Abstract
Based on materials collected during a fieldwork in Barnaul (Siberia, Russia) in 2001–2004, the article explores two provincial academic discourses that are focused on issues of Russian national identity. Ethnohistories of trauma address Russia’s current problems through the constant re-writing of the country’s past in order to demonstrate the non-Russian character of its national and state institutions. In the second discourse, ethno-vitalism, the struggle over constructing and interpreting the nation’s memory of the past is replaced with a similar struggle over constructing and interpreting perceptions of the nation’s current experience. Produced by professional intelligentsia, these frameworks and discourses provide a useful link to understanding imaginary constructions of the national belonging in a situation where more positive ways of inventing traditions and imagining communities are unavailable or discredited.
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Notes
See e.g.: Jardine (1991). In his essay On Generation, Blumenbach caustically rendered the main argument of this approach: “According to this theory we, and indeed all the children of Adam, were at one time ipso facto, pent up in the two ovaria of our common mother Eve. There we lay, as it were asleep, and although astonishing little creatures, yet completely organized bodies, and perfect miniatures of the form we have since assumed.” (Blumenbach 1792: 13)
For more discussion see: Wheeler (1939).
As Filippov explained in an interview, the cooperation is merely technical – he writes the texts, while the co-author finds money for publication.
Normally, the usual formula that accompanies most of academic books in Russia states that “the book was recommended for publication by such and so.” The book that came out in the fall of 2004 states something very different: “This is the authors’ edition (sobstvennaya redaktsia) of the book that is based on an independent research of the most brutal and vicious aspects of the expansion of Zionism in Russia in the shape of Trotskyism and Yel’-cynicism.” (Filippov, Goncharov 2004: 2).
To quote Filippov: “…our language is deliberately chased out of common usage in mass media. Every year more than five thousand words, alien to the Russian ethnos’ language and nature, are introduced into daily speech.” (Filippov and Goncharov 2004: 333)
The School includes seven departments: General Sociology; Empirical Sociology and Conflict Studies (konfliktologii); Social Work; Social Technologies, Innovations and Management (sotsialnukh technologii, innovatsii i upravlenia); Psychology; Psychology of Communications and Psycho-technologies; Mathematical Methods in Social Sciences.
Both degrees are dissertation-based. To illustrate the scope of the Altai Dissertation Council’s intellectual influence: in July 2004, during its summer session the Dissertation Council held several public meetings in which seven Candidate and one Doctoral dissertations were publicly defended by three scholars from the Altai region, one from Vladivostok; two from Eastern Siberia, three from different regions of Western Siberia. (Degtiarev 2004)
During these years, Semipalatinsk was used as the main site for testing nuclear bombs above and under ground. For more than decade, the population in Altai was exposed to the flow of radiation from the testing ground.
More on latent and direct racism in post-soviet social sciences see: Voronkov et al. (2002).
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Oushakine, S.A. Vitality rediscovered: theorizing post-Soviet ethnicity in Russian social sciences. Stud East Eur Thought 59, 171–193 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11212-007-9033-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11212-007-9033-8