Category Archives: field work

‘Declasse’ foreignness? Roundtable reflections on Russian fieldwork. Part 3

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I’d like to be more than a ‘visitor’ to my fieldsite.

Here’s the last part of my personal reflections on the questions put to the roundtable on fieldwork at IGITI.

— «Нероссийские» и «российские» работы о России, основанные на полевой работе: в чем их сильные и слабые стороны, ограничения? Чему можно учиться у других исследователей?

[- “Non-Russian” and “Russian” works on Russia based on field work: what are their strengths and weaknesses, limitations? What can you learn from other researchers?]

This is a question where really I don’t feel qualified to make a clear judgement as my knowledge is lacking. Certainly the ‘best’ of both worlds for me reflects my disciplinary background – where there is deep ethnographic diving AND good contextual and cultural knowledge. What’s interesting is that sometimes both these are lacking in BOTH ‘natives’ and ‘foreign’ researchers. Again I’d like to return to the value of ‘observation’ as much as ‘interview-transcribe-interpret-report’. As Whyte and Whyte in 1984 wrote: ‘Observation guides us to some of the important questions we want to ask the respondent, and interviewing helps us to interpret the significance of what we are observing.’ While the interview remains at the heart of ethnographic research we should remember that it’s an artificial environment.

I’ll highlight quickly some of the advantages and disadvantages of foreigner research as I see them:

Laura Adams noted that the mascot status of foreigners can aid access but can impede honesty and lead to conflict. https://sci-hub.se/10.1177/089124199129023479

Foreignness draws attention to the ‘value’ of subjects (hey we are worth studying and we’ll tell you about ourselves) but can conversely lead to conflict and break down in trust – as one anthropologist recently told me, ‘The locals couldn’t believe that a US professor would be interested. Throughout the research I felt I was not trusted enough’. The same researcher also commented on work done with indigenous people – how this provoked conflict with ‘Russians’ who felt neglected by the angle of the researcher that was addressed to ‘indigenous’ non-Russian ethnics.

From my own perspective I’d like to highlight the advantages of being an outsider in aiding the shedding of ‘class’ baggage. It’s sometimes easier for a foreigner to adopt a declasse position, for want of a better word, in entering the field. Whereas I think for some Russian researchers, because of their own privileged class positioning that might be more challenging and require rather unnatural poses that would then backfire. As one of our participants said at the roundtable – she found herself having to ‘choose her vocabulary from an unfamiliar set of expressions’. Now for me, this immediately evokes an idea that what we are talking about is class, though I know that some of my Muscovite hosts would resist this reading.

However, I’m also willing to accept that my idea about foreigners being able to shed their class positioning (in the eyes of the beholders) is perhaps wishful thinking on my part and only based on my own experience. When I presented this idea, one very experienced researcher who is himself from a working-class background had a different interpretation. He said that the foreigner entering the field would be interpreted according to a set of ‘weirdo’ categories that pre-exist among the working-class people at the factory I was studying. Thus I, as researcher would be ascribed one of a set of existing ‘oddball’ categories and accepted as such. Class would have less to do with it. Or, in his opinion, class is relegated, but it’s significance not avoided.

I don’t really have a neat tying up of this discussion, beyond what I’ve already said, in that I think perhaps one of the ‘problems’ in ‘native fieldwork’ is an allergic reaction to ‘class’ as a frame of reference in thinking about fieldwork and the types of fieldwork places. This was only underlined by some of the reactions I got from the roundtable and the subsequent Labour Studies school I attended.

In place of a conclusion I can refer Russian speakers to the [paywalled] interview I conducted for the online Republic media outlet. It was a bit of a rushed affair and some of my answers are rather ill-considered or undeveloped. The translation too is a little rough and ready. The reactions in the comments speak for themselves about general attitudes towards class, Marxian-influenced research agendas, and also the foreign researcher. E.g. ‘Republic, зачем опять левацкое дерьмо?’ and ‘Стандартный для западного обществоведения, в массе – розового или красного, ритуальный язык.’

 

 

 

Serving not the prince, but the people. Roundtable reflections on Russian fieldwork Part 2.

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Photo by Lina Yatsen on Unsplash.

The previous post began my reflections about this rountable I attended last week at IGITI in Moscow. Круглый стол «Полевые исследования России: своя/другая страна»

Now I continue some relatively rough-and-ready thoughts.

— Как воспринимается исследователь и исследование в поле, как происходит вход в поле (и выход из него)? Какие возникают трудности и как они решаются?

[- How is the researcher and research perceived in the field, how does the entry into the field (and exit from it) take place? What difficulties arise and how are they solved?]

For me this question revolves around building trust and overcoming two problems – particularly important for foreigners. These are typified by two reactions foreigners get when they initiate contact with field interlocutors. 1. ‘Why would you study us? There must be an ulterior motive’. And, 2. ‘Ohh, foreigner, I’m wary of saying anything that might be construed as politically critical of my own country’.

Solutions. 1. Long term rapport building, holding oneself back from ‘mining’ for specific, quick and dirty insights at the expense of really inhabiting the world. Developing a public language of research ‘worth’ – ‘This is important to the wider community/world because by talking to you we can better understand X’. But, at the same time, paradoxically, it might be apposite to not hold oneself back and to sometimes ‘display’ and ‘perform’ one’s ideological basis for doing the research – especially if you think it’s neglected, etc. The paradox is that the two approaches are somewhat opposed, but then they ‘aim at’ the same thing – persuading one’s interlocutors of the worth of their input.

Solutions 2. For me the only solution to this is like the purloined letter holder in Poe – have the letter (the political context) on full display but to ignore it. Eventually (and it took 8 years for me) some interlocutors start to point to the letter you are holding – they start to get surprised themselves that you’re not mentioning it. Perhaps the elephant in the room is a better metaphor. But I like the idea that the political implications of your research being understated, ‘hidden’ in plain sight even, but the point being that you don’t mention them, merely let the interlocutors initiate any political talk.
— Как на выбор темы и на фокус исследования влияет собственный бэкграунд, характеристики и опыт исследователя?

[- How do the background, characteristics and experience of the researcher affect the choice of the topic and the focus of the study ?]

Rather than focus on the problems of bias, and of reading too much of the Russian context through the concerns of the origin country of the researcher, here I think I’d make a pretty obvious comment that hunches and life experience are actually a great way to build up a scholarly justification for the relevance of studying something. I use this example a lot but I have a lot of time for scholars like Simon Charlesworth who come to research through their own experience of, for example dispossession and despair, but also anger and thirst for sharing this neglected life experience with others. However, of course this does depend on being well versed enough in two levels of scholarship – the general field studies that relate to your object of interest and at least a few conceptualisations that pre-exist. We had this argument in the roundtable itself between people taking extreme positions that one should know ‘everything’ about the topic in advance that exists in scholarship and journalism, and the other, that one should go into the field ‘cold’. I don’t agree with either…
— Какие теоретические рамки и концепты используются в исследованиях? Требует ли местная реальность местных концептуальных подходов или для её осмысления достаточно общепринятых зарубежных подходов?

[- What theoretical framework and concepts are used in research? Does the local reality require local conceptual approaches or is it enough to use generally accepted foreign approaches to understand it?]

Again this question highlights for me some of the dirty secrets of ethnography and anthropology more widely – the re-packaging of ‘emic’ concepts in a way to make them sexy and accessible in the global core. Inevitable perhaps, but at risk of doing symbolic violence at the very least, and at worst, downright misleading to a scholars’ audience. In particular, I think something of relevance to a Russian audience is the overtheoreticisation of empirical research as a problem. There’s a very big ‘philosophical’ baggage in Russian-focussed anthropology that I think is easy to overlook.

So while some scholars feel they need to ‘justify’ their research based on very complex thinking from philosophy, often ‘classical’ texts, equally there’s something of a neglect of some of the ‘obvious’ but important social theorists who surely have much to say today – Foucault and Bourdieu. Perhaps we are living through a time where fashion is changing, but not for the better. I mention these two, not because I think they are the ‘most’ relevant to someone doing social research in Russia (though they probably are!), but because time and again I feel resistance among some people to engaging with these thinkers over less obvious (and perhaps sexier or exotic choice).

Perhaps this is one point where an outsider perspective is useful, and of course I would say that the Anglo-Saxon empirical tradition in thinking might be useful to this. This is why I like what’s going on in critical geography at the moment – which of course is largely an Anglo-Saxon phenomenon. It’s not a de-theoreticizing movement, but a grounding, critical perspective that takes ‘big theory’ hats – like geopolitics, and turns them inside out. By doing that it sees if they still ‘fit’ the head when emptied of the normative and hegemonic. So from geopolitics such scholars move to ‘anti-geopolitics’ in order to look at grassroots practices – ‘in the streets, in homes, in jungles,’ ‘off the page’, as Koopman calls it (2011).

https://sci-hub.se/https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2011.01.007

She gives a nice example of an analysis of blogs out of Baghdad as an example of this – (Gregory 2004). But basically the idea is to problematize how ‘elites write space’ and to ‘see’ how geopolitics is peopled and how people have agency. The point of bringing up this example is that it is theoretically, or rather conceptually rich, without being obfuscatorily obsessed with theory. At the same time, these scholars emphasise how science cannot and should not be divorced from ideals of solidarity and collaborative theorising with the oppressed. Serving not the ‘prince’, but the people. This is of course not a new argument, but I think it again underlines how ‘extractive’ sociologists and anthropologists are in reality and how they are often in denial about this.

On foreign and native modes of fieldwork in Russia: postpositivism, interpretivism and extractivist field research. Part 1.

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I was invited to take part in a roundtable on fieldwork bringing together ‘foreign’ researchers working on Russia with ‘native’ ones. Here are some of my notes. I’ve split them into three parts and here is the answer to the first question (that we agreed on beforehand).

— Какие существуют принятые способы и стандарты полевой работы в вашей дисциплине? Каковы типичные сочетания методов, использование каких методов проблематично?

[What are the accepted methods and standards of field work in your discipline? What are the typical combinations of methods; which methods are problematic?]

I’m interested particularly in the degree of acceptance of interpretive methods beyond their ‘origin’ in anthropological social constructivism, phenomenology and hermeneutics. To what degree does a very open commitment to post-positivism find fertile ground or, indeed, resistance, in Russian research environments where fieldwork is a key method. And I think this is equally relevant to Russia/non-Russian universities because of the ‘colonisation’ by both humanities and social sciences of ethnography in recent years. My own experience, in a political science department for 10 years, allowed me a very small glimpse into the world of political ethnography and organisational studies, as one example of this. And one small set of literatures that I got exposed to was concerning the interpretive turn in political science associated with Dvora Yanow and Peregrine Schwartz-Shea  – a ‘new’ commitment to ethnography by political scientists and those looking at studying international relations, and organisational and policy studies.

For more on this see this piece on the isolation – ten years ago – of polsci people doing interpretive ethnography. https://sci-hub.se/https://www.jstor.org/stable/40927048

[It’s a paper on the ‘perestroika movement in polsci’. – a call for a more pluralist approach to political science. Even though I’m guessing that many people are not so interested in ‘hegemonic’ research design based on experimental modelling as in Polsci, the implications of the movement are relevant to all disciplines in making us think about ‘methods hegemony’ in our own disciplinary corners. We also need to be aware of how methodological expectations can be used to discipline ‘unruly’ scholars (for example, accusing them of being less productive because of their ethnographic methods). It does strike me that this struggle in US Polsci may have some relevance to those contexts in Russia where there is a strong positivist tradition in social research.]

However, at this point I should raise my main misgiving about the interpretive methodology, as understood by some political scientists and not only them. There’s a danger here that ‘interpretation’ can be just a repackaging of discourse analysis and can draw scholars further away from the fieldwork of moments and of presence, just as they feel more confident about entering it. It’s more of a hunch than anything, but I do see a lot of scholars figuratively sigh with relief in their early writing and research when they fall back into a very close analysis of speech – really getting into the coding of words of interlocutors and not paying enough attention to the ‘bigger picture’ of their ethnographic interaction. This also relates to the ‘time’ in the field – and I know this is a difficult issue due to funding and commitments. However, perhaps a dirty secret of the new wave of ethnographies is how thin (some of them) really are – both temporally, spatially and, dare I say it, empathetically. I don’t want to single out any of the ‘new’ adopters of ethnography – like political science. In fact I think this ‘dirty secret’ of superficial and rather ‘extractive’ ethnography is just as true of some ‘traditional’ anthropologists.

So what I’m saying is that the varieties of ‘content analysis’ are never enough and can even be a dangerous trap – substituting ‘text’ or ‘textuality’ of lived experience, for embodiment, and even, objective observation (e.g. these people sell mushrooms because of poverty), and subjective observations from the field ‘these people like living here because it seems like a relatively pleasant part of town regardless of what they say about it’. This brings to the fore the researcher in something of a more honest way, I think, whereas discourse analysis can, in the wrong hands, become a rather ‘dishonest’ research practice that hides a multitude of sins – like the ‘extractivist’ mode of fieldwork.

[the point above echoes a point Bourdieu makes about the distinction between linguistic and social dimensions of ‘text’ – see Judith Butler ‘Performativity’s Social Magic’. At the same time he is aware of the problem of subjectivism – that ethnographic practice can ‘forget’ that it doesn’t inhabit the social practices it reveals and so also neglects that it is a translation. Butler also timely reminds us that the linguistic and the social dimensions of habitus can’t really be separated, contra Bourdieu. I guess one thing to take away from this debate is the degree to which our research practices are ‘practical mimesis’ of others’ research. What are the doxa we write in and to?]

From here there’s a point I’d like to make a point about the value of participant observation (PO), which I see less as a commitment by fieldworkers (for structural and economic reasons as much as desire), and this is something true both of Russia and non-Russia work. It seems to me that all over the world there’s a great moment now for PO – whether in NGOs, bureaucracies, activist groupings, but, to give an example in the urban activism book I’m editing, any PO is really buried, when it needn’t be. I’d also argue that to really understand today’s Russian state – it’s ‘incoherence’ as I like to call it, we desperately need more organisational ethnographies from within, and that’s something foreigner researchers in Russia certainly can’t do.

On intellectual journeys without destinations in Russian studies

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Some flats in Russia. Image by Natalya Letunova @naletu

I gave a talk at NYU Jordan Center just now, and they decided to get their money’s worth by asking me to do an interview. I hate these kind of things, as I’m a not a great ‘on-my-feet’ thinker, so I prepared a written reflection on the questions they pre-sent me. I think they are quite a fun exercise for any researcher to undertake as a way of pausing to reflect on their own practice.

Here are the questions and some of my answers. I’m not going to link to the actual interview and I hope this doesn’t come across as too self-indulgent.

  • Can you briefly describe your current research, and describe how you initially became interested in it?

My research on ordinary people and the everyday looks quite weird on the surface. My background was in literature and philosophy, not sociology or anthropology. However, a lot of my PhD study focussed on a particular ‘naturalistic’ and ethnographic form of fiction writing in the late USSR. One of the aims of that writing was to uncover a hidden reality – a ‘warts and all’ look at the dirty underbelly of urban working-class life. Most importantly though, it was also ‘sociological’ writing in the sense that it looked at things like work-relations, the black market, criminal violence, ‘organic intellectuals’, etc, – mostly taboo social ‘problems’ that mainstream literature couldn’t touch, and which dissident literature wasn’t interested in. Most importantly, this literature was interested in the ‘voices’ of the voiceless.  So in a sense I was primed by my literature study to then transfer that interest into the social science domain.  I was also primed in that I spent a time living in Russia in the 90s before my PhD, and it was striking to me when I entered traditional Russian studies faculties, how few scholars were interested in the ‘everyday life’ of people in Russia.

  • What is the major conclusion of your research to date?

It’s worth paying attention to the small things – research is increasingly beholden to media interests in Russia – which are about ‘big’ things like authoritarianism, corruption, kleptocracy, state violence, nationalism, but all these things are ‘generated’ or ‘play out’ in ordinary everyday contexts.

  • What’s one thing you’ve learned that surprised you?

How politically conscious and sophisticated and nuanced ordinary people are – an insight for political research generally and for Russia in particular. Of course, only a person working in the media or academia or policy community would make this elementary mistake.

  • How has feedback helped shape your research?

Feedback from as many disciplinary perspectives as possible, from Working-class Studies (which is located more in literature and cultural studies) on rustbelts in USA, but also feedback from people who work on postsocialist spaces but who are firmly situated in Critical Geography. It’s more important to me to get exposed to different literatures than to look for people to comment specifically on technical things like writing.  On the other hand, the more I write for academic journals, the more I doubt my ability and willingness to adhere to the sometimes rigid and narrow interpretations of what a good journal article is. So increasingly I value peer-review feedback – even when it is negative, as it forces me to think not just about academic writing, but about epistemology. What is ‘valued’ as knowledge in the academy is undergoing quite rapid change.

  • How do you make your work relevant?

This is always a loaded question because relevance is in the eye of the beholder. I think it’s a mistake for anyone but the most mainstream scholar to look at the ‘news agenda’, instead I think you need to identify communities of scholars. But of course as my work is about contemporary Russian society it’s a given that I should look at what the media is saying and what’s happening in politics. There is certainly something powerful in the trick of presenting what perhaps looks like a very ‘ivory tower’ argument, but then finding something very concrete in the media that proves your point.

  • How do you keep your personal bias out of your work?

Bias is inevitable – it can’t be avoided and anyone who says so doesn’t fully understand the history and the philosophy of science. Instead, you should try to be in touch with your biases and indeed they can intuitively lead you to some interesting places. Everyone believes that something about their research is ‘true’ – but all those truths are ideologically nested. Science should be more of a story about why you think it’s true. In a scholarly process, the body of knowledge you produce should somehow feel like it belongs to you. It’s more a process of being aware of what your own ideological positioning is, rather than pretending it doesn’t exist. Thomas Basbøll recently wrote that the purpose of academic writing is to ‘share our reasons for believing things, so that others may understand us or challenge us as they will.’ See https://blog.cbs.dk/inframethodology/?p=2841

  • What is your favorite aspect of your research

I enjoy all the things in my research. One of them is the feeling of learning more from people, even though I know the people in my research for more than 20 years. Coming back to them and not trying to be too clever in asking them about relevant things to my research – Being too obvious or direct often doesn’t work. For example, for this talk I just did at the Jordan Center, I went back to someone and felt like asking, ‘how are people resisting the state now, given these big political changes in the last 2 years? How are they talking about the constitution?’ This is a recipe for disaster! I would not have got any ‘good’ answers. Instead, we just fell into a conversation about cars, about utility bills, about the lack of jobs. And hey presto, a while later (that’s why patience is a good thing) I learn that a friend of mine had just ‘swapped’ out his car engine for a more powerful one and illegally neglected to update this vehicle passport registration! A big tax saving and an example of ‘ordinary resistance’ to the state.

  • Can you describe some of your experiences conducting research in Russia?

I just finished reading Kristen Ghodsee’s short book of reflections on her fieldwork in Bulgaria. She has some amazing and shocking stories – even the non-fictional ones are unbelievable! I have of course been in a lot of scrapes because of the kind of fieldwork I do. Like the time I helped a random guy on the street who was so drunk he couldn’t work out how to use the push-button ignition on his fancy new automatic car (most people are used to stick-shifts – as am I). After looking under the bonnet (hood) of the car, trying various things, I finally worked out that the car needed to be in ‘drive’ for the push button to work. He was so grateful. However, what I wasn’t prepared for was that he was the brother of the leader of a local criminal group – who insisted on providing me with some rather ‘extended’ hospitality in the next town. Another ‘experience’ is ‘by chance’ getting the opportunity to work in an underground (illegal) factory for a short time.

However, the most abiding ‘experience’ that I think is important is ‘aimlessly waiting’. It’s easy to trick yourself into thinking that the current moment is not relevant – waiting in a park for someone to come home from work to deliver their acquaintance subsidised medicine. The whole concept of ‘meta-occupational community’ that I develop comes from there. Listening endlessly to a person talk about their former life in Turkmenia and how they don’t feel Russian. I thought it was irrelevant, but it helped me later understand their personal philosophy of post-materialism due to this traumatic experience of leaving everything behind in Turkmenia. Another example is the revelatory feeling on going beyond the immediate field – being reluctant to go to Moscow with my small town interlocutors, but then realising when I actually go there that I would learn a whole lot about coercion, grief, exploitation, and local patriotism.

Automobile masculinities and neoliberal production regimes among Russian blue-collar men.

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Automobile masculinities and neoliberal production regimes among Russian blue-collar men.

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This post is a bit of a ‘cut and shut’ – British slang for two written off cars that have been welded together, cleaned up and sold to an unsuspecting client.

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I had written a little about the meaning of ‘car culture’ in my book – how there seemed to be two groups of men in my Russian town – those who had a more ‘rebellious’ and fun-loving attitude towards car ownership – and frequently bought ‘bangers’ to tinker with. And those that aspired to pricer foreign and quasi-foreign (the new range of Ladas) cars. The latter group also associated their car ownership with ‘making the grade’ in new, non-Russian factories. A classic class-consumption-neoliberalism paper was emerging.

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On the left the new Lada Priora – a ‘quasi-foreign’ car. On the right, a traditional Lada, lovingly and ironically referred to by its owner as a ‘Qashqai’ (heavily advertised on Russian TV as a middle-class car signifying social mobility)

Then in 2015 two opportunities arose – to publish with Charlie Walker on Global Masculinities, and the write a second paper on Automobilities for A Workshop in Regensburg on the Postsocialist street. However, some of the material for that workshop wasn’t so useful for Charlie’s book chapter and so I cut it.

The book chapter is more about subaltern masculinities and the possibility of agency – dramatized by choices and talk about car ownership. It, perhaps not so successfully, makes use of Lazzarato’s ideas on machinic enslavement.

The paper – the short version follows – is more about challenging the western-centric ideas about automobility that emerge from Urry’s work. The main point is that car use can be influenced by consumption and status norms in the West, yet have other meanings locally, many of which revolve around sociality.

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The local shop. ‘avtolavka’. ‘Mam! Avtolavka priexala!!!’ The highlight of a village kid’s day.

Paper summary:

 Working-class men have found themselves in an unparalleled position of subalterneity in such societies (Kideckel 2002). They are faced with an ‘illusory corporatism’ (Ost 2000): state, and employer relations are exclusory and seek to impose a strong form of neoliberal labour disciplining and dispossession. Elites and the emergent middle classes alike see workers as little more than politically quiescent, mechanical-turk operators of moribund Soviet plant in dying factories of industrial hinterlands far from Moscow. …they should be grateful to be given the privilege to unthinking remake the self into a pliant, self-sacrificing, and interchangeable cog in the newly emergent transnational operations of manufacturers of global capital.

Introduction

Car ownership and the DIY skills in repairing mechanically simple old Russian cars speak to issues around the display of working-class masculinities In addition, the paper explores automobility as emblematic of uneasy social mobility and fraught engagement with new neoliberal regimes of work on the self and flexibility. Choices about what kind of car to own, whether to use credit, to buy Russia-built or ‘foreign’, whether to learn from others how to maintain it or pay a stranger – all these forks in the path of becoming automobile are statements of what kind of man a person wants to be. They are similarly subject to interpretation by others in a working-class setting. Conversations and conflicts about cars come to dramatize aspects of literal and social class mobility, immobility. Cars as markers of masculinity intersect with both aspirational fantasies (that largely remain inaccessible) and stubborn retrenchments of more traditional identities.  These ‘debates’ bespeak an uneasy relationship with the ‘desired’ car as status symbol and object of labour in the ‘Western’ factories which employ the subjects of this research.

Glocalizing automobile working-class masculinities

Private car ownership and use as representing differentiated performances of masculinity has long been a staple of youth studies. However, the majority of research has focussed on the automotive articulations of gender in terms of subcultures; cars express a form of refracted hegemonic masculinity – particularly among the dominated fraction of working-class male youth in the West (e.g. Bengry-Howell and Griffin 2007; Lumsden 2010). Often examining street racing, cruising, and car-modification – (e.g. lowering/low-riders), research on automobility comes to be associated with delinquency and deviance, which is less representative of a non-Western experience.

locally contrastive meanings – collective affordances extending to the realms of shared car ownership and homosocial tinkering in garages (Kononenko 2011). Similarly, a classed perspective finds car ownership less to do with conspicuous consumption, but as a store of value (ibid), and, in the creation of ‘carholds’, automobility, and mobility itself, as a household, rather than individual achievement (Broz and Habeck 2015).

Western-centric assumptions at the heart of Urry’s seminal scholarly treatment to show how post-socialist automobility intersects with masculinity and neoliberalism in ways that contrast with Sheller’s and Urry’s original definitions (Sheller and Urry 2000).

Automobility in Russia has, since the end of communism and the explosion in private ownership, expanded in many ways as Urry predicted – as a ‘self-organizing autopoietic, non-linear system’ which ‘generates the preconditions for its own self-expansion’ (Urry 2004: 27). In the recent post-socialist era Russians, as in the West, have come to experience the automobile as the quintessentially manufactured object and status consumption object; (Urry 2004: 25-26). However, Urry’s third, fourth and fifth systemic components are arguably incomplete in much of the non-Global North. These comprise: a)  automobility as one of the most important examples of the technical-social nexus of modernity; b) the predominant form of quasi-private mobility with other forms of movement subordinated; c) dominant in symbolic articulations of the cultural meaning of the good life and well-being (ibid). For the majority of post-socialist citizens, time-space has not yet been remade according to the logic of automobility. Access to a car, use of urban space, the symbolic meanings of mobility, remain inflected by socialist-era forms of modernity. Consequently, while the – predominantly male – driver may well appear as a techno-social-cultural assemblage (ibid; Thrift 1996), that assemblage is ‘put together’ out of the particular collision of mobility, masculinity, and neoliberal categories pertaining to the post-socialist world.

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Just three examples of post-socialist mobility will suffice to illustrate this: the either/or of mass transit and walking remain dominant in many citizens’ everyday mobilities; ‘commuting’ by car is a minority sport. Many drivers (and particularly among working-class men) interpret ownership as a practical as much as symbolic achievement and their ownership as an economic hedge against the backdrop of a generation-long experience of socio-economic dislocation – i.e. a literal store of value and as a practical resource for income generation – as described below.  The ‘good life’ and symbolic status, while important, are secondary or encompass modalities of enjoyment and leisure that are in contrast to those in the West (see, for example, Broz and Haback 2015, on the meaning of ‘day tripping’).

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As the same time as the affordances of the automobile may differ outside the Global North, the negative side of the car may not correspond. A sense of risk and uncertainty may increase with ownership. Automobility in Russia is particularly associated with the risks of accident and death, criminality, and corruption (respectively because of the infamously poor road maintenance and climatic factors, and an abysmal culture of driving where one can still illegally buy a licence without any training; the sense of the ‘wild’ open road populated by bandits and thugs, corruption whereby the highway police are viewed as worse than thieves). Few car journeys are seen as having the ‘seamless’ potential of point-to-point travel as in the Global North (Urry 2004: 29). If just one category – mobility – is capable of such a contrasting inflection, then what of its intersection with similarly different meanings of masculinity and the (newly emerging) neoliberal subject? Automobility may represent a kind of masculine ‘freedom’, as Urry argues (2004: 28), but it is one tempered by understandings of risk, economic uncertainty, the valuing of practical skills, and as the main ethnographic section that follows relates – a particular kind of homosociality.

Car ownership, use and care as the nexus of the neoliberal hailing of Russian subaltern masculinity

The freedom, not of the road, but of the garage: spaces of masculine working-class sociality

Most blue-collar workers can realistically aim for ownership of a basic Soviet-era AvtoVAZ Lada model (a low-tech vehicle based on the 1960s Fiat 124 and produced in large numbers until the early 2010s), or buy a ‘western-style’ car on rather crippling credit terms. Technical skills in DIY maintenance have long been desiderata for long-term ownership for three reasons: a) very poor road maintenance and severe climatic conditions; b) poor automobile network infrastructure generally – a preponderance of low grade roads and poor distribution of vehicle maintenance businesses; c) the simple construction of most Russian cars. ‘Tinkering’ in garage blocks with acquaintances also has a long history and is a significant part of working-class homosociality – among young and old alike (Morris 2016).

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Like the use of ‘sheds’ in Anglophone culture – the garage is a masculine reserve devoted to practical activity, often for its own sake; the car may never get completely ‘fixed’, but a lot of talk and drinking ensure that homosocial ties are cemented and broadened. Recently there has been a movement to give shed culture more of a communitarian ethic which is somewhat in contrast to its culturally-specific association with Anglophone individualistic masculinity (Cavanagh et al. 2014). In contrast, Russian garage use is predicated not on the lone tinkerer, but only men coming together to reinforce bonds of competent masculinity – the garage can be cosy space of consociality, whether used as a bar or mechanic’s shop.

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Discussion

Two visions of vehicular performative masculinity emerge within the social group, the first of which, represented by Petr is broadly understood as accepting of the neoliberal challenge of working on themselves to become flexible subjects of Russia’s harsh neocapitalist order (cf. Kideckel 2008; Morris 2012). His story represents the transition from work in a Soviet-type labour habitus to ‘making the grade’ in TNC production regimes. Petr’s ‘new’ working-class masculinity is entrepreneurial, striving, and progressive. Aspiring to ownership of a Western car goes hand in hand (and is the reward for) becoming a flexible neoliberal subject, taking on consumer credit, yet also delaying gratification. These dispositions are symbolised by the purchase of a ‘new’ or, more likely ‘nearly new’ foreign car, often on credit.  Yet such cars are associated too with risk, fear and uncertainty; less used for leisure they are objects of reverence and nurture in a guarded garage block, where men pay ritual homage in cleaning and maintaining them. As Nikita notes: the car drives the man, whereas it should be the other way around.

The second group examined here are those who choose to remain in lower-paid traditional industrial employment or even semi-legal informal work, represented by ‘Nikita’. They are wary of the new neoliberal order, seeing it as restrictive of autonomy and an unequal compact. To them the ‘contract’ offered by new work and new cars is ‘unmasculine’ – automobility is about the use of cars in the ‘now’ for pleasure regardless of the ‘risk’ of damage. The ‘risk’ to them is ownership on credit of a ‘delicate’ foreign car. Thus they interpret the care for cars by the first group as unbecoming. They compare this kind of car ownership to new production regimes: involving loss of autonomy and control over life (the car controls the owner). They emphasise a more traditional performative masculinity linked to ‘banger’ car culture that revolves around self-reliance, DIY skills and the car as source of eternally tinkering homosociality. For those that ‘give in’ to calculated self-moulding according to neocapital’s requirements, the social affordances: the garage, the key spaces and making of automobile masculinity, are lost.

Thus each group’s competing versions of masculinity are linked with either adapting masculine personhood to neoliberalism or not. A particularly classed performance of gender comes to dramatize the response of persons to changes in production regimes and the advent of the neoliberal order more generally.  The significance of this case study lies in the need to acknowledge localized yet globally-inflected subaltern masculinities and how they intersect with similarly non-Global North working-class responses to both neoliberalism and automobile versions of global modernity.

Conclusion

The social self-organisation of working-class men through the shared experience of automobility and the continuing class salience of the compressed social space of the small industrial town sees subaltern masculinity reconstituted as a meta-occupational community of confrères. Just as they are hailed by the neoliberal reconception of the labouring subject, the spaces of masculine automobility also produce alternative responses.  The Russian case shows the need to acknowledge both the constrictions of working-class masculinity after the socialist project – it’s doubly subaltern positioning, but also the anchoring and solidaristic communities of the former second world that remain; automobile working-class masculinity is a site for the production of ‘small agency’ in the face of the onslaught of the neoliberal processes of self-making. Here, retreating into garage spaces, men articulate and perform practices of homosociality and car-dom that articulate, if not enact alternative forms of personhood to those offered by the TNC.

Russian men’s automobility – and ‘garage culture’ is an ideal site to witness how hegemonic masculinity is renegotiated, refracted in a particular way both in relation to and in contrast to the West. Many Russian men are subject to symbolic violence and unable to ‘propertize’ working-class masculine identity (cf. Griffin 2011: 255, and Skeggs 2004). But this study would also suggest that Skegg’s search for autonomist working-class values is not in vain (2011); automobile worker-masculinity is a project of personhood inexorably bound to, yet revealing the limits of projects of neoliberal globalization (Connell and Wood 2005).

 

Ukraine, Russia, solidarity, trauma, and keeping it in the family.

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soslbjndyd8jDoes the West make sense without the East?

This subtitle paraphrases Marci Shore’s reflections on Tony Judt in the context of Maidan and could serve as a fitting summary to the way the Ukraine conflict is mainly framed in terms of its impact on West-Russia relations and the way Ukraine, or rather Ukrainians, and their agency, gets lost in the discussion.

Two weeks ago I took part in a round-table in Warsaw on the Ukraine conflict, and as I mentioned in my previous post, I don’t feel we did justice to cause of European solidarity with Ukraine. In fact, I was surprised how, in an audience of Poles and academics critical of Russia, my call for a solidary response was not received sympathetically.

So I want to lay out this position again, more clearly than is possible in a round-table.

Really my position started to emerge in my own research into the responses of ordinary Russians to their ‘hailing’ by the relentless ‘black PR’ of Russian state-controlled media, about which I wrote a little in my previous post. This research became an article about the ethnographer as diplomat – or otherwise. At the same time as writing on Russians, I have seen many, too many, talks by political scientists on Ukraine in the last two years. One stands out: a book launch by my colleagues Kasia Wolczuk and Rilke Dragneva in CREES where Sarah Whitmore was discussant.

Wolczuk summed up her presentation of the book content with the pithy phrase: ‘The EU doesn’t care enough about Ukraine… and Russia cares too much’, adding ‘It’s up to Ukraine to live up to its integration choice and confront the consequences’.

While I don’t disagree in principle with that statement, at the time and now I feel this ignores the agency of ordinary Ukrainians who have already made that choice. Not only that, but focusing on the failures of Ukrainian politics avoids us confronting our own failings – particularly, the failure of European solidarity in providing enough support to Ukraine – however that ‘support’ is defined (actually in the round-table there was mention of the need for a Marshall plan for Ukraine).

So that, in essence was how I framed my contribution to the round-table.

In particular, the question of the meaning of solidarity seemed particularly apt since previous speakers at the Warsaw event – particularly Rick Fawn from St Andrews, had stressed the idea of the ‘family’ of European nations, and of course the Poles had highlighted the idea of the return to Europe of former USSR satellite states.

So this idea of familial relations – what could be a better example of solidarity? – seems a fitting way of framing things. Kinship relations demand reciprocity and mutuality – as any anthropologist will tell you.

However, I am aware of the problems with the ‘kin’ analogy. I tried another kin metaphor – how, if a family member has a drug problem (endemic corruption and the oligarchic relations that perpetuate this), then what that person needs is a therapeutic treatment, not punishment. Of course here lies a trap – sceptics of Ukraine’s ability to reform will say that this metaphor is all too apt – the addict needs coercion, as well as encouragement, they would argue. In the end, Rick Fawn and others had a better metaphor for the need for solidarity – the family member who is the victim of domestic violence – the relative has a duty to support the victim.

But in my contribution to the round-table I only had the opportunity to say a fraction of this. I had more luck in presenting some facts that indicate that Ukraine has irreversibly changed, and that these facts alone mean that an urgent ‘meeting more than halfway’ is needed from the EU. I drew attention to the fundamental fact of Ukrainian decoupling from Russia – trade with Russia is now a fraction of the figure of trade with the EU (44%) and Ukraine has, with the connivance of the IMF, of all bodies, defaulted on the Russian loan of $3bn made under Yanukovych. Gas demand, believe it or not, is half what it was ten years ago. Yes, much of this is due to the incredible economic crisis that continues, and the loss of the industrial east – all the more reason why even more help is needed now.

A simple act of solidarity that is of relevance here would the long awaited visa-free regime with the EU – this would allow remittances in hard currency to flow into Ukraine from the EU via migrant workers – hardly the argument hard pressed EU citizens want to hear, but a practical, realistic help. In fact, this would be the best ‘medicine’ for Russia too, the best way of showing true European values. There are many migrant workers from Ukraine among my informants in Russia. Visa-free travel to the EU would see decoupling increase.

But the fact is that almost no one focusses on the human cost among the most vulnerable in either Russia or Ukraine. The average pension in Ukraine is about $53 and 17% of GDP spent on pensions – the highest figure in Europe. Before the devaluation of the rouble, in Russia average pensions were around 10 times that figure. (Now they are around $240, not enough to live on). Inflation is 20% in Ukraine. It was nearly 50% last year. There will probably only be a 12% increase in indexation of benefits this year. Another practical extension of solidarity might be, not military aid of lethal weapons as many have argued, but medical, material and psychological support to the thousands of ex-service personnel now struggling with PTSD leading to alcoholism, homelessness and other ‘side-effects’ of war.

So I come back to solidarity again and the problem of ‘conditionality’: unless you fulfil ‘x’, we cannot provide ‘y’. Conditionality just doesn’t work in crisis situations like this. Just like the Greek crisis, Europe is at least as morally responsible for the situation in Ukraine now as much as any other party. Therefore Ukraine will continue to serve as a barometer for the health of a wider European project.

Back to Russia – back to the past

But what of Russia? Partly my interest in Ukraine stems from the highly poisonous effect of the conflict on ordinary Russians. And this was evident in the fieldwork encounters I began to relate in my previous post.

Really, the long piece I’ve written for the Cambridge Journal of Anthropology is about Russians and their inability to deal with Ukrainian conflict (and that inability as reflecting a wider and deeper impasse: the psycho-social effect of 25-years of not being able to deal adequately with the past) – its psycho-traumatic effects, and, among other things, its effect on the relations in fieldwork.

But let’s start with the more tangible results any political economist can see. First there is the massive demand destruction, and no end in sight of sharp income falls for most Russian citizens – note again, the pension figures mentioned above and compare the ‘before’ devaluation and ‘after’. Oil price slide aside, Ukraine is the marker, if not the overriding cause, of ordinary Russians going back to the 1990s in terms of economic insecurity – with a fall of 10% in average incomes in 2015, a figure not seen since 1990.

And in a sense the idea of the Ukraine conflict symbolizing a barrier to Russia moving to the future and repeating the past is something we see in all sorts of contexts – a retreat to ‘kitchen relations’, both in terms of not having any money to do anything else and in terms of a fear to speak too openly of one’s misgivings; a return to the garden plot; the way public life is now a party loyalty test, of any position of power, in any context.

If anything the Ukraine crisis is revealing of the Russian people as a clinical psychological case of trauma that is unresponsive to treatment. Alexei Yurchak’s most famous finding is 1991 as a ‘break in consciousness’ on the part of Russians, but really he’s just talking about the intelligentsia, and then only the progressive intelligentsia. There remains a large swathe of people, and many of them highly educated, who have not been able to collectively overcome their sense of trauma about the past.

Elena Bogdanova, in an unpublished work, puts it in this way – as a ‘bottling up’ of the past – and the Ukraine conflict sees this made evident in various psycho-social dysfunctional effects – the pathological need to believe in state propaganda, the dehumanisation of Ukrainians, the aggressive xenophobia, or, at best, the neurasthenic reaction – evident in the ‘Moscow bombing’ comment in my previous post – ‘irritability’ and lassitude are key affective states I talk about in my paper – certainly I also felt them (here I am indebted to Navaro-Yashin’s work). At the same time, there is a revealing of cognitive dissonance between the strident response of patriotic enthusiasm and the realisation that this state is untenable in the long term. And can have unpredictable consequences of disaster for Russians.

I was in Russia when the Malaysian ‘Boeing’ was shot down – and a cardinal change in perspective occurred. Russians didn’t so much say it. In fact the more strident the response: ‘Putin will show you lot’, the more I detected a fundamental disquiet. Everyone understood the long-term, devastating consequences of the ‘Boeing’ (note the metonymy as an indicator of trauma!) Even the term ‘zato Krym nash’ (but we’ve got Crimea!) is used ironically now even by those most patriotically inclined.

But the last words go to those remnants of the independent Russian media. They talk of the social catastrophe the conflict in Ukraine has accelerated in Russia: the ‘loss of public understanding of the reality of its own existence, economically, socially, culturally and politically; this far reaching process has been the cause of the moral degradation of society’ (Kobrin 2015).

Russia-Ukraine conflict and fieldwork relations

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I am going to make a couple of posts that touch on the Ukraine conflict. This is prompted by three things. First, I was invited to contribute to a panel some time ago at the 2015 ASA. I spoke there on ‘diplomatic relations’ as a metaphor for field relations with Russians after the Ukraine conflict. Second, I then developed that talk into a paper for Cambridge Journal of Anthropology which should come out this year – and some bits didn’t make into the final cut – so I’ll use them here. Finally, this month I was invited to an event at the University of Warsaw International Relations Institute to take part in a round table on the Ukraine conflict with other academics and the Ukraine Ambassador. This was my first foray into the territory of IR and I can’t say it was successful. My attempt to focus on the missing agency of Ukrainians and my perception of the lack of European solidarity for their situation didn’t get a very sympathetic hearing. I will write more about that in the next blog post.

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Moscow scene I passed daily in 2014 – was always empty!

Researchers as Insider/Outsiders

Here I want to highlight some of the reflections on fieldwork relations that in part will appear in the CJA piece. Following up on a chapter in my book, I wanted to look at how the ethnographer and informants alike are unwilling ‘diplomatic’ representatives of their origin countries. I talk about political neutrality in field relations, indirect communication, and affective states that both facilitate and threaten ‘everyday diplomacy’.  In their examination of the researcher’s positionality in fieldwork in both Turkey and Azerbaijan, Ergun and Erdemir (2010) discuss how foreignness and cultural familiarity interact with research contexts. They summarize well some of the problems with insider status that are particularly relevant to the Russian context: an ‘insider, for example, may be perceived as being untrustworthy because of his or her knowledge of and connections to the community under study’.

Ironically, it was my outsider status – as non-Russian – which allowed a degree of greater access in my fieldwork (as well causing distrust and disbelief by others). Did the lime kiln technicians my monotown genuinely believe that our conversations might get back to the director? Russian reality suggests that their fears are reasonable. While cross-cultural issues constitute the ‘elephant in the room’ for foreign area studies researchers working on Russia, outsider status can help not only to mitigate, but also to reverse the researcher–researched relationship, particularly when it is understood in terms of cultural exchange (see Charlie Walker on this – 2011). This is no less true as Russia moves further away from its closed past (if anything since the Ukraine conflict, a sense of cultural difference has been emphasized by the state itself and people are more inquisitive than ever about ‘representatives of Europe’). By the same token, my foreignness, allowed me to witness both first hand and in stories, significant illegality – particularly in the informal economy, but also in terms of stealing from work, and so on. What possible risk would there be from a foreigner – the status of whom in Russia is always viewed as contingent, powerless and temporary? At the same time, what Ergun and Erdemir call ‘cultural proximity’, evidenced by linguistic competency and lived experience, can allow a researcher to cross over temporarily into partial ‘insider’ status which can build rapport, trustworthiness and openness.

 

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My ‘lime kiln technicians’. Eventually they talked to me!

 

In the book I go on to talk about the challenge of justifying ethnography to a Polsci/Area Studies ‘audience’ in the academy – particularly departmental colleagues, grant agencies and REF committees. In fact, I just got back my own internal REF evaluation – done anonymously at College level. It draws attention to the small ‘data sample’ of my ethnography to justify not awarding a higher number of ‘stars’. For those unfamiliar with the REF there is some commentary here. In the ‘Diplomacy’ paper for ASA, I talk at length about two ‘groups’ of people in my research – ‘national patriots’ who drew attention to the Ukraine conflict in our talk, and others who more subtly reflected politicisation by referring to my ‘Europeanness’. Here’s a shortened version of some of the reflections in the original paper. (The Europe stuff got cut for the CJA version)

The national patriot informants

From some informants their response to the researcher after the Ukraine conflict was predictable based on their previous clearly expressed patriotic and anti-West views: Sasha is a long-standing key informant who has always enjoyed making combative and provocative statements about the decadent and treacherous West. For as long as I have been visiting Russia, informants like Sasha have readily made reference to geopolitical issues, British and US foreign policy, and in linking the researcher and origin country, history, and politics in the widest sense. Partly reflecting popular history broadcasting and publishing in Russia in the Soviet Union (think of the series Seventeen Moments of Spring), informants have commented, seriously and jokingly about issues such as WWII: ‘where was the second front when we needed it?’ The ambiguous role of Britain as an ally to the USSR – as reflected in popular Russian history –  is attached in conversation to the person of the researcher, albeit temporarily. More recently, in the late 1990s, British nationals in Russia were likely to encounter personal antagonism during the NATO bombing of Serbia. I recall not being able to avoid adopting a ‘public’ position in conversation with a group of informants then. In a discussion characterised by anger on the part of my interlocutors at NATO actions, I stated that ‘generally’ I was against the air campaign, without ruling out a view that military intervention of another form against Milosevic might be acceptable to me.

In current fieldwork, Sasha is representative of the politicised, national-patriot encountered.  A former factory forklift driver and now eking out a living in the informal economy, Sasha, in one conversation in 2014 he expressed himself thus: ‘wait until winter. Over there in your Europe you’ll be cold and hungry enough when we cut your gas off. You’ll be begging us for breadcrumbs’. Sasha and his circle reflect some of the most disenfranchised Russians who readily latch on to official narratives about Russia’s renewal of greatness and the enemy of the West. They are partly the target group for state-controlled televisual framings of the conflict as a proxy for geopolitical victimisation of Russia and her refusal to be ‘bullied’. Putin here is presented as a rational, calculating and honest, if cunning, resistor of Western neo-imperialism. At the same time, when discussing aspects of domestic politics, they are extremely critical of the Russian government and Putin too.

This ‘group’ of informants if I can generalise, are well known for their perpetual ‘political testing’ of foreigners. In the best traditions of official state diplomacy, one possible response from the researcher is polite silence or ambiguous deflections (Blackman 2001). But how realistic is long term ‘field neutrality’ in such circumstances – when the researcher is from a country with a long history of political enmity or mistrust? As during the 1990s NATO intervention in Serbia, the current Ukraine conflict means researchers in Russia are unwillingly interpellated as national representatives – everyday diplomats, if you will.

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my 2014 visit as to a Russian org collecting supplied for refugees from Ukraine conflict. ‘Diplomacy’ needed here as they would only allow entry after quizzing me.

My response to Sasha’s initially aggressive ‘testing’ or posturing on the Ukraine-Russia-sanctions issue was deflective – to avoid a response – silent even. However, as with the Serbian context, this was untenable – a semi-public-facing response had to emerge. This involved politely insisting that things were going to be fine in the UK and that we had our own gas supplies, and so on. Sasha quickly became much more like his usual self and ‘normal’ conversation continued without reference – at least for a while – to the conflict. Nonetheless the conflict had led to a re-interpretation of the researcher and researched as national representatives. Willingly or unwillingly, we had come to embody public diplomacy. Public diplomacy (of which ‘soft power’ is a recent scholarly sub-category) are about building credibility abroad through the display and demonstration of particularistic values and policies (Melissen 2005: 3).  It is also about ‘openness and cooperation’. On the one hand, these diplomatic roles are similar to those normally adopted by the ethnographer: credibility is built with informants, rapport established with a means to an end, but tempered by ethical values that are supposed to be transparent and demonstrable to informants. The paradox of diplomacy therefore extends to ethnography – it is simultaneously means and ends directed activity. Hence the long-standing comparisons of ethnography with espionage and liminality. For ethnographers, like it or not, as for official representatives of a state who reside as aliens in another jurisdiction, ‘trust’ is a necessary by product of activity that has ‘transactional objectives’ (Rose and Wadham-Smith 2004: 34-35). Taking into account the intrusion of geopolitics into field relations, the diplomatic comparison appears equally apt.

Nevertheless, the metaphor breaks down, and in some respects necessarily so. Unlike the diplomat the informant and researcher alike can pursue various tactics not available to the official state representative. Firstly, and importantly, continual deflection through disavowal of the national representing role – ‘I am not a representative of my state’. But this, as indicated above, is not tenable over time as the usual response is: ‘yes, but what do you think about this conflict?’ More powerfully than disavowal is ‘silence’ and continuing ‘civility’ – two modes of indirect communication, both ‘diplomatic’, but equally available to researcher and researched as tools to resist interpellation by politics and open up avenues for alternative interpretation of cultural and national difference in the field. To a degree these responses by the researcher to Sasha’s kind of aggressive discourse are already suggested: what could one say in response? More or less my reaction was civility and silence over time when the topic came up in similar circumstances. For informants, this was also, increasingly, a micro-political response encountered. Silence and civility against the backdrop of international conflict involving people’s respective states is both self-censorship, but also pregnant with affective meaning: the beginning of the mutual acknowledgement of trauma of some kind. ‘Performing the script’ of national representative breaks down in the face of the inadequacy of politics to express the intimacy of field relations and vice versa. A quieter politics inevitably ensues (cf. Askins 2014 on the script performance of refugees, affect and friendship). Silence speaks to acknowledgement of the other in a way that open discussion and argument would not. While new meanings of globalised ‘intimacy’ are currently being calibrated in anthropology, which the accent put on the problem of differentiating ‘authentic’ from purely performative (Sehlikoglu and Zengin 2015: 23), the “‘deep’ knowledge of the field is also a realm of the intimate” (24). transnational intimacies are highly shaped by and embedded in specific social relations of inequality, based on perceived gender, ethnic, racial, national (23).  As Pain and Staeheli suggest, the ‘stretching of intimate spaces’ – of private conversation – to accommodate geopolitical meaning should not verify the political as primary, but acknowledge the geopolitical itself as always already intimate and the multi-scalar (Pain and Staeheli 2014: 345).

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‘Let’s not talk about Ukraine’ – silence is better

‘European’ and ‘Boeing’ metonymy: ‘we are the victims’

Sasha’s use of the word ‘your Europe’ (alternatively given as your ‘West’, when in more combative mood) gives an indication of another group of interactions with informants. The Ukraine Maidan movement is of course associated with the desire for some Ukrainians to join the EU. A number of informants, while avoiding mention of the conflict itself, framed certain seemingly innocuous discussions in terms of the adjective ‘European’: Thus, a certain approach to child rearing, or choice of food, cooking or something else illustrated a ‘European mentality’. In the last couple of decades the adjective European has not been marked in this way in everyday discourse – if anything it is associated with ‘quality’ – the ‘Euro apartment’, ‘Euro food quality’. In this second subset of encounters it is possible to characterise this cultural distancing by informants as a proxy for discussing, or not discussing, the international conflict. Often these same informants had previously been some of the most reflexive about cultural difference and often more critical of their own culture and politics.

A corollary of the ‘European’ approach was when informants with ambiguous or critical viewpoints avoided expressing their disapproval of the Russian government – a very understandable approach – but instead talked about impending ‘punishment’ or catastrophe befalling their country as a result of the ‘Boeing’ (the type of airliner shot down over Ukraine) – note also the metonymic distancing in the use of this word. One woman, Marina, who had relatives in Moscow said: ‘I just hope it is quick. I wake up in the night thinking about a nuclear attack on Moscow. Hopefully they [the relatives] are close to the centre that they will all be killed outright.’ Another said, ‘I suppose we won’t see you again. We will be completely isolated now and they won’t let you come here.’ The ‘they’ were the all-powerful UK government, not the Russians. Externalising feelings of fear and stress to an outside punisher was a common reaction and in some ways inflects the ‘victimhood’ discourses adopted at a state level (Russia as the victim of NATO expansion and Atlanticist encirclement). In a politically highly charged environment, a focus on the reaction of the other, rather than the actions of one’s state was also understandable.

In a follow-up post I will write more about the Ukraine conflict and its effect on my field work, but more importantly, how I see its effects at work on ordinary Russian people.