Editor's Introduction: Urban Anthropology in a Changing Russia

A younger generation of scholars in Russia has been experimenting with diverse themes, perspectives and methodologies of anthropology. Their work is exciting, timely and sometimes humorous, as they join the mainstream of globally informed scholarship. These relatively young scholars also are creating their own “Rossiiskie” [Russia-oriented multicultural] research, writing styles, and fieldwork scope. The talented authors featured here are ethnographer-sociologist-anthropologists, with varying emphasis on these strands of fieldwork-based approaches. They came together from all over Russia for a conference sponsored by the Russian Academy of Sciences Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology, in Moscow in December 2014, on the hot topic “Anthropology of the City: Youth Aspects.” I immediately approached the organizers for a selected group of papers for this journal. Several of the solicited authors came through with expanded versions of their papers, and this issue is the result.1

The lead article by Aleksandra V. Alekseeva answers several key anthropological questions at once, exploring migrant adaptation in St. Petersburg and the in-process consolidating of an ethnic group, the Pamiris. Relatively recently, Pamir-based identities were more splintered and regional, in the magnificent mountainous homeland of the Pamir Mountains of Tajikistan. In a clarifying correspondence [email 2 March 2016], the author stressed the sensitivity of how we should translate English terms for these migrants by suggesting that “Pamir peoples is speaking about different groups, while the ‘Pamiri people’ or ‘Pamiris’ is one group unified by this identity.” For the group she worked with in St. Petersburg, she prefers the term ‘Pamiris.’

Still more delicate, Aleksandra Alekseeva shows in her article that the Pamiris' efforts to be nonthreatening and accommodating newcomers in Russia have led to a stress on the “museum-ization” of their culture in the city, specifically at folkloric gatherings in the St. Petersburg “House of Nationalities,” and “House of Culture.” While this is in part a direct Soviet legacy, two different concepts of tolerance seem to be converging here—one based on the old-fashioned Soviet-style, often patronizing “brotherhood of the peoples” idea, and the other based on indigenous Ismai'li Muslim precepts.2

The next article continues the theme of interethnic relations in urban Russia, in the context of a relatively more homogeneous, small, impoverished town in the Kostroma region of Russia's heartland. Natalia A. Belova has studied youth complaints in Nerekhta concerning housing, leisure, employment, and migration. Here, the Russian youth are the uneasy ones contemplating out-migration to larger cities like St. Petersburg. They are also worried about the perceived “rudeness” of newcomer ethnic “others” in their town. Young Russians' few local triumphs, for instance establishing a discotheque in a House of Culture with public and private sponsorship, may seem small but they are meaningful efforts in a sea of depression. Several generations of voices are heard strongly in this article about “provincial” Russia, as the author herself terms it. Natalia Belova ends with report-like exhortations to better publicize, on the Internet and elsewhere, any existing social services. Her humor (unintended?) is evident when this female researcher claims that her male respondents offered “better reasoning” than their female counterparts.3

Humor and charm are very much on display in the cleverly titled article “Fifty Shades of Toyota.” Dmitry Yu. Doronin is a young yet seasoned Moscow-based ethnographer of the Altai region who has made good friends with his interlocutors over many field seasons. He bridges rural and urban contrasts with the theme of car ownership for four-wheel drive purpose and prestige. These are not simply well-cared-for pretty cars, but they are perceived to be alive. They are only truly “well” if a shaman or “wise one” has blessed their purchase with ritual, or analyzed their photographs to learn about their previous owners. The clever title of this article comes from one of Dmitry's friends, not the author himself. And one of his interlocutors, noting Dmitry's surprise that Altaian natives of the city would think of their cars as “horses,” proceeds to further shock by citing for comparison-justification a grade-B Hollywood film called “Christine.”4 By the end of the article, a serious comparative case has been made for explaining the widespread attribution of personality to cars and other objects. It fits well with the pioneering work of Arjun Appadurai on the “social life of things,” and with Alfred Gell on “art and agency.” The author also makes an appropriate correlation to Melanesian “cargo cults.”5 Setting aside the so-called “exotic” for a moment, who of us has not had flashes of anthropomorphic identification, or at least attachment, to our cars?

The next article brings us north to the Siberian Far East, and interethnic relations that have changed dramatically over time and space between the Evenki and Russians of the Sakha Republic (Yakutia). Anna N. Kulikova is a scholar with an insider's insights and passion concerning the changes in Evenki young people's well-being as they move from reindeer-breeding camps to local town-based residential schools, and then sometimes to higher education in industrial cities like Neryungri, where the author teaches. Both republic and federal policies have failed these children, she argues. She begins eloquently with a quote from the Dolgan writer Ogdo (Evdokiia) Aksyonova about the loneliness of a Native child torn from his parents and roots. Anna Kulikova advocates expansion of the “nomadic schools” that would allow at least some Native children not to be sent away to school at all, if they plan careers in traditional economic activities, such as herding and hunting.

Touching on alcohol and drugs, as do other authors in this issue, Kulikova mentions the alienation that has notoriously led to high rates of suicide among Siberian Natives, although she provides no statistics and only hints at suicide acceleration. Most controversially, she brings attention to what she perceives as an artificial stimulation of Evenki identity in the current school system. Citing Moscow-based researchers Valery Tishkov and Yuri Shabaev, she seems to agree that the process of early-on privileging of Native indigenous identities has led to later ill-adaptation in the ethnically plural larger towns, as well as to potentially dangerous anti-Russian chauvinist nationalism. Here I think she may go too far, for I hardly see the harm in any level of school program that emphasizes ethnonational festivals, Native language training, folklore, folk dress, and yes, birch-bark basket making. To her credit, Anna Kulikova provides articulate context by outlining the sad legacies that led to losses of Evenki language knowledge and its active use in the Soviet period.6

Our final article returns us at first glance to lighter themes, and to Moscow and St. Petersburg, where young people have been enthusiastically engaged in Live-Action Role-Playing (LARP) games during the whole post-Soviet period, and indeed well before. I recall an encounter in 1986 with a young Leningrad University history student who shyly confided that she and her friends often met at a leisure camp outside the city where they played “Cowboy and Indian” games. They especially enjoyed dressing up as Indians of various stereotyped tribes. Imagine my amusement when a decade later I heard that a Native American filmmaker had learned of this, and was himself filming the Russian “Indians” playing at being him.7

The spirit of group-play has become far better developed since then, based on well-known literary, historical, and Internet scenarios that have counterparts all over the world. The Russian version of this group solidarity building is particularly elaborate and sometimes poignant, as “participant observer” author Ol'ga V. Vorobyeva makes clear. Precisely how elaborate they are is clear from the photograph of “1924” she provided. She makes fascinating analytic use of the moments when participants break out of their roles, or use coding and double entendre to bridge who they are in their ordinary lives. One striking example involved a serious mid-play joke about “unsanctioned demonstrations.” It was based on the first-hand protest experiences of at least some of the group. Ol'ga Vorobyeva's main argument is that she can see the process of sub-group cohesion and insider-ness forming before her eyes through the witty “framing” of these games.

In sum, some of the more ironic and knowing approaches of the youth featured in these articles, as well as the scholars who write about them, gives me hope for Russia's next generation, many of whom are far from chauvinist, xenophobic nationalists. Russian youth may not be “political” or “democratic” in the senses observers outside of Russia valorize, but they are more aware of their conditions of life and their possibilities for healthy leisure outlets (including escape into role-playing and use of diverse Internet sources) than we may think.

During the editing process, I realized that four out of the five authors for this issue were women. Was it an accident? Are more women than men becoming anthropologists in Russia because it is a poor-paying profession? Is there a gender (female dominant) component to the study of youth because of the preponderance of women teachers in the school systems? While it is probably “no accident” that many of our authors here are women, it is more important to stress that all of the authors are great at what they do, and seem to love their work.

Notes

^1. I am especially grateful to Irina Kucherova of the Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology, one of the conference organizers, for her recommendations and responsive correspondence.

^2. On pioneering Pamiri ethnography, see Davlat Khudonazarov, Pamirskie Ekspeditsii grafa A.A. Bobrinskogo 1895–1901: Etnograficheskii alb'om (Moscow: Nauka, 2013). On the sadly relevant Tajik civil war of the early 1990s, see Davlat Khudonazarov, The Conflict in Tajikistan: Question of Regionalism (Washington, Gettysburg: The Eisenhower Institute, 1995). For more on the Muslim Shi'ia Isma'ilis, see http://www.theismaili.org/community and http://www.akdn.org/akf.

For perspective on migrants in Russia, see especially Olga Brednikova and Oleg Pachenkov, “Migrants-‘Caucasians’ in St. Petersburg” Anthropology and Archeology of Eurasia, 2002, vol. 41, no. 2, pp. 43–48 on St. Petersburg; and Madeleine Reeves, “Clean Fake: Authenticating Documents and persons in migrant Moscow” American Ethnologist, 2013, vol. 40, no. 3, pp. 508–24.

^3. This was not evident from the data provided, but one person's logic may be another's illogic. On youth and interethnic relations in other Russian towns, see especially Hillary Pilkington, “‘How Can I say it… in a more Tolerant Way?’ Ambiguity, Ambivalence and Contradiction in Youth Dialogue on Ethnic Tolerance and Intolerance,” Europe-Asia Studies, August 2015, vol. 67, no. 6, pp. 847–69. See also Irina Semenenko, “Ethnicities, Nationalism and the Politics of Identity: Shaping the Nation in Russia,” Europe-Asia Studies, March 2015, vol. 67, no. 2, pp. 306–26; as well as the whole special issue of Europe-Asia Studies, 2015, vol. 67, no. 2, edited by Cameron Ross, on “State against Civil Society: Contentious Politics and the Non-Systematic Opposition in Russia.”

^4. A quick glance at the trailer for this horror movie about an uncontrollable murder-car confirms a pattern I have noticed over many years: that some of Hollywood's worst movies are exported to Russia and become better known there than in the U. S..

^5. See Arjun Appadurai, ed., The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986); Alfred Gell, Art and Agency: an Anthropological Theory (Oxford, New York: Clarendon Press, 1998); Theodore Schwartz, “The Cargo Cult: A Melanesian Type-Response to Change,” in George DeVos, ed., Responses to Change: Society, Culture, and Personality (New York: Van Nostrand, 1976), pp. 157–206. Laurel Kendall's marvelous work on shamans blessing cars and apartments in urban Korea is also relevant: Shamans, Nostalgias and the IMF (Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press, 2009).

^6. See also Alexia Bloch, Red Ties and Residential Schools Indigenous Siberians in a Post-Soviet State (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania, 2003); Nikolai Ssorin-Chaikov, The Social Life of the State in Subarctic Siberia (Palo-Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003); Ul'iana Vinokurova, Tsirkumpoliarnaia Tsivilizatsiia: Idei i Proekty (Yakutsk: Ministerstvo Kul'tury, 2011); and Olga Ulturgasheva, Narrating the Future in Siberia (New York, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).

^7. Personal communication, the late Lakota anthropologist Bea Medicine, at an American Anthropological Association meeting in 1996. Tracing this film has been difficult, and any information readers may have on it would be welcome. A comparable phenomenon evolved in Germany: http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2013/03/23/germanys-obsession-american-indians-touching-and-occasionally-surreal-148331. See also the brilliant critical monograph Philip Deloria, Playing Indian (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994).

On a Novosibirsk role-playing community, see Tatiana Barchunova and Natalia Beletskaia, “Are Play Regiments Really for Play? Militarian Practices in Novosibirsk: Simulation of Military Actions in Role-Playing Games for Young People and Militarized Games for Adults,” Anthropology and Archeology of Eurasia, 2009–10, vol. 48, no. 3, pp. 9–30.