Psychological Culture: Ambivalence and Resistance to Social Change

National character, modal personality, collective unconscious, ethnic mentality, cultural identity -- these and similar notions are designed to capture psychological traits that distinguish one social group from another. Attempts to isolate such hypothetical qualities are not different in principle from efforts to describe religious, legal, or other social patterns found among people who have lived together for a length of time, except that psychological constructs tend to focus on subjective characteristics and are somewhat harder to identify. For the first time, the link between culture and psychology came under close scrutiny in the nineteen century. German linguists Steinthal and Lazarus and psychologist Wilhelm Wundt made an elaborate case for Folkpsychology -- a discipline that examined the interfaces between folklore, language, social institutions, and psychological traits. In this century, around the time of World War II, much attention was given to the so-called modal personality and national character that purported to describe the ways in which other people, often belonging to enemy nations, raised their children and behaved in their daily life. Margaret Mead, Clyde Kluckhohn, Geoffrey Gorer, Henry Dick, along with other social scientists, developed a concept of the Russian national character which sought to explain the contradictions in the overt behavior of America\u27s arch-enemy in psychological terms. In the last few decades, scholars began to pay closer attention to the role that culture and psychology plays in nation-building. As economic differences between nations level off, less tangible cultural characteristics -- emotional, cognitive, aesthetic, axiological -- have come to the fore as key factors determining national peculiarities. E. Gellner put it most provocatively when he said that cultures produced nations, not the other way around

Storicismo magico

Magical HistoricismIl magico letterario, così bizzarro, che anima la narrativa post-sovietica è palesemente diverso dai generi gotici, fantascientifici, o fantasy di ambito occidentale o Anglo-americano. Le differenze sono molte, ma le più importanti riguardano il centro di vero interesse, che in questo genere post-sovietico, si localizza su congetture storiche bizzarre piuttosto che su creature magiche e strane. Qualsiasi  elemento gli autori post-sovietici proiettino nel passato o nel futuro, il loro scopo usuale è la comprensione del trauma essenziale, o piuttosto della catastrofe, del periodo sovietico

Luonnonvarat ja Venäjä – kriittinen teoria

Politiikan tutkijat ovat kirjoittaneet ”öljykirouksesta” – siitä, miten öljyntuottajavaltiolleon ominaista epädemokraattinen hallinto, hallintoon pesiytynyt korruptio jayhteiskunnallinen epäoikeudenmukaisuus. Taloustieteilijät ovat puolestaan kirjoittaneetosallistavista ja poissulkevista valtioista: kun osallistavat meritokratiat rakentavattuottavia instituutioita, poissulkevat valtiot estävät sellaisten instituutioidenmuodostumisen, sillä ne muodostaisivat uhkan voitoille ja ryöstelevän eliitinetuoikeuksille. Koska taustani on näissä molemmissa tutkimusperinteissä, olenkehittänyt käsitteen suurten luonnonvarojen tuottajamaa, jossa eliitti saa vaurautensasuoraan luonnonvaroista ilman, että väestö ja valtion instituutiot osallistuvattähän prosessiin. Kun analysoin resurssiriippuvuuden poliittisia seurauksia, käytänNeuvostoliiton jälkeistä Venäjää esimerkkitapauksena suurten luonnonvarojentuottajamaasta

Peasant settlers and the ‘civilizing mission’ in Russian Turkestan, 1865-1917

This article provides an introduction to one of the lesser-known examples of European settler colonialism, the settlement of European (mainly Russian and Ukrainian) peasants in Southern Central Asia (Turkestan) in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It establishes the legal background and demographic impact of peasant settlement, and the role played by the state in organising and encouraging it. It explores official attitudes towards the settlers (which were often very negative), and their relations with the local Kazakh and Kyrgyz population. The article adopts a comparative framework, looking at Turkestan alongside Algeria and Southern Africa, and seeking to establish whether paradigms developed in the study of other settler societies (such as the ‘poor white’) are of any relevance in understanding Slavic peasant settlement in Turkestan. It concludes that there are many close parallels with European settlement in other regions with large indigenous populations, but that racial ideology played a much less important role in the Russian case compared to religious divisions and fears of cultural backsliding. This did not prevent relations between settlers and the ‘native’ population deteriorating markedly in the years before the First World War, resulting in large-scale rebellion in 1916

Warped mourning : stories of the undead in the land of the unburied

After Stalin's death in 1953, the Soviet Union dismantled the enormous system of terror and torture that he had created. But there has never been any Russian ban on former party functionaries, nor any external authority to dispense justice. Memorials to the Soviet victims are inadequate, and their families have received no significant compensation. This book's premise is that late Soviet and post-Soviet culture, haunted by its past, has produced a unique set of memorial practices. More than twenty years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia remains'the land of the unburied': the events of the mid-twentieth century are still very much alive, and still contentious. Alexander Etkind shows how post-Soviet Russia has turned the painful process of mastering the past into an important part of its political present.-- Introduction -- 1.Mimetic and subversive -- 2.Mourning and warning -- 3.The parable of misrecognition -- 4.Writing history after jail -- 5.On tortured life and world culture -- 6.The debt to the dead -- 7.The cosmopolitan way -- 8.The tale of two turns -- 9.The hard and the soft -- 10.Post-Soviet hauntology -- 11.Magical historicism -- Conclusion -- Notes -- Inde

Barrels of fur: Natural resources and the state in the long history of Russia

This article argues that in its enormous Northern and Eastern stretches, the geographical space of Russia was shaped by the fur trade. The essay follows the boom and depletion of the fur trade in the longue durée of Russian history. The fur trade brought many Northern tribes to the edge of extermination. Hunting and trapping was intrinsically violent, did not entail the long-term cycles that were characteristic for agriculture, and needed no participation from women. It also created the situation that some historians called the hyper-activity of the state. The resource-bound economy made the population largely superfluous. The essay also explores the historiography of the fur trade and the debates that this historiography saw in the 1920s. Finally, it draws an analogy between two resource-bound epochs, the pre-modern dependency of the Russian state on fur and its modern dependency on oil. Very little part of the population took part in the fur business, with the result that the state did not care about the population and the population did not care about the state. A caste-like society emerges in these conditions. The security apparatus becomes identical to the state. Due to a chance of history or geography, the same areas that fed the fur trade of medieval Novgorod and Moscow, have provided the Soviet Union and post-Soviet Russia with their means for existence

Reversible modernity

The ten responses gathered here in response to Michael David-Fox's article Russian — Soviet Modernity: None, Shared, Alternative, or Entangled? represent a broad diversity of opinions. The discussion centers around the question of Soviet and post-Soviet modernity as such: did Russia have a modernity at all, and if yes, then in what form and of what quality? Each participant in the discussion suggests his or her own conception of modernity and vision of what Russian modernity looks like (or argues that there can be no discussion of “modernity” in connection with Russia or the USSR). Meanwhile, the respondents also comment at length on the historiography of (post-) Soviet modernity, the starting point for David-Fox's article in the first place

Post-Soviet Russia : the land of the oil curse, pussy riot, and magical historicism

The early twenty-first-century Russia still calls itself, and is called, “post-Soviet.” But this term increasingly sounds like a purposeful euphemism, which both insiders and observers from outside are using to conceal the novelty of Putinism. Though Putinism is entirely different from Stalinism, post-Soviet Russia still defines itself in contrast to its Soviet past, with all the ambiguity that the prefix post entails. Looking at a number of cultural texts that explicitly address the issues of memory, mourning, and atonement, this essay expands this argument by connecting it to Russia’s political economy. The oil curse is a self-imposed condition, a contingent political process that depends on unique choices of authorities and the population. The oil curse does not determine Russia’s arrested development; it only provides conditions that are eagerly used by the group in power. For Russia’s hyperextractive state, the population is superfluous. Introducing the concept of magical historicism, the essay aims at an intrinsic analysis of cultural change. It uses fictional texts, such as Dmitry Bykov’s and Vladimir Sorokin’s recent novels, to explore political, gender, and cultural results of synergy between the oil and gas trade and security services. This hyperextractive synergy creates an overmasculine, cynical, and misogynistic culture—petromachismo, as I prefer to call it

Природа зла : cырье и государство

Это книга фактов и парадоксов, но в ней есть мораль. Текст соединяет культурную историю природных ресурсов с глобальной историей, увиденной в российской перспективе. Всемирная история начиналась в пустынях, но эта книга больше говорит о болотах. История требует действующих лиц, но здесь говорят и действуют торф и конопля, сахар и железо, мех и нефть. Неравномерность доступных ресурсов была двигателем торговли, и она же вела к накоплению богатств, росту неравенства и умножению зла. У разных видов сырья — разные политические свойства, и они порождали разные социальные институты. Поэтому сырьевые зависимости редко сменяли друг друга без войн и революций. Ни один из этих кризисов не пропал впустую, они вели к драматическим изменениям в отношениях между трудом, сырьем и государством. На пороге климатической катастрофы в борьбу людей за различение добра и зла включилась сама природа. Наш мир — итог ее временного единения с человеком. И раз уж изменить его не удалось, надо понять, как он устроен