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Suspended Beyond Borders: Contesting History and Identity in Crimea
No full textThis dissertation delves into the weaponization of history and the performance of national belonging in Crimea and Russia. Drawing on nearly two years of ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2017 and 2021 in Crimea, Ukraine, and Russia, it examines the social, cultural, and political conditions preceding the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and how the annexation of Crimea and subsequent war in Ukraine have reshaped the embodiment and understanding of Russian citizenship. The dissertation argues that while the Russian state developed new political discourses to legitimize the annexation of Crimea—presenting it as a 'reunion' and a 'return home'—it also redefined 'Russianness' for the entire country. By promoting militarized forms of patriotism, supporting war games, and portraying Russian history as a series of conflicts, Russia crafted a dichotomous worldview dividing the 'Russian World' from Western civilization. My research aims to offer fresh perspectives on Crimea as a space between Russia and Ukraine. Fieldwork evidence indicates that prior to the conflict, despite predominantly using the Russian language in daily life, people readily switched between Russian and Ukrainian depending on context. Being Crimean meant navigating fluid identities of 'Russian-ness' and 'Ukrainian-ness,' which were not mutually exclusive. Following the annexation, state-sponsored militarization and patriotic narratives increasingly swayed Crimeans towards Russian allegiance, shaping their identities through state performances and participation.
Centering performance in my analysis, I explore how war narratives, history, and myths become embodied in people’s actions. Since 2014, history has evolved into a cornerstone of Russian state politics, not merely legitimizing Crimea's annexation but informing broader international and domestic policies. The Kremlin’s emphasis on historical 'restoration' serves as both a motto for international relations and a unifying force domestically, motivating actions in Eastern Ukraine and beyond.
Crimea was an entry point to Russian politics in general. Since 2014, Russia has been developing a political toolkit in Crimea that I observed between 2017 and 2024: support of pseudo-democratic forms of popular expression (such as referendums and state-supportive mass gatherings), suppression of alternative political positions, control of language and vocabulary of self-expression, and the development of social security in exchange for giving up political freedoms. By 2022, the Kremlin had begun to apply this toolkit to control the rest of Russia as well as the newly occupied territories of Ukraine. In addition to Russia’s use of such tactics, both Russia and Ukraine have developed mechanisms for fostering patriotism and nationalism by turning the historical past into a weaponized discourse in the present
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Politics of Impasse: Specters of Socialism and the Struggles for the Future in Postwar Bosnia-Herzegovina
Full text linkThis dissertation is an ethnography of contemporary Bosnia-Herzegovina that examines the central conundrum of the country's postwar life: the seeming contradiction between the high levels of political dissatisfaction among its citizens and the absence, perhaps even the impossibility, of a mass mobilization that could usher in meaningful change. Through an anthropological investigation of everyday politics, community dynamics and grassroots activism, this thesis look at how the terms of the Dayton Peace Agreement, which stopped the war but deferred crucial political questions, created a political impasse while turning the future into an urgent political problem.This impasse, marked by contradictory hopes of a great violent transformation and what has come to be known as the "problem of political apathy," produces unique configurations of the political field to which this dissertation is dedicated. In order to understand how a flowering of unconventional political interventions becomes possible alongside a systematic disengagement from political affairs, one must attend not only to the structural conditions that have produced this sense of suspension, but also consider the effect of thick histories on the political imagination and contemporary dispositions and sensibilities. The bloody Bosnian war, which took place between 1992-1995 within a decade-long dismantling of Yugoslavia, has undoubtedly left a dramatic impact on collective consciousness. But so have too the often-sidelined decades of socialism, which helped shape norms and attitudes about the place of politics in public life.This dissertation gives attention to the intersections of the postwar projects of social reengineering, and the forms of political action and thinking inherited from socialism. It argues that political subjectivity cannot be understood except in specific historic and socio-cultural coordinates, and demonstrates that certain kinds of orientations that are often seen as "apathetic", "illiberal" and "pathological" are in fact ethical, active and responsible. The skepticism with which many Bosnians approach political participation today is the product of acute awareness of limits of transformative capacity of all political action. Politics of Impasse is based on over two years of ethnographic fieldwork in Sarajevo, Bosnia's capital, as well as the town of Jajce, the famed birthplace of socialist Yugoslavia, and finally, the regional center of Banja Luka
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North Korea So Far: Distance and Intimacy, Seen and Unseen
Full text linkThis is a project that seeks to broaden the spatial, conceptual, and ethnographic terrain on which north Korea can be encountered. In order to imagine and undertake anthropological fieldwork that approaches north Korea in this way, a seemingly inaccessible place, a seemingly insurmountable task, I had to look obliquely, from multiple vantage points, to infinitely approach, but not subsume the elusive “object” that is north Korea. I take on the problematic of seeing in this dis-located fieldsite, what it entails, the risks, limits, and possibilities. I mobilize a method of “peripheral vision” to trouble the assumption that the “real” north Korea is “totalitarian” or that the “real” north Korea is “the most dangerous place on earth,” that the “real” is something to be uncovered or exposed by a certain vigilant, scrutinous “hyper focused” observation. In contrast to this limited view of vision, my work explores what happens when seeing is expanded in all of its embodied, relational, philosophical, ontological, and sensory capacities. Photography and experimental modes of writing are central to this endeavor, which I mobilize from a negative space of becoming, rather than through the logic of representation. The research proceeds in multiple contexts within north Korea proper, as well as in places and times both distant and intimate. As a visitor to north Korea, there was an immediate and intimate connection in our Koreanness, but also a vast and unbridgeable distance within the same sentiment. As an instructor at the Pyongyang University of Science and Technology, there was life in a closed, closely monitored campus, but the people who were “minding” me, my students, the administrative staff, the Foreign Affairs officials, blurred these lines of enclosure and division. These kinds of relations and encounters are not things that can be readily observed, nor are they experiences hidden from view. These are scenes that only come into view peripherally, unfolding in the margins, in the spaces between and within rules and prohibitions, lingering in whispered questions on a soccer field, handwritten notes passed through the hands of others, half formed responses to ambiguous questions, and drunken exchanges in late night Pyongyang, seen and unseen. In Yangjiri, a south Korean village bordering the DMZ, the north can be encountered through echoes. When attuning to the sound of the loudspeaker broadcasts that echo across the border, north Korea appears through loss, longing, curiosity, anxiety, evoking an ambivalent and paradoxical image, unlike the ritual of seeing through binoculars, from observatory platforms, on dioramas and maps, which too precisely aims to locate the other side. In Kazakhstan, north Korea emerges through the memory of the Soviet Korean diaspora that lived the time of Korea as an Asian frontier of socialism, a time before the division. In the Sino-Korean borderland, from which I could peer across the river from one socialism to another, there was a postsocialist nostalgia to heed to, the space of an intimate gap, where the sultry resin of socialism and its afterlives are made visible from a broken bridge, a rupture. From these various peripheries, no matter how distant and fragmented the seeing, my hope is that north Korea feels nonetheless intimate and viscerally presenced. It is in this sense that I say, north Korea so far
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Feeling Alive: Unofficial Jewish Practices in the USSR in the 1970s and 1980s
Full text linkThis dissertation explores unofficial “Jewish practices” in the Soviet Union in the 1970s and 1980s. The interest and participation in such practices in the late Soviet period are usually analyzed within either “totalitarian” or Zionist frameworks, which represent them as manifestations of “anti-Soviet” sentiments and goals, and as part of a political movement struggling for the chance to leave the Soviet Union, particularly for Israel within the Zionist framework. However, I argue, this interpretation reflects much less the real Soviet context than the set of assumptions about the Soviet system that have been shaped in Western liberal discourses during and since the Cold War. In this dissertation I show that Jewish practices and pursuits in the late Soviet period could not be grouped under the concept of a “political movement” or reduced to an anti-Soviet agenda and Zionist activity. Instead, they should be understood as a particular example of “searching for the extraordinary” – a much broader cultural phenomenon that developed among the Soviet intelligentsia during that period. My informants often mentioned a unique feeling of “liveliness” that they felt when engaging with Jewish practices and pursuits. Sometimes they linked this feeling with “freedom” – a concept that cannot be easily equated with the liberal conception of freedom understood in terms of individual choice. In fact, many of them also reported that after having emigrated from the Soviet Union to market democracies (Israel, USA, Canada etc.) they, surprisingly, experienced a “loss” of freedom. Analyzing what the experience of “freedom” might mean in the Soviet context, and what unique forms it could take in the context of the “Jewish practices,” I argue that a number of ideological, economic and cultural realities of state socialism made this experience of freedom part and parcel of the Soviet system itself. From this perspective, gaining the actual right to emigrate was just as important as, if not more important than, performing the actual act of emigration. The real “Exodus” happened within the borders of the Soviet Union rather than outside of them. This dissertation further reflects on the role of the global political context in shaping the unofficial Jewish practices and pursuits in the Soviet Union and in giving them a unique form that made them different from many other unofficial practices that developed around that time
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Rearticulating the Social: Spatial Practices, Collective Subjects, and Oaxaca's Art of Protest
Full text linkMy dissertation, titled “Rearticulating the Social: Spatial Practices, Collective Subjects, and Oaxaca's Art of Protest,” explores how the popular uprising begun in Oaxaca, Mexico in 2006 is reconfiguring conceptions of public space and rights to the city, redefining political participation through novel practices of self-formation, and questioning the role of democratic government in Mexico's future. As both an architect and an anthropologist, my central research objective was to analyze how shifts in Oaxacan's habitual practices enabled and engendered socio-political and subjective transformations. In eighteen months of ethnographic fieldwork (2007–2008), I thus worked closely with and became a member of a group of political street artists from marginalized communities who were part of the coalition of individuals, collectives, and social organizations that became the Popular Assembly of the People's of Oaxaca, or APPO. Focusing on practices of struggle such as the making and maintaining of barricades, protest marches, sit-in strikes, and making the art of protest, the dissertation argues that APPO's practices of struggle in Oaxaca have been both highly mobile and mobilizing. As the dissertation argues, greater attention to both senses of movement as moving bodies and the capacity of spatial practices to mobilize people affectively allows us greater understanding of the materiality and imagined political geographies of social movements. The dissertation focuses on the role of practices of struggle and the competing aesthetics of political street artists, protest groups, elite cultural and governmental institutions, and ordinary Oaxacans to emphasize the importance of everyday spatial practices and a recognition that, as Michel de Certeau writes, “history begins at ground level, with footsteps” (1984:129). Whether manifested as literal occupations and appropriations of city spaces or as different modalities for inhabiting and making place, Oaxacans' spatial practices disrupted dominant understandings and uses of the open and democratic nature of public space. In stenciling their graphic messages on city walls, street artists gave visual form to a long history of the systemic marginalization of the Oaxacan people and, more importantly, to the Oaxacan people's courage in mobilizing to find a solution. Speaking from the perspective of shared experiences and struggles, images on city walls revealed common points of identification that interpellated the collective subject of el pueblo (the people). Focusing on the transformative potential of artists' spatial practices through their investment in the material spaces of the city, my dissertation contends that political subjectivities are formed in and through an encounter with the city's material environment. Consequently, I argue that urban space is not a passive landscape but is an actant—to use Bruno Latour's terminology—that interpellates individuals as members of particular political publics. This is rendered visible, for example, in how an anti-government stencil hailing el pueblo on the façade of a municipal building invites a different mode for inhabiting social and physical space from a billboard promoting tourism for foreigners framing the city as the heritage and patrimony of all Oaxacans. An empirical and theoretical focus on these practices of struggle is central to work that I conceive of as an anthropology of urban space and provides a critical perspective on spatial practices that are changing definitions of political agency and public responsibility in an increasingly polarized urban world. Though artistic expression has been central to contemporary and past social movements such as those of the Black Panthers, the Chicano movement and the United Farm Workers, and more recent struggles against the World Trade Organization, the artistic and social relevance of this cultural production has not received much scholarly attention in anthropology. For the economically impoverished and socially marginalized youths that made up the street art collective I worked with, artistic expression and collective organization became a means not just to make their voices heard, however, but fostered communal practices that gave rise to alternative models of human flourishing or of “the good life.” Organized through participatory assembly, creating and collaborating on art projects as a group, and holding art workshops to teach artistic skills to members and others, members of the art collective were able to transform their isolation and create a space of dialogue and debate that produced a powerful sociality that went beyond aesthetic expression or the imagined political and social horizon of the social movement engendered by APPO. Assessing the social and political dynamics produced by the art of protest, the dissertation addresses how Oaxaca's terrain of political positioning was constantly shifting, putting into doubt the notion of a possible scripted strategy pre-existing the mobile dynamics of contestation and struggle. The practices of struggle that APPO engendered were an invitation to insurgency, yet lacked any roadmap. As situated spatial practices with multiple mobile manifestations, the practices exceed the possibility to pin down APPO as a political formation, model, or organization. This raises challenges for mapping Left and populist politics in Latin America and the Global South, yet offers new opportunities for considering the power and possibilities of social movements from Caracas to Cairo to change and challenge not just governing regimes, but dominant social norms and forms. Attentive to the spatial practices through which collective political subjectivities were formed in Oaxaca's social movement, my dissertation also brings a critical perspective to how social movements in the Global South are commonly assessed in political imaginaries in the West. Filtered through discourses of democratic representation or human rights, social movements are generally appraised in relation to the possibilities that these afford for subaltern groups to subvert the dominant structures that marginalize them by giving voice to the injurious workings of power. I argue that an important effect of the political imaginaries of resistance that emerge from this perspective is to conceive of political traction through the lens of what Michael Warner refers to as “state-based thinking.” Under the framework of state-based political imaginaries, agency is acquired in relation to the state and the state remains the means of political self-realization. However, by looking at the internal processes that social movements enable, I consider how social movements produce possibilities for social transformation that go beyond the external goals that they set forth. The mobilizing practices of struggle in Oaxaca demanded and gained recognition and rights to the city at a multiplicity of social and geographic scales. While marches, local media takeovers, and stencils on city walls were localized political practices, their political traction and demand for recognition addressed multiple audiences that included, but were not limited to, regional or federal government bodies. The dissertation argues that, when the state is imagined as the ground by which to secure social justice and political change, this marginalizes the productive power of practices of struggle in social movements as transformative of spaces and social relations in their own right. In a contemporary moment where democracy is both seen as the global future and yet is also in need of being defended and implemented militarily, the dissertation contends that practices of social protest in urban settings produce forms of organizing collective life that call into question prevalent conceptions of representative democracy and the state as the pinnacle of political organization. What emerges from an ethnographic analysis of the practices of struggle of the public assemblies, neighborhood barricades, political art on city walls, and the megamarches of millions are the ways in which these transcended the purely confrontational aspect of a repudiation of the governor to become their own point of reference; Oaxacans' embodied practices are forming alternative conceptions of ethical communities and a collective subject that bypasses state-based frameworks as the necessary horizon of Oaxaca's future. I thus argue that making the populist collective subject of “the people” is just as important as challenging the state in pursuing social justice and making a space for politics. Delimiting the political and social effect of APPO in relation to the authoritarian politics of Oaxaca's governor means neglecting how its mobilizing practices of struggle changed forms of political subjectivity and social community, with effects that continue to reverberate to this day
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Provoking Tolerance: History, Sense of Self, and Difference in Latvia
Full text linkIn this dissertation, I explore how the post-Soviet Latvian state and people are invited and pressured to become European through discourses and practices of tolerance promotion, which have emerged as an integral element of contemporary liberal political culture in Europe. I locate this intervention in the broader context of the "minority problem" through which Eastern European states and peoples have been and continue to be governed by supranational organizations, such as the League of Nations at the beginning of the 20th century and the Council of Europe in the present. My work examines concrete practices of tolerance promotion through which local and international human rights and minority organizations, as well as international monitoring bodies, ask Latvians to reflect upon and remake their attitudes and conduct in relation to ethnic, racial, sexual or religious difference. Due to the fact that tolerance promotion initiatives draw legitimacy from the various political treaties and human rights conventions that shape the European present in Latvia, many Latvians exhibit skepticism and resentment towards such initiatives and view them as political and legal injunctions that misrecognize the historical specificity of public and political life in Latvia, especially the way in which the Soviet past bears upon the present. Consequently, in the view of human rights and minority activists and organizations, the problem of intolerance is often closely linked with the problem of Latvian nationalism, which constitutes an obstacle on the road to acquiring political and cultural membership in Europe. In my research, therefore, I focus specifically on how the historical community of Latvians is constituted through arguments about tolerance in Latvia. Rather than explain the Latvians' reluctance to embrace the liberal politics of tolerance as a problem of backward nationalism, I offer a more complex analysis of the historical and political contexts that produce such a reaction. For example, my research shows that the transnational discourses of tolerance tend to take for granted particular notions of sexual, racial, and ethnic identities, which, in turn, give rise to specific understandings of public and political life. Consequently, the Latvians' skepticism and resentment is largely a reaction to the ways in which the discourses and practices of tolerance attempt to remake public and political life. In six chapters, which focus on politics of injury, minority politics, injurious language, anti-racism, gay and lesbian activism, and the practice of critical reflection, I show that arguments about racism in Latvia are not only about whether there is racism in Latvia or not, but also about how public reflection on racism matters for the collective life of Latvians in the current historical moment; or how arguments about intolerant language are not only about which words are injurious and which are not, but also about the historical conditions that enable the question of injury to be posed at all; or how arguments about gay and lesbian politics are not only arguments about normative morality, but also about different conceptions of self and associated forms of political engagement. Most importantly, I show that arguments about the ways in which Latvians should relate to ethnic, racial, or sexual identities are profoundly shaped by concerns that the injunction to publicly reflect on the problem of intolerance misrecognizes the demands that the recent and injurious Soviet past places upon public and political life in the present. The dissertation is based on ethnographic fieldwork I conducted between 2005 and 2008 on the implementation of the European Union funded National Program for the Promotion of Tolerance, which was launched in 2004. My primary research object was the practices through which the problem of intolerance was introduced, addressed, and contested as a matter of public reflection and conduct. My field site was therefore constituted, on the one hand, by the activities of a network of government institutions and human rights and minority organizations that aimed to address problems such as racism, homophobia, and intolerant speech, and, on the other hand, by ordinary Latvians' responses and reflections on these issues.While my ethnographic research focused on the discourses and practices of tolerance that have emerged in the Latvian public sphere during the last seven years, my work is not primarily aimed at a critical examination of tolerance as a particular kind of political rationality. Rather, I am interested in arguments about tolerance that unfold in a specific historical conjuncture in Latvia at the intersection of the Soviet past and the European present. Moreover, I am interested in the kind of political subjects and relations between them that are constituted through arguments about tolerance and what they tell us not only about the post-Soviet Latvian present, but also about the European present more generally. In analyzing the discourses and practices of tolerance, my aim is thus threefold: (1) to trace how the historical community of Latvians is constituted through arguments about tolerance; (2) to show that this historical community of Latvians cannot simply be characterized as animated by deeply rooted nationalism, but is rather an effect of political subjectivation that unfolds at the intersection of imperial, colonial, and communist trajectories; and (3) to show how the historical specificity of public and political life in Latvia illuminates the possibilities and limitations of particular analytical frameworks, such as that of nationalism, as well as of liberal political culture in Europe
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
El cuerpo de Lenin, entre lo forense y el arte/ Lenin’s body between forensics and art. Sesión plenaria 1 del congreso "Cuerpos incómodos: Violencia masiva, fosas comunes y necropolítica"
No full textVídeo de la Sesión plenaria 1 del “Congreso Internacional. Cuerpos incómodos: Violencia masiva, fosas comunes y necropolítica”. Celebrado en Donostia en el marco de los cursos de verano de la Universidad del País Vasco los días 18-21 de julio de 2008.Peer reviewe
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