Abstracts

Russia on Edge: Reclaiming the Periphery in Contemporary Russian Culture

Interdisciplinary Workshop, 11-12 December 2009 (CRASSH, University of Cambridge)

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Serguei Oushakine

Princeton University

The Will to Connect: Plots and Fragments of Postsocialist Capitalism in Provincial Russia

Based on fieldwork materials that I collected in Siberian city Barnaul during my fieldwork in 2001-2003 and later visits in 2004-2006, in my paper I show how postsocialist changes were gradually incorporated in peoples daily life and everyday vocabulary. Emerging market relations both polarized people and simultaneously activated what Jean and John Comaroff have fittingly called the will to connect.  The perceived feeling of disconnectedness and social fragmentation has caused a proliferation of discourses that exposed missing links and hidden structures. 

The zero years (nulevye gody), as the first decade of the century was often called in Russia , have been marked by an intense striving to imagine a new symbolical environment that could unite parts isolated by quick commercialization. In many of these stories, the invisible hand that is supposed to guide the free market is made dramatically real in various scenarios of manipulation. The experience of global circulation of capital was counterbalanced with images of the enclosed national community. Increasingly, postsoviet Russian culture was construed as in-alienable wealth, i.e., as a particular form of socially meaningful property that can be shared among people but that could not enter commercial circulation or exchange.

Instead of dismissing these narratives as yet another example of the post-Soviet return to the archaic and mythological, I approach them as a historically specific form of symbolization that not only endows its authors and consumers with some interpretative agency and social identity but that also provides them with a plausible organizing plot in a situation where established patterns of interactions and traditional forms of rationality lost their orienting function.