtyards, solid metal doors, and narrow alleys leading downward.  It looks a lot like  an lowland Albanian village or neighborhood in Macedonia.  The museum is in a hot, stuffy two-story 19th century pastel building on a corner about a block from the sea.  We begin on the second floor with a room full of 19th-century paintings of the Caucasian War and other battle scenes punctuated by an occasional "at the well" or "hauling hay", but these pastoral scenes have a sad quality in a bilious yellow light.  There are also threatening rough cast bronze statues of Caucasian warriors.  The next room is full of 19th century West European art, then a long, unlit alcove of reproductions of Greco-Roman sculpture, Assyrian bas-reliefs, and a cuneiform inscription.  The next room has a few pieces of gilt Meissen china, two blue and white Wedgwood vases, a Shinto reliquary, and some Chinese ceramics.  Apparently these were gifts to the Czar and after the revolution, when treasures of the Hermitage were divided up, these were given to the Republic Art Museum.  Next is a room of Daghestani crafts, beautiful 19th century Kubachi metal work, jewelry, photos of women wearing the jewelry, a decorated cradle, a pandur (square-boxed lute), kilims of varying age and quality, a seat cover here a vest there, kinzhals (Caucasian short swords), swords, ibriks (narrow spouted pitchers), some paintings, mostly portraits, and in the unlit central hall there is a display of large pots for milk , ibriks for water, ceramics, etc.  Downstairs they open up a locked room with exhibitions of work of 20th century Daghestani artists, mostly portraits and illustrations from a Kumyk gazette.

While the plane back to Moscow is still on the runway, after all the passengers have boarded, a man enters, stops in front of the man sitting across the aisle from me (we are in the row closest to the door), and puts in his lap a cube-shaped package wrapped in white paper and completely sealed with clear cellophane tape.  Drugs?  I don’t want to know.  The seated one says in Russian why are you asking me to take this, but the standing one gives him a handful of rubles in large denominations, shows him a picture of the person who will be waiting for the package at the airport, and has him write down the address and phone just in case.  He says the person waiting is an Avar.  They shake hands and the non-passenger leaves.  The seated guy puts the package in his duffel bag.  Back in Moscow, we walk from the plane to the terminal and up a flight of stairs into a waiting room.  Through a narrow door at the other end of the room is an improvised customs area, officials are checking each passport and putting hand luggage through a screener.  This is not normal procedure for a domestic flight.  It is being done because we are arriving from the Caucasus.  As a foreigner I am waved past the passport formalities, but I still have to put my luggage through the screener.  The machine just rolls stuff through and onto the floor if you don't catch it in time, and my bottles of konyak almost broke.  As I leave, I see the guy who took the cellophane wrapped package standing to one side and the package is on a table next to him.

OBSERVATIONS ON POLITICS

The political situation in Daghestan is influenced by a number of factors of which the following broad categories appear to be the most significant:  1) ethnic complexity, 2) Chechnya, 3) Wahhabism, 4 ) Russia, 5) returned exiles and exiled returnees, 6) transnational ethnicities, 7) highlanders (rural) vs lowlanders (urban), 8) cis-Terek vs trans-Terek,  9) money, business, mafias, clan structure, and blood feuds.

The May incident in Maxachkala that caused the cancellation of the  meeting I was supposed to attend can serve as an organizing principle for a discussion of politics (although some of the abovementioned factors are restricted to footnotes).  The key actors in the  uprising were Magomed Xachilaev and his younger brother Nadirshah.  Magomed is a member of the Daghestani parliament, president of the Daghestan Committee for Defense and Peace, and of  the "Kazi-Kumux" Lak national movement.¹¹ Nadirshah is a member of the Russian Federal Parliament and head of the Union of Muslims of the Russian Federation.

Apparently on 17 May people in the Novolakskij rajon began to blockade roads into Chechnya, including the main Baku-Rostov highway.  That highway runs along the Caspian to Maxachkala, then cuts across Daghestan to Xasavjurt, which borders on Novolakskij rajon.  From there it continues through Novolakskij into neighboring Chechnya and on to Rostov.  Novolakskij is itself the source of considerable tension, since it was the homeland of Akkin Chechens until 1944, when they were among the peoples deported by Stalin to Kazakhstan.  Laks were resettled in the region.  In 1957 the Akkin Chechens were allowed to return to Daghestan but not to resettle their traditional lands.  Most of them are now in Xasavjurt.  In 1989 Moscow began building a new Novolakskij rajon near Maxachkala for the Laks and planned allow the Chechens to return to their traditional lands, which would go back to the former name of Auxovskij rajon.  The collapse of the Soviet Union, however, derailed the process.  Since 1991 the Akkin Chechens have been reappropriating their former lands in a haphazard fashion.¹² Progress has picked up again on the new Novolakskij project recently, but it will be at least another two or three years or more before it is done.  Meanwhile tensions continue.

 According to RFE/RL Newsline (20 May 1998) the blockade was a protest against cross-border raids and kidnappings by Chechen gangs.  According to people I spoke to in Daghestan, the protesters were Akkin Chechens demanding a return to their traditional lands.  (There were armed clashes between Kumyks and Dargis in Xasavjurt in 1993 [RFE/RL Daily Report 25 May 1993; cf. note 11], and during the 1994-96 Russian-Chechen war this was an area of all sorts of incidents, tensions, and refugee-related problems.  In 1995, the estimated number of Chechen refugees in Daghestan was 70,000 [OMRI Daily Digest 26 September 1995].)

The next stage occurred when Nadirshah was returning from Novolakskij (or Xasavjurt) to Maxachkala.  Here, too, accounts differ.  According to some people I talked to, Nadirshah was returning from the Novolakskij rajon where he had supposedly gone to calm the demonstrators and refused to stop for a routine police checkpoint because, as a member of the federal parliament he had immunity.  According to another version, Xachilaev broke through a police blockade that had been set up in the Novolakskij rajon connection with the unrest.  In a third account, Xachilaev broke through a Chechen roadblock and was subsequently chased by police.  Shortly after the uprising, Nadirshah claimed that Daghestani Prime Minister Xizri Shixsaidov provoked the incident by requesting him to travel with a group of armed followers to the Daghestan-Chechen border to calm the situation and then ordering local police to intercept them as they returned to Maxachkala (RFE/RL 26 May 1998).

According to what people told me, eventually Xachilaev's car stopped.  When a police officer approached, one of Xachilaev's body guards shot the policeman dead.  It was suggested to me by people I talked to that the circumstances were highly suspicious because Xachilaev had a cavalcade of cars, not just one, and thus the refusal to stop for the checkpoint or roadblock was interpreted as potentially being connected with arms smuggling.¹³

Nadirshah's people fled to his house in Maxachkala, where the police surrounded it and another policeman was killed on 21 May when the Xachilaev supporters attempted to break through the cordon of police.  This was the day of the occupation of the Daghestani parliament building, which my Daghestani friends referred to as an uprising, as a literal seizure of power.  The huge square in front of the building was filled with people (including my friends, who stopped by to see what was happening).  Many people had automatic rifles, machine guns, or bazookas.  None of them wore masks or made any attempt to conceal their identity.  The police simply ran, and armed rebels came and went as they pleased.  (The RFE/RL report of 22 May 1998 wrote:  "Moscow had responded to the seizure of the building by deploying additional police and security forces in the town. "  This report fails to mention, however, that apparently none of these police were anywhere near the scene of the rebellion.)  Hundreds of Xachilaev supporters occupied the parliament building.  As noted above, they hoisted a green flag.  They also stole all the computers, telephones, the food from the buffet, and raided the arms that were hidden in the basement.  Meanwhile, also in the building, the body guard of Maxachkala's Mayor, Said Amirov — who is former assistant to state council president Magomedali M. Magomedov and, like him, a Dargi — surrounded him protectively ready to shoot to kill, but the rebels weren't interested in him and he left peacefully.  Amirov is confined to a wheel chair as a result of one of the five assassination attempts he has survived so far.

My friends said that Amirov himself is deeply involved in his own "mafia" activities.  The 16 June "Dagestanskaja Pravda" carried a small front-page notice of a homemade bomb filled with nails exploding in the Izberbash (a town midway between Maxachkala and Derbent on the Caspian) Muslim cemetery on 12 June.  According to my friends, what the notice did not mention was that Amirov was attending his father's funeral in that cemetery at the time the explosion occurred.  The May uprising was given a political focus by demands that the position of president of the state council (occupied since 1994 by Magomedali Magomedov) be elected directly rather than by the constitutional assembly.¹⁴ On 22 May, Xachilaev's supporters withdrew peacefully.  Nadirshah said he had been promised that the constitution would be amended to allow for a direct election of state council president, while Magomed said that  for the sake of stability they had dropped their demand for Magomedali Magomedov's immediate resignation.¹⁵ When I was in Maxachkala, a Russian officer told me that everything would be calm until 25 June, which was election day.  In fact, however, Magomedali Magomedov was reelected peacefully by the constitutional assembly (his only challenger was Pension Fund head Sharaputdin Musaev, also a Dargi).¹⁶

Virtually everyone I spoke with in Daghestan, regardless of ethnicity, regarded the entire incident as a provocation, a set-up.  When I described the Bit Pazar incident in Skopje (6 November 1992) — a young Albanian teenager selling smuggled cigarettes in the market fled from a routine Macedonian police inspection, fell down as he ran, began screaming that he was being beaten, and the entire market quarter exploded into a riot in which there was shooting and six people were killed — everyone immediately agreed that it had the same ring of questionable motivation and people just waiting for an excuse to start shooting.

The people I spoke with did not care for the Xachilaev brothers politically (nor for anyone in power, for that matter), although some expressed feeling of loyalty for them based on personal connections.  Apparently the brothers come from the aul of Xurukli/Xurukra(Lak X’uruk’ul), a tiny settlement just across the valley southeast of Kumux.  Nadirshah has a red brick (i.e. expensive) house in Kumux and likes to style himself as native of Kumux, which is seen by people I spoke with as pretentious behavior.  The involvement of the Xachilaevs both with opposition politics and the Lak national movement, combined with the problems created by the Akkin Chechens on the one hand and Chechen interest in Daghestani affairs on the other has focused so much attention on Novolakskij rajon that on the plane to Maxachkala my border guard friend told me it was highly unlikely the authorities would allow me to go to Lakkia, because it borders on Chechnya and is precisely the scene of recent unrest.  When I said that according to the maps I had seen Lakkia was surrounded on all sides by other Daghestani peoples and thus not on the border, my friend was quite adamant that this was not the case, and so I let the matter drop.  In fact, it was a misunderstanding because I was thinking of Lakkia proper while my friend thought of Novolakskij rajon as Lakkia and was more or less unaware of Lakkia proper.¹⁷

ETHNICITY AND LANGUAGE

Despite linguistic diversity and lack of a unified national history prior to the Soviet period, there is in Daghestan a well developed over-arching common identity of 'mountaineer'.¹⁸ The cultural identity of mountaineer extends to a certain extent even to the Xevsurs, who are Georgian-speaking Christians living in the Georgian highlands on the other side of the Caucasus from Daghestan and Chechnya.  Although Xevsurs have a Georgian "national identity," a Daghestani colleague told me that as students in Moscow the Xevsurs hang out with the Daghestanis rather than with the other Georgians.  This difference of Xevsurs from other Georgians was confirmed also by Georgians I spoke to, who said they were different from all the other Georgian mountain groups (Pshav, Tush, Moxevi) in this respect.  According to Wixman (1980:68) the Xevsurs remained animists until the early twentieth century.  Among Daghestanian-speaking peoples, identity was by village community.  Neither Avars nor Dargis had a common ethnonym at the beginning of this century, although the Avars did refer to themselves as ma‘arulal 'mountaineers'.  The ethnonyms Lak and Lezgi are of considerable antiquity, and in the case of Lak there was the khanate of Kazi-Kumux to serve as a political basis.

 Moreover, although Shamil led a multi-ethnic mountaineers' Islamic holy war against the Russians, there is an awareness that he was an Avar, lending to that identity a certain prestige.  The Laks retain their cultural prestige based on both cultural and political history.  In addition to the Kazi-Kumux khanate and the fact that they supported Shamil, the Laks claim (and are thought of by other Daghestanis) to be the first of the mountaineers to accept Islam.  According to Bennigsen and Wimbush (1986:168) the Lezgi are “without the cultural or political prestige of the Avars of the Laks (they did not participate in the Shamil movement.)”  This assessment was born out in a discussion I had with some Avars on ethnic stereotypes among Daghestanis themselves.  They said that in terms of Daghestani in-group stereotypes, Avars are emotional and hot-headed, Laks are crafty and sly, Dargis are calculating, Lezgis are cowards, and Tabasarans are peace-loving and musical but not cowards.  The stereotype of Kumyks is that they are neither fish nor fowl, not true mountaineers but not lowlanders either.  (According to Bennigsen and Wimbush 1986:170 the northern Kumyks supported Shamil, the central Kumyks sided with the Russian, and the southern Kumyks remained neutral.)  Although the relation to Shamil’s war seems to influence ethnic stereotyping and prestige in modern Daghestan, such influence does not appear to extend to contemporary attitudes towards Chechens (cf. note 16)

While it can hardly be said that prior to the Soviet period people in Daghestan lived in a permanent state of peace and harmony, it is indeed the case that linguistically based ethnic differences were not the organizing principles of violence.  Rather, there was the tradition of the blood feud, which was clan-based, and, when a large imperial neighbor such as Persia or Turkey (or later Russia) attempted conquest, clans would unite in self-defense, sometimes successfully.  There was also a tradition among highlanders living on poor land of raiding people living at lower altitudes.  The attitude toward vendettas expressed by modern urbanites was one of regretful understanding, the perception being that it functioned as a kind of legal system that regulated social relations and kept order in what would otherwise have degenerated into lawlessness (e.g., it discouraged murder because of the consequences).  The current ethnic basis of most conflicts, therefore, is seen as a product of the interference of Soviet nationality policies.  It is certainly the case that the Soviet practice of exiling and resettling peoples on the basis of ethnicities so defined has contributed enormously to the current instability.

As discussed in note 11, the fall of Soviet power occasioned the rise of various national and cultural movements aimed at autonomy, independence, etc.  One of the results of these movements is that the number of official literary Daghestanian languages has increased from five to nine:  Basically those languages with populations over ten thousand (Agul, Rutul, Tsaxur, Andi)  all demanded and received literary status, although there is no evidence of this yet in Maxachkala.¹⁹ Literary status affects local schooling, press, and literacy.  According to those I spoke to, dictionaries had yet to be published and Andi was recognized but not implemented.  Nonetheless, the movement among the Andi for separation form the Avars is quite strong.  (From 1926-38 the Various Ando-Tsez peoples were listed separately in Soviet censuses, but from 1939 onward they have all been counted as Avars and used Avar as their literary language.)  The Tsez and Chamalals are also pushing for separate recognition, and the Bezhta have been given a separate uchastok (sub-division) within Tsuntinskij rajon.²⁰ This is a strictly economic/administrative move however.  Although a M. Sh. Xalilov's Bezhta-Russian dictionary was published by the Daghestan branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences (1995), its avowed purpose is cultural-scholarly rather than the raising of Bezhta to literary status.  According to those I spoke to, the other Ando-Tsez people still identify as Avars.  For Dargwa the problem consists in the fact that even the dialects of Dargwa proper are not mutually intelligible, and so the position of Kaitag, Kubachi, and Megeb is felt in Daghestan itself to be midway between that of dialects and languages.  They are all clearly in  a Dargwa group, and as yet they all still use Dargwa (Akusha dialect) as the literary language.  The situation is thus still as described, e.g. in Bennigsen and Wimbush (1986:171).

Archi represents an especially interesting example of a type that occurs elsewhere in Daghestan.  Archi is spoken in a single aul (Archib), and until recently its affiliation within Daghestanian was uncertain.  It has since been determined that, like Xinalug and Udi, it is an isolate within the Lezgian branch of Daghestanian.  Archib is sandwiched between Lak and Avar territory in the highest and most inaccessible mountains of central Daghestan.  The closest auls are almost all Avar (one is Lak), but Archib was part of the Kazi-Kumux feudal state, and so Kumux (formerly Kazi-Kumux) was the focus of political and economic interaction.  The structure of Archi attests to long contact with both Avar and Lak, but until 1917 the inhabitants of Archi considered themselves Lak, which was the main contact language.  This pattern of identity being determined by political and economic units was a pattern typical of Daghestan.  Under the Soviets, Archib was included in a predominantly Avar rajon, and when a paved road was finally built, it connected Archi to that rajon's center, Tsunib.  The result has been a shift from Lak to Avar identity, and Archi-speakers are now demanding to be counted as Avars rather than as Laks.

Although the origins of Archib are lost in time, it is known that both Dargwa-speaking Megeb in Avar territory and Lak-speaking Shadni in Dargi territory were founded by families fleeing blood feuds centuries ago.  Like the Archi, the Megeb are located between Lak and Avar territory and were part of Kazi-Kumux and Lak oriented prior to 1917.  They were also assigned to a predominantly Avar rajon (Gunib) after 1921.  Although most Megeb were bilingual in Lak prior to 1917, they registered as Dargi in the 1926 census, but they have registered as Avar in subsequent censuses.  The older generation has Dargi identity, the younger has Avar identity, but everyone still speaks Megeb in the village itself.  Schooling was in Avar until 1957, when the language of instruction was shifted to Russian and Avar became a subject.²¹ Here, too, schooling and  administration  seemed to have conditioned an identity shift without affecting home language use.  Similarly, the Lak-speakers of Shadni are all bilingual in Dargwa, have their schooling in Russian with Dargwa as a subject, consider themselves to be Dargi, but continue to speak Lak in their village (Sergeeva 1996:113-116).

A NOTE ON MAPS

There are three principle problems with existing ethnolinguistic maps of Daghestan all connected to lack of detail and all shared with ethnolinguistic maps of the Balkans and similar regions.  First, such maps invariably fail to portray multilingualism, thereby oversimplifying the complex social realities of linguistic interaction.  Second, the village-to-village situation is sufficiently complex that most maps are not drawn to a sufficient scale to illustrate even first language distribution with complete accuracy.  Finally, a problem which is particularly relevant to Daghestan (but also to the Balkans, especially before World War One) is that ethnolinguistic maps do not include physical geography.  Thus, for example, It would appear from such maps that southern Lakkia is directly in contact with Tsaxur and Rutul, but in fact there are uninhabited mountain peaks between the regions.  Moreover, the single Azeri aul in southern Lakkia usually does not show up on ethnolinguistic maps and is much more significant for the neighboring southernmost Lak aul up the mountain than Rutul, which is what appears to be the contact language on most maps.  Similarly, languages with small populations appear to occupy larger areas because uninhabited mountains are not distinguished from inhabited ones, and by failing to show altitudes, roads, and river valleys such maps do not necessarily indicate the actual directions of contact and orientation.  According to Chenciner (1997:239) detailed ethnographic maps have been prepared by the Institute for Language, Literature, and Art, but their publication has been delayed for fear of fueling disputes.

INSTEAD OF A CONCLUSION

A systematic comparison of ethnic, ethnolinguistic, and ethnopolitical processes in Daghestan and Macedonia would show certain generalizable tendencies as well as salient differences, some of them arising from the political situation, some from differences in history.  Both regions, however, have much to offer comparative perspectives in politics, linguistics, and ethnicity.  I have only been able to touch lightly on a few of these.  Both are regions of fascinating linguistic complexity and both are potential time bombs with diverse internal and external ethnopolitical factors contributing to potential instability.  I can only hope that neither one explodes.

APPENDIX:  Languages of the Naxo-Daghestanian Family

Totals for USSR as of 1989, some figures are estimates (Sources Geiger 1959, Comrie 1981, Tishkov 1994; Classification based on Schulze 1996; Asterisked Daghestanian Languages are spoken entirely in Azerbaijan. )  I have used letters and numerals to indicate how the nodes would branch in a stem-tree diagram to indicate relative degrees of closeness.

NAX
A1.    Chechen (904)
A2.    Ingush (237)
B.      Tsova-Tush [Bats’] (3)

DAGHESTANIAN
I.       Avar-Andi-Cez
A.     Avar (499.4) [Xunzax, Bol mac’]
B.     Andi

         North
1a. Andi (30)
1b. Botlix (4)
1c. Godoberi (3)
2.      Karata (6.4)
3.      Axvax (6.5)

         South
         Bagvalal (5)
         Tindi (10)
         Chamalal (9.5)
C.      Tsez [Dido]

         West
         Tsez [Dido] (8)
         Hinux (0.6)

         East
         Xunzib (1.7)
         Xvarshi (2)
         Bezhta [Kapucha] (9)
II.      Lakko-Dargwa
A.      Lak [Kazikumux] (118.1)
B.      Dargwa (345.9)
B1.    Megeb
B2.    Kubachi (1.9)
B3.    Kaitak (17.2)
III.     Lezgian [Samurian]

East Samur
A1.    Lezgi (304)
A2a.  Tabasaran (97.5)
A2b.  Agul (18.7)

West Samur
B1a.  Rutul (20.4)
B1b.  Tsaxur (19.8)

Central Samur
B2a.  Budux* (1)
B2b.  Kryts [Djek]* (6)
C.     Xinalug (1)*
D.     Archi (1)
E.     Udi (8)*

Endnotes

1. Most of the Nagai territory was administratively removed from Daghestan in 1938.

2. "Daghestan", like "Macedonia", is thus a regional geographic term of pre-modern origin referring to a multi-ethnic area. Unlike the Republic of Macedonia, however, the Republic of Daghestan is larger rather than smaller than the area claimed at the beginning of this century. Moreover, Macedonia is independent while Daghestan is not.

3. The most conservative estimate for the number of languages in the Daghestanian family is 26. In the case of Dargwa, however, there are three dialects (two limited each to a single aul ['mountain village'], one in a region that was a separate political unit in pre-Czarist times) that are so divergent that they are generally classed as separate languages within a Dargwa group. This brings the total to 29. For purposes of literacy, however, only the five most populous Daghestanian languages were used during the post-World War Two Soviet period: Avar, Lezgi, Dargwa, Lak, and Tabasaran. (In 1923 Azeri was declared the only official language of Daghestan other than Russian, but in the 1930's the current policies took shape. Tsaxur and Axvax were declared literary during this period but were subsequently abandoned; see Wixman 1980:151-52). Other Daghestani peoples used a geographically contiguous (and usually relatively closely related) literary language. Among the other languages currently spoken in the Republic of Daghestan are Russian. Ukrainian, Belarusan (all Slavic), Nagai (Turkic), Ossetian (Iranian), and Georgian (Kartvelian). The region between the rivers Sulak and Terek was part of the Terskaja Oblast' in Czarist times but was traditionally Kumyk territory.

4. Although President Yeltsin signed a decree in 1997 allowing foreigners to move freely around the Russian Federation, the old Soviet system of specifying permitted cities on visas for US citizens remained in effect. As of October 1998 this situation is supposed to change (RFE/RL Newsline, 4 September 1998).

5. Another difference is that the forced migrations of the Balkans during the first half of this century generally resulted in greater ethnolinguistic homogeneity, whereas the Soviet exiles have been more like those of Ottoman times in the Balkans, fragmenting populations.

6. According to Chenciner (1997:211), the number of mosques in Daghestan was reduced from 2,000 to 17 between 1928-38, but more than a thousand have now been rebuilt. These figures, however, apply mainly to villages and pre-Russian towns.

7. Striking by their absence from the shelves were the non-indigenous languages spoken in Deghastan that are literary languages spoken in Daghestan that are literary languages elsewhere: Azeri, Chechen, Ukrainian, Nogai, Tat, etc. In some cases this may have been due to relatively small numbers of speakers present in Daghestan. In others it may have been due to the location of Maxachkala, e.g. the main Azeri-speaking population is in the Derbent region to the south. It is possible, however, that political relations with Chechnya were also involved.

8. The one tragic exception is Udi, whose speakers are Armenian Orthodox Christians and lived in two villages in Azerbaijan and one in Georgia. According to Alice Harris of Vanderbilt University, due to their religion, they were identified with the Armenians (with whom, however, they have nothing linguistically in common) and murderously driven out of Azerbaijan during the Karabakh War. The survivors are living in Georgia, where it is not at all clear that they will be able to reconstitute their community and thereby save their language.)

9. I should note that a salient difference between Daghestan and Macedonia is the position of Russian in Daghestan as the lingua franca. It is more pervasive than was Serbo-Croatian in the former Yugoslav part of Macedonia. Leaving to one side the problem of the Skopje urban dialect, which happens to be in a north Macedonian transition zone, the retreat of Serbo-Croatian in the Republic of Macedonia since 1991 has been significant, while Russian continues to dominate in Daghestan's towns. Even were Daghestan to become an independent country, it is not clear that Russian would be replaced, since there was no single traditional lingua franca in pre-Czarist ties but rather local contact languages; cf. Bennigsen and Wimbush 1986:174). The style of codeswitching that I heard---especially given the difference between Indo-European and Northeast Caucasian languages---was striking. The borrowing of interjections as discourse markers, e.g. Russ. ponimaesh 'you understand', is a well attested phenomenon in many languages (cf. Matras 1998), but particularly salient in Lak and Avar was code-switching in the use of temporal adverbials (v penodelnike, vecherom,uzhe 'on Monday, in the evening, already'). Further investigation is necessary concurring the systemic motivation for this.

10. Two days later an agreement was reached with villagers about investigating the killing.

11. Kazi-Kumux is the former name of Kumux, when it was the center of a a small feudal state that dominated the central highlands of Daghestan. Aside from the Kazi-Kumux Lak movement there are a number of other ethnonational movements and organizations that have been formed since 1989 in Daghestan, e.g. the Lezgian Sadval 'Unity' which is concerned with the cultural and possibly political unity of Lezgians on both sides of the Azerbaijan-Daghestan border, which runs through the middle of Lezgistan; the Kumyk Tenglik 'Equality', the Avar Imam Shamil Popular Front, as well as Nogai Birlik 'Unity', the Kizljar Community of the Ter Cossaks Army, the Derbent movement Azeri, and the movement Rossija 'Russia'. Bobrovnikov (1997:59) also mentions a Dargi movement Tsadesh 'Unity', but the Avar and Lak people I spoke to were not aware of it. There perception was that Dargis are in key political and economic positions in Daghestan so they do not need a movement. (Prior to Soviet collapse, Avars dominated political life in Daghestan [Bobrovnikov 1997:55], but this is no longer the case.) They also mentioned a Tabasaran movement, described as 'a group with no leader but they call it a movement' and an Ando-Tsez separatist movement headed by Magomed Gamzatov. The kumyk movement was at one time separatist, demanding that all the highlanders return to the mountains, and in 1990 the Republic was on the edge of war, especially between Avars and Kumyks, since so many Avars have settled in the lowlands. (There was significant migration of highlanders to the lowlands during the Soviet period, some of it the result of forced moves, as well as traditional seasonal transhumance and seasonal rural/urban economic migration.) Tenglik is currently concerned only with cultural autonomy. During 1992-94, Lezgistan and the problem of the Daghestan-Azerbaijan border, which had shifted from administrative to international, was the main focus of instability. Since the Russian-Chechen War of 1994-96, however, the problems of Chechen refugees and especially the Akkin Chechens are the main focus of attention (Bobrovnikov 1997:58). The Nogai and Cossack movements are also potentially separatist, which is of concern to the Avars, Laks, Dargis, and others settled in those northern regions of the Republic.

12. In 1991-92 the Chechens from Kalinin aul and Lenin aul just across the border of Novolakskij in Kazbekovskij rajon tried to expel the Avars who ahd been settled there since 1944 and there was almost a war. Aside from the problem of peoples exiled or resettled to, from or within Daghestan (including Nogais, Avars, and Lezgis) large numbers of Dargi and Avar merchants have had to return to Daghestan since 1989 from regions and republics to Daghestan while a smaller number of Chechen and Azeri merchants have had to leave Daghestan all due to sorsening interethnic relations (Bobrovnikov 1998:51).

13. Russians in Daghestan characterized the Xachilaev brothers as gangsters and racketeers who were also involved in politics. Daghestanis that I spoke to said that all mafiosi become government officials.

14. In March 1998, the Daghestani constitution had been amended to allow for his election to a second term (RFE/RL 1 September 1998). According to other people I spoke with, popular dissatisfaction was centered on local concerns, such as the attempt of the government to close down a market place on the outskirts of Maxachkala, which the Xachilaevs promised to oppose. Other Daghestanis said the uprising was connected with the desire to unify Daghestan and Chechnya. Magomedov appears to represent the old guard, loyal to Russia. From this it can be seen that individual struggles for power, and regional and local concerns are intersecting in various ways (cf. also note 16).

15. I am reminded here of recent events in Albania. On 12 September 1998 (opposition) Democratic Party legislator Azem Hajdari and his body guard were killed in front of DP headquarters by unidentified gunmen. The next day, in connection with Hajdari's funeral, DP supporters stormed and occupied the prime minister's offices, parliament, and the radio-TV building. Central Tirana was in a state of anarchy, but by the following day police managed to establish control. DP leader Sali Berisha has been stripped of his immunity and accused by (Socialist Party) prime minister Fatos Nano of attempting a coup. Berisha continues to claim that he is committed to bringing down the government by "peaceful" means. Speculations for motivation for the assissination include political motivations (either SP anti-opposition or Berisha's removal of a rival or provocation to bring down the government by accusing them of responsibility), a blood feud, and a dispute involving arms trafficking. (Hajdari was from Bajram Curri near the border with Kosovo, where both these latter possible motivations are highly relevant).

16. On 17 August, however, Karamaxi (the Dargi Wahhabi village mentioned above) along with two others (not mentioned in the reports, but probably the two nearest villages, Chankurbe and Kadar, which are the only other Dargi villages in the predominantly Kumyk Bunajksk rajon) declared themselves an "independent Islamic territory," and on 20 August Chechen field commander Shamil Basaev warned that he would depoly his troops to protect the villagers if the Daghestani authorities resorted to violence against them. Daghestani Security Council acting Secretary Magomed-Salix Gusaev responded that Daghestan would treat any Chechen move to support the Wahhabi village leader was reported as rejecting Basaev's statement as a "provocation". Basaev is the founder and chairman of the Congress of Peoples of Chechnya and Daghestan. This organization is perceived by people I spoke with in Daghestan as essentially a Chechen ruse, using Islam as a cover, to take over Dagestan and gain access to the Caspian. (Despite "brotherhood and unity" disclaimers to the contrary, it is my impression that the Chechens are particularly resented and feared. One Avar I spoke with expressed it like this: "One Chechen is OK, but as so as you get two in a room they try to take over and tell everyone what to do. We have nothing in common with them aside from Islam." In discussing ethnic sterotyping in Daghestan with a Lak colleague in the US who had not seen her father's aul for many decades, the only stereotype she could remember hearing expressed was a negative one of Chechens.) Although it could be argued that Russian news sources are attempting to put an anti-Chechen slant on events, the people I spo