Abstract:Scholars have long tracked how the USSR, a laboratory of social engineering, was deeply informed by local readings of Marxist social theory. Why, then, in recent years, have so many historical and anthropological studies of Russia excluded “Marxist” from the list of main descriptors, or optics, through which they view their material? In this essay, I argue that in much contemporary scholarship Marxism and its many afterlives have evidenced a kind of blind spot, reducing Marxism to “just” an ideology. I assert … Show more
“…But local Nanai/Hezhe too enact a ‘vernacular’ version of such material approaches (cf. Kruglova 2017), as today's attempts to revivify forgotten elements of their culture from a pre-colonial past paradoxically take a distinctly colonial, materially rooted form. A late-2013 visit I made to the Amur occurred a mere few months after massive flooding had caused devastation on both the Russian and Chinese sides.…”
The once-unified indigenous northeast Asian people known as the Hezhe in China and the Nanai in Russia are little-discussed in any discipline, but their long experiences of cross-border division and, more recently, renewed inter-community contact, offer us a new framework for understanding both Chinese and Russian states in the region. As I show here ethnographically, today's Hezhe in northern Heilongjiang province (China) and Nanai in Khabarovsk territory (Russia) live amid the physical furniture of very different polities. But rather than merely reflecting their separation, I argue, these distinct surroundings in fact invite us to consider how the incorporation of Nanai/Hezhe into China and Russia have been constituted in important ways by the uses and flows of material objects. In support of this argument, which draws on recent anthropological insights concerning materiality to push back against existing identity-, landscape-, or production-focused theories of Chinese and Russian power, I examine sources in several languages to develop a longue durée account of materially mediated interactions between Nanai/Hezhe and China and Russia. From early imperial tribute through to socialist command economies to postsocialist cross-border trade, I show how—with notable continuity—states have been embodied in flows and usage of goods, bringing about the incorporation of Hezhe and Nanai into separate realms with immanent material existences.
“…But local Nanai/Hezhe too enact a ‘vernacular’ version of such material approaches (cf. Kruglova 2017), as today's attempts to revivify forgotten elements of their culture from a pre-colonial past paradoxically take a distinctly colonial, materially rooted form. A late-2013 visit I made to the Amur occurred a mere few months after massive flooding had caused devastation on both the Russian and Chinese sides.…”
The once-unified indigenous northeast Asian people known as the Hezhe in China and the Nanai in Russia are little-discussed in any discipline, but their long experiences of cross-border division and, more recently, renewed inter-community contact, offer us a new framework for understanding both Chinese and Russian states in the region. As I show here ethnographically, today's Hezhe in northern Heilongjiang province (China) and Nanai in Khabarovsk territory (Russia) live amid the physical furniture of very different polities. But rather than merely reflecting their separation, I argue, these distinct surroundings in fact invite us to consider how the incorporation of Nanai/Hezhe into China and Russia have been constituted in important ways by the uses and flows of material objects. In support of this argument, which draws on recent anthropological insights concerning materiality to push back against existing identity-, landscape-, or production-focused theories of Chinese and Russian power, I examine sources in several languages to develop a longue durée account of materially mediated interactions between Nanai/Hezhe and China and Russia. From early imperial tribute through to socialist command economies to postsocialist cross-border trade, I show how—with notable continuity—states have been embodied in flows and usage of goods, bringing about the incorporation of Hezhe and Nanai into separate realms with immanent material existences.
“…An amphibian stood for something else—the exploratory, sensory driving on the road or into the boggy Russian plains. It embodied the deeply engrained morality of nonalienation from one's environment, to which these ordinary city dwellers purposefully referred (Kruglova ), often portraying driving as intense physical labor immersed in the material and hybrid qualities of the world. For instance, Pavel, whose job as an electrician took him to many places and along many roads, recalled that when you drive, your muscles work all the time!…”
Section: Bodies In the Mud: The Last Soviet Generation And The Moralimentioning
A B S T R A C TThe developing culture of mass private automobile ownership in Russia became a prominent platform for post-Soviet citizen-drivers to (re)negotiate their relationship with the state. The convergence of power, infrastructure, and modernity in automobility made salient the old Soviet promise of infrastructural and cultural development, delegitimizing the post-Soviet contraction of the state's sphere of responsibility. On the other hand, the inherent danger and autonomy of automobile technology, combined with highly spatialized local politics, reveal a number of political mechanisms and imaginaries that make such withdrawals peculiarly legitimate. Finally, through the windshield of a private car in Russia, the state emerges as the ontology and a total social fact. This contradicts the anti-statist, pluralist, and the localizing concepts of the state in contemporary anthropology. [automobility, accidents, the state, modernity, politics of statelessness, Russia]
“…In the end, I would interpret the changes occurring now in Russian society as a revival of a certain class-based perception of social inequality relying on an unexpressed, and maybe unconscious, Marxist frame for grasping the social reality around them. I am encouraged to make such an assertion by my empirical findings and by recent ethnographic studies that also stress "vernacular Marxism" 36 as a strong framework for the understanding of everyday Russian world. Maybe it is time for scientists to come back to Marxism as a theory useful for grasping the deep structural constraining process of social changes, as well as the way people, more or less consciously or actively, arrange with them.…”
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