Minorities in the Post-Soviet Space Thirty Years After the Dissolution of the USSR

When the Soviet Union broke apart in 1991, the Russian Federation and the newly independent republics of the Baltics, the Caucasus and Central Asia engaged in redefining their national identity in a challenging regional and global context. The stances and policies towards the minorities living in these countries became part of the striving towards national independence and identity formation. Despite vastly different post-Soviet nation-building trajectories, the development and implementation of state policies towards minorities had similar relevance and importance across the region. Thirty years after the end of the USSR what is the situation of minorities and minority issues in the countries that emerged from that multi-ethnic state? How have the former republics – including Russia dealt with their minorities and minority affairs? To what protection and rights are minority communities entitled to? Studies of the dissolution of the USSR and of nation-building in the independent post-Soviet states have flourished over the past decades. However, despite the relevance of the theme, there is a dearth of specialist publications which address the many issues related to minority communities in the post-Soviet space. This volume attempts to fill this gap by providing a collection of essays covering some of the most relevant aspects of the contemporary status and situation of minorities in the area

The State, Popular Mobilisation and Gold Mining in Mongolia: Shaping ‘Neoliberal’ Policies

Mongolia’s mining sector, along with its environmental and social costs, have been the subject of prolonged and heated debate. This debate has often cast the country as either a victim of the ‘resource curse’ or guilty of ‘resource nationalism’. In The State, Popular Mobilisation and Gold Mining in Mongolia, Dulam Bumochir aims to avoid the pitfalls of this debate by adopting an alternative theoretical approach. He focuses on the indigenous representations of nature, environment, economy, state and sovereignty that have triggered nationalist and statist responses to the mining boom. In doing so, he explores the ways in which these responses have shaped the apparently ‘neo-liberal’ policies of twenty-first century Mongolia, and the economy that has emerged from them, in the face of competing mining companies, protest movements, international donor organizations, economic downturn, and local and central government policies. Applying rich ethnography to a nuanced and complex picture, Bumochir’s analysis is essential reading for students and researchers studying the environment and mining, especially in Central and North East Asia and post-Soviet regions, and also for readers interested in the relationship between neoliberalism, nationalism, environmentalism and state

Knowledge and Authority in Shift: A Linguistic Ethnography of Multilingual News Media in the Buryat Territories of Russia.

How might institutional projects to improve the status of minority languages and publics have unintended and contradictory consequences? This dissertation examines media and language practices in order to illuminate the everyday sociocultural processes by which the value of knowledge is figured. It focuses on news media institutions in the Buryat territories, a multilingual region of southeastern Siberia, to advance two main arguments. First, as language shift in this region has progressed, media in the once-dominant native language, Buryat, have taken on an increasingly symbolic (rather than informational or referential) social role, with content becoming more culturally circumscribed. Second, although media institutions position themselves—and are locally interpreted—as monolithic arbiters of linguistic authority, encapsulated in a strong Buryat literary standard, they in fact manifest great diversity in ideology and praxis, shaped by the material demands of specific mediums. This situation presents an indexical disjuncture between the authority granted to individuals and their actual linguistic practices, unevenly extending the imprimatur of institutional authority over practices that would not otherwise be interpreted as ‘standard.’ The study interweaves archival, ethnographic, and sociolinguistic data, drawing on 19 months of multi-sited field research conducted between 2005 and 2011 in the Buryat territories of the Russian Federation. Generations of speakers in this region have been shifting from Buryat to Russian, while experiencing rapid transformations in demography, economy, and lifestyle. By focusing on the heavily ideologized and authoritative domain of news media, this dissertation illustrates how linguistic and cultural knowledge and authority are renegotiated in the context of dramatic changes that are experienced not only as language shift, but as profound sociocultural shift as well. In particular, it describes instances of insecurity, shame, and other emotional responses in interactions to show how possessing such knowledge and authority in this context becomes a moral concern. An additional contribution of the dissertation is methodological. The study integrates production data from newsrooms with consumption/reception data from audiences and formal linguistic analyses of texts and transcripts, employing a novel holistic approach to elucidate how the language used and manufactured in institutional settings circulates from and into other domains of daily life.Ph.D.AnthropologyUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/91451/1/kegraber_1.pd

The State, Popular Mobilisation and Gold Mining in Mongolia

Mongolia’s mining sector, along with its environmental and social costs, have been the subject of prolonged and heated debate. This debate has often cast the country as either a victim of the ‘resource curse’ or guilty of ‘resource nationalism’. In The State, Popular Mobilisation and Gold Mining in Mongolia, Dulam Bumochir aims to avoid the pitfalls of this debate by adopting an alternative theoretical approach. He focuses on the indigenous representations of nature, environment, economy, state and sovereignty that have triggered nationalist and statist responses to the mining boom. In doing so, he explores the ways in which these responses have shaped the apparently ‘neo-liberal’ policies of twenty-first century Mongolia, and the economy that has emerged from them, in the face of competing mining companies, protest movements, international donor organizations, economic downturn, and local and central government policies

Multiethnic Societies of Central Asia and Siberia Represented in Indigenous Oral and Written Literature

Central Asia and Siberia are characterized by multiethnic societies formed by a patchwork of often small ethnic groups. At the same time large parts of them have been dominated by state languages, especially Russian and Chinese. On a local level the languages of the autochthonous people often play a role parallel to the central national language. The contributions of this conference proceeding follow up on topics such as: What was or is collected and how can it be used under changed conditions in the research landscape, how does it help local ethnic communities to understand and preserve their own culture and language? Do the spatially dispersed but often networked collections support research on the ground? What contribution do these collections make to the local languages and cultures against the backdrop of dwindling attention to endangered groups? These and other questions are discussed against the background of the important role libraries and private collections play for multiethnic societies in often remote regions that are difficult to reach

Multiethnic Societies of Central Asia and Siberia Represented in Indigenous Oral and Written Literature

Central Asia and Siberia are characterized by multiethnic societies formed by a patchwork of often small ethnic groups. At the same time large parts of them have been dominated by state languages, especially Russian and Chinese. On a local level the languages of the autochthonous people often play a role parallel to the central national language. The contributions of this conference proceeding follow up on topics such as: What was or is collected and how can it be used under changed conditions in the research landscape, how does it help local ethnic communities to understand and preserve their own culture and language? Do the spatially dispersed but often networked collections support research on the ground? What contribution do these collections make to the local languages and cultures against the backdrop of dwindling attention to endangered groups? These and other questions are discussed against the background of the important role libraries and private collections play for multiethnic societies in often remote regions that are difficult to reach

Linguistic Diversity and Disparity in the Periphery

This thesis uses methods of linguistic ethnography to explore linguistic diversity and disparity in the global periphery. In terms of diversity, it investigates how language users nurture their translingual identities by engaging in creative translingual practices, and relocalising everyday communicative resources. In terms of disparity, it examines the challenges of Culturally and Linguistically Diverse migrant communities in Australia in cases when their translingual identity becomes grounds for lin