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

At the end of the Soviet period, anthropologists influenced by Western trends and events within Eurasia began in unprecedented numbers to research and expose to wider audiences’ contemporary concerns under the rubric “Urgent Anthropology.” What is today termed “action anthropology” in the United States became a subset of innovative applied work in Russia that grew in part out of an internal “tradition” of writing classified government reports on causes of ethnic conflict. The more public style of “urgent anthropology,” under the directorship of Valery Tishkov at the then-Institute of Ethnography, became an Academy of Sciences series published in thick orange (subliminally code orange for warning?) pamphlets. Early coverage ranged from the Tajik civil war in Central Asia and separatism in the North Caucasus to mass media in Tatarstan, religious divisions in Ukraine, and religious splits within Islam. In the 1990s, pamphlets included “ethnopolitical situations” in various regions of Russia, and concerns of the “near-abroad” Russians in post-Soviet newly independent states.¹

This issue features more current versions of excellent “urgent” research done on the crucial themes of gender, ethnic conflict, migration, and anti-Americanism. When I selected these articles, I envisioned simply presenting a sample of “hot issues” of our times. On rereading, I realized that the selected themes cohered in ways I hope our readers will explore for themselves. “Intersectionality” is a buzz word in current anthropology and the convergence of complex interrelated problems should come as no surprise. Our authors probe fascinating structural contradictions as they unravel the ramifications of post-Soviet society-wide doubts, interrogating basic assumptions as new social interactions collide with older traditions. They also reveal the birth pains of awareness of why gender issues are magnified when societies become “modern” and their members grapple with values no longer fitted to multiple interpenetrating levels of social change.

The first two articles featured here are on gender issues and their ripple effects throughout society, increasingly acknowledged in Russia, the North Caucasus and Central Asia to be critical to any social reform. Our lead article documents a shocking revelation that female genital mutilation, in the form of full or partial clitoridectomies, is practiced traditionally and sometimes today, in mountain villages and nearby towns of Russia’s Republic of Dagestan. The researcher, Saida V. Sirazhudinova, based in Rostov-on-Don and originally from Dagestan, argues that the practice has been able to survive semi-underground due to embarrassment about mentioning it, community social (patriarchal) pressure, and female enforcement. Similar to Saba Mahmood’s Egyptian “female conservatives,” this has become a way for some elderly Muslim women to preside over traditional values and practices proclaimed to be Islamic.² The author uses impressive sociological and ethnographic data, interspersed with moral condemnation of the tradition and mention of international campaigns against “female circumcision.”

In contrast to Sirazhudinova, Aksana Ismailbekova argues for a return to benevolent familial or community practices usually perceived to be patriarchal, protective and outdated. Again, women help reinforce the practices. We go from secret operations on young girls in the North Caucasus to rape and its ramifications during and after the Osh “riots” of 2010 in Kyrgyzstan. Door-to-door rapes have long been associated with the prolonged outbreak of mass Kyrgyz-Uzbek violence and subsequent simmering mutual hatreds. Ismailbekova, based currently in Berlin and originally from the region, is a Kyrgyz woman interviewing Uzbek families. Her background represents an attempt to transcend the ethnic enmity that is all too common and ongoing in the region. The heart-breaking stories she tells, including dramatic narratives of specific Uzbek families, go beyond personal tragedy into the realm of understanding community-wide mechanisms to cope with gender-based violence in times of war. As her Uzbek informants often repeated, they need to protect their women and young girls, and are thus doomed (honor bound) to marrying them off early to a low bidder, as long as he is Uzbek. The author argues that traditional “bride price,” also called “bride wealth,” or kalym, has been cheapened in the process, and that it is this distortion of tradition that is debilitating, rather than the tradition itself.³ Also demoralizing is how frequently the new grooms skip out on their young families to earn money in Russia.

Our third article, by renowned St. Petersburg-based Russian ethnographer Sergei N. Abashin, focuses precisely on migration to and from Russia. He explains that a circular pattern with many individual variations, some of them ad hoc, has developed for Central Asians seeking not only relatively stable finances in a “push-and-pull” context of impoverishment and hope, but also emotional and social gains that are often motivated by more than economics. His research describes ramifications of changing policies in Russia and recently independent states, while his conclusions emphasize the importance of thinking more dynamically about migration as having many overlapping types and motivations. His article, reinforcing findings of British anthropologist Madeleine Reeves, was the lead for a set on migration published in Etnograficheskoe obozrenie.⁴

The finale article appears at first glance to be anomalous, since it covers a topic rarely broached in this journal, United States and Russian foreign policies and domestic reactions to them in Russia. The subject is sanctions, mutual albeit unevenly tit for tat, and the Russian reactions are hilarious, sad or mocking, depending on the perceiver. Urban studies scholars Alexandra S. Arkhipova, Daria A. Radchenko, and Alexey S. Titkov advocate that chimeric Russian public opinion can be “read” through humor, banners during demonstrations, and street theater.⁵ Even car bumper stickers and signs on café windows express acts of revenge against judgmental Americans. The authors write for educated Russian audiences who themselves are grappling with contradictions in their society beyond Moscow and St. Petersburg. In a similar spirit, I feel that American readers deserve to be informed not just about Russian meddling in our elections, but about Russian resentment of perceived “world leader” arrogance. The article “Our Answer for Obama: The Logic of Symbolic Aggression” is less about the departing (at the time of writing) President Obama as it is a serious yet playful analysis of why Russians feel aggrieved and express it in support for President Putin’s taking of Ukraine’s Crimea in 2014, the cause of our ongoing sanctions. Russian humor can be double-edged, since double entendre can keep resentment of Putin’s countersanctions vague and anti-Putin jokes from being direct. Russians do not expect Presidents Putin, Obama, or Trump to walk into their cafés, and yet patriotic Russian nationalists can post signs denying Obama and Trump access. Many know President Obama was a dignified foreign leader, and yet some draw racist images of him as a monkey, or burn a U.S. president in effigy at demonstrations.⁶

The legendary ethnographer Sergei Arutiunov in his lectures and writing has distinguished Eurasia along a rough continuum of “honor-dignity cultures,” those that are more or less prone to emotions of shame, pride and revenge.⁷ While most anthropologists, including Arutiunov, no longer generalize about “whole cultures,” we can still see the persistent strength of values and practices (such as blood revenge and its antidotes in the North Caucasus) that may turn groups in on themselves and against others. The worlds of secrecy (about Dagestani female mutilation), of shame (about rape during the Osh conflict), of racism (against Central Asian migrants in Russia or Obama), and of ridicule (anti-American reactions to sanctions) are intertwined under an umbrella of fear concerning the loss of perhaps overly idealized traditional communities or exaggerated claims of Soviet stability. Who are we to judge? Among the tasks of provocative “urgent anthropology” is understanding when and how it is appropriate to make judgments.

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].