Longing for the Kollektiv: Gender, Power, and Residential Schools in Central Siberia

Abstract

Interpretations of post‐Soviet subjectivities have tended to emphasize the ways in which subjects experience these with a sense of liberation from a monolithic socialist state; however, local responses to post‐Soviet forms of power have varied widely. In the case of indigenous Siberians in the 1990s, an older generation of Evenk women expressed positive feelings about their experience as students in the Soviet‐era residential schools that continue to shape their subjectivity in the post‐Soviet present. Evenk subjectivities, as with those of other indigenous Siberians, have been significantly formed through the institution of the residential school and, by extension, through a range of interactions with state power as it has been locally remade and interpreted in the 1990s. In this article, I explore the widespread nostalgia associated with the residential school. Drawing on the narratives of elderly Evenk women, I argue that such expressions of Evenk nostalgia for the socialist era are a form of critique of the neoliberal logics emerging in Russia today. In this respect, Evenk women's accounts allow us to explore negotiations of power in a post‐Soviet era and to examine how ideologies shape conceptions of self and the social order more broadly.

Managing everyday (in)securities: Normative values, emotional security and symbolic recognition in the lives of Russian rural elders

“…Relatively little insight has been offered into the lived experiences of elderly people, their contributions and agency or their understandings and means of negotiating this shifting welfare landscape emotionally as well as pragmatically. Whilst a few ethnographic accounts have begun to address this absence, these have tended to focus on the lives and experiences of urban residents (Caldwell, 2004(Caldwell, , 2007Kondakova and Ivankova, 2002;Harris, 2011), or on the experiences of indigenous populations (Bloch, 2005). With a few notable exceptions (e.g.…”

Disorder and Civilization: The Future(s) of Ukrainian Medicine

“…Personalised networks are conducive to establishing trust among medical professionals and they substitute for the lack of trust they feel towards the state and its offi cials [RivkinFish 2005]. The relevance of work collectives has also been reported by Patico [2008] and Bloch [2005] in Russia, testifying to the saliency of this imperial ruin. In facilities where the atmosphere is more competitive and intense, collectives are still present discursively in people's regrets about their absence.…”

“…Reliance on the collective has a 'positive structuring effect that old shapes could produce, even when they are not supported by their primary contexts' [Oushakine 2007: 454]. The imperial debris of the collective persists not only because it is familiar, but also as a critique of market logic [Bloch 2005]. The emerging social stratifi cation and new inequalities invited people to re-examine their conceptions of social order.…”

Emotion Work, Shame, and Post-Soviet Women Entrepreneurs: Negotiating Ideals of Gender and Labor in a Global Economy

“…34. While the Soviet state caused significant hardship for many, it also has a lasting legacy established through institutions like museums, schools, and mobile medical units that for decades provided marginal members of society like reindeer herders and laborers with a place in the grand narratives of socialist society (see Bloch and Kendall 2004;Bloch 2005;Grant 1995). Through these mechanisms, state discourses on undesirable behaviours, and conversely on what it meant to be an upstanding citizen, indelibly shaped moral frameworks, thus illustrating Foucault's much-cited point that "discourses .…”