Red Ties and Residential Schools. Alexia Bloch
West as a place to envy for its opulence and basic amenities.
As scholars have written about housewares and status elsewhere (Rosenberger 1992), in the early 1990s housewares in Russia increasingly appeared to announce individual aspirations to become more “Western” and thereby increase status levels. The prominent display of wrappers and the aspiration to install a Finnish toilet could both be understood as examples of what Bourdieu (1984) describes in other contexts as the simulation of higher classes’ tastes, or cultural capital, by households with insufficient income, or economic capital. In short, throughout Russia in the 1990s consumerism was extensive; some have hypothesized this was the result of an earlier inaccessibility of goods, a sort of thirst created by an earlier dearth of consumer products (Verdery 1996: 26–29). In this area of Russia, consumerism seemed to be at least equally the result of the sudden appearance of advertising on television and sheer curiosity as the result of some sort of flaw in socialist ideology.
An all-pervasive sense of insufficient consuming power was shared by people of diverse ethnic backgrounds in the town of Tura. Russians, Evenki, Ukrainians, Sakha, and the few Azeris and Tadzhiks (displaced by civil war) all tended to share this sense. This was intensified by an insecurity about financial sources and inflation; as soon as much-awaited paychecks were received, Turintsy would seek a means of transforming the cash into the material goods that were available. For those with paychecks funded directly from federal budgets, mostly Russians and Ukrainians working in the local radio and television station or with the local aviation, these were luxury goods such as radios, telephones, and video players. Those subsisting largely on locally issued paychecks or subsidies that were sometimes months late could generally only afford foodstuffs. My presence in the field at a time when such schisms around consumption were beginning to be intensified by television advertising and growing disparities of wealth significantly affected my attempt to “gain rapport.”
A Researcher’s Cultural Baggage: MTV, Bush’s Legs, and the Cold War
As a range of ethnographers (for example, Abu-Lughod 1993; Lancaster 1988; Rosaldo 1989) have attested, the subject position of a researcher is critical to how research is conceived and conducted, and in turn, how communities react to or engage with projects. In my case, “the West” loomed as an icon that often took on far more importance than my stated research project for the people with whom I worked. The legacy of restricted travel both outside Russia and within the country was in part responsible for creating this intense interest but more important was the imagery of binary cultural frameworks established during the Cold War. This historical influence resonates in the lyrics of a late 1980s rock song by the acclaimed Soviet group Nautilius Pompilius. As the chorus of one song laments: “Goodbye America, oooo, where I will never be. Farewell to your faded jeans and your forbidden fruits” (“Goodbye Amerika, ooooo, gde ia nikogda ne budu. Goodbye Amerika, ooooo, proshchai tertye dzhinsy i tvoi zapretnye plody”). The song incorporates a sense of the officially “forbidden” West prior to the onset of Perestroika in the mid-1980s. As in this song, in the popular imagination in central Siberia in the early 1990s, Amerika, meaning the West, continued to occupy a central place in a cultural landscape, both figuratively and literally.
The jarring disjuncture between a time when Amerika was a forbidden fruit and a time when its images and products were colonizing the cultural landscape further heightened the attention paid to me as an ethnographer. Various people looked to me as the definitive source of information on the West, and specifically the United States. At one point, for instance, the director of the Office for the Defense of the Family, Children, and Motherhood (Otdel po delam zashchity semei, detei i materinstva), an office established in the early 1990s combining social welfare and housing concerns, asked me to comment on a local community event being termed the “Celebration of the Family.” She was interested in what types of activities would be planned for a similar celebration in the United States, but also in how “family” might be construed there. At another point I was asked by students of a local vocational school to give a television interview reflecting on contemporary adolescence and family dynamics. And in the residential school and in several organizations in the town of Tura, I was frequently queried about Alaska. “Do towns there have running water? How much do they get for a sable pelt? Do children there know their native languages? Are there reindeer in Alaska?” and “How much are their [teachers’, herders’, doctors’, etc.] paychecks?”
The knowledge of the United States and its high standard of living relative to the rest of the world was also invoked by Russians and Evenki who sought to align the project of anthropology more with their pressing concerns (compare with Rethmann 1999). In various contexts they questioned my lack of personal complaints regarding the rough living conditions which they faced on a daily basis. Many jokingly inquired if I had been exiled or at least assigned by my academic supervisor to work in the town. While I sometimes grumbled to myself about the unkempt public outhouses or the poor drainage system that sometimes caused spring melt and waste water to flow over the sidewalk and road, for the most part I did not comment on these aspects of daily life; I viewed myself as a guest in Tura.
Following a radio broadcast of an interview in which I was asked how I felt about the town, and specifically about the lack of indoor plumbing, several Turintsy stopped me in the street to talk. These listeners were dissatisfied that I had answered the radio correspondent’s question without criticizing the local politicians who had not seen to improving basic amenities. Some people emphasized that as an international researcher I could potentially publicize and perhaps assist in improving social conditions in the region. I took their criticism as a commentary on how anthropology is far too often disengaged from addressing the pain and suffering so widespread in the world. The local sense that research should be tied to direct improvements in social conditions is a reminder to social scientists and echoes Scheper-Hughes’s concerns. As she explains, anthropology’s “time-honored conventional stance of ‘cultural relativity’ … dedicated to seeing the ‘good’ in every culture” (1979: 12) is closely linked to a narrow functionalist view of human societies prevalent in the discipline and in need of scrutiny.
Shifting Sites of Power: Political Parties, Spies, and Methods
In the initial stages of fieldwork, I learned that establishing rapport needs to be rethought as not simply an individual’s decision to “woo” as Kumar (1992) indicates but as a matter of the complex web of sociopolitical relations into which one enters as a researcher. Furthermore, as I quickly learned, methods of research must be carefully fitted to both research projects and shifting situations in the field. In my effort to use a range of methods, I supplemented semistructured interviews with a household survey. My thinking was that a survey of households would give me a broader sample of perspectives than I could gain in structured interviews. I completed a survey of eighty households, but, ultimately this approach threatened to intensify the dichotomy I had sought to reduce of “us” (social scientists) and “them” (subjects). More importantly, the survey had a detrimental affect on the rapport established with members of the community in the prior months of research. The survey approach was inextricably associated with a strong dichotomy within Russian society between the government (pravitel’stvo) and the people (narod). As Roger Lancaster found in his work in Nicaragua (1988: 15), the survey approach was associated with an “officiousness” and “social distance” of bureaucrats, or worse, intelligence officers. This misguided attempt to employ such an empiricist method led me both to refocus my efforts on qualitative approaches and to reconsider the dynamics of power in the specific post-Soviet context.
Perhaps the recent break with the Soviet government caused people to be even more suspicious of any official attempts to collect data and quantify their lives, particularly in the privacy of their apartments.5 The survey emphasized a distancing of researcher from community and reminded Turintsy that the fieldwork was part of a much larger academic enterprise that potentially had little to do with them. Furthermore, the survey reminded Turintsy of the need to “guard” their speech. Other scholars have also noted sharp distinctions between “guarded” and “unguarded” speech in Soviet society resulting from the suspicion that often pervaded social life in the former Soviet Union (Humphrey 1994b: 69). Ultimately, I set aside this method following the completion of a pilot survey; a more extensive survey would have jeopardized the trust of those with whom I sought to consult