Non-Liberation, or "The Tradition of All the Dead Generations Weighs Like a Nightmare on the Brain of the Living"

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

While this year’s conference theme is liberation, this panel focuses on the opposite–being stuck, mired, or weighed down. How do people experience the seemingly eternal return of tropes, structures of feeling, or paradigms for social relations? The papers on this panel consider being burdened by social forms with a storied history–whether ‘culturedness,’ ‘productivism,’ ‘Russianness,’ or ‘barbarism.’ Does liberation from such values require the work of collective re-interpretation of these commonplaces–rather than mere resistance or refusal? Or, in a time where sources of commonality and solidarity are scarce, do such forms foreclose liberation because they are the few sites of shared experience that remain? Maria Sidorkina’s paper dwells on the irresistible pull of the concept of ‘culturedness’ for contemporary Russian political activists from across political divides. Rusana Novikova’s paper explores the idyllic image of an ‘entrepreneurial peasant’ that has haunted Russia’s agrarian reforms for the past 30+ years. Alina Parker’s paper considers how behind the unavoidable, commonsensical concept of russkost’ or Russianness, there is actually very little common sense. Tatiana Chudakova’s paper returns to the notion of ‘barbarism’ to ask why it remains so rhetorically effective in Russophone media spheres.

Sub Unit

• Anthropology, Cultural Studies

Chair

• Tatiana Chudakova, Tufts U

Papers

• Battle Over Russianness: What It Means to Be Russkii in Wartime Russia - Alina Parker, U of Massachusetts Amherst

• The Land Needs a Master?: Searching for an ‘Ideal Peasant’ in Post-Soviet Russia - Rusana Novikova, UC Berkeley

• 'Culturedness' in the Time of Culture War: Re-reading Civility, Propriety, and Class in Putin-Era Russia - Maria Sidorkina, U of Texas at Austin

• 'Barbarian Invasions': Rhetorical Appellations to 'Barbarism' in Wartime Russophone Media - Tatiana Chudakova, Tufts U

Discussants

• Xenia A. Cherkaev, Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology (Germany)

• Tobias Rupprecht, Freie U Berlin (Germany)