Laboratorium: Russian Review of Social Research

Identification and Professionalization: Two Optics of Sociological Consideration of Military Personnel

2023-07-04T17:37:27+03:00

This review article examines the factual and theoretical differences between rank-and-file military personnel and the military establishment and critically describes possible approaches that are used in analyzing military groups and institutions. It demonstrates that the theoretical framework of occupational group studies of military institutions fails to encompass a number of important elements of military reality—the rank-and-file soldiers and junior officers. The article argues that military as a pursuit and military as a profession do not always overlap. It considers identitarian sociology as an analytical resource for the conceptualization of ordinary soldiers and junior officers. However, borrowing from Rogers Brubaker, it then presents a number of arguments to demonstrate that the use of the concepts of identity sociology is essentially counterproductive, since the unsystematic and private use of the idea of “identity” only makes it more difficult to understand the differences and similarities between ordinary soldiers and the military establishment. In the conclusion some studies are presented that consider such distinctions and commonalities in order to identify the key to “military identity” and thus to gradate and nuance the military service person as a professional and the military as a mode of (self-)identification.

Article in English

Jade McGlynn. Memory Makers: The Politics of the Past in Putin’s Russia. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2023

2024-01-24T23:50:09+03:00

Лингвистический поворот, произошедший в эпистемологии несколько десятилетий назад, привнес в изучение общественных процессов внимание к языку, которым говорят политики и которым говорят о политике. Любые политические действия нуждаются в объяснительных моделях, а также требуют соответствующего языка, способного объяснить эти действия не только принимающим решения лицам, но и более широкому кругу людей. Такой язык должен быть понятен и признаваем этим широким кругом. Другими словами, легитимация политических решений требует их объяснения, вписывания в более широкое представление об устройстве политики и общества. Без такой концептуальной рамки политики не бывает. Это означает, что для радикального поворота государственного курса деятелям режима нужна смена языка говорения о политике.

Text in Russian

William Wheeler. Environment and Post-Soviet Transformation in Kazakhstan’s Aral Sea Region: Sea Changes. London: UCL Press, 2021

2024-02-21T13:43:28+03:00

Советский Союз совершил экоцид над собственной природой, и примером этого служит исчезновение Аральского моря. Таков был вывод авторов одного из первых исследований по истории окружающей среды СССР в книге американских авторов Мюррея Фешбаха и Альфреда Френдли (Feshbach and Friendly 1992). Приводя в пример технологическую модернизацию природы, авторы настаивали на понятии «экоцид» применительно к советскому опыту природопользования, в итоге укоренив его в историографии. Экоцид – объяснительная модель отношений между человеком и природой, в которой первый совершает «геноцид» над «экологией».

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Jeff Sahadeo. Golosa sovetskikh okrain: Zhizn' iuzhnykh migrantov v Leningrade i Moskve. Moscow: NLO, 2023

2024-02-27T13:53:28+03:00

В 1988 году Гаятри Чакраворти Спивак опубликовала эссе «Могут ли угнетенные говорить?» (Спивак 2022), в котором, опираясь на концепцию субалтернов, отмечала, что угнетенные находятся не просто в политически или экономически подчиненном положении, но прежде всего лишены доступа к различным медиа и в силу этого оказываются неспособными заявить о своих интересах. Работа Спивак оказала большое влияние на постколониальные исследования, ставившие под сомнение доминирующие нарративы западной академической традиции. Книга Джеффа Сахадео, посвященная жизни «южных мигрантов» в Москве и Ленинграде, объединяет антропологический подход и постколониальную перспективу для анализа советской миграции. Следуя идеям Спивак, Сахадео обращается к «голосам» людей, не всегда оставляющих след в привычных для историков источниках и тем самым оказывающихся в «слепой зоне». Так, автор возвращает советских субалтернов в «большую историю» и делает их частью советского опыта.

Text in Russian

Vladislav Aksenov. Voina patriotizmov: Propaganda i massovye nastroenia v Rossii perioda krushenia imperii. Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2023

2024-02-26T13:06:50+03:00

Vladislav Aksenov’s book whose title translates as The War of Patriotisms: Propaganda and Mass Moods in Russia during the Collapse of the Empire was published in 2023. This book was released in the popular science series What Is Russia? (Chto takoe Rossiia?) by Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie publishing house. Although this work is partly an adaptation of the author’s large monograph (Aksenov 2020) for a wider audience, the central theme of the 2023 book is narrower. Aksenov defines it as a combination of the history of ideas, images, and symbols, and the history of emotions to examine the phenomenon of patriotism in the Russian Empire from the early nineteenth century to 1917. Moreover, the psychological side of patriotic discourses and practices receives here central attention.

Text in English

Elena Bogdanova. Complaints to the Authorities in Russia: A Trap between Tradition and Legal Modernization. London: Routledge, 2021

2024-03-07T17:13:06+03:00

Автор книги – Елена Богданова – исследователь финского Центра российских и восточноевропейских исследований Александровского института (Aleksanteri Institute) Университета Хельсинки, редактор журнала «Laboratorium». Книга вышла в рамках серии «Studies in Contemporary Russia», редактором которой является профессор Университета Хельсинки Маркку Кивинен. Ранее выходил тематический номер журнала «Laboratorium» «Культура жалоб в Восточной Европе и Евразии», собранный по результатам одноименной конференции (Богданова 2014:8). Спустя несколько лет редактор этого номера Елена Богданова опубликовала книгу о феномене жалобы в России.

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Maya Nadkarni. Remains of Socialism: Memory and the Futures of the Past in Postsocialist Hungary. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2020

2024-03-26T13:47:49+03:00

«Следы социализма» Майи Надкарни – это исследование, посвященное постсоциалистической памяти Венгрии и раскрывающее значение наследия социализма при переходе страны от одного политического уклада к другому. Книгу можно отнести к работам, критикующим транзитологию или прямой линейный путь от коммунизма и социализма к либеральной демократии (Gradskova and Morell 2018; Krastev and Holmes 2019; Robbe 2023; Sharafutdinova 2020). Придерживающиеся этого подхода авторы отмечают, что многие постсоциалистические общества последних десятилетий столкнулись с разочарованием: ожидаемое после развала социализма процветание так и не наступило. Исследователи также указывают, что неоправданные надежды на быстрый переход к демократии нередко становятся фактором, способствующим ностальгии по советскому в современных странах. Тому, как эти процессы происходили в Венгрии, посвящена рецензируемая книга.

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Jennifer J. Carroll. Narkomania: Drugs, HIV, and Citizenship in Ukraine. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2019

2024-06-05T12:11:43+03:00

Книга Дженнифер Кэрролл посвящена культурно обусловленной концепции «зависимости» в ее взаимосвязи с вопросами здоровья и прав человека, гражданства и суверенитета. В книге проблематизируется понятие «гражданство», здесь показано, как гражданство и суверенитет переосмысляются в процессе геополитического кризиса на востоке Украины и какую роль в этих процессах играют «образы зависимости», способы концептуализации наркомании.

Text in Russian

Oksana Sarkisova and Olga Shevchenko. In Visible Presence: Soviet Afterlives in Family Photos. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2023

2024-05-05T16:09:10+03:00

Книга Оксаны Саркисовой и Ольги Шевченко о советских семейных фотоархивах обладает выдающимися достоинствами и как исследование, и как художественный проект. Тщательность и взвешенная позиция в анализе, богатый материал и высококлассная полевая работа делают эту работу исключительным событием, значимость которого выходит за рамки собственно визуальной антропологии и визуальных исследований.

Text in Russian

Anastasia Gordienko. Outlaw Music in Russia: The Rise of an Unlikely Genre. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2023

2024-05-06T09:06:46+03:00

В 2022 году издательство Висконсинского университета выпустило в свет книгу «Outlaw Music in Russia: The Rise of an Unlikely Genre». Ее автор Анастасия Гордиенко предприняла попытку реализовать амбициозный замысел, объединяющий два исследовательских нарратива. Один – о культурной биографии российской outlaw music, «от ее истоков» до наших дней и во всем многообразии сменявших друг друга форм. Другой – о феномене «русского шансона», который рассматривается не только в исторической оптике – как последнее звено в этой цепочке трансформаций «нежелательного жанра», но и в политическом контексте российской современности.

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Body as Responsibility and Independence: Women’s Experience of Transition into Adulthood

2023-11-23T10:07:34+03:00

This article focuses on bodily dimension of becoming an adult. Transition into adulthood is often seen as a social process in which bodily practices play a limited role. Some scholarship sees the bodies of young people and especially young women as objects of concern that require constant monitoring. In addition, research often focuses on the negative bodily experiences of transition into adulthood where young women are presented as victims of objectification, sexualization, and dissatisfaction with their appearance. This article is based on 37 in-depth semistructured interviews with women aged 18–35 years. These interviews revealed that young women feel their agency in making decisions regarding their body and are actively involved in construction of their own embodiment, and such categories of adulthood as responsibility and independence play an important role in this process.

Article in Russian

Emotional Modes of Autobiographical Memory: Heroes and Victims of Different Generations

2023-06-03T12:17:01+03:00

The authors of this article share an interest in the emotional component of memory present in documentary evidence of the Soviet era and memoir narratives about it. The polarized reception of the historical context of the 1930–1980s led to the fact that the memory about heroes and “antiheroes” is recorded in two different types of archival materials, which in practice could be recording different stages of the same person’s life. Focusing on the concept of autobiographical memory, the authors of the article propose to consider through the categories of emotives the archival heritage of veterans of the era of industrialization and the reception of materials from criminal cases from the era of the Great Terror. The study draws on a collection of memoirs by veterans of a machine-building plant about the time of their youth and their contribution to the construction of the plant in 1929–1933 and on a corpus of semistructured interviews with the descendants of the repressed who had had a chance to examine their ancestors’ investigative cases. The research goal was to analyze, on the one hand, how the emotional modes of composition of the documents in the 1930s and in the 1960s–1980s affect the transmission of memory about the 1930s and, on the other hand, how the actors of intergenerational transmission deal with the polarized memorative context. The study comes to the conclusion that already at the stage of their composition, documents and ego documents of the Soviet era limited the emotional palette of the writer and that memoires by the industrialization-era workers were conditioned by their genre no less than were the texts of criminal cases. The change of historical context and the loss of the intended reader of both types of documents create the need for interpretive work for our contemporaries. Analysis of the memoires reveals some nonobvious causes of emotional reduction as well as the freest compositional positions for expressing emotions. During interviews the descendants of the repressed, faced with a lack of emotionality in the texts of criminal cases and positioning themselves to resist the affective style of interrogations and denunciations, talk about their bodily involvement in communication with the artifact that helps them experience empathy toward their relative. The authors conclude that Alison Landsberg’s concept of prosthetic memory is useful for autobiographical narratives about both “heroes” and “enemies.” The juxtaposition of documents from different eras, united by the frame of autobiographical memory, shows that “affective experience” of an (auto)biographical narrative can be obtained both through the resources of (auto)communicative memory, when the subject retrospectively comprehends their own life experience, and through the mechanisms of cultural memory— by stimulating imagination and emotions as a reaction to a “document of the epoch,” thanks to which the latter is endowed with personal meaning.

Article in English

Suspicion, Trust, and Brokerage among Contemporary Don Cossacks in Rostov Oblast of Russia

2023-12-05T10:53:31+03:00

This study explores the construction of authority and formation of reputation inside the contemporary Don Cossack community/movement in Rostov Oblast of Russia. The subject of the study is the structure of informal relationships based on the interpersonal acts of reciprocal categorization and recognition. I explore the emergence of authority of contemporary Don Cossack leaders that takes place in the context of permanent suspicion, mutual surveillance, and recognition seeking among Cossacks inside and outside of formal Cossack organizations. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork data, interviews, and network analysis, I explain the rise of Cossack intragroup brokerage and the noninstitutionalized authority of Cossack leaders. The article emphasizes the importance of symbolic communication, especially the use of semantic polysemy of nominative categories to connect distinct groups, cliques, and individuals. The structure of distributed authority among Cossacks is explained by the discursive strategies of framing the perpetually contested group boundaries. This explanation requires a reconceptualization of “brokerage” in anthropological theory as a practice that relies on switching between the symbolic frames of mutual categorization and recognition.

Article in English

Curating Russian-Language Literary Projects in War Time

2023-09-08T14:44:26+03:00

The essay considers the curators of Russian-language literary projects (editors, organizers of actions, publishers of contemporary literature, creators of literary study courses) implemented in war time. The text is based on an empirical qualitative study of the viewpoints and motivations of literary curators based both in Russia and abroad. Among the latter are literary curators who have lived abroad for a long time or who have emigrated from Russia in the last year and a half. The essay explores the reasons why curators closed or suspended their literary projects in Russia and their motives for creating new projects or continuing old ones. It reveals the literary curators’ point of view on the possible and real goals of Russian-language literary projects during the war. The study draws attention to the specificity of curatorial positions and actions depending on the location of the project (in Russia, abroad, in metropolitan or regional Russian cities), as well as the age of the curator. In addition, the study reveals the spectrum of literary curators’ opinions on “high-profile,” debatable issues related to the fate of Russian-language literary projects during the war: their attitude to cooperation with state cultural institutions, the practice of filtering project participants depending on the political position of the participants, their attitude to the thesis about the responsibility of Russian language and literature for military aggression, and their attitude to the demand for Russian-language literary projects to “shut up.” In general, the study showed that curators interpret the current situation of Russian contemporary literature as a “new underground” and see their task in psychological and professional assistance to the author, politicization of projects, and documentation of a new literary emigrant environment.

Text in Russian

Authors

2024-06-05T12:21:37+03:00

This issue's authors.