Affective Infrastructures of Immobility: Staying While Neighbors Are Leaving Rural Eastern Siberia

Abstract

Framing “immobility” as already containing mobility, this research asks why people stay in conditions of economic disadvantages and social abandonment even when they have tangible opportunities to leave. Based on ethnography conducted in Eastern Siberia, this research investigates how people throughout the region maintain connections to one place: the village of Anosovo. I argue that the notion of “affective infrastructure” can encapsulate a multiplicity of ties connecting people to places. Affective infrastructure refers to the capacity of “hard” infrastructural agglomerations—such as pipes, wires, and buildings—to evoke feeling, and to the “social” infrastructure such as kinship ties, memories, attachments, and human–nonhuman relationships. Seeing people as always already included in the agglomerations of affective infrastructures opens the space to see them pinned down to the place even as their neighbors leave while the hopes for improvements of conditions are bleak.

“Communism Happened!”

“…Specifically, I investigated how people made decisions to stay in a place that did not seem to promise much in terms of future development. I attempted to explain this movement or "immobility" through the concept of affective infrastructures that kept people put (Orlova 2021a(Orlova , 2021b(Orlova , 2022. As an ethnographer, I investigated the connections of people in the region to one particular village, the village of Anosovo, and the choices that people made in selecting the place to live.…”