“Cheerful Nonchalance” as an Affective Response to Precarity: Refusing Safety Measures in Eastern Siberia

Abstract

This article is building on the analysis of affective responses to precarious conditions to argue that one such response can be described as “cheerful nonchalance.” The village of Anosovo emerged in 1961 after the construction of the Bratsk dam on the Angara River. Many villagers were certain Anosovo was a temporary settlement from the beginning. Yet more than half a century later, Anosovo is still there, even as its population diminishes. When not only the state gives up on a place, but people also adopt a kind of blasé attitude to the risks of daily life, the affect of cheerful nonchalance comes to life to help with the living. Various affective attitudes toward precarity and uncertainty in post-Soviet realities and beyond have been described as nostalgia, “patriotism of despair,” and “cruel optimism” in post-Soviet realities and beyond. Nonchalance has been overlooked, even though it is doing the work of making life possible in a place enduring socio-economic disenfranchisement. With the use of ethnographic methods, this article shows how mundane events—such as the implementation of a polygraph test by a timber harvesting firm or a refusal to abide by safety measures like wearing seat belts—are the expressions of the affect of nonchalance.

“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.…”