Anthropology News
Volume: 49, Number: 8 (November 2008)
http://www.anthrosource.net/doi/pdfplus/10.1111/an.2008.49.8.11
A Lemon
U michigAn-Ann Arbor
Writing against the New "Cold War"
Recent work on formerly socialist states is poised to disrupt both the
resurgence of "Cold War" media imagery and the lingering influence
of such imagery on social thought. Anthropologists and
historians are publishing research that can achieve this in three
ways: (1) by refusing to posit Eastern Europe or the former USSR
as passive recipients of "transition"; (2) by questioning dominant
accounts of the recent, latesocialist past and the ways the
past moves in the present; and (3) by opening lines of inquiry that
might seem irrelevant to political events but in fact reveal generative
practices.
Multidirectional influence
Many descriptions of postsocialism focus on incursions of US ideas,
organizations and objects into Eastern Europe and Russia-just as
hegemonic accounts of globalization tend to stress Americanization.
It is certainly true that McDonald's restaurants have become landmarks
at Moscow metro stops and that local businesses run trenings
drawing from Western management standards, but the most illuminating
new research also looks intently at movements of values-
concretized not only in bodies and commodities, but also in ideas and
techniques-across socialist and post-socialist borders.
Historians are currently doing this best, and if we pay more
attention to their work, it may change how we do ours-saving
us from assuming the geographical and temporal unilinearities
of transition. Young historians have been moving away from
documenting Stalin-era repressions in order to detail times in
living memory. They are, in the process, also fleshing out trajectories
of cultural and social connections across socialist state borders
that have left lasting traces on structures and institutions across
the globe. Such traces have been erased by US-based journalists
(and even by many scholars) or else dismissed on moral grounds
as communist colonialism. Yet these relations and their lingering
effects are well worth illuminating, as historians have begun
to do (writing, for instance, about Soviet engineers in Egypt).
My current fieldwork speaks to the movement of physical bodies,
ideas and techniques in different directions. The Russian Academy
for the Theatrical Arts is an institution whose operations challenge
the notion that influential values emanate only from the West, or
have been blocked by the Iron Curtain. Since early Soviet times,
the academy recruited groups of actors to Moscow from Soviet
republics and regions to train together and then to radiate back
out to their provinces, as collectives.
Over time, this practice of training and then disseminating
collectives broadened to include actors from friendly socialist states,
"non-aligned" client states and the occasional Western metropolis.
The practice persists today, with students in 2002 enrolling
from France, Kuwait and Sweden and collectives being sent back to
South Korea and Siberia. Attending to this multidirectional movement
of knowledge and aesthetics-in theater, and also in film and other
areas-could change the way we understand not only formerly
socialist spaces, but the paths of what we have been calling
"globalization."
Questioning Dominant Historical Accounts
Historians and a few anthropologists have begun to unravel monolithic
accounts of the recent Soviet past. However, the dominant
accounts that today influence US media readings of Putin are shaped
by histories of Stalinist repressions themselves hedged in by Cold
War politics. In those readings, the social structures and institutions
of the 1960s, '70s and '80s recede, or are painted as simply
extensions of Stalinism. Recent work has been amending this,
allowing us to not only deepen our understanding of socialist life,
but also to broaden ethnographic vision of the unexpected ways the
past lives in the present.
Different regions of the postsocialist world have met the transformations
differently. In contrast to places such as Eastern Germany,
where regime change swept away socialist-era media and rendered
forms of everyday socialist life instant "history," Russia did not
undergo sudden or total change.
The new state did replace textbooks and shake up ministries,
but many old forms stayed in circulation. In most cities, all
statues of Lenin remain standing, Soviet goods (such as candy and
tea) continued to circulate in their familiar wrappers among new
goods and imports, and every person with a TV continued to
have daily access to Soviet-era representations of social life. Post-
Soviets live by pulling on strands that connect them to material
objects, actions, social institutions and signs that emanate from
various points in socialist time, not just Stalin's time.
This layering of chronotopes is hard to see for those of us
who grew up in the kapstrany (capitalist countries). Many visitors
from the US enjoy looking for patches of socialist times as
we assume them to have been: bronze statues of revolutionaries,
war medals and murals of tractors.We miss continuities not
colored red and grey. Conversely, we mistake as signs of change
phenomena that people growing up in these places feel to be deeply
familiar because, to kapstran eyes, they clash with socialist fabric.
For instance, in the 1990s more than one US journalist read the
practice for keeping large, purebred dogs in small Moscow apartments
as a sign of transition freedoms, when in fact the fashion
had spread decades before.
Over the last decade, I have led groups both of undergraduates and
retired alumni to Russia. Most have interpreted any rules or patterns
unfamiliar to them-from public transit procedures to urban standards
of deportment-as signs of lingering socialist repression. "Do
they not smile because of Stalin?" they would ask. Such examples
of temporal misguidance might seem funny if not for the way they
bleed into diplomacy. Studies that complicate the recent past can only
help undo this troubling tendency.
New Lines of inquiry
Recent anthropology of postsocialism has theorized texts,
objects, bodies and places seemingly "irrelevant" to political
events-horoscopes, detective novels, personal ads and old Soviet
films; potatoes and cigarettes; corpses and comedians; dance
clubs and maternity wards. To pose research questions about the former
socialist bloc and Soviet states that do not address directly economic
priorities or strategic issues has become easier since ideological
fear has shifted from communism to Muslim "extremism."
We have more latitude now to study how, during socialist times,
people related to socialist states and their institutions in ways that
cannot be explained by a binary of "blind subjugation" versus "dissidence"
(mediated by "indifference"), but also through minute
forms of investment and engagement.
The way is open to examine "everyday" life without dismissing
its minutiae as efflorescence, and instead seeing it as a source for
emergent political performances and social constellations. I hope
to see us frame questions in terms other than those favored by political
science, politicians or NGOs. In my current writing, I confront
how categories such as "sentiment" (and the aesthetics linked
to them) shaped Cold War and Transition paradigms. Feelings
were, along with the space race and production figures, another
field of competition. However, Cold War competition also simultaneously
set us up to neglect sentimental categories. During
the Cold War, scholars wanting to project seriousness about the
"big" picture seemed compelled to excise feeling from their variables.
Russian émigré scholars and literary historians, for their part,
often segregated "feeling" to the expressions of dissident or pre-
Soviet writers, with "socialism" being "totalitarian," cold, stern
and rational-silliness, warmth and love could not be counted as
part of the system. However, the system did deploy, provoke and
engage diverse sentiments. From the perspective of Hollywood,
in the Orwellian socialist Russia of our nightmares, there was no
romance, no affection and no laughter, but from the perspective
of Mosfil'm comedies and love stories, communism made space
for varied and strong sentiments across social domains. Countless
Soviet films and stage productions encouraged and modeled subtle
technologies for expressing affect.
We have for so long ignored what was tender-or even silly-in both
Soviet "private" life and "public" representations that, while we have
well-documented state repressions, we have not been asking: What
else could "the state" do besides dominating or denouncing? What
did (and do) people try to do through the state and in it?
Up to now, non-area scholars have valued (post)socialist
studies because of the ways it has confronted dominant economic
and political theories, but more is coming. For a long time it seemed
we could frame our work intelligibly only in line with those kinds
of engagement. Now, perhaps we can join and challenge social
theoretical conversations about human existence more broadly.
Alaina Lemon is an associate professor of anthropology at the
University of Michigan. She researches how struggles over aesthetic forms and
techniques relate to social hierarchies and transformations in Russia. Her
writing has focused on the Moscow Romani Theater, currency exchanges,
public transit, film sets and, most recently, theatrical academies.
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