Editor’s Introduction: Urgent Anthropology: Gender, Ethnic Conflict, Migration, and Anti-Americanism

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size

Notes

1. The small print run series, begun in 1990, was called Issledovaniia po prikladnoi i neotlozhnoi etnologii [Research in Applied and Urgent Ethnology]. Issues came with a disclaimer: “The material of this series represents the opinion of the author and should not be taken as the official position of the Institute.” Its website boasts “over 200 issues” published, although recently fewer issues have been published and coverage has broadened to increase geographical scope beyond the former Soviet space. See https://iea-ras.ru/?page_id=767. A review of the series from 1990 to 2011 is by N.A. Lopulenko, Issledovaniia po prikladnoi i neotlozhnoi etnologii, 1990–2011: analicheskii obzor (Moscow: Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology, Russian Academy of Sciences, Issledovaniia po prikladnoi i neotlozhnoi etnologii, 2012, no. 228). A recent example comparing international and Russian legislation on Indigenous peoples is by Sergey V. Sokolovskiy, Politika priznaniia korennykh narodov mezhdunarodnom prave i zakonodatel’stve Rossiiskoi Federatsii (Moscow: Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology, Russian Academy of Sciences, Issledovaniia po prikladnoi i neotlozhnoi etnologii, 2016, no. 250).

2. In the Egyptian case, however, the practice featured was women’s koranic study groups, not female circumcision. See Saba Mahmood, The Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004). For North Caucasus context, see our theme issue featuring the work of Yuri Karpov, “The Dagestani Mountain Village,” Anthropology and Archeology of Eurasia, 2010, vol. 48, no. 4.

3. For perspective, see Sophie Roche, ed., The Family in Central Asia: New Perspectives (Berlin: Klaus Schwarz Verlag, 2017). A further ramification has been the recent increase of bride kidnappings, especially in Kyrgyzstan. See Cynthia Werner, Christopher Edling, Charles Becker, Elena Kim, Russell Kleinbach, Fatima Sartbay, and Woden Teachout, “Bride Kidnapping in Post-Soviet Eurasia: A Roundtable Discussion,” Central Asian Survey, 2018, vol. 37, no. 4, pp. 582–601.

On the Osh conflict and whether it was “ethnic” or whether “ethnicity” became an idiom for other underlying causes, see Valery Tishkov, “Don’t Kill Me, I’m a Kyrgyz! An Anthropological Analysis of Violence in the Osh Ethnic Conflict,” Journal of Peace Research, 1995, vol. 32, no. 2, pp. 133–49; and Morgan Liu, Under Solomon’s Throne. Uzbek Visions of Renewal in Osh (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012).

4. See Madeleine Reeves, Border Work: Spatial Lives of the State in Rural Central Asia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2014). The other articles that were part of this important theme issue are: E.V. Borisova, “Ne stala zdorovat’sia—vot shto znachit ezdit v Rossiiu!: vozvrashchenie detei migrantov kak predmet moral’nykh suzhenii v Tajikistane,” Etnographicheskoe obozrenie, 2017, no. 3, pp. 16–31; O.E. Brednikova, “(Ne)vozvrashchenie: mogut li migrant stat’ byvshimi?” Etnographicheskoe obozrenie, 2017, no. 3, pp. 32–47; V.M. Peshkova, “Zhiznennye plany trudovykh migrantov iz Srednei Asii v Rossii: narrativy i praktiki,” Etnograficheskoe obozrenie, 2017, no. 3, pp. 48–62; and G.A. Sabirova, “‘Vozvrashchenie posle vozvrashcheniia’: povtornaia trudovaia migratsiia v Rossiu,” Etnograficheskoe obozrenie, 2017, no. 3, pp 63–75. See also M.M. Balzer, ed., “Migrants, Urbanization and Diasporas,” Anthropology and Archeology of Eurasia, 2017, vol. 56, no. 3–4, including Olga Brednikova’s article “(Non)-Return: Can Migrants Become Former Migrants?” pp. 298–320 (from the theme issue).

5. The authors also draw on Russian public opinion surveys, although these have become a political battleground under President Putin. Since 2003, Levada Analytical Center polling is the most reliable, relatively pan-Russia sociological survey research organization, although their work in the republics is less thorough than in Russian regions. The independent Levada Center was established by and named for the esteemed (late) sociologist Yuri Levada, after his All-Union Public Opinion Research Center [VTsIOM], founded in 1987, was appropriated by the government. See also recent surveys by Mikhail Dmitriev and Anastasiia Nikol’skaia that indicate shifts toward Russian discontent with Russia’s war in Ukraine, for example “Osennii perelom v soznanii rossiian: mimoletnyi vsplesk ili novaia tendentsiia?” Obshchestvennye nauki i sovremennost’ 2019 no. 2, pp. 19–34.

6. Humor is an “eye-of-the-beholder” phenomenon often going flat in shifting sociopolitical contexts, especially when racist and cruel us–them nationalist tropes are played. For more on the increase of political humor as Russians attempt mass psychological release in recent years under President Putin, see Aleksandr Maisurian “Umom Rossiiu ne poniat’. A politicheskim anecdotom—zaprosto!” Dec. 5, 2019

https://publizist.ru/blogs/109404/34073/-?utm_source=politobzor.net, including a cartoon of a Russian bear going two directions at once https://pp.userapi.com/c636823/v636823623/57314/pMYTcf2m3Oo.jpg.

I am grateful to Paul Goble for calling attention to these and other political anecdotes periodically in his Window on Eurasia blogs, including “12 New Political Anecdotes Say what Needs to Be Said about Putin’s Russia … ” windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2019/12/12-new-political-anecdotes-say-what.html. See also our theme issue on humor, M.M. Balzer, ed. “Humor Through Russian Eyes,” Anthropology and Archeology of Eurasia 2006, vol. 44, no. 3.

Compare the special theme issue of Serguei A. Oushakine, ed., “Jokes of Repression,” East European Politics and Societies 2011, vol. 25, no. 4.

7. See Sergei Arutiunov, “Ethnicity and Conflict in the Caucasus,” in Fred Wehling, ed., Ethnic Conflict and Russian Intervention in the Caucasus (San Diego: University of California Institute for the Study of Global Conflict and Cooperation, 1995), p. 17; and his introduction “Russian Culture in the 20th Century,” in Margaret Mead, Geoffrey Gorer, and John Rickman, Russian Culture (New York, NY: Berghahn Books, 2001), pp. vii–xx. Compare Sergei Arutiunov, Narody i Kul’tury (Moscow: Nauka, 1989), and S.A. Arutiunov and S.I. Ryzhakova, Kul’turnaia Antropologiia (Moscow: Ves’ Mir, 2004). See also Charles Herrman, “The Classification of Honor-Based Societies” (2017) https://www.researchgate.net/publication/312213912_The_Classification_of_Honor-Based_Societies [accessed Dec 11 2019].