ABSTRACTS OF THE PRESENTATIONS

Ayse Akalin (PhD Candidate, Sociology, CUNY, Graduate Center) “Producing Affects: Migrant Domestic Workers of Postsocialism in Turkey”

One of the major impacts of postsocialism on Turkey has been the change the former has caused on the migration routes of the latter. Formerly only a country of emigration, Turkey has also become one of migration and immigration in the post-1989 period, partly due to the different flows of people coming from the formerly socialist countries in the region. First as shuttle traders, then as sex workers and finally as domestic workers, this migration from postsocialist countries has not only been predominantly composed of women but has also been pulled towards gendered fields and occupations. 

In this presentation, I look at the demand for migrant domestic workers coming from the proximately located post-socialist countries in the Turkish urban middle class homes, and its relatedness both with the postsocialist phenomenon as well as the transformation in labour in the age of neoliberalism and postfordism. I argue that common arguments explaining the migration of women around the world for purposes of domestic work, which suggest that the demand for this kind of labor is due to its cheapness in the host countries, appear insufficient for this case. Since postsocialist migrants are employed strictly as live-in caregivers and housekeepers, the criteria to scrutinize their performance gets blurred as they both work for and live with their employers, hence simultaneously overtaking the roles of the fictious adoptee as well as the professional employee of the family. As this vagueness of their identity requires it, their performance can only be evaluated by their subjectivity.  

I argue that the demand for the postsocialist migrant woman in the domestic work sector is the result of the different capacities invested in her body, which via migrancy now functions as a flexible accumulation strategy, that are borrowed both from the socialist period as well as the postsocialist period. While the socialist period has made her a competent public actor and labourer, postsocialism has first caused her working body lose the economic value of her former competence but has then revolarised it by turning her into a producer of affects. The preference for the migrant domestic worker over the Turkish native workers is then to be seen as one for her available body, which is an assemblage of her socialist heritage, her postsocialist unemployment and poverty, and the flexibility of her migrancy that have turned her into an affect-producing machine. By focusing on migrant domestic workers, this presentation underlines the need to interrogate postsocialism within neoliberalism and vis a vis the changing relations between production and consumption.

Eunice Blavascunas (PhD Candidate, Anthropology, UC Santa Cruz) “Ecological Gaps: Nature, Absences, and Postsocialist Politics of Memory in a Polish Wetland”

The social life of natural spaces has changed tremendously with the advent of a liberal economy in postsocialist Europe.  Dozens of new national parks and nature preserves rebranded land formerly thought of as backwards and useless into eco-tourist destinations fit for consumption.  Within the same time frame of the last 18 years, citizens of postsocialist countries wanted to believe that historical truth could be brought to light in a democratic society.  Scholars of national parks have long written about how the reassignment of land into parks is accompanied by amnesia about the past.  This paper examines the way suppressed history has undergone a transformation in tandem with changing ideas of nature in northeastern Poland.  The nature space I speak of is the Biebrza Wetland, established as a Europe’s largest national park in 1993.  The park borders villages with traumatic histories of Polish on Jewish violence during WWII, recently brought to light by J.T. Gross’ book “Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne,” a book that sent shock waves through the Polish national consciousness for implicating Poles in the Holocaust. 

The articulation between discursive nature practices and suppressed histories has rarely been made in the postsocialist context.  However, anthropology of national parks in postcolonial and U.S. contexts frequently links violent pasts with national parks.  More often than not the link between nature and violence is brought to light as nature conservationists dispossess people of their legitimate place on the land.  I am interested in how the reassignment of postsocialist space teases out ecological gaps, that is, spaces that are within discursive ideas about new natures, but that do not figure into official place making practices, such as national park promotions that fail to include villages with histories of pogroms into ecotourist programs.  My paper will attend to the co-production of nature-cultures in a space that, due to the unevenness of capitalist development, has been marginalized for a long time, and is being further marginalized by the public, postsocialist “outing” of the region’s violent past.  One of the more interesting responses by the residents of one village is the reinvention of a peasant carnival drawing upon ancient fertility rites, a festival that many ecologists label as xenophobic, for its burning of bear effigies at the conclusion of the festival.  My paper will discuss the ethnographic details of this festival and ask how this Polish, postsocialist problem space of nature can contribute to the theorization of nature spaces within other regions of the world and within anthropology more broadly.

Alexia Bloch (Assistant Professor, Anthropology, University of British Columbia) “Post-Soviet Labor Migration and New Geographies of Power and Intimacy”

With intensified processes of globalization, and the fall of the Soviet Union more than 15 years ago, post-Soviet migrants have both widely immigrated out of home areas and become involved in return labor migration to Western Europe, North America, Asia, and the Middle East.  Given its relatively liberal tourist visa policies for citizens of the former Soviet Union, and the high demand for undocumented gendered labor, Turkey has become a significant destination for return migration.  This paper draws on ethnographic research conducted over several years (2003-2006) among post-Soviet migrants to Turkey, who are overwhelmingly women.  The paper argues that in order to better understand the context of a growing worldwide gendered migration, we need to examine the articulation of several issues—strategic intimacy, the role of the state, and broad patterns of gendered labor flows.  Focusing on research in Istanbul, the paper examines:  1) the ways in which strategic intimacy plays a role in migration across a range of spheres, including domestic work, sexwork, or retail sectors; 2) the role of both sending states and the Turkish state in circumscribing women's types of agency; and 3) the way in which globalization, including the movement of people into areas where their labor is in demand, leads to distinctly gendered contact zones like those found within the metropolis of Istanbul, Turkey.  Ultimately, while the demands of globalization for low-wage, feminized workforces are ubiquitous, the case of post-Soviet women labor migrants reminds us that migrants are also enmeshed in distinctive, localized patterns of gendered negotiations in their receiving societies.  Furthermore, this ethnographic research focused in Istanbul sheds light on the intersections between late socialist and late capitalist negotiations around sexuality and practices of intimacy.

Pietro Calogero (PhD Candidate, Urban and Regional Planning, UC Berkeley) “Nostalgia as Appropriation: the Return of GenPlan Urban Management in Kabul”

Afghanistan pursued a combination of increasingly Soviet-style developmental strategies beginning in 1919. Soviet occupation in 1979 meant a continuation and refinement of these same policies until the collapse of the Najibullah regime in 1992. The urban strategy since 2002 has been to rely on this substantial infrastructure while deprecating the technocratic tradition that created it. But after five years of failure in the ‘new style’ of urban management, popular support for technocratic planning and development has returned. In the absence of a socialist regime—let alone support from an outside state—this ‘return’ to technocratic planning has in fact been an innovation. In the face of strong normative pressure from the United States and a phalanx of NGOs, engineers in Kabul Municipality have largely rejected Western planning ideologies and sought to update the long-interrupted process of urban development via the GenPlan method.

To achieve this without foreign subsidies, Kabul Municipality acts as a developmentalist urban regime much like redevelopment agencies in the United States. Using eminent domain, it expropriates urban land to make space for urban highways and private midrise development. Informal settlements, which now constitute about 70% of the built area of Kabul, are often appropriated without compensation. The public infrastructure increases the value of the adjacent land, and the costs are recovered by selling roadside land to private developers. This method of financing urban redevelopment has been used across the world for decades. It was even used in Kabul before Afghans adopted a more Soviet style of urban development in the 1960s. However, the fusion of this developer-urban regime strategy with implementation of a Soviet-assisted GenPlan is new, and a startling refutation of a Western attempt to introduce a Neoliberal style of urban governance. Given the popular support I observed among Afghans for the return to this form of technocratic developmentalism, I would characterize this as a populist return to top-down planning. The public Municipality seems be the preferred agent of urban planning for three reasons: first because it is visible, in contrast to the invisibility of authority described by Achille Mbembe and others describe in sub-Saharan Africa. Second, because it is predictable, with a clear intent expressed in the graphic form of the GenPlan itself. Third, it is accountable at least to those Kabulis with the power to broker with the local regime, whereas neither NGOs nor foreign-state organizations are receptive to local brokering. 

Through this case study I hope to illustrate some of the ways in which postcolonial theory is useful for the analysis of Afghanistan, and to consider the relationship between postcolonial and postsocialist theory. In some respects Afghanistan can serve as a ‘control’ case for countries which have somewhat shared experiences, such as the Central Asian republics under the Soviets and the South Asian republics under the British. And in the present moment, the multiple levels of power exerted in the urban space of Kabul raises questions of soverignty and governmentality which can be understood through the critical framework of exceptionalism.

Adriana Chira (PhD Candidate, Anthropology, Cornell University) “Witnessing the Virtual”

Still in an incipient stage of development and at a historical juncture at which the public’s confidence in a technology-based growth paradigm can no longer be taken for granted, nanotechnology’s social legitimacy and anticipated revolutionary breakthroughs must be assiduously conjured up through carefully deployed “technologies of trust” (Porter 1995). This paper focuses on the manifestation of such technologies of trust in the documentary practices of a Romanian nanotechnology institute. Emerging in the aftermath of several other promissory technologies and millenarian/populist political and economic policies, nano-talk has generally been received with more skepticism and reflexivity than its predecessors had. The paper examines the ways in which the bureaucratic management of a Romanian institute for nanotechnology reflexively establishes the production of a transparent documentary practice and governance of science as a condition sufficient in and of itself for the articulation of a new material technology. I argue that the members of the institute sidestep the absence of nanotech technologically transferable objects through the adoption of a regime of regulatory objectivity (Cambrosio 2006). Within such a regime, nanotechnology’s credibility is not produced through marketable material goods or publishable research, but through institutional conventions whose adoption must be continually evidenced. The focus of documentary practices on the ostensible technicalities of institution-building backgrounds questions about what nanotechnology is and does and how it is different from other technologies as if these questions had already been answered. I suggest that the skill with which the management of the nanotech facility deploys regulatory objectivity may have been honed in the conditions of hypernormalization (Yurchak 2006) of late socialist official discourse.  

To interpret the persistence of a particular culture of evidence from late socialism to post-socialism as a sign of the liminality of Romania’s bureaucratic culture within the E.U.’s technocratic culture would simply not do. In fact, the Romanian management of science and its documentary practices are heavily supported by the E.U., a position that is part of larger shifts within the E.U.’s governance of science. Following recent waves of public reflexivity toward science, the Commission has attempted to create alternative arrangements between the previously discursively demarcated domains of science and society. Within this larger policy strategy, the management of the Romanian nanotech facility reframes the deployment of technology for political goals as the creation of communication bridges between the political and the scientific. The objective rationality of technologically based growth is given no consideration, for what the Romanian bureaucracies of science foreground is precisely the politically embedded construction of technological artifacts. What becomes interesting then is not necessarily highlighting the political nature of ostensibly objective technical knowledge, the typical kind of revelatory move in the anthropology of science. Instead, I have decided to pay attention to the ways in which the political and the public become artifacts that have to be carefully constructed using aesthetic devices, such as particular document templates, paper trails and so on.

Susanne Cohen (PhD Candidate, Anthropology, University of Michigan) “Postsocialism and the Hybridities of Actually Existing Neoliberalism: Communicating Agency in the Post-Soviet Office”

Neoliberalism has often been viewed as a unified set of policies, practices, and ideological commitments that is progressively encircling the globe with seemingly no geographical bounds.  However, I will suggest, examination of actually existing neoliberalism in postsocialist settings promotes an understanding of neoliberalism that is more partial, contested, and negotiable than the monolithic concepts that have been prevalent in contemporary social theory. The rapid economic, political, and cultural transformations that have occurred in postsocialist countries have not resulted in a uniformly neoliberal milieu; rather various neoliberal strategies, practices, and ideologies have become complexly intertwined with other types of cultural and ideological commitments stemming from the evolving histories of the socialist past, the upheavals that followed, and the ever-changing exigencies of the present.  In such a context, I suggest, the impact of neoliberalism not only differs widely across the countries of the former socialist world; it can also differ dramatically in different locations and among different social actors within a single city.

The proposed paper explores the multiple and various consequences of neoliberal transformations in postsocialist settings by discussing the impact of neoliberalism on practices and ideologies concerning proper communication at the office in urban Russia.  Based upon long-term dissertation fieldwork in private offices and training centers in St. Petersburg, I discuss three different approaches to proper office communication prevalent in particular institutional settings, all of which were strongly impacted by neoliberalism but also significantly differed from one another.  In particular, I focus on the interaction between ideal-typical models of neoliberal agency and ideas about proper business communication skills, demonstrating how different language ideologies of business communication support similar models of agency in different ways.  While a model of individualized agency in which employees acted as neoliberal “entrepreneurs of the self” was quite pervasive, it was supported by three different language ideologies, each of which had links to different historical, geographical, and structural contexts.  The first approach, which was promoted at a multinational firm, suggested that communication of an “open” and often quasi-therapeutic type was a tool for creating individualized agency in the form of personal and organizational accountability and empowerment.  The second approach, which was prevalent at a Russian-owned private factory established in the post-Soviet period, held that control over information and the formation of carefully selected alliances and connections was a primary means of attaining personal success in one’s career. The third approach, which was articulated by a local secretarial school, asserted that the best way for women to pursue individual agency was to communicate an ideal version of the subordinate self by crafting a perfect feminine “image” that was attuned to the needs and expectations of others.  

This diversity of language ideologies, I will suggest, gives support to a view of neoliberalism that is less like an all-encompassing force progressively achieving global hegemony, and more like a complex of historically linked elements that can be drawn upon selectively by social actors pursuing particular goals, forming a diverse array of hybrid formations that cannot be predicted a priori.

Jennifer Dickinson (Assistant Professor, Anthropology, University of Vermont) “The Semiotics of Selling and the Transformation of Public Space in Postsocialist Ukraine”

As Miller and others have argued, the cultural manifestations of late capitalism are maintained through complex interplay between everyday practices of consumption, and the core beliefs about health, identity, and personal relationships that those practices support.  In this paper, I focus on how the cultural meaning of postsocialist public spaces is constructed in part through quotidian practices of consumption.  Using interview and visual data from contemporary Ukraine I will consider how the consumerist reorganization of public space in the postsocialist has contributed to experiences of identities and human relations as they unfold in these spaces.  Although I focus primarily on public space in contemporary Ukraine, I also consider what Yurchak has termed the “spatial regimes” of the late Soviet period and Buchli’s work on Soviet ideology and the reconstruction of domestic space to illuminate the parallels and divergences between public and private space in the Soviet and post-Soviet periods. 

To ground this theoretical discussion, I will draw on data I collected in Ukraine in 2003-2005, while also discussing the final stage of this research, planned for 2008.  Approaching issues of public space from the perspective of geosemiotics, the study of language and its relation to its physical surroundings, I will devote particular attention to the theoretical implications of the proliferation of outdoor advertising and signs for private businesses.  These advertisements and shop signs represent a significant transformation of public space through particular linguistic and aesthetic practices.  For example, Ukrainian billboards may combine two or even three different languages and shop signs may utilize several different typefaces and images to define the public face of their commercial space and attract customers.  In comparing these linguistic and aesthetic practices to those of the Soviet period, I raise the question of what late capitalist ideology or ideologies these linguistic and aesthetic practices support, and how they contrast with those of late socialism. 

Dace Dzenovska (PhD Candidate, Anthropology, UC Berkeley) “Postcolonial Sensibility, the Postsocialist Present, and the Question of Difference”

This paper is a critical engagement with postsocialist and postcolonial problem-spaces, analytics, and sensibilities. Rather than establishing whether the Soviet socialist project was colonial, or demarcating otherwise positioned agents and victims of colonialism, I suggest another way in which postcoloniality may have traction in the postsocialist present. I reflect on postcoloniality as a sensibility—a worldly, analytical, and political orientation that gives direction to an inquiry without guarantees. More specifically, I consider how my own ethnographic inquiry on the question of difference in postsocialist Latvia has been guided by such a sensibility and where and how the postsocialist ethnographic present exceeds, elides or disrupts this trajectory.

My ethnographic project builds on recent attempts to render ways in which people inhabit, constitute, and relate to difference—in the form of sexual orientation, ethnicity, race, or religion—as a problem requiring intervention. Yet, my primary concern is not with the ways people understand and relate to difference as an aspect of identity, but rather with difference as a set of practices that are consequential for particular ways of life or power/knowledge regimes. For example, I am interested in the ways that refusing to see particular acts as racist is consequential for the liberal regime, or the ways in which not having sufficient “ethnic consciousness” is unsettling for the state-based Latvian national project, or the ways in which tolerance as a way of relating to difference is seen by many Latvians as a disguise for domination and thus fundamentally consequential for the Latvian way of life. 

At the same time as the question of difference is an ethnographically derived concern, my conceptualization of difference is shaped by the historical articulation of the question of difference with anti-colonial struggles and subsequently postcolonial critique. In this paper, then, I want to focus on both the traction that a postcolonial sensibility may have in a postsocialist context, but also, and perhaps more importantly, on the ways in which the postsocialist present brings into focus the limits of an interpretive frame inspired by a postcolonial sensibility. For example, while reconceptualizing the Soviet past as not only oppressive, but also productive of difference is useful, attempts to suggest how seemingly innocent representational practices are productive of racialized difference meet with puzzlement and resentment not only due to different language ideologies, but also due to different sensibilities towards how one inhabits and relates to difference. Rather than insisting that postsocialist subjects sensitize themselves to critical intellectual practices formed in relation to different historical moments, I reflect on the limits of intelligibility between the postsocialist problem-space and postcolonial analytics. In the process, I suggest that understanding the ways in which (counter)liberal orientations shape postcolonial critique might be central to grasping this dynamic and consider what critical tools for engaging with or reformulating the question of difference might emerge from the postsocialist present. The question therefore is: how might an inquiry of postsocialism, inspired but not determined by a postcolonial sensibility, illuminate not only the postsocialist, but also the postcolonial present?

Catherine Earl (Lecturer, School of Humanities, Communications and Social Sciences, Monash University) “Cosmopolitan Subjectivities through the Lens of Postsocialist Anthropology”

This proposal outlines a paper that engages with recent renewed interest in cosmopolitanism subjectivities in postsocialisms to explore its implications for contemporary anthropology and social inquiry beyond both postsocialist and European contexts, particularly for ASEAN Southeast Asia. The proposed paper deviates from conventional approaches to cosmopolitan subjectivities by engaging selected concepts from the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu, a scholar whose work at first appears wildly incompatible with both cosmopolitanism and postsocialism. The paper draws on Bourdieu’s habitus clivé, which describes dissonant, incompatible and unexpected cultural tastes within (capitalist) “class” profiles (as further developed by sociologist Tony Bennett). This perspective enables me to argue for a more nuanced conceptualization of cosmopolitanism that recognizes fragmentation or dissonance in particularized contexts where qualitatively different cultural capitals circulate as the currency of subjectivities. In this sense, my understanding of cosmopolitanism has moved well beyond any universal category to consider the shared experiences of cosmopolitan subjectivities in terms of dissonant cultural and class-based practices. Rather than working with Ulf Hannerz’ spatial cosmopolitanism, I engage with Lisa Rofel’s cosmopolitan humanity and “desiring” in China’s public culture and Caroline Humphrey’s Soviet cosmopolitan citizenship as well as Ulrich Beck’s cosmopolitanization which describes the heterogeneity of material culture and aspects of everyday life that are defined by things that are not local. 

A lens of postsocialism enables me to highlight the significance of dissonance in cosmopolitan subjectivities, particularly beyond Europe. The questions I seek to explore in this paper include: Do cosmopolitan subjectivities necessarily involve embodied practices outside the “home” culture? Can cosmopolitan subjectivities take place “in the mind” or through virtual experiences rather than “through the body”? Can a single linguistic context enable cosmopolitanism between subjects at “home” and in a diversity of diasporas? Do cosmopolitan subjectivities need to bridge an East-West cultural divide? Are there always a series of globalized “centers” (Los Angeles, London, Paris, Singapore, Hanoi, Moscow) to/from which cosmopolitan desires are drawn? Is there a relationship between urban migration and emerging cosmopolitan subjectivities? Do cosmopolitan subjectivities emerge only with middle classes or also with spatially and socially mobile classes? Can popular cosmopolitan subjectivities persist despite political transitions to/in postsocialisms, or in twentieth-century Southeast Asian colonial/ postcolonial/ ASEAN-era social landscapes? 

Following Anna Szemere and Igor Barsegian, among others, I understand the concept of postsocialism as a gradual shift involving layering and a multistory, rather than a strict rupture of a monolithic nature. I include Vietnam as a postsocialism, despite Vietnam Studies scholars’ objections to the use of the term “postsocialist” to describe Vietnam – a regime which remains nominally socialist and continues to cling to the official tenets of socialism. That is to say, I regard postsocialism to comprise a diversity of postsocialisms that have emerged from a diversity of socialisms. 

It is worth acknowledging the empirical context that drives my theoretical inquiry into cosmopolitan subjectivities. The questions I have raised evolved in the process of my empirical research on migration, cultural capital and social change among re-emerging middle classes in Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon), Vietnam’s second city and commercial capital. A following project explores the shifting function of state cultural institutions, particularly the Nhà Văn Hóa Thanh Niên Thành Phố Hồ Chí Minh [Ho Chi Minh City Youth Cultural Palace], in postsocialist urban youth culture.

Mischa Gabowitsch (Post-doctoral Fellow, Society of Fellows, Princeton University) “Post-socialism and the Turn from Critical Theory to a Theory of Critique: Lessons from the Debate about Nationalism and Fascism”

One of the most notable recent developments in the social sciences is the turn away from critical theory understood as a “sociology of suspicion”—an approach that sees the aim of social inquiry in unmasking a hidden reality behind the discursive veil established by “the dominant groups” and reproduced by those duped into subordination. This approach, with its quasi-ontological division of reality into “real” and “imagined” levels, is being replaced with research agendas that take people’s descriptions of their own predicament more seriously, without postulating that the scholar has access to higher knowledge by virtue of his command of some superior theory. Rather than seeing sociologists, anthropologists or philosophers as the sole “critical theorists,” authors working in this perspective study the different types of critique that “ordinary” people apply in situations of conflict, controversy and resistance against “domination.”

One of the criticisms most often leveled against this “pragmatic turn” is that it has only local value, being a description of “Western” societies with their relatively low level of physical and symbolic violence. Answering these criticisms, I would like to reflect in my paper on how a sociology of critique might be enriched by the study of post-socialism, a field of study that has traditionally been seen as particularly prone to relations of domination, “false consciousness,” and collective myth-making. I will do so by examining the debate on post-Soviet Russian nationalism.

In the study of post-Soviet Russia, nationalism, patriotism, extremism and Fascism are among the most popular topics in terms of the sheer number of publications. At the same time, however, they are among the most frustratingly under-developed fields in terms of the quality of analysis. The vast majority of publications on post-Soviet Russian nationalism adopt a nominalist perspective, enumerating the various labels attached to nationalist groups and quarrelling about which groups, given their overtly proclaimed ideology, may be classified as “fascist” or “extremist.” By contrast, a smaller but more sophisticated literature seeks to “unmask” nationalist ideologies by unveiling the pragmatic interests or psychological mechanisms at work in their construction: nationalism is thus presented as merely an outward expression of “nomenklatura capitalism,” “negative identity,” a “post-colonial complex,” cynical frustration, or “trauma.” My aim in this paper is to go beyond both approaches by showing how nationalism can be both a seriously held and non-deconstructable worldview and an “inauthentic” narrative. I will do so by examining not only those who describe themselves as nationalists, but also those who present themselves as opponents of nationalisms, or as being neutral in the debate between nationalist and liberal ideas. In doing so, my aim is to explore the extent to which articulations between “nationalism as a political project” and “nationalism as a cynical ploy” in post-Soviet Russia are unique to post-socialist contexts. By retracing the evolution of discursive and pragmatic protests against Russian nationalism since its first public emergence in 1987, I will try to show how these responses were conditioned by what part nationalism was seen as playing in every given situation: that of a political project to be countered as a threat, that of a “symptom” of social malaise to be treated by means of socio-medical engineering, or that of a literary provocation calling for the ironic stance of stiob. Given the initial expansion and subsequent shrinking of public space in Russia since perestroika, that country presents an especially rich array of response to what may initially seem to be a one-dimensionally political phenomenon, and might therefore serve as an illuminating example for an understanding of global developments.

Zsuzsa Gille (Associate Professor, Sociology, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign) “Materialities of state Socialism and Postsocialism”

Materialities of state socialism and postsocialism This paper aims at provoking a debate about the agency of nature and materials in shaping the social and political structures of both state socialism and postsocialism. I want us to ask what it would mean for our understanding of state socialism if we understood it not as a social, economic and political formation but as a socio-material assemblage, as a particular network of human and nonhuman agents? It is not a reinstatement of the Marxist base-superstructure model that I seek here but rather the reimagining of materialism. Modernities, including the state socialist variety, pride themselves on having made their natural moorings inconsequential for their own social make-up through the radical transformation of the natural environment, materials, and spatial designs. Did state socialism, as Burawoy argued for capitalism, erase its origins? Or did it try but only at the cost of creating certain unintended consequences that do testify to nonhuman agency? How has the "biting back" of materials and nature compelled social engineers to redesign their visions for state socialism and communism? Building on Latour's idea that "we have never been modern," Barry's concept of technological zones, Aihwa Ong and Stephen J. Collier's concept of global assemblage, and on environmental history, I will show the links, or if you will, elective affinities, between state socialism, including its collapse, and its techno-material foundations. I will also point to how the state socialist spatial-material infrastructures have shaped current institutions of postsocialism and neoliberalism.

Jessica Greenberg (Postdoctoral Fellow, Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies) “Participatory Democracy, Apathy, and the Legacies of Yugoslav Socialist Self-management”

This paper responds to a radical shift in the role that Yugoslavia  plays in the contemporary European democratic imaginary. While  Yugoslavia was once a frequently cited ‘success story’ in self-managed  participatory democracy, it has now become a site to which external  models of participatory practice are imported to ensure successful 

‘democratic transition.’ More specifically, this paper is concerned  with how a shift in the position of the formerly socialist world within democratic imaginaries, has produced normative understandings of politics—within scholarly and policy analysis—that rest on a distinction between participation and apathy.  Participation is now the basis for a wide range of new democratic programs and benchmarks through which postsocialist democratic transition is judged within national political discourse, everyday narratives, and external assessments by NGOs, and policymakers. This paper will ultimately consider instances of ‘apathy’ as productive social moments rather than the mere absence of democratic participation. In making this argument it will also address the legacy of self-management understandings of participation and what they share, and have in part contributed to, the participatory democratic model now being deployed in the region. I argue that, ironically, apathy as a democratic ‘problem’ is in part traceable to socialist-inspired notions of participatory democracy that are circulating back into the region as  normative mechanisms of judgment from "the west."

Larisa Honey (Adjunct Lecturer, Lehman College, CUNY) “Alternative Health in Post-Socialist Moscow: Unifying Individual and Collectivist Values”

With the fall of the Soviet Union, the rapid growth of alternative health organizations that celebrated individualism and self-exploration seemed at first glance to reflect new processes of neo-liberal democratization in Russia.   Exploring this avenue of social change through ethnographic fieldwork and life-story interviews with members of such organizations in Moscow reveals a far more complex reality.    Following women on their individual paths to self-discovery, transformation and empowerment, I discovered journeys marked by active attempts to improve lives – their own, their families’, and the broader world around them.    In these attempts we can see a unification of individualist notions of freedom and collectivist notions of social responsibility - civil and social rights.   Practitioners encourage the development of individual potential and personal responsibility over one’s health and life.   Theirs is not, however, a neo-liberal approach to social organization, and their focus on individualism is not purely a product of western influence.   Acutely aware of certain negative social and cultural effects of globalization, the movement offers a critical assessment of neo-liberal reforms that, according to practitioners, have left many in Russia impoverished – both economically and spiritually.  

Situated within post-socialist space, the alternative health sphere highlights the inadequacy of western binaries that pit individualism versus collectivism and East against West, and provides an opportunity to re-examine commonly held assumptions and long-held truths about the nature of democratic society.   Participant observation combined with life histories reveal the historical development of this distinctive post-socialist configuration.  Many in this sphere began practicing in the 1970s through officially sanctioned Soviet health classes, often starting with yoga classes in Houses of Culture.  Their stories reveal a space permeated with esoteric and other practices that promoted individualism and responsibility and point to an emerging pluralism of activities and beliefs that pre-date the political and economic changes instituted under perestroika.   Their current practices and beliefs emerged within a dialectical engagement with the Soviet state.   And while most welcomed the fall of the Soviet system, practitioners I spoke with did not fully reject Soviet ideals but rather formed unique interpretations which are visible today and often mistakenly taken as signs of neo-liberal westernization.    Through an exploration of these unique interpretations, this paper endeavors not only to reveal a disconnect between western binaries and post-socialist reality, indicating the inadequacy of ideological markers such as collectivism and individualism, but also hopes to challenge us to re-examine the use of such markers within western society as well.

Neringa Klumbytė (Post-Doctoral Fellow, Havighurst Center for Russian and Post-Soviet Studies, Miami University) “Biographic Citizenship Through the Lens of Postsocialism”

In Soviet times, the Soviet state control and discipline of its subjects as well as its commitment to collectivism gave rise to culturally specific personhood regimes defined in relation to official state ideologies and values. Soviet citizen biographies were social, political, and historical formations that were reproduced into the post-Soviet period. Soviet and post-Soviet biography has been as an ideology and enactment of subjectivity reproduced and recirculated by the state and the society as well as adopted and enlived by an individual. In this paper I introduce the concept of biographic citizenship to speak of different subject relations to the state and political history. I argue that people who are subjected to biographic alterity regimes in post/socialist or other societies develop opposition toward the state and political history.

This paper analyzes voting in the last two presidential elections in post-Soviet Lithuania (2002 and 2004 after the presidential impeachment). It illustrates how biographic citizenship regimes are articulated during political campaigns and how biographic alterity is translated into votes for anti-establishment parties. I show that many villagers, former industrial town residents, former Communist Party members, and intellectuals who are subjected and experience biographic alterity in a post-Soviet society, vote for populist and neo-socialist parties. These parties are associated with anti-Western, anti-democratic, and pro-Russian agendas. Their voters are defined as outsiders to democratic politics, neoliberal regime and citizenship and labeled backward, damaged, and anomalous. By voting for anti-establishment parties, the post-Soviet biographic others support the alternative political visions of post-Soviet modernity and alternative biographic citizenship.

Conversely Soviet time biographic others, including former dissidents, deportees, political prisoners and others, are the major proponents of neoliberalism and pro-Western politics advocated by the mainstream parties. In their case, the West and neoliberal modernity are the icons of their positive selves while populism and neosocialism remind of biographic difference in Soviet times and are disproved of.

Kevin Karpiak (PhD Candidate, Anthropology, UC Berkeley) “Moral Divides: The Problem of Policing ‘After the Social’”

Political commentators, whether on the Left or Right, alternately lament or laud the political program of current French president, and former Interior Minister, Nicolas Sarkozy as the emergence of a neo-liberal platform in France.  Such commentary offers little import, however, for an understanding of the machinations of political action as it exists in France today.  This paper proposes to use the insights garnered from the ethnography of Post-Socialist Europe in order to shift the discussion in such a direction. 

One of Sarkozy’s most coherent and fully actualized political interventions has been the re-organization of the French Police Nationale from an institution which emphasized socially-oriented police work—the so-called police de proximité—to what he has called a “culture of results”.  The latter mode of policing explicitly rejects the terrain of the Social as either a legitimate or useful object of policing.  Instead, it offers the instauration of a series of auditing and actuarial practices—usually associated with the neo-liberal governance of populations—in order to re-orient police work itself.  Within this context, police administrators and officials struggle to re-chart an ethical terrain whose central object has become problematized.

This paper will draw upon one of the classic texts of Post-Socialist ethnography, Andreas Glaeser’s Divided In Unity: Identity, Germany and the Berlin Police, in order to clarify the ethical stakes involved in such an institutional reorganization of police work.  Specifically, it will take up Glaeser’s emphasis on the moral dimension of police work.  Beyond mere bureaucratic synergy, beyond the diffusion of a technical toolkit, even beyond conceptions of time and space, the challenge of unification for a divided Berlin police force, in Glaeser’s handling, is above all a moral quandary expressed vis-à-vis both “work” and  “the State”.  In this paper I will build on this insight in order to explore whether it can be used to make sense of the ethical stakes between the police de proximité and the “culture of results” and, more broadly, what I call the problem of a ‘post-social police’.

Jonathan Larson (PhD Candidate, Anthropology, Miami University) “Classroom Intimacies and Democratic Practice in Western Slovakia”

 “Hierarchical” social relations are often used to characterize the structure of various “totalitarian” regimes of the past century. In contrast, Westerners have frequently assumed that greater “egalitarianism” and political access underlie a “culture” of democratic states. Yet how might a closer look at alienation and affective solidarities under socialism break down this assumed opposition? How might it force us to reflect more carefully on what dispositions and institutions distinguish between the conduct of politics in a liberal democracy versus in a one-party state? This paper examines discourses of failure in Slovakia’s educational system that have circulated in postsocialist Western Slovakia. Looking at suppositions of how classroom pragmatics in secondary schools are supposed to recursively influence political relations of national scope, I argue that there was much to the conduct of educational life under socialism that actually resembles presumed pedagogical and civic goals today. Rather than assume categorical tendencies for “democratic” political orders to emerge from more “horizontally” structured classroom interactions, I suggest that lessons from postsocialist contexts can push for theories of democratic practice that more carefully integrate ethnographies of interpersonal relations and institutions.

Julia Lerner (Lecturer, Ben-Gurion University and Van Leer Jerusalem Institute) “‘The real pseudo’:  Considering the Post-Soviet Mimetic Culture through the Lens of Postcolonial and Symbolic Anthropology” 

During the last week the western as well as some Russian press has been preoccupied with what is considered to be an act of the political oppression towards the European University at St. Petersburg. As Guardian put it, the university "has been forced to suspend teaching after officials claimed its historic buildings were a fire risk". Interestingly enough, no one of the actors, actually involved in the affair, assumes that the official "fire" explanation for the closing of the university is the "real" one; everybody recognizes the familiar pattern of surveillance, immediately arising in the collective memory. So, why this false front is still needed at all? And why the university's authorities insist, at least until today, to play according to the rules and fix the pseudo fire-security problems in the building and apply for an amnesty?  

This paper departs from the ethnographic interpretation of the European University at St. Petersburg. As an institution carrying out re-socialization in order to create a "new" and "real" academic culture, the European University explicitly takes a stand against Soviet academic culture and aims to teach its students “like in the West”. Practices of imitation and imposture inform the notion of “mimetic change” that I propose here as an analytic tool, enabling new light to be shed on processes of knowledge and identity formation in post-Soviet space. I would elaborate an analytical encounter between the concept of mimesis and mimicry, as developed in post-colonial writing, and its unique appearance in both its historic and current Russian context; I would also consider some empirical examples of  what I would name as the post-soviet "mimetic culture" in the academic filed, in the filed of politics and cultural production.  Finally, I would argue that the post-Soviet mimetic culture offers us a rare opportunity to sharpen our analytic tools for understanding the particular ways of local cultural change within seemingly standardized global world. 

Without searching for what is real and what is false, and without even assuming the existence of the original at some other place, I focus my analytical concern on the understanding of the interpretative mimetic act, as well as the meaning of the act of its confirmation or disclosure. Hence, the mimetic character of the European University allowed me to reveal a category of the “pseudo” as central interpretive category that serves the actors in their self-positioning vis-à-vis relevant academic and cultural authorities. In interviews with students, lecturers and researchers, a distinction was drawn between the “pseudo” and the “real” or between the “as if” and the “in fact” as a basic interpretive category by which the observed field operates; a field in which subjects talk and behave, interpret their reality and locate themselves therein. I will claim that the interpretive category of “pseudo” has particular meaning in the Russian cultural system and is connected to mimetic culture in Russia. The structural nature of the post-Soviet condition, that is similar in many ways to the post-colonial one, strengthens and sharpens mimetic practice as a strategy of conduct towards many authorities simultaneously.  

Combining the post colonial reading of multiple power-relations with the cultural structuralists' approach, I also propose a reading of the expansion and diffusion of the global western forms of knowledge. This reading involves the consideration of the local cultural symbolic frames as a necessary and powerful, but also largely missing link in the analysis.  Through the analysis of the post-Soviet academic and cultural field, I will demonstrate how an interpretative anthropological examination of the mimetic acts, allows for the understanding of the mimetic act, not merely as instrumental imitation of hegemonic norms from the "West", and not only as an assortment of practices used for maneuvering in the performance of identity while hiding the resistance of the "real" self.  Such an examination allows us to consider the possibility of the transformation of the imitation into identity itself, and to reveal the case where the pseudo could become "the real". Moreover, an examination of the mimetic acts that occur in the post-Soviet context enables an upgrade of the post-colonial discussion on imitation. It proposes to consider the mimetic strategy as a cultural act that does not necessarily oriented outwards to external objects and forms overseas, outside cultural or political borders. A mimetic act can be directed inwards, to the past, to the national ethos, the powerful historical images, and even to the damnable acts of oppression and control, as we are witnessing it in the recently EU affairs. 

Marianne Liljeström (Centre for Women’s Studies, University of Turku, Finland) “Producing Feminist Knowledge in Postsocialism” 

In her criticism of Susan Gal’s and Gail Kligman’s (2000) argument that gender issues of the East European transformation period can be incorporated into categories and analyses of Western feminist discourse, Nanette Funk (2004) underlines the need to address the different, historically specific local political theories within which East and West operate. She demands a sharpened attention both to the complexity of travelling feminist theory, and to the local specificities, which, according to her, will continue to differ and affect feminist categories and analyses. Such emphasis on the particularity of sites in feminist theories clearly valorise the local, and often as the locus of political and cultural resistance. However, reference to the local is not transformative in and of itself. In fact, specifying location is a standard gesture in the West, part of the production of value and knowledge that creates races, genders, and a host of other marked categories.  

In this paper, I ask, how we are, in the contemporary circumstances of postsocialism and ongoing remoulding of the dichotomy between East and West, to imagine new communities of knowledge, the varieties of “we-ness” of transnational feminism? The question is essentially linked to the extensive discussion on hegemony and otherness in the postsocialist era, and in my research it concerns the hierarchies, exclusions and inclusions of feminist knowledge production. More specifically, I analyse the topical, growing debate among Russian feminists about the implementation of Gender Studies in the Russian academia, contrasting it to the institutionalisation of the discipline in the Nordic countries. In such setting, I am prompted to examine how the concept of West is constructed in the process of establishing Gender Studies as a legitimate Russian academic field. Drawing on my case study, I propose two methodologically important implications: Firstly, the contrastive approach requires that the concepts of geopolitics and politics of location are scrutinised, and seen as both a strategy and a method in knowledge production. With these notions I refer to politically informed cartographies of one’s position as a researcher, and thus, I, secondly, discuss them as my own situatedness as researcher in the context of Finnish, feminist Russian Studies. 

In my presentation, I concentrate on two broad issues: On the one hand, the “travelling feminist theory” and the question of “borrowing” key concepts. On the other hand, I look at the interrelationship between “specificity” (locality) and potentially subversive thinking within canonised feminist theory. In dealing with these issues I ask, how can we envision feminist communication between non-identically positioned communities? How can we create intellectual dialogues that bypass the firmly existing institutional settings and scenarios? How can we loosen old dichotomies and such easy identification, which continually allows thinking of others as “something”, as a generalised figure, or as “not-really-proper” feminist subjects? How to understand that the coherence of the “we-ness” of epistemic communities is always imaginary, and, thus, that this “we” does not eliminate differences, but emerges through them.

Maya Nadkarni (PhD Candidate, Anthropology, Columbia University) “‘You are stealing the past’: Family drama and discourses of transparency in Hungary’s informer scandals”

Questions of lustration rarely entered public or political debate during Hungary’s first decade of postsocialism.  In 2002, however, the announcement that newly-elected prime minister Péter Medgyessy had been a counterintelligence agent in the 1970s set off a chain of revelations across Hungary’s political and cultural spectrum that culminated in unearthing the informer past of Oscar-winning filmmaker István Szabó in 2006.   

With no legal remedies possible, debates about these activities were instead framed in terms of moral justice and clarity, in which questions of retribution for the past were displaced by demands for political and personal transparency in the present.  For, as elsewhere, the neoliberal discourse of transparency has become the watchword for good governance under postsocialism (West and Sanders, Transparency and Conspiracy), even where it conflicts with other values (such as privacy) that were similarly not upheld under previous regime.  Such openness has been viewed as an antidote to not only the conspiratorial logic of the past system, but also the discourses of conspiracy and corruption that have structured much of the quotidian experience of postsocialism.   

The informer scandals, however, translated this demand for clarity and accountability in political and economic institutions into a model of ideal personhood for the postsocialist subject.  Specifically, the actions of past informers were scrutinized according to a politics of sincerity, through which the desire for privacy or private rapprochement with one’s victims was pathologized as perpetuating past injustice, and the cleansing light of publicity was viewed as not merely a means to justice, but a form of justice in itself.  Yet rhetorics of transparency may occlude as much as they illuminate, and former informants and their defenders argued that the focus upon individual acts of betrayal distracted from analyzing the system that forced such difficult moral choices.  Exposing their past actions, they maintained, now merely repeated their past victimization by the former regime, in the context of which the very decision to inform might even be viewed – as Szabó controversially insisted – as a form of heroism. 

My paper will focus upon the ways in which the problem of past informers and the demand for transparency emerged as a cultural “family drama” (Lynn Hunt), in which the absent or ineffectual fathers of the socialist era (as figured in films and cultural mythologies of that time) were replaced by parents whose actions and legacies were perceived to be all-too-present for the generation that has come of age after the fall of socialism.  Accusing the older generation of “stealing the past” – and thus the present – from their children, the younger generation contrasted the lies and secrecy of the past era with the moral transparency they perceived to have been made possible by socialism’s demise.  In so doing, they not only challenged the narratives of heroism and victimization through which their parents’ generation had attempted to narrate their past experiences of socialism, but also sought to redefine the very nature of the present-day they were to inherit.

Zhanara Nauruzbayeva (PhD Candidate, Anthropology, Stanford University) “Art for Government: Entrepreneurial Techniques of the Union of Artists in Post-socialist Kazakhstan”

This paper addresses the transforming relationship between the state and artists/cultural producers in post-socialist Kazakhstan. I investigate how the Union of Artists, a professional membership organization that already had a close relationship with the state during the Soviet period, interacts and collaborates with the government today. Based on an ethnographic account of the First International Art Symposium organized in summer 2007 by the Union of Artists in Astana, Kazakhstan, I analyze how this relationship has become entrepreneurial and privatized. This event reveals that personal decisions, tastes and dislikes play a major role in the transactions between artists and government officials. Although local art critics often remark that now the Lenins have been simply substituted by horse-riding batyrs, I contend that the relationship between artists and the state has become based on modes of patronage, and is markedly distinct from the Soviet era. I use this analysis in order to develop an understanding of how Soviet institutions and practices of cultural production have been transforming and what can it tells us about postsocialism.

In order to understand postsocialism both as a historical formation and as a conceptual frame, it is critical to examine how the relationship between cultural producers and the state - a key feature of socialist formation – has changed. Cultural producers were constituted by the state as ideologues. Even dissident non-conformist art was shaped by the state by its overt oppositionality (Grois 2003); its artistic value was defined precisely because it defied the pressure of the state (Dodge 1995). After the Soviet Union collapsed, the state drastically cut its social obligations to its citizens across the board, including commissions and stipends for artists. Artists were left to fend for themselves. At the same time, the newly opened international borders attracted visiting foreigners who supplied a steady source of cash for artists in exchange for their artworks. Before the first barrels of oil were pumped in the early 2000s, artists were among the few people in the country who produced anything of exportable value. In time however, this newness wore off. The economic situation in Kazakhstan began to improve, and with that came inflation, and a decline in living standards. Gradually, many artists found themselves coming back into the fold of the state—this time around, a stronger and wealthier neo-liberal state. My paper proposes to investigate and unpack this familiar yet different relationship.

Liene Ozolina (PhD Candidate, Social Sciences, University of Amsterdam) “Bringing Up the New Citizens: Governmentality in Post-Soviet Latvia”

Changes taking place in Latvia after 1990 have called for re-socialization of people. Its first expression was redefining boundaries of national citizenship. But also other, more socially and culturally embedded, citizenship projects are undertaken to ‘make up’ citizens for the new regime. The focus of this paper is one such case of ‘making up’ the citizens: the reform of social studies curriculum for primary schools.   

The necessity for educational reform that would address subjects like ethics, health, civic norms and economics was envisioned by the Latvian government in early 1990s when the transition process towards a democratic, liberal society was announced as the state priority. An integrated social studies course was worked out by the Ministry of Education and the Soros Foundation Latvia and implemented in schools across the country in 2005/2006. As an educational project, this reform creates/reproduces certain truths that are offered to children as ways to think about themselves, their emotions, their body, about them being part of the society. Furthermore, it also implies exact practices, as seminars are held, lessons are taught, and bodies are molded when the national anthem is played. Therefore, this educational reform can be analyzed as a prime example of a strategic approach to constitute citizens in an ethically, normatively and socially ‘correct’ manner, according to prevailing aspirations of the post-Soviet Latvian state.

The study is based in the (neo-)Foucauldian theory of governmentality, embracing the following dichotomy: (a) (political) rationality that gathers morals, knowledge and discourse, as well as (b) actual governmental technologies, i.e. not only what the state is, but also what the state does. The Foucauldian perspective allows studying mundane truth-beliefs and particular events and practices that bring about large-scale shifts in society. As a result, the recent transformations can be illuminated in a theoretically and empirically more nuanced way that complements the existing knowledge about post-socialist societies.

I argue in my analysis that there are currently three analytically distinguishable rationalities drawn on in the contemporary Latvia: the nationalistic, the Soviet and the neoliberal. The study inquires into the historical character of these rationalities, their manifestations in the case of social studies reform, techniques they purport, as well as relationships that are unfolding between them. Such analysis eventually allows drawing first conclusions about what the post-Soviet governmentality is like.

Without essentializing the latter, several relevant conclusions have been drawn. To briefly mention but two of them, (1) striking parallels between the nationalistic and the Soviet rationality have been brought to the surface that together provide strong ground for contesting the neoliberal rationality conveyed by the educational reform; (2) the dichotomous thinking promoted by the nationalistic rationality (‘we/them’) has contributed to positioning the reformed social studies curriculum as ‘the new truth’ of existential importance vs. ‘the old Soviet thinking’. As a result, even though the reform is aimed at promoting valorizing of individual differences, plurality and diversity, the stark categorization into ‘new’/’old’ and ‘right’/’wrong’ that the reformers use unintentionally deters the changes they are striving to introduce.

Madeleine Reeves (Research Councils UK Academic Fellow, Center for Research on Socio-Cultural Change, University of Manchester) “Becoming ‘Integral’: Separation, Intimacy and Territoriality on the Kyrgyzstan-Uzbekistan Border”

This paper draws on ethnographic materials from a newly-militarised area of post-Soviet border to explore what “territorial integrity” might look like as an object of anthropological enquiry.  It explores a particular fieldwork event and its aftermath in May 2005 on the Kyrgyzstan-Uzbekistan border, when the spatial correlates of “normal statehood” were thrust into the weave of everyday conversation. The incident in question was a dispute between neighbouring villages over the use of cross-border canal-water that has now become an “international” resource: an event that was readily inserted at the time into a narrative of ongoing inter-ethnic conflict in Central Asia’s Ferghana valley. But it also concerned the proper limits of a border guard’s authority and the everyday meanings of having a “manned” border – in the very gendered sense of that term -- in a rural part of Central Asia. This is a specific story about a specific place at a moment when the gulf in political possibilities on either side of this new post-Soviet divide was dramatically exposed. It offers a series of complications to the narrative of ongoing inter-ethnic antagonism into which it was inserted by exploring how, at a time of political crisis, the location of the state was dramatically and very visibly contested. 

It does so by focusing on two particular instances of post-conflict border work, concerning the “proper” separation of a previously-joint market, and the appropriate limits of a border guard’s “legitimate violence” and legitimate document-checking. Rather than taking state spatiality as a given, it explores a site where the “integrity” of the state and the authority of those nominally personating it were intensely contested. What, the paper asks, is at stake in materialising the state’s territoriality, in producing that integrity in practice? And what might attending to the everyday work of enacting a border – particularly in an area where borders are new and poorly-demarcated, sporadically militarised and of little social salience for those who find themselves living at the new state “edge” – reveal about the way in which the state comes to be produced as coherent, bounded and integrated? These are questions which have tended to be sidelined in much contemporary anthropological debate concerning the workings of sovereign power. 

The recent (and important) move to “shift the ground” of our analysis of contemporary power from questions of territoriality towards “the internal constitution of sovereign power through the exercise of violence over bodies and populations” (Hansen and Stepputat, 2005:2) has opened up important sites for thinking about where the “exception” comes to be located, including in “tissues, genes or irrationalities beyond the control of the individual, legislated by the state or patented by corporation” (2005: 18).  However, this attention to the deterritorialized exception risks dismissing “territoriality” too easily.   This paper argues that by shifting focus from “territory” (as given, static, eternal attribute of states) to the production of territorial integrity and territorial fragmentation as the outcome of particular activities (militarizing a border, gating a community, creating zones of corporate sovereignty for the extraction of oil, etc….) we can begin to gain some grasp on how and when power comes to be articulated through the regulation of bodies in space – and when it doesn’t. 

The paper thus draws on a paradigmatic site of postsocialist reconstruction -- the borders of two newly-international and vigorously nationalizing states – to engage critically with contemporary accounts of “post-territorial” sovereignty and biopower.

Natalia Roudakova (Visiting Lecturer, Communications, UC San Diego) “Post-Soviet Journalism as ‘Prostitution’: Understanding Russia’s Reactions to Anna Politkovskaya’s Murder”

When the Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya was gunned down in her apartment building in Moscow in October 2006, heads of Western governments and nongovernmental organizations hurried to make strong statements condemning the murder, and public rallies in Politkovskaya’s honor were held in front of Russian embassies across the world. In contrast to this swift and unequivocal response, the reaction of Russian officials, journalists and the public at large was delayed, lukewarm, or nonexistent, much to the incomprehension of Western observers. To understand why the majority of Russian citizens were unmoved by Politkovskaya’s murder, this talk will contend, we need to understand the specific history of media-political transformation in Russia over the past decade and a half. This includes a) approaching Soviet journalism as a unique nexus of ethics and politics; b) studying the centrifugal forces unleashed during Russia’s media privatization in the 1990s, and c) understanding how those forces (in tension with the centering pull under President Putin) have been shaping the practices and meaning of journalism in post-Soviet Russia over the past decade and a half. Such context-sensitive and historically contingent exploration will, in turn, suggest new theoretical tools for thinking about journalistic action, or agency, in political contexts short of classical liberalism more broadly.

Nona Shahnazarian (Kuban Social and Economic Institute, Krasnodar, Russia) “Living in Suspense: Illegal Migration, Care Drain and the Crisis of Patriarchal Masculinity”

The study touches upon global social transformations, i.e. migrant woman economy and commercialization of care which seems an indirect aftermath of US official gender policy failure. In a structure of global division of labour the donors of care are so-called Third World women (sometimes men). The author try to look at the impact of migration on gender systems and relations, examining how age, ethnicity and class interact with gender in shaping the meanings of migration for different groups of women. The focus will fall especially on discursive representations. The study is based on eight months of observation and 14 interviews with nannies and host family members among Armenians in Los Angeles (2006-2007) and numerous interviews among ex-nannies and their relations in Yerevan (Summer-Fall 2007).

In keeping with anthropological approaches to the study of nation state (Armenia) and globalization, the author will concentrate on the effects of commercialization of emotions/care and national(ist) (neo-traditional) discourses on 1) (culturally) specific conceptual frameworks; 2) the fabric of relationships between employees and employers.

The author argues that the migrant women who are involved in care giving work in remote country are subjected to multiple exploitations either from employer (host family) or from their home country and family. Essentially sometimes it is not clear who of them shows more zeal.

The role of a nanny as a ‘family employee’ is highly problematic since it, on the one hand, disrupts understandings of the private, domestic sphere (defined as a place of unselfish reciprocity) through associations with the public sphere and commerce. On the other hand, the nanny is not a ‘real’ family member (though it supposed to be culturally the same, co-ethnic employee) and usually come from post-socialist world which is different in symbolic values, motivation, and everyday habits/life style. As a consequence, nannies are ascribed through everyday practices the often contradictory roles as in host family as well as in their own distant one. At the same time in spite of huge cultural distance between Diaspora and post-soviet Armenians, nannies join to the global consumer network meeting new life standards. This fact engenders a sort of nannies’ false self identification.

Post-Soviet Armenia, torn by war, blockade and unemployment, turn to be the economy of remittances, resolving their entire inner social problems through labour migration. The consequences of women migration for Armenia can be expressed via formula: brain drain + care/emotions drain = poverty (decreasing of life quality), unhealthy physiological atmosphere, and destroyed families. Neo-conservative women discourse displays the vise versa earning inferiority: women feel their lives miserable involuntarily earning more than their husbands and not being glad to transgress traditional roles of patriarchal gender model. 

To examine those mechanisms of ascription, the author employs feminist theories of reproductive labour, its stratification and commodification as well as ethnic economy studies influenced in particular by the works of Scott J. (the weapons of the weak), Hochschild A. (new forms of (emotional) exploitations), Ishkanian A. (mobile motherhood), Light I. (ethnic economy niches and earning inferiority), Solari C. (gender identities at work), Broz L. (false self identification).

Anita Starosta (PhD Candidate, History of Consciousness, UC Santa Cruz) “Shadows of the Postsocialist Future: Newness and Rhetoric”

“Postsocialism” is a late-comer to the stage of world-historical and theoretical paradigm shifts. It finds itself, from the beginning, in the company of post-modernism, post-colonialism, post-feminism, and a litany of other “posts,” all of them pre-existing it and, necessarily, determining the context of its emergence. Though a putatively new field of inquiry, “postsocialism” adds to the sense of weariness with the ways in which critical theory has risen—or failed to rise—to the challenge of apprehending historical change. For many, the exhaustion of available appellations signals a crisis in the capacity to envision a future. What are the consequences—for the study of the post-Soviet world and for critical inquiry—of the proliferation of “posts” among which “postsocialism” unwittingly finds itself and in whose shadow it develops?

This question leads beyond intra- or even inter-disciplinary self-reflexivity and toward the very problem in which, I believe, “postsocialism” intervenes: how to recognize, how to account for, how to produce newness. The proliferation of “posts” is, of course, itself an effect of the search for the new; the problem of newness, moreover, is not itself new, already raised by Homi Bhabha, Stephen Heath, and Paul Bové, among others. “Postsocialism,” however, renders the problem of newness more acute and urgently demands a response. The question of the post-Soviet world’s relevance or implications for critical inquiry is haunted by past ways of thinking about the region—of leaving it behind in the traffic between the object of area studies as a particular and the theoretical insights it enables as a universal. Is there a way of keeping this object in the present, in a simultaneous relation to theory? More importantly, is there a way of imagining modes of thinking that would not themselves be belated, and that would not repeat the past gestures of relegating the region to an example or to empirical ground?

To address this broader problematic, my paper explores the possibility of a “literary historiography,” or of a “rhetorical or allegorical theory of history” (as Timothy Bahti, following Benjamin, has put it), as a critical perspective attuned to newness. I focus on two Polish texts that speak to the vicissitudes of “postsocialism”—even as they precede it. The first is Tadeusz Konwicki’s 1970s novel A Minor Apocalypse, whose protagonist is asked to burn himself in public protest at a state-sponsored celebration. The second is The Shadow of the Future, a memoir by Solidarity activist Anna Walentynowicz, for whom the moment of a genuine opening does not coincide with the officially recognized moments of democratic triumph but is, instead, foreclosed long before the advent of democracy. How might Benjamin’s writing on allegory or Erich Auerbach’s writing on figura—tropes that serve as vehicles of epistemic and historical translation—help resolve the impasse of the proliferating “posts” in which the study of a world currently named “post-Soviet” finds itself?

Oane Visser (Radboud University of Nijmegen & Institute of Social Studies, the Netherlands) “Crucial Connections in Late Socialism, Post-Socialism and Beyond: Insights from fieldwork on Networks and Institutions in Rural Russia”

The incomplete institutions in post-Soviet countries entail high risks and uncertainty, such as problems of late payments, defaults and barter. This paper builds on research on how (farm) enterprise directors cope with insecure and volatile markets in post-socialist countries like Russia. Whereas with regard to the emerging economies in Asia in the 1980s, networks were seen as a motor of socio-economic modernization, in post-socialism networks are seen as a cause of stagnation or even decline. Personal relations within the Russian economy have generally been described in negative terms, such as ‘clans for plan’ (Dinello 2001), a ‘virtual economy’ (Carlsson et al. 2001; Gaddy and Ickes 1998) or ‘enterprise network socialism’ (Bernstam and Rabushka forthcoming). The relationships are assumed to be hierarchical and legacies of the past, and therefore incompatible with adapting to a market economy (Huber and Wörgötter 1998; Starodubrovskaya 1995). Others have mainly stressed criminal aspects. This paper aims to present a nuanced analysis of networks in post-socialism, based on extensive field research in the Russian countryside, looking for parallels (and differences) with late socialism. This will be done by taking into account the two-tiered, but interwoven, structure of business contacts in socialism.

While the formal, hierarchical state structures have broken down in the early 1990s, in the 2000s they are being rebuilt on the regional level, e.g. in the form of parastatal corporations. The informal networks, which were originally built to mitigate shortages, have not lost their relevance. As the economy became more uncertain after the demise of the command economy, the need for networks increased. Various anthropologists have argued that with the decline of state channels, informal networks came more to the fore (Humphrey 1998; Kandiyoti 2001). However, at the same time, many factors tend to undermine these networks, such as the widespread opportunism due to lawlessness, the low trust in state institutions and the low interpersonal trust. Therefore, the character of business networks and their, partly shifting, functions in socialism and post-socialism is a complex issue, which requires further investigation.

The central questions are: to what extent are networks legacies of the command economy which restrain enterprises and their directors in a capitalist, globalizing environment? Are they examples of resistance by post-socialist actors to neo-liberal reform associated with Western dominance? Or do such strategies show dynamism and form effective adaptations to current problems?

Further, how do network strategies relate to the use of market institutions (e.g. contracts and courts), as well as the use of more ‘traditional’ state-oriented strategies (such as turning to authorities for information/contacts) and the persistence of old institutions (such as collective, large-scale, enterprises)? Finally, the paper discusses to what extent the insights gained about practices, networks and institutions (and their complex interrelationships) can be translated to situations of dramatic socio-economic change beyond post-socialism, such as ‘disaster capitalism’, and post-imperialism more broadly.

Susanne Wengle (PhD Candidate, Political Science, UC Berkeley) “Managers, Energetiki and Power Politics: Conflicting Expert Discourses during the Privatization of the Russian Electricity Sector”

In the ongoing liberalization of the Russian electricity sector, prices are being deregulated, assets privatized, and markets created. These reforms fundamentally alter the organization of a key sector. The re-organization and privatization will influence the cost of living and the cost of producing in the future, and there is little doubt that everyone in a country with cold winters and energy-intensive industries is affected by these transformations. On the face of it the reforms appear uncontested, they seem not to be “politicized”, as they have not been subject of public protest or even much public debate. This paper argues that this is not a sign of a “de-politicization”, as some have argued, but of a shift of the locus of politics in post-Soviet Russia to new and unpredicted sites and places.

The paper traces the history of a controversy between "engineers/technical experts" and the "managers/economists" that has unfolded during the marketization of the electricity sector. The former group is a coalition of professionals with long-standing experience in the sector and loyalties to the collective bound together by this shared experience (the energetiki). The latter are young economists with a shared experience in well-known Russian or foreign economics programs and a shared vision of the effectiveness of market forces in allocating scarce resources. The fault-lines of the conflict between these two groups turn on key issues of sector liberalization, such as the degree of unbundling of vertically integrated monopolies, public versus private ownership of networks, pricing mechanisms, etc. The “winners” – the young economists, who have recently gained much influence in the sector, at the expense of the energetiki - downplay the relevance and political salience of this controversy, referring to it as a question of a clash between different types of expertise, between old and new experts.  The paper traces the evolution of this conflict and the concurrent shift in the influence over the commanding heights of the electricity sector. The paper argues that even though the issues at stake are not framed as political, the nature of the debates and the legitimizing effect of the winning position warrant this label.

The implication of this research is the following: By relocating the site of inquiry away from elections, parties and presidents, towards the politics of market-making, it suggests a new way to understand the politics of liberal reforms in post-Soviet Russia. Competing expert discourses and their influence over the details of sector reform are intensely political, but they risk being obscured in the general assessment of Russia as an increasingly authoritarian polity. The paper relies on fieldwork in Moscow, Irkutsk and Vladivostok undertaken in 2006 and 2007 for a broader research-project on the politics of liberalization in Russia’s electricity sector. The aim of the larger project is to find new ways to theorize the politics involved in the creation of institutional and legal frameworks that underpin new markets.

Gerard A. Weber (PhD Candidate, Anthropology, City University of New York) “‘The Fish Rots from the Head’: Theoretical Insights into the Problem of Corruption from the Working Class in Post-Socialist Romania”

This paper presents a multifaceted examination of interpretations of and experiences with corruption among working-class people in an industrialized city in eastern Romania (Moldavia).  In recent years, corruption has been a widely discussed problem in Romanian society.  It was a central component of party platforms in the most recent national election (the National Liberal Party and Democratic Party, e.g., campaigning on a promise to “burn the corrupt”) and is likely to feature prominently in the 2008 election; it nearly upset Romania’s bid to join the European Union, in the run-up to accession in 2007 the problem of corruption repeatedly being assailed by EU officials monitoring government progress toward fulfilling the acquis; it has successively reemerged in cases brought to public attention over this decade (including, e.g., recent allegations of corruption involving the Minister of Agriculture); and it has been opposed with a public campaign entitled “Don’t Give Bribes” that sought to educate people about the problem.  Paralleling this public discussion of corruption, working-class men and women in Moldavia generally express considerable unease about the proliferation of the problem in the post-socialist era, some viewing it as one component of broad-scale moral dissolution they believe the end of socialist rule has triggered.  At the same time, this population’s personal encounters with corruption reveal that in some contexts they feel very ambivalent about the problem.  This is particularly evident in their descriptions of low-level corruption within the healthcare system.  This practice involves medical professionals’ requesting or expecting out-of-pocket payments for medical services that by law are free of charge, a phenomenon which existed under socialism yet has become more widespread in the post-socialist era.  Although some working-class men and women describe forgoing medical care as a result of the practice or worry about quality of care because of their inability to make adequate payments, most are very forgiving of healthcare workers for requiring or anticipating such gratuities.  There are manifold reasons for this ambiguous attitude, including for example overall respect for members of the healthcare professions because of the extensive training required to practice medicine and the valuable public service they provide.  In addition, most people sympathize with medical professionals’ low income partly as a result of well-organized efforts by influential healthcare workers’ unions to draw attention to low salaries and poor labor conditions.  In the end, most working-class people attribute blame for the problem on political and business elites whose high-level corruption they view as a contagion spoiling the entire social fabric, some arguing that healthcare professionals’ payment expectations are a case of “the fish rotting from the head” or, i.e., that the practice exists because more severe corruption has financially and morally instigated it.  This paper concludes with discussion of the application beyond Romania of the theoretical insights it offers.  The importance of interpreting corruption within specific political, economic and historical contexts is underscored: acts appearing “corrupt” on the surface may not at the local level be understood as such, a fact potentially influencing global efforts to address this problem.

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